Walter Damrosch - Criticism By Adorno

Criticism By Adorno

Damrosch is often remembered today as the target of Theodore Wiesengrund Adorno's criticism. Adorno, without always naming Damrosch, wrote during his rather unhappy tenure at the "Princeton Radio Research Project", funded by Sarnoff's RCA, that the Damrosch approach towards popularizing classical music was infantilizing and authoritarian, and part of a broader, if not centrally planned, system of domination.

Adorno showed ways of teaching both children and adults about classical music that would describe its form simply, whereas Damrosch focused on being able to identify pictures of composers, instruments, and the bare bones of symphonic themes. Adorno's criticism, regarded by some of his colleagues as ground-breaking and by others as pedantic (and by some as both) resulted in his being eased out of the Radio Research Project. Adorno contrasted what he considered a dead end (being able to whistle the theme of the Fifth Symphony) with the child who hears a string quartet in the next room and cannot sleep because the music holds his attention.

Today, despite Adorno's popularity in literary studies, his criticism of Damrosch is regarded by musicians and musicologists as an historical curio. It should be noted, however, that, through no fault of Adorno, classical music broadcasting and listening is today at an all-time low in the USA, meaning that RCA's goals for the Princeton Radio Research project, and Damrosch's pedagogy, failed to accomplish their stated goals.

Adorno felt that Damrosch's musical pedagogy was a justification of class oppression, in which the conductor, without actually "working" at least in the sense that the musicians "work", is shown as "above" the mere musicians, none of whom can be said to play other than a part. Without claiming that the symphony orchestra was completely a product of capitalism (while pointing out that to be economically viable it had to find a place in exchange), Adorno saw the Radio Research Project and Damrosch as introducing, to children and working class adults, a justification of alienation and oppression.

If Adorno was right, this may have caused the rejection by the public of classical music that began in the Depression (with its images of well-fed opera goers passing starving men) and gathered steam in the "big band" era of the 1940s, in which the "jazz" fan defined himself in part as too "hip" to like the music of "squares", negatively, without in fact any special love or understanding for what Adorno overbroadly called "jazz".

According to Hullot-Kentor, most music on radio in the 1920s was European and classical. Of course, it has rapidly and continuously declined, which shows that the "Damrosch" approach to musical pedagogy was a dead end, since it was so widely adopted in schools.

Perhaps the funniest, if untargeted, comment on the whole situation was made by New York Yankees catcher Yogi Berra, famous for gnomic aphorisms: "I would like to go back to college and study. But I would not study music appreciation. I already like music".