아도르노의 사회학적 음악론

Abstract

T. W. Adorno's social criticism theory focuses on criticizing and denying mainstream ideologies in 20th century society. His philosophical thoughts, which developed from the perspective of historical philosophy, provides a foundation for criticizing the hegemonic ideologies. Dialectic of Enlightenment, one of Adorno's works, puts stress on self-reflection of enlightenment by locating the original root of its historical evolution in which reason as a tool became ironically uncivilized, and his another work Negative Dialectic reveals that social mainstream of ideology bases on the historial ideologic thoughts, thereby leading to self-reflection of thinking. Here, his epistemological methodology begins with social criticism based on socio-historical reflection, i.e. criticism on enlightenment, goes through criticism on ideologies and then leads to criticism on art. His art philosophy focused on dual character of art - autonomous and social - and ships to overcome such duality between art and society within confrontational relationship. Here, fine art resists social realities by dialectic perceptibility and thereby expresses absurdity of hegemonic ideology and human agonies resulting it. Adorno advocates new music of modernism as an art genre to reveal mainstream ideology of social realities as they are. New music aims to reflect our real world seeking to be free from any social hegemony and coercion by means of atonal music new materials on music, while attempting to recover subjectivity of independent entity. In particular, innovation like liberation of discord as shown in atonal music is a trial to express without filteration our social absurdity and painful inner world of independent entity. without giving up any change in self-reflective perception via art from sociologic viewpoint, Adorno reinterpreted new music of modernism into progression and retrogression. Here, music of progression means that independent entity perceives real ideologic absurdity as it is. This is to reveal social absurdity covered in music works, and also motivate any one who listens to music to face up to social absurdity and recognize truth for the sake of self-reflection. However, even before new music of modernism attains its real autonomy, social mainstream ideology commercializes music with a strategy called cultural industry, and also fakes out the general public. Adorno takes very critical standpoint about these phenomena. Particularly, commercial music interrupting any spontaneous listening of misleads to wrong social perception, and compromises qualitative values of art under assessment of marketability. In our absurd modern society where everything is commercialized subject to the principle of exchange in cultural industry, every individual loses even his own identity and becomes a being of solitude to consume popular music indulging in pseudo-individualism. As the logic of cultural industry become acute, the easy accessibility of popular music comes to be feasible but fictitious ideology. Hence, the key of critical thinking revealed throughout Adorno's aesthetic theory is to unveil our real existence deceived by hidden mainstream ideology of 20th century society for the benefit of recovering our alienated human identity. It is concluded that his critical and dialectic aesthetic theory gave esthetic justification to new music, and had great effects on establishing modernism music theory as well.