Adorno’s central musical divide was market-oriented versus non-market music.

Evidence

As was the case with all cultural phenomena, it was neither fully reflective nor fully autonomous. Still, in the current era, its autonomy was severely threatened. Most music displayed the characteristics of a commodity, dominated more by exchange than by use value. The real dichotomy, Adorno contended, was not between “light” and “serious” music - he was never a defender of traditional cultural standards for their own sake - but rather between music that was market-oriented and music that was not. If at the present time the latter tended to be incomprehensible to most listeners, this did not mean that it was objectively reactionary. — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 554

Categorization

• DEFINE: Adorno’s conceptual framework for judging music — commodity vs. autonomous — rather than the light/serious divide.
• XREF: This is the foundational Adorno polarity at the heart of later works like ‘On the Fetish-Character in Music.’ — connects to: Adorno saw jitterbugging as a vestige of negation within standardized pop music — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 582; Adorno held that popular music became a tool of ideological manipulation — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 563; Making good music widely popular seemed meaningless to Adorno under existing broadcast conditions. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1014