Is Music a Language?
Adorno, Voloshinov and the Language Character of Music
In: Historical MaterialismSearch for other papers by Mark Abel in
Current site
Google Scholar
Abstract
Marxists regard works of art as meaningful, and look for political meanings in apparently non-political literature, films and paintings. But where does music’s meaning lie? The conventional view is that music is non-referential, capable only of supporting other artforms or of expressing emotions. Adorno rejects the idea of music as a language of emotions, and does not believe that music has universal grammatical and syntactical rules. Yet he claims that music has language characteristics which make it as political as other artforms. What does he mean, and is he right? To answer those questions, we need to know how he understands language. This article examines how Adorno’s view compares with the Marxist theory of language and consciousness developed by Valentin Voloshinov, and explores the extent to which approaching music from this direction might clarify a Marxist understanding of music and contribute to solving the thorny question of musical meaning.
Purchase
Buy instant access (PDF download and unlimited online access):
Institutional Login
Log in with Open Athens, Shibboleth, or your institutional credentials
Personal login
Log in with your brill.com account
-
Abel, Mark 2014, Groove: An Aesthetic of Measured Time, Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill.
-
Adorno, Theodor W. 1982, Against Epistemology: A Metacritique; Studies in Husserl and the Phenomenological Antinomies, translated by W. Domingo, Oxford: Blackwell.
-
Adorno, Theodor W. 1984, ‘The Essay as Form’, translated by Bob Hullot-Kentor and Frederic Will, New German Critique, 32: 151–171.
-
Adorno, Theodor W. 1992a, ‘Music and Language: A Fragment’, in Adorno 1992c.
-
Adorno, Theodor W. 1992b, ‘Vers une musique informelle’, in Adorno 1992c.
-
Adorno, Theodor W. 1992c, Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, London: Verso.
-
Adorno, Theodor W. 1993a, ‘Music, Language, and Composition’, translated by Susan Gillespie, The Musical Quarterly, 77, 3: 401–414.
-
Adorno, Theodor W. 1993b, Hegel: Three Studies, translated by Shierry Weber Nicholsen, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
-
Adorno, Theodor W. 1995 [1964], ‘On Some Relationships between Music and Painting’, translated by Susan Gillespie, Musical Quarterly, 79, 1: 66–79.
-
Adorno, Theodor W. 1997, Aesthetic Theory, translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor, London: Continuum.
-
Adorno, Theodor W. 2002 [1965], ‘Little Heresy’, in Essays on Music, edited by Richard Leppert and translated by Susan H. Gillespie, Berkeley: University of California Press.
-
Adorno, Theodor W. 2007, ‘Theses on the Language of the Philosopher’, in Adorno and the Need in Thinking: New Critical Essays, edited by Donald Burke, Colin J. Campbell, Kathy Kiloh, Michael K. Palamarek and Jonathan Short, Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
-
Althusser, Louis 1996, For Marx, translated by Ben Brewster, London: Verso.
-
Bailes, Freya 2007, ‘The Prevalence and Nature of Imagined Music in the Everyday Lives of Music Students’, Psychology of Music, 35, 4: 555–570.
-
Benjamin, Walter 1993, ‘On Language as Such and on the Language of Man’, in Selected Writings, Volume 1: 1913–1926, edited by Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
-
Bowie, Andrew 1989, ‘Music, Language and Modernity’, in The Problems of Modernity: Adorno and Benjamin, edited by Andrew Benjamin, London: Routledge.
-
Bürger, Peter 1984, Theory of the Avant-Garde, translated by Michael Shaw, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
-
Callinicos, Alex 2004, Making History: Agency, Structure, and Change in Social Theory, Historical Materialism Book Series, Leiden: Brill.
-
Clayton, Martin, Trevor Herbert and Richard Middleton (eds.) 2003, The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction, London: Routledge.
-
Collins, Chik 2004, ‘Marxism and Language: A Response to McNally’, Historical Materialism, 12, 2: 169–187.
-
Cook, Nicholas 2003, ‘Music as Performance’, in Clayton, Herbert and Middleton (eds.) 2003.
-
Cooke, Deryck 1989 [1959], The Language of Music, Oxford: Clarendon Press.
-
Cross, Ian 2012, ‘Music as a Social and Cognitive Process’, in Rebuschat, Rohrmeier, Hawkins and Cross (eds.) 2012.
-
Engels, Frederick 1883, ‘Frederick Engels’ Speech at the Grave of Karl Marx’, available at: <https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1883/death/burial.htm>.
-
Engels, Frederick 1934 [1876], The Part Played by Labour in the Transition from Ape to Man, Moscow: Progress Publishers.
-
Gandesha, Samir 2006, ‘The “Aesthetic Dignity of Words”: Adorno’s Philosophy of Language’, New German Critique, 97: 137–158.
-
Hanslick, Eduard 1957 [1854], The Beautiful in Music, Indianapolis: The Bobbs-Merrill Company.
-
Kant, Immanuel 1987 [1790], Critique of Judgment, translated by Werner S. Pluhar, Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company.
-
Langer, Susanne K. 1969, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
-
Lecercle, Jean-Jacques 2009, A Marxist Philosophy of Language, Historical Materialism Book Series, Chicago: Haymarket Books.
-
Lerdahl, Fred and Ray Jackendoff 1983, A Generative Theory of Tonal Music, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
-
Liikkanen, Lassi A. 2012, ‘Musical Activities Predispose to Involuntary Musical Imagery’, Psychology of Music, 40, 2: 236–256.
-
Marx, Karl 1973 [1844], Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts, in Karl Marx and Frederick Engels on Literature and Art, edited by Lee Baxandall and Stefan Morawski, New York: International General.
-
Marx, Karl and Frederick Engels 1970 [1845], The German Ideology, London: Lawrence and Wishart.
-
McNally, David 2001, Bodies of Meaning: Studies on Language, Labor, and Liberation, Albany, NY: SUNY Press.
-
Müller, Harro 2009, ‘Mimetic Rationality: Adorno’s Project of a Language of Philosophy’, New German Critique, 108: 85–108.
-
Nelson, Amy 2004, Music for the Revolution: Musicians and Power in Early Soviet Russia, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press.
-
Paddison, Max 1991, ‘The Language-Character of Music: Some Motifs in Adorno’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 116, 2: 267–279.
-
Paddison, Max 1997, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music, New Edition, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
-
Raffman, Diana 1993, Language, Music, and Mind, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press.
-
Rebuschat, Patrick, Martin Rohrmeier, John A. Hawkins and Ian Cross (eds.) 2012, Language and Music as Cognitive Systems, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
-
Rose, Jacqueline 2016, ‘From the Inside out. Review of The Lesser Bohemians by Eimear McBride’, London Review of Books, 38, 18: 11–12, available at: <https://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n18/jacqueline-rose/from-the-inside-out>.
-
Schopenhauer, Arthur 2010 [1818], The World as Will and Representation, translated by Judith Norman and Alistair Welchman, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
-
Statista Research Analysis 2014, ‘Share of People who Play Music in the United States in 2014, by Age’, available at: <http://www.statista.com/statistics/352204/number-of-people-play-musical-instrument-usa/>.
-
Swain, Joseph P. 1995, ‘The Concept of Musical Syntax’, The Musical Quarterly, 79, 2: 281–308.
-
Toynbee, Jason 2003, ‘Music, Culture, and Creativity’, in Clayton, Herbert and Middleton (eds.) 2003.
-
Vološinov, Valentin N. 1973, Marxism and the Philosophy of Language, translated by Ladislav Matejka, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
-
Williams, Raymond 1977, Marxism and Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press.
-
Williamson, Victoria J. and Sagar R. Jilka 2014, ‘Experiencing Earworms: An Interview Study of Involuntary Musical Imagery’, Psychology of Music, 42, 5: 653–670.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 2216 | 173 | 31 |
| Full Text Views | 324 | 15 | 1 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 399 | 32 | 2 |
Is Music a Language?
Adorno, Voloshinov and the Language Character of Music
In: Historical MaterialismSearch for other papers by Mark Abel in
Current site
Google Scholar
PubMed
Abstract
Marxists regard works of art as meaningful, and look for political meanings in apparently non-political literature, films and paintings. But where does music’s meaning lie? The conventional view is that music is non-referential, capable only of supporting other artforms or of expressing emotions. Adorno rejects the idea of music as a language of emotions, and does not believe that music has universal grammatical and syntactical rules. Yet he claims that music has language characteristics which make it as political as other artforms. What does he mean, and is he right? To answer those questions, we need to know how he understands language. This article examines how Adorno’s view compares with the Marxist theory of language and consciousness developed by Valentin Voloshinov, and explores the extent to which approaching music from this direction might clarify a Marxist understanding of music and contribute to solving the thorny question of musical meaning.
| All Time | Past 365 days | Past 30 Days | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Abstract Views | 2216 | 173 | 31 |
| Full Text Views | 324 | 15 | 1 |
| PDF Views & Downloads | 399 | 32 | 2 |
