In their talks and writings on music in the years following World War II, Hindemith and Adorno saw a vision of utopia in contrapuntal music. Though they advocated different styles and aimed at different utopias, they both assigned counterpoint a role in the transformation of the world. In “Die Funktion des Kontrapunkts in der neuen Musik” (“The Function of Counterpoint in New Music,” 1957), Adorno noted that a critic needs to read the aesthetic and technical components of a piece in conjunction, for “the spiritual substance of a work of art — what traditional philosophy called the artistic idea — is constituted in the life of its components, in the way in which they continually modify each other, forming ever new constellations.”2 Although he was aware that his suggestion would seem odd, he offered counterpoint as the paradigm for contemporary practice. Counterpoint preserved the traditional aspirations of music and at the same time critiqued these aspirations.
Music in the medium of positive negation — that is precisely how we should think of counterpoint: simultaneously as the negation and affirmation of the voice to which it is added. Without making concessions to a bad utopia, it is not wholly illegitimate to imagine that music may hope through spontaneous receptivity, through immersion in the unique, to become more than a mere existent thing.3
Properly disposed, the processes of music could become more than mere sound. So long as they made no “concessions to a bad utopia,” they could contain some transcendent meaning and ultimately a promise of reconciliation.4
In A Composer’s World (his Norton Lectures delivered at Harvard in 1949–1950, published in 1952), Hindemith saw no less promise in music. “Harmonic, melodic, and rhythmic laws, as worked out in a most beautiful and exalted composition, would transform the world’s woes and falsehood into the ideal habitat for human beings, who by the same process of musical ennoblement would have grown into creatures worthy of such a paradise.”5 Although Hindemith sought to unify the theoretical disciplines, to view harmony and counterpoint as endpoints on a sliding scale rather than as separate disciplines, he nonetheless accorded the highest “moral” value to linear construction because of the challenges it posed to the listener. As he outlined as early as the first volume of the Unterweisung im Tonsatz (The Craft of Musical Composition, 1937, rev. 1940), “The danger of becoming unintelligible is greater in contrapuntal writing; the chordal style is more liable to sink into shallow insignificance.”6 Composers, performers, and listeners alike, if they assimilated the interplay of tones, could feel their participation in the great harmony of the world. In widely divergent fashions and with varying degrees of affirmation, Hindemith and Adorno alluded to the metaphysical claims of Western art music that so frequently underpinned theories of counterpoint.
They also both attended to the topos of labor or effort that differentiated the metaphysics of counterpoint from the metaphysics of harmony, though they again tacked in opposed directions. Like many musicians before them, Hindemith and Adorno both believed that counterpoint resulted from work and rested upon metaphysical ideals. Of course, they could not have disagreed more as to what constituted metaphysics or labor in music. Hindemith appealed to a metaphysics of an objective harmony of all things and the conscious attention to musical processes by composer and listener alike; Adorno appealed to a metaphysics rooted in subjective expression and the unconscious mental labor produced by the encounter between artists’ minds and their historical situation. Their technical descriptions of counterpoint accorded with their aesthetic views. For Adorno, the antagonisms between simultaneously sounding voices resulted from the mental process of composition. For Hindemith, linear connections allowed listeners to follow the musical current from point to distant point. But although they seized upon different aspects, both advocated a developmental, processual type of music with a high density of events.
The purpose of this essay, then, is twofold: first, to show that Hindemith and Adorno defended poles of the same tradition, and, second, to elaborate on prominent features of this tradition: the promise of utopia, the valorization of human labor, and a dense, processual musical texture. Rather than address Adorno’s reception of Hindemith, as Wolfgang Lessing has brilliantly done,7 the essay illuminates the common turf that joined them as contenders on a single battleground. In the wars of words waged between avant-garde and conservative camps during the 1950s and 1960s, both lobbied volleys in the other’s direction. On at least a few issues, however, Hindemith and Adorno agreed with each other more than they realized,8 and there was considerable misunderstanding on both sides. In particular, because the Philharmonisches Konzert of 1932 was “perhaps the last time that Adorno willingly lent a work of Hindemith’s his ear,” as Rudolf Stephan has written,9 the philosopher often used a caricature of Hindemith to exemplify a music-philosophical position.
Although he firmly believed that the complete musician should attend to both means and ends, Hindemith separated his discussion of technique and poetics into different writings. It is thus necessary to draw upon a diverse selection of his writings from the 1930s through 1950s, in particular the Craft of Musical Composition and A Composer’s World. While Hindemith’s thought did evolve, the broad outlines discussed here remained relatively constant. As Adorno linked technical to aesthetic issues, it is possible to focus on a single essay that binds the two together, “The Function of Counterpoint in New Music.”10
Both writers argued the cause of counterpoint in part in reaction to contemporaneous compositional developments. By the end of World War II, neither Hindemith nor Adorno were young, and they had to choose how to face two challenges to their own tradition, from the avant-garde and from commercial music (or what they perceived as such).
As a composer and public figure, Hindemith was at first lionized immediately after the end of the War. He was then left behind (“thrown out with the old iron” as his publisher put it in German) by composers at Darmstadt moving toward total serialism.11 Although Hindemith was never quite the conservative that either his champions or his critics wanted him to be — his own views were more sophisticated than those attributed to him — he was without doubt a conservative and extended an attack that he had begun in the 1930s on what he perceived as modish and effect-seeking modernism. To be old iron, as Hindemith wrote his publisher on July 19, 1949, was a better honor than to be new “goat shit” (Bockmist): music history was full of old iron. While elements of his polemic were developed in the Craft of Musical Composition, it continued throughout the postwar period and reached an extreme pitch in the lecture “Sterbende Gewässer” (“Dying Waters”) delivered as he received the Order Pour le mérite in Bonn only six months before his death in 1963.12 The public fervor masked private doubts about his own place in history and his own compositional techniques.13
Adorno, on the other hand, enjoyed some favor with composers at Darmstadt. His Philosophie der neuen Musik (Philosophy of New Music, 1949) offered legitimacy to their innovations, or so it seemed to them. Despite his own apprehensions of “being thrown out with old iron,”14 Adorno maintained ambiguous relations with the newest musical developments. In “The Function of Counterpoint,” Adorno looked nostalgically back at an approach to composition with obvious debts to Schoenberg’s expressionism. While he devoted his essay to a genealogy that linked Bach’s counterpoint to twelve-tone works, Adorno sympathized despite himself with the works written during his own youth. Of the six works mentioned in the essay, four are among Schoenberg’s early and expressionist works (the Gurrelieder; the First String Quartet, Op. 7, the First Chamber Symphony, Op. 9, and the Five Orchestral Pieces, Op. 16), while only two follow twelve-tone procedures (the Woodwind Quintet, Op. 22, and the Fourth Quartet, Op. 37). It is true that Adorno never rejected the innovations of the most recent composers. Their treatment of technical problems of material organization as an artistic goal, making “no bones about substituting technological criteria for aesthetic ones,”15 met his recognition as timely, if not his approval as appropriate. To respond to their activities, he used the essay on counterpoint to return to and rethink the relationship between craft and aesthetics that Schoenberg had addressed in his Harmonielehre (Theory of Harmony, 1911).16 This was the starting point for his essay.
In addition to their varying distance from the avant-garde, Adorno and Hindemith both looked upon commercial uses of music with much horror. Both were concerned primarily with attitudes of listening and reception, but frequently attacked particular styles and genres that they saw associated with these attitudes. Adorno attacked both jazz and the commodification of high culture through radio and record. For his part, Hindemith aimed his polemic squarely at a type of listener “who is the exclusive product of our system of musical mass-distribution carried on by radios, Muzaks, and other relentlessly running music-faucets; a listener of the most degenerate type, who is surrounded by music every minute of his daily life.”17 Just as he accused serialism of environmental pollution in “Dying Waters,” he accused popular styles of crimes against health and human well-being in A Composer’s World: “after several generations of hens and cows exposed to crooning, jazz, and hillbilly, eggs will deteriorate into something uneatable, and the milk and meat of cows will turn poisonous.”18
While Hindemith’s and Adorno’s writings on counterpoint must be understood as products of their time, as reactions to a particular historical situation by two members of an aging generation, they are more than documents of history. They addressed issues related to a certain type of existential experience of music often associated with counterpoint. The experience is one of sonic formations with formal sophistication, high potency, and overwhelming power. The experience defies easy definition or description, and is thus related to what has been known since the nineteenth century as “absolute music.” The experience is by no means empty. While it is difficult to assign certain meaning to the sounds themselves, the existential experience has always demanded and received interpretation and explanation, often of a metaphysical nature. Indeed, as Hindemith’s and Adorno’s writings show, the metaphysics often give this music its social relevance. Of course, the recurrent idea that music moves beyond language and opens up a realm beyond culture can only be transmitted through language and culture. Because the metaphysics of counterpoint can only be discussed through linguistic and cultural prisms, they cannot be accorded today the ontological weight that they once possessed. Yet the issues such metaphysics bespeak retain a cultural weight and function that, for all their problems and dangers, can and should be neither suppressed nor ignored.
Counterpoint has assumed a wide variety of guises over the course of time: specific technical procedures, styles, and symbolic meanings. Hindemith and Adorno could draw upon this diversity as they fashioned their own approaches and ideas, and it is against this background that they engage in an implicit dialogue.
At the most basic level, “counterpoint” applies to the broad array of techniques of setting music “point counter point” (punctum contra punctum) and thus can apply to any music that is more than monophonic. Many musicians have distinguished polyphony (music with more than one part) from counterpoint (music that normatively regulates the intervals between lines or the relationship between thematic entries), though many have used the terms interchangeably as well.19 With the shift toward homophonic styles and the establishment of theories of root function in the eighteenth century, musicians began to differentiate between harmony and counterpoint, though the two terms were also used interchangeably well into the nineteenth century. The new technical procedures of harmony (in the narrow sense) accelerated the formulation of contrapuntal styles linked to particular genres and even composers. By the nineteenth century, counterpoint itself had two main stylistic ideals: Renaissance vocal music (represented by Palestrina) and late Baroque keyboard fugues (Bach); as well as several ancillary ones, including late Baroque vocal choruses (Handel) and a living, if marginal, and at times academic tradition of Catholic church music (represented at its best by such fugues as those in Verdi’s Requiem and at its worst by the fugue d’école). The multiplicity of stylistic ideals led to a situation in which counterpoint could be learned through a number of theoretical traditions and pedagogical courses of study. If they at times consciously cultivated historical styles, composers also developed new technical procedures modeled or trained on historical styles of counterpoint: in particular the techniques of motivic manipulation and chromatic linear connections between chords. The symbolic associations of counterpoint were many. Depending on the writer and the context, it stood for law or for history; for both timeless laws of music and for historically specific stylistic principles; for rationality, objectivity, and masculinity in music; for social, religious, and metaphysical harmony; for professional mastery of craft and for scientific knowledge of nature; for ethical dedication and expressive depth; and so forth. No one technical procedure, style, or symbolic association defines the essence of counterpoint.
At the same time as they looked back on a long history of counterpoint, Hindemith and Adorno both felt a common conviction in the timeliness of counterpoint, a conviction that was generational. Both were trained during the first decades of the twentieth century, a time in which a fascination with counterpoint cut across national and music-political boundaries. Within the immediate purview of Hindemith and Adorno, well-known champions of counterpoint included such composers and theorists as Max Reger, Arnold Schoenberg, Heinrich Schenker, August Halm, and Ernst Kurth. Although they parted ways in the musical politics of the 1920s and 1930s, Hindemith and Adorno both participated in this revival of counterpoint. It was part of their common ground. In addition to the traditional contrapuntal forms (canon and fugue), four less marked technical procedures commonly fell under the broad heading of “counterpoint”: (1) motivic-thematic working and thematic process; (2) the extensive use of chromatic voice leading between chords; (3) fundamental lines; and (4) hierarchies of complementary lines. First, according to Schoenberg, motivic working could replace the musical logic that had been endangered by increasing chromaticism. Along similar lines, Halm contrasted two musical archetypes: the developmental process of fugues and the dispositional organization of the sonata (with its correlates, tonal harmony and periodic phrasing). Each emphasized the gradual spinning forth of a theme. Second, both Schoenberg and Kurth noted that the profusion of leading tones and chromatic alterations led to the development of chromatic lines or “voices” within highly chromatic textures.20 Third, both Kurth and Schenker described single melodic lines or the reciprocal exchanges between motives and melodies within homophonic textures using some notion of a fundamental line. Finally, Schoenberg designated principal and secondary voices (Hauptstimme and Nebenstimme) in his scores in order to accentuate their collaboration and hierarchy.
From this web of technical procedures, specific contrapuntal forms, and symbolic associations, Hindemith and Adorno wove notions of counterpoint that suited their own individual purposes yet linked them together. Hindemith avoided clear distinctions between harmony and counterpoint, so he never specifically recommended “counterpoint” as a compositional model. He preferred rather to address techniques and goals of composition in broad terms, mandating nothing. Yet in practice he preferred textures that favored both fundamental lines and the complementarity of voices. On the aesthetic level, he believed that homophonic constructions encouraged passive listening, and, on the technical level, he emphasized the centrality of an overarching “two-voice framework.”21 It is true that the technical training only gave composers the tools to write in a linear style, if they so wished. Nonetheless, if, as a theorist and pedagogue, he aimed to give composers the technique to write compositions in the style of their choice, as a musician he clearly favored a strong sense of line.22 He saw dangers in homophonic styles, even if he recognized their necessity and importance when wisely used.
Adorno also regarded “counterpoint” as central to contemporary composition, although his definition of the discipline is peculiar, as he himself recognized in the essay. Adorno approached the subject both normatively and historically. At the normative level, he defined the discipline according to a principle: “positive negation.” Given two voices, the secondary one was “the negation and affirmation of the voice to which it is added.”23 With the term counterpoint, he referred generally to music in which simultaneous sounding parts do not synthesize seamlessly into a whole, but rather retain their independence.24 This quality he missed in the highly integrated music of the younger generation, and this quality he hoped to protect. To illuminate the situation of the composer of new music, as he saw it, he outlined a history that reached from Bach to Schoenberg. This history can only be sketched here. If, in Bach, the movement of contrapuntal lines made the listener forget the harmony, in the turn toward the galant style, harmony took priority for the constitution of a musical work. Counterpoint was partially recuperated through motivic processes in the Viennese “Classics,” expanded in the developing variation of Brahms, supplemented by the increasing linearity of non-melodic voices (especially the bass), and finally “emancipated” from the constraints of harmony by Schoenberg. While this “freedom” was enjoyable while it lasted, composers had to develop serial procedures to regain the integrity of autonomous works. Following Schoenberg, Adorno viewed serial procedures as outgrowths of counterpoint, though he distinguished between levels of “contrapuntal” integration: the subcutaneous unity provided by the row and the overt one established through canonic manipulations of a theme. The double determination of the musical work (through both row and canonic procedures) led to overly integrated music in which freedom seemed to vanish; the part no longer retained its relative independence. “If the intrinsic logic of authoritative contrapuntal thinking terminates in total constructivity, the total constructivity ends up by liquidating the living substance of counterpoint.”25 Adorno sought to move beyond this stage with a type of music that would rely on the fundamental principle of counterpoint (“positive negation”) without relying on any conventions.
While each writer dealt with techniques that were by no means new — linear counterpoint, fundamental lines, motivic development — they gave these techniques particular meaning through their thoughts on the power of music.
In their versions and visions of counterpoint, both Hindemith and Adorno dealt with its long association with ideals of harmony and natural law, the former appreciatively and the latter critically. Yet underlying both writers understanding of the discipline was a concern for music’s potential to transform the world through an image of utopia. In his own way, each insisted upon the power of music to transform the human experience of the world and invoked metaphysical ideals to put music in the service of this eminently worldly and pragmatic end. It should be emphasized again that despite their intangibility, utopias are important to people as part of an eternal quest for “the good life.” The metaphysics of music are by no means idle speculative matters. Despite their empirical elusiveness, they touch on issues of central importance to human existence.
The two writers built on different traditions in the metaphysics of music. Drawing upon ancient notions of the metaphysics of harmony, Hindemith portrayed musical sounds as objective, physical manifestations of the imperceptible forces that linked human beings to the cosmos. By contrast, Adorno relied upon a Romantic linguistic ideal in which gifted artists express themselves in artworks.26 In the Romantic version, the subjective but powerfully uttered “message” of such works was a measure of the artist’s interior link to higher principles. While Adorno played cat and mouse with the theological character of the artistic work, he insisted that it held present the reconciliation of social problems. Thus, by vastly different means, musical works in both Hindemith and Adorno’s eyes indicated a better world. At the same time, both voiced considerable and, given the experiences of World War II and the tensions of the Cold War, understandable skepticism that human individuals could partake in this harmony.
In his writings on musical technique and practice, Hindemith was guided by an ideal of harmony. While he arrived at his ideas only gradually over the 1930s, in the course of several revisions of the Craft of Musical Composition and as he was excluded from active musical pursuits,27 he seized upon the ancient trinity of musica mundana, humana, and instrumentalis as a foundation for ideas on music theory and practice. As he wrote in the first volume of the Craft,
For us there is no longer, thanks to our understanding of their common physical basis, a fundamental difference between musica humana and musica instrumentalis, and even as concerns musica humana and musica mundana we may concentrate our attention today rather on those aspects which they have in common than on those in which they differ. We shall not do as the ancients did, and carry over earthly relations to happenings far out in space. Rather, we shall observe in the tiniest building unit of music the play of the same forces that rule the movements of the most distant nebulae.28
While Hindemith later distanced himself from the precise theoretical prescriptions that he derived from his acoustic calculations in the Craft,29 he never gave up the general conviction that the laws of music were immutably intertwined with the laws of nature. He returned to this topos explicitly again in A Composer’s World and implicitly in his numerous pronouncements on the nature of music.30 Like Zarlino and Rameau before him, he perceived a link between a subjectively sensed quality (the sensuous beauty of harmony) and an objective set of physical relationships (such as simple ratios or the overtone series). From this link, Hindemith made metaphysical claims about the nature of the world, the mind, the body, and their relations. He was not the first.
In part, he wished to give his own musical activities a stable point of reference at a time of political and social instability. However, he also used the cosmology to address issues of personal balance and general well-being, which he associated with musica humana and mundana respectively. While Hindemith was not about to see music as the only thing necessary for a good life, he did think that music could play an important role. At the personal level of musica humana, music instilled harmony within human individuals. Such harmony or personal balance involved such perennial issues as the relationship between mind and body, the relationship between rational will and instinct, and the maintenance of physical and mental health. Musica humana
is the principle which unifies the immateriality of our faculty of reasoning with our corporeal existence; which keeps the conscious and rational part of our soul aligned with its instinctive and animalistic feelings; and which brings about the harmonious coherence of our body’s members and their smooth and well-tuned synchronization.31
At the all-encompassing level of well-being, designated by musica mundana, music instilled the harmonious interaction between individuals and their world. Following ancient precedent, Hindemith presented the order of the world as an abstract set of relations. Musica mundana “governs the heavens, time, and the earth. It causes the planets to revolve in their orbits; it moves the celestial spheres. Without such organizing harmony how would the cohesion of the entire universe be possible?”32 While he was interested in such harmony in part because it made the investigation of tonal laws possible, he was most attracted to it because the connotations of cosmic harmony fit a certain class of experience. It can be described in existential terms as an intense sense of connectedness with the world, or, drawing on Heidegger, as Dasein, as “being in the world.” For some, like Hindemith, this experience was also theological.
Musical order, as recognized and evaluated by our mind, is not an end in itself. It is an image of a higher order which we are permitted to perceive if we proceed one step further to the sixth degree on our scale of musical assimilation: if we put our enjoyment of such knowledge (“enjoyment, the weight of the soul!”) into the side of the balance that tends towards the order of the heavens and towards the unification of our soul with the divine principle.33
Although Hindemith used the topos of harmonia mundi primarily to talk about individual cultivation, he also believed that music could contribute to harmonious communities. “People who make music together cannot be enemies, at least not while the music lasts.”34 While Hindemith seemed to imply that communal music necessarily instilled good social graces, it is important not to forget his insistence on personal cultivation, on inner balance (musica humana) and well-being (musica mundana). Music may help to form a harmonious community but only when those involved also aim to put their own houses in order.
However, while he believed in the quest, Hindemith was profoundly skeptical that harmony could be attained. One could work toward it in many ways — through scientific exploration and artistic composition, and through efforts for personal betterment and social concord — but human nature was too imperfect for the ideal to become reality. His idealism had a strongly pragmatic, realistic tint, and even bordered on pessimism as he aged. For all their mastery of technical craft, musicians would never be completely privy to the secrets of composition but were rather only gifted with a vision.35 As a messenger but no initiate, the composer in particular had great responsibilities but also faced the same arduous quest toward harmony as all other human beings. Hindemith also wrote his skepticism into his works. In his opera Die Harmonie der Welt, the protagonist Johannes Kepler envisions the harmony of the world but does not experience it until after his death. As Dieter Rexroth has pointed out, the opera presents an atomized society of isolated individuals. The harmony provides a vision of hope to individuals, a vision alone and nothing more. Human beings may strive toward the cosmic and its suggested social state of grace, but they do not arrive.36 And Hindemith also realized that music, for all its power to build community, would not necessarily last.
Nonetheless, Hindemith believed that the quest for the utopia would have practical results for daily life in the here and now. “This life in and with music, being essentially a victory over external forces and a final allegiance to spiritual sovereignty, can only be a life of humility, of giving one’s best to one’s fellow men.”37 Hindemith’s goal has much in common with that of Bildung, of self-cultivation through art, though with several differences. As a point of comparison, one can take Karl Philipp Moritz’s classic formulation of the ideal in Über die bildende Nachahmung des Schönen (On the Artistic Imitation of the Beautiful, 1788).
Humanity cannot raise itself higher than the point at which, through nobility in action and beauty in contemplation, pulling the individual out of his individuality, it perfects itself within beautiful souls, souls that are capable of losing themselves in their species as they stride out of their limited egoism and toward the interests of humanity.38
Hindemith diverged from these ideals of Bildung in several respects. He exchanged the organic metaphors for physical ones. Second, he did not limit the capacity for growth to “beautiful souls” but rather believed that all human beings could work toward the final goal. Gifted composers certainly had a special role to play, a role that he assumed for himself, but he firmly believed that all individuals could have “visions,” if vague and indistinct. Finally, and most importantly, he preached what he felt in practice. In his letters, he frequently viewed the bustle of human life around him from an ironic distance, and those around him undoubtedly found his behavior in day-today affairs uncomfortably direct and his personality prickly. Yet when he reported on music making with those equally dedicated to the art, as with Donald Tovey in Edinburgh, his tone shifted momentarily toward the rhapsodic.39 He felt the harmony and his personal experience fueled his lifelong devotion to a range of concrete practical and pedagogical efforts. By contrast, the universalizing but somewhat cold “interests of humanity” failed many people when it came to practical action. As twentieth-century history has adequately shown, people with the best intentions toward an impersonal “humanity” could be unfeeling or even murderous toward individuals. (If music is to help people to keep a vision of social harmony in mind, the experience of musical harmony alone will not do. Words, such as the aesthetics spelled out in A Composer’s World, complement the music.)
For Adorno, on the other hand, the harmony that fascinated Hindemith was neither natural phenomenon nor proper utopian goal. It rather revealed a coercive social structure. Not only did the conventions of tonal harmony develop according to a historical logic, he argued, but the dominance of tonality was allied to restrictions on individual freedom proper to capitalism and bourgeois society. It is a fundamental if debatable premise of his essay on counterpoint that the harmonic conventions of functional tonality constrained the free expression of composers. If composers chose to follow harmonic conventions, they did so at the price of their true subjective sensibility. Thus, for example, the melodies in “Viennese Classical” works might outline harmonic structures (triads or diatonic scales), but
melodies of this kind hardly ever laid claim to full plasticity and autonomy. Such restraint, the renunciation of the unconditioned subjective definition of the basic figures subjectively chosen for each work, is what gave the Viennese school around 1800 its roundness, saturated in resignation, and the glory of seamless success that is conveyed by the concept of classicality.40
This musical cession of freedom matched a contemporaneous political one. Just as Classical composers molded their melodies to certain conventions of harmony, bourgeois individuals gave up on true personal fulfillment as they bowed to the dictates of state and society. And although it may have seemed a model of perfection, the balanced classical work (the rounded whole) actually required the repression of the subjective impulse, just as the seemingly well-ordered bourgeois state required individuals to give up on their dreams of freedom. Adorno was thus suspicious of the language of self-abnegation involved in the search for harmony. To “stride out of egoism and toward the interests of humanity” was a dubious aim, all too easily turned toward authoritarian ends. His political doubts had good grounds, especially as people before World War II had often substituted Romantic nationalism for Enlightenment universalism as the goal of Bildung. Nonetheless, it requires a leap of faith to see a direct bridge between musical structures and social sensibilities. While people have long and often regarded musical harmony as an expression of social harmony, the link between the two is not a necessary one.
By contrast, in twentieth-century works that eschewed the conventions of harmony, the music gained in freedom but also expressed the absence of communal feeling. “[T]he contemporary evolution of the contrapuntal spirit offers us the paradox of a multivoiced music without a community.”41 New music presented a sonic image of the current society, its sufferings and its alienations.
Despite his bleak assessment of the contemporary situation, Adorno did not wholly discard metaphysical ideals of music, although he did not wholly affirm them either. His essay on counterpoint concurred with the closing line of the Negative Dialektik (Negative Dialectics, 1966), where he affirmed a processual style of thinking that “shows solidarity with metaphysics at the moment of its fall.”42 Human beings could neither live with metaphysics nor could they live without them. In the essay on counterpoint, he fleshed out this ambiguous situation with a reference to a “promise of reconciliation.”43 A vision of reconciliation hovered in works built only upon the subjective intuitions of the composer, that is, in works built on free expressive gestures unconstrained by harmonic conventions.
The reasons that a work mirroring social isolation nonetheless promised reconciliation are complex because the logic rested on a critique of the essay’s own premises. Adorno drew a parallel between philosophical positions and compositional approaches. “Realism” treats the world as a stable entity, separate from human consciousness, while “nominalism” emphasizes that, because the world can only be perceived through human consciousness, human beings “determine” their own world. Realist composers create works by relying on harmonic conventions, which they assume to be based on stable properties of nature, while nominalists create ones that avoid conventions and, because they follow the inner impulses that make them individuals, write music that is new, sui generis, and as processual as thought itself. (Hindemith and Schoenberg are the two obvious models.) Adorno preferred nominalism but also recognized the limitations of the position.
What it [new music] regards as authoritative are not norms imposed from outside, but only those that arise from within itself, as if from beneath. That, however, takes it beyond the bounds of nominalism and so holds out the promise of reconciliation. For absolute individuality is a delusion, just as much as absolute universality: in contrast, reconciliation would be the truth. The utopia of such an aesthetic challenge is the primal image [Urbild] of a future real condition, and precisely because the real situation today refuses reconciliation, we must retain the idea of it in an image.44
In other words, by trusting their sense of what should be, rather than following imposed norms, nominalist composers could write works that would be more than purely personal confessions. Through their sui generis quality (their distance from conventions), such works would have a universal message. “Both the secret and the criterion of new music that counts is that the path of its specificity leads into a core of universality.”45
Adorno’s link between the individualized work and universal truth is rooted in a combination of Hegelian and Freudian thought, as phrases like “spiritual substance” and “from beneath” imply.46 As Hegel conceived the “activity of the artistic imagination,” the “productive fancy of an artist” exhibits, among more tangible things, “the most universal human interests in pictorial and completely definite sensuous form.”47 Spirit revealed itself as artists put intuited universals into material form. If works tapped into this submerged spirit, personal and even confessional artistic works could have universal significance. It was then the expressive and individualized core of artworks, rather than their use of conventions, that gave them the greatest significance and universality. In Hegel’s expressive model of metaphysics, musical works are like linguistic utterances of revelatory power. Adorno described the linguistic and metaphysical character of music more overtly in the “Fragment über Musik und Sprache” (“Music and Language: A Fragment,” 1956).
Intentional language wants to mediate the absolute, and the absolute escapes language for every specific intention, leaves each one behind because each is limited. Music finds the absolute immediately, but at the moment of discovery it becomes obscured, just as too powerful a light dazzles the eyes, preventing them from seeing things which are perfectly visible.48
In the essay on counterpoint, he spoke more concretely of the universal truth promised by individualized works: reconciliation.
With this term, Adorno referred to two issues. On the one hand, the reconciliation pointed obliquely to the German idealist utopia in which human beings would not feel divided from their world, condemned to sense the distance between their subjective view of the world and its objective state. On the other hand, it referred to a social reconciliation in which the sufferings imposed by capitalist society and its attendant miseries would be not only overcome but also redeemed. As a Marxist, Adorno was more interested in the social reconciliation and criticized German idealism. Yet at the very least, the social reconciliation he envisaged relied on the metaphysical weight of the idealist program for its potency and power. Adorno drew upon the promise or pathos, as one will, of the sense of homecoming contained in the idealist program and assigned it instead to an ideal of social reconciliation.
Hindemith and Adorno, then, both conceived of music as a symbol for a social utopia. Neither believed this utopia imminent, but they assigned music a role in some progress toward it. However, they differed diametrically on how the music actually conveyed its image of utopia. While both would have objected to the distinction as outmoded, one can describe Hindemith’s image as one of “consonance” and Adorno’s as one of “dissonance.” In Hindemith’s aesthetics, music should portray what is possible, a positive image toward which society should strive. In Adorno’s aesthetics, music should depict a picture of what currently exists, a negative image of what society should move beyond, and, through the honesty of this image, hold out the promise of a better world.
In order to assign counterpoint its utopian function, Adorno and Hindemith each drew upon argumentative strategies that idealized labor and assigned it a constitutive role in the human effort to change the world. Hindemith spoke often of the value of mental effort, of willed action. Adorno, on the other hand, insisted time and again on the rights of the unconscious in the creation of qualitative musical works.
Taking up the mantle of the historical musicologist in A Composer’s World, Hindemith described two “philosophical approaches” to music that he considered useful, an Augustinian approach and a Boethian one. The best music would answer the demands of both, though listeners could mix and match to preference. Both involved the activity of the mind in the practice of music. In the Augustinian model, the musician, whether composer, performer, or listener, uses music as a ladder toward spiritual refinement. As Hindemith wrote,
music has to be converted into moral power. We receive its sounds and forms, but they remain meaningless unless we include them in our own mental activity and use their fermenting quality to turn our soul towards everything noble, superhuman, and ideal. It is our own mind that brings about this conversion.49
As mental activity was the chief component of the Augustinian approach, Hindemith located moral effects in acts of reception rather than in any specific style of music, contrapuntal or otherwise. He was open to the possibility that “the highest moral effect could be achieved with music of lowest technical quality, [though] we may assume that music of high quality will at least not be felt to disturb the moral effect.”50 As a result, Hindemith showed an interest in a variety of musical types, from simple Gebrauchsmusik for lay musicians all the way up to complex serial works. “There are many methods of creating, distributing, and receiving music, none of which must be excluded from its [a music philosophy’s] theses so long as the slightest effort towards stimulating the receiving mind into moral activity is perceptible.”51 Here, Hindemith fitted august philosophical credentials to his own long cherished interest in a wide variety of musical activities, including but not limited to amateur music making. The moral effect of music arose from the combination of a practice and goals: an active involvement in music with the goals of personal balance, well-being, and social harmony. In the Augustinian approach, contrapuntal styles and constructions had no special priority.
Although he saw the potential for any music to be useful in the quest for inner and outer harmony, Hindemith also believed that certain types of music could have especially beneficial effects. Turning to Boethius, he reversed the tables.
The first sentence in Boethius’ work can be regarded as the principal thesis of his philosophy. It says: “Music is a part of our human nature; it has the power either to improve or to debase our character.” In the relationship of music and the human mind the position of forces has now changed: music has become the active partner; our mind is a passive receiver and is impressed and influenced by the power music exerts.52
But Hindemith did not proceed, at least directly, to sort out good from bad styles, contrapuntal from homophonic. As a champion of both amateur and new music, if not necessarily of the amateur or new music he heard around him, he tried to be open to all approaches to composition. All the same, he believed that some approaches were dead ends. To reprimand his contemporaries without making outright normative pronouncements, he altered the classical and Boethian theory of ethos or ethical affect. He located music’s ethical power in its harmony, broadly construed, not in the characteristics of different modes. The effect of music lay in its power to engage listeners in an experience of personal harmony and well-being. Boethius, by contrast, gave more room to the specific affective powers of modes: “Nothing is more characteristic of human nature than to be soothed by sweet modes and disturbed by their opposites.”53 While Boethius did transmit theories both of harmony and of modal ethos, Hindemith showed little interest in the principle of mode or its descendents. Even aside from his insistence that the distinction between major and minor was not an essential feature of music, he had his reasons. By focusing on the ineffable category of “harmony,” he avoided writing concrete technical norms into the foundations of his poetics. Works were good if they instilled harmony. Second, he was suspicious of any music that acted directly upon the emotions of the listener. Hindemith’s “Boethian” listeners may have been passive to some degree, but they were certainly less so that the fabled soldiers of antiquity marched off to battle to sounds of a martial mode. With the sounds of harmony, Hindemith aimed for subtler transformations of human character. The Boethian agency of the music left plenty of room and even primacy to the Augustinian activity of the listener. The foundation of both philosophical models was a type of mental activity in the listener, not prescriptions or proscriptions on specific musical procedures or styles. Thus, he censored music that did not achieve the moral goals he set before musicians, rather than music that did not adhere to the technical foundations he developed in the Craft of Musical Composition.
To meet his ethical standards, this mental activity needed to have a strong conscious component. Hindemith associated the best musical activity with a balance of mind and body that yet left the conscious part of the human psyche firmly in control. On one hand, he noted that “we need not go so far in castigating ourselves as some purists do, who feel they are dwelling in mud and sin if occasionally and unexpectedly a phrase in their carefully selected musical fare has a plainly pleasant effect on their recondite souls.”54 On the other hand, he insisted that “We must remain the masters.”55 Musical harmony served as an aid in a quite traditional battle of mind over body.
Although effort was essential to both his own musical tastes and to his conception of the utopian potential of music, Hindemith did not apply it to one part of the compositional process essential to Adorno. While Hindemith saw labor primarily in the realization and reception of artworks, the most important part of the process, the composer’s “vision,” was a sudden flash in which he or she saw a work as a constellation of forces. “If we cannot, in the flash of a single moment, see a composition in its absolute entirety, with every pertinent detail in its proper place, we are not genuine creators.”56 The moment of inspiration was a “gift of seeing” and it arrived effortlessly.57 In sharp contrast, Adorno attributed great importance to a type of work involved in intuition and inspiration. Because composers worked internally through their experiences with their world, in the subconscious so to speak, they could write music that, if it followed a subjective urge, could register not just their personal feelings but also the general experiences of their society.
More than any other discipline, Adorno argued, counterpoint allowed this subconscious labor to manifest itself in a productive manner for new music. The primacy of the discipline stood on a few premises about the way that composers express themselves in musical works. They can be summarized as follows. The relative freedom of the individual is related both to individual lines within the composition (to parts within the whole) and to the manner that notes are woven together, and ultimately to the integrity of the composition itself (to the various structures, all the way up to the whole itself). On one hand, the individual line or gesture represents some subjective impulse. “ To put it crudely, we might say that counterpoint holds fast to the idea of the songlike melody … and thereby to the idea of the sovereign subject.”58 On the other hand, the diverse musical forms in which gestures are woven together also reflect the inner recesses of the individual.
The most hidden, most fleeting impulses of the human subject that a composition tries to capture contain general concepts of musical coherence, in sublimated form and transformed beyond all recognition. Only because of them do ephemeral subjective impulses acquire any meaning; only through them are such impulses able to participate in a comprehensive framework that they themselves help to create.59
The “ephemeral subjective impulses,” which register themselves in part as minute musical gestures, gain philosophical import as the composer searches to give them form. Thus, if the expressive quality of a work always depends on the individual line (the part), it finds its more significant formulation as these lines are combined together into larger constellations of parts. As composers should not rely on harmonic conventions to make an integrated work, they must rely on an intuitive sense of coherence to make one that at least proceeded logically. And as composers draw upon their intuitions in the process of putting together tones into logical structures, they unavoidably and unconsciously draw upon forms of expression and experience deeply embedded in their subconscious, experiences that define the individual as part of a particular culture at a particular moment in history. For this reason, historical and social forces inform the composer’s choice of musical structures. In a characteristically apodictic phrase, Adorno laconically noted that “every musical language contains the entire history of music and ultimately the whole of society.”60
There are two ways to explain the inner links between individuals and their times, and it is not entirely clear to which Adorno adheres. The link may lie in a mystical common spirit that joins together all. For Hegel, the “spirit” that ran through history was ultimately divine, and it worked itself out in the minds and thoughts of human individuals. Alternatively, one may explain the link as a foundational intersubjective body of experience, the collective results of mental labor that constantly goes on as individuals interact with each other and with their world. To wit, an artist subconsciously engages with the shocks and pleasures of the known and the unknown, and must constantly integrate these experiences into his or her private sense of self. Insofar as all people within a particular culture will undergo a similar process, they will develop private senses of selves that have some commonalities with that of the artist. In this case, to speak of spirit is to use a shorthand for collective experience within a particular culture. This second explanation punctures the idealist connotations of spirit, but it is also one that is more convincing today. In any case, either type of “spirit” depends upon subliminal mental activity. And in both cases, it is the inner mental activity of the composer that allows musical form to register cultural truths.
No less than Hindemith, then, Adorno appealed to a principle of labor to support his preference for contrapuntal music. But where Hindemith envisaged easy gifts of inspiration preceded by hard training and followed by hard but pleasurable work, Adorno emphasized a labor of the unconscious, accompanied before and after by work.
Despite their differences in matters of metaphysics and labor, the two writers championed a single type of music, one that combines a quality of developmental process with a density of local events. It was a style that was familiar to them. As so often in several centuries of German historiography, the two both looked back to Bach as a particularly important model or antecedent for this stylistic ideal. In the course of the essay on counterpoint, Adorno invoked the composer as a point of comparison and as a point of departure for later developments. Hindemith showed his own sense of affinity in the lecture and essay, “Johann Sebastian Bach: Ein verpflichtendes Erbe” (Johann Sebastian Bach: Heritage and Obligation, 1950).61 The processuality and the density of counterpoint suited both writers’ notions of the utopian potential and labor involved in music.
Counterpoint fits Hindemith’s demand for mental activity because it asks for close attention to the progress of multiple themes, lines, or motives. The listener needs attention to synthesize both the simultaneous events and the successive moments. Not only are there many things to listen to at once, but there are few signposts, such as periodic structures or cadential articulations, to point the way forward. There is a payoff for this effort, of course. If listeners actively attend to the musical process, they lose themselves in the play of tones. While all music allows this potentially pleasurable sense of communion with a tonal world, counterpoint offers a particular type of evanescence. As the multiplicity of events and the amplitude of the developmental process flirt with the boundaries of human comprehension, the listener feels both overwhelmed and exhilarated. The experience is sublime.
While Hindemith did draw upon the alternatives to counterpoint — the paratactic concatenations of well-defined rhythmic units (as found, for instance, in Sammartini), or the hypotactic organization of phrases into periods (as in the works of Mozart) — the processual quality of counterpoint was particularly important to him. This quality is evident from a passage where he attributed to past theorists and practical musicians a “basic misconception.” While he, like they, based his theory on the physical properties of individual intervals and chords, he believed that their approach had inhibited the musical flow. He argued that
music which is entirely dependent, for its effects, on the movement of sound, was always dealt with in static terms. Music was not understood as a flowing medium, but as an assemblage of numerous individual sounds. To be sure, the understanding of single harmonies (intervals or chords) is founded on their isolated, noncollaborative harmonic qualities, but single harmonies do not cause musical effects; they must progress and thus produce the typical musical impression of streaming, of traversing spatial and temporal distances.62
His words say more about his own musical aesthetics than about the problems of past theory. Metaphors of aquatic and electric currents speckle Hindemith’s prose and they reflect his interest in process. With lines spun out over pieces, he pursued tight connections between temporal points, connections that were stronger than paratactic metric units and hypotactic periodic hierarchies.
He achieved these tight connections in his own music through the technical precepts taught in his Craft of Musical Composition. Tonality still defined goals, though he left it bereft of both major-minor duality and the priority of tonic, subdominant, and dominant. By expanding the framework of tonality in this way, he weakened its articulating power. A variety of harmonic and melodic principles stepped in to control the sense of motion between the goals: the two-voice framework, the harmonic degree progression, harmonic fluctuation, the melody degree progression, and the step progression. While he did not think rhythm unimportant, he left it largely untheorized and practiced a great flexibility in both rhythm and meter. Thus, because he expanded the range of tonal movements by basing his version of tonality on the chromatic scale, and treated rhythm and meter with great plasticity, the linear or “contrapuntal” components of his theory, especially the two-voice framework, the melodic degree progression, and the step progression assumed great importance in his music and in his theory. The linear component can be sensed in the analyses that Hindemith appended to the first volume of the Craft. Like Schenker, Hindemith reduced works to linear and harmonic currents, leaving aside rhythm and meter. While he intended these analyses as demonstration pieces of his theory rather than as analyses per se — he did assign rhythm a central place in his quasi-phenomenological analysis of Bartók’s Sixth String Quartet — they still show the central place that linear processes had in his musical thought.63
As Adorno rooted his approach to musical technique principally in a psychological process (as opposed to a physical substrate, as Hindemith proposed), he tended to depict counterpoint less as a specific technical procedure or style than as a highly generalized musical principle. The individual gesture is integrated into some larger structure without it losing its primordial expressive content, or, in other words, the part retains its autonomy even as it is integrated into a whole. As positive negation, counterpoint was “the negation and affirmation of the voice to which it is added.” The formulation does capture the multiplicity of simultaneous processes (motivic or linear) that comprise most approaches to counterpoint, as well as the sense of conflict that Adorno valued. It does so, however, at a level of generality in which almost any complex music can be described as “contrapuntal.” In 1965, Diether de la Motte noted that composers and theorists were using the term so promiscuously that it threatened to become useless as a theoretical concept.64 Adorno’s definition probably encouraged this overextension of the term. The generality is partly due to his rejection of harmonic conventions, an essential feature of counterpoint until the twentieth century. As he did not allow any norm to regulate the relationship between lines, he was left solely with the composer’s intuition as the control. While harmonic norms were “no longer constitutive,” “anything that makes harmonic nonsense must not be allowed to stand; the harmonic flow must not come to a halt or glide forward automatically, it must not make unmotivated leaps, and nothing must sound ‘wrong’ in a sense immediately familiar to the composer’s ear.”65 By robbing counterpoint of its normative controls on harmonic simultaneities, Adorno transformed it from a precise technique into a general principle. His definition of counterpoint derives much from the philosophical import assigned to this variety of “positive negation.” The individual gesture (the voice) registers primordial subjective impulses that need to be “negated” by some larger structural formation, while at the same time this negation allows the individual voice to take on its own full significance. This quite precise philosophical interpretation of counterpoint as “positive negation” is not wholly convincing, at least as a general description. It presents counterpoint primarily from the perspective of the part (as individual lines added to each other) rather than the whole (as a complex of differentiated voices). However, it does fit the relationship of Hauptstimme and Nebenstimme in much of Schoenberg’s oeuvre, the model for Adorno’s ideas. For instance, the individual lines at figure 3 in Schoenberg’s Orchestral Piece, Op. 16, No. 2 (cited by Adorno) do seem to register fragmentary gestures, gestures whose full import only can be felt when they enter into the dialogue of parts and the process of developing variation.
If it lacks specifics, the formula “positive negation” does capture general musical qualities of density, development, and process. By focusing on the primacy of the individual line or gesture, Adorno advocated a musical style in which the part had high autonomy within the whole. Individual moments and gestures — the highly expressive musical lines of Schoenberg’s works — do not vanish into larger structures (periodic phrases) but rather maintain their potentiality as musical prose. As the gestures do not fall into repeated patterns (such as two- or four-bar phrases) or tonal formulas, they rather seem to develop gradually. In addition, because the gestures interact, often antagonistically, the musical texture has a motivic complexity that registers itself as a sounding image of effort. “From the outset [Schoenberg] was guided by the unconscious knowledge that in works of art above all, unity can be made substantial only as the result of a struggle; and only if it does not dourly assert itself, and run on automatically, without any countervailing resistance, as in motoric music.”66 (Without being named, Hindemith served here as a foil to Schoenberg, though Hindemith also preferred music that resisted easy reception.)
Both Hindemith and Adorno, then, favored a developmental, evolutionary texture: the “prosaic” developmental process (in lines or of motives) was more important than “poetic” patterns of repetition (harmonic or metric), and the density of texture required the mental effort of the listener. Hindemith emphasized the flow, but still demanded a certain weight of texture that would draw the listener into the tonal play. Adorno, on the other hand, privileged the density but still asked that the music have a sense of logical continuity. While Hindemith stressed large-scale contrapuntal movement (through degree and step progressions, and the two-voice framework), and Adorno focused on local motivic interactions, both asked for a type of music that resisted easy reception but repaid concentrated listening with intimations of a better world. They departed from distant premises, Hindemith from the conscious but pleasurable efforts of the composer and listener, and Adorno from the subconscious and potentially uncomfortable workings of an individual mind in contact or conflict with its culture. They arrived at a similar point.
Hindemith and Adorno accorded to counterpoint, variously construed, a special role in achieving the full potential of music. They both pursued a metaphysics of counterpoint that differed from the broader category of the metaphysics of harmony. Hindemith drew upon a mathematical-physical explanation of his material linked above all to harmony, and Adorno upon a linguistic one traditionally linked to melody. Both however emphasized the element of labor, conscious or unconscious, and it is this element that delineates the metaphysics of counterpoint as a subset of the metaphysics of harmony.
While the two writers stood at opposite ends of the music-political spectrum during the 1950s, their statements on music and counterpoint delineate one particular tradition of absolute music. In their particular tradition, music is accorded some transcendent status through an appeal to some combination of physical and linguistic ideals of metaphysics. Labor is considered a good, as the work ethic is turned to both pleasurable and edifying ends. And a musical work is sought that engages the listener in the play of tones through developmental process and dense texture. Most importantly, the practices of making music have as their goal a better world, held sonically present in the musical work. Of course, contrapuntal music has served many other functions and uses as well, both positive and negative. In both drawing room and concert hall, it has served as entertainment and as a means of sociability. It has also served as a convenient carrier for prejudice and partiality. After all, music can serve many purposes and have many meanings.
Metaphysics are neither a necessary accompaniment to contrapuntal music, nor linked solely to contrapuntal music, nor the sole significance that this music has. They certainly cannot be accorded full conviction. Yet through their invocation of far-reaching principles, Hindemith and Adorno defined and defended some of the central reasons that they and those before them found value and meaning in music. To ignore the metaphysics of music would be to impoverish the practice of making music.