Adorno: Perennial Fashion-Jazz

"Anyone who allows the growing respectability of mass culture to seduce him into equating a popular song with modern art because of a few false notes squeaked by a clarinet; anyone who mistakes a triad studded with 'dirty notes' for atonality, has already capitulated to barbarism. Art which has degenerated to culture pays the price of being all the more readily confused with its own waste-products as its aberrant influence grows."


Theodor W. Adorno [Perennial Fashion-Jazz, 1953]

Matt Damon on a Unicycle

"Nothing in these operas is any more implausible than the events of the average Shakespeare play, or, for that matter, of the average action movie. The difference is that the conventions of the latter are widely accepted these days, so that if, say, Matt Damon rides a unicycle the wrong way down the Autobahn and kills a squad of Uzbek thugs while singing becomes, under the circumstances, more plausible."


Alex Ross, "Unlikely Stories" (Opera Review in the New Yorker), [2009].