Popular Culture and Post-Traditional Arts: Debates and Controversies During Adorno’s Exile in the USA

This chapter aims to relocate Adorno’s essays on popular culture and musical mediation in the field of the communication theories developed in North America between 1935 and 1955. It involves the research projects on radio and film music in which Adorno participated. It searches for convergence or divergence with the writings of David Riesman, Charles Wright Mills and other representatives of critical approaches to mass culture. Thirdly, a section of this chapter is devoted to changes in the way of understanding jazz, as demonstrated by the publications of André Hodeir, Gunther Schuller, Martin Williams, Nat Hentoff, and other authors active in these two decades; this will furnish further fuel for a reconsideration of the culture industry and musical mediation which is more coherent with the social and technological changes of the half century following Adorno’s death