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

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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].

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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

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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 in 1930, Stravinskycalls not only for recording practices that take advantage of the plastic capabilitiesof phonographicreproduction, as the com- poser claimsto have done in his recordsfor the Columbia label; he also insiststhat "it would be of the greatestinterest to produce music specificallyfor phonographicreproduction, a music whichwould only attain its true image-its original sound-through the mechanical reproduction. This is probablythe ultimategoal for the gramophoniccomposer of the future" (Igor Stravinsky,"Meine Stellungzur Schallplatte,"Kultur und Schallplatte9 [1930], cited in Musikund Gesellschaft,vol. 1, no. 8 [1931], p. 32).

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The key to the proper understandingof the phonographrecords ought to be provided by the comprehensionof those technologicaldevelopments that at one point transformedthe drumsof the mechanicalmusic boxes and organs into the mechanism of the phonograph. If at some later point, instead of doing "historyof ideas" [Geistesgeschichte],one were to read the state of the cultural spirit[Geist] off of the sundial of human technology,then the prehistoryof the gramophone could take on an importance that might eclipse that of many a famous composer.4There is no doubt that,as music is removed by the phono- graph record from the realm of live production and from the imperativeof artisticactivity and becomes petrified,it absorbs into itself,in this process of petrification,the verylife that would otherwisevanish. The dead art rescues the ephemeral and perishingart as the only one alive. Therein may lie the phono- graph record's most profoundjustification, which cannot be impugned by an aestheticobjection to itsreification. For thisjustification reestablishes by the very means of reificationan age-old, submergedand yetwarranted relationship: that between music and writing. Anyone who has ever recognized the steadilygrowing compulsion that,at least during the last fiftyyears, both musical notationand the configurationof the musical score have imposed on compositions- (the pejorative expression "paper music" betrays this drastically)-will not be surprised if one day a reversal of the followingsort occurs: music, previouslyconveyed by writing, suddenly itselfturns into writing.This occurs at the price of its immediacy,yet withthe hope that,once fixedin thisway, it willsome day become readable as the "last remaining universal language since the constructionof the tower,"5 a language whose determinedyet encryptedexpressions are contained in each of its "phrases."6 If, however, notes were still the mere signs for music, then, throughthe curves of the needle on the phonograph record, music approaches decisivelyits true character as writing.Decisively, because this writingcan be recognized as true language to the extent that it relinquishesits being as mere signs:inseparably committed to the sound thatinhabits this and no otheracoustic groove. If the productiveforce of music has expired in the phonographrecords, if the latter have not produced a form through their technology,they instead

4. As early as the mid-1920s, articlesdiscussing the prehistoryof the gramophone were in fact being published in increasingnumber in the more progressivemusic journals of the time: see, for example, H. H. Stuckenschmidt,"Maschinenmusik," Der Auftakt,vol. 7, no. 7/8 (1927), pp. 152- 56; K. Marx, "Schallplatten-Geschichte,"Der Auftakt,vol. 10, no. 11 (1930), pp. 241-43; and GiintherZiegler, "Musikautomaten,"Der Auftakt,vol. 13, no. 9/10 (1933), pp. 131-33. 5. See Walter Benjamin,Ursprung des deutschenTrauerspiels, in vol. 1 of the GesammelteSchriften (Frankfurta.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974), p. 387; translatedby John Osborne as The Origin of GermanTragic Drama (London: New Left Books, 1977), p. 214; translationslightly modified. 6. A play on the German word Satz, which means "phrase" and-in a musical context-the "movement" of a composition.

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transformthe mostrecent sound of old feelingsinto an archaic textof knowledge to come. Yet though the theologianmay feel constrainedto come to the conclu- sion that"life" in the strictestsense-the birthand death of creatures- cannot be ascribed to any art, he mayalso tend to hold thatthe truth-contentof art only arises to the extent that the appearance of liveliness has abandoned it; that artworksonly become "true," fragmentsof the true language, once lifehas left them; perhaps even only throughtheir decline and thatof art itself.It would be then that,in a seriousnesshard to measure, the formof the phonographrecord could findits true meaning:the scriptalspiral that disappears in the center,in the opening of the middle, but in returnsurvives in time. A good part of thisis due to physics,at least to Chladni's sound figures,7to which- according to the discoveryof one of the most importantcontemporary aesthetictheorists-Johann WilhelmRitter referred as the script-likeUr-images of sound.8 The most recent technologicaldevelopment has, in any case, contin- ued what was begun there: the possibilityof inscribingmusic without it ever having sounded has simultaneouslyreified it in an even more inhuman manner and also broughtit mysteriouslycloser to the characterof writingand language.9 The panicked fear that certain composersexpress regardingthis invention cap-

7. ErnstFlorens FriedrichChladni (1756-1827), a German physicistoften called the "fatherof acoustics" for his pioneeringstudies of the transmissionof sound. The firstto examine sound waves mathematically-as in his 1802 study entitledDie Akustikpublished in Leipzig by Breitkopfund Hertel--Chladni experimented with vibratingplates of thin glass and metal covered with sand, noting that the sand remained in curved lines at the points where the plates did not quiver. These symmetricalpatterns, the so-called Chladni figures,attracted popular attention,and in 1809 a demonstrationwas staged for Napoleon. In 1790 Chladni inventeda musical instrumentcalled the "euphonium," whichwas composed of glass rods and steel bars made to sound throughrubbing with moistened fingers.Along with its contemporary,the "aiuton," invented by Charles Clagget, the euphonium was the firstof numerous frictionbar instruments,some with piano keyboards and horizontalfriction cylinders or cones thatacted on verticalbars, and otherswith bars strokedby the player's fingersor with a bow. For more on Chladni, see Mary Desiree Waller, Chladni Figures:A Studyin Symmetry(London: G. Bell, 1961). 8. The German physicistJohann Wilhelm Ritter (1776-1810), often called the "father of electrochemistry,"is credited withthe discoveryin 1801 of the ultravioletregion of the spectrum and in 1803 of the polarizationof electrodes in batteries.Adorno here extends a concealed compli- ment to Walter Benjamin, who reviewed Ritter'streatment of Chladni in the Originof theGerman TragicDrama. For furtherremarks on Ritterby Benjamin,see the introductorynote to Ritter'sletter to Franz von Baader included in Benjamin's epistolarycompilation DeutscheMenschen (1936), in Benjamin, GesammelteSchriften, vol. 4, pp. 176-77. For Ritter'sdiscussion of Chladni, see Johann Wilhelm Ritter,Fragmente aus demNachlasse einesjungen Physikers:Ein Taschenbuchfir Freundeder Natur, ed. J. W. Ritter [Editorshipfictitious], vol. 2 (Heidelberg: Mohr und Zimmer, 1810), pp. 227ff. For a detailed study of Ritter, see Walter D. Wetzels, Johann WilhelmRitter: Physik im Wirkungsfeldder deutschenRomantik (Berlin/New York, Walter de Gruyter,1973). 9. Adorno here is most likely referringto the more recent variations on the possibilityof composingfor mechanical pianos by inscribingdirectly upon the scrolls.This had been demonstrated as early as 1926 at a "Festival of Mechanical Music" in Donaueschingen where Ernst Toch and Gerhard Miinch had composed pieces in thismanner for a Welte-Mignonpianola. These workswere "performed" by Paul Hindemith (who serviced the machine) together with a similarlygenerated work by Hindemith that served as an accompanimentto Oskar Schlemmer's "Triadic Ballet." See

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tures preciselythe extraordinarythreat to the life of artworksthat emanates from it just as it already did from the gentler barbarismof the phonograph recordalbums. What maybe announcingitself here, however, is the shockat that transfigurationof all truthof artworksthat iridescentlydiscloses itselfin the catastrophictechnological progress. Ultimately the phonographrecords are not artworksbut the black seals on the missivesthat are rushingtowards us fromall sides in the trafficwith technology;missives whose formulationscapture the sounds of creation,the firstand the last sounds,judgment upon lifeand message about that which may come thereafter.

Dr. Erich Steinhard,"Donaueschingen: MechanischesMusikfest," Der Auftakt,vol. 6, no. 8 (1926), pp. 183-86; on the historyof the pianola, see Peter Hagmann, Das Welte-Mignon-Klavier,die Welte-Philharmonie-Orgelund die Anfiingeder Reproduktionvon Musik,(Bern/Frankfurt/New York: Peter Lang, 1984). In the late 1920s and early 1930s, the musicjournals were regularlyreporting on a host of newly"invented," largelyelectric instruments such as Theremin's "Atherwellenapparat," Dr. Friedrich Trautwein's "Trautonium," Helberger's "Hellerton," and Jirg Mager's "Spharo- phon": see, for example, Herbert Weisskopf,"Sphirophon: Das Instrumentder Zukunft,"Der Auftakt,vol. 6, no. 8 (1926), pp. 177-78; Hans Kuznitzky,"Neue Elemente der Musikerzeu- gung,"Melos 6 (April 1927), pp. 156-60; Frank Warschauer, "Neue Moglichkeitenelektrischer Klangerzeugung,"Der Auftakt,vol. 10, no. 11 (1930), pp. 233-35; and Edwin Geist, "Bedeutung und Aufgabe der elektrischenMusikinstrumente," Melos 12 (February 1933), pp. 49-52.

ErnstFlorens Friedrich Chladni. Tonefigures from Die Akustik.1802.

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