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The Form of the Phonograph Record Author(S): Theodor W The Form of the Phonograph Record Author(s): Theodor W. Adorno and Thomas Y. Levin Reviewed work(s): Source: October, Vol. 55 (Winter, 1990), pp. 56-61 Published by: The MIT Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/778936 . Accessed: 16/02/2013 21:53 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. The MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to October. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded on Sat, 16 Feb 2013 21:53:08 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The Form of the Phonograph Record* THEODOR W. ADORNO TRANSLATED BY THOMAS Y. LEVIN One does not wantto accord it any formother than the one it itselfexhibits: a black pane made of a compositemass whichthese days no longer has itshonest name any more than automobile fuel is called benzine; fragilelike tablets,with a circularlabel in the middle thatstill looks mostauthentic when adorned withthe prewar terrierhearkening to his master'svoice; at the verycenter, a littlehole thatis at timesso narrowthat one has to redrillit wider so thatthe record can be laid upon the platter. It is covered with curves, a delicatelyscribbled, utterly illegiblewriting, which here and thereforms more plasticfigures for reasons that remain obscure to the layman upon listening;structured like a spiral, it ends somewherein the vicinityof the titlelabel, to whichit is sometimesconnected by a lead-out groove so that the needle can comfortablyfinish its trajectory.In terms of its "form," this is all that it will reveal. As perhaps the firstof the technological artisticinventions, it already stems from an era that cynically acknowledgesthe dominance of thingsover people throughthe emancipationof technologyfrom human requirementsand human needs and throughthe presen- tation of achievementswhose significanceis not primarilyhumane; instead,the need is initiallyproduced by advertisement,once the thingalready existsand is spinningin its own orbit. Nowhere does there arise anythingthat resemblesa formspecific to the phonographrecord- in the way thatone was generated by photographyin itsearly days. Just as the call for "radio-specific"music remained necessarilyempty and unfulfilledand gave rise to nothing better than some * This essay, "Die Form der Schallplatte,"was firstpublished in 23: Eine WienerMusikzeitschrift 17-19 (December 15, 1934), pp. 35-39 [signed "Hektor Rottweiler"]. It is reprintedin Theodor W. Adorno, GesammelteSchriften, vol. 19 (Frankfurta.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1984), pp. 530-34, ? 1984, SuhrkampVerlag. More recently,this text has been reprintedin BrokenMusic: Artists' Record- works,ed. Ursula Block and Michael Glasmeier (Berlin: DAAD and gelbe Musik, 1989), pp. 47-48, togetherwith translationsinto French by Carole Boudreault ("La Forme du disque," pp. 51-52) and into an oftenclumsy and inaccurate English byJohn Epstein ("The Form of the Record," pp. 49-50) [thisand subsequent notes are by the translator]. This content downloaded on Sat, 16 Feb 2013 21:53:08 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions The Formof thePhonograph Record 57 directionsfor instrumentationthat turned out to be impracticable,so too there has never been any gramophone-specificmusic.1 Indeed, one ought to creditthe phonograph record with the advantage of having been spared the artisanal transfigurationof artisticspecificity in the artyprivate home. Furthermore,from their phonographicorigins up throughthe electricalprocess (which,for better and forworse, may well be closelyrelated to the photographicprocess of enlarge- ment), the phonograph records were nothing more than the acoustic photo- graphs that the dog so happilyrecognizes. It is no coincidence that [in German] the term"plate" is used withoutany modificationand withthe same meaningin both photographyand phonography.2It designates the two-dimensionalmodel of a realitythat can be multipliedwithout limit,displaced both spatiallyand temporally,and traded on the open market.This, at the price of sacrificingits thirddimension: its heightand its abyss. According to every standard of artisticself-esteem, this would implythat the formof the phonograph record was virtuallyits nonform.The phonograph record is not good for much more than reproducing and storinga music de- privid of itsbest dimension,a music,namely, that was alreadyin existencebefore the phonograph record and is not significantlyaltered by it. There has been no developmentof phonographiccomposers; even Stravinsky,despite all his good will towards the electricpiano, has not made any effortin this direction.3The 1. The stakesinvolved in Adorno's resistanceto the possibilityof compositionspecific to what he himselfcalled "the mostimportant of all the musicalmass media" are articulatedin the opening lines of his essay "On the Musical Employmentof Radio": In the early 1920s, when radio was becoming generallyestablished, there was much talk of radio-specificmusic. Such compositionshad to be particularlylight and transparentsince it was held thatnot onlyanything massive but also everythingcomplex could onlybe transmitted badly. Individual acoustic timbressuch as the flutewould stickout so badly thatone would do well to avoid them. On the surface,such rules recalled those contemporaryimperatives for both constructionand functionalforms that did justice to theirmaterials. In truth,however, they ran parallel with the enthusiasticcommunity-oriented slogans calling for simplification that had been launched around the same time in reaction to the alienating aspects of new music. "Uber die musikalischeVerwendung des Radios," GesammelteSchriften, vol. 15 (1976), p. 369. 2. In German this linguisticcoincidence still resonates clearly since, analogous to the photo- graphic plate, the word for the phonograph record is Schallplatte(literally "sound-plate"). 3. Stravinsky,whose interestin mechanical musical instrumentsof all sorts dated back to his childhood, composed a studyfor pianola in 1917 for the Aeolian Company, London, whose exhibi- tion of pianolas he had seen a few yearsearlier. This short,barely two-minute-longpiece (which the composer orchestratedin 1928 under the title "Madrid" as the last section of his "Quatre Etudes pour Orchestre") was performedon October 13, 1921, in the Aeolian Hall in London and was subsequentlypublished as roll #T-967B. In 1923, the year he signed a six-yearcontract with Pleyel in Paris to record his entire corpus on pianola rolls, Stravinskyalso wrote an early instrumentationof "Les Noces" for two cymbalons,harmonium, pianola, and drums. In a statemententitled "My This content downloaded on Sat, 16 Feb 2013 21:53:08 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 58 OCTOBER only thing that can characterize gramophone music is the inevitable brevity dictatedby the size of the vinylplate. Here too a pure identityreigns between the form of the record disc and that of the world in which it plays: the hours of domestic existence that while themselvesaway along with the record are too sparse for the firstmovement of the Eroica to be allowed to unfold without interruption.Dances composed of dull repetitionsare more congenial to these hours. One can turnthem offat any point. The phonographrecord is an object of that "daily need" which is the veryantithesis of the humane and the artistic, since the lattercan not be repeated and turnedon at willbut remain tied to their place and time. Nevertheless,as an article,the record is already too old not to present us with its riddles, once one forgoes consideringit as an art object and explores instead the contoursof its thingness.For it is not in the play of the gramophone as a surrogatefor music but ratherin the phonographrecord as a thingthat its potentialsignificance - and also itsaesthetic significance - resides.As an artistic product of decline, it is the firstmeans of musical presentationthat can be possessed as a thing.Not like oil paintings,which look down fromthe walls upon the living.Just as these can hardly fitany more in an apartment,there are no trulylarge-format phonograph records. Instead, records are possessed like pho- tographs;the nineteenthcentury had good reasons for coming up withphono- graph record albums alongside photographicand postage-stampalbums, all of them herbaria of artificiallife that are presentin the smallestspace and ready to conjure up every recollection that would otherwise be mercilesslyshredded between the haste and hum-drumof private life. Through the phonograph record, timegains a new approach to music. It is not the time in which music happens, nor is it the time whichmusic monumentalizesby means of its "style." It is time as evanescence, enduring in mute music. If the "modernity" of all mechanicalinstruments gives musican age-old appearance - as if,in the rigidity of its repetitions,it had existed for ever, having been submittedto the pitiless eternityof the clockwork-then the evanescence and recollectionthat is asso- ciated withthe barrel organ as a mere sound in a compellingyet indeterminate way has become tangibleand manifestthrough the gramophone records. Position on the Phonograph Record," published
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