Mahler transmutes regressive, vulgarized musical fragments into genuinely new wholes
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. Just as the chauffeur’s knowledge of his old second-hand car can enable him to drive it punctually and unrecognized to its intended destination, so can the expression of a beat-up melody, straining under the pressure of clarinets and oboes in the upper register, arrive at places which the approved musical language could never safely reach. Such music really crystallizes the whole, into which it has incorporated the vulgarized fragments, into something new, yet it takes its material from regressive listening. — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 112
Categorization
- DEFINE: Clarifies Adorno’s reversal: a composer accused of being uncreative because he reuses expropriated material is actually suspending the bourgeois concept of original creation itself.
- XREF: connects to: Adorno read Mahler’s ambiguous endings allegorically as signs of possible redemption within destruction — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 762