[Bret L]

The Mysterious German Professor

Elizabeth Whitcombe

September 3, 2009

"The Atlantic Recording Company's history strangely parallels the Jewish-American elite's cultural revolution after World War II. This elite promoted Frankfurt School teaching in a effort to weaken the middle classes — their political nemesis. Atlantic Records prides itself on plugging the same socially destructive behavior.

This article explores a possible connection between Theodor Adorno and
Atlantic Records. The connection: An unnamed German professor helped
Atlantic Records devise its signature sound in 1947. When this
professor could no longer work with Atlantic, he was replaced by a
research assistant from the Manhattan Project. I argue that this
professor was Theodor Adorno.

The significance of this connection is that Atlantic Records was one
of the most influential recording companies during the sexual
revolution, the Civil Rights movement, and era of immigration reform.
A connection with Adorno would suggest that the company at its origins
was intent on tapping the expertise of one of the greatest
propagandists of the 20th century.

The Frankfurt School

Adorno was the Frankfurt School's music critic. His forte was
analyzing the psychological and political impact of music on
listeners. He was also interested in how new recording technology
changed the listening experience. Of course the point of all this
interest in the technical side of music was Adorno's passion for
finding out how to use music to achieve the Frankfurt School's leftist
political aims.

Theodor Adorno

Adorno knew what made music intellectually challenging, as well as
what made it appeal to the masses. Very broadly, popular music
appeals to our expectations about what sounds should follow one
another; intellectual music challenges those expectations.

In general leftist intellectuals during the 1930s and 1940s were
hostile to mass produced culture, including all forms of popular
music. Both the New York Intellectuals and the Frankfurt School saw
mass culture as the result of manipulation by elites, whether it was
in the Soviet Union, National Socialist Germany, or capitalist,
bourgeois United States. According to Adorno, mass culture appealed to
base pleasures, propped up the status quo, and led to a pervasive
conformity which denied the individuality and subjective experience of
the masses.

Adorno considered Jazz to be one of the worst forms of popular music.
He though Jazz reconciled erotic urges with traditional Western
Cultu that it transformed people into insects.

He was both right and wrong. Any music with a strong, steady beat
tends to absorb the listener's attention — the beat has a focusing
effect on music. The jazz of the 1920–1930s was often made from
traditional tunes played loudly with a syncopated beat — an easily
produced commodity that wasted energy that Adorno thought should be
spent in revolution. Everything about big-band music went against
Adorno's philosophy. Fun-loving jitter-buggers indulging in their base
instincts were not good revolutionary material. Rather than expressing
their individuality, they were doing little more than conforming to a
cultural fad.

Adorno’s desire for a socialist revolution led him to favor Modernist
music that left the listener feeling unsatisfied and dislocated —
music that consciously avoided harmony and predictability. He believed
that only discord could usher in what Herbert Marcuse would later
describe as the “return of the repressed.” This is why Adorno
endlessly praised the work of Arnold Schoenberg, his coreligionist and
avant-garde composer.

A recent collection of Adorno's music criticism, Essays on Music
contains the essay Why is the New Art so Hard to Understand?,
originally published in 1931. In his usual opaque style, Adorno
explains why the general public instinctively rejects Schoenberg and
“the new music”:

The difficulty of understanding the new art has its specific basis in
this necessity of consumer consciousness to refer back to an
intellectual and social situation in which everything that goes beyond
the given realities, every revelation of their contradictions, amounts
to a threat.

In other words, in order to understand this music, people had to get
beyond their consumer consciousness and realize the contradictions of
middle class life. The omniscient Frankfurters were very proud of
their ability to reveal to “stupid” consumers the contradictions in
the Western society and the psychological inadequacies of the middle
class.

Plato thought that new art styles could trigger social revolutions.
This is why Plato believed that the State should carefully censor the
arts to make sure they preserve the values that society is based on.
Adorno and the rest of the Frankfurt School wanted to use the “new
music” to undermine Western middle class values, as described more
fully in my essay, The Difficult Class.

Adorno's goal was to present his political message as the solution to
the feelings of dislocation that “the new music” invoked. Adorno
thought that these feelings of dissatisfaction could be used against
Western Cultu He wanted listeners to associate these negative
feelings with traditional lifestyles, and look toward the Frankfurters
for something “better."

Adorno's hopes for the revolutionary potential of Schoenberg's music
were dashed because very few people wanted to listen to it.
Schoenberg's music has never been popular outside of academic circles,
partly because you have to be highly musically trained to find it even
interesting, much less beautiful. Even if one can appreciate the
studied discord of his pieces, listening to Schoenberg is hard work.

After World War II it became clear that Adorno’s hopes for
Schoenberg's work were unfounded. The most widely respected Frankfurt
School historian, Martin Jay, says that Adorno had stopped publicly
criticizing contemporary popular music by 1960. This suggests that he
may have changed his mind on the revolutionary potential of popular
music even before that time.

Atlantic Records

Atlantic Records was founded in 1947 by Ahmet Ertegun, a Turkish-
American, and Herb Abramson, who was Jewish. Much of the growth of
Atlantic occurred after 1953 when music producer Jerry Wexler, also
Jewish, joined the firm.

The story about Atlantic's first sound engineer is intriguing.
Atlantic moved out of Washington, DC. and into a building at 234 W
56th Street in New York in 1947. There a “German Professor” helped the
young businessmen record their first jazz albums.

Ertegun told this story many times, but no one ever found out who the
“German Professor” actually was.

There are clues though. According to Ertegun, “the studio had this
German professor who did the bulk of the engineering.” The professor
was “a little middle-aged German doctor” who was “really difficult to
work with.” Ertegun claimed that, the professor “wouldn't let us turn
up the bass, or touch anything, but we were told he was a master, so
we put up with him.”

Ertegun also claimed that the professor “didn't know anything about
popular music” but that that he was “technically reliable.”

There are only so many German professors with knowledge of music
recording and a negative attitude toward jazz and popular music in any
city — but especially so in 1940s New York. The publicly available
evidence points to Adorno being that mysterious sound engineer.

Ertegun recorded music that more established performers like Count
Basie considered “ignorant.” Ertegun specifically wanted to produce
music that appealed to the masses, not the musically trained. As noted
above, Adorno really disliked this type of mass production and made a
point of telling us so in his essays, particularly On Popular Music
(1941) and On the Fetish-Character in Music (1938). See my Adorno as
Critic for more information on this.

Nevertheless, Adorno was a brilliant music analyst who had been
thinking in terms of multi-track recording for a long time. He
understood recording technology and its effect on music and he knew
the music industry inside-out. Adorno knew a lot about how music
affects people's thinking and he had written extensively on the
dumbing-down effect of pop culture.

There would seem to be two possibilities. One is that Adorno helped
Ertegun achieve a popular musical sound even though Adorno himself
hated popular music for all the reasons noted above. This would seem
to be unlikely. Why would the Adorno as a self-conscious revolutionary
participate in something he saw as reactionary?

The second possibility is that by the late 1940s Adorno understood
that popular music could be used to further the cause of revolution.
Adorno and the other Frankfurt School theorists and New York
Intellectuals were well aware that popular music could be used to
manipulate the masses in communist, fascist, and capitalist societies.
As alienated intellectuals living in New York in the 1930s and early
1940s, they had excellent reasons to dislike popular cultu In the
US, it upheld the capitalist status quo. In National Socialist Germany
it reinforced anti-Semitism and racialist ideology. And in the Soviet
Union, it was part of Stalinist repression.

But it's a completely different ballgame when they had the power to
influence popular culture, as they did after World War II. If these
leftist intellectuals had the power to influence popular culture, they
could use it to manipulate the masses in the directions that they
wanted — toward liberal cosmopolitanism, breaking down racial
barriers, and promoting Black cultural icons.

Atlantic Records was certainly involved in these trends. By all
accounts (including Ertegun's), Atlantic Records led the way breaking
down racial segregation in 1950s America. Ertegun says he promoted
Black music when nobody else would. (He used a stage name so he
wouldn't embarrass his family.) Ertegun is credited with having set
America on course for appreciating Black culture and replacing White
cultural icons with Black ones.

This is only a half-truth. According to Ertegun's partner Jerry
Wexler, Atlantic was in the business of “taking the gospel songs and
putting the devil’s words to them.” They weren't representing Black
culture, but a self-destructive Black sub-culture. They were promoting
icons that spoke for society's underbelly: unrestrained sexuality,
violence, and drugs.

The message that Ertegun promoted is the same message that Herbert
Marcuse plugged in Eros and Civilization and Adorno pushed in The
Authoritarian Personality. Based on psychoanalysis, their message was
that socialism could only develop if people free themselves of their
sexual repressions. In The Culture of Critique, Kevin MacDonald
described the basic ideas as follows:

In Eros and Civilization Marcuse accepts Freud’s theory that Western
culture is pathogenic as a result of the repression of sexual urges,
paying homage to Freud, who “recognized the work of repression in the
highest values of Western civilization—which presuppose and perpetuate
unfreedom and suffering” (p. 240). Marcuse cites Wilhelm Reich’s [he
of orgone energy fame] early work approvingly as an exemplar of the
“leftist” wing of Freud’s legacy. Reich “emphasized the extent to
which sexual repression is enforced by the interests of domination and
exploitation, and the extent to which these interests are in turn
reinforced and reproduced by sexual repression” (p. 239). Like Freud,
Marcuse points the way to a nonexploitative utopian civilization that
would result from the complete end of sexual repression, but Marcuse
goes beyond Freud’s ideas in Civilization and Its Discontents only in
his even greater optimism regarding the beneficial effects of ending
sexual repression. (Ch. 4)

Clearly the Frankfurt School intellectuals had come to find virtue in
appealing to base pleasures and unrestrained sexuality. Such views fit
well with Eric P. Kaufmann's emphasis on the role of leftist
intellectuals in the rise of expressive individualism as a theme of
the 1960s counterculture that in many ways remains dominant today.
Such views are quite opposite to those of Plato who believed that they
would weaken the state and pave the way for tyranny.

Atlantic branched out into rock music in the 1960s, and by the 1990s
they were into “gangsta rap.” I can't think of a better example of
“polymorphously perverse” sexuality than The Rolling Stones, or a more
degenerate icon than Snoop Dogg.

In the years following World War II the music recording industry was
massively consolidated. In 1967 Atlantic Records was bought by what
is now the Warner Music Group, although Atlantic continued to operate
under its own label.

But Atlantic Records/Warner Music Group isn't just an unfortunate
anomaly. The preponderance of the modern recording industry promotes
lifestyle choices that the Frankfurters came to identify as being
conducive to social revolution. EMI, Universal and Sony have signed a
corps of artists who espouse the same morally weakening messages. As I
discussed in The Difficult Class, this revolution has concentrated
power in the elite and disenfranchised the middle class.

The Columbia University Connection

The Frankfurters had been revolutionary propagandists since the
beginning of the Institute for Social Research in Germany in 1923.
Refugees from National Socialist Germany, the Frankfurt School moved
to Columbia University in New York City in 1934.

Columbia University was also very important to the scientific side of
Roosevelt's war effort. The Office of Scientific Research and
Development recruited heavily from Columbia for the Manhattan Project.
The OSRD was also interested in psychology and psycho-acoustics —
topics that were more in tune with Adorno's research.

It is also noteworthy that during World War II, several Frankfurters,
including the sociologist Herbert Marcuse, joined the Office of
Strategic Services (OSS) which became the Central Intelligence Agency
in 1947.

The connections between the Frankfurters, Columbia University, the OSS/
CIA and the OSRD are important because when the "German Professor" was
called away from Atlantic Records in 1947, he was replaced by Tom
Dowd, a Columbia University student straight from the OSRD's Manhattan
Project. Dowd’s high-level connections made him a likely candidate to
replace the prickly Adorno once Atlantic had established its signature
sound.

The German Professor suddenly stopped helping Atlantic Records in
1947. Ertegun recalled only that Dowd had been sent to help Atlantic
“because the professor can't make it.” No one seems to how Dowd got
the job.

Tom Dowd was a classically trained musician as well as a Manhattan
Project researcher. Dowd stated that his bomb work was paid for by the
OSRD, which was closed in 1947. He claimed that he couldn't continue
studying nuclear physics at Columbia because he knew a lot of very
current, sensitive information on the bomb project and didn't want to
have to sit through lectures that were a decade old. (See Tom Dowd and
the Laugage of Music, a film by Mark Moormann.) Fortunately for Dowd,
Adorno was unhappy at work.

The Bomb and Personality Profiling: Closer Than You Think

John Marks, author of The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA
and Mind Control, shows that there were many links between the
Manhattan Project and the CIA's “mind control” initiative known as
Project MK-ULTRA. MK-ULTRA was organized along the Manhattan Project
model, and Manhattan Project contractors were hired by MK-ULTRA for
top-secret research into psychotropic drugs.

The MK-ULTRA program was also interested in profiling personalities —
work that the Frankfurt School had been concentrating on for the US
Government since the final years of the war.

I have been through the MK-ULTRA files at the National Security
Archives. I would like to clear up a common misconception about them.
The LSD research was only a part of this organization's interests.
Their main goal was to figure out the most efficient way to manipulate
people. The LSD projects were simply the most sensational and not even
the most effective.

Many of the MK-ULTRA programs were designed to analyze different
personalities and how they are likely to respond to certain
situations. MK-ULTRA teams tried to map out the beliefs and
insecurities of certain ethnic groups, like Blacks; and social groups,
like lower-class inner-city residents; and religious groups like
Evangelical Christians. They were building a database of how to
manipulate ethnic politics and special interest groups.

The Frankfurt School's work on “authoritarian personalities” in the
1930s was repackaged for American audiences as Studies in Prejudice,
including the landmark The Authoritarian Personality and other books
that attempted to develop psychological profiles of White Americans.
In general, these works are more ideological than scientific,
typically relying on psychoanalysis as a very pliable means of
attaining its political goals of depicting White Americans with
ethnocentric tendencies as victims of variously formulated psychiatric
disorders.

The CIA's MK-ULTRA program picked up where the Frankfurters left off
by analyzing politically-organized minority groups. Tom Dowd belonged
to a very select group of students who had the security clearance to
be exposed to the type of work that the Frankfurters were doing
through the US government. Tom Dowd would have been an obvious choice
to replace Adorno at the recording studio.

Conclusion

In this article I have not provided evidence proving that Atlantic
Records is an offshoot of Frankfurt School social engineering. I have
provided circumstantial evidence that shows cooperation between the
two organizations was very likely. Much of what the Frankfurters were
doing was beyond public scrutiny. But when an entire industry devotes
itself to ideals espoused by a handful of aging leftist radicals, it
is a strong indication that something is amiss.

Governments have always existed to control society. Humane
philosophers recognize that a legitimate government exercises control
in a way that benefits its citizens. Anything else is tyranny. Music
companies like Warner promote behavior that is corrupting and
damaging. Just ask the joker in the White House."

Elizabeth Whitcombe (email her) is a graduate of MIT in Economics with
a concentration in International Economics. She is a financial analyst
and free-lance writer living in New York City.

http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net...-AdornoII.html