This theory’s importance to the Genre Implosion project is in the premise that musical genres, rather than specific pieces, have become the works of art in society, with the dissolution of the collective ‘album’, the creator ‘artist’ and the individual ‘piece’ in favour of the more expeditious category for marketing music, genre.  Going beyond Adorno’s critique of these items having supplanted the formal entity of music, Genre Implosion argues that Adorno’s ‘truth content’ in music is not merely obscured, but lost through genre’s pervasive offers of identity, status, and the social.

Born on September 11th, 1903 in Frankfurt am Main, Theodor Ludwig Wiesengrund (Adorno), was son to a wealthy Jewish wine merchant and an accomplished musician of Italian Catholic descent.He studied philosophy with the neo-Kantian thinker Hans Cornelius and musical composition with Alban Berg.  Following the conclusion of his studies he spent two years as a university instructor before being expelled by the Nazis along with other professors and intellectuals either of Jewish heritage or on the political left. Like many others who found themselves in his position during the rise of the Third Reich he turned his father's Jewish surname, ‘Wiesengrund’, into an unelaborated middle initial and adopted his Italian mother’s surname.

He left Germany in the spring of 1934, residing in Oxford, New York City, and southern California until well after the end of the war. He returned to Frankfurt in 1949 to take up a position in the philosophy department, and quickly established himself as a leading German intellectual, central figure in and eventually Director (1958-1969) of the Institute of Social Research.  The Institute had been founded in 1923 as a centre for Marxist scholarship, and had been led by Max Horkheimer since 1930: today it is principally remembered as home to a number of 20th century philosophers including Horkheimer, Adorno, Walter Benjamin and later, Jürgen Habermas, now identified with the “The Frankfurt School.”

Adorno became a leading figure in the "positivism dispute" in German sociology, and a key player in debates about restructuring German universities, and as such found himself regularly attacked by both student activists and their right-wing critics.  Matters worsened through the 1960s, and came to a head in April 1969, when three women activists interrupted Adorno’s lecture by surrounding him at the podium, bearing their breasts, simulating caresses, and “attacking” him with flowers.  As biographer Martin Jay described it, “Adorno, unnerved and humiliated, left the lecture hall with students mockingly proclaiming that “as an institution, Adorno is dead.”  His physical death from a heart attack came four months later on August 6.”

Read Chapter 2, “Genre as Artwork” of Imploding Musical Genre in PDF format here.

For Imploding Musical Genre’s Foreword, Introduction, Conclusion, Appendix and Bibliography return to the main Project Page to view the entire document.