the jazz essays of theodor adorno: some thoughts on jazz reception in weimar germany

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The Jazz Essays of Theodor Adorno: Some Thoughts on Jazz Reception in Weimar Germany Author(s): J. Bradford Robinson Source: Popular Music, Vol. 13, No. 1 (Jan., 1994), pp. 1-25Published by: Cambridge University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/852897Accessed: 17-11-2015 17:52 UTC

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Popular Music (1994) Volume 13/1. Copyright @ 1994 Cambridge University Press

The jazz essays of Theodor Adorno: some thoughts on jazz reception in Weimar Germany

J. BRADFORD ROBINSON

Theodor Adorno's writings on jazz remain at best a puzzle, and to many an acute embarrassment. To jazz historians they merely contain 'some of the stupidest pages ever written about jazz' (Hobsbawm 1993, p. 300) and are generally dismis- sed without further comment. Adorno scholars, on the other hand, are unlikely to see in them anything more than preliminary steps to his later and more substantial studies in the sociology of music, or - in the words of Martin Jay (1984, p. 132) - a 'gloss on The Authoritarian Personality'. Nor are matters helped by Adorno's own attitude. In the preface to volume 17 of his Gesammelte Schriften he clearly distances himself from his early jazz writings, referring to his ignorance of the specifically American features of jazz, his dependence on the German-Hungarian pedagogue Mityas Seiber in matters of jazz technique, and his willingness to draw hasty psycho-sociological conclusions without clear knowledge of the institutions of the commercial music industry. If these essays are belittled by their own author, why should we bother to study them at all?

Adorno, however, is not to be taken at his own evaluation. True, if read for their insights into jazz history in the narrow sense of the term, 1 his writings have little to offer today, unless we are willing to believe that the rhythmic achievements of New Orleans Jazz were already present in far more sophisticated form in the music of Brahms, or that Armstrong's instrumental timbre was derived from the lead violinists of the central European cafr concert. But they have consistently been read in the wrong light, perhaps not least of all by their own author. In what spirit, then, should we approach this body of writings today?

Our first step must to be remove two misconceptions associated with Adorno's use of the term 'jazz': first, that it referred to what we regard today as jazz, and second, that the music it referred to was American. Neither was the case. Because of the peculiar manner in which American popular music was introduced into Weimar Germany, Adorno could not have known that when he took up his pen to polemicise against jazz he was writing about a specifically German brand of music. Adorno's jazz writings, although post-dating the Weimar Repub- lic, must be read within the context of Weimar Germany's commercial music scene as a whole, a context largely forgotten today and, due to the predations of recent history, extremely difficult to reconstruct.2 For the purposes of this article, Adorno will be treated for the moment not as a socio-cultural theorist but as an astute observer of the popular music of his time - indeed, the most astute observer

1



2 J. Bradford Robinson

this music was to experience. Later, in Section V, we will return to some of his socio-cultural conclusions.

I: Overview of Adorno's writings on jazz Adorno's jazz essays, as already mentioned, were all written after the fall of the Weimer Republic over a period of twenty years, from 1933 to 1953. Yet they are

intimately connected with the music of the 1920s, and must be read in those terms. Even his later writings on jazz, rather than reconsidering the subject, are mainly intended to bring his ideas on 1920s commercial music up to date or to correct some of their deficiencies. As such, they form an integrated and inter-related body of material which can, and should, be read as a whole. Before proceeding, then, it is best to describe these writings briefly and the circumstances that gave rise to them.

Adorno's first jazz essay, 'Abschied vom Jazz' (Farewell to jazz), was

prompted by a radio ban on Niggerjazz promulgated in October 1933 by the newly installed Nazi broadcasting directors (reprinted in Wulf 1983, p. 385). The essay is highly ironic in tone: since jazz, Adorno insists, had already lived out its life span and succumbed to other forms of commercial pressure, the radio ban accomplished nothing that had not already occurred from natural causes. Many of Adorno's constant themes are touched upon in highly compressed form: the myth of black

jazz, jazz as a false utopia, the limits of its technical features, its relation to the

ruling class. In the event, of course, Adorno's 'obituary' proved premature: jazz did not disappear, as he was to discover in exile, and his later essays take on a

slightly defensive edge to account for the 'paradox' (1953a, p. 126) of jazz's con- tinued existence.

This brief essay was followed by a substantial study written in 1936 during Adorno's years at Oxford and published one year later, pseudonymously, as 'Uber

Jazz' (On jazz). Here the notions outlined in the earlier essay are vastly expanded to include a detailed account of jazz technique, the various subgenres of jazz, its distribution within society, its false promises, its commercial exploitation, its relation to fascism. Particularly new is his positing of a Jazz-Subjekt (jazz mentality or

personality) with distinctly sado-masochistic traits. This latter discussion, so remote from present-day notions of jazz, points directly to the larger psycho- sociological works of Adorno's American exile.

The 'Oxforder Nachtraige' (Oxford addenda) to the preceding essay, though written in 1937, were withheld from publication until 1982, when they appeared in volume 17 of the Gesammelte Schriften. Essentially they elaborate, in highly polemical language, those features of the 'jazz subject' that brought this music within the sphere of fascism and anti-Semitism. As such they reflect a deep-seated bitterness more readily accountable by Adorno's frame of mind during his early years of exile than by the topic under discussion. Indeed, there is some reason to doubt the wisdom of publishing these highly speculative ruminations, unless one is willing to grant a resemblance between Amfortas and the jazz personality or to detect an essential relation between syncopated dance music and the Final Solution.

The reviews of Wilder Hobson's American Jazz Music (1939) and, especially, Winthrop Sargeant's classic study Jazz Hot and Hybrid (1938) gave Adorno an opportunity to compare the points in his earlier essays with the findings of two American



The jazz essays of Theodor Adorno 3

experts and with recent developments of jazz in the country of its origin. This essay-review, published in 1941, shows that Adorno was not about to revise his notions of jazz upon contact with the American original. Although he now dis- cusses, for the first time, the phenomenon of 'swing' (as opposed to syncopation), the vocalisation of timbre and the superimposition of speech-melody, he is content to fit these musical characteristics of legitimate jazz into his earlier categories and dismiss them as 'pseudo-vocalisation', 'pseudo-improvisation' and, altogether, 'pseudo-morphosis'. The reviews may be seen as an elaboration under new conditions of the thoughts contained in

'Uber Jazz', which, indeed, is cited in a footnote. This essay was immediately followed in 1942 by an entry on jazz from

Runes's and Schrikel's Encyclopedia of the Arts, published in English in 1946. Here Adorno distills his ideas and sets them for the first time against the background of American jazz historiography, which had begun to emphasise the importance of the New Orleans tradition and the early black-American trumpet kings. Once again, however, Adorno's interest attaches primarily to commercialised forms of jazz, and he sees his thoughts on 1920s popular music reconfirmed by his experience of the American culture industry.

Finally, in 1953, having returned to Germany, Adorno was able to summarise twenty years of thoughts on jazz in a lengthy article entitled 'Zeitlose Mode: Zum Jazz' (Timeless fashion: on jazz). In length and complexity the essay was obviously meant to stand alongside 'iOber Jazz' (which is cited in a footnote along with the reviews of Hobson and Sargeant) and to correct several of its misconceptions. As its title implies, however, the general conclusions he drew of jazz in the 1920s apply 'timelessly' to its later offshoots, and jazz is reinstated as the music of fascism. This view, however, applicable to German commercial music of the 1920s, was unlikely to pass uncontested by writers who recalled the suppression of jazz under the Nazis. Challenged by the new German expert on jazz, Joachim-Ernst Berendt, Adorno published a rebuttal under the title 'Fuir und wider den Jazz' (Jazz pro and contra) which made only too clear that these two authorities approached their subject from entirely different angles - Berendt from legitimate jazz, of which commercial music represents a dilution, and Adorno from commercial music, from which jazz is a failed attempt at individualisation. Indeed, this spirited rebuttal shows Adorno retrenching to some of the positions he had seemingly abandoned in the USA, among them his insistence that jazz is a white man's music to which blacks merely added the frisson of their skin colour.

Toward the end of his life, however, the self-rejuvenating properties of jazz, and perhaps some of Berendt's criticism, apparently caused Adorno to rethink a number of his earlier ideas. By the time of Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie (1962) the generic term 'jazz' had given way to 'leichte Musik' (popular music), and the discussion tends to centre on operetta, musical and popular songwriting, legitimate jazz being dealt with in passing. The conclusions he draws, however, are much the same: not even legitimate jazz is allowed to partake of a claim to artistic status as it has constantly been co-opted by the entertainment industry. Even this chapter, Adorno's final statement on jazz, betrays his lifelong insistence on the primacy of the compositional substrate rather than on improvised performance. The achievements of legitimate jazz musicians within the tight restrictions imposed by their genre are seen as less significant than the existence of those very restrictions.

As this brief survey makes clear, Adorno's ideas on jazz, however tempered by his experiences abroad, never entirely left the Weimar Republic and can only




be understood in that context. His very use of the term jazz, which elevates the vaudeville entertainer Ted Lewis into a 'patriarch of jazz' (1941, p. 395), requires further analysis and differentiation if we are to understand these writings in their full significance, and particularly if we are to understand the burden of all his thoughts on jazz: its fascist propensities. It is to the stylistic and social history of popular music in Germany of the 1920s, then, that we shall now turn.

II: Styles and currents of the German 'Jazz Age' Weimar culture, at least in the eyes of its media and of later cultural historians, was Germany's 'Age of Jazz'. Yet its relation to this music, or rather musics, differed fundamentally from that experienced in the United States or even in other

European countries. Germany, like France and England, was seized with a jazz craze among its urban upper-middle-class population immediately after the cessa- tion of hostilities, but its craze assumed a unique form. First, while black American musicians of the stature of Sidney Bechet were playing in London and Paris, and the records of the Original Dixieland Jazz Band were spreading an image of the new music, however distorted, among the peoples of western Europe, Germany was still isolated culturally and economically by the continuation of the Allied blockade. No gramophone records were imported into Germany; no American

jazz musicians visited the country; indeed, even the latest printed Anglo-American foxtrots were unobtainable. Hardly had the blockade been lifted than this situation was prolonged by the inflation of Germany's currency, culminating in the Hyper- inflation of 1923. American musicians avoided Germany for the simple reason that its money was worthless; record companies refused to export records to Germany because its economy was too unstable. From 1919 until the first American jazz group appeared in Germany at the belated date of 1924, the German jazz craze thrived on a musical surrogate developed by German musicians from their own commercial traditions, upon which they imposed vague notions as to the actual sound and nature of the fabled music from America.

Some German commentators of the time, and many of its commercial musicians, were painfully aware of their country's cultural isolation. In 1922, when jazz was still so new in Germany that even its spelling was uncertain, a well-known writer on social dance described the situation as follows:

For a whole year the yazz [sic] band was more than merely a fashion. This state of affairs, though in itself deplorable, is not without its element of high comedy. The joke is that neither in Germany nor, with few exceptions, on the rest of the Continent has a genuine American yazz band ever been seen, much less danced to. (Pollack 1922, p. 79)3

The German jazz craze, at least in its early years, was thus forced to rely on

home-grown products to satisfy the demand for the new dance music. These were

supplied by commercial musicians who, like a Dortmund bandleader in 1920, concocted their own 'yazz' by importing Anglo-American foxtrots from London, adopting the instruments shown on the printed covers, and guessing its musical characteristics from conversations with jazz fans who themselves had never heard the black American original (an amusing first-person account of these salad days of German jazz can be found in Ernst 1926). Under these circumstances, German jazz was invented by grafting ragtime syncopations and an uninhibited performance style onto three existing genres of commercial music inherited from Wilhel-




mine Germany: the military band, the salon orchestra, and the Radaukapelle or 'racket band'.

This process of assimilation is documented, however scantily, in the few recordings surviving from this period. The earliest German recording bearing the word 'jazz' - 'Tiger Rag-Jazz' by a pseudo-American bandleader called Groundzell - is nothing more than military-band music to which have been added a few stiff syncopations of the type marketed before the war under the name of cake walk. The Radaukapelle, a term that survives in the memoirs of George Grosz (1955, p. 97), was Viennese salon music played with deliberate distortions and clown-like stage antics. It, too, existed before World War I, and was now simply marketed under the name of jazz and undergirt with an arsenal of percussion and novelty effects, from police whistles and pistol shots to musical saws. An example of this music, thought at the time to be revolutionary for its disregard of musical convention, can be heard on a recording by the Original Piccadilly Four. Later it was exploited commercially by such groups as Weintraub's Syncopators, who among other things supplied the music to Josef von Sternberg's The Blue Angel (1930).

It was however the salon orchestra, headed by a lead violinist or Stehgeiger, that provided the primary basis of early German jazz. (A German jazz manual of 1929 even offers precise instructions for converting a salon orchestra into a jazz band; see Baresel, p. 62.) There were several reasons for this. First, the salon orchestra, or at least the 'gypsy music' variant known in Viennese cafes, had a tradition of improvisation which could be transferred to jazz. Second, these bands and their leaders already existed, and needed only to be slightly refurbished and rechristened 'jazz bands' to enter the commercial music market. It comes as no surprise to learn that the leading figures of early German jazz - Marek Weber, Dajos Bela, Efim Schachmeister, Erno Geiger, Berhard Ettd, Barnaby von Geczy - all derive from the central European tradition of the Stehgeiger. In the eyes of the German public, the typical jazz musician of the 1920s was a violinist of Hungarian or Slavic extraction, and there was no difficulty in accepting Krenek's Jonny as a jazz musician and his violin as a jazz instrument.

At the same time that these early performance traditions were being created, the leading and most lucrative branch of the commercial musical trade, the publishing industry, was turning out American and German dance music, semi- virtuoso piano rags and popular songs under the name of jazz. Here the leading exemplars were Zez Confrey, whose 1921 novelty piano piece Kitten on the Keys achieved almost classical status (Adorno (1933, p. 799) considered it one of the two lasting achievements of the Jazz Age), and the American song composer Irving Berlin. Again it should be observed that the notoriety of Irving Berlin and Tin Pan Alley, as with piano ragtime, pre-dated the German Jazz Age, and that German jazz could build upon established traditions. Early Weimar publicists regarded Berlin in particular as the quintessential jazz composer, and the new style of Amer- ican popular song in syncopated rhythms as a form of jazz. It was this music, so readily available in print and so easy to study and assimilate, that underlay the early essays in jazz by Weimar's young art composers Paul Hindemith, Ernst Krenek and Kurt Weill.4

These subgenres of German jazz were all in existence before the first Amer- ican jazz band visited Germany in 1924. The first half-decade of Germany's Jazz Age, then, was nourished on music which bore only a tenuous relation to Amer-




ican popular music, and no relation at all to the legitimate American jazz of King Oliver, Sydney Bechet, Louis Armstrong or James P. Johnson. From mid-decade, however, new influences impinged on German jazz with the stabilisation of the economy, the rise of the matrix-exchange programme among international gramophone monopolies, and the first tours of legitimate American jazz musicians. Each of these developments engendered new styles in Germany's popular music.

The matrix-exchange programme revolutionised the import and export of

gramophone recordings. No longer were heavy shellac discs shipped between countries, but merely the metal matrices, which could then be used to press records in the new country. By 1926-7 this programme had given rise to a steady influx of American dance music in exchange for German recordings of classical music. The recordings chosen for import, however, excluded a priori the 'race records' on which most black American jazz was issued (American record companies published their music in segregated catalogues for marketing purposes). With few exceptions, the classics of black American jazz were thus commercially unavailable at any time during the Weimar Republic." Still, besides a vast amount of 'sweet' commercial dance music of little interest to jazz, by the end of the decade a number of legitimate jazz recordings by white New York studio groups under the leadership of Red Nichols and Miff Mole began to enter the German market. This music sold in very low quantities (no more than 500 copies of each recording), but soon gained a following among jazz insiders and aficionados, as can be seen in several first-person accounts of this period (e.g. H6chst6tter 1987).

More significant was the influx of recordings by such white bandleaders as Vincent Lopez and especially Paul Whiteman, the self-proclaimed King of Jazz, whose own publicity agents had made him by far the leading proponent of commercial jazz in America. Unlike the New York studio jazz mentioned above, these

recordings were sold in issues of up to 10,000 copies, and thus left an indelible mark on Weimar Germany's image of jazz. Other leading 'jazz' figures whose

recordings were sold in comparable numbers were the famous vaudeville singer Al Jolson (soon to be immortalised as 'The Jazz Singer' in the first sound movie) and the now forgotten banjo virtuoso Harry Reser. Neither of these figures, of course, had anything to do with jazz as we know it today.

Whiteman pursued two goals: the establishment of the jazz arranger as a musician equal in importance to the composer and soloist, and the elevation of

jazz to a form of concert music with original orchestral compositions. Both of these currents - the 'arranger's orchestra' and 'symphonic jazz' - left a strong imprint on Weimar Germany's commercial music. Many German dance bands expanded their numbers, hired staff arrangers, and aped the performance style of the Whiteman orchestra, especially after Whiteman's triumphant European tour of 1926. German popular composers likewise tried their hand at symphonic jazz modelled after Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue, which Whiteman had commissioned and premiered in 1924. At the same time, the 'art jazz' of Krenek and Weill began to attract popular attention, especially after the phenomenal box-office success of Krenek's opera Jonny spielt auf in 1926.6 By the end of the 1920s concert jazz was thus being produced from two directions at once: by popular musicians attempting to elevate jazz to the concert hall, and by art composers trying out new hybrids with lowbrow music.

Black American jazz, however, was still virtually uncharted territory. Although a few superior black American musicians in revue orchestras had visited




Berlin in 1925-6, they remained unknown to experts and the mass public alike. In 1929 the great jazz clarinettist Sydney Bechet played anonymously in the Wild West room of Berlin's Haus Vaterland (an entertainment complex immortalised in Siegfried Kracauer's 1930 study of the rising German white-collar class) and pri- vately on invitation from the grande bourgeoisie. At no time, however, did he perform in public under his own name; even his appearance in an early German 'talkie' was anonymous.' In the words of Kurt Weill (1926, p. 732), who otherwise showed a discerning appreciation for black revue orchestras, jazz 'does not reflect towering personalities standing above time, but rather the instincts of the masses'.8

The German radio networks, also established around mid-decade, did nothing to change the image of white jazz propagated in Weimar Germany, preferring instead to broadcast the music of their own radio dance bands and, later, gramophone recordings from the leading German bandleaders. A statistical study of Weimar Germany's jazz broadcasting reveals that of 12,500 titles broadcast under the name of jazz, three were by Duke Ellington and none by Louis Armstrong (Hoffmann 1987). Only in 1930 were these two musicians mentioned for the first time by name among the millions of words published on jazz by the hyperactive Weimar press (Strobel and Warschauer 1930). The same article introduces, likewise for the first time, a distinction between genuine black American jazz, black jazz diluted for commercial distribution, and jazz-influenced dance music. By this late date, however, Germany's Jazz Age had already come to a close as the Wall Street crash of 1929 and ensuing depression left American popular music bereft of its ideological attraction. By the early 1930s the same salon musicians who had produced Germany's Tanzjazz, notably Barnaby von Geczy, were now playing non- syncopated dance music and marches for increasingly conservative dancers and audiences.

III: Adorno's jazz terminology Of the many strands touched upon in this brief outline of the complex reception of American popular music in Weimar Germany, only Theodor Adorno was able to keep them apart and recognise that each had its own social carrier-stratum that separated it from the others, both musically and sociologically. For purposes of reference, these strands are summarised here in Table 1 below. By the end of the decade, when Adorno began to formulate his thoughts on jazz and commercial music, all of these various styles and concepts coexisted under the blanket term 'jazz' and were included accordingly in his jazz writings. However, a closer read- ing reveals that for each of these subcategories Adorno had his own terminology which he maintained even in his essays of the 1950s, long after the 'hot' jazz and syncopated dance music of the 1920s had disappeared and new jazz styles had arisen in their place (Swing, Bebop, cool jazz). Adorno's terms are summarised in Table 2 below.

Since Adorno's terminology hardly coincides with the terms generally accepted by jazz historians today, a few explanatory remarks are called for. The

Militiarmarsch, like ragtime itself, was not a jazz style per se but rather one of the forebears of German jazz, indeed of jazz altogether. Hot-Musik gradually came to be Adorno's term for the main tradition of jazz as understood by today's historians, including New Orleans Jazz, Chicago Jazz, New York small-group jazz, Swing and Bebop. Jazz-Excentric, implying a connection with circus and music hall, was




Table 1.

Style Years Features and social distribution

Military rags 1905-1920 Orchestral ragtime and cake walks played by German

marching bands. Radaukapelle 1912-1930 Music of youthful protest, sustained by young

middle-class and upper middle-class amateurs, with much stage clowning and percussion effects; later commercialised.

Syncopated dance music 1920-1930 Derived from Wilhelmine salon music and performed by professional dance musicians from the Stehgeiger tradition for mass middle-class consumption.

Novelty piano 1922-1930 Semi-virtuoso piano ragtime, admired and studied by art musicians; sometimes recorded commercially.

Popular song 1918-1930 Printed and recorded for mass consumption, often

closely patterned on recent American hits.

Arranger's jazz 1925-1932 Syncopated dance music for large ensemble using a distinctive arrangement either purchased from a pub- lisher (and possibly revised to suit the given ensemble) or created by the bandleader; dominated Weimar jazz during late 1920s.

Symphonic jazz 1925-1930 Jazz compositions in the style of Gershwin's Rhapsody in Blue.

Art jazz 1922-1930 Jazz-influenced concert or operatic works written by composers in the classical tradition (e.g. Hindemith, Krenek, Weill, Milhaud, Schulhoff, Ravel, Wilhelm

Grosz) and cultivated by the musical intelligentsia. Small-ensemble jazz 1926-1932 Improvised jazz in tradition of Red Nichols and Miff

Mole, admired by professional dance musicians and connoisseurs for its musical expertise but with little commercial potential.

Legitimate black American jazz 1925-1930 Known only to a few connoisseurs, cultivated by the

grande bourgeoisie and aristocracy; no direct impact on the jazz of Weimar Germany.

Table 2.

Style Adorno's term

Military rags Militirmarsch Radaukapelle Amateurjazz Syncopated dance music Tanzjazz Novelty piano musikalisches Kunstgewerbe

Popular song Jazzschlager Arranger's jazz Arrangeur, Arrangement Symphonic jazz Jazz-Symphonie-Orchester Art jazz Kunstjazz Studio jazz hot-Musik Black American jazz Jazz-Excentric

a term adopted from Debussy's piano piece General Lavine, eccentric (1937a, p. 97). Adorno first used it in reference to Louis Armstrong when he became aware of the great jazz trumpeter in the mid-1930s, and later applied it to leading black- American jazz soloists, who combined flamboyant instrumental virtuosity with a certain amount of showmanship. (At that time, it should be recalled, Armstrong was cultivating a career as an entertainer, and comparisons with clowns and circus antics were not entirely inappropriate.) More importantly, however, Adorno con-




sidered the true earmarks of black-American jazz - vocalised timbre, blues inflections, identifying licks, expressive instrumental effects (smears, wavers, pitch sags, fall-offs, etc.) - as personal eccentricities which left the substance of the music unchanged.

Adorno, then, considered legitimate improvised jazz and the great jazz soloists as marginal phenomena within commercial music as a whole. Throughout his career, at least until Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie (1962), jazz to him meant the most widespread forms of popular music, whether the syncopated dance music of the 1920s or the big band music of the 1930s and 1940s. This accounts for his narrow view of jazz technique, which was limited to the blandest of formulae rather than those elements by which a jazz musician could distinguish himself from his less talented confreres. It is to Adorno's analysis of these formulae that we shall now turn.

IV: Adorno on jazz technique Adorno's jazz essays, even the shortest, invariably include a summary of the technical basis of jazz music as he understood it. What surprises the modern reader, however, is the passionate and generally disparaging language he chose to describe the supposedly objective features of this music. Jazz, for Adorno, posed a threat not only by its prevalence in Weimar society or its manner of distribution and inculcation, but in its very essence, much as did the music of Stravinsky. Accustomed to analysing works of music as the expression of their moment in history, Adorno treated jazz music as a single, undifferentiated 'work' crying out to be socially deciphered.

The tools with which he set out to analyse this music were, of course, those of art music. For this he should not be held to account: only recently has an analytical vocabulary been developed for jazz, and the technical terms used by musicians themselves were long disparaged, not only by Adorno, as the ill- informed jargon of musical illiterates. But lacking a vocabulary for the defining features of legitimate jazz, it was a foregone conclusion that Adorno would discover those aspects of popular music that pointed up its deficiencies when compared to musical works of art, and would conclude that jazz is at best 'good bad music' (1962/1988, p. 32).

Adorno saw the technical innovations of jazz primarily in two areas: rhythm and timbre (1937a, p. 74). In other areas jazz was merely derivative. Jazz harmony, he concluded, was borrowed wholesale from impressionism: 'Ninth chords, added sixths and other mixtures such as the stereotypical "blue chord" [i.e. the tonic seventh], parallel chord progressions and whatever other vertical charms jazz has to offer are taken from Debussy' (1937a, p. 90).' While this is certainly true if one examines the printed sheet music and stock arrangements of 1920s popular music - and if one takes musicians such as Duke Ellington at their word, as did Adorno (ibid.) - it hardly accounts for the non-standard harmonies actually heard in jazz performance, whether from its improvised contrapuntal texture or the microtonal inflections of blue notes on the 3rd, 5th and 7th degrees of the scale. Neither of these harmonic effects, of course, could be fixed in notation, and neither was specially emphasised in Weimar's commercial music. Accordingly, both escaped Adorno's analysis. Later he tried to rectify this shortcoming by treating the blue note as an ambiguous major-minor third and microtonal inflections as 'dirty notes'. Since, however, the former had already been examined by Eduard von der Nuill




as a formative sonority in the music of Bart6k (1953b, p. 807), and the latter left the harmonic function of the inflected pitch unchanged (ibid),1o neither could, to Adorno's mind, be considered innovative. Harmonically, jazz remained well behind the state attained by art music.

Adorno found still less to praise in jazz melody, which likewise had 'impres- sionistic models' (1937a, p. 90). Not knowing the freely evolving melody of great black American soloists such as Bechet and Armstrong, he could only draw his conclusions from the melodies of popular songs and from the 'daredevil cadenzas of hot music' (die abenteurlichen Kadenzen der hot music', 1993, p. 796), those pseudo- improvised instrumental breaks inserted at regularly recurring junctures in the

thirty-two-bar song form. These two- and four-bar improvisations were strictly codified at the time and in no way permitted the free unfolding of melody associated with jazz today. German musicians generally learnt them by rote from any of the many 'break manuals' published by the house of Zimmermann in Leipzig (e.g. Evans 1928a and 1928b; Baresel c.1930) and played them as small-scale concert etudes. Adorno was fully aware of these jazz manuals and of their stultifying effect on the musical creativity of commercial musicians, who in fact replicated tired formulae where they claimed to be improvising. Indeed, one of these manuals was written by his long-time associate and jazz adviser Mityas Seiber (1929).

It was the thirty-two-bar song form itself, the periodic structure of jazz, the

'eight-bar period with its subdivision into half-cadence and full cadence'

('achttaktige Periode mit [ihrer] Gliederung in Halb- und Ganzschluss', Adorno 1933, p. 797), that constituted the most atavistic feature of the music, preventing it from

evolving organically and its practitioners from developing individuality of expression. Being unaware of the work of the major jazz soloists, who showed great ingenuity precisely in overcoming the rigid structure of the standard tunes on which they improvised, Adorno may be excused for seeing in jazz only the

straitjacket of the Tin Pan Alley song and the limited expressive opportunities offered by the two- to four-bar break. In later years, however, even after he had become acquainted with Bebop, he saw no reason to revise this opinion. It never occurred to him that this 'straitjacket' was in fact a prerequisite to improvisation, which must leave some parameters intact in order that others might be explored, and a stimulus to the performer's imagination much like a rigid fugue subject to an improvising organist. The jazz musician, it would seem, is faulted for not acting with the liberties granted an art composer: 'popular music is touched up rather than jazz as such being composed; ('Leichte Musik [wird] frisiert, nicht etwa Jazz als

solcher komponiert', 1953a, p. 125). If the preceding features of jazz were evidently derivative of art music, the

same could not immediately be claimed of its timbre and rhythm, which were

quite obviously new to the world of 1920s commercial and concert music. Adorno, however, was not willing to grant jazz even these modest claims to innovation.

Jazz timbre, he maintained, consists in instrumental vibrato, this being its 'vital element' ('Lebenselement', 1937a, p. 75). While the application of vibrato to standard orchestral instruments such as the clarinet, trumpet and trombone was indeed unusual at the time, Adorno saw the roots of this vibrato in the Wilhelmine

Stehgeiger, in whom he correctly recognised one of the forebears of Weimar's commercial music. Other forms of jazz instrumental timbre - growl and plunger-mute effects, slap-tonguing, and especially the new percussion sounds (crash cymbal, hi-hat, wire brushes) - escaped his attention where they were not simply explained




as instances of Excentric. Later, after encountering legitimate jazz in the USA, he felt the need to expand upon the achievements of jazz timbre, specifically men-

tioning the application of vocal effects to instrumental performance (1953a, p. 381) and the individualisation of instrumental timbre (1953b, p. 805). For these phenomena, however, he reserved the words 'pseudo-vocalization' and 'pseudo- individualization' to indicate that they in no way altered the substance of the music, by which he meant the compositional substrate of the thirty-two-bar song. Once again we notice that Adorno's encounters with legitimate jazz only encour-

aged him to restate his earlier positions with greater insistence. Jazz, no matter how complex, no matter how obscure to the general public, no matter how remote from the dance music of the Weimar Republic, was not allowed to shed its label as popular music.

This became especially apparent in Adorno's treatment of the rhythmic properties of jazz. Like all commentators of the time, he saw the rhythmic basis of jazz in syncopation, a technique familiar in art music and ubiquitous in the music of ragtime. This impression was reinforced by the jazz publicists of the 1920s, who lauded the revolutionary and disinhibiting properties of jazz syncopation, and by the aforementioned jazz manuals, which largely consisted in rudi- mentary exercises for adding syncopation to existing melodies (e.g. Baresel 1926). Indeed, one of the champions of syncopation as a teaching device was Adorno's

jazz adviser Mityais Seiber, who later went on to elaborate his theory of jazz syncopation to almost comic proportions in an English scholarly journal (1945). The rhythm of legitimate jazz, as we now know, meant much more than syncopation: it included triplet swing, the superimposition of speech rhythms, the freedom to anticipate or lag behind the unit pulse, and all the while that urgency and momentum known as 'swing'. By insisting on syncopation Adorno kept his discussion rooted at the level of ragtime, from which, he maintained, jazz differed only by abandoning the timbre of the piano (Adorno 1953a, p. 123). Indeed, because syncopation is also found in two American fiddling tunes from the 1830s - Turkey in the Straw and Old Zip Coon - Adorno could claim that jazz's rhythmic basis had remained unchanged since the mid-nineteenth century (1946, p. 71; 1953a, p. 123). However, it should be borne in mind that Weimar's commercial music, the object of Adorno's inquiries, never in fact strayed very far from ragtime syncopation, and that Weimar's jazz manuals never demanded of aspiring jazz musicians more than the simplest forms of syncopation.

Adorno identifies two sub-categories of syncopation, the first called UGberbin- dung (tying) and related to ragtime, the second Aussparung (excision) and related to the Charleston (1937a, p. 74). The principal difference seems to lie in whether the syncopation is produced by a sound or silence - by a tie or a rest - although this distinction would presumably become less important in actual performance. But however the syncopation is produced, it is always resolved to coincide with the underlying unit pulse maintained in the bass drum. To Adorno, this resolution automatically negates the artistic freedom explicitly claimed for jazz syncopation by its champions. Moreover, syncopation in Weimar Germany was almost invariably applied mechanically to a pre-existing melody, which was meant to remain immediately recognisable beneath the rhythmic distortions. (Indeed, one of the favourite practices of Weimar's jazz musicians was to syncopate a melody from the classical repertoire as a sort of irreverent caricature.) Again, as Adorno pointed out, the freedom claimed for syncopation proves illusory: never does it sever the bonds of




the compositional model, and never does it break the shackles of the unit pulse. More important is Adorno's discussion of Scheintaktigkeit, a technical term

specifically coined by Weimar Germany's jazz theorists to explain what is known

today as secondary rag. Scheintakte, or 'pseudo-bars', are created when crotchets or

quavers are grouped in threes within a 4/4 metre and allowed to produce three-beat

patterns extending over the normal bar lines. This simple device, immortalised in

Euday Bowman's familiar 12th Street Rag (1914) and more spectacularly in Con-

frey's Kitten on the Keys (1921), was lauded by Weimar's more enthusiastic jazz apologists as an important contribution to the evolution of rhythm in Western music. Adorno was suitably sceptical. It is in this context that we should understand his claim that the rhythmic achievements of jazz - meaning specifically Scheintaktigkeit - were already foreshadowed if not surpassed in the music of Brahms (1933, p. 797; 1953a, p. 126), who indeed occasionally used displacement of metre to massive effect in his orchestral and chamber music.

Still, Adorno himself misunderstood the nature of the Scheintakt. On several occasions he describes it as a combination of 3 + 3 + 2 quavers within a 4/4 bar, which, of course, would merely produce the Charleston rhythm (1933, p. 798; 1937a, p. 74; 1941, p. 393). It is surprising to find that a musical analyst of Adorno's fastidiousness should consistently overlook the simple fact that Scheintakte can only be perceived if they extend beyond the normal bar line. Adorno's point, however, is that no matter how complex Scheintakte may become, they always eventually resolve into the underlying 4/4 metre. The rhythmic freedom of the Scheintakt, like

syncopation, ultimately proves deceptive, a favourite thought of Adorno's first elaborated in 1937 (1937a, pp. 74-5) and repeated in all his later essays.

The third element in Adorno's discussion of jazz rhythm, after syncopation and Scheintakt, is the break. As surprising as it may seem to consider the break a feature of rhythm (we have already examined it from the standpoint of melody), it was here that the most daring polyrhythms and cross-accents of Weimar's jazz were to be found. Many of the examples contained in Weimar's break manuals are almost case-studies of the level of complexity that a jazz performance may attain when the soloist is allowed to play unaccompanied. Adorno's point here is much the same as with Scheintaktigkeit: no matter how daring and uninhibited the break, it will always fit into the underlying eight-bar periodic structure of the

performance. The break therefore merely functions as an ornament - or, as he later acidly remarked, a 'vitamin injection in the tedium of mass-produced articles'

('Vitaminspritze im Einerlei der Massenproduktion', 1953b, p. 806) - rather than

imparting form and structure. Again, the alleged rhythmic freedom of jazz proves to be illusory: jazz performance even in its wildest outbursts of improvisation is

hamstrung by the thirty-two-bar song form, the eight-bar period, the 4/4 metre and the unit pulse.

It need hardly be mentioned that, as dance music, jazz could scarcely afford

to do without an underlying beat, clear metre and regular periodic structure. Adorno sees jazz's efforts to free itself from the unit pulse and the eight-bar period into the world of rubato and compound time signatures thwarted by its function, by its need to fulfil a purpose and to reach a large body of listeners who insisted on easy intelligibility. The fact that later jazz no longer functioned as dance music, and appealed to a limited audience, did not lead him to revise these opinions. On the contrary, he merely insisted that modern jazz was attracting talented young musicians from art music into pseudo-art (1953a, p. 135). To the end of his days,




when speaking of jazz, Adorno clung to the technical vocabulary he had developed to analyse the German commercial music of the 1920s; and as his analytical terminology remained the same, so did his conclusions.

V: Jazz sociologically deciphered The limitations that Adorno saw in jazz's technical devices, then, resulted from and were accountable to its function as dance music. Jazz, in other words, was Gebrauchsmusik, and had to be approached in a way fundamentally different from art music. 'Jazz', as Adorno succinctly put it, 'is a commodity in the strict sense of the term' ('Ware im strikten Sinn', 1937a, p. 77). This did not absolve jazz, however, from an obligation to reflect in good faith its position in history and its role in society. Here, too, 'the technological fact of [its] function may be viewed as a cipher for its role in human society' ('der technologische Tatbestand der Funktion darf als Chiffre eines gesellschaftlichen verstanden werden', 1937a, p. 76). Like musical works of art, then, jazz music cries out for sociological deciphering.

Admittedly there are no works to appeal to in the case of jazz. Adorno rarely mentions the name of a jazz composer or performer, the title of a song or jazz number, and never a recorded or live performance. Being a mass music jazz was necessarily anonymous, or at best 'pseudo-individualised', and should therefore be treated as such by its analysts. The few names or works mentioned in Adorno's essays - Confrey, Armstrong, Ellington, Tiger Rag, Valencia, The Isle of Capri, Deep Purple - are never singled out for analysis but only to add a detail to a more generalised argument about the nature of popular music. 'No jazz piece', Adorno proclaimed, 'knows history in a musical sense' ('wie kein Jazzstiick, im musikalischen Sinn, Geschichte kennt', 1953a, p. 127). It was the formulae of commercialised jazz itself, as suggested in the preceding section, that constitute the 'work' to be deciphered.

To begin our discussion we will take one of the most striking, and to later generations mystifying, of Adorno's pronouncements upon jazz: his denial of its black American heritage. Time and time again he refers to the Negerfabel, the myth of black jazz (1937a, p. 88, and passim in the later essays). For Adorno, as for many of his Weimar contemporaries (including his mentor Maityas Seiber, 1931), jazz was a white man's music that followed upon and completely superseded some colourful black American traditions: the spirituals and, to a lesser extent, ragtime (Adorno, 1937a, p. 83). (Adorno knew or said nothing about black gospel music or rural blues.) In his most caustic formulations of this view he merely grants that 'the skin of the Negroes, like the silver of their saxophones, is a colouristic effect' useful at best for advertising purposes ('die Haut der Neger [ist] so gut wie das Silber der Saxophone ein koloristischer Effekt', 1937a, p. 83). Even in later life Adorno clung to the notion that blacks added nothing to jazz apart from their skin colour: 'I have no prejudice against Negroes except that they only differ from whites in point of colour' ('Ich habe kein Vorurteil gegen die Neger, als dass sie von den Weissen durch nichts sich unterscheiden als durch die Farbe', 1953b, p. 809). Small wonder that he has been unable to escape charges of covert racism from his latter-day critics (Barnouw 1976 and Berendt's original critique in Adorno 1953b).

These charges, however, prove groundless the moment we transfer his remarks to the commercial music of Weimar Germany, where jazz, as we have seen, followed a completely different line of development. Confronted with a




music played by whites, heard, purchased and danced to by whites, and mass-

produced and marketed by whites, Adorno may be excused for concluding that any black American features that may have existed in jazz had been utterly eradic- ated in the course of its social evolution. Nor was he able to detect black American traits in the music itself, remarking laconically, 'It is, incidentally, difficult to pin- point the authentic Negro elements of jazz' ('Ubrigens faillt es schwer, die authentischen

Negerelemente des Jazz zu isolieren', 1953a, p. 124) - an opinion that can only be seconded after a close hearing of Weimar's jazz recordings. Jazz, by the time it reached Adorno, had undergone two processes of re-acculturation during which its black American features were first blunted for consumption by white American audiences and in turn virtually obliterated for the musicians and consumers of Central Europe. Not until 1930 were German jazz enthusiasts aware that black American musicians played a different and more earthy style of jazz for race records and varied their performance style to suit the skin-colour of their audience

(Strobel and Warschauer 1930). If the true origins of jazz were not to be found in the music of black Amer-

icans, where then did jazz originate? Adorno's answer to this question goes to the heart not only of his sociological interpretation of jazz music but of Weimer Ger-

many's jazz reception altogether:

Due to its origins, jazz is rooted deep in the salon style. To put it bluntly, it is the salon style from which jazz derives its espressivo, everything about it that seeks an emotional outlet. [ ... ] The subjective pole of jazz [ ... ] is salon music; it quivers with the latter's every movement. If one wished to define jazz in broad and tangible stylistic categories as an interferential phenomenon, one might call it the combination of salon music and march. (1937a, pp. 91-2)"

The last words - 'the combination of salon music and march' - deserve reiteration. We have already seen how Adorno traced 'jazz vibrato' to the playing of the

Stehgeiger. Now, it seems, the roots of jazz itself are to be found in the Paris ensembles and military bands of Wilhelmine Germany. However bizarre Adorno's view may appear from today's standpoint, our survey of Weimar's jazz reception, given in Section II, confirms the accuracy of both these claims when applied to German jazz. For Adorno, as for most German musicians and commentators, very few of whom ever set foot in America until forced by circumstances to do so, jazz was a thoroughly central European phenomenon and could be understood entirely in central European categories.

Adorno, then, correctly recognised two of the currents that contributed to the formation of German jazz in the early post-war years. This discovery was of central importance when he came to 'decipher' this music. Nor did he overlook the third contributing factor to early Weimar jazz, the Radaukapelle, or what he called Amateurjazz. But he was quick to see through the revolutionary posturings of this music, with its unmotivated percussion and novelty effects, animal imitations, deliberate executive blunders and general attitude of dpater le bourgeois. In this

respect he was far in advance of many commentators of his time, who found the music so rebellious that it was sometimes called Matrosenmusik in order to link it to the sailors' mutinies that had precipitated the German revolutions of 1918 (e.g. Bernhard 1927).12 Adorno recognised that Amateurjazz, far from being produced in a revolutionary spirit, was in reality nothing more than a debased version of ordinary commercial dance music:




The amateur is not the fresh and unencumbered musician whose originality lifts him above the daily routine of commerce; that belongs to the realm of the Negerfabel. [ ... I The amateur apes the stereotypes of current jazz music and bestows upon them a commercial opportunity to be retailed at a possibly even cheaper price. (1937a, p. 88)13

In later years, though without denying the original 'anarchic' impetus of this music (1953a, p. 132), he correctly saw that the fate of such musical outbursts by the rebellious young is to be subsumed into the culture industry, as happened to Weimar's Amateurjazz in the 1920s and has happened since then to every sub- sequent jazz, rock and urban blues style with the sole exception of the deliberately unmarketable Free Jazz. Later history has borne out the pattern that Adorno posited for such youthful heresies in popular music: standardisation, commercial can- nibalisation, paralysis ('Standardisierung, kommerzielle Ausschlachtung und Erstar- rung', 1953a, p. 124).

At the other extreme was the highly professional 'hot music', which raised a claim to artistic status by virtue of its quality of execution, freedom of improvisation, and the relatively high standards and small size of its audience. Adorno was aware that such music appealed to dance-band musicians as an antidote to boredom, and to fans who placed higher demands on the music than did the dancers on the dance floor. Moreover, these fans generally came from the higher echelons of society, and used the artistic claims of this music to set themselves apart from middle- and lowbrow consumers (1937a, p. 80). However, by accepting the func- tional limitations of dance music, 'hot music' (by which Adorno also meant legitimate black American jazz) was unable to distance itself essentially from the mass product:

Theory must [... ] confront the problem of contingency vis-a-vis hot music, no matter how little headway this music has made in the broad public, at least in Europe. For compared to the minima of march and salon music, hot music represents the greatest attainable maximum. (1937a, p. 95)"

At the most, hot music could aspire to the status of Kunstgewerbe, a slightly derogat- ory term usually associated in German with porcelain figurines and antique furni- ture, but likewise capable of exhibiting high-quality craftsmanship and attracting admirers.

This was also the label Adorno set aside for novelty ragtime, especially Zez Confrey's Kitten on the Keys with its clever cross-relations, major-minor triads, overlapping Scheintakte and concluding piano clusters. Like many of Weimar's jazz publicists, and like composers as far apart as Darius Milhaud and Erwin Schulhoff, Adorno felt secretly attracted to the technical polish of this music and its playful treatment of elements new at the time to art composers. (The clusters in its final chorus, though merely evocative of a cat stumbling on a piano keyboard, antedate those of Bart6k by several years.) But by applying the analytical categories of art music to Confrey, Billy Mayerl and Rube Bloom he could only discover the poverty of novelty ragtime compared to the art music of the time, and particularly its failure to evolve into something more substantial. In the event, novelty piano rags soon disappeared from Weimar's music culture, leaving behind nothing more than 'the elan of a new beginning' (1933, p. 799).

If novelty ragtime was familiar only to a few professional musicians and intellectuals, the same could not be said of the popular song, or Jazzschlager. It is important to note that, for Adorno, popular song was not a separate genre of




commercial music that occasionally betrayed echoes of instrumental jazz, but the central genre of jazz itself. Indeed, most of his references to jazz, even where he does not specifically mention Jazzschlager, could be replaced by the term 'popular song'. There were several reasons for this. Popular songs appeared in print and could therefore be studied and analysed, whereas live or recorded performances, at least at that time, could not. They were also published in huge numbers, and were thus far more widely distributed than gramophone discs. What is more, the sheet music trade was in control of musical copyright, making it the most lucrative branch of the 'culture industry'. It was popular song, rather than instrumental 'hot music', that constituted the musical core of Weimar's Jazz Age.

The popular song also provided jazz with its compositional substrate. To a critic such as Adorno, with his fixation on written music, this was essential for his assessment of other styles and sub-categories of jazz. Confronted with the

compositional monotony of Weimar's popular song output, he could feel with

many others that superior musicians were more likely to be found among the

arrangers of jazz rather than among its composers: If we compare the achievement of a good band with the music printed in, say, the piano score, we might readily conclude that qualified musicians are more likely to be found among the arrangers than among the composers. (1937a, p. 85)15

Yet no matter how inventive the jazz arrangement, it was fated to follow the strict

thirty-two-bar melody and harmonic pattern of the compositional substrate, and was thus condemned to banality:

Gimmick and artifice, the new colour and the new rhythm: all are merely inserted into banality. [... ] True, this interferential quality in jazz is the achievement of the arrangement upon the composition. The contours of the latter, however, remain the same. [ . .

. ] The

performing musician may tug at the fetters of his boredom, and even at times make them jingle: but he will never be able to break them. (1937a, p. 86)16

The achievements of the jazz arranger, like the improvising soloist, were thus

merely ornamental. Nor did the symphonic jazz of the later 1920s, whether from Gershwin or

German epigones such as Mitja Nikisch, succeed in lifting jazz from the realm of

Kunstgewerbe. The first sin of this music was to eliminate all of the 'hot' improvised passages that gave at least a certain physiognomy to the facelessness of the under-

lying composition. What is more, by leaving itself open to the evaluative categories of art music, symphonic jazz - or what Adorno called 'stabilised jazz' - could only reveal its compositional backwardness (1937a, pp. 89-90). Adorno recognised that the pompously inflated music of Whiteman's 'jazz symphony orchestra' was

merely an attempt to reach out to a new circle of potential buyers who were willing to accept 'consumption as artistic enjoyment' (Konsum als Kunstgenuss', 1933, p. 798). Later jazz historians, untroubled by the lasting success in the concert hall of

Gershwin's ingratiating potpourris, have seconded this judgment. But Adorno was no more willing to accept the value of attempts to ennoble

jazz from the other direction. While admitting that hardly an art composer in Weimar Germany had been able to withstand the attractions of jazz, Adorno found the reasons for this in the coincidence that both jazz and art music were at that time exploring the same asymmetries, particularly in the subdivision of the bar. Yet the factor that ultimately motivated these composers had little to do with compositional technique and much to do with expansion of the audience. Milhaud,




Krenek and Weill were merely 'nimble art composers' ('fixe Kunst-Komponisten', 1933, p. 795) reaching out for a wider market with jazz as their vehicle:

It cannot be disputed that many 'serious' composers tried to escape their isolation and get in touch with the public by experimenting with the highly successful and technically stimulating new kind of dance music. Even within autonomous production there is almost no composer who did not somehow react to the impulse of jazz. This is not only due to the so-called mood of the time and the supposed up-to-dateness of jazz but also to purely musical reasons. In serious music the emancipation from tonality and its intrinsic symmet- ries, and esp[ecially] the emancipation from the accent upon the down-beat, met the idea of jazz half-way. (1946, p. 72)17

The deprecatory tone of Adorno's original German has been considerably blunted in translation for the purposes of a purportedly objective encyclopaedia entry: 'experimenting with' was originally 'worming its way into' (Anbiederung), 'getting in touch with the public' originally read 'entering the market' (Anschluss an den Markt), 'highly successful' should rather read 'trendy' (smart). Yet even the

attempted scientific tone of Adorno's authorised translation scarcely conceals his

contempt for the early efforts at jazz hybridisation. If Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt

Mahagonny could draw his praise for its hard-nosed attack on capitalism and the

opera business, Weill's songs even fell behind the standards set by hot music, dispensing with syncopation to such a degree that they were connected to jazz by timbre alone (1933, p. 797; 1937a, p. 76). As befit his perception of jazz rhythm, Adorno saw the culmination of this process of hybridisation in Stravinsky's ragtime essays of 1917, written, it should be noted, before the very word jazz, much less the music, had been heard in Europe: The most important results of the process between art music and jazz, however, are probably Stravinsky's Ragtime and Piano Rag Music; and above all, his Histoire du soldat. In the latter, the whole technique of jazz, particularly that of percussion, is put into the service of a genuine [compositional intention] which reveals, as it were, the hidden meaning of jazz itself. (1946, p. 73)18

In retrospect, Adorno cannot be entirely faulted for localising the technical attainments of Weimar's Kunstjazz in ragtime. German art composers, partly from lack of opportunity, partly from an inbred sense of self-importance, refused to visit the United States to acquaint themselves with the roots of the music they were trying to assimilate. How different from their French counterparts Milhaud and Ravel, who made expeditions to Harlem to encounter jazz at first hand, or, in the case of Ravel, even went so far as to take weekly jazz lessons from a professional trombonist. There is nothing in Weimar's Kunstjazz to compare with the free- flowing dissonant counterpoint of La crdation du monde or the pliant melody in the slow movement of Ravel's Violin Sonata, both products of first-hand encounters with legitimate jazz. Weimar's Kunstjazz, however, as shown by the accuracy of its part-writing, its harmonic conservatism and the stiffness of its rhythms, was beholden to printed music and the rhythmic legacy of ragtime, as found in Weim- ar's syncopated dance tunes and as codified in its jazz manuals (a more detailed discussion of this subject can be found in Robinson 1994). While Adorno certainly failed to foresee the full historical impact of Kunstjazz, particularly its bearing on the stylistic pluralism of post-serial music from Bernd-Alois Zimmermann onward, his rejection of this music within the context of Weimar society, when measured against the claims made for it at the time, carries at least an air of plausibility.

Having dispensed with popular song and Kunstjazz, hot music and the




arranger's orchestra, symphonic jazz and the Radaukapelle, Adorno was left with that genre that made up the largest part of Weimar's jazz culture and forms the actual object of his jazz polemics: syncopated dance music, or Tanzjazz. This music, being entirely commercial by its very nature, posed no false or inflated claims to be a music of revolutionary protest, a new species of art music, or an indigenous urban folk music. It was merely intended to serve the function of accompanying Weimar's dancers in the new social dance forms imported from America by way of France and England: tango, foxtrot, shimmy, Charleston, and the blues, then understood to be a slow dance taken at approximately thirty-three bars per minute. Here, with jazz stripped of its artistic claims and reduced to the level of its social function, Adorno was prepared to proceed rigorously with his sociological ana-

lysis. 'Jazz is not that which it "is", he maintained, disclaiming any of the music's individual traits, 'it is that for which it is employed' ('Jazz ist nicht, was er "ist" [ ... . er ist, wozu man ihn braucht', 1937a, p. 77). As such it is consumed like any other useful commodity, becoming a 'commodity in the strict sense'. It is from this axiom, the commodity nature of jazz, that Adorno's analysis implicitly sets out: 'To decipher the formulae of jazz [ ... ] is automatically to presuppose insight into their original character as a commodity' ('Die Dechiffrierung der Jazzformeln setzt

S. . die Einsicht in deren unspriinglichen Warencharakter aus', 1941, p. 382)." This raises the twin questions of who consumes the music and who profits

from its consumption. Adorno, relying on his own post-war experiences, required no statistical surveys to find the answers to these questions: 'Jazz was the Gebrauchs- musik of the grand-bourgeois upper crust during the post-war years' ('Der Jazz wa die Gebrauchsmusik der grossbiirgerlichen Oberschicht in der Nachkriegszeit', 1933, p. 796), seemingly implying that the music was consumed by a mere handful of aristocrats, industrialists and high-level diplomats. While this class certainly did constitute an early body of jazz consumers (one need only read the diaries of

Harry Graf Kessler or recall the live performances of Sidney Bechet at the Roth- schild mansion in Berlin-Griinwald), it is unthinkable that the jazz craze was restricted to such a narrow spectrum of society. Adorno's point, however, is

slightly different. The new dance forms required training and leisure time which were not available to the less well-off, who only participated in the jazz craze

vicariously through the media or in large dance halls:

The function of jazz, then, must first be understood in relation to the upper class. Today its more stringent forms, at least insofar as they involve a more intimate manner of reception than mere exposure to loudspeakers and bands in mass dance-halls, are probably the special preserve of the highly-trained, dance-groomed upper crust. To this class jazz is no different than, say, the gentlemen's evening attire: both put on display the implacability of the social court of appeal that they themselves constitute. (1937a, p. 78)20

Lest we imagine that Adorno has tailored his view of the social distribution of jazz to suit his theories, we would do well to quote the observations of an early student of Weimar's jazz fever. Here again is the dance critic Heinz Pollack, writing in 1922:

Social dancing [i.e. the new dance forms from America] is held to be an affair of the so-called upper ten-thousand. Fortunately, things are slightly different today. Dancing is at least as much an affair of the lower one-hundred-thousand. But it is not an affair of the lowest millions. [... ] From the very outset one encounters their violent resistance because (thanks to the brisk propaganda of our glorious mondaines) they can only regard dancing as a luxury, as the private entertainment of wealthy racketeers, capitalist youths and affluent ladies-of-




the-night; because every day they walk past salons, wine locales and hotel lounges which they are forbidden to enter for the sole reason that they lack appropriate attire; and because they are obliged for this very reason to turn their backs on the cultural attainments of a few idlers who are at a loss to know how best to kill their days and nights. (Pollack, 1922, pp. 108-9)21

This 'propaganda', if such it was, cannot have been entirely far-fetched, for to the end of the Jazz Age the tuxedo remained de rigueur as male attire for dancing, performing and listening to jazz. German jazz, to quote the satirical songwriter Walter Mehring (1919), was from its earliest days the music of the Frackmensch.

Adorno was correct, then, to equate jazz and the tuxedo as emblems of the upper classes. Partly through imitation by the middle classes, partly by deliberate marketing through the heavily monopolised Weimar media (the entire gramophone industry was in the hands of a few magnates based in Berlin), jazz now began its march downward through the strata of Weimar society, subduing all but the peasantry:

Even so, the impact of jazz remains no more bound to the upper crust than the minds of this class stand apart in acuity from those of the people they dominate. The mechanism of psychic deformation, so central to the continuation of present-day conditions, wields its power over the deformers themselves. [ . . . ] As a distraction and diversion, if not as a serious ritual of amusement, jazz permeates the whole of society, even the proletariat. In Europe, the only groups left unaffected are perhaps those specifically involved in agricul- ture. (Adorno 1937a, p. 79)"

Adorno, probably under the spell of the urban media, exaggerates both the volume of jazz consumed and its actual distribution in Weimar society. Neither the proletariat nor the burghers of small- and middle-sized towns would have anything to do with the music, which became the province of a new class of young urban white-collar workers, uprooted from earlier traditions of leisure pursuits and avidly seeking new diversions. Adorno was more correct to see the typical mass con- sumer of Weimar jazz as the young professional intent on impressing his girlfriend by taking her out to a new-fangled jazz bar.

But Adorno goes one step further. The descent of jazz through the levels of society was ineluctably bound up with a decline in musical quality. High-quality jazz - 'hot music' - thus remained the domain of the upper classes, while the lower classes had to make do with a music that progressively shed its syncopations and timbral effects, returning almost phylogenetically to its 'reactionary' roots in salon music and the march:

The farther jazz moves down the rungs of society, the more reactionary traits it adopts, the more completely it becomes subservient to banality, the less patience it shows towards freedom and outbursts of the imagination, until finally, as the musical accompaniment of collective fashion, it does little more than apotheosize suppression itself. The more demo- cratic the jazz, the worse it becomes. (1937a, p. 80)3

At this point we might pause to note with some astonishment that Adorno has, without knowing it, stood the social dissemination of legitimate American jazz squarely on its head. Whereas legitimate jazz arose among American blacks in the very lowest rungs of society, or at best in an ostracised black middle class, and reached the white bourgeoisie through a process of cultural assimilation, German jazz proceeded in the exact opposite direction, being first introduced by a small coterie from the upper classes and then imposed, in a dialectical process




of imitation and aggressive marketing, on the lower strata of society. If legitimate jazz in America was the music of a minority - the urban black population - its Weimar equivalent, the 'more advanced, grand-bourgeois, New Sobriety hot music, so difficult to comprehend by the layman' ('vorgeschobenere, neusachlich-

grossbiirgerliche und dem Laien schwerer verstilndliche hot music', 1937a, p. 92) was likewise the music of a minority, namely of the white upper class. Sociologically, Weimar Germany's jazz was the mirror-inverted image of its American

counterpart. Adorno was one of the few commentators of the time who clearly insisted

on the elitist origins of jazz rather than repeating journalistic cant about jazz being the music of skyscrapers or the African jungle. Not content with this insight, he

goes on to itemise the mechanisms that led to jazz's debasement as it spread out from the upper classes through the institutions of Weimar's jazz reception. Since

cheap dance halls were not in a position to pay for a virtuoso jazz band, they had to make do with radio broadcasts that conveyed a highly diluted version of the live original (1937a, p. 79). In this respect, Adorno would probably have found himself in agreement with Kurt Weill (1926) on the low quality of jazz broadcasting by Weimar's radio stations, which tended to rely on their own house orchestras rather than reaching out for established and recognised dance bands.

The retrograde transformation of jazz into salon and march music is likewise borne out by recent research in German popular music. An examination of the

printed dance anthologies of the Weimar Republic reveals an increasingly large percentage of marches beginning around 1930 (Ritzel 1987, especially p. 291). Indeed, just as German dance-band musicians had felt challenged and bewildered

by the new jazz music in the early post-war years, trade journals such as Musik- Echo, a little-known monthly published by a jazz speciality shop in Berlin, now carried editorials with titles such as 'German military march or modern dance

music?' ('Deutscher Militiir-Marsch oder moderne Tanzmusik', 4/2, 1933, pp. 37-8) or 'Cultivation of dance music, not exclusion!' ('Kultivierung der Tanzmusik - aber nicht

Ausschaltung!', 4/3, 1933, pp. 47-51), all indicative of a wave of uncertainty among commercial musicians who had barely had time to master the secrets of the instrumental break. A quotation from the first-named article, published shortly after Hitler's seizure of power, shows the accuracy of Adorno's analysis from the perspective of an ordinary dance-band musician: 'In these days of national turnabouts, when our German military march in particular is being restored to its former

station, it seems appropriate to bring clearly to mind its meaning and

significance.'24 By 1933, then, the year in which Adorno published his first jazz essay, the

regression of German dance music to the military march was complete. Adorno's

commentary on this development betrays all the bitterness of one who suffered the full brunt of its consequences, and yet could claim that he had predicted it

from the very start:

For two years now [i.e. since 1931] the manufacturers of jazz have, however, with an alacrity which will not redound to their credit and which has already been seen through, readjusted to the patriotic kitsch imposed at the same time that jazz was banned by govern- mental edict. Nor is this mere coincidence, for the two musics are intimately related: beneath jazz's colourful filigrees the military march long lay ready and waiting. (1933, p. 798)2

In Adorno's view of jazz technique - as we saw in Section IV - improvisation, syncopation, vocalised timbre and instrumental breaks were all ornaments which




left the essence of the music unchanged: the unit pulse, the 4/4 metre, the eight-bar period, the restricted instrumentation of winds and percussion. With these ornaments now discarded, only the underlying substance of jazz remained, a substance identical to that of the military march. The 'Gebrauchsmusik of the upper crust' was no longer put in the service of the social dancing, but of the newly awakened German militarism:

The presence of the march principle in jazz is patently obvious. The underlying rhythm of continuo [sic] and bass drum dovetails perfectly with the rhythm of the march, and it was possible to transform jazz [ ... ] effortlessly into march music. [ ... ] Not only is the saxophone borrowed from the military band, the entire layout of the jazz orchestra, with its division into melody, bass, 'obbligato' accompaniment and simple filler instruments, is identical to that of military bands. That is why jazz has lent itself so readily to the usages of fascism. (1937a, p. 92)26

Jazz, in its final transformation, thus proves to be the music of political reaction. The history of German jazz, sociologically deciphered, parallels the downfall of the Weimar Republic itself.

VI: Conclusion: Adorno and the jazz opera To modern-day readers accustomed to thinking of jazz as the musical expression of the black American underclass, as indeed it was at certain periods in its evolution, Adorno's conclusion - that jazz was the music of fascism - seems risible. After all, was not jazz suppressed in totalitarian regimes the world over, including the Third Reich? And why have its fascist tendencies not revealed themselves in the land of its origin, in the USA? Even allowing for the Nazi 'Swing craze' of the late 1930s (for further information on this strangely self-contradictory phenomenon see Polster 1989) and the manipulative entertainment cartels of America today, these objections cannot be taken lightly. Adorno was perhaps too eager to draw univer- sal conclusions from the particulars of his musical environment. Narrowed down to the context of Weimar Germany, however, they not only take on an air of plausibility but find confirmation from other sources as well: from gramophone catalogues and sheet music anthologies, professional magazines and radio broadcasting. But there was another, highly authoritative source of confirmation: Weim- ar's art composers.

The late 1920s were also the age of the so-called 'jazz opera', in which German dance music was not only quoted as a musical ingredient but entered the meaning of the work as a signifier. The typical dramaturgical outline of a jazz opera (always excepting Krenek's Jonny spielt auf) was a progression from dance rhythms to march music as the syncopation and instrumental timbres of jazz gradually dissipate in the last-act finale. Even overtones of fascism play a part. The most illustrious example, Kurt Weill's Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny (Brecht specifically gave his city this fictitious name because of its colour relation with the fascist Brown Shirts), culminates in a brutal funeral march as Mahagonny disintegrates in an orgy of mass demonstrations. But even lesser works - Max Brand's Maschinist Hopkins, George Antheil's Transatlantic, Marc Blitzstein's The Cradle Will Rock (a work profoundly influenced by Brecht and Hanns Eisler) - end in politically sym- bolic march finales, usually involving the disaffected populace in a mass demon- stration. The era of fascism and mass politics is clearly foreshadowed in a process




whereby the jazz syncopations, just as Adorno had predicted, revert to the rhythms of the march.

Weimar's opera composers were also implicitly in agreement with Adorno's inversion of jazz's social distribution, which cast jazz as the music of the upper classes. One revealing example, set on a transatlantic liner, is Karol Rathaus's Fremde Erde, in which jazz is played live to passengers on the upper deck while the proletarian immigrants in the hold suffer to the music of expressionism. The same distinction between upper-class jazz and proletarian expressionism is found in Wilhelm Grosz's lightweight ballet-pantomime Baby in der Bar. Brand's Maschin- ist Hopkins employs a live jazz band in the executive suite of a large corporate office building while the lower classes, in a dive called Bondy's Bar, listen to a debased surrogate played mechanically on a pianola. For these composers, Adorno's dictum of jazz as the 'Gebrauchsmusik of the upper crust', and its debasement in the lower levels of society, were sufficiently obvious to function as theat- rical topoi.

If these works symbolically situate the jazz milieu in the upper echelons of

society, and outline the demise of the German Jazz Age in the oom-pah of the

military march, we might conclude that Adorno's views on jazz were forecast in the works of Weimar's own art composers. This conclusion falls short, however, when we consider the sado-masochistic characteristics posited by Adorno for the

'jazz subject', although some of these traits are doubtless present in the four Alas- kan lumberjacks transformed in Mahagonny into middle-class jazz consumers. We

may be willing to see a connection between 'jazz and pogrom', as Adorno asks of us in the 'Oxford Addenda' (1937b, p. 101),27 but we are unlikely to hear the voice of Amfortas beneath the strains of Julian Fuhs and Bernhard Ette. If for 'jazz subject' we read 'authoritarian personality' these sections of Adorno's jazz essays are put into clearer perspective, and point the way to his more detailed and illu-

minating discussions of the same topic in the book of that title. What is left is a series of brilliant sociological and aesthetic analyses of Weimar's popular music culture by a committed contemporary observer who understood, more than

anyone else at the time, the peculiar origins, musical fabric, institutional prerequis- ites and foreordained demise of this uniquely German music.

Endnotes

1. For the purpose of this article I will use the term 'legitimate jazz' in reference to the music understood as jazz by historians today, i.e. the tradition extending from the New Orleans

trumpet kings to the Free Jazz of the 1960s and 1970s. Otherwise, the term 'jazz' refers to that larger complex of popular music outlined in Section II below. This is how jazz was understood in Adorno's day and how he himself used the term.

2. The sales and marketing records of Weimar's

gramophone companies, all based in Berlin, were largely destroyed after the Second World War when the companies transferred their operations to West Germany. Many useful import-export statistics are contained in Dietrich Schulz-K6hn's pre-war disserta-

tion (1940). Information on the press runs of Weimar's jazz recording was obtained by the author in a telephone conversation on 6 October 1988 in Berlin with Horst Lange, who had access to the companies' files before their destruction.

3. 'Yazz-Band war ein Jahr lang mehr als nur Mode. Der Fall, an sich beklagenswert, entbehrt doch nicht k6stlichen Witzes. Der Witz ist, daf3 weder Deutschland, noch, mit

wenigen Ausnahmen, der uibrige Kontinent,

jemals bis jetzt eine richtige amerikanische Yazz-Band gesehen, viel weniger nach ihr getanzt hat'.

4. All three composers had already dabbled in

popular music forms by 1922, when Hindem- ith published his piano Suite 1922, Krenek




composed the 'Foxtrott' of his Suite op. 13a, and Weill wrote down several unpublished revue numbers in score (see Drew 1987, pp. 129-30, 157-8).

5. The Parlaphon-Beka catalogue of 1925-6 includes among its American jazz recordings only two titles by black musicians, the Odeon

catalogue of 1926 none at all. Yet these were the leading German importers of American

'jazz' at the height of the German Jazz Age. 6. Allowing a conservative estimate of 1,000 lis-

teners for each of the 500 known performances we arrive at the phenomenal figure of half a million people who heard this work on

stage, a figure that matches the greatest film successes of D. W. Griffith and Charlie

Chaplin. 7. Einbrecher (1930), a film of no artistic signific-

ance apart from its jazz scenes. Nor did Bechet's name appear in any of the advert-

ising material used to market the film. 8. 'Die Tanzmusik gibt ja nicht - wie die

Kunstmusik - die Empfindung iberragender Pers6nlichkeiten wieder, die uiber der Zeit stehen, sondern sie spiegelt den Instinkt der Masse'.

9. 'Nonenakkorde, Sixte ajoutee und andere Mixturen, wie der stereotype blue chord, par- allele Verschiebung von Akkorden und was immer der Jazz an vertikalen Reizen zu bieten hat, ist von Debussy entlehnt'.

10. It is important to observe, as Adorno did not, that the effect of dirty notes is as much timbral as harmonic. Distortion of instrumental timbre and harmonic ambiguity are mutually conditioned.

11. 'Mit seinen Urspriingen reicht der Jazz tief in den Salonstil hinab. Aus ihm stammt, dras- tisch gesagt, sein Espressivo; alles, womit ein Seelisches darin sich kundtun will ... .Der subjektive Pol des Jazz ... ist die Salonmusik; von ihren Regungen zittert er. Wollte man die

Interferenzerscheinung Jazz mit groi3en und handfesten Stilbegriffen bestimmen, man

k6nnte ihn die Kombination von Salonmusik und Marsch nennen'.

12. Jazz was even thought to have been invented by Anglo-American sailors, presumably because it first reached Germany by transatlantic steamer. A residuum of this myth belatedly found its way into German Kunstjazz in Ervin Schulhoff 's jazz oratorio H.M.S. Royal Oak of 1930.

13. 'Der Amateur ist nicht der Unbelastete und Frische, dessen Originalittit gegen die Routine des Betriebs sich durchsetzte; das gehort ins Bereich der Negerfabel ... So klatscht der Amateur die Schablone der kurrenten Jazzmusik ab und gewihrt die kommerzielle Chance, sie womoglich noch zu unterbieten'.

13. 'Die Theorie ... mulB ... das Problem der

Kontingenz stellen im Angesicht der hot music, so wenig auch diese, jedenfalls in

Europa, in der Breite des Publikums sich durchgesetzt hat. Denn den Minima von Marsch und Salonmusik steht die hot music als das erreichbare Maximum gegenuiber'.

15. 'Vergleicht man die Leistung einer guten Ka- pelle mit dem Notentext etwa der Klavierfas- sung, so mag man gern glauben, daf3 die qual- ifizierten Musiker unter den Arrangeuren und nicht unter den Komponisten sich finden'.

16. 'Reiz und Kunststiick, die neue Farbe und der neue Rhythmus werden dem Banalen bloB eingelegt ... ; ja diese Interferenz des Jazz ist die Leistung des Arrangements an der Komposition. Deren Konturen aber bleiben die alten ... .Der Reproduzierende mag an den Ketten seiner Langeweile zerren, wohl auch mit ihnen klirren: zerbrechen kann er sie nicht'.

17. 'Waihrend fraglos viele seri6se Komponisten durch Anbiederung an die smarte und tech- nisch avancierte Tanzmusik ihrer Isolierung zu entgehen und AnschlufB an den Markt zu

gewinnen hofften, muf3 zugestanden werden, daf3 es auch in der autonomeren Produktion kaum einen Namen gibt, der auf die Anre- gung des Jazz nicht irgend reagiert haitte. Das

erkliirt sich auBer aus der vorgeblichen Zeitge- miiBheit des Jazz rein musikalisch damit, daf3 die Emanzipation von den der TonalitAit inhtir- enten SymmetrieverhAiltnissen, insbesondere vom Akzent auf dem guten Taktteil, dem Jazz sehr entgegenkam'.

18. 'Das wichtigste Resultat der Begegnung diirften Strawinskys "Ragtime" und Piano

Rag Music, vor allem aber die Histoire du soldat sein. In der letzteren ist die gesamte Jazztechnik, insbesondere die des Schlag- zeugs, einer kompositorischen Intention dienstbar gemacht und gleichsam durch diese gedeutet'.

19. Surprisingly this bold sentence, here trans- lated from the German original, was omitted from the American publication.

20. 'Die Funktion des Jazz ist dann auch zunaichst relativ auf die Oberklasse zu verstehen, und seine folgerichtigeren Formen diirften, jedenfalls soweit es um intimere Rezeption geht als das bloBe Ausgeliefertsein an Lautsprecher und Kapellen in Massenlokalen, heute noch der tanzgerechten und hochtrainierten Ober- schicht vorbehalten sein. Der Jazz repriisen- tiert ihr, ihnlich etwa wie die Abendkleidung des Herrn, die Unerbittlichkeit der gesellschaftlichen Instanz, die sie selber ist'.

21. 'Man hailt Gesellschaftstanz ftir eine Sache der sogenannten Oberen Zehntausend. Gluick- licherweise liegen die Dinge heute schon ein




wenig anders. Tanz ist zumindest ebenso Sache der unteren Hunderttausend. Aber eben noch nicht der Untersten Millionen ... Man wird dabei zunachst auf heftigen Widerstand bei ihnen stolen, weil sie - dank

rtihrigster Propaganda unserer herrlichen Mondanen - den Tanz als Luxus, als Privat-

vergniigen reicher Schieber, Kapitalisten- jiinglinge und begiiterer Kokotten ansehen

miissen, weil sie taglich an Bars, Weinrestau- rants und Dielen vorbeikommen, die zu besuchen ihnen allein schon mangels einer

standesgemaiBen Toilette verwehrt ist, und weil sie eben deshalb sich abwenden mtissen von den Kulturerrungenschaften einiger Mfiiigganger, die nicht wissen, wie sie am besten ihre Tage und Nachte totschlagen sollen'.

22. 'Allein die Wirkung des Jazz bleibt so wenig an die Oberschicht gebunden, wie deren BewulBtsein von dem der Beherrschten in Scharfe sich abhebt: der Mechanismus der

psychischen Verstiimmelung, dem die gegen- wartigen Bedingungen ihren Fortbestand verdanken, hat Macht auch uiber der Ver- stiimmler selber .... Als Oberflachenwir-

kung und Zerstreueng, ob auch nicht als

seri6ses Amiisierritual, durchdringt der Jazz die gesamte Gesellschaft, selbst das Prolet-

ariat; in Europa diirften allenfalls spezifisch agrarische Gruppen ausgenommen sein'.

23. 'Je tiefer der Jazz gesellschaftlich wandert, um so mehr reaktionare Zuige nimmt er an, um so vollkommener ist er dem Banalen h6rig, um so weniger duldet er Freiheit und Aus-

bruch von Phantasie, bis er endlich als Be-

gleitmusik der zeitgema••en

Kollektive

schlechtweg die Unterdrtickung selber verherrlicht. Je demokratischer der Jazz, um so schlechter wird er'.

24. 'In einer Zeit des nationalen Umschwunges, in der besonders unser deutscher Militar- marsch seine friihere Stellung wieder ein- nimmt, erscheint es angebracht, sich einmal

uiber seinen Sinn und seine Bedeutung klar zu werden'.

25. 'Die Jazzfabrikanten aber haben, mit jener Eil-

fertigkeit, die ihnen nicht zum Guten aus-

schlagen wird und die durchschaut ist, schon seit zwei Jahren [i.e. since 1931] sich auf jenen patriotischen Kitsch umgestellt, den wohl nicht zufillig ein Regierungsverdikt zugleich mit dem Jazz ereilt, eben weil er ihm nahe verwandt ist; lingst schon lag unter den bunten Schn6rkeln des Jazz der Militarmarsch bereit'.

26. 'Die Wirksamkeit des Marschprinzips im Jazz ist evident. Der Grundrhythmus von Con- tinuo und groi3er Trommel failt mit dem

Marschrhythmus durchweg zusammen, und miihelos konnte der Jazz . .. in den Marsch sich verwandeln .... [N]icht bloli das Saxo-

phon ist den Militarkapellen entlehnt, sondern die gesamte Disposition des Jazzor- chesters, nach Melodie-, Bai3-, "obligaten" Begleit- und bloi3en Fiillinstrumenten, ist mit der der Militarkapellen identisch. Darum will der Jazz zum faschistischen Gebrauch gut sich schicken'.

References

Adorno, Theodor. 1933. 'Abschied vom Jazz', Europa'ische

Revue, 9, pp. 313-16. Reprinted in Gesammelte

Schriften, XVIII (1984), pp. 795-9 1937a. '[Ober Jazz. [pseud. Hektor Rottweiler], Zeitschrift fiir Sozialforschung, 5. Reprinted in Gesammelte

Schriften, XVII (1982), pp. 70-100 1937b. 'Oxforder Nachtrige' [1937], Gesammelte Schriften, XVII (1982), pp. 100-8 1941. Reviews of American Jazz Music by Wilder Hobson [1939] and Jazz: Hot and Hybrid by Winthrop

Sergeant [1938] in Studies in Philosophy and Social Science, 9, pp. 167-78. German original in Gesam-

melte Schriften, XIX (1984), pp. 382-99 1946. 'Jazz' [1942], in Encyclopedia of the Arts, ed. D. Runes and H. Shrikel (New York), pp. 511-13.

Original German in Gesammelte Schriften, XVIII (1984), pp. 70-3 1953a. 'Zeitlose Mode', Merkur (June 1953). Reprinted in Prismen and Gesammelte Schriften, X/1 (1977),

pp. 123-37 1953b. 'Fiir und wider den Jazz', Merkur (September 1953). Reprinted in Gesammelte Schriften, X/2

(1977), pp. 805-9 1962. Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie (Frankfurt). English trans. by E. B. Ashton (1988) 1982 'Vorrede', Gesammelte Schriften, XVII (Frankfurt)

Baresel, Alfred. 1925. Das Jazz-Buch, (Leipzig) 1929. Das Neue Jazz-Buch (Liepzig) c.1930. 77 Klavier-Breaks (Leipzig)




Barnouw, Dagmar. 1976. "Beute der Pragmatisierung": Adornos Aisthetische Theorie in der Retrospek- tive', in Die USA und Deutschland: Wechselseitige Spiegelungen in der Literatur der Gegenwart, ed. W. Paulsen (Berlin)

Bernhard, Paul. 1927. Jazz: Eine musikalische Zeitfrage (Munich) Drew, David. 1987. Kurt Weill: A Handbook, (Los Angeles and Berkeley) Ernst, Henry. 1926. 'Meine Jagd nach der "Tschetzpend", Der Artist, no. 2134, pp. 4-5 Evans, O. A. 1928a. 99 Breaks fir Alt-Saxophon, (Leipzig)

1928b. 99 Breaks fiir Trompete (Leipzig) Grosz, George. 1955. Ein kleines Ja und ein grosses Nein (Hamburg) Hobsbawm, Eric. 1993. The Jazz Scene (New York) Hochst6tter, Ernst. 1987. 'Als der Jatz nach Miinchen kam ... ', Fox auf 78, ed. Klaus Krtiger (Autumn

1987), pp. 54-7 Hoffmann, Bernd. 1987. 'Jazz im Radio der frtihen Jahre', in Rock/Pop/Jazz: Vom Amateru zum Profi, ed.

H. Rosner (Hamburg), pp. 43-59 Jay, Martin. 1984. Adorno (Cambridge, Massachusetts) Kracauer, Siegried. 1930. Die Angestellten: Aus dem neuesten Deutschland (Frankfurt) Mehring, Walter. 1919. 'Grotesksong' [1919], Die Weltbiihne, 17/13 (1921), p. 364 Pollack, Heinz. 1922. Die Revolution des Gesellschaftstanzes (Dresden) Polster, Bernd (ed.). 1989. 'Swing Heil': Jazz im National-sozialismus (Berlin) Ritzel, Fred. 1987. "'Hiitte der Kaiser Jazz getanzt ... ": US-Tanzmusik in Deutschland vor und nach

dem ersten Weltkrieg', in Ich will aber gerade vom Leben singen ... : liber populiire Musik vom aus- gehenden 19. Jahrhundert bis zum Ende der Weimarer Republik, ed. S. Schutte (Reinbek)

Robinson, J. Bradford. 1994. 'Jazz Reception in Weimar Germany: In Search of a Shimmy Figure', in Music and Performance in Weimar Germany, ed. Bryan Gilliam (Cambridge)

Schulz-K6hn, Dietrich. 1940. Die Schallplatte auf dem Weltmarkt (Berlin) Seiber, Mityas. 1929. Schule fiir Jazz-Schlagzeug (Mainz)

1931. 'Welche Rolle spielt die Synkope in der modernen Jazzmusik?', Musik-Echo, 2/3, p. 14 1945. 'Rhythmic freedom in jazz? A study of jazz rhythms', Music Review, 6, pp. 30-41, 89-94, 160-71

Strobel, Heinrich and Warschauer, Frank. 1930. 'Interessante Jazzschallplatten', Melos, p. 482 Weill, Kurt. 1926. 'Tanzmusik', Der deutsche Rundfunk, 4/11, pp. 732-3 Wulf, Joseph. 1983. Musik im Dritten Reich: Eine Dokumentation (Berlin)

Discography Original Excentric [sic] Band, 'Tiger Rag-Jazz'. Homokord 15984. December 1919 Original Piccadilly Four, 'My Baby's Arms'. Anker 1027. Berlin, 12 February 1921



the jazz essays of theodor adorno: some thoughts on jazz reception in weimar germany

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