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“Music is similar to language.” So Adorno begins a theoretical reflection of 1931, before he left Germany. Well no, we want to clarify, music is similar to speech, sharing as it does the same medium, sound. In music, “[q]uestions, exclamations, subordinate clauses are everywhere, voices rise and fall, and, in all of this, the gesture of music is borrowed from the speaking voice.”²⁷⁷ The comparison is now with speech, and for a moment, we can agree.

But then, a formulation from Adorno that contradicts his earlier one, music is not like language, intentionally referring or unambiguously signifying. For this reason, “[i]t is impossible to determine in any comprehensive way the meaning of music … [T]here is something enigmatic that is apparent in all music.”²⁷⁸ No, we would say, meanings in speech and text are more complicated than this counterposition suggests; and meanings indeed there are in music, and of a similar range. Cazden calls this range naturalism, pictorialism, and realism. These parallel what we call likeness, directedness, and abstraction.

Then, another formulation of Adorno’s that jars: “music has no concepts.”²⁷⁹ And now again, we need to disagree. In our grammar, concepts are things that happen in the plural, sharing a generality.^§MS1.1.3 Concepts are the raw material of Cazden’s realism in music, Peirce’s symbolism, and in this grammar, our abstraction.^§AS1.1.3

With no concepts, Adorno’s music slips into a place where analysis is no longer required. “What music says is a proposition at once distinct and concealed. Its idea is the form of the name of God. It is demythologized prayer, freed from the magic of making anything happen, the human attempt, futile as always, to name the name itself, not communicate meanings.”²⁸⁰

Norman Cazden is of greater help than Adorno in the making of a functional grammar of music, parsing the forms of its meaning in relation to the intricacies of its media. Music is a structure of contrasts between simultaneous or successive tones, he says, experienced as consonance or dissonance, harmony or disharmony, smoothness or roughness. Speech is a structure of sound contrasts, said Ferdinand de Saussure,^§MS3d then Roman Jakobson.^§AS1.4.1a But Cazden goes further than de Saussure and Jakobson, because his structures are always in movement and inevitably socio-historical. The meanings are in this movement, and the socio-historical context that gives movement its meaning.

Consonance and dissonance, says Cazden, are integral to larger structures in what he called a “systemic theory” of music: “a diatonic base, against which chromatic inflections may accordingly react; tonality, or gravitation towards a tonal center, which thereby dialectically admits its opposite, modulation; modality, notably reduced from an earlier multiplicity of qualities to the antithesis between major and minor; a predominance of metrical rhythm, as over against free, rhapsodic or prose rhythm; and functional harmony that involves a species of voice-leading rooted in polyphony.”²⁸¹

In Cazden’s systemic theory, the task is not merely a matter of “identifying consonance with tuning ratio, and hence inadvertently with a supposedly inherent property of intervals considered in isolation.”²⁸² Such an approach “reduces the objective range of the data to sensory elements below the observed level of their function.”²⁸³ It treats them as “isolated attributes … overlooking … the experiential context that inevitably conditions musical perception. That prior context is the cumulative, lifetime experience with music by the perceiver.”²⁸⁴

In this larger context, “[c]onsonance refers to the stable moment following upon the resolution of dissonance, while dissonance means the unstable moment calling for resolution to consonance. Their inter-relations emerge during the harmonic progressions which characterize the systemic framework of the traditional Western tonal system.”²⁸⁵

In a systemic theory, dissonance is not merely a place in sound where music shouldn’t go, the over-the-border that retrospectively delineates the border. Music always strays edgily towards but not-too-far over that border, and as it does, it demands of itself resolution, a coming-back. Dissonance is a kind of impatience, a complication requiring closure. Cazden’s structures are not simply to be discovered in an elemental decomposition of a stable system – an occupational hazard for structural analyses. Consonance and dissonance are in our terms transpositions, structural points in a sounding system that are always begging movement.

Nor are Cazden’s structures reducible to the technical forms and objectivities of sound. Although the bases of consonance and dissonance are in the materialities of sound as medium, their meanings vary because these are also social and historical. “[L]isteners conditioned to Western music sense a somewhat directionless indecision of harmonic moment when they attend to the heterophonic gamelan music of Bali or to the highly mannered Gagaku music of Japan. Conversely, systemic habits undoubtedly engender bewilderment at the seeming irrelevance of Western harmonic relationships to the classical Karnatic music of India or to the drum ensemble music of Ghana.”²⁸⁶

Consonance and dissonance are “functional moments akin to grammatical constructions, in that their hallmarks are among the learned responses peculiar to a specific system of music-making … The expectations involved in recognizing and responding to consonant and dissonant moments thus become embedded in the systemic set, in the built-in complex of familiar forms, normative expectations and habits that are common to members of a given human society during a definable historical period.”²⁸⁷

And another example: although dissonance is written into and around all music, modernist music is disorientingly overwrought with it. A 2018 “big data” statistical analysis searched for tritone intervals in MIDI files of 9,996 classical music pieces by 76 composers between 1500 and 1900. In Western music, tritones are conventionally understood to be dissonant. The result: tritones became more frequent as music became more modern.²⁸⁸ On modernism in its highest forms, concludes Cazden, “non-tonal music is not so much the bewildering absence of resolution, but the even more disconcerting absence of criteria for the expectation of resolution.”²⁸⁹ To this we would add a corollary: modernism is only disconcerting to moderns, alert to dissonance, and that is its meaning. To others, it is meaningless.

The music that Adorno revered was the high modernism of Arnold Schönberg and Alban Berg.²⁹⁰ Adorno moved to Vienna in 1925 – Otto Neurath’s Vienna,^§MS1.1.3h Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Vienna,^§MS2.1.1d Victor Gruen’s Vienna^§AS2.3b – to study composition with Berg and Schönberg, the so-called Second Viennese School. Schönberg’s goal: “the emancipation of dissonance.” This was Western classical music at its end point, as dissonant as it would get. When the Nazis came to power, music of this kind was considered “degenerate art.” Schönberg fled to the United States, also because he was a Jew.

After this, Adorno’s writings strayed well beyond his music of choice. And when he encountered contemporary “popular” music, he violated his own theoretical principle, managing to find plenty of meaning. Now in exile, in 1936 he wrote an article, “On Jazz.”

Jazz, said Adorno, has “a tone which is rigid and objective; … it ascribes to it subjective emotions without this being allowed to interrupt the fixedness of the basic sound pattern.” It has a “quality of mechanical soullessness or licentious decadence” that “does not come up to the standards for the crudest characteristic of rhythmic and tonal interference.” It is “technically backward, … a rigid system of tricks.”²⁹¹

As for social meanings, Adorno’s own music was inscrutable. But not jazz.

Race: Jazz was “supposed to perversely subject the over-stimulated Western nerves to the vitality of blacks.”

Sex: Jazz evokes “a sense of having been erotically emancipated through that which is dangerously modern or perverse … [T]he rhythm of the gait is similar to the rhythm of sexual intercourse; … an immediate reference to coitus.” However, “it leads nowhere and is arbitrarily withdrawn by an undialectical, mathematical incorporation into the beat. It is plainly a ‘coming-too-early.’”

Class: Jazz is “delivered up to loudspeakers and the bands in clubs for the masses.” But it is at best “pseudo-democratic … The more deeply jazz penetrates society, the more reactionary elements it takes on, the more completely beholden it is to banality … The more democratic jazz is, the worse it becomes.” And when the upper class takes to jazz, “the mechanism of psychic mutilation upon which the present conditions depend for their survival also holds sway over the mutilators themselves.”

Capitalism: “jazz is a commodity in the strict sense: its suitability for use permeates its production in terms none other than its marketability … With jazz, a disenfranchised subjectivity plunges from the commodity world into the commodity world.” It is an expression of “helplessness (the whimpering vibrato) … [A]nxiety in the face of the fatal characteristics of capitalism, seeks a despairing way out.”²⁹²

Adorno did not like jazz. And he never did like America, returning to the ruins of Frankfurt to direct the School for Social Research once the war ended. This city of the Rothschilds and Anne Frank had before the Nazis a population of thirty thousand Jews, but only six hundred when Adorno decided to return.

“Adorno wrote some of the most stupid pages ever written about jazz,” says Eric Hobsbawm,²⁹³ arguably the greatest world-historian of the twentieth century. Hobsbawm also wrote about jazz, and extensively.²⁹⁴ For Hobsbawm, this was a music redolent of social critique and resistance, inscribed in its methods of improvisation and spontaneous conversation between musicians. Two Jews, two people who had grown up in Germany, two socialists, and they read such different social meanings into jazz. Our point here not so much their differences, but that, as music, they both found it readable. Both were prepared to parse its meanings.

One of the things Adorno didn’t like about jazz was that it was unwritten, the “improvisational elements of disruption” as a consequence of which “all jazz is inconsistent.” Some of the variation he put down to mere “[e]rrors in musical orthography.”²⁹⁵ Adorno evidently liked his music to have been written. The dissonances of modernism had to be carefully crafted if they were not to descend into unrecognizable noise.

A score, said Adorno, is a “picture” of the music, postulated in “formal schemata,” where practices such as dissonance are a “complex relationship of deviation to schema.” Once composed, “the music, as text, is really fixed, and is not actually becoming something as it is already all there.”²⁹⁶

If music is similar to speech, musical notation is similar to poetry, a fastidiously premeditated design for faithful performance. Musical performance off a script is a hybrid. It is to sound what poetry reading is to speech. Musical notation also bears the same kind of inexact relationship to sound that phonetic transcription has to speech. Performance requires interpretation to add meaning that is inevitably missing from notation, given the affordances of its transposability. This is why no two performances can be the same. No matter how faithful the performer is to the design in the script, performances are inevitably redesigns.

Where Adorno expressed his disdain for jazz, Norman Cazden in his ethnomusicological practice transcribed and notated the as-yet unwritten music of the poor and the marginal. Their meanings, expressed in their peculiar plays of consonance and dissonance, he assumed as his own.

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²⁷⁷ Theodor W. Adorno, 2002, Essays on Music, translated by S.H. Gillespie, Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 113.

²⁷⁸ Ibid., p. 137.

²⁷⁹ Ibid., p. 113.

²⁸⁰ Ibid., p. 114.

²⁸¹ Norman Cazden, 1980, “The Definition of Consonance and Dissonance,” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 11(2):123–68, p. 167.

²⁸² Ibid., p. 124.

²⁸³ Norman Cazden, 1962, “Sensory Theories of Musical Consonance,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 20(3):301–19, p. 312.

²⁸⁴ Norman Cazden, 1979, “Can Verbal Meanings Inhere in Fragments of Melody?”, Psychology of Music 7(1):34–38, pp. 34–36.

²⁸⁵ Norman Cazden, 1980, “The Definition of Consonance and Dissonance,” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 11(2):123–68, p. 166.

²⁸⁶ Ibid., p. 161.

²⁸⁷ Ibid., p. 159.

²⁸⁸ Eita Nakamura and Kunihiko Kaneko, 2018, “Statistical Evolutionary Laws in Music Styles,” arXiv:1809.05832 [physics.soc-ph].

²⁸⁹ Norman Cazden, 1980, “The Definition of Consonance and Dissonance,” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 11(2):123–68, p. 167.

²⁹⁰ Theodor W. Adorno, 1949 [2006], Philosophy of New Music, translated by R. Hullot-Kentor, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

²⁹¹ Theodor W. Adorno, 2002, Essays on Music, translated by S.H. Gillespie, Berkeley: University of California Press, pp. 471, 470, 472, 475.

²⁹² Ibid., pp. 471, 476, 486, 490, 474, 475, 474, 473, 478, 480, 473.

²⁹³ Eric Hobsbawm, 1988, Uncommon People: Resistance, Rebellion, and Jazz, New York: The New Press, p. 253.

²⁹⁴ Eric Hobsbawm, 1989 [1993], The Jazz Scene, New York: Pantheon Books.

²⁹⁵ Theodor W. Adorno, 2002, Essays on Music, translated by S.H. Gillespie, Berkeley: University of California Press, p. 483.

²⁹⁶ Ibid., pp. 163, 165, 171.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 112–117. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Theodor Adorno’s “On Jazz” §AS1.4.2b