The Distinction between Serious and Popular Music - Essay Example

In particular, he explained that the supply of chords from the classics is limited compared to a modern composer who culls from Debussy, Ravel, and later sources' (Adorno 1990:305). The rallying point of Adorno was the question of whether culture validated the experience of the individual or whether culture had eclipsed it. (Ridlesss, 1984).

According to Adorno and Horkheimer, under monopoly, all mass culture is identical. Movies and radio are not art but businesses made into an ideology to reinforce the rubbish they produce. These businesses refer to themselves as industries. Some people explain the culture industry in technological terms. They state that reproduction processes are necessary that would require similar needs in many places to be satisfied with identical goods. Adorno and Horkheimer stipulate that the standards were based on consumers needs. ' needs. The basis on which technology acquires power over society is the power of those whose economic hold over society is at its greatest.

A technological rationale is the aim of domination itself. It is the coercive nature of society alienated from itself. The outcome is that the technology of the culture industry resulted in standardization and mass production. (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1993). Moreover, Adorno and Horkheimer state that the man with leisure has to accept everything that the culture manufacturers offer him. The industry robs the individual of his function since the industry does the schematizing and classification for him.

(Adorno and Horkheimer, 1993). Adorno and Horkheimer stated that style is significant in every work of art. Artistic expression is embedded in the style or the language of music, painting, and words. The promise a work of art holds depends on how it will create truth by lending a new shape to conventional social forms. The fulfillment of art lies in its aesthetic derivatives. (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1993). The culture industry is an illusory spectacle.

In the face of the person who is stimulated by all those brilliant names and images, there is an ode to the depressing everyday world it sought to escape. The culture industry is essentially pornographic and prudish. Love is further downgraded to romance. After the descent, the license becomes a specialty, it is known as "daring. The stronger the positions of the culture industry become, the more it can handle consumers' needs by manufacturing them, manipulating them, disciplining them, and even withdrawing amusement from them.

(Adorno and Horkheimer, 1993). In the culture industry, the individual is an illusion due to the standardization of the means of production. The reactions of human beings have been reified that the idea of anything specific to themselves shows as an abstract notion. The emphasis is on bodily perfections devoid of distinction. The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them. (Adorno and Horkheimer, 1993). Stuart Hall's encoding and decoding diagram is closely related to the works of Eco, Adorno, and Horkheimer.   

Hall showed that production practices in television translate into a message, a sign vehicle that is organized using a set of codes. Hall expounded on the visual sign which takes an ideological dimension at the level of connotation where coded signs intersect with deep semantic codes. In the case of the advertising discourse: every sign stands for quality, situation, value, or inference, which is then regarded as an implied meaning. (Hall, 1980).

     One can adopt Barthes' example of the "sweater," which in the field of advertising and fashion always connotes "a warm garment" or "keeping warm," and by further connotative elaboration "the coming of winter" or "a cold day." In the sub-codes of fashion, "sweater" may connote "a fashionable style of haute-couture" or "an informal style of dress." Set against the right background, it may connote a "long autumn walk in the woods" (Barthes, 1977, pp. 31-32).

     These codes are how power and ideology are made to signify in selected discourses. They refer to the "maps of meaning" by which any culture is classified. These "maps of social reality" have the whole range of social meanings, practices, uses, power, and interest, "written" into them (pp. 56-57).

      The denotative level of the television sign is fixed by complex codes; the connotative level is open to active transformations. Any society and culture tend to impose its classification of the social and the culture and the political world on its citizens. These constitute a dominant cultural order. This refers to preferred readings. They have the institutional, political, and ideological order imprinted on them (p. 57).

     Although research is aimed at determining how much of a message the audience recalls and at improving the audience's understanding of the message, few researchers undertake this. The main difficulty faced is that some viewers may not get the dominant code. These discrepancies were expressed as a reference to the selective reception. Selective perception is difficult since it affects the coded message which is intended for the mother and her siblings. (Hall, 1974, p. 58).