Musical Revolutions in German Culture: Musicking against the Grain, 1800–1980 by Mirko M. Hall (review)

Not long ago, the German intellectual historian Philipp Felsch published a book on the heyday of theoretical thinking in the Federal Republic. The book caused quite a stir among its German readers. Largely ignoring theoretical content, it explored the rise (and fall) of intellectual pop stars from Theodor W. Adorno to Michel Foucault, shedding light on the culture of theoretical obsession that had gained ground in- and outside German universities. Felsch’s work represents a well-written, smart, and provocative attempt to historicize the reception and wider impact of theory from the Frankfurt School in the 1960s to the French poststructuralists in the 1980s.

Reading Mirko M. Hall’s Musical Revolutions in German Culture, one gets the impression that this fascination for theory is making a comeback. Hall’s study of musical thinking in the work of four German intellectuals—Friedrich Schlegel, Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Blixa Bargeld—is in full harmony with many of the assumptions and the language of the Frankfurt School. Basically, Hall reads Adorno and Benjamin backward and forward in order to delineate common threads among the book’s four protagonists in the field of music, conceived of by Hall as a “powerful site of cultural creativity, critique, and resistance,” or alternatively as a “site of critical-revolutionary activity” (3). Linking Carl Schmitt to Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, Hall posits a structural “acoustic state of emergency” (12). This, he argues, is the permanent threat by the culture industry and its mainstream products to annihilate music’s revolutionary potential.

In studying these four intellectuals, Hall aims to apply critical theory to critical theoreticians in order to identify and enable counterhegemonic musical discourses and practices. At the end of his introduction, Hall invites the reader to “sing and dance together in the following pages!” (24). Four chapters later, he rather dramatically concludes that, “indeed, we must all listen with pain!” (136). The final coda nonetheless pivots back to a more optimistic stance and paves the way for a “musical future perfect” (146). Here the message is that musicking against the grain, representing a critical, self-reflective practice, allows for successful resistance to late capitalism. How this practice has worked in different variations between 1800 and 1980 is Hall’s object of interest in his four intellectual case studies.

To begin with Schlegel, Hall states that the philosopher did not write much about music, and that what he said was highly contradictory. However, Hall reverts to Schlegel’s reasoning on literature and poetry, assuming that what is true for the written arts applies also to music; in some of Hall’s quotes from Schlegel, “[music]” replaces slots where “poesy” appears in the original text (51). To be sure, Hall has good arguments to see poetry and music as parallel. Schlegel’s idea of the “hermeneutic inexhaustibility” of language, for example, can be applied to music as well (30). Indeed, Schlegel identifies music as an even better art form through which it is possible to articulate multiple meanings. Elaborating on Schlegel’s plea for literal romanticism as an infinitely perfectible process that obeys certain aesthetic criteria, Hall concludes that Schlegel can help us (critical) listeners to get a clearer picture of the romanticized musical work, its “dialectical configurations,” and “intrinsic criticizability” (47). Hence Schlegel’s contribution would have aesthetically foreshadowed Adorno’s concept of the autonomous musical work, and in practice also his idea of structural listening.

A similar methodological trick shapes the chapter on Benjamin: elaborating on his theory of the dialectical image, Hall conceptualizes a “dialectical sonority” as a “courier of history-laden aural data that becomes ‘actualized’ … in the present” (66). Given this concept, it comes as a little bit of a surprise that Hall refers to Luigi Nono’s Prometeo as an example of dialectical sonority, even if this work is full of montage and electronic sampling...