APPENDIX: KEYWORDS FOR THE 1954 DARMSTADT SEMINAR

Musical reproduction not a question of style but rather of musical sense. Creation of the musical context. Elements of thematic work must be clarified.

Sound takes the place of construction. Do away with the idea of sounding good.

It is wrong to fulfil the audience's expectations

Colour as a means of formal constitution.

Question of extremes: vividness of the music, principal and secondary voices.

What does it mean to play thematically? Different weight of themes. Phrasing.

Begin with tempo, 1st movement of F minor Quartet [op. 95 by Beethoven]

Making music against the grain. They drift along with the musical current rather than realizing each shape, they let their fingers guide them. The musical current must be blocked or broken.

Rudi [Kolisch]: in praise of paper-music.

In Beethoven the tension between the subcutaneous and the surface must be realized. In Schönberg the subcutaneous has devoured the skin.

Critique of the minstrel. One-sided emphasis on the idiomatic.

Rudi [Kolisch]: general critique of the state of string music today.¹ String instruments outdated – must be converted into chromatic ones.

1st session general introduction

2nd session: tempo, dynamics, sound, dominance of colourism over construction.

3rd/4th session thematic work, op. 59 No. 2 [by Beethoven].

Overemphasis of the strong beat

Playing dissonances. Question of the critical tone. Playing harmonies correctly.

Question of clarity, pseudo- and genuine clarity

Rhythm. In thematic music no two metric units are identical. Against the conventional idea of playing rhythmically.

The metric and the rhythmic must not be confused with one another

What does it actually mean to play a melody?

There are no special problems for modern music, the difference lies in the fact that modern music is imagined and understood entirely differently to traditional music.

Inflection, declamation, Mozart, Adagio from the G minor Quintet [KV 516]

Ts 49563

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Kranichstein 1954.            13 August.

Introductory lecture.²

1. Against hermetic isolation of new music, not a specialist sect.
2. Old music thus a museum-piece
3. Attempt to break through this, renew older music.
4. No putting on of modernist get-up, rather ask: what can we learn about traditional music from new music.
5. This is the theme of the course.

1. Is that not simply ‘wilfulness’, ‘reading things into …’[?]
2. Critique of immutability
3. Will of the author unknown.
4. Tradition as sloppiness (sociologically: culture industry).
5. Performer faced with problems, constantly.
6. But: certainty of what is ‘right’, possibility of concrete decision.
7. Idea of musical sense. Senseless music-making
8. Quality of the sense's complete realization.
9. ‘X-ray image’.
10. Objection to that

1. Answer: history of music: dual structure, the emergence of the subcutaneous.
2. This tendency must be taken into account.

1. Reflection upon musical writing.
2. The text contains 3 elements

1. the material (significative, the essence of all that is unequivocally given through the symbol).
2. the idiomatic (‘music-lingual’, that which must be discovered within the musical language that is prescribed in each case and encompasses the work;³ ‘tempo giusto’, ‘wienerisch’ etc.)
3. the neumic (= mimic-gestural), the old immediacy of interpretation.

The problem of interpretation is predefined by the relationship between these elements.

2. dies off. Greater freedom with older texts, increase in rigour.

1. is relatively constant but insufficient. Temptation to limit oneself to it as the schema. Musical positivism and historicism. Organ. Senselessness. Excursus on subjectivism + objectivism. The former has its limit with the historical-objective change in the works. The latter as a residual theory. What is true is not what remains after an elimination of the subject: the full subjective innervation is required in order to dissolve within the matter.
   Concept of the musical.
2. The problem. No longer immediate but rather mediated through (1), something to be discovered. Analysis as a condition for musical interpretation.
   Develop. No rationalism.

1. the idiomatic element necessary, but must be consumed. ‘Making music against the grain’.
2. the task of analysis is the reconstruction of the neumic from the context. The latter, once realized, takes the place of ‘style’. Reproduction is more than the realization of analysis.

All this can only be achieved with the concrete work, not in abstracto, as the sense only constitutes itself in works. The idea of interpretation is that of objective reality, its realization is always inadequate. There is no such thing as good interpretation. The end of interpretation.

Various problems:

1. avoid making music with the musical current i.e. the hierarchy of tonality but rather thematically. Distortion. NB. Bruckner. Realize imagination.
2. avoid thinking from the perspective of instrumental technique (qualify. NB tonality both convention and construction at once.)
3. Against culinary music-making, beauty as an end in itself. Atomistic music-making. Smoothing out. Colour, tone as means of representation.
4. Primacy of clarity (Mahler)
5. Example of how a single incorrectly interpreted note can make the music senseless Berg op. 3
   that which is overlooked [demisemiquavers] bar 91 and its identity with the coda theme bars 51–52.
6. ad against the grain: weak beats, dissonances etc. But this too should not be mechanical.

To close: ‘self-evidence’. But in concreto that which is far from self-evident will come to light.

[Ad 6)] it is a matter of not only realizing the subcutaneous, but also realizing the process between it and the surface. Interpreting means: unlocking music as a force field.

*

NB not isolated, one can stand in for the other

3rd lecture 15 Aug. Elements of presentation

    54

1)	Tempo
a)	The anti-atomistic. Whole forms means playing more quickly
	Idea of time as a moment.
	Unity of the whole.
	Difference between mood and presentation in the tempo. Slow movements from [op.] 59, 2 and A minor Quartet [op. 132 by Beethoven].
b)	Unity of the manifold.
	‘The’ tempo as an idea.
	Rudi's [Kolisch] hypothesis
	Differentiation within a movement, Schnabel. Problem of unity.
	Antagonism between the shapes to be presented and the totality
c)	How does one find the correct tempo.
	Rule: lower threshold is the unity of what one is feeling one's way through
	of the basic tempo, for example clarity of shapes. (Example Berg sonata)4
	Extrapolation of the tempo example Beethoven op. 10, 1.
	In general begin with the idea of the totality as a character
	Provisional rule: find unity. Often very difficult. Example Beethoven C minor Concerto Allegro con brio, the a.c.b. does not mean 138, but rather such quick that one counts in minims, so roughly = 80.

[Notes in the left margin:]

No let-up Eroica p. 12 after general pause⁵

keeping a movement flowing: op. 59, 2, p. 3, bars 5–6

Eroica p. 16

Tempo is the advocate of the whole against the detail

Consequence of quick tempi: the sound to the utmost degree a means of differentiation

Treatment of tempo independent from the content of the music, so in thematic music more flexible than in rhythmic music

Music must be able to linger, but not listen to itself.

[Note in the left margin:]

Tempo + expression. Mimetic matters

2)	Dynamics
	not from the perspective of playing technique: new music and dynamic extremes
	Against intermediate dynamics. Wrong: develop the volume through modification from the intermediate mf. Right: from the characters and their proportion.
	Greater dynamic range.
	Greater dynamic differentiation e.g. mf + mp, F and FF etc.
	an accent can stand for an F area.
	Dynamics and presence, dynamics as a qualitative concept
	Difference between H− and N− in the classical period.
	Problem of playing a secondary voice correctly op. 59, 1, p. 34 bar 9 1st Violin [= bar 9 of the 2nd movement] op. 59, 2, 1st movement bar 13
	Difference between interruptedly contrapuntal and genuinely polyphonic presentation, requirement of immediate receding
	Dynamics can stand in – as the more subtle means – for tempo, e.g. Eroica p. 7 [= bar 55f.]. Here already in the composition; often only through interpretation.

*

ad dynamics (continued)

Starting sound not mf

Music not as the normal condition, therefore –

3)	Phrasing.
	Presentation of shapes
	Emancipation from the bar line.
	Unity of beats, no emphasis on the downbeat
	against internal stress on tied notes.
	Punctuation i.e. different degrees of phrasing
	Crossing of phrasings
	Phrasing and formal course: example reduction of differences between phrases.
	Emphasis on critical notes
	correct phrasing i.e. meaningful delivery of themes achieves what, in primitive music-making, the rubato attempts in vain from without.
	Rule: avoidance of dead notes, the mechanical. / Against Riemann dead intervals.
	The more rigorous modern approach to presentation is at once the more flexible one.

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ad op. 59, no. 2.

p. 1

bar 1 play melodically

    bar 13. Rhythm (accent on E)

    Play field of dissolution i.e. no accents, cf. bar 155

    bar 21 NB the leading note F [recte: E] as a consequence of [bar] 13

p. 2 accents in the 1st system [bar 26f.]

    bar 35 breathing-space beforehand – do not drop the C

p. 3 bar 48 leap of a 6th should be played thematically owing to [bar] 18

    [bar] 49 not as the end of the crescendo but subito owing to the new shape (but careful with the 2nd passage) cf. Eroica 1st movement

    [bar] 51 viola, almost a variation of [bar] 48

    [bar] 55 the ‘cushioning’ as in the Finale Les Adieux and Eroica 1st [movement]

p. 4 [bar] 78 play middle voice thematically

p. 5 top [= bar 82f.] phrasing very important

p. 6 [bar] 107 cello + viola thematic.

2nd movement not solemn mood but rather theme

    2nd strophe play upper voice

Notes

1    See Rudolf Kolisch, Über die Krise der Streicher, in Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik I, ed. Wolfgang Steinecke, Darmstadt, 1958, pp. 84–90.

2    Some of the keywords noted by Adorno for his introductory lecture, which are clearly intimately connected to his ‘Notes Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction’, have already been published; see Rolf Tiedemann, ‘Nur ein Gast in der Tafelrunde: Theodor W. Adorno: kritisch und kritisiert’ [Only a Guest at the Round Table: Theodor W. Adorno: Critical and Criticized], in Von Kranichstein zur Gegenwart, ed. Rudolf Stephan et al., Darmstadt, 1996, p. 150.

3    See p. 67.

4    See note 154, p. 256.

5    See note 155, p. 256.