Adorno's music theory

Review: Theodore Adorno, Philosophy of New Music

Bret Schneider

Review: Theodore W. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music. Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006.

The new translation and re-publishing of Philosophy of New Music is a further clarification of modernism, necessitated by recent postmodern vulgarization utilized to keep it at a fictitious distance. Perhaps as his remedy for the most fragmented part of the whole of the arts, music, translator Robert Hullot-Kentor has in recent years been steadily re-introducing Adorno’s aesthetic philosophy to English readers.The re-publishing of Philosophy of New Music continues this process, explicating Adorno’s complicated aesthetic theories, which also includes Current of Music, embodying Adorno’s aesthetic hopes for the early emergence of radio transmission.

Philosophy of New Music is one of Adorno’s more obscure and niche analyses. Split up into two sections comprising intricate dissections of Schoenberg and Stravinsky, Philosophy of new Music is tighter and less ambitious than, say, The Dialectic of Enlightenment, co-written with Horkheimer around the same time. Philosophy of New Music could be understood as its compliment, its object is imbricated with that of the culture industry critiqued in the more famous contemporary volume. Operating in an inverse way, New Music seeks to exacerbate and expose those same symptoms from within the music itself. American readers may have a difficult entry into the text, not only because the writing styles itself on Schoenberg’s esoteric manner of composition, but also because the European modernist avant-garde serves as Adorno’s object of critique. The text pays strict attention to Schoenberg’s music technique, while delving into historical comparisons to previous composers like Richard Wagner and the regressive, constrictive trajectory implied by their music styles. The volume also incorporates some of Adorno’s most sustained ruminations on the significance of the musical ‘material,’ one of Adorno’s most pivotal, and least understood concepts for approaching new music. As a concept, it seeks to articulate possibilities emanating from the split in idealization and materialization, which we now associate with the music of the mid-century avant-garde that Adorno anticipated.

Philosophy of New Music thwarts the tired criticism that Adorno’s writing is too elitist, ambiguous, generalizing, or abstract. His critique of Schoenberg adheres so meticulously to Schoenberg’s music technique that in the process he demonstrates objective analysis’s ability to abstract and destabilize an already contingent aesthetic construction by way of acute specificity. Early on, Adorno attacks status quo criticism of avant-garde music: “Amongst the reproaches that they obstinately repeat, the most prevalent charge is the charge of intellectualism, the claim that new music springs from the head, not the heart or the ear… They are put forward as if the tonal idiom were itself given by nature … The second nature of the tonal system is an illusion originating in history” [13]. Already discernible are the grounds for his more well-known critiques of mass deception through pop music. That the simplistic charge of intellectualism emerges out of the history of bourgeois radical culture presents its own intellectual failure to comprehend the complicated forms of new music’s material criticism of tonal idiom, implying internal contradiction and the exhaustion of that history. Bourgeois society’s failure manifests in a disintegration of historical consciousness regarding radical music, and the surprising reification of a history (tonal progression) which seemed aimed at the very opposite of stasis. For Adorno, a dogmatic concretizing of this tonal illusion pre-echoes the same consciousness pop music is a response to, as its development is bound up in both radical and mainstream aesthetics. This is elaborated in the section ‘Radical Music Is Not Immune,’ where, in typically self-referential style which itself reflects the formal contortions of modern artists like Schoenberg who “realize total enlightenment in themselves, regardless of the cunning naivete of the culture industry”, Adorno asserts, “…they also simultaneously make themselves like the internal structure of what they oppose and enter into opposition with their own intentions” [16]. A relentless train of self-contained, monolithic statements like these are the pointilist mimicry comprising the Schoenberg analysis, poetically mobilized to question their own truth content. Likewise, the literary technique exercising immense paragraphs sans line-breaks (identical in form to Samuel Beckett’s contemporary novel trilogy which Adorno admired) echo the calculated and monotonous historical transformation from a dynamic music to one of stasis – “the music no longer presents itself as being in a process of development” [50].

The first part of the book, “Schoenberg and Progress,” introduces the issue of musical style as hardening against suffering, briefly alluded to in The Dialectic of Enlightenment. “What radical music knows is the untransfigured suffering of men whose powerlessness has so increased that it no longer permits semblance and play” [37]. Schoenberg’s music, in its strict form and restrictive technique, itself expresses the decline of human subjectivity, allowing it to surface with dire earnestness. Schoenberg’s music embodied Adorno’s modern art philosophy. It exemplified the true art he intensively argued for, in distinction to the false ideology “innervated” in Stravinsky’s restoration, which allowed a “binding quality” back into the work. Better a rigorous, elitist art exposing the true, complicated bleakness of declining subjectivity, than a fantasized, populist escapism. Though neatly divided into two opposed sections, to Adorno both expressed the same individual-consuming apparatus of society.

Stravinsky represents all the regressive, destructive complications of a solidarity desperate to maintain the illusion of identity. To Adorno, Stravinsky’s music is a calculated mechanism of unintentionality and lightness (differing from Schoenberg’s heavy sound masses) and a mass ornamentation summoning the audience to rally together and annihilate their own subjectivity. Adorno dissects how Stravinsky’s music embodies modernism’s paradoxes, incorporating a romanticized primitivism while yet retaining an impressionist ephemerality of rapidly changing styles. Ritual and sacrifice are significant problems in Stravinsky’s music, and Adorno describes their manipulative function in quelling individual subjectivity, exacerbated by Stravinsky’s mastery of style: a style which is both the culmination of history and also ironically its own nihilistic undoing. He notices the ubiquitous trend when he suggests that Stravinsky unwittingly strikes the same nerve as the psychologist C. J. Jung: “The search for musical equivalents to the “collective unconscious” prepare for the transition to the establishment of the regressive community as a positive achievement” [121]. The same regressive impulse extends to the false identification with nature in music: “The pressure of reified Bourgeois culture incites flight into the phantasm of nature, which then ultimately proves to be the herald of absolute oppression. The aesthetic nerve quivers to return to the stone age” [113]. Almost unflinchingly, the reader freely associates Stravinsky’s ritualist spectacle with reprises of the same in contemporary culture (Lady Gaga’s primitive masks embedded in a stylized futurism and the neo-pastoralism now prevalent in ‘experimental’ drone and electronic folk music, not to mention precious back-to-the-land motifs in contemporary art).

The delusion that Adorno articulates is the same delusion we share today. For this reason, Philosophy of New Music is a primary historical artifact for gleaning the impetus of earlier stages of still-crystallizing collective grotesqueness. At first, readers may interpret this text as mere analysis, uncritically adopting the back-cover’s claim that the book somehow represents Adorno’s “manifesto.” But the more the reader grapples with Adorno’s criticism, the more she begins to understand that this text is as much a manifesto on how criticism could actively participate in, and clarify artistic concerns, immanently complicating solidarity between theory and practice. That the text has collected so much dust, and that the manifesto socially degrades into pure theory, divorced from its hopes of intellectual action, perhaps embodies the failure of Adorno’s emancipatory modernism.

originally published in The Platypus Review