The Jazz Essays of Theodor Adorno: Some Thoughts On Jazz Reception in Weimar Germany

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. 1-25
Published by: Cambridge University Press
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PopularMusic(1994)Volume 13/1. Copyright@ 1994CambridgeUniversityPress
The
jazz
Adorno:
reception
essays
some
in
of
Theodor
thoughts on jazz
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 dismissed 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 TheAuthoritarianPersonality'. Nor are matters helped by Adorno's
own attitude. In the preface to volume 17 of his GesammelteSchriften 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 Republic, 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
Robinson
J. Bradford
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 continued 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 psychosociological 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 JazzHot 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 TheodorAdorno
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 discusses, 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
which, indeed, is cited in a footnote.
'Uber Jazz',
This essay was immediately followed in 1942 by an entry on jazz from
Runes's and Schrikel's Encyclopediaof 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 'iOberJazz' (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
his
by
experiences abroad, never entirely left the Weimar Republic and can only
J. BradfordRobinson
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 cessation 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 Hyperinflation 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 Germanynor, with few exceptions, on the rest of the Continent has a genuine
Americanyazz band ever been seen, much less danced to. (Pollack1922, 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 Radaukapelleor
'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, semivirtuoso 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 American 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 American 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-
Robinson
J. Bradford
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 Rhapsodyin 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 privately 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 nothto
ing
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 nonsyncopated 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 reading 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
like ragtime itself, was not a jazz style per se but rather one of the
Militiarmarsch,
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
Robinson
J. Bradford
Table1.
Style
Years
Features and social distribution
Military rags
1905-1920
Radaukapelle
1912-1930
Syncopated dance music
1920-1930
Novelty piano
1922-1930
Popular song
1918-1930
Arranger's jazz
1925-1932
Symphonic jazz
1925-1930
Art jazz
1922-1930
Small-ensemble jazz
1926-1932
Orchestral ragtime and cake walks played by German

marching bands.
Music of youthful protest, sustained by young
middle-class and upper middle-class amateurs, with
much stage clowning and percussion effects; later
commercialised.
Derived from Wilhelmine salon music and performed
by professional dance musicians from the Stehgeiger
tradition for mass middle-class consumption.
Semi-virtuoso piano ragtime, admired and studied by
art musicians; sometimes recorded commercially.
Printed and recorded for mass consumption, often
closely patterned on recent American hits.
Syncopated dance music for large ensemble using a
distinctive arrangement either purchased from a publisher (and possibly revised to suit the given
ensemble) or created by the bandleader; dominated
Weimar jazz during late 1920s.
Jazz compositions in the style of Gershwin's Rhapsody
in Blue.
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.
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.
Known only to a few connoisseurs, cultivated by the
grande bourgeoisie and aristocracy; no direct impact
on the jazz of Weimar Germany.
Legitimate black American jazz 1925-1930
Table2.
Style
Adorno's term
Military rags
Radaukapelle
Syncopated dance music
Novelty piano
Popular song
Arranger's jazz
Symphonic jazz
Art jazz
Studio jazz
Black American jazz
Militirmarsch
Amateurjazz
Tanzjazz
musikalischesKunstgewerbe
Jazzschlager
Arrangeur, Arrangement
Jazz-Symphonie-Orchester
Kunstjazz
hot-Musik
Jazz-Excentric
a term adopted from Debussy's piano piece GeneralLavine, 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 blackAmerican 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 conThis content downloaded from 128.122.149.145 on Tue, 17 Nov 2015 17:52:39 UTC
Thejazz essaysof TheodorAdorno
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 illinformed 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
10
Robinson
J. Bradford
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),1oneither 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 'impressionistic 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 abenteurlichenKadenzender hot music', 1993, p. 796), those pseudoimprovised 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'
Periodemit [ihrer]Gliederungin Halb-und Ganzschluss',Adorno 1933, p.

('achttaktige
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; ('LeichteMusik [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
Thejazz essays of TheodorAdorno
11
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 mentioning 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 'pseudoindividualization' 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 encouraged 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 rudimentary 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 UGberbindung (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
12
J. BradfordRobinson
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 Confrey'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 Scheintaktecan only
be perceived if they extend beyond the normal bar line. Adorno's point, however,
is that no matter how complex Scheintaktemay 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,
13
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 technologischeTatbestandder Funktion darf
als Chiffreeines gesellschaftlichenverstandenwerden', 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, Geschichtekennt', 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 Saxophoneein koloristischerEffekt', 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 Vorurteilgegen die Neger, als dass sie von den Weissen
durch nichts sich unterscheidenals 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
14
J. BradfordRobinson
music played by whites, heard, purchased and danced to by whites, and massproduced and marketed by whites, Adorno may be excused for concluding that
any black American features that may have existed in jazz had been utterly eradicated 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 pinpoint the authentic Negro elements of jazz' ('Ubrigensfailltes schwer, die authentischen
Negerelementedes 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 Americans, 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 Germany'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 subjectivepole 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 interferentialphenomenon, one might call it the combinationof 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 Matrosenmusikin 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:
15
The amateuris not the fresh and unencumberedmusician whose originalitylifts him above
the daily routine of commerce; that belongs to the realm of the Negerfabel.[ ... I The
amateur apes the stereotypes of currentjazz 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 subsequent 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 cannibalisation, paralysis ('Standardisierung, kommerzielleAusschlachtung und Erstarrung', 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 functional 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:
Theorymust [... ] confrontthe problemof contingencyvis-a-vis hot music, no matterhow
little headway this music has made in the broad public, at least in Europe. For comparedto
the minima of march and salon music, hot music represents the greatest attainablemaximum. (1937a, p. 95)"
At the most, hot music could aspire to the status of Kunstgewerbe,a slightly derogatory term usually associated in German with porcelain figurines and antique furniture, 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 Scheintakteand 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
16
J. BradfordRobinson
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 readilyconclude that qualifiedmusiciansare more likely to be found among
the arrangersthan 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 interferentialqualityin jazz is the achievementof the arrangement
upon the composition. The contours of the latter, however, remain the same. [ . . . ] The
performingmusician 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 underlying 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,
17
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 experimentingwith the highly successful and technically
stimulatingnew 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 emancipationfrom tonality and its intrinsic symmetries, and esp[ecially] the emancipationfrom 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 importantresults of the process between art music and jazz, however, are probably Stravinsky'sRagtimeand PianoRagMusic;and above all, his Histoiredu soldat.In the
latter, the whole technique of jazz, particularlythat of percussion, is put into the service
of a genuine [compositionalintention] 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 freeflowing dissonant counterpoint of La crdationdu 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 Weimar'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
18
J. BradfordRobinson
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 analysis. '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 Dechiffrierungder Jazzformelnsetzt
. die Einsicht in deren unspriinglichen Warencharakter
aus', 1941, p. 382)."
S.
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 Gebrauchsmusik of the grand-bourgeois upper crust during the post-war years' ('Der Jazz
wa die Gebrauchsmusikder grossbiirgerlichenOberschichtin 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 Rothschild 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 stringentforms, at least insofaras they involve a more intimatemannerof reception
than mere exposure to loudspeakersand bands in mass dance-halls,are probablythe special
preserve of the highly-trained,dance-groomedupper crust. To this class jazz is no different
than, say, the gentlemen's evening attire:both put on display the implacabilityof 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:
Socialdancing [i.e. the new dance forms fromAmerica]is held to be an affairof 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. [... ] Fromthe very outset one encounterstheirviolent resistancebecause (thanks
to the briskpropagandaof our glorious mondaines)
they can only regarddancing as a luxury,
as the private entertainmentof wealthy racketeers,capitalistyouths and affluent ladies-of-
19
the-night;because every day they walk past salons, wine locales and hotel lounges which
they are forbiddento enter for the sole reason that they lack appropriateattire;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 distractionand 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 specificallyinvolved in agriculture. (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 consumer 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 fartherjazz moves down the rungs of society, the more reactionarytraitsit 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 accompanimentof
collective fashion, it does little more than apotheosize suppression itself. The more democraticthe jazz, the worse it becomes. (1937a,p. 80)3
At this point we might pause to note with some astonishment that Adorno
without
has,
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
20
J. BradfordRobinson
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,neusachlichgrossbiirgerlicheund dem Laien schwerer verstilndlichehot 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 MusikEcho, 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-Marschoder moderneTanzmusik', 4/2, 1933, pp. 37-8) or
'Cultivation of dance music, not exclusion!' ('Kultivierungder 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 manufacturersof jazz have, however, with an
alacritywhich will not redound to their credit and which has already been seen through,
readjustedto the patriotickitsch imposed at the same time that jazz was banned by governmental edict. Nor is this mere coincidence,for the two musics are intimatelyrelated:beneath
jazz's colourfulfiligrees the militarymarch 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
21
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 'Gebrauchsmusikof 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 principlein jazz is patently obvious. The underlying rhythm of
continuo [sic] and bass drum dovetails perfectlywith the rhythm of the march, and it was
possible to transformjazz [ ... ] effortlessly into march music. [ ... ] Not only is the
saxophone borrowed from the militaryband, the entire layout of the jazz orchestra,with
its division into melody, bass, 'obbligato'accompanimentand simple filler instruments, is
identical to that of militarybands. 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 universal 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: Weimar'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 symbolic march finales, usually involving the disaffected populace in a mass demonstration. The era of fascism and mass politics is clearly foreshadowed in a process
22
Robinson
J. Bradford
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 Maschinist 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 'Gebrauchsmusikof the upper crust', and its debasement in the lower levels of society, were sufficiently obvious to function as theatrical 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 Alaskan 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),27but 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 illuminating 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 prerequisites 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 Hindemith published his piano Suite 1922, Krenek
5.
6.
7.
8.
9.
10.
11.
12.
13.
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).
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.
Allowing a conservative estimate of 1,000 listeners 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.
Einbrecher(1930), a film of no artistic significance apart from its jazz scenes. Nor did
Bechet's name appear in any of the advertising material used to market the film.
'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'.
'Nonenakkorde, Sixte ajoutee und andere
Mixturen, wie der stereotype blue chord, parallele Verschiebung von Akkorden und was
immer der Jazz an vertikalen Reizen zu bieten
hat, ist von Debussy entlehnt'.
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.
'Mit seinen Urspriingen reicht der Jazz tief in
den Salonstil hinab. Aus ihm stammt, drastisch 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'.
Jazz was even thought to have been invented
sailors, presumably
by Anglo-American
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.
'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'.
23
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 Kapelle mit dem Notentext etwa der Klavierfassung, so mag man gern glauben, daf3die qualifizierten 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 technisch 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 Anregung des Jazz nicht irgend reagiert haitte. Das
erkliirt sich auBer aus der vorgeblichen ZeitgemiiBheit des Jazz rein musikalisch damit, daf3
die Emanzipation von den der TonalitAitinhtirenten 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 Schlagzeugs, einer kompositorischen Intention
dienstbar gemacht und gleichsam durch diese
gedeutet'.
19. Surprisingly this bold sentence, here translated 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 Oberschicht vorbehalten sein. Der Jazz repriisentiert ihr, ihnlich etwa wie die Abendkleidung
des Herrn, die Unerbittlichkeit der gesellschaftlichen Instanz, die sie selber ist'.
21. 'Man hailtGesellschaftstanz ftir eine Sache der
sogenannten Oberen Zehntausend. Gluicklicherweise liegen die Dinge heute schon ein
24
Robinson
J. Bradford
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 Privatvergniigen reicher Schieber, Kapitalistenjiinglinge und begiiterer Kokotten ansehen
miissen, weil sie taglich an Bars, Weinrestaurants 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 gegenwartigen Bedingungen ihren Fortbestand
verdanken, hat Macht auch uiber der VerAls Oberflachenwirstiimmler selber ....
kung und Zerstreueng, ob auch nicht als
seri6ses Amiisierritual, durchdringt der Jazz
die gesamte Gesellschaft, selbst das Proletariat; 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 BeKollektive

der
gleitmusik
zeitgemaen
selber
die Unterdrtickung
schlechtweg
verherrlicht. Je demokratischer der Jazz, um
so schlechter wird er'.
24. 'In einer Zeit des nationalen Umschwunges,
in der besonders unser deutscher Militarmarsch seine friihere Stellung wieder einnimmt, erscheint es angebracht, sich einmal
uiber seinen Sinn und seine Bedeutung klar
zu werden'.
25. 'Die Jazzfabrikanten aber haben, mit jener Eilfertigkeit, die ihnen nicht zum Guten ausschlagen 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 Continuo und groi3er Trommel failt mit dem
Marschrhythmus durchweg zusammen, und
miihelos konnte der Jazz . .. in den Marsch
sich verwandeln ....
[N]icht bloli das Saxoden
ist
entlehnt,
Militarkapellen
phon
sondern die gesamte Disposition des Jazzorchesters, nach Melodie-, Bai3-, "obligaten"
Begleit- und bloi3en Fiillinstrumenten, ist mit
der der Militarkapellen identisch. Darum will
der Jazz zum faschistischen Gebrauch gut sich
schicken'.
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Strobel, Heinrich and Warschauer, Frank. 1930. 'Interessante Jazzschallplatten', Melos, p. 482
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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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The Jazz Essays of Theodor Adorno: Some Thoughts on Jazz Reception in Weimar Germany

Author(s): J. Bradford Robinson

PopularMusic(1994)Volume 13/1. Copyright@ 1994CambridgeUniversityPress

I: Overview of Adorno's writings on jazz

The jazz essays of TheodorAdorno

II: Styles and currents of the German 'Jazz Age'

The jazz essays of TheodorAdorno

The jazz essays of TheodorAdorno

III: Adorno's jazz terminology

Features and social distribution

Syncopated dance music

Orchestral ragtime and cake walks played by German

Legitimate black American jazz 1925-1930

Thejazz essaysof TheodorAdorno

sidered the true earmarks of black-American jazz - vocalised timbre, blues

IV: Adorno on jazz technique

Periodemit [ihrer]Gliederungin Halb-und Ganzschluss',Adorno 1933, p.

Thejazz essays of TheodorAdorno

as instances of Excentric. Later, after encountering legitimate jazz in the USA, he

The jazz essays of TheodorAdorno

V: Jazz sociologically deciphered

The jazz essays of TheodorAdorno

The jazz essays of TheodorAdorno

Thejazz essaysof TheodorAdorno

of imitation and aggressive marketing, on the lower strata of society. If legitimate

The jazz essays of TheodorAdorno

VI: Conclusion: Adorno and the jazz opera

tion (1940). Information on the press runs of

Thejazz essaysof TheodorAdorno

composed the 'Foxtrott' of his Suite op. 13a,

Amateur die Schablone der kurrenten

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

wenig anders. Tanz ist zumindest ebenso

bruch von Phantasie, bis er endlich als BeKollektive

Thejazz essaysof TheodorAdorno

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