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Between modern and postmodern worlds: Theodor W. Adorno's struggle with the concept of musical kitsch

conditions. Thus the elusiveness of the concept persists, in part because of the inescapable historical and cultural contingency of the term, and the subjective way in which it is most often used. All too often, the term is wielded thoughtlessly as a weapon to deride aesthetic expressions found lacking in some respect. Contemporary Writers on Kitsch For decades, intellectuals have attempted to write about kitsch in a relatively detached way, with varying degrees of success. At around the same time that the idea of kitsch came to the forefront of Adorno’s consciousness in the early 1930s, other writers in Europe and the United States also revealed their growing interest in the term. Complaints about the commercializing and popularizing forces in American society took vehement form among a group of cultural critics, including the American art critic Clement Greenberg (1909-1994) and the Austrian-born writer Hermann Broch (1886-1951), both of whom adopted the term “kitsch” in discussions of popular culture, especially in America. Broch, a modernist author who lived in Austria until the Nazis forced him to emigrate to the U.S. in 1938, wrote short but pithy essays on kitsch both before (1933) and after (1950) he left Europe. Although Adorno’s essay “Kitsch” of 1932 was among the earliest intellectual treatments of kitsch, it remained unpublished, and thus Broch’s published essay                                                          13 Indeed, in September and October of 2011, members of the American Musicological Society engaged in a lively debate on the subject via the society’s email listserv; the music scholars involved came to no particularly definitive agreements on the essence of musical kitsch. One of the scholars involved was Richard Taruskin, who wrote in an e-mail message to this author that “kitsch is an elastic term that can be shaped into anything one wants to deride,” and that use of the term to describe artworks “is just a cover for one’s prejudices” (Richard Taruskin, e-mail message to author, 27 March 2012).