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

This essay 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, involving the research projects on radio and film music in which Adorno participated. The author searches for convergence or divergence with the writings of David Riesman, Charles Wright Mills and other representatives of critical approaches to mass culture. A section 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 this period. The results of this inquiry furnishes further fuel for a reconsideration of the culture industry and musical mediation, more coherent with the social and technological changes of the decades following Adorno’s death.