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The
jazz
Adorno:
reception
essays
some
in
of
Theodor
thoughts on jazz
Weimar
Germany
J. BRADFORD ROBINSON
Theodor Adorno's writings on jazz remain at best a puzzle, and to many an acute
embarrassment. To jazz historians they merely contain 'some of the stupidest
pages ever written about jazz' (Hobsbawm 1993, p. 300) and are generally dismissed without further comment. Adorno scholars, on the other hand, are unlikely
to see in them anything more than preliminary steps to his later and more substantial studies in the sociology of music, or - in the words of Martin Jay (1984, p.
132) - a 'gloss on TheAuthoritarianPersonality'. Nor are matters helped by Adorno's
own attitude. In the preface to volume 17 of his GesammelteSchriften he clearly
distances himself from his early jazz writings, referring to his ignorance of the
specifically American features of jazz, his dependence on the German-Hungarian
pedagogue Mityas Seiber in matters of jazz technique, and his willingness to draw
hasty psycho-sociological conclusions without clear knowledge of the institutions
of the commercial music industry. If these essays are belittled by their own author,
why should we bother to study them at all?
Adorno, however, is not to be taken at his own evaluation. True, if read for
their insights into jazz history in the narrow sense of the term, 1 his writings have
little to offer today, unless we are willing to believe that the rhythmic achievements
of New Orleans Jazz were already present in far more sophisticated form in the
music of Brahms, or that Armstrong's instrumental timbre was derived from the
lead violinists of the central European cafr concert. But they have consistently been
read in the wrong light, perhaps not least of all by their own author. In what
spirit, then, should we approach this body of writings today?
Our first step must to be remove two misconceptions associated with
Adorno's use of the term 'jazz': first, that it referred to what we regard today as
jazz, and second, that the music it referred to was American. Neither was the
case. Because of the peculiar manner in which American popular music was introduced into Weimar Germany, Adorno could not have known that when he took
up his pen to polemicise against jazz he was writing about a specifically German
brand of music. Adorno's jazz writings, although post-dating the Weimar Republic, must be read within the context of Weimar Germany's commercial music scene
as a whole, a context largely forgotten today and, due to the predations of recent
history, extremely difficult to reconstruct.2 For the purposes of this article, Adorno
will be treated for the moment not as a socio-cultural theorist but as an astute
observer of the popular music of his time - indeed, the most astute observer
1
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Robinson
J. Bradford
this music was to experience. Later, in Section V, we will return to some of his
socio-cultural conclusions.
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experts and with recent developments of jazz in the country of its origin. This
essay-review, published in 1941, shows that Adorno was not about to revise his
notions of jazz upon contact with the American original. Although he now discusses, for the first time, the phenomenon of 'swing' (as opposed to syncopation),
the vocalisation of timbre and the superimposition of speech-melody, he is content
to fit these musical characteristics of legitimate jazz into his earlier categories and
dismiss them as 'pseudo-vocalisation', 'pseudo-improvisation' and, altogether,
'pseudo-morphosis'. The reviews may be seen as an elaboration under new conditions of the thoughts contained in
which, indeed, is cited in a footnote.
'Uber Jazz',
This essay was immediately followed in 1942 by an entry on jazz from
Runes's and Schrikel's Encyclopediaof the Arts, published in English in 1946. Here
Adorno distills his ideas and sets them for the first time against the background
of American jazz historiography, which had begun to emphasise the importance
of the New Orleans tradition and the early black-American trumpet kings. Once
again, however, Adorno's interest attaches primarily to commercialised forms of
jazz, and he sees his thoughts on 1920s popular music reconfirmed by his experience of the American culture industry.
Finally, in 1953, having returned to Germany, Adorno was able to summarise
twenty years of thoughts on jazz in a lengthy article entitled 'Zeitlose Mode: Zum
Jazz' (Timeless fashion: on jazz). In length and complexity the essay was obviously
meant to stand alongside 'iOberJazz' (which is cited in a footnote along with the
reviews of Hobson and Sargeant) and to correct several of its misconceptions. As
its title implies, however, the general conclusions he drew of jazz in the 1920s
apply 'timelessly' to its later offshoots, and jazz is reinstated as the music of
fascism. This view, however, applicable to German commercial music of the 1920s,
was unlikely to pass uncontested by writers who recalled the suppression of jazz
under the Nazis. Challenged by the new German expert on jazz, Joachim-Ernst
Berendt, Adorno published a rebuttal under the title 'Fuir und wider den Jazz'
(Jazz pro and contra) which made only too clear that these two authorities
approached their subject from entirely different angles - Berendt from legitimate
jazz, of which commercial music represents a dilution, and Adorno from commercial music, from which jazz is a failed attempt at individualisation. Indeed, this
spirited rebuttal shows Adorno retrenching to some of the positions he had seemingly abandoned in the USA, among them his insistence that jazz is a white man's
music to which blacks merely added the frisson of their skin colour.
Toward the end of his life, however, the self-rejuvenating properties of jazz,
and perhaps some of Berendt's criticism, apparently caused Adorno to rethink a
number of his earlier ideas. By the time of Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie (1962)
the generic term 'jazz' had given way to 'leichte Musik' (popular music), and the
discussion tends to centre on operetta, musical and popular songwriting, legitimate jazz being dealt with in passing. The conclusions he draws, however, are much
the same: not even legitimate jazz is allowed to partake of a claim to artistic status as
it has constantly been co-opted by the entertainment industry. Even this chapter,
Adorno's final statement on jazz, betrays his lifelong insistence on the primacy of
the compositional substrate rather than on improvised performance. The achievements of legitimate jazz musicians within the tight restrictions imposed by their
genre are seen as less significant than the existence of those very restrictions.
As this brief survey makes clear, Adorno's ideas on jazz, however tempered
his
by
experiences abroad, never entirely left the Weimar Republic and can only
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J. BradfordRobinson
be understood in that context. His very use of the term jazz, which elevates the
vaudeville entertainer Ted Lewis into a 'patriarch of jazz' (1941, p. 395), requires
further analysis and differentiation if we are to understand these writings in their
full significance, and particularly if we are to understand the burden of all his
thoughts on jazz: its fascist propensities. It is to the stylistic and social history of
popular music in Germany of the 1920s, then, that we shall now turn.
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mine Germany: the military band, the salon orchestra, and the Radaukapelleor
'racket band'.
This process of assimilation is documented, however scantily, in the few
recordings surviving from this period. The earliest German recording bearing the
word 'jazz' - 'Tiger Rag-Jazz' by a pseudo-American bandleader called
Groundzell - is nothing more than military-band music to which have been added
a few stiff syncopations of the type marketed before the war under the name of
cake walk. The Radaukapelle,a term that survives in the memoirs of George Grosz
(1955, p. 97), was Viennese salon music played with deliberate distortions and
clown-like stage antics. It, too, existed before World War I, and was now simply
marketed under the name of jazz and undergirt with an arsenal of percussion and
novelty effects, from police whistles and pistol shots to musical saws. An example
of this music, thought at the time to be revolutionary for its disregard of musical
convention, can be heard on a recording by the Original Piccadilly Four. Later it
was exploited commercially by such groups as Weintraub's Syncopators, who
among other things supplied the music to Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel
(1930).
It was however the salon orchestra, headed by a lead violinist or Stehgeiger,
that provided the primary basis of early German jazz. (A German jazz manual of
1929 even offers precise instructions for converting a salon orchestra into a jazz
band; see Baresel, p. 62.) There were several reasons for this. First, the salon
orchestra, or at least the 'gypsy music' variant known in Viennese cafes, had a
tradition of improvisation which could be transferred to jazz. Second, these bands
and their leaders already existed, and needed only to be slightly refurbished and
rechristened 'jazz bands' to enter the commercial music market. It comes as no
surprise to learn that the leading figures of early German jazz - Marek Weber,
Dajos Bela, Efim Schachmeister, Erno Geiger, Berhard Ettd, Barnaby von Geczy all derive from the central European tradition of the Stehgeiger. In the eyes of the
German public, the typical jazz musician of the 1920s was a violinist of Hungarian
or Slavic extraction, and there was no difficulty in accepting Krenek's Jonny as a
jazz musician and his violin as a jazz instrument.
At the same time that these early performance traditions were being created,
the leading and most lucrative branch of the commercial musical trade, the publishing industry, was turning out American and German dance music, semivirtuoso piano rags and popular songs under the name of jazz. Here the leading
exemplars were Zez Confrey, whose 1921 novelty piano piece Kitten on the Keys
achieved almost classical status (Adorno (1933, p. 799) considered it one of the
two lasting achievements of the Jazz Age), and the American song composer Irving
Berlin. Again it should be observed that the notoriety of Irving Berlin and Tin Pan
Alley, as with piano ragtime, pre-dated the German Jazz Age, and that German
jazz could build upon established traditions. Early Weimar publicists regarded
Berlin in particular as the quintessential jazz composer, and the new style of American popular song in syncopated rhythms as a form of jazz. It was this music, so
readily available in print and so easy to study and assimilate, that underlay the
early essays in jazz by Weimar's young art composers Paul Hindemith, Ernst
Krenek and Kurt Weill.4
These subgenres of German jazz were all in existence before the first American jazz band visited Germany in 1924. The first half-decade of Germany's Jazz
Age, then, was nourished on music which bore only a tenuous relation to Amer-
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Robinson
J. Bradford
ican popular music, and no relation at all to the legitimate American jazz of King
Oliver, Sydney Bechet, Louis Armstrong or James P. Johnson. From mid-decade,
however, new influences impinged on German jazz with the stabilisation of the
economy, the rise of the matrix-exchange programme among international gramophone monopolies, and the first tours of legitimate American jazz musicians. Each
of these developments engendered new styles in Germany's popular music.
The matrix-exchange programme revolutionised the import and export of
gramophone recordings. No longer were heavy shellac discs shipped between
countries, but merely the metal matrices, which could then be used to press
records in the new country. By 1926-7 this programme had given rise to a steady
influx of American dance music in exchange for German recordings of classical
music. The recordings chosen for import, however, excluded a priori the 'race
records' on which most black American jazz was issued (American record companies published their music in segregated catalogues for marketing purposes). With
few exceptions, the classics of black American jazz were thus commercially
unavailable at any time during the Weimar Republic." Still, besides a vast amount
of 'sweet' commercial dance music of little interest to jazz, by the end of the decade
a number of legitimate jazz recordings by white New York studio groups under
the leadership of Red Nichols and Miff Mole began to enter the German market.
This music sold in very low quantities (no more than 500 copies of each recording),
but soon gained a following among jazz insiders and aficionados, as can be seen
in several first-person accounts of this period (e.g. H6chst6tter 1987).
More significant was the influx of recordings by such white bandleaders as
Vincent Lopez and especially Paul Whiteman, the self-proclaimed King of Jazz,
whose own publicity agents had made him by far the leading proponent of commercial jazz in America. Unlike the New York studio jazz mentioned above, these
recordings were sold in issues of up to 10,000 copies, and thus left an indelible
mark on Weimar Germany's image of jazz. Other leading 'jazz' figures whose
recordings were sold in comparable numbers were the famous vaudeville singer
Al Jolson (soon to be immortalised as 'The Jazz Singer' in the first sound movie)
and the now forgotten banjo virtuoso Harry Reser. Neither of these figures, of
course, had anything to do with jazz as we know it today.
Whiteman pursued two goals: the establishment of the jazz arranger as a
musician equal in importance to the composer and soloist, and the elevation of
jazz to a form of concert music with original orchestral compositions. Both of these
currents - the 'arranger's orchestra' and 'symphonic jazz' - left a strong imprint
on Weimar Germany's commercial music. Many German dance bands expanded
their numbers, hired staff arrangers, and aped the performance style of the
Whiteman orchestra, especially after Whiteman's triumphant European tour of
1926. German popular composers likewise tried their hand at symphonic jazz
modelled after Gershwin's Rhapsodyin Blue, which Whiteman had commissioned
and premiered in 1924. At the same time, the 'art jazz' of Krenek and Weill began
to attract popular attention, especially after the phenomenal box-office success of
Krenek's opera Jonny spielt auf in 1926.6 By the end of the 1920s concert jazz was
thus being produced from two directions at once: by popular musicians attempting
to elevate jazz to the concert hall, and by art composers trying out new hybrids
with lowbrow music.
Black American jazz, however, was still virtually uncharted territory.
Although a few superior black American musicians in revue orchestras had visited
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Berlin in 1925-6, they remained unknown to experts and the mass public alike. In
1929 the great jazz clarinettist Sydney Bechet played anonymously in the Wild
West room of Berlin's Haus Vaterland (an entertainment complex immortalised in
Siegfried Kracauer's 1930 study of the rising German white-collar class) and privately on invitation from the grande bourgeoisie. At no time, however, did he
perform in public under his own name; even his appearance in an early German
'talkie' was anonymous.' In the words of Kurt Weill (1926, p. 732), who otherwise
showed a discerning appreciation for black revue orchestras, jazz 'does not reflect
towering personalities standing above time, but rather the instincts of the masses'.8
The German radio networks, also established around mid-decade, did nothto
ing
change the image of white jazz propagated in Weimar Germany, preferring
instead to broadcast the music of their own radio dance bands and, later, gramophone recordings from the leading German bandleaders. A statistical study of
Weimar Germany's jazz broadcasting reveals that of 12,500 titles broadcast under
the name of jazz, three were by Duke Ellington and none by Louis Armstrong
(Hoffmann 1987). Only in 1930 were these two musicians mentioned for the first
time by name among the millions of words published on jazz by the hyperactive
Weimar press (Strobel and Warschauer 1930). The same article introduces, likewise
for the first time, a distinction between genuine black American jazz, black jazz
diluted for commercial distribution, and jazz-influenced dance music. By this late
date, however, Germany's Jazz Age had already come to a close as the Wall Street
crash of 1929 and ensuing depression left American popular music bereft of its
ideological attraction. By the early 1930s the same salon musicians who had produced Germany's Tanzjazz, notably Barnaby von Geczy, were now playing nonsyncopated dance music and marches for increasingly conservative dancers and
audiences.
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Robinson
J. Bradford
Table1.
Style
Years
Military rags
1905-1920
Radaukapelle
1912-1930
1920-1930
Novelty piano
1922-1930
Popular song
1918-1930
Arranger's jazz
1925-1932
Symphonic jazz
1925-1930
Art jazz
1922-1930
Small-ensemble jazz
1926-1932
Table2.
Style
Adorno's term
Military rags
Radaukapelle
Syncopated dance music
Novelty piano
Popular song
Arranger's jazz
Symphonic jazz
Art jazz
Studio jazz
Black American jazz
Militirmarsch
Amateurjazz
Tanzjazz
musikalischesKunstgewerbe
Jazzschlager
Arrangeur, Arrangement
Jazz-Symphonie-Orchester
Kunstjazz
hot-Musik
Jazz-Excentric
a term adopted from Debussy's piano piece GeneralLavine, eccentric (1937a, p. 97).
Adorno first used it in reference to Louis Armstrong when he became aware of
the great jazz trumpeter in the mid-1930s, and later applied it to leading blackAmerican jazz soloists, who combined flamboyant instrumental virtuosity with a
certain amount of showmanship. (At that time, it should be recalled, Armstrong
was cultivating a career as an entertainer, and comparisons with clowns and circus
antics were not entirely inappropriate.) More importantly, however, Adorno conThis content downloaded from 128.122.149.145 on Tue, 17 Nov 2015 17:52:39 UTC
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10
Robinson
J. Bradford
as a formative sonority in the music of Bart6k (1953b, p. 807), and the latter left
the harmonic function of the inflected pitch unchanged (ibid),1oneither could, to
Adorno's mind, be considered innovative. Harmonically, jazz remained well
behind the state attained by art music.
Adorno found still less to praise in jazz melody, which likewise had 'impressionistic models' (1937a, p. 90). Not knowing the freely evolving melody of great
black American soloists such as Bechet and Armstrong, he could only draw his
conclusions from the melodies of popular songs and from the 'daredevil cadenzas
of hot music' (die abenteurlichenKadenzender hot music', 1993, p. 796), those pseudoimprovised instrumental breaks inserted at regularly recurring junctures in the
thirty-two-bar song form. These two- and four-bar improvisations were strictly
codified at the time and in no way permitted the free unfolding of melody associated with jazz today. German musicians generally learnt them by rote from any
of the many 'break manuals' published by the house of Zimmermann in Leipzig
(e.g. Evans 1928a and 1928b; Baresel c.1930) and played them as small-scale concert
etudes. Adorno was fully aware of these jazz manuals and of their stultifying
effect on the musical creativity of commercial musicians, who in fact replicated
tired formulae where they claimed to be improvising. Indeed, one of these manuals
was written by his long-time associate and jazz adviser Mityas Seiber (1929).
It was the thirty-two-bar song form itself, the periodic structure of jazz, the
'eight-bar period with its subdivision into half-cadence and full cadence'
797), that constituted the most atavistic feature of the music, preventing it from
evolving organically and its practitioners from developing individuality of expression. Being unaware of the work of the major jazz soloists, who showed great
ingenuity precisely in overcoming the rigid structure of the standard tunes on
which they improvised, Adorno may be excused for seeing in jazz only the
straitjacket of the Tin Pan Alley song and the limited expressive opportunities
offered by the two- to four-bar break. In later years, however, even after he had
become acquainted with Bebop, he saw no reason to revise this opinion. It never
occurred to him that this 'straitjacket' was in fact a prerequisite to improvisation,
which must leave some parameters intact in order that others might be explored,
and a stimulus to the performer's imagination much like a rigid fugue subject to
an improvising organist. The jazz musician, it would seem, is faulted for not acting
with the liberties granted an art composer: 'popular music is touched up rather
than jazz as such being composed; ('LeichteMusik [wird] frisiert, nicht etwa Jazz als
solcher komponiert',1953a, p. 125).
If the preceding features of jazz were evidently derivative of art music, the
same could not immediately be claimed of its timbre and rhythm, which were
quite obviously new to the world of 1920s commercial and concert music. Adorno,
however, was not willing to grant jazz even these modest claims to innovation.
Jazz timbre, he maintained, consists in instrumental vibrato, this being its 'vital
element' ('Lebenselement',1937a, p. 75). While the application of vibrato to standard
orchestral instruments such as the clarinet, trumpet and trombone was indeed
unusual at the time, Adorno saw the roots of this vibrato in the Wilhelmine
Stehgeiger,in whom he correctly recognised one of the forebears of Weimar's commercial music. Other forms of jazz instrumental timbre - growl and plunger-mute
effects, slap-tonguing, and especially the new percussion sounds (crash cymbal,
hi-hat, wire brushes) - escaped his attention where they were not simply explained
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11
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12
J. BradfordRobinson
the compositional model, and never does it break the shackles of the unit pulse.
More important is Adorno's discussion of Scheintaktigkeit,a technical term
specifically coined by Weimar Germany's jazz theorists to explain what is known
today as secondary rag. Scheintakte,or 'pseudo-bars', are created when crotchets or
quavers are grouped in threes within a 4/4 metre and allowed to produce three-beat
patterns extending over the normal bar lines. This simple device, immortalised in
Euday Bowman's familiar 12th Street Rag (1914) and more spectacularly in Confrey's Kitten on the Keys (1921), was lauded by Weimar's more enthusiastic jazz
apologists as an important contribution to the evolution of rhythm in Western
music. Adorno was suitably sceptical. It is in this context that we should understand his claim that the rhythmic achievements of jazz - meaning specifically
Scheintaktigkeit- were already foreshadowed if not surpassed in the music of
Brahms (1933, p. 797; 1953a, p. 126), who indeed occasionally used displacement
of metre to massive effect in his orchestral and chamber music.
Still, Adorno himself misunderstood the nature of the Scheintakt. On several
occasions he describes it as a combination of 3 + 3 + 2 quavers within a 4/4 bar,
which, of course, would merely produce the Charleston rhythm (1933, p. 798;
1937a, p. 74; 1941, p. 393). It is surprising to find that a musical analyst of Adorno's
fastidiousness should consistently overlook the simple fact that Scheintaktecan only
be perceived if they extend beyond the normal bar line. Adorno's point, however,
is that no matter how complex Scheintaktemay become, they always eventually
resolve into the underlying 4/4 metre. The rhythmic freedom of the Scheintakt,like
syncopation, ultimately proves deceptive, a favourite thought of Adorno's first
elaborated in 1937 (1937a, pp. 74-5) and repeated in all his later essays.
The third element in Adorno's discussion of jazz rhythm, after syncopation
and Scheintakt,is the break. As surprising as it may seem to consider the break a
feature of rhythm (we have already examined it from the standpoint of melody),
it was here that the most daring polyrhythms and cross-accents of Weimar's jazz
were to be found. Many of the examples contained in Weimar's break manuals
are almost case-studies of the level of complexity that a jazz performance may
attain when the soloist is allowed to play unaccompanied. Adorno's point here is
much the same as with Scheintaktigkeit:no matter how daring and uninhibited the
break, it will always fit into the underlying eight-bar periodic structure of the
performance. The break therefore merely functions as an ornament - or, as he
later acidly remarked, a 'vitamin injection in the tedium of mass-produced articles'
('Vitaminspritze im Einerlei der Massenproduktion', 1953b, p. 806) - rather than
imparting form and structure. Again, the alleged rhythmic freedom of jazz proves
to be illusory: jazz performance even in its wildest outbursts of improvisation is
hamstrung by the thirty-two-bar song form, the eight-bar period, the 4/4 metre
and the unit pulse.
It need hardly be mentioned that, as dance music, jazz could scarcely afford
to do without an underlying beat, clear metre and regular periodic structure.
Adorno sees jazz's efforts to free itself from the unit pulse and the eight-bar period
into the world of rubato and compound time signatures thwarted by its function,
by its need to fulfil a purpose and to reach a large body of listeners who insisted
on easy intelligibility. The fact that later jazz no longer functioned as dance music,
and appealed to a limited audience, did not lead him to revise these opinions.
On the contrary, he merely insisted that modern jazz was attracting talented young
musicians from art music into pseudo-art (1953a, p. 135). To the end of his days,
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13
when speaking of jazz, Adorno clung to the technical vocabulary he had developed
to analyse the German commercial music of the 1920s; and as his analytical terminology remained the same, so did his conclusions.
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14
J. BradfordRobinson
music played by whites, heard, purchased and danced to by whites, and massproduced and marketed by whites, Adorno may be excused for concluding that
any black American features that may have existed in jazz had been utterly eradicated in the course of its social evolution. Nor was he able to detect black American
traits in the music itself, remarking laconically, 'It is, incidentally, difficult to pinpoint the authentic Negro elements of jazz' ('Ubrigensfailltes schwer, die authentischen
Negerelementedes Jazz zu isolieren', 1953a, p. 124) - an opinion that can only be
seconded after a close hearing of Weimar's jazz recordings. Jazz, by the time it
reached Adorno, had undergone two processes of re-acculturation during which
its black American features were first blunted for consumption by white American
audiences and in turn virtually obliterated for the musicians and consumers of
Central Europe. Not until 1930 were German jazz enthusiasts aware that black
American musicians played a different and more earthy style of jazz for race
records and varied their performance style to suit the skin-colour of their audience
(Strobel and Warschauer 1930).
If the true origins of jazz were not to be found in the music of black Americans, where then did jazz originate? Adorno's answer to this question goes to the
heart not only of his sociological interpretation of jazz music but of Weimer Germany's jazz reception altogether:
Due to its origins, jazz is rooted deep in the salon style. To put it bluntly, it is the salon
style from which jazz derives its espressivo,everything about it that seeks an emotional
outlet. [ ... ] The subjectivepole of jazz [ ... ] is salon music; it quivers with the latter's
every movement. If one wished to define jazz in broad and tangible stylistic categories as
an interferentialphenomenon, one might call it the combinationof salon music and march.
(1937a,pp. 91-2)"
The last words - 'the combination of salon music and march' - deserve reiteration.
We have already seen how Adorno traced 'jazz vibrato' to the playing of the
Stehgeiger. Now, it seems, the roots of jazz itself are to be found in the Paris
ensembles and military bands of Wilhelmine Germany. However bizarre Adorno's
view may appear from today's standpoint, our survey of Weimar's jazz reception,
given in Section II, confirms the accuracy of both these claims when applied to
German jazz. For Adorno, as for most German musicians and commentators, very
few of whom ever set foot in America until forced by circumstances to do so, jazz
was a thoroughly central European phenomenon and could be understood entirely
in central European categories.
Adorno, then, correctly recognised two of the currents that contributed to
the formation of German jazz in the early post-war years. This discovery was of
central importance when he came to 'decipher' this music. Nor did he overlook
the third contributing factor to early Weimar jazz, the Radaukapelle,or what he
called Amateurjazz.But he was quick to see through the revolutionary posturings of
this music, with its unmotivated percussion and novelty effects, animal imitations,
deliberate executive blunders and general attitude of dpater le bourgeois. In this
respect he was far in advance of many commentators of his time, who found the
music so rebellious that it was sometimes called Matrosenmusikin order to link it
to the sailors' mutinies that had precipitated the German revolutions of 1918 (e.g.
Bernhard 1927).12 Adorno recognised that Amateurjazz,far from being produced in
a revolutionary spirit, was in reality nothing more than a debased version of ordinary commercial dance music:
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15
The amateuris not the fresh and unencumberedmusician whose originalitylifts him above
the daily routine of commerce; that belongs to the realm of the Negerfabel.[ ... I The
amateur apes the stereotypes of currentjazz music and bestows upon them a commercial
opportunity to be retailed at a possibly even cheaper price. (1937a,p. 88)13
In later years, though without denying the original 'anarchic' impetus of this music
(1953a, p. 132), he correctly saw that the fate of such musical outbursts by the
rebellious young is to be subsumed into the culture industry, as happened to
Weimar's Amateurjazz in the 1920s and has happened since then to every subsequent jazz, rock and urban blues style with the sole exception of the deliberately
unmarketable Free Jazz. Later history has borne out the pattern that Adorno posited for such youthful heresies in popular music: standardisation, commercial cannibalisation, paralysis ('Standardisierung, kommerzielleAusschlachtung und Erstarrung', 1953a, p. 124).
At the other extreme was the highly professional 'hot music', which raised
a claim to artistic status by virtue of its quality of execution, freedom of improvisation, and the relatively high standards and small size of its audience. Adorno was
aware that such music appealed to dance-band musicians as an antidote to boredom, and to fans who placed higher demands on the music than did the dancers
on the dance floor. Moreover, these fans generally came from the higher echelons
of society, and used the artistic claims of this music to set themselves apart from
middle- and lowbrow consumers (1937a, p. 80). However, by accepting the functional limitations of dance music, 'hot music' (by which Adorno also meant legitimate black American jazz) was unable to distance itself essentially from the mass
product:
Theorymust [... ] confrontthe problemof contingencyvis-a-vis hot music, no matterhow
little headway this music has made in the broad public, at least in Europe. For comparedto
the minima of march and salon music, hot music represents the greatest attainablemaximum. (1937a, p. 95)"
At the most, hot music could aspire to the status of Kunstgewerbe,a slightly derogatory term usually associated in German with porcelain figurines and antique furniture, but likewise capable of exhibiting high-quality craftsmanship and attracting
admirers.
This was also the label Adorno set aside for novelty ragtime, especially Zez
Confrey's Kitten on the Keys with its clever cross-relations, major-minor triads,
overlapping Scheintakteand concluding piano clusters. Like many of Weimar's jazz
publicists, and like composers as far apart as Darius Milhaud and Erwin Schulhoff,
Adorno felt secretly attracted to the technical polish of this music and its playful
treatment of elements new at the time to art composers. (The clusters in its final
chorus, though merely evocative of a cat stumbling on a piano keyboard, antedate
those of Bart6k by several years.) But by applying the analytical categories of art
music to Confrey, Billy Mayerl and Rube Bloom he could only discover the poverty
of novelty ragtime compared to the art music of the time, and particularly its
failure to evolve into something more substantial. In the event, novelty piano rags
soon disappeared from Weimar's music culture, leaving behind nothing more than
'the elan of a new beginning' (1933, p. 799).
If novelty ragtime was familiar only to a few professional musicians and
intellectuals, the same could not be said of the popular song, or Jazzschlager.It is
important to note that, for Adorno, popular song was not a separate genre of
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J. BradfordRobinson
commercial music that occasionally betrayed echoes of instrumental jazz, but the
central genre of jazz itself. Indeed, most of his references to jazz, even where he
does not specifically mention Jazzschlager,could be replaced by the term 'popular
song'. There were several reasons for this. Popular songs appeared in print and
could therefore be studied and analysed, whereas live or recorded performances,
at least at that time, could not. They were also published in huge numbers, and
were thus far more widely distributed than gramophone discs. What is more, the
sheet music trade was in control of musical copyright, making it the most lucrative
branch of the 'culture industry'. It was popular song, rather than instrumental
'hot music', that constituted the musical core of Weimar's Jazz Age.
The popular song also provided jazz with its compositional substrate. To a
critic such as Adorno, with his fixation on written music, this was essential for
his assessment of other styles and sub-categories of jazz. Confronted with the
compositional monotony of Weimar's popular song output, he could feel with
many others that superior musicians were more likely to be found among the
arrangers of jazz rather than among its composers:
If we compare the achievement of a good band with the music printed in, say, the piano
score, we might readilyconclude that qualifiedmusiciansare more likely to be found among
the arrangersthan among the composers. (1937a,p. 85)15
Yet no matter how inventive the jazz arrangement, it was fated to follow the strict
thirty-two-bar melody and harmonic pattern of the compositional substrate, and
was thus condemned to banality:
Gimmick and artifice, the new colour and the new rhythm: all are merely inserted into
banality.[... ] True,this interferentialqualityin jazz is the achievementof the arrangement
upon the composition. The contours of the latter, however, remain the same. [ . . . ] The
performingmusician may tug at the fetters of his boredom, and even at times make them
jingle: but he will never be able to break them. (1937a,p. 86)16
The achievements of the jazz arranger, like the improvising soloist, were thus
merely ornamental.
Nor did the symphonic jazz of the later 1920s, whether from Gershwin or
German epigones such as Mitja Nikisch, succeed in lifting jazz from the realm of
Kunstgewerbe.The first sin of this music was to eliminate all of the 'hot' improvised
passages that gave at least a certain physiognomy to the facelessness of the underlying composition. What is more, by leaving itself open to the evaluative categories
of art music, symphonic jazz - or what Adorno called 'stabilised jazz' - could only
reveal its compositional backwardness (1937a, pp. 89-90). Adorno recognised that
the pompously inflated music of Whiteman's 'jazz symphony orchestra' was
merely an attempt to reach out to a new circle of potential buyers who were willing
to accept 'consumption as artistic enjoyment' (Konsum als Kunstgenuss', 1933, p.
798). Later jazz historians, untroubled by the lasting success in the concert hall of
Gershwin's ingratiating potpourris, have seconded this judgment.
But Adorno was no more willing to accept the value of attempts to ennoble
jazz from the other direction. While admitting that hardly an art composer in
Weimar Germany had been able to withstand the attractions of jazz, Adorno found
the reasons for this in the coincidence that both jazz and art music were at that
time exploring the same asymmetries, particularly in the subdivision of the bar.
Yet the factor that ultimately motivated these composers had little to do with
compositional technique and much to do with expansion of the audience. Milhaud,
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Krenek and Weill were merely 'nimble art composers' ('fixe Kunst-Komponisten',
1933, p. 795) reaching out for a wider market with jazz as their vehicle:
It cannot be disputed that many 'serious' composers tried to escape their isolation and
get in touch with the public by experimentingwith the highly successful and technically
stimulatingnew kind of dance music. Even within autonomous production there is almost
no composer who did not somehow react to the impulse of jazz. This is not only due to
the so-called mood of the time and the supposed up-to-dateness of jazz but also to purely
musical reasons. In serious music the emancipationfrom tonality and its intrinsic symmetries, and esp[ecially] the emancipationfrom the accent upon the down-beat, met the idea
of jazz half-way. (1946, p. 72)17
The deprecatory tone of Adorno's original German has been considerably blunted
in translation for the purposes of a purportedly objective encyclopaedia entry:
'experimenting with' was originally 'worming its way into' (Anbiederung), 'getting
in touch with the public' originally read 'entering the market' (Anschluss an den
Markt), 'highly successful' should rather read 'trendy' (smart). Yet even the
attempted scientific tone of Adorno's authorised translation scarcely conceals his
contempt for the early efforts at jazz hybridisation. If Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt
Mahagonny could draw his praise for its hard-nosed attack on capitalism and the
opera business, Weill's songs even fell behind the standards set by hot music,
dispensing with syncopation to such a degree that they were connected to jazz by
timbre alone (1933, p. 797; 1937a, p. 76). As befit his perception of jazz rhythm,
Adorno saw the culmination of this process of hybridisation in Stravinsky's ragtime essays of 1917, written, it should be noted, before the very word jazz, much
less the music, had been heard in Europe:
The most importantresults of the process between art music and jazz, however, are probably Stravinsky'sRagtimeand PianoRagMusic;and above all, his Histoiredu soldat.In the
latter, the whole technique of jazz, particularlythat of percussion, is put into the service
of a genuine [compositionalintention] which reveals, as it were, the hidden meaning of
jazz itself. (1946, p. 73)18
In retrospect, Adorno cannot be entirely faulted for localising the technical attainments of Weimar's Kunstjazz in ragtime. German art composers, partly from lack
of opportunity, partly from an inbred sense of self-importance, refused to visit the
United States to acquaint themselves with the roots of the music they were trying
to assimilate. How different from their French counterparts Milhaud and Ravel,
who made expeditions to Harlem to encounter jazz at first hand, or, in the case
of Ravel, even went so far as to take weekly jazz lessons from a professional
trombonist. There is nothing in Weimar's Kunstjazz to compare with the freeflowing dissonant counterpoint of La crdationdu monde or the pliant melody in the
slow movement of Ravel's Violin Sonata, both products of first-hand encounters
with legitimate jazz. Weimar's Kunstjazz, however, as shown by the accuracy of
its part-writing, its harmonic conservatism and the stiffness of its rhythms, was
beholden to printed music and the rhythmic legacy of ragtime, as found in Weimar's syncopated dance tunes and as codified in its jazz manuals (a more detailed
discussion of this subject can be found in Robinson 1994). While Adorno certainly
failed to foresee the full historical impact of Kunstjazz, particularly its bearing on
the stylistic pluralism of post-serial music from Bernd-Alois Zimmermann onward,
his rejection of this music within the context of Weimar society, when measured
against the claims made for it at the time, carries at least an air of plausibility.
Having dispensed with popular song and Kunstjazz, hot music and the
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J. BradfordRobinson
arranger's orchestra, symphonic jazz and the Radaukapelle,Adorno was left with
that genre that made up the largest part of Weimar's jazz culture and forms the
actual object of his jazz polemics: syncopated dance music, or Tanzjazz.This music,
being entirely commercial by its very nature, posed no false or inflated claims to
be a music of revolutionary protest, a new species of art music, or an indigenous
urban folk music. It was merely intended to serve the function of accompanying
Weimar's dancers in the new social dance forms imported from America by way
of France and England: tango, foxtrot, shimmy, Charleston, and the blues, then
understood to be a slow dance taken at approximately thirty-three bars per minute.
Here, with jazz stripped of its artistic claims and reduced to the level of its social
function, Adorno was prepared to proceed rigorously with his sociological analysis. 'Jazz is not that which it "is", he maintained, disclaiming any of the music's
individual traits, 'it is that for which it is employed' ('Jazz ist nicht, was er "ist"
[ ... . er ist, wozu man ihn braucht', 1937a, p. 77). As such it is consumed like any
other useful commodity, becoming a 'commodity in the strict sense'. It is from
this axiom, the commodity nature of jazz, that Adorno's analysis implicitly sets
out: 'To decipher the formulae of jazz [ ... ] is automatically to presuppose insight
into their original character as a commodity' ('Die Dechiffrierungder Jazzformelnsetzt
. die Einsicht in deren unspriinglichen Warencharakter
aus', 1941, p. 382)."
S.
This raises the twin questions of who consumes the music and who profits
from its consumption. Adorno, relying on his own post-war experiences, required
no statistical surveys to find the answers to these questions: 'Jazz was the Gebrauchsmusik of the grand-bourgeois upper crust during the post-war years' ('Der Jazz
wa die Gebrauchsmusikder grossbiirgerlichenOberschichtin der Nachkriegszeit', 1933,
p. 796), seemingly implying that the music was consumed by a mere handful of
aristocrats, industrialists and high-level diplomats. While this class certainly did
constitute an early body of jazz consumers (one need only read the diaries of
Harry Graf Kessler or recall the live performances of Sidney Bechet at the Rothschild mansion in Berlin-Griinwald), it is unthinkable that the jazz craze was
restricted to such a narrow spectrum of society. Adorno's point, however, is
slightly different. The new dance forms required training and leisure time which
were not available to the less well-off, who only participated in the jazz craze
vicariously through the media or in large dance halls:
The function of jazz, then, must first be understood in relation to the upper class. Today
its more stringentforms, at least insofaras they involve a more intimatemannerof reception
than mere exposure to loudspeakersand bands in mass dance-halls,are probablythe special
preserve of the highly-trained,dance-groomedupper crust. To this class jazz is no different
than, say, the gentlemen's evening attire:both put on display the implacabilityof the social
court of appeal that they themselves constitute. (1937a,p. 78)20
Lest we imagine that Adorno has tailored his view of the social distribution of jazz
to suit his theories, we would do well to quote the observations of an early student
of Weimar's jazz fever. Here again is the dance critic Heinz Pollack, writing in
1922:
Socialdancing [i.e. the new dance forms fromAmerica]is held to be an affairof the so-called
upper ten-thousand. Fortunately,things are slightly different today. Dancing is at least as
much an affair of the lower one-hundred-thousand.But it is not an affair of the lowest
millions. [... ] Fromthe very outset one encounterstheirviolent resistancebecause (thanks
to the briskpropagandaof our glorious mondaines)
they can only regarddancing as a luxury,
as the private entertainmentof wealthy racketeers,capitalistyouths and affluent ladies-of-
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the-night;because every day they walk past salons, wine locales and hotel lounges which
they are forbiddento enter for the sole reason that they lack appropriateattire;and because
they are obliged for this very reason to turn their backs on the cultural attainments of a
few idlers who are at a loss to know how best to kill their days and nights. (Pollack,1922,
pp. 108-9)21
This 'propaganda', if such it was, cannot have been entirely far-fetched, for to the
end of the Jazz Age the tuxedo remained de rigueur as male attire for dancing,
performing and listening to jazz. German jazz, to quote the satirical songwriter
Walter Mehring (1919), was from its earliest days the music of the Frackmensch.
Adorno was correct, then, to equate jazz and the tuxedo as emblems of the
upper classes. Partly through imitation by the middle classes, partly by deliberate
marketing through the heavily monopolised Weimar media (the entire gramophone industry was in the hands of a few magnates based in Berlin), jazz now
began its march downward through the strata of Weimar society, subduing all but
the peasantry:
Even so, the impact of jazz remains no more bound to the upper crust than the minds of
this class stand apart in acuity from those of the people they dominate. The mechanism of
psychic deformation, so central to the continuation of present-day conditions, wields its
power over the deformers themselves. [ . . . ] As a distractionand diversion, if not as a
serious ritual of amusement, jazz permeates the whole of society, even the proletariat.In
Europe, the only groups left unaffected are perhaps those specificallyinvolved in agriculture. (Adorno 1937a, p. 79)"
Adorno, probably under the spell of the urban media, exaggerates both the volume
of jazz consumed and its actual distribution in Weimar society. Neither the proletariat nor the burghers of small- and middle-sized towns would have anything to
do with the music, which became the province of a new class of young urban
white-collar workers, uprooted from earlier traditions of leisure pursuits and avidly
seeking new diversions. Adorno was more correct to see the typical mass consumer of Weimar jazz as the young professional intent on impressing his girlfriend
by taking her out to a new-fangled jazz bar.
But Adorno goes one step further. The descent of jazz through the levels of
society was ineluctably bound up with a decline in musical quality. High-quality
jazz - 'hot music' - thus remained the domain of the upper classes, while the
lower classes had to make do with a music that progressively shed its syncopations
and timbral effects, returning almost phylogenetically to its 'reactionary' roots in
salon music and the march:
The fartherjazz moves down the rungs of society, the more reactionarytraitsit adopts, the
more completely it becomes subservient to banality, the less patience it shows towards
freedom and outbursts of the imagination, until finally, as the musical accompanimentof
collective fashion, it does little more than apotheosize suppression itself. The more democraticthe jazz, the worse it becomes. (1937a,p. 80)3
At this point we might pause to note with some astonishment that Adorno
without
has,
knowing it, stood the social dissemination of legitimate American
jazz squarely on its head. Whereas legitimate jazz arose among American blacks
in the very lowest rungs of society, or at best in an ostracised black middle class,
and reached the white bourgeoisie through a process of cultural assimilation,
German jazz proceeded in the exact opposite direction, being first introduced by
a small coterie from the upper classes and then imposed, in a dialectical process
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J. BradfordRobinson
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left the essence of the music unchanged: the unit pulse, the 4/4 metre, the eight-bar
period, the restricted instrumentation of winds and percussion. With these ornaments now discarded, only the underlying substance of jazz remained, a substance
identical to that of the military march. The 'Gebrauchsmusikof the upper crust' was
no longer put in the service of the social dancing, but of the newly awakened
German militarism:
The presence of the march principlein jazz is patently obvious. The underlying rhythm of
continuo [sic] and bass drum dovetails perfectlywith the rhythm of the march, and it was
possible to transformjazz [ ... ] effortlessly into march music. [ ... ] Not only is the
saxophone borrowed from the militaryband, the entire layout of the jazz orchestra,with
its division into melody, bass, 'obbligato'accompanimentand simple filler instruments, is
identical to that of militarybands. That is why jazz has lent itself so readily to the usages
of fascism. (1937a,p. 92)26
Jazz, in its final transformation, thus proves to be the music of political reaction.
The history of German jazz, sociologically deciphered, parallels the downfall of
the Weimar Republic itself.
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Robinson
J. Bradford
whereby the jazz syncopations, just as Adorno had predicted, revert to the
rhythms of the march.
Weimar's opera composers were also implicitly in agreement with Adorno's
inversion of jazz's social distribution, which cast jazz as the music of the upper
classes. One revealing example, set on a transatlantic liner, is Karol Rathaus's
Fremde Erde, in which jazz is played live to passengers on the upper deck while
the proletarian immigrants in the hold suffer to the music of expressionism. The
same distinction between upper-class jazz and proletarian expressionism is found
in Wilhelm Grosz's lightweight ballet-pantomime Baby in der Bar. Brand's Maschinist Hopkins employs a live jazz band in the executive suite of a large corporate
office building while the lower classes, in a dive called Bondy's Bar, listen to a
debased surrogate played mechanically on a pianola. For these composers,
Adorno's dictum of jazz as the 'Gebrauchsmusikof the upper crust', and its debasement in the lower levels of society, were sufficiently obvious to function as theatrical topoi.
If these works symbolically situate the jazz milieu in the upper echelons of
society, and outline the demise of the German Jazz Age in the oom-pah of the
military march, we might conclude that Adorno's views on jazz were forecast in
the works of Weimar's own art composers. This conclusion falls short, however,
when we consider the sado-masochistic characteristics posited by Adorno for the
'jazz subject', although some of these traits are doubtless present in the four Alaskan lumberjacks transformed in Mahagonny into middle-class jazz consumers. We
may be willing to see a connection between 'jazz and pogrom', as Adorno asks of
us in the 'Oxford Addenda' (1937b, p. 101),27but we are unlikely to hear the voice
of Amfortas beneath the strains of Julian Fuhs and Bernhard Ette. If for 'jazz
subject' we read 'authoritarian personality' these sections of Adorno's jazz essays
are put into clearer perspective, and point the way to his more detailed and illuminating discussions of the same topic in the book of that title. What is left is a
series of brilliant sociological and aesthetic analyses of Weimar's popular music
culture by a committed contemporary observer who understood, more than
anyone else at the time, the peculiar origins, musical fabric, institutional prerequisites and foreordained demise of this uniquely German music.
Endnotes
1. For the purpose of this article I will use the
term 'legitimate jazz' in reference to the music
understood as jazz by historians today, i.e.
the tradition extending from the New Orleans
trumpet kings to the Free Jazz of the 1960s
and 1970s. Otherwise, the term 'jazz' refers
to that larger complex of popular music outlined in Section II below. This is how jazz was
understood in Adorno's day and how he himself used the term.
2. The sales and marketing records of Weimar's
gramophone companies, all based in Berlin,
were largely destroyed after the Second
World War when the companies transferred
their operations to West Germany. Many
useful import-export statistics are contained
in Dietrich Schulz-K6hn's pre-war disserta-
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5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
der Negerfabel
...
So klatscht
der
23
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Robinson
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Discography
Original Excentric [sic] Band, 'Tiger Rag-Jazz'. Homokord 15984. December 1919
Original Piccadilly Four, 'My Baby's Arms'. Anker 1027. Berlin, 12 February 1921
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