I just puked

Is music an exchange value or a use value? And to boot are you forgetting what is the subject and what is the object here. To some of you, the music is the subject and thus has
a use value, to the artist who created the music it has an exchange value which makes it much more an objective concern. If you are interested in this, please read the social philosopher, T. Adorno, and his edited book of articles called "the Culture Industry". This very perceptive member of the Frankfurt School of Social Research ( and a music student of Alban Berg) reasons why monopoly capitalism has turned the artistry of music (and its murky past: how can an artist create music without using the created artistic results as a basis of exchange??), into the culure industry it is. How the culture "business" influences what you hear and even how you hear it. Even your beloved underground rock is grounded in the culture industry, from the very beginning. You think this is a fable of the future? It is here now my friends. Everything you hear and see artistic is already prepackaged and sold. The culture industry is the very fabric of society you live in: from tract housing to TV( T. Adorno has a great article in the book called "how to watch TV", even better is "what is 'free time'"). The book is fairly straight forward to read, however be forwarned, he sometimes uses the theoretical jargon of his "School". For the extremely adventureous, his book "Aesthetic Theory" is for those who want to venture into the realm of late 20th century social philosophy and find out using critical reasoning what art is and is not.

Nrchy: That is the murky question can art have an exchange value and an use value? Adorno, stated that it was the middle class that created musical art not the upper class (remember it was the nobles and clergy that used the middle class artists like Mozart and Haydn); the lower class had their own artists and art (singspiels, folk songs); there was always an intermix between low art and high art. Music publishers could make money off both. Art according to the greatest artist of the middle class, Beethoven, effected all social classes. The monopoly capitalists changed all that, since high art after 1920 became autonomous art rather than art within an integral social context, ie modern music of Schoenberg and beyond. It was no longer viable, to too many people. The middle class, could no longer understand the "music" that was fast becoming an autonomous art without any social or cultural function. Classical music became from the 20s onward, with that insult to music Toscanini, a fossilized, historical travesty. He and the New York Philharmonic and later the NBC Symphony, played the warhorses over and over, the list of accepted pieces becoming shorter and shorter. The advertisements(the right hand of the culure industry), proclaiming: hear the greatest conductor, playing the greatest music, with the greatest orchestra, it will be the greatest event of all time. Even today, the same warhorses are played over and over, you wonder why classical music is such a mess! A Pavarotti concert is promoted as a rock concert. Hear the greatest singer sing the greatest songs ever! What about pop or rock music? Is it not the same: the playlists of the radio stations are tightly reigned in. Classic Rock, Oldies, Contemporary rock, Country, it is all part of the culture industry. Isn't it to hear a song over and over the same as liking a song? How do you think you get to hear anything if not from the culture industry? You think you get to hear a song because it is artistically satisfying? No because the culture industry tells you to like it so you will buy it. Why do you think the culture industry is so nasty to the internet interlopers? They are disrupting the exchange value of their culture products!!!

Onhwy61: I disagree concerning that A'goners spend to much money or a disproportionate amount on audio equipment. In fact we spend too little. A'goners are the last remnants of the cultural elite. We need to hone our skills as the last outpost in this fast becoming vast wasteland of culture. Hegel once pondered whether high art was historically conditioned. That is in only in a particular time in a particular place, and perhaps for only a short time frame, high art would be nurtured and flower only to fade away like all ideas and civilizations. High Art at one time had something to say about the condition of man or mankind. Beethoven's 9th Symphony, definitively and decisively made a statement about the then curent condition that man/mankind was in. The music communicated. After Mahler's titanic symphonies
and Wagner's music dramas, music was frustrating to everyone, composers, audiences, critics. In a way Beethoven legacy haunted all composers: Schubert envied him so much that he was buried nesxt to him. Wagner could not write a symphony because the 9th said it all. The symphonic form was used up, Mahler just made it more titanic and personal at the same time. Schoenberg came along saw the mess that music was in. The diatonic scales had been corrupted, everthing was chromatically disfunctional. He set it straight by going to absolute atonality ( Schoenberg prefered pantonal, then he developed the 12 tone system, almost perfected by Webern). Of course, some of the astute composers loved it, but it surely lost its audience. The music no longer communicated to the masses, or to society. So in some ways, this situation, created "new music". The composer was no longer constrained, to concern itself with the masses, the high art of music could become autonomous, truly absolute music. It no longer became consumable art, it no longer had to have one eye on the consumption by the masses. It freed it self. But the cost was high, mass culture assumed the mantle of all culture not because high culture had anything to say, but said it in a very negative way, it was longer a utopian future, like Beethoven's 9th, but a more profund inward, almost psychologically focused aesthetic. ( it is interesting that in Vienna in the 1920s you had both Schoenberg and Freud, meeting in coffeehouses, you wonder what they talked about!) Is there high art now? YES! It is there if you want it, it is not hard to find. It is not on the Billboard's TOP 200 of clssical music, but it is there. So is it selfish to want to have the "best" audio equipment? The real question for you, is high culture to be stamped out, and trampled upon by the culture industry. Is it not worth saving too. If there is no higher ground to take, or a higher cultured life to save or be a part of then what is the worth of that charity if the very civilization
and culture you cherish is polluted, diluted and destroyed?

Flex: Beethoven was one of the first to look back on the past. He read the scores of JS Bach. I will accord you the fact that the phonograph is one of the compelling reasons for the downfall of classical music. However,the mass media led it down the golden path of monopoly capitalism. It turned the high art of music from a user value into a consumptive exhange value. Only modern classical art music is the only viable alternative to the stagnant repetitive classical music environment which pervades now. How many
Mahler cycles do we need? How many Beethoven cycles can you endure? The culture industry, and its sidekicks, mass media and advertising make sure there are enough. However I must admit, classical music sales are < 3% of music sales. And even of that 3%, 97% retreaded warhorses. But as Isaid above there is an alternative to the tired warhorses, there is modern music. I am talking about Schnittke, Ligeti, Berio, Penderecki,Rihm, Xenakis. Their music is not boring, it is extremely engaging, it is freely atonal, though as Schnittke once said about one of his works which did have a tonal center: I guess I can write in "the old style" if it suits my purpose.

Perhaps the internet will emerge as the forum and stage for new forms of music, however monopoly capitalism may have the last word. Any way capitalism can make a buck it will do it, culture or no culture, its the nature of the beast, like a weed it grows wherever it can.