From Frankfurt to Berlin: Adorno and the aesthetics of techno

Corn Driesprong (1947990) December 23th, 2011

Paper Globalization and Music MA Kunsten, Cultuur en Media Dr. K. A. McGee

Table of contents 1. Introduction 2. The aesthetics of techno 2.1 Sonic reproduction 2.2 Repetition 2.3 Simplicity of form 2.4 The liberation of sound 3. Conclusions

1. Introduction The goal of this paper is to relate the concept of the musical material from Theodor W. Adorno's influential philosophy of music to contemporary techno music. I chose this subject because, despite ubiquitous criticism and admittedly waning relevance, I find Adorno's thinking about music still very intriguing. The concept of the musical material is one of the central concepts around which his theorizing about music and its social relevance is based, and I think it is interesting to actualize it and test its relevance by holding it against one of the pivotal musical genres to have emerged out of the rapid developments in music and music technology of the past decades, namely techno. Adornos writings have been widely disputed. His adversaries often scorn his relentless antagonism and vehement rhetoric. Importantly though, his works need to be understood within the period and conditions in which they were conceived, which were marked by the rise of National Socialism in Europe and the rampant emergence of state capitalism and mass culture. Many of his works were written while he was forced into exile to the United States from Nazi Germany during the Second World War. Of the Frankfurt School members, who were all living in Los Angeles during that period, according to Thomas Wheatland, Adorno in particular coped with cultural shock, and this profoundly influenced his intellectual attitude (Wheatland: 275). Adornos theorizing, which is mostly complex and inaccessible is often misunderstood or paraphrased in a simplified manner that does not do justice to his elusive philosophy of music. However, his aesthetic theories formed the backbone for his broader critiques

that may appear implausible when taken at face-value and not sufficiently embedded within his aesthetic philosophies. Furthermore, Adornos idealism, is directed at an in principle unattainable utopia, at the creation of an awareness in the collective consciousness, rather than political action and revolution. In his own words: "I had set up a theoretical model, but I could not suspect that people would want to put it into action with Molotov cocktails"1. Adornos influence is still distinctly felt in cultural studies today, especially those concerning music, both classical and popular, as he is the only major theorist whose primary medium was music (McClary: 28). Indeed, as Robert Witkin points out, actually more than half of the published works by Adorno were about music (Witkin: 2). His major contribution to these fields is the establishment of a concern for the ideological consequences of musics formal characteristics. According to Susan McClary: In his hands, the presumably nonrepresentational instrumental music of the canon becomes the most sensitive barometer in all of culture. It is thereby made available to social criticism and analysis (McClary: 28). His theorizing thereby provided a way of getting beyond formalism and afforded music, as the most abstract form of art which is intuitively the most far removed from everyday reality, with social and critical relevance. Thus, Adornos thinking continues to intrigue and wide attention is still given to his work today. His recognition of the critical potential of music not only contributed to, but paved the way for influential studies such as those by Jacques Attali and Susan McClary.
1 Adorno, Theodor W. 1969. "Interview Of barricades and ivory towers." In: Encounter, 33 (september 1969), 63 ff. Quoted from: Max Paddison, Max , Adorno, modernism and mass culture. Essays on Critical Theory and music. London: Kahn and Averill, 2004, in turn quoted from Velema.

Like his peers of the Frankfurt School, Adornos theorizing is fundamentally marked by the philosophy of G. W. F. Hegel, in his dialectic conception of history, as well as the psychoanalytic theory of Sigmund Freud, in connecting the listening experience of music to processes within the unconscious and the frequent employment of psychoanalytical terminology. Furthermore, we can discern a distinct influence from Max Weber, in the thesis of ongoing rationalization and Karl Marx, in its base-superstructure derived assumption that culture has the ability to ideologically reflect the social and economic order and the concept of commodity fetishism. However, in much aspects Adornos thinking markedly diverges from Marxism, for example, in his belief in the power of music to be able to actively criticize social reality rather than being just a byproduct of the economic base (Scruton 2009: 207). However, Krims argues that, especially in musicology, Adornos name is commonly even conflated with Marxist music-analysis and is therefore taken to represent a simplified notion of Marxism (Krims: 92). Adorno's critique of the culture industry and of music were part of a larger agenda to oppose the dreaded process of rationalization in all aspects of social life. Adorno, together with Max Horkheimer, in their seminal work Dialectic of Enlightenment, argue that the enlightenment has turned into its opposite and has become a force which alienates people from themselves and their surroundings. They illustrate this by means of an episode of Homer's epic tale of Odysseus, where he lets himself be tied to the mast of his ship in order to be able to safely pass the deadly Sirens without being able to answer to their call. According to Horkheimer and Adorno, Odysseus here represents

the bourgeois individual who is able to dominate nature (the Sirens), but only at the price of binding himself and thus losing touch with his natural surroundings.

Adorno's philosophizing on music is based on the post-18thcentury Western art music conception of the musical piece as an autonomous, self-contained work. According to his theory, music represents liberation, a return to a primordial state preceding the separation of subject and object, while at the same time this freedom is necessarily restricted by form. In the compositional process, the composer has to balance formal conventions and individual spontaneity and creativity within a dialectical process. When a composer enters into this dialectic relationship with the musical material, the music becomes ideologically invested. According to Adorno, instrumental music was able to reflect critically on social reality, through the notion of the musical material: the technical means of musical expression, concerning melody, rhythm and harmony, which a composer finds at his or her disposal at a particular point in history which form a crystallization of the creative impulse. Musical forms become objectified and are handed down along subsequent generations of composers via the linear and singular historical process which is the development of music. Any music that does not build further upon the musics that directly preceded is can, from this point of view, be regarded as anachronistic, regressive and existing of impotent clich's. For Adorno, a musical form being developed at a given point in social history was structurally analogous to the social reality from which it emerged and therefore carries ideological consequences.

As Fredric Jameson describes: [the] technical mastery, in which the superiority of a Schoenberg over a Hindemith, say, or a Sibelius, lies in the formers will to draw the last objective consequences from the historical state in which he found his own raw materials. Music thus becomes aesthetically of formally self-conscious (Jameson: 5). Adorno believed twelve-tone music, which is a technique for the composition of atonal music that emerged in the beginning of the twentieth century, and was pioneered by the mentioned Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg, to be an inevitable and necessary consequence of the increasing tonal flexibility in Western art music that would be able to thwart the malignant effects of the continuing rationalization. By subjugating the personal expression of chromaticism to an external process, that is to say, by coercing the notes into the ordered rows which twelve-tone technique prescribed to them, this music was able to mimic the objectified subject as it appears in modern society and thus was the ultimate expression of the alienated state of modern man. Art that does not acknowledge this state is merely false art as it is based on an illusion. As much as Adorno emphasizes the historicity of music, twelve-tone music itself proved to be very historical itself, and turned out to be a more or less passing development as virtually all the music written in every cultural stratum today is still very much rooted in tonality. As we will see later, Adorno was very critical about the popular music of his time. However, many of his ideas concerning popular music can by now be considered outdated, as he could not have envisioned the myriad of styles which have emerged as a result of technological developments and low-level access to music production. Nevertheless, as Krims points out, many scholars writing about popular music somehow
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still feel the need to hedge themselves against Adornos critique even today as to invalidate his normative claims, before being able to cast the critical or aesthetic merits of popular music in a more popular light (Krims: 91). This illustrates how his legacy and looming influence in music theorizing are still felt today. Therefore, I think it is very interesting to hold Adorno's theories about music and its social relevance against one of the pivotal musical genres to have emerged out of the rapid developments in music and music technology of the past decades, namely techno, in order to actualize it and test its relevance. Thereby I will look in particular at the aesthetic merits which techno might have when investigated from the point of view of Adorno's philosophy of music, while trying not to be overly affected by his paralyzing contempt for the structural characteristics of popular styles, which he generally regarded as false and regressive, but instead place these in a context which is more constructive and relevant today. The term techno is used ambiguously in scholarly literature on music. It is sometimes understood more generally to describe the whole myriad of genres which came to emerge from the post-disco movement since the late 1970s and rely on electronic instruments and techniques (such as synthesizers, drum machines and sampling), while it can also denote a more specific genre that emerged out of Detroit, Chicago and later Berlin and other cities, which is characterized by a mixture of electronic genres with African-American (funk, electro) influences, minimalist aesthetics and futuristic and dystopian themes. It is this latter specific genre with which this paper deals. I will look at the particular aesthetic characteristics of techno music, such as its repetitive and non-narrative structures, and relate those to Adorno's thinking, for
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example concerning concept of the autonomous musical work. Also, I believe Adorno's notion of the musical material is in itself interesting when attention is shifted from the abstract, tonal development to the possibilities concerning the use of concrete sounds opened up by techniques for the manipulation of recorded sounds, as it is in this particular area that considerable developments have occurred during the period since the emergence of Adorno's philosophy of music. Finally, I will attempt to assess whether techno music, through these developments, can be said to be able to critically reflect upon social reality as could serious art music according to Adorno, and thereby investigate whether his concept of the musical material is still relevant.

2. The aesthetics of techno In his critique of popular music, Adorno defines its standardization its fundamental characteristic2. Therefore, in this music nothing fundamentally novel will be introduced (Adorno 2002: 438). The particular elements that define a popular musical style, e.g. syncopation or blue notes, are only superficially novel but are in no way fundamentally innovative are therefore false. The notion of the musical material is essential to this critique: whereas the great composers of serious music were able to 'break through' the musical forms that were handed down to them by their precursors, which allowed the attentive listener to momentary see through the veil of the objective form and catch a glimpse of their subjective liberation, popular music merely reproduces itself within the bounds of a thoroughly standardized form, thereby numbing any critical or intellectual impulse and lulling the listener into a state of false consciousness. An important element in this distinction between serious and popular music, which is tied up the musical material, is the fact that in classical music every smaller element is relevant to the whole, and thereby the particular is conciliated with the general. The musical piece unfolds as a self-similar structure, to which every micro-element is relevant and mirrors the structure of the whole piece. In popular music, on the other hand, position is absolute. Every detail is substitutable; it serves only as a cog in a machine (Adorno 2002: 440). If this where to be said concerning techno, Adorno would hit the nail exactly on the head. Techno tracks function not so much as discrete and self-contained entities, but
2 It needs to be noted that Adorno's conception of 'popular music' was mainly based on jazz

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serve rather as a sort modular lego bricks for a dj to mix into a whole. This is illustrated by the fact that a track usually starts out with a few bars of a stripped down drum rhythm, which allows the dj to beatmatch3 the records. Often, parts of different tracks will be played synchronically to form a new whole. Being conceived this way, the notion of an autonomous work is defied. Tracks are regarded rather as building blocks, that are of non-linear structure for they consist of cyclical structures that are to be repeated an arbitrary number of times, perhaps disappearing at one point to be brought back in the mix at a later moment, and which can be combined and rearranged in processes that are guided by the dj who attempts to intuitively react on the atmosphere and the energy that is created by the dancing crowd. It is here that the Dionysian and embodied element of the music is foregrounded: it is rather an embodied sound-experience than an incorporeal, intellectual form of art. Its repetitive repetitive elements are often associated with the Dyonisian trance and can be contrasted with the experience of The prisoner who is present at a concert, an inactive eavesdropper like later concertgoers, and his spirited call for liberation fades like applause" (Adorno and Horkheimer: 34). As McLeod states: In contemporary club/dance music, however, the use of technology, and its attendant hypnotically repetitive beats allows a type of technological spirituality a literal transference of spirit from the machine to the body. In this manner, techno dance music defeats what Adorno saw as the alienating effect of mechanization on the modern consciousness (McLeod: 339). This bears similarities to the power of mimetic negation Adorno ascribed to
3 Beatmatching is the technique of synchronizing the tempo of two records by controlling the speed of a turntable (or cd-player), allowing for a fluid transition between two tracks without silence or changing the tempo

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atonality. By embracing the mechanized repetition and digital sounds of the industrialized age, techno allows its creators and audiences to cope with the alienating effects of contemporary urban life. The cityscapes from which techno often emerged: Detroit, Berlin, are notably dystopian, characterized by high levels of vacancy and abandoned industry. In Adornos theorizing, music inexorably regarded as an intellectual and spiritual art form, which is to be experienced by means of attentive listening and intellectual contemplation. In this sense, his aesthetics are a pre-eminent expression of the rationalizing impulse which he seeks to oppose. In dance music, the experience of freedom from the subjective reality is, however, not established by a momentary release from musical form, but by a digression through form, as an ubiquitous element that lifts it out of itself, into the realm of timeless objectivity. A distinct characteristic of electronic dance music culture and popular music in general is the proliferation of creative and cultural initiative that it has spawned. Although technologically advanced, electronic music often relies on relatively low-cost equipment for its creation (a point that I will later return to) which makes for low-level access to production, comparable to DIY-culture in punk music where the ability to play a few chords on a guitar was enough to form a band. In the words of Krims: The costs of professional-quality production, in the wake of ever cheaper digital technology and programming, have enabled profitable independent music production on a smaller scale than Adorno could ever have envisioned (Krims: 97).

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Finally, electronic music allows degree of control over musical parameters regarding dynamics and timbre that exceeds even the most thorough serialism from the composers who extended Schnbergs techniques, and therefore might be argued to represent at least the possibility of an entirely immanent musical objectivity.

2.1 Sonic reproduction This we can see this process as the commodification and standardization of concrete sounds, in the practices of sampling and re-sampling, but also in the frequent reoccurrence and of standard sounds and presets from commercially available synthesizers and drum machine. Listening to Derrick Mays seminal Detroit techno track The Dance from 1987, we hear a drum beat from a TR-909 model drum machine, which is later joined by a bass line from the illustrious TB-303 bass-synthesizer, both manufactured by the Japanese company Roland. In the light of the Adornian notions of standardization and reproduction, it is interesting to note how sounds and timbres produced by electronic musical instruments become not only widely used, but even highly sought-after by producers of electronic music. Both mentioned machines represent signature sounds and were widely used in techno and other genres of electronic dan music and that are still highly wanted. Ironically however, both machines, initially flopped after their initial releases in 1984 and 1981, respectively, which led prices to drop to a level that was affordable to aspiring house and techno producers from Detroit and Chicago, which adopted them as the source of drum and bass sounds for their tracks. As these this music gained popularity however, the mentioned machines
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became highly sought-after, causing their market values to sour even beyond their original retail prices. A similar story goes for the TR-909s predecessor, the TR-808, which has however traditionally been more in vogue by hip-hop and electro producers. The iconic status of the machines is reflected in band and track names of electronic music artists, for example in the act 808 State and Fatboy Slims Everybody Needs a 303. These particular machines, through their initial use by pioneering techno producers and the subsequent popularity of their creations, have gained massive cultural currency and have become markers of techno-authenticity. We can investigate effect of the popularity of these machines in Adornian terms in two ways: firstly, they have become a preeminent example of the Marxian concept of commodity fetishism: ideological illusions which obscure realities of social and economic powers and cause people to lose their subjective freedom by investing it in objects. Furthermore, they can be regarded as a false means of establishing pseudo-individuality among (amateur-)producers of electronic music. The distinct valuation of certain instruments, effects, amplifiers, etc. is indeed what characterizes a lot of independent music production. However, in these cases it is not merely a process where a new product is marketed towards a passive and docile mass of consumers which are led to believe that they need a particular product through obtrusive advertising. As the products initially flopped and were sold at bargain prices which allowed aspiring artists to afford them, only then did cultural capital culminate around them which led prices on the second hand market to rise. Furthermore, the mentioned Roland TB-303 was originally meant to be used as a way of providing programmable bass accompaniment to practicing guitarists. However, the
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sound - which does not resemble that of a real bass-guitar at all was quickly appropriated by electronic dance producers and came to be known in a way that could not have been anticipated by its manufacturers. Furthermore, the machines have been long-since out of production (although many emulations have been produced by other companies, by means of what Paul Thberge calls second order simulation a simulation of a sound (the original 808) simulating a sound (a drummer)) (Thberge: 197). Therefore, the commodity fetishism is not attributed to these objects in a one-way process from manufacturer to consumer, but instead is established in an interesting threefold mutual relationship between the music industry, (amateur-)musicians and the manufacturers of musical instruments - the latter of which was never considered by Adorno - in which consumers actively participate, though within the bounds of supplyand-demand market forces. The second aspect concerns the fact that the sounds and timbres of these machines are repeated over and over again in many techno tracks, and thus become a standardized element on the level of concrete sounds. Adorno however never questioned the standardizing effects of the limited set timbres of the classical orchestra. Apparently, these mechanism are merely active on the more abstract levels of the musical structure. It is also interesting to note that the interfaces of these drum machines are essentially loop-based, facilitating the repetition of the same rhythm for an arbitrary number of times (and thereby also influencing the structure of the music which is produced with them), these are elements that would induce what Adorno regressive

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listening. In fact, however, here we arrive at one of the salient features of techno music: it's conspicuous repetitiveness.

2.2 Repetition Although Adorno advocated for serialism, which is often characterized as modernistic in its rationalized and subjectless nature, his conception of music is still very much classical. It is comparable to that of Roger Scruton when he describes: listening to a Bach fugue, a late quartet of Beethoven, or one of those infinitely spacious themes of Bruckner, I have the thought that this very movement which I hear might have been made known to me in a single instant: that all of this is only accidentally spread out in time before me, and that it might have been made known to me in another way, as mathematics is made known to me. (Scruton 2005: 150/151) This presupposes a notion of the musical piece as a transcendent, achronic idea which is transferred to composer to listener by means of its unfolding in time: a translation from the abstract to the concrete and then back to the abstract into the mind of the attentive and competent listener. It is from this conception of music as a purely intellectual and spiritual art form that the idea of repetition as a regressive quality emerges: repetition here serves merely as a device to support the listener's memory. Therefore, too much repetition might be taken as insult the 'serious' listener, who feels

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like being treated as an amnesiac. Roger Scruton likewise dreads the American popular song form for being short breathed and quickly exhausted (Scruton: 224). The conception of a musical work described above can be relativized or problematized in many ways, for example by pointing to ethnomusicological research of non-Western musics in which abundant repetition plays an important role, for example, in the communal aspects of the music. I would like to point out how the aspect of repetition functions as an particular innovative aesthetic device within techno music rather than an infantile and regressive characteristic: Techno music defies the dialectical nature of Western art music, which works towards a resolving of a fundamental 'problem', for example by way of neutralizing the second theme by pulling it back to the home key in the recapitulation within the sonata form. It is instead essentially non-narrative and non-teleological, thereby resolving the division between object and subject and purging the music of historicity. In opposition to 12-tone and serialist music, techno and for that matter, virtually all popular and post 20th century (neo-)classical art music marks a distinct return to tonality. As a result of techno's repetitive nature, the melodic and harmonic elements are not so much foregrounded, consisting often of a repeating pattern that continues for the length of the track, while the emphasis is mainly on the rhythmic elements. In some tracks, such as Marcel Dettmann's Duel, harmonic and melodic elements are altogether absent and the track consists merely of sounds with no definitive or a constantly shifting pitch. Melodic voices and and harmony thereby cast off their function as the

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mechanisms which generate forward movement, which is instead established by the regular rhythmic pulse while the music stays in harmonic stasis. This establishes a more cyclical sense of musical narrative, as opposed to the linear and climactic structures which Susan McClary criticizes as an expression of the misogynist and imperialistic cultural paradigm of Western art music. She compares this to a number of pieces (by female composers), such as Genesis II by Janika Vandervelde, which, not unlike the minimal music of Steve Reich and Philip Glass, suggests the possibility of being in time without the necessities of striving violently for control [parentheses in original text] (McClary: 122). Another striking similarity to minimal music is the notion of music as a process which is present in techno music. A striking example of this is Thomas Brinkmann's X100 lp, on which, during the course of the amount of time that a 12-inch record spinning at 33 rpm can contain, two pulses fade out and back into sync again in a process that is conspicuously analogous to Steve Reich's early tape pieces. In both cases, the medium imposes the form to the work, in a way which illustrates how, in techno music, the medium is often foregrounded as consists unapologetically of machine generated sounds.

2.3 Simplicity of form Simplicity in music is anything but simple (Tarasti: 227), Eero Tarasti argues in his book in his book A Theory of Musical Semiotics. This statement is based on his concept
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of modalizations, which is borrowed from A. J. Greimas semiotics, where the subject brings sense to abstract, moving sound forms only in the process of listening to music, by modalizing a musical structure in the same way that a speaker modalizes speech with wishes, will, belief and emotions (Tarasti: 27). This is a level of meaning that is subjoined to the structural perception of a musical piece that transcends timbral, contextual and performative meanings. This concept provides a way to analyze the seemingly simple formal structures of techno music. In terms of information theory, in Adornos conception of the great musical work there is minimum redundancy (at most to support the listener's memory), while techno music generally features ample redundancy (multiplicity of information) which serves to emphasize and make transparent the musical form. Rhythms and melodic phrases are repeated a manifold number of times, which forces the listener to modalize the music to a larger extent. This means that the attribution of meaning shifts from the composer, to the listeners. As every moment is equally central, the perspective of listening is not prescribed to the listener, and as a subject he or she becomes free from the will of the music. Her of she can float in or out with attention at will, detached from the devices of memory and anticipation, while the music proceeds as a series of 'nows'. As complexity of form is reduced to a minimum, the emphasis is shifted to the experience of the listener him- or herself. The music does not represent a hidden structure which is to be uncovered by attentive listening, but consists mostly as sound as such and needs to be experienced that way. It invites the listener to put meaning into it, to modalize it. This also leaves much room for the experience of the concrete sounds

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that are heard, which is an important aspect of techno music. From this point of view, it can be regarded as form of pure sound art. It foregrounds the use of particular timbres and sounds, into which I will go in the following chapter.

2.4 The liberation of sound Techniques for the recording, storage, manipulation and synthesis of sounds, first analog and later digital, have brought about many radical changes in music production and distribution since their emergence during the course of the 20 th century. Creatively and aesthetically, they have opened music up for a multiplicity of timbres and sounds that are no longer tied to the limitations of existing musical instruments and human performance. These developments were heralded by the Italian artist Luigi Russolo, who, as a member of the Futurist movement, wrote a manifesto entitled 'The Art of Noises' in 1913 in which he advocated for the inclusion of non-tonal noises into the timbres that were available to music, which would act as an expression of the clamor of everyday life in an industrialized world (Russolo). The use of sound recording- and manipulation techniques was first pioneered musique concrte school in Paris during the 1940s, who were well aware of the revolutionary nature of the techniques with which they worked and whose members theorized extensively on the possibilities opened up by these new technological developments. These were already occurring during the time in which Adorno developed his theories, and he wrote about them in his essay The Aging of New Music, saying, however:

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"Music regresses to the pre-musical, the pre-artistic tone. Many of its adepts logically pursue musique concrte or the electronic production of tones. But to date, electronic music has failed to fulfill its own idea; even though it theoretically disposes over the continuum of all imaginable sound colors, in actual practice similar to the musical tin-can taste familiar from the radio, only much more extreme than that these newly won sound colors resemble one another , whether because of their virtually chemical purity, or because every tone is stamped by the interposition of the equipment" (Adorno, 1955: 194). Evidently, Adorno cast these developments in a rather negative light. This is remarkable as there are some interesting analogies to note between the twelve-tone music which he endorsed and the emerging electronic music. Whereas the first freed music from the bounds of tonality, the latter liberates it from the notably limited set of timbres of the classical orchestra into the continuum of all imaginable sound colors. However, as stated earlier, Adorno held a profoundly classical conception of classical music which idealized it as a transcendent and abstracted idea, that therefore bears no essential relationship to its manifestation as concrete sound. This functions merely as a medium, from which the serious listener, may perceive the original idea of the composer. Hence the arrangement of a particular piece becomes in fact arbitrary. A composer may choose certain instruments because of their particular register and therefore their ability to relate certain notes to other notes in the musical space that is available within the bounds of human cognition, but their timbres and the particular

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playing styles of the musicians serve only to convey the transcendent musical idea of the composer. However, I would like to argue that what has become all the clearer since the emergence of recording technologies and the proliferation of musical timbres and the opening up of the domain for music, is that music is not just this transcendent idea, but that it is, in the terms of Tarasti, continually modalized, not in the least by the concrete sounds that it uses and the associations that they evoke. In fact, I would like to argue that the whole range of timbres that is available to us through the traditional orchestra have become, in a sense not unlike Adorno's notion of the musical material, themselves a clich, and therefore, to the ears of modern music audiences, have lost their power to meaningfully convey a musical truth. From being used over and over in sappy movie soundtracks, to dramatic effects in pop ballads, these timbres have been exhausted of their neutrality and subsequently accumulated a myriad of connotations that modalize the conveyance of the musical idea. The reason for Russolo in wanting to open up music up for the multiplicity of sounds from industrial life was because these sounds had become the very sonic fabric of this life. Reality was no longer silent as it had been in pre-industrial times. Therefore, concrete sounds gained a particular relevance to modern life. The collective ears of modern man have grown used to the noise of everyday urban life, and therefore demanded more harsh and violent means of conveying a musical idea, through sounds and noises that mirrored the sonic environment of daily life. In Russolo's words: the machine today has created so many varieties and combinations of noise that pure
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musical sound with its poverty and its monotony no longer awakens any emotion in the hearer (Russolo). Here music gains the ability to mimic the conditions of social reality very lively, a potential which Adorno praised in twelve-tone music. However, this mimesis is, this time established not by structural analogy, but by means of concrete sound. In techno music, as we have seen, the occurrence of concrete sound events is very much foregrounded in the listening experience. The listener is confronted with the sounds appearing as such, without conceiving them as a medium representing an abstract musical idea, thereby once again breaching the Adornian dialectics of form and content and instead directing the emphasis towards directness and intensity of experience.

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3. Conclusions Techno music is part of an artistic and conceptual lineage that can be drawn from Erik Satie's musique pauvre, via the American minimal music composers of the 70s towards modern electronic music, with its notable influence from African-American musical cultures, which was, among other non-Western influences, manifest in minimal music as well. It is within the aesthetic principles of this tradition that the artistic merits of techno music need to be understood. However, they appears to be essentially incompatible with Adornos philosophy of music, in that its merits can never be acknowledge through his terms, which regard its ubiquitous repetition and standardization merely as elements that induce 'regressive listening' and 'false consciousness'. The dialectic conception of history on which Adorno's philosophy of music is based has been opposed in the post-structuralist philosophies of Gilles Deleuze and Jean-Franois Lyotard. In the artistic experience that is proper to post-dialectic music, the listener is no longer coerced into a fixed referential perspective in relation to the musical work but instead becomes an arbitrary point in a rhizomatic network of perspectives, values and associations (i.e. modalizations) that are subjectively conceived. It hereby becomes detached from the historical context by which Adorno rendered it potentially critical, as the historical connection can no longer be objectively established but is dependent purely on subjective context. The music cannot retain a critical distance from reality as it becomes permeated by it. This is a fundamental consequence of the postmodern condition in which objective truth, 'grand narratives' (Lyotard) and objective identity (Deleuze) are renounced.
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The question, then, whether techno music, as in instrumental, non-representational, non-dialectical and ahistorical art form retains any ability to critically reflect on social reality has to be answered in the negative. Following the Cagean philosophy, in which sounds are valued in themselves without being subjugated to a composer's will, the sounds become autonomous entities and which paradoxically leads the music out of the abstract realm into the world of actualized sound, where it is unable to convey normativity as it is immediately neutralized by itself. Such is the experience of the attendants of techno parties, the pivotal situational context to which techno music aspires, who often report experiencing a (perhaps drug-induced) ecstatic and trance-like state, as a fictitious and momentary kind of liberation. The vain longing for the unattainable utopia of subjective liberation which is expressed within the dialectics of twelve-tone music has been exchanged for a temporary arrival at this utopian state, however at the cost of a complete alienation from reality within the objective musical forms.

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Bibliography Adorno, Theodor W, edited by Richard Leppert. 2002. Essays on Music. University of California Press. Adorno, Theodor W. and Max Horkheimer. 1947. The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception in Dialectic of Enlightenment. London: Verso, 120-167. Attali, Jacques. 2003. Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Benjamin, Walter. 1936. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction in The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Davis, Mike. 1992. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles. Vintage. Deleuze, Gilles. 1995. Difference and Repetition. Columbia University Press. Garcia, Luis-Manuel - On and On: Repetition as Process and Pleasure in Electronic Dance Music in Music Theory Online 11/4 (2005) (url: http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.05.11.4/mto.05.11.4.garcia.html ). Jameson, Fredric. 2003. Foreword in Noise: The Political Economy of Music. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Krims, Adam. 2007. Marxist Music Analysis after Adorno in Music and Urban Geography. Routledge. Lyotard, Jean-Franois. 1984. The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. University Of Minnesota Press. McClary, Susan. 2002. Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality. University Of Minnesota Press. McLeod, Ken. Space Oddities: Aliens, Futurism and Meaning in Popular Music in Popular Music 22/3 (2003): 337-355. Mertens, Wim. 1980. De Amerikaanse Repetitieve Muziek. Vergaelen. Russolo, Luigi. 1913. The Art of Noises. (url: http://www.unknown.nu/futurism/noises.html). Scruton, Roger. 2009. Why read Adorno? in Understanding Music. London: Continuum. Scruton, Roger. 2005. Music in Philosophy: Principles and Problems. London: Continuum.
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Tarasti, Eero. 1994. A Theory of Musical Semiotics. Indiana University Press. Thberge, Paul. 1997. Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology. Wesleyan. Tillekens, Ger. 2000. Wat moeten we nu nog met Adorno? in Soundscapes: Journal on Media Culture, vol. 2 (winter 2000) (url: http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/VOLUME02/Wat_moeten_we_nu_nog_met_Adorn o.shtml). Velema, Floris. 2007. From Technique to Technology: A Reinterpretation of Adorno's Concept of Musical Material in Soundscapes: Journal on Media Culture vol. 10 (20072008) (url: http://www.icce.rug.nl/~soundscapes/VOLUME10/From_technique_to_technology.shtml ). Wheatland, Thomas. 2009. The Frankfurt School in Exile. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Witkin, Robert Winston. 1998. Adorno on Music. Routledge.

Discography Thomas Brinkmann X100 (1998), Suppos Rhythim Is Rhythim (Derrick May) The Dance, on v/a House Trax (1987), Street Sounds Marcel Dettmann Deluge / Duel (2011), Fifty Weapons

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