You ask why?

I am not one of those who may be questioned about their

Why.

DAS GOLDKIND ZUM KUPFERMAN

Do my experiences date from yesterday? It is a long time since I

experienced the reasons for my opinions.
Should I not have to be a barrel of memory, if I wanted to carry my reasons,
too, about with me?
It is already too much for me to retain even my opinions; and many a bird
has flown away.
Nietzsche, Of Poets from Thus Spoke Zarathustra

40

Adorno: Late Essays

TRANSLATORs NOTE
Les traductions sont comme les femmes: lorsquelles sont belles,
elles ne sont pas fidles, et lorsquelles sont fidles, elles ne sont pas belles.
From a more familiar source we are instructed that to have honesty
coupled to beauty is to have honey a sauce to sugar. And on the
highest authority of all we know that the price of a virtuous woman,
with no mention of other charm, is above rubies. All things
considered, what remains to hope is only that an English version of
Adornos Das Goldkind zum Kupferman here presented may at
least not conjure up the picture of a femme ni belle ni fidle.
Of course the very nature of translation, even of the most
elementary sort, almost invariably produces a semantic falsehood.
When the material at hand is not just words and their translation,
but, rather those possessing the idiosyncratic mode of expression
which form the essence of Adornos discursive dialectic, the process
becomes all the more fearful. In addition to the complex yet onedimensional problem of the words themselves, there is also the
matter of the cultural climate which produced the likes of a
Theodor Adorno. Just as Adornos philosophy addresses a fractured
or false totality, the impermanence and havoc of his life manifests
itself in a hybrid mode of discourse which is particularly resistant to
a clear, uniform translation of any resembling objective linguistic
expression: a knotted and combined association, symbolism,
biography, and autobiography which might make even German
readers be glad of a key to unlock its uttermost treasure. Such a key
may never exist. Until such a key comes into being, it is still
necessary for us to read and absorb what Adorno has to say, even in
a version which cannot lay claim to being beautiful, though in every
intent it is deeply faithful.
The translator wishes to express warm and heartfelt thanks
to the scholars who have been so helpful. To Dr. Brian Hyer, for his
patient, thorough and clear understanding and

Das Goldkind Zum Kupferman

41

explanation of Adornian thought; to eminent ethnomusicologist Sir

Patrick Burke, for his insights on the translation of Adornos
references to jazz and popular music; to Dr. Christina Baade for her
invaluable general suggestions and a lovely breakfast. Other
scholars, notably Dr. Kristen Edgerton, have helped the translator
with comments and suggestions in ways too numerous to specify in
detail. That they have done so is a tribute to the wealth of Adornos
contribution.

42

Adorno: Late Essays

Das Goldkind zum Kupferman1

Whether it be during an Age of Reason or one exhibiting a
base decline of bourgeois consciousness, there appears to be no
universal, logical guiding principle to the chronological ascendance
and decline, potency and banality, of Western art musics great
composers. Whether we speak of Beethoven and his transcendence
of the bourgeois spirit which marks the moment of transition from a
period of optimistic portrayal of subjectivity to one which rejects the
illusory [scheinhaft] appearance of a unity between the subjective and
objective; or Schoenberg, whose mid-career formulation and strict
adherence to a structuring ideology unfortunately sully, if not
negate, much of the cultural import of what would become his
musical legacy. Of course it is not always a simple, linear or
formulaic pattern of what went up inevitably coming down. Even
with his radical evolution of technical means, the output of Berg
forms a complete continuum of quality and relevance. Mahler, while
beginning and ending his musical life with works that, against all
odds, and even the influence of Strauss, manages still to reconcile the
nobility of artistic expression with its culpability of collusion with
social privilege. Yet there are moments, most notably Mahlers selfconscious attempts to realize his magnum opus [Hauptwerk],
which unfortunately bear witness to the serendipitous nature of
attuned greatness. Todays new, regrettable cult of sycophantic
worshippers who dance about his spirit as if he

Das Goldkind Zum Kupferman

were a Golden Calf would probably attribute this fall from Grace,
were they to have the sense to see it as such, to his fallibility qua his
humanity. Mahler the idol is held up by those suffering from
dementia, brought on by hunger and languishing in the desert void
embodied by the culture industry. As such, they perceive this
fallibility as the antithesis of what it truly is: not the magnum opus
and its shortcomings that imbue its creator with humanity. Nay, the
greatness of Mahler derives from the humanity that spills forth from
every ill-concealed crack and crevice of his lesser works. The fact
that, in these works, affirmation founders again and again in his
development is his triumph, the only one without shame, the
permanent defeat. Mahler understood the meaning of mans
transitory status and the shock, both conscious and subconscious,
that it could produce, both in the individual and the collective. The
temptation that arose from this, to glorify the collective that he felt
sounding through him as an absolute, was almost overwhelming.
That he did not resist it, like Moses who impetuously hit the rock
2
rather than spoke to it, was his offense.
Of course all this talk of Mahler has its place in our critique
of Goldkind. While purely a fortuitous event, to encounter the
3
music of the person he would later idolize, it

This perhaps enigmatic title is actually a pun which refers to young Goldkinds
college study with composer/professor Meyer Kupferman. While Adorno was
often at odds with many of the opinions held by members of the American
artistic-academic community, he seems to be in accord with the general
prevailing disapproval of Kupferman-the-composer and Kupferman-the-selfpromoting-egotist. While Goldkind maintained a discernible diplomatic distance
when questioned by Adorno on the subject of his first music mentor (Cf.
Goldkind. Negative Lunch: Conversations with Adorno.) Adorno, in his many
writings that obsessively critique Goldkinds works, relates Goldkinds aesthetic
decay to the eventual flowering of the bad seeds which were sewn during this
early and necessarily seminal period.

43

Goldkind was obviously inspired by Adornos view of Mahler and inventively

synthesized it into his own personal religious ideologies. During his lecture
series for the Jewish Prisoners of Rikers Island, entitled Dayeynu: Enough is
Enough!, Goldkind extrapolates on Adornos work, particularly Mahler: A
Musical Physiognomy: Adorno writes, Mahler was a poor yea-sayer. His
voice cracks. Obviously yet another striking similarity between Mahler and
Moses. While Moses had Aaron to speak for him, Strauss often took center stage
in the musical dialogue of that era. One little gaffe and Moses is banned from
entering the Land of Milk and Honey -- festers in the desert -- and Mahler dies in
1911. Smooth-talkin Aaron leads the Exodus party into the Promised Land,
Strauss gets to do his thing until 1949. Dayeynu? Dayeynu?!? (from a
projected series of six lectures by Goldkind: The Prison Culture Industry:
Rehabilitation as Mass Deception. For unspecified reasons the series was
canceled after the first lecture.)
Goldkinds first hearing of Mahler, a recording of the Fifth Symphony. The now
well-known anecdote, perhaps apocryphal, is that Goldkind brought this
recording not to hear Mahler, but rather because he had overheard another
musician extolling the virtues of Berg, whose excerpts from Wozzeck were also
contained on the same recording. Apparently Goldkind was immediately struck
by the depth of the Mahler work, whereas years would pass before he would
develop any appreciation of any of Bergs music.

44

Adorno: Late Essays

Das Goldkind Zum Kupferman

45

moved and inspired his emotive efforts for a significant portion of

his early creative life. Perhaps whence his creative compositional
virtue springs, scarce though they may be.

contribution, correctly if brusquely learned from Mahler, of art

which recognizes its own illusory nature, which resists closure and
reconciliation.

While the emotional listener might be moved by the

apparently urgent yearnings of youthful and earnest plaintiff
conversations for string quartet, to see this as a prodigious or
remarkable achievement defying the composers lack of
chronological maturity would be mere fetishization of the work: a
reification of an albeit modest subjective declaration and the
commoditization of its creator. To focus on the works evocative
powers, which is to say, to not truly focus on the work at all, is to
destroy the works use-value by substituting it with its exchange
value which has for itself appropriated the role of the object of
enjoyment. While such a false, lamentable apprehension of music
might be a more logical outcome as it relates to most of Goldkinds
other works, Was War is, at least to some extent, beyond this
shortcoming.

Analysis, being the destruction of the illusory, is critical.

However, youth, like many of natures wonders, can, at least
partially, resist critical analysis. Such is the case with Goldkinds
early output. In The Happiest Day and Valse Melancolique, works
which Goldkind adamantly writes off as trite juvenilia, he also puts
forth images which resist the forces of aesthetic domination. In this
unorthodox narrative, (Poes text in the case of Happiest Day)
Goldkind, knowingly or not, imbues the works with a vulgar
validity. The social significance of this artistic vulgarity is the
subjective identification with an objectively reproduced state of
debasement. Unfortunately, this edifying character is not to play a
constant role in Goldkinds music. In fact, even in Was War there is
the initial hint of an ontological self-awareness, an aesthetic selfsatisfaction which, like the rest of the culture industry, generates
false consciousness in order to define and deliver the mass-produced
goods to the hordes of culture consumers, who in turn satisfy
themselves with the spurious belief that what theyve received has
actually been made to order.

While this composition suggests a less-than-profound

mastery via its preponderance of simplicity, still its means of
expression are unified and coherent enough to suggest a portrait of
the subject as it inter-relates within the context of the totality. From
the opening phrase by the solo violin, then mirrored by another, only
to be interrupted, reiterated and transformed, there is a semblance of
the subject which is, ultimately, the promise of the non-semblance.
With the frail last sonorities, a major chord, inverted, in the lower
three strings while the first violin bleats in vain, like a helpless veal
calf confined to its dark box, perhaps to be heard only by the farmer
on the say to slaughter, scratching at upper harmonics discordant
with the triad beneath. Such a semblance of life, with its
omnipresent despair, disillusionment and, ultimately, alienation, is
Goldkinds

It would be one thing if the role of art and the corresponding

responsibility of the artist who produced that art were contingent
upon the wealth or dearth of moral conscience at the time during
which that art was conceived and produced. However, unlike the
forces which constitute market capitalism, responding to the simple
and amoral flux of supply and demand, the artist and his art must
not be rewarded merely for their reflexive capabilities. Unlike the
stock trader, praised for his prodigious, uncanny, perhaps even
artful clairvoyance of market movement, leading him to buy, sell
and short the market at tight intervals, sometimes even
simultaneously, the shares which constitute the matire of the true
artist can only be the means of a more bullish investment, lest they
take on the most banal, non-artistic commodity character. While an
admirably conscientious

46

Adorno: Late Essays

citizen comprehends his role and responsibility in the negativity of

his society, the composer must go beyond even a well-intoned Mea
Culpa! Indeed such critical self-reflection, aware of the subjects
alienation [Entuerung] and reification conflicting with and within
the autonomous society must go beyond, must produce a voice
which embodies critical stance against the negative social tendencies.
Its social content, its substance [Gehalt] must never forsake its
parallel relationship to the task of critical social theory.
In sharp, and shameful, contradistinction is Goldkinds
positing himself as not merely the personified manifestation of such
a society where content and its corresponding value are in marketrelated flux, the product of ones society as it is all-too-often
expressed by the increasingly ubiquitous subscribers to humanist
outlook. Indeed, Goldkind would have us interpret his vre as
evidence of the Golden Child [Goldkind] as Victim. Akin to Strauss,
his sleight-of-hand shuffling of the cards of consonance, dissonance
and superficial textural manipulations are to be understood as a
vehicle of a meaningful dialectic of culture; a product of a social
situation as might be propounded by the effete dilettante holding
court from his pulpit at the junior college for his recalcitrant students
4
desperately seeking satisfaction of their humanities requirement.
Were it possible to maintain a genuine and genuinely harmless
chasm between the Squadron of the Disinterested and Corps of
Culture Consumers, then perhaps Goldkinds new-town-animal-inan-unfurnished-cage, victimized view of himself and his resultant
artistic curios might not be so odious. However the situation in art,
even bad art, is hardly so rarefied as to allow for such an abdication
of responsibility, even if the composers role in such a realm never
aspires to the throne, but rather only the appointment of court jester.
Ideally, in such an apparently subservient situation the jester can still
afford to appropriate unto himself the proverbial

Adorno was particularly scornful and amused at this phrase as it was employed
within American academia.

Das Goldkind Zum Kupferman

47

last laugh. Yet Goldkind as composer, as victim, or as jester are

unfortunately one and the same, and it is he himself who does not
get his own joke.
Goldkinds misunderstanding of his would-be role in his
could-never-be art is akin to putting the cart before the horse which
has already been sold to the first bidder. In his middle-period
works, Goldkind transcends mere folly to become almost pure
fetishization of its commodity character. Upon first hearing, this
could be understood as an example of affirmative music. But unlike
popular music, unlike the monadic composers, unlike Schoenberg,
who Goldkind professed to dislike, he not only does not sever
communication with the listener, he insists on listening with the
listener. There is a certain curious, perhaps even charming alteration
of the normal narrative perspective at work here. We might try to
see this as a kind of informed Objectivity. Yet ultimately we will
find this to be no more than Objectivist music vis-a-vis its
fetishization of its technological paraphernalia, thus completely
diverting attention from anything to do with the works social
function.
While the concept of taste might by now be long outmoded,
the concept of a responsible art is not. As such, a responsible art
adjusts itself to criteria which approximate judgments: the
harmonious and the inharmonious, the correct and the incorrect.
Works such as Buddha in der Glorie and Duet: Unsynchronized for Solo
Flute, in an attempt to address a progressive, de-aestheticized ethos,
only invoke their fetishization of the most banal technical and
technological features. In Mozarts day there was a Magic Flute
which played music in which the utopia of the Enlightenment and
the pleasure of a light opera comic song precisely coincided in a
single moment. With the progression of historical time, however,
comes a shifting of societal mass. To think of this in terms of fault or
responsibility would be to misunderstand causal relations even more
than Hume or Berkeley, something which even Goldkind is probably
unable to do . While it is true that after The Magic Flute it was never
again possible to force the serious and light musics together,
Goldkinds

48

Adorno: Late Essays

utilization of the flute is no more magic than that performed by

gypsies or traveling snake-oil salesmen. What transpires in the
classic is that which beguiled young Goldkind, yet these new
works for a Magic Flute impel one to look behind the curtain not
to discover, or even debunk any Wizardry (were there any), but
rather to remove oneself from this foreign, non-sensible quasi5
aesthetic environment.
Here artifice beguiles. The reification of instrumental
technique is fetishized and sold wholesale to all takers. The
difficulty, or novelty of these extended techniques would no sooner
be disputed here than the merits of a Dolby tape player or a new
quadraphonic speaker, for indeed they are of the same character and
equally removed from the subject of aesthetics or its more important
role as cultural referent. The need for music is present in bourgeois
society and this need increases with the problematic social
conditions that cause the individual to seek satisfaction beyond
immediate social reality which denies him this satisfaction. The
magic of the multiphonics of Buddha does not address the wonders
of form, content, or musical development. Nor does it in any way
embody any meaningful subjective assertion which might somehow
transmogrify its vacuousness. While art should be part and parcel of
the disenchantment of the world, inextricably linked with
rationalization, Goldkinds art plays itself out not like a musical
composition, but is rather played with as a toy which is thrown to the
(Golden) child [Kind] in the pen. It becomes the fetishized object of
this regressive listener who, like the baby presented with the nipple
is delighted by the miracle of its function. At least the nipple has its
use value. Implicit in the construction of Buddha there is the
subservience to Freuds repetition complex: such infantile behavior
marvels and takes delight in the retelling of the same narrative, the
revisiting of the same landscapes. Goldkind would reduce music to
such infantilism,

Curiously, when in America Adorno was known to repeat the lament: Theres
no place like home. One can only wonder whether or not he clicked his heels
together three times.

Das Goldkind Zum Kupferman

49

would have us be as satisfied by a non-organized replaying of the

same multiphonic magic. Even in a purely musical critique it would
not be inappropriate to invoke the parental reprobation: Grow up!
Unlike Schoenbergs atonal composition, Goldkinds output
completely contradicts the notion of a monadic composition, one
which, like the windowless monad, unself-consciously reflect
societys antinomies. Not only do these works lack this almost
miraculous virtue, but their creator would have us derive virtue
from his relentless awareness of the reaction that his works might
provoke. While he is neither the first nor last to accomplish this, it is
no less repugnant that Goldkind transforms the object of his work
from listener to audience. Purpose is denatured in the extreme
from a sedimented representation of the disenfranchised, the voice
of the oppressed, to the dumbfounding of the disengaged. Purpose
of sound (as opposed to music) goes beyond societys elastic
interpretation of Kantian aesthetics. His paradoxical statement that
beauty is what is purposeful without a purpose expresses a truth
that is valid over and above the systematic context in which it crops
up. Works of art were purposeful because they were dynamic
totalities wherein all individual moments exist for the sake of their
purpose--the whole--while the whole in turn had the purpose of
fulfilling the moments or redeeming them negatively. Goldkind, in
all his hubris, would have us believe that Kant was altogether
wrong, that beauty is no longer purposeful without a purpose, but
rather it has become mere functionality without function.
Goldkinds fetishized works not only resist signification but eschew
any vestige of arts approximation of language by eschewing any
inner organization of their all-too-disparate moments. In its place,
grandiloquent enactment of a works genesis, a technical manual
written in verse.
In accord with that too-oft-quoted dictum which describes
the infrastructure of Hades, Goldkind believes that the intentions of
his mature works are beyond reproach. His 5 Pieces for Trumpet and
Orchestra exemplifies this. Whereas to its author it represents a
ripening of subjective

50

Adorno: Late Essays

identification, it is actually nothing more than the fortuitous

stumblings of youth along the path that leads to the hubris of
maturity. It is not the case that the subject-object duality is not
addressed. However it is their handling which ultimately renders
them useful or harmful, true or false, regressive or revolutionary.
Were the nature of the discourse so readily indictable, there would
still remain the problem of the object upon which such discourse
would focus.
While the aspects of the large-scale organization have
6
already been extensively critiqued, their bearing on musics critical
nature can not be of use to anyone whose elitist commoditization via
an exultant, self-congratulatory, grasp of musics formal properties.
Like the popular teenage birthday girl who is beguiled not by her
gifts but the sheer number of them, their shining bows and wrapping
paper, the Five Pieces attempts to beguile the listener with the
accessibility of its packaging: easy to open, no assembly required, it
is immediately put to use. However, no sooner has the party begun
that the candles have been blown out, the cake is consumed and the
party girl is more aware of her stomach ache than the value of what
she has received.
This complete displacement of use value derives from the
shallow content of a work which is but a string of superficial curios,
completely devoid of any musical meaning. Certainly the success
of this piece can only be attributed to the fetishized taste of the horde
of culture consumers to whom the unfoldment of a work does not
matter. The Five Pieces not only commoditize the musical
materials but attempts to nullify the overall function of form. If a
work of art is to have any dialectical power, form must serve to
support the detail of musical materials. In such a genuine artistic
situation the detail depends upon the whole. But no stress is ever
placed upon the whole as a musical event, nor, more important, does
the structure of the whole ever depend upon the details. Only

Cf. George Perle, 12-Tone Folk Modality: Theft and Disguise of Bartokian ArchFormal Structures in the Orchestral Works of Elliott Goldkind, PNM, VXX, 1992.

Das Goldkind Zum Kupferman

51

from these details can a developing variation unfold, bearing

dialectical witness to subjective ontological entity. In such a
situation, where the detail contains the whole and leads to the
exposition of the whole, there is the complementary production of
the detail borne of the conception of the whole. The fatal flaw in
these regressive tunes is that indeed they are bereft of a
development, instead substituted by the mutilation of the detail,
rendering it inconsequential. The effect is much worse than benign,
as the work whose musical detail which is not permitted to develop
becomes a caricature of its own potentialities.
Characteristic of the brusqueness of his compositional
rhetoric, Goldkinds musical materials, these still-born musical
offerings are presented a priori as immediate musical material. In
this way they resemble a vapid jazz standard which gracelessly
clobbers the listener with the head. Like the accomplished jazz
songwriter, Goldkind is the master of the first 8 measures. Yet
among the facets of the art of their predecessors, Goldkind, and the
jazzer, spurn the most important, that of transition. Here, further
example of the absence of meaning with respect to form. True form
refutes the belief that art works have immediate being. They do not.
Form is sedimentation of content. However, in this work there can
be no sedimentation because there is actually no content. Contrary
to all the pomp and circumstance, sweet-sixteen finds that
Goldkinds gift is nothing more than a well-adorned yet empty box.
Virtue, whether it be the virtue of a work of art or of
something else, is not implicit in a things purely subjective or
objective ontology, but rather in the synthetic. In general
philosophic terms, Hegel understood what Kant could not. As this
might apply to virtue, such an impossibility of the purity of
separation of the two spheres bears unfortunate aesthetic influence
on the Five Pieces. For indeed, were it possible for aesthetic value
to remain after hypostatization of the component parts of work--an
impossibility still believed in by certain critics and audience
members alike--there would be

52

Adorno: Late Essays

some virtue to be found amid the wreckage of the regressive parts

which constitute its false totality.
The only movements of this work which are at all worthy of
further consideration are the first and last. As he is so quick to boast,
these musical episodes came to Goldkind in a dream. Not
surprisingly, he relates the tale, in typically vulgar fashion, as such:
I dreamt the two movements. When I woke up, it was just a matter
of writing them down. We have previously discussed the crucial
and hardly subtle difference between our two differing versions of
the dream and its genesis, so the reader shall be spared further
7
elaboration of this matter. What is relevant here is what transpires
in these two movements. To deny the presence of a genuine dialectic
of negative moments would be incorrect, if only because the works
outer movements are based on the preponderance of self-conscious
display of the subject-object duality. As such, this musical dialectic
strives to portray the subject-hero in the form of the instrumental
soloist whose alienation is enacted against a combative
accompaniment. Indeed, here Goldkind has crafted a curious
soloistic model; one which innovatively negates the traditional role
of the concerto soloist as virtuoso, as hero. In this work it is the
solo trumpets role to play extremely few notes and that even in a
context of repeated and limited musical material. Over the course of
various instrumental dialogues, childish attempts to portray a kind
of musical battle, we eventually arrive at a curious synthesis. This
Finale is the furthest thing from what one might label as Grand,
as it is but a thin unison on the note G, which functions as a
dominant in the spurious mock-tonal context of C major, and which
fades away into nothingness. Whether or not it is a meaningful
representation of the individual in society, at least it resists, from the
outset, any temptation to succumb to a masochistic sacrifice of
subjectivity.
Perhaps even Goldkind himself eventually tired of his
numerous musical models of emotional trickery which

Adorno. Minimal Moralia.

Das Goldkind Zum Kupferman

53

could only produce a false consciousness, whether experienced

individually or en masse. In Micro, Goldkind postures himself as
modernist, and thus in the realm of music as de-aestheticized work
of art. While such modernist works of art have their place in the
general critique of socio-historical organization and experience, in
music this is valid only when the work can shed light on social
ontologies sedimented in the work itself. Unfortunately, Micro is
nothing more than a phantasmagoria of modernity. As such it is
illusory: counterfeit freedom. Musically the illusion is a textural and
timbral one which function via disjunction. There can be critical
merit to the unintelligibility which results from such rapid
progression of timbral areas. To try to see this in the most positive
light would be to at least recognize the difference between this music
and another modern phantasmagoria, jazz. Whereas jazz is the most
conducive sonic satisfaction to the regressive listener, Micros
unintelligibility could never be absorbed by those moved to Jitterbug.
Quite to the contrary, Goldkinds false posture is in the form of
someone who has analyzed the condition of impotent subjectivity
and whose disgust with the conclusions drawn from this analysis
can only lead him to an attempt to transcend an inhuman objectivity.
Unlike the regressive work which clings for dear life to an
unambitious harmonic and melodic framework, Micro is a mere
disjointed pastiche of unrelated fragments which attempts to
confound and beguile the listener into forgetting musics aesthetic
and social virtues. In these constantly changing timbral episodes,
Goldkind frees his creation from any responsibility to relate the parts
of the work to the whole. If contemporary composers frequently
reject this concern, it is not always because they have advanced
beyond it, but rather because their technical abilities are often not up
to the demands of the necessary control of their materials. In doing
so, Goldkind would reductively see the work as the musical
embodiment of the stratified society in which the work derives its
genesis. However, nothing could be further from the truth. Due to
its lack of development these grossly

54

Adorno: Late Essays

delineated timbral vignettes stand out as reified blocks of sound

which bear no relation to their original society. The height of odious
falsehood, they serve to isolate culture as something superior, yet
free from its constraints, thus ignoring the pervasive power of the
dominating totality into which modern life has coalesced. Seen from
a distance, it is clear that this child [Kind] is hoping to flip the
goldpiece [Gold] and somehow hope that he can get away with a
declaration of heads I win, tales you lose. Of course there is much
folly in embarking upon such an obvious cheat. What is worse is
that even the coin itself is counterfeit.