Fleeing the Nazis, Theodor W. Adorno lived in New York City as a
refugee from 1938 until 1941. During these years, he was
intensively involved in a study of how the recently developed
techniques for the nation-wide transmission of music over radio
were transforming the perception of music itself. This broad
ranging radio research was conceived as nothing less than an
investigation, partly empirical, of Walter Benjamin's speculative
claims for the emancipatory potential of art in the age of its
mechanical reproduction. The results of Adorno's project set him
decisively at odds with Benjamin's theses and at the same time
became the body of thinking that formed the basis for Adornos own
aesthetics in his Philosophy of New Music.
"Current of Music" is the title that Adorno himself gave to this
research project. For complex reasons, however, Adorno was not able
to bring the several thousands of pages of this massive study, most
of it written in English, to a final form prior to leaving New York
for California, where he would immediately begin work with Max
Horkheimer on the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Robert Hullot-Kentor,
the distinguished Adorno scholar, reconstructed Adorno's project
for the Adorno Archive in Germany and provides a lengthy and
informative introduction to the fragmentary texts collected in this
volume.
"Current of Music" will be widely discussed for the light it
throws on the development of Adorno's thought, on his complex
relationship with Walter Benjamin, but most of all for the
important perspectives it provides on questions of popular culture,
the music of industrial entertainment, the history of radio and the
social dimensions of the reproduction of art.
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