A composer can create something genuinely new using only expropriated, vulgarized material

Evidence

Not popular music but artistic music has furnished a model for this possibility. It is not for nothing that Mahler is the scandal of all bourgeois musical aesthetics. They call him uncreative because he suspends their concept of creation itself. Everything with which he occupies himself is already there. He accepts it in its vulgarized form; his themes are expropriated ones. Nevertheless, nothing sounds as it was wont to; all things are diverted as if by a magnet. What is worn out yields pliantly to the improvising hand; the used parts win a second life as variants. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 108

Categorization

• DEFINE: This is Adorno’s account of what genuine artistic use of mass-cultural material looks like — the contrast case against which the culture industry’s pseudo-individuation is defined.
• XREF: The Mahler model echoes the ‘Grafting & Growth’ article’s theme of grafting as creative practice — old stock, new scion — except here it is musical rather than arboreal.
• SEED: Angle: ‘The Mahler test’ — a way to distinguish genuine repurposing of cultural garbage (the chauffeur’s second-hand car) from the culture industry’s fake individuation, applied to a post-Adorno artifact.