![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() I thus situate this discussion of the sirens in the contexts of Adorno's aesthetic project and of Forkel and Burney's Enlightenment-era histories of music, which each treat Odysseus's encounter with the sirens at substantial length. Subsequent commentators, however, have given relatively little attention to how this reading complicates an understanding of art's utopian character they have, moreover, largely neglected the episode's specifically musical resonances. He complies with the contract of his bondage and, bound to the mast, struggles to throw himself into the arms of the seductresses.” Indeed, throughout their treatment of the story of the sirens, Adorno and Horkheimer suggest that unfreedom is not externally imposed on art by a wrong society, but rather inheres in art's concept, the dialectical reverse side of its promise of reconciliation. Adorno and Horkheimer's seminal Dialectic of Enlightenment provides an extended reading of Odysseus's encounter with the sirens and draws a startling connection between the experience of musical listening and the condition of unfreedom: “ realizes that however he may consciously distance himself from nature, as a listener he remains under its spell. ![]()
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