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Composing for the Films
This classic account of the nature of film music aesthetics was first published in 1947. Its value comes from a unique combination of talents and experience enjoyed by the book's authors. Eisler's time at Hollywood gave him a particular insight on the technical questions which arise for composers when music is used in the production of films; while Adorno was able to contribute on wide aesthetic and sociological matters as well as specifically musical questions. Above all, the authors envisaged the book as a contribution to the study of modern, industrialised culture; and, in this respect, it has a particular importance to the whole area of cultural studies.
176 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1947
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161 people want to read
About the author
Theodor W. Adorno
600 books1,380 followersTheodor Wiesengrund Adorno was one of the most important philosophers and social critics in Germany after World War II. Although less well known among anglophone philosophers than his contemporary Hans-Georg Gadamer, Adorno had even greater influence on scholars and intellectuals in postwar Germany. In the 1960s he was the most prominent challenger to both Sir Karl Popper's philosophy of science and Martin Heidegger's philosophy of existence. Jürgen Habermas, Germany's foremost social philosopher after 1970, was Adorno's student and assistant. The scope of Adorno's influence stems from the interdisciplinary character of his research and of the Frankfurt School to which he belonged. It also stems from the thoroughness with which he examined Western philosophical traditions, especially from Kant onward, and the radicalness to his critique of contemporary Western society. He was a seminal social philosopher and a leading member of the first generation of Critical Theory.
Unreliable translations hampered the initial reception of Adorno's published work in English speaking countries. Since the 1990s, however, better translations have appeared, along with newly translated lectures and other posthumous works that are still being published. These materials not only facilitate an emerging assessment of his work in epistemology and ethics but also strengthen an already advanced reception of his work in aesthetics and cultural theory.
Unreliable translations hampered the initial reception of Adorno's published work in English speaking countries. Since the 1990s, however, better translations have appeared, along with newly translated lectures and other posthumous works that are still being published. These materials not only facilitate an emerging assessment of his work in epistemology and ethics but also strengthen an already advanced reception of his work in aesthetics and cultural theory.
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July 15, 2021
Interesting book by a renowned composer - Eisler - and one of the key Marxist thinkers of the 20th C - Adorno. The book is mostly written by Eisler - is an offshoot of a project on movie music, how to improve it, financed by the Rockefeller Foundation. The book takes down the studio system in general and how it treats composers in particular. The authors mostly dislike movie music - and their analysis will forever change the way you listen to a sound-track while you watch a movie. You'll become more analytical of the music in movies after reading this book. It does take some of the "magic" of movies away. The volume also contains an interesting new introduction by Graham McCann. He thinks the writing is sometimes uneven and that the latter portion of the book isn't as good as the earlier part - he is right that the second half of the book isn't as well-written. Still, the book is always interesting, and its insights into the process of composing for movies, at the time it was written in 1947, are illuminating. Movie buffs should enjoy this book even though it will give them a different, more critical, perspective on run-of-the-mill movie music.
Here are the quotes:
From the New Introduction by Graham McCann:
"The Institute [of Social Research in New York] had [originally] been established in Frankfurt in 1923, with classical Marxism as the theoretical basis of its program, but had undergone a radical change in outlook in 1930 when the philosopher Max Horkheimer, an old friend of Adorno's, took over as its director. In contrast to the ahistorical, scientistic Marxism associated with the Party, which seemed to discourage prudential forms of political theory, Horkheimer's Institute proposed a Marxism that was true to Marx's original, critical project: a theory for the times, a theory that changed with the times. The Institute's reanimated Marxism was thus a 'Critical Theory,' radically opposed to dogmatism of any kind, constantly on guard against the twin dangers of fetishizing the general or the particular. The Institute was now committed to a program of interdisciplinary study, explicating the set of mediations which enable the reproduction and transformation of society, economy, culture and consciousness."
"Eichler arrived [at the 'University in Exile,' set up by the New School for Social Research in New York] ... early in 1938..."
"Mass culture, [Adorno and Horkheimer]... insisted, had an important political function. It was a mass culture for a class society; far from arising spontaneously from the 'masses' themselves, as it presented itself as doing, it was actually imposed on them from above..."
"The culture industry, integrated into capitalism, in turn integrates consumers from above. It operates to ensure its own reproduction; the cultural forms it produces must therefore be compatible with this aim. Cultural commodities must be instantly recognizable and attractive while seeming distinctive and new; the familiar must therefore be promoted as the unfamiliar, the old re-styled as the ever-new: routine standardization is thus obscured by 'pseudo-individualization'..."
"The culture industry encourages forgetfulness and distraction. The breathless pace of most Hollywood movies, for example, left little room for serious reflection on the part of the audience: 'The liberation which amusement promises is freedom from thought and from negation.' [Adorno/Horkheimer, "Dialectic of Enlightenment"]
"Adorno's specific criticisms of music in the movies were founded on his more general critique of the culture industry."
"[Eisler's] ...project was, primarily, a political one: to give concrete musical expression to the Marxist vision of society and the aspirations of the working class. Eisler's militant songs and political ballads were to be distinguished by their topicality and precise political content, whose impact was heightened by the music. They were songs for the workers in the great modern cities, and they sought to lend their weight to the complex process of enlightening people about their own material interests."
"Music, [Adorno] ... believed, was the index of the culture in which it was composed, all the more so because its codes are so hard to fathom. 'Works of art do not lie,' he said, 'what they say is literally true.'"
"...[Brecht]...recorded in his diary, 'With Eisler at Horkheimer's for lunch. After that, Eisler suggests for the Tui novel: the story of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. A wealthy old man dies, worried over the suffering in the world, leaves in his will a substantial sum of money establishing an institute that shall search for the source of misery - which of course was himself.'"
"In a passage which echoes Adorno's earlier essay on the fetishism of music and the concomitant regression of hearing, the authors [of "Composing for the Films"] stress the 'archaic' character of acoustical perception, its ability to preserve 'traits of long bygone, pre-individualistic collectivities' more effectively than optical perception, and the regressive process whereby industrial capitalism debases the nature of hearing through commercialized music, mechanical mass-reproduction, and the utilization of music in advertising."
"The familiar should be made unfamiliar, the normal made strange, encouraging a more troubled kind of entertainment."
"The original demand for a radical change in [movie music] practice continues to go unanswered. The promissory note, however, goes on being played; hope can still, faintly, be heard. Adorno once likened his theoretical efforts to 'messages in bottles on the flood of barbarism.'"
From the book by Adorno and Eisler:
¨The motion picture cannot be understood in isolation, as a specific form of art; it is understandable only as the most characteristic medium of contemporary cultural industry, which us the techniques of mechanical reproduction.¨
¨In this advanced industrial age, the masses are compelled to seek relaxation and rest, in order to restore the labor power that has been spent in the alienated process of labor; and this need is the mass basis of mass culture. On it there has arisen the powerful amusement industry, which constantly produces, satisfies, and reproduces new needs.¨
¨Taste and receptivity have become largely standardized; and, despite the multiplicity of products, the consumer has only apparent freedom of choice.¨
¨The old individualistic mode of production should not be set up against [industrialized culture] ... as necessarily superior to it, nor should technology as such be held responsible for the barbarism of the culture industry.¨
¨The idea of the leitmotif has been popular since the days of Wagner. His popularity was largely connected with his use of leitmotifs.¨
¨Wagner conceived [the leitmotif´s] ... purpose as the endowment of the dramatic events with metaphysical significance.¨
¨More than anything else the demand for melody at any cost and on every occasion has throttled the development of motion-picture music.¨
¨Music is concocted to go with meretricious lyrics.¨
¨The absurdity of such ´applied art´ arrangements [that is, the practice of investing costume pictures with music of the corresponding historical period] is glaring in contrast with the technique of the film, which is of necessity modern.¨
¨Mass production of motion pictures has led to the elaboration of typical situations, ever-recurring emotional crises, and standardized methods of arousing suspense.¨
¨The violins must sob or scintillate, the brasses must crash insolently or bombastically, no moderate expression is tolerated, and the whole method of performance is based on exaggeration.¨
¨All middle-class music has an ambivalent character. On the one hand, it is in a certain sense pre-capitalistic, ´direct,´ a vague evocation of togetherness; on the other hand, because it has shared in the progress of civilization, it has become reified, indirect, and ultimately a ´means´ among many others. This ambivalence determines its function under advanced capitalism. It is par excellence the medium in which irrationality can be practiced rationally.¨
¨Such a rationally planned irrationality is the very essence of the amusement industry in all its branches. Music perfectly fits the pattern.¨
¨Music is unveiled as the drug that it is in reality, and its intoxicating, harmfully irrational function becomes apparent. The composition and performance of the music combined with the picture must demonstrate to the public the destructive and barbarizing influence of such musical effects.¨
¨Musical techniques for arousing suspense have been developed for the most part since the middle of the eighteenth century.¨
¨The new [autonomous] musical resources should be used because objectively they are more appropriate than the haphazard musical padding with which motion pictures are satisfied today, and are superior to it.¨
¨The suitability of modern, unfamiliar resources should be recognized from the standpoint of the motion picture itself. The fact is that this form of drama originated in the county fair and the cheap melodrama has left traces that are still apparent; sensation is its very life element. This is not to be understood solely in a negative sense, as lack of taste and aesthetic discrimination; only by using the element of surprise can the motion picture give everyday life, which it claims to reproduce by virtue of its technique, an appearance of strangeness, and disclose the essential meaning beneath its realistic surface. More generally, the drudgery of life as depicted in a reportage can become dramatic only through sensational presentation, which to a certain extent negates everyday life through exaggeration, and, when artistically true, reveals tensions that are ´blacked out´ in the conventional concept of ´normal´ average existence. The horrors of sensational literary and cinematic trash lay bare part of the barbaric foundation of civilization. To the extent that the motion picture in its sensationalism is the heir of the popular horror story and dime novel and remains below the established standards of middle-class art, it is in a position to shatter those standards, precisely through the use of sensation, and to gain access to collective energies that are inaccessible to sophisticated literature and painting. It is this very perspective that cannot be reached with the means of traditional music. But modern music is suitable to it. The fear expressed in the dissonances of Schoenberg´s most radical period far surpasses the measure of fear conceivable to the average middle-class individual; it is a historical fear, a sense of impending doom.¨
¨The twelve-tone chord at the moment of Lulu´s death in Berg´s opera produces an effect very much like that of a motion picture. While the cinema technique aims essentially at creating extreme tension, traditional music, with the slight dissonances it allows, knows of no equivalent material.¨
¨The principle of tension is latently so active even in the weakest productions that incidents which of themselves are credited with no importance whatsoever appear like scattered fragments of a meaning that the whole is intended to clarify and that transcend themselves. The new musical language is particularly well-suited to do justice to this element of the motion picture.¨
¨The haphazard development of cinema music is comparable to that of the radio or of the the motion picture itself. It is first of all a question of personnel. In the early days of the amusement industry, owners and directors were the same persons.¨
¨The whole realm of musical performance has always had the social stigma of a service for those who can pay. The practice of music is historically linked with the idea of selling one´s talent, and even
one´s self, directly, without intermediaries, rather than selling one´s labor in its congealed form, as a commodity; and through the ages the musician, like the actor, has been regarded as closely akin to the lackey, the jester, or the prostitute.¨
¨In fact, the late-comer industry of motion pictures has not rid itself of the pre-capitalist elements of musicianship, the social type of the Stehgeiger [the violinist who stands while he conducts a cafe orchestra, the other members remaining seated], despite its apparent contradiction to industrial production and the artistic incompetence of its outspoken representatives. On the contrary, this ´irrational´ type itself has been given a monopolistic position in the streamlined set-up. The industry, out of deepest kinship, has attracted him, preferred him to all musicians with objective tendencies, and made him a permanent institution. He has been regimented like other sham elements of a former spontaneity. The cinema exploits the barber aspect of his personality as a Don Juan, and his head-waiter functions as a troubadour deluxe, and occasionally even gives him the role of a bouncer to keep undesirable elements out. Its musical ideal is schmaltz in a chrome metal pot. But since the regimentation of the gypsy musician deprives him of the last vestiges of spontaneity which the inexorable technical and organizational machinery has already undermined, objectively nothing is left of the itinerant musician except a few bad mannerisms of performance."
¨The historical processes that can be perceived in cinema music are only reflections of the decay of middle-class cultural goods into commodities for the amusement market.¨
¨The full-fledged and quantitatively pretentious scores composed for the last silent pictures were essentially the same as those composed later for sound pictures.¨
¨[Kurt London:] Finally, in the last few years of the silent film period, the big cinema palaces were served by orchestras which, composed, as they were, of 50-1000 musicians, put to shame many a medium sized city orchestra. Parallel with this development, a new career for conductors offered itself: they had to lead the cinema orchestra and select the illustrative music. Prominent men often filled these posts with salaries which more often than not exceeded those of an opera conductor.¨
¨The term ´prominent´ as used here does not express real artistic accomplishments, but is part of the grandiloquent phraseology affected by all advertising in the entertainment industry, with its insincere slogan that nothing is too good for the public. This kind of prominence is determined by the fabulous salaries paid to those whom the publicity agencies elect to build up - the prominence of Radio City, the Pathe Theatre in Paris, or the Ufapalast am Zoo in Berlin. It belongs to the realm that Siegfried Kracauer called Angestelltenkultur, culture of the white-collar workers, of supposedly high-class entertainment, accessible to recipients of small pay checks, yet presented in such a sway that nothing seems too good or too expensive for them. It is a pseudo-democratic luxury which is neither luxurious nor democratic, for the people who walk on heavily carpeted stairways into the marble palaces and glamorous castles of moviedom are incessantly frustrated without being aware of it. This kind of opulence, manifested, for instance, in submersible and floodlighted monster orchestras, marks the beginning of a development that has left behind it all the obvious naivete of the old amusement park, but raised the technique of the barker to the point of anonymous yet all-embracing practice.¨
¨Subjection to administrative control is responsible for the stagnation of motion-picture music.¨
¨The truth is that no serious composer writes for the motion pictures for any other than money reasons; and in the studios he does not feel that he is a beneficiary of Utopian technical potentialities, but a regimented employee who can be discharged on any pretext.¨
¨Because, for real or pretended reasons of economy, no risks are permitted, the industry accepts only material similar to that which has already proved its market value.¨
¨The practitioners of commercial music... have had to deal with an illiterate, intolerant, and uncritical public taste, and they have had to bow to it if they wanted to remain true to their dubious maxim: give the public nothing but what the public wants. The contradiction between the middle-class public and its music was resolved in antipathy against anything experimental, anything that is even remotely suspected of being intellectual, and even anything that is just different.¨
¨The whole form language of current cinema music derives from advertising. The motif is the slogan; the instrumentation, the standardized picturesque; the accompaniments to animated cartoons are advertising jokes; and sometime it is as though the music replaced the names of the commercial articles that the motion pictures do not yet dare mention directly.¨
¨The collective function of music has become transformed into the function of ensnaring the customer.¨
¨Roughly speaking, all music, including the most ´objective´ and non-expressive, belongs primariy to the sphere of subjective inwardness, whereas even the most spiritualized painting is heavily burdened with unresolved objectivity.¨
¨There can be no greater error than producing pictures of which the aesthetic ideas are incompatible with their technical premises, and which at the same time camouflage this incompatibility."
¨The alienation of the media from each other reflects a society alienated from itself, men whose functions are severed from each other even within each individual.¨
¨The origin of motion-picture music is inseparably connected with the decay of spoken language..."
¨...it was said long ago that in every domain the genuine artist must master his spontaneous ideas. This is possible if the whole conception of the work is rooted in his freedom, is truly his own, and is not imposed upon him by another agency.¨
¨...the general practice of rummaging though all our cultural inheritance for commercial purposes which characterizes the cultural industry.¨
Here are the quotes:
From the New Introduction by Graham McCann:
"The Institute [of Social Research in New York] had [originally] been established in Frankfurt in 1923, with classical Marxism as the theoretical basis of its program, but had undergone a radical change in outlook in 1930 when the philosopher Max Horkheimer, an old friend of Adorno's, took over as its director. In contrast to the ahistorical, scientistic Marxism associated with the Party, which seemed to discourage prudential forms of political theory, Horkheimer's Institute proposed a Marxism that was true to Marx's original, critical project: a theory for the times, a theory that changed with the times. The Institute's reanimated Marxism was thus a 'Critical Theory,' radically opposed to dogmatism of any kind, constantly on guard against the twin dangers of fetishizing the general or the particular. The Institute was now committed to a program of interdisciplinary study, explicating the set of mediations which enable the reproduction and transformation of society, economy, culture and consciousness."
"Eichler arrived [at the 'University in Exile,' set up by the New School for Social Research in New York] ... early in 1938..."
"Mass culture, [Adorno and Horkheimer]... insisted, had an important political function. It was a mass culture for a class society; far from arising spontaneously from the 'masses' themselves, as it presented itself as doing, it was actually imposed on them from above..."
"The culture industry, integrated into capitalism, in turn integrates consumers from above. It operates to ensure its own reproduction; the cultural forms it produces must therefore be compatible with this aim. Cultural commodities must be instantly recognizable and attractive while seeming distinctive and new; the familiar must therefore be promoted as the unfamiliar, the old re-styled as the ever-new: routine standardization is thus obscured by 'pseudo-individualization'..."
"The culture industry encourages forgetfulness and distraction. The breathless pace of most Hollywood movies, for example, left little room for serious reflection on the part of the audience: 'The liberation which amusement promises is freedom from thought and from negation.' [Adorno/Horkheimer, "Dialectic of Enlightenment"]
"Adorno's specific criticisms of music in the movies were founded on his more general critique of the culture industry."
"[Eisler's] ...project was, primarily, a political one: to give concrete musical expression to the Marxist vision of society and the aspirations of the working class. Eisler's militant songs and political ballads were to be distinguished by their topicality and precise political content, whose impact was heightened by the music. They were songs for the workers in the great modern cities, and they sought to lend their weight to the complex process of enlightening people about their own material interests."
"Music, [Adorno] ... believed, was the index of the culture in which it was composed, all the more so because its codes are so hard to fathom. 'Works of art do not lie,' he said, 'what they say is literally true.'"
"...[Brecht]...recorded in his diary, 'With Eisler at Horkheimer's for lunch. After that, Eisler suggests for the Tui novel: the story of the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. A wealthy old man dies, worried over the suffering in the world, leaves in his will a substantial sum of money establishing an institute that shall search for the source of misery - which of course was himself.'"
"In a passage which echoes Adorno's earlier essay on the fetishism of music and the concomitant regression of hearing, the authors [of "Composing for the Films"] stress the 'archaic' character of acoustical perception, its ability to preserve 'traits of long bygone, pre-individualistic collectivities' more effectively than optical perception, and the regressive process whereby industrial capitalism debases the nature of hearing through commercialized music, mechanical mass-reproduction, and the utilization of music in advertising."
"The familiar should be made unfamiliar, the normal made strange, encouraging a more troubled kind of entertainment."
"The original demand for a radical change in [movie music] practice continues to go unanswered. The promissory note, however, goes on being played; hope can still, faintly, be heard. Adorno once likened his theoretical efforts to 'messages in bottles on the flood of barbarism.'"
From the book by Adorno and Eisler:
¨The motion picture cannot be understood in isolation, as a specific form of art; it is understandable only as the most characteristic medium of contemporary cultural industry, which us the techniques of mechanical reproduction.¨
¨In this advanced industrial age, the masses are compelled to seek relaxation and rest, in order to restore the labor power that has been spent in the alienated process of labor; and this need is the mass basis of mass culture. On it there has arisen the powerful amusement industry, which constantly produces, satisfies, and reproduces new needs.¨
¨Taste and receptivity have become largely standardized; and, despite the multiplicity of products, the consumer has only apparent freedom of choice.¨
¨The old individualistic mode of production should not be set up against [industrialized culture] ... as necessarily superior to it, nor should technology as such be held responsible for the barbarism of the culture industry.¨
¨The idea of the leitmotif has been popular since the days of Wagner. His popularity was largely connected with his use of leitmotifs.¨
¨Wagner conceived [the leitmotif´s] ... purpose as the endowment of the dramatic events with metaphysical significance.¨
¨More than anything else the demand for melody at any cost and on every occasion has throttled the development of motion-picture music.¨
¨Music is concocted to go with meretricious lyrics.¨
¨The absurdity of such ´applied art´ arrangements [that is, the practice of investing costume pictures with music of the corresponding historical period] is glaring in contrast with the technique of the film, which is of necessity modern.¨
¨Mass production of motion pictures has led to the elaboration of typical situations, ever-recurring emotional crises, and standardized methods of arousing suspense.¨
¨The violins must sob or scintillate, the brasses must crash insolently or bombastically, no moderate expression is tolerated, and the whole method of performance is based on exaggeration.¨
¨All middle-class music has an ambivalent character. On the one hand, it is in a certain sense pre-capitalistic, ´direct,´ a vague evocation of togetherness; on the other hand, because it has shared in the progress of civilization, it has become reified, indirect, and ultimately a ´means´ among many others. This ambivalence determines its function under advanced capitalism. It is par excellence the medium in which irrationality can be practiced rationally.¨
¨Such a rationally planned irrationality is the very essence of the amusement industry in all its branches. Music perfectly fits the pattern.¨
¨Music is unveiled as the drug that it is in reality, and its intoxicating, harmfully irrational function becomes apparent. The composition and performance of the music combined with the picture must demonstrate to the public the destructive and barbarizing influence of such musical effects.¨
¨Musical techniques for arousing suspense have been developed for the most part since the middle of the eighteenth century.¨
¨The new [autonomous] musical resources should be used because objectively they are more appropriate than the haphazard musical padding with which motion pictures are satisfied today, and are superior to it.¨
¨The suitability of modern, unfamiliar resources should be recognized from the standpoint of the motion picture itself. The fact is that this form of drama originated in the county fair and the cheap melodrama has left traces that are still apparent; sensation is its very life element. This is not to be understood solely in a negative sense, as lack of taste and aesthetic discrimination; only by using the element of surprise can the motion picture give everyday life, which it claims to reproduce by virtue of its technique, an appearance of strangeness, and disclose the essential meaning beneath its realistic surface. More generally, the drudgery of life as depicted in a reportage can become dramatic only through sensational presentation, which to a certain extent negates everyday life through exaggeration, and, when artistically true, reveals tensions that are ´blacked out´ in the conventional concept of ´normal´ average existence. The horrors of sensational literary and cinematic trash lay bare part of the barbaric foundation of civilization. To the extent that the motion picture in its sensationalism is the heir of the popular horror story and dime novel and remains below the established standards of middle-class art, it is in a position to shatter those standards, precisely through the use of sensation, and to gain access to collective energies that are inaccessible to sophisticated literature and painting. It is this very perspective that cannot be reached with the means of traditional music. But modern music is suitable to it. The fear expressed in the dissonances of Schoenberg´s most radical period far surpasses the measure of fear conceivable to the average middle-class individual; it is a historical fear, a sense of impending doom.¨
¨The twelve-tone chord at the moment of Lulu´s death in Berg´s opera produces an effect very much like that of a motion picture. While the cinema technique aims essentially at creating extreme tension, traditional music, with the slight dissonances it allows, knows of no equivalent material.¨
¨The principle of tension is latently so active even in the weakest productions that incidents which of themselves are credited with no importance whatsoever appear like scattered fragments of a meaning that the whole is intended to clarify and that transcend themselves. The new musical language is particularly well-suited to do justice to this element of the motion picture.¨
¨The haphazard development of cinema music is comparable to that of the radio or of the the motion picture itself. It is first of all a question of personnel. In the early days of the amusement industry, owners and directors were the same persons.¨
¨The whole realm of musical performance has always had the social stigma of a service for those who can pay. The practice of music is historically linked with the idea of selling one´s talent, and even
one´s self, directly, without intermediaries, rather than selling one´s labor in its congealed form, as a commodity; and through the ages the musician, like the actor, has been regarded as closely akin to the lackey, the jester, or the prostitute.¨
¨In fact, the late-comer industry of motion pictures has not rid itself of the pre-capitalist elements of musicianship, the social type of the Stehgeiger [the violinist who stands while he conducts a cafe orchestra, the other members remaining seated], despite its apparent contradiction to industrial production and the artistic incompetence of its outspoken representatives. On the contrary, this ´irrational´ type itself has been given a monopolistic position in the streamlined set-up. The industry, out of deepest kinship, has attracted him, preferred him to all musicians with objective tendencies, and made him a permanent institution. He has been regimented like other sham elements of a former spontaneity. The cinema exploits the barber aspect of his personality as a Don Juan, and his head-waiter functions as a troubadour deluxe, and occasionally even gives him the role of a bouncer to keep undesirable elements out. Its musical ideal is schmaltz in a chrome metal pot. But since the regimentation of the gypsy musician deprives him of the last vestiges of spontaneity which the inexorable technical and organizational machinery has already undermined, objectively nothing is left of the itinerant musician except a few bad mannerisms of performance."
¨The historical processes that can be perceived in cinema music are only reflections of the decay of middle-class cultural goods into commodities for the amusement market.¨
¨The full-fledged and quantitatively pretentious scores composed for the last silent pictures were essentially the same as those composed later for sound pictures.¨
¨[Kurt London:] Finally, in the last few years of the silent film period, the big cinema palaces were served by orchestras which, composed, as they were, of 50-1000 musicians, put to shame many a medium sized city orchestra. Parallel with this development, a new career for conductors offered itself: they had to lead the cinema orchestra and select the illustrative music. Prominent men often filled these posts with salaries which more often than not exceeded those of an opera conductor.¨
¨The term ´prominent´ as used here does not express real artistic accomplishments, but is part of the grandiloquent phraseology affected by all advertising in the entertainment industry, with its insincere slogan that nothing is too good for the public. This kind of prominence is determined by the fabulous salaries paid to those whom the publicity agencies elect to build up - the prominence of Radio City, the Pathe Theatre in Paris, or the Ufapalast am Zoo in Berlin. It belongs to the realm that Siegfried Kracauer called Angestelltenkultur, culture of the white-collar workers, of supposedly high-class entertainment, accessible to recipients of small pay checks, yet presented in such a sway that nothing seems too good or too expensive for them. It is a pseudo-democratic luxury which is neither luxurious nor democratic, for the people who walk on heavily carpeted stairways into the marble palaces and glamorous castles of moviedom are incessantly frustrated without being aware of it. This kind of opulence, manifested, for instance, in submersible and floodlighted monster orchestras, marks the beginning of a development that has left behind it all the obvious naivete of the old amusement park, but raised the technique of the barker to the point of anonymous yet all-embracing practice.¨
¨Subjection to administrative control is responsible for the stagnation of motion-picture music.¨
¨The truth is that no serious composer writes for the motion pictures for any other than money reasons; and in the studios he does not feel that he is a beneficiary of Utopian technical potentialities, but a regimented employee who can be discharged on any pretext.¨
¨Because, for real or pretended reasons of economy, no risks are permitted, the industry accepts only material similar to that which has already proved its market value.¨
¨The practitioners of commercial music... have had to deal with an illiterate, intolerant, and uncritical public taste, and they have had to bow to it if they wanted to remain true to their dubious maxim: give the public nothing but what the public wants. The contradiction between the middle-class public and its music was resolved in antipathy against anything experimental, anything that is even remotely suspected of being intellectual, and even anything that is just different.¨
¨The whole form language of current cinema music derives from advertising. The motif is the slogan; the instrumentation, the standardized picturesque; the accompaniments to animated cartoons are advertising jokes; and sometime it is as though the music replaced the names of the commercial articles that the motion pictures do not yet dare mention directly.¨
¨The collective function of music has become transformed into the function of ensnaring the customer.¨
¨Roughly speaking, all music, including the most ´objective´ and non-expressive, belongs primariy to the sphere of subjective inwardness, whereas even the most spiritualized painting is heavily burdened with unresolved objectivity.¨
¨There can be no greater error than producing pictures of which the aesthetic ideas are incompatible with their technical premises, and which at the same time camouflage this incompatibility."
¨The alienation of the media from each other reflects a society alienated from itself, men whose functions are severed from each other even within each individual.¨
¨The origin of motion-picture music is inseparably connected with the decay of spoken language..."
¨...it was said long ago that in every domain the genuine artist must master his spontaneous ideas. This is possible if the whole conception of the work is rooted in his freedom, is truly his own, and is not imposed upon him by another agency.¨
¨...the general practice of rummaging though all our cultural inheritance for commercial purposes which characterizes the cultural industry.¨
June 13, 2024
¿Donde se anclan las conexiones entre la banda sonora de Hollywood y la musica alemana del siglo XIX? Para Adorno está claro. Los compositores del ámbito germánico, huyendo del nazismo, buscan un oficio en EEUU, y resuelven hacer bandas sonoras para Hollywood para ganarse la vida. Si, vereis a un Adorno un poco en plan abuelo cebolleta cabreado diciendo que esta gente destruyó la opera y que la musica de cine es un simple manierismo.
No obstante, da una serie de claves para analizar las bandas sonoras que son exportables a la actualidad, y cuando lo leas no dejaras de esbozar una sonrisa cuando veas una pelicula con BSO de John Williams.
No obstante, da una serie de claves para analizar las bandas sonoras que son exportables a la actualidad, y cuando lo leas no dejaras de esbozar una sonrisa cuando veas una pelicula con BSO de John Williams.
January 2, 2023
Creo recordar que me pareció un libro bastante falaz.
August 2, 2008
This book, written while in exile in Hollywood by European intellectuals Theodor Adorno & Hanns Eissler, reminded me a good deal of "Barton Fink." It's a totally ridiculous critique of film scoring circa the 1940s, arguing that Hollywood arrangers should adopt 12-tone music & other "advanced" techniques that (I imagine) would get a hearty laugh from cigar-chomping studio bosses. Still, it's a definitely a valuable breakdown of early film music, with some interesting art-head/academic exercises (like Eisler's appendix "14 Ways to Describe Rain," though it only gives sheet music for one of them).
December 21, 2010
Basically, a 100 page theoretical exposition on not selling out. Interesting but without a great understanding of musicology, it was only interesting to see how Adorno framed certain things.
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