1st Edition
The Mediations of Music Critical Approaches after Adorno
Adorno believed that a circular relationship was established between immediacy and mediation. Should we now say that this model with its clear Hegelian influence is outdated? Or does it need some theoretical integration? This volume addresses these questions by covering the performance of music, its technological reproduction and its modes of communication – in particular, pedagogy and dissemination through the media. Each of the book’s four parts deal with different aspects of the mediation process. The contributing authors outline the problematic moments in Adorno’s reasoning but also highlight its potential. In many chapters the pole of immediacy is explicitly brought into play, its different manifestations often proving to be fundamental for the understanding of mediation processes. The prime reference sources are Adorno’s Current of Music, Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction and Composing for the Films. Critical readings of these texts are supplemented by reflections on performance studies, media theories, sociology of listening, post-structuralism and other contiguous research fields.
1 Popular Culture and Post-Traditional Arts: Debates and Controversies During Adorno’s Exile in the USA
GIANMARIO BORIO
PART I: The Dynamics of Musical Mediation
2 The Logic of Judgement-less Synthesis: Theodor W. Adorno on Vermittlung and the Language of Music
DIETER MERSCH
3 Beyond Mediation
ESTEBAN BUCH
4 Media, Mediation and ‘Bildung’ in Adorno’s Current of Music
MICHELA GARDA
PART II: Notation and Performance
5 ‘Every written note is the image of a beat’: Rethinking Adorno’s Critique of Notation
ANDREAS MEYER
6 Towards a Practice of Musical Performance Creativity
DANIEL LEECH-WILKINSON
7 Exploring the Text-Performance Continuum in Music: Reflections on Immediate Mediation
ALESSANDRO CECCHI
PART III: Music on Screen
8 Instrumentalizing Music for the Movies: Comedy, Portability, Labor, Critique
LYDIA GOEHR
9 Composing for the Films in the Age of Digital Media
JAMES BUHLER
PART IV: Recorded Sound in Changing Environments
10 Adorno and Jazz: A Dialogue with the Philosopher from an Audiotactile Perspective
VINCENZO CAPORALETTI
11 Adorno, the Jitterbug and the Becoming Insect of Music
MAKIS SOLOMOS
Biography
Gianmario Borio is professor of Musicology at the University of Pavia and director of the Institute of Music at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice. In 1999 he was awarded the Dent Medal by the Royal Musical Association. In 2013 he was Distinguished Visiting Professor at The Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America. Since 2013 he has been member of the Academia Europaea, since 2016 corresponding member of the American Musicological Society, and since 2019 corresponding fellow of the British Academy. He is the director of the book series Musical Cultures of the Twentieth Century (Routledge) and the online-journal Archival Notes. His publications deal with several aspects of the music of the 20th century (theory and aesthetics, political background, the audiovisual experience), with the history of musical concepts and the theory of musical form.
