Any study of the relationship between Adorno’s aesthetics and the postwar musical avant-garde has to function on two complementary levels: (1) to establish the range and nature of Adorno’s influence on composers, and (2) to consider the question whether his encounter with the principles of serialism and indeterminacy might have engendered in Adorno ideas with implications, not only for his writings explicitly on music, but also for his Aesthetic Theory, the crowning achievement of his intellectual trajectory in the realm of art.
To address the first problem leads to an approach common to the historiography of any artistic genre: namely, to determine the moments of intersection among different temporal trajectories or historical structures, contemporary with each other but with their own dynamic. Adorno’s impact has been measured in divergent terms: either as an apologist for the Second Viennese School (and thus refractory to those trends which sought to transcend it), or as the theorist of the new, whose writings on Schoenberg formed the basis for the more radical trends which were to follow. Often commentators link Adorno’s writings to those of composers as if they were entities of the same kind, unaware of the difference between philosophical aesthetics and musical poetics; this misses out on the fact that the problem to be studied is represented by musical thought manifested primarily in compositions. Thus, the real counterpart to Adorno’s aesthetic assertions is represented not by composers’ writings on the same subjects, but rather by the philosophical horizon outlined by the technical structures of their works. This hermeneutic procedure runs into obstacles, however, in the current state of studies on serial and aleatoric music, which (despite marked progress in recent decades) is still neither capable of tracing a line of demarcation between explicit and actual poetics, nor of plausibly determining the pillars of avant-garde aesthetics. Conscious of these difficulties, I shall restrict myself to reconstructing the stages of the relationship between Adorno and the leading representatives of the musical avant-garde, reducing the critical/normative aspect to brief notes.
In contrast, the second issue can be addressed more fundamentally. Adorno’s philosophy of music can certainly be studied in terms of its internal evolution; to advance hypotheses as to the formative experiences of its evolution almost goes without saying. By limiting the argument to certain basic concepts, I shall attempt to demonstrate that Adorno’s encounter with the musical avant-garde determined the formulation of important parts of Aesthetic Theory, especially many of the points on which the book distanced itself from traditional aesthetics and acquired a continuing vitality.
In November 1949, Adorno ended his American exile and decided to return to Germany so as to contribute his organizational, educational, and academic energy to rebuilding the Frankfurt Institute for Social Research. On his return voyage he stopped in Paris where he met several friends, among them René Leibowitz with whom he had been in correspondence for about three years. The preceding summer Leibowitz had given courses for the first time at the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik in Darmstadt, arousing enormous interest. Together with the books which he published in those years, these lectures made a fundamental contribution to the reception of the Second Viennese School, a process of assimilation which had been hampered in Europe by the predominance of neoclassicist aesthetics and, in political terms, by the discrimination on the part of fascist and soviet dictatorships.2 Leibowitz saw in Adorno a kindred spirit with whom he shared roots in the world of Expressionism, an attraction toward philosophical problems, and (on a personal level) the experience of emigration. Leibowitz’s recommendation to the director of the Ferienkurse, Wolfgang Steinecke, had an immediate effect.3 Adorno was invited to give the opening speech of the Kranichsteiner Musikgesellschaft (the German section of the International Society for Contemporary Music, ISCM), and then to participate in the 1950 Ferienkurse with a course titled “Criteria of New Music” (“Kriterien der neuen Musik”).4
For Adorno, as for many other intellectuals who had shared his fate, the return from exile represented an occasion to reforge the links with those living and free strains of German culture which had been broken with the installation of the Nazi regime. Darmstadt as an institution, that is, those Ferienkurse which had had the adjective “international” added to their name a few years before, seemed like one of the most promising places to regain lost ground and open a vision of a more hopeful future. It is thus no surprise that, upon accepting Steinecke’s invitation, Adorno was to focus on those pieces which united technical quality with innovation. He proffered analyses of pieces in different styles so as to differentiate Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Bartók, and early Stravinsky as examples of a coherent and radical style of composing as opposed to “bad modernism,” whose most eloquent representatives included Paul von Klenau, Egon Wellesz, Werner Egk, and Hermann Reutter.5
In many respects, the 1950 edition represents a change in the Ferienkurse: Ernst Krenek and Edgard Varèse taught composition, Robert Beyer and Werner Meyer-Eppler gave a seminar on the electronic production of sound, and, for the first time, works were heard in which the serial technique was extended and differentiated: Bruno Maderna’s Composizione II and Luigi Nono’s Variazioni canoniche sulla serie dell’op. 41 di Arnold Schönberg. From the surviving sources it can be deduced that Adorno gave a seminar on musical criticism, but it is unclear whether he completely realized his project of discussing criteria of quality or whether he limited himself to illustrating the main points of the Philosophy of New Music, a book which had just been published and which had an immediate impact on European musicians.6
In 1951, the problems raised by the electronic production of sound led Steinecke to program a wide-ranging conference on the relationship between music and technology. Participants included Beyer, Meyer-Eppler, Friedrich Trautwein, Ernst Grunert, Pierre Schaeffer, and Herbert Eimert.7 In this context Adorno gave a talk on “Musik, Technik und Gesellschaft” (Music, Technique, and Society), in which he referred to American studies of music in radio broadcasts, and expounded upon his idea of the “technical work of art” which would play an important role in his critique of serial music.8 In addition, he participated in the “Second International Congress of Twelve-Tone Music” with a talk on Webern and took over the leadership of the “Arbeitsgemeinschaft für freie Komposition” in place of Schoenberg, who had to decline Steinecke’s invitation because of the gradual worsening of his health. The discussions in this seminar — especially those following a partial performance of Karel Goeyvaerts’ Sonata for Two Pianos by the composer and Karlheinz Stockhausen — stand at the origin of the hard line on serial thought which Adorno initially took. Critical theory, as developed by Adorno and Horkheimer at the time of the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung, rejected the idea that sociologists, philosophers, and art critics are neutral observers analyzing and judging processes outside of them.9 The kind of musical criticism that Adorno supported and had personified in the 1920s is closely bound to an idea of the intellectual who interacts with social reality; it is an activity whose subject is an integral part of events and who, by the process of criticism, contributes dialectically to changing the situation. Faced with the proposition of a global organization of sonic material by means of mathematical control — an idea whose radicalism far surpassed all the compositional innovations of the preceding half-century — Adorno could not remain indifferent. His reply was not long in coming and took the concrete form of a heated polemic that diagnosed the aging of new music.10
In the mid-1950s Adorno played a dual role in the institutions formed around the musical avant-garde; he was a passionate defender of the Second Viennese School and an attentive if critical observer of the most recent developments. His talks at the Ferienkurse are fully comprehensible only if we take into account the double bind in which the Second Viennese School seemed caught: the larger public rejected it no less than in the obscure past (giving only partially different reasons), while the avant-garde seemed to recognize its value only as a first step in a historical process which had wound up transcending it. In 1954 Adorno gave a seminar on “New Music and Interpretation” together with two representatives of the Second Viennese School, Rudolf Kolisch and Eduard Steuermann. In 1955 he devoted his lectures to a topic which must have seemed marginal to serial composers interested in probing the latent possibilities of twelve-tone technique: “Early Schoenberg.” The topic of the 1956 lectures, “Schoenberg’s Counterpoint,” was explicitly chosen as a corrective to the idea of a polyphony of structures which had gained ground after the first phase of integral serialism. Only in 1957 did Adorno return to the idea of drawing up a balance sheet of the current situation, attempting to test the problems raised by the growth and differentiation of serial thought.11
In the recent evolution of musical language, ill-suited to the concept of progress formulated in the Philosophy of New Music, Webern’s twelve-tone works — precisely those in which Adorno had suspected “row fetishism” — had leapt to the center of general interest, reshaping the historical role of the works of Schoenberg, Berg, Bartók, Hindemith, and Stravinsky.12 Only the ideas of formal openness, which some discerned in the works of Debussy’s last decade, seemed to keep step with the insistent rhythm of progress.13 For the 1957 talks, Adorno returned to the same title, “Criteria of New Music,” which Steinecke had proposed to him in 1950. His intention was to discuss the general principles of composition, criticizing the contradictions and dead ends that he perceived in current practice. But in the seven years which had passed between the two cycles of talks with the same title, musical thought had undergone profound changes. Multidimensional serialism had left its experimental stage behind, producing masterworks like Maderna’s String Quartet, Boulez’s Le marteau sans maître, Nono’s Il canto sospeso, and Stockhausen’s Gruppen — works which had received an enthusiastic reception and which were establishing themselves as reference points for compositional theory and practice. After asking Boulez, Maderna, and Tudor to lead an “Arbeitsgemeinschaft Komposition und Interpretation” (Workshop on Composition and Interpretation) in 1956, Steinecke decided to give ample space in 1957 to a number of figures in their thirties, promoting them to the rank of composition teachers. Nono presented a detailed analysis of Schoenberg’s Variations for Orchestra, op. 31, in which he identified important precursors of current techniques; Pousseur examined pieces by Webern from different periods, showing not only the unity of the composer’s thought but also the premonitory signs of a profound change in the conception of composition, performance, and hearing; Stockhausen gave a seminar on “Zeitkomposition” clarifying major aspects of his article “… wie die Zeit vergeht …” (… How Time Passes …), which had just appeared in die Reihe; and Boulez, who could not come for health reasons, sent the text of “Alea” to be read by Heinz-Klaus Metzger.14 In this kind of ferment, Adorno’s appeal not to confuse “objective construction” with “aesthetic coherence,” his warnings against falling victim to a positivist infantilism, and his invectives against empty “shock effects” degenerating into “meaninglessness,” seemed to many composers to be abstruse arguments or at least manifestations of a nostalgia for a phase of musical modernism which could hardly find an echo in contemporary perception.15
During these years Adorno was present on two fronts in which compositional issues intersected with politics: socialist realism (whose principles were formulated for music at the 1948 Second International Congress of Composers and Music Critics in Prague), and music education.16 The lowest common denominator of these polemics is the idea that controlled societies knew no bounds to their power, and that free artistic expression would encounter resistance within totalitarian systems as well as within capitalist democracies.
The publication of an article by Harry Goldschmidt on music and progress generated a lengthy correspondence between Adorno and Stockhausen, which revealed the arguments that would animate the radio debate “Widerstand gegen die neue Musik” (“Resistance against the New Music”).17 Goldschmidt, who had studied musicology in Bern, moved after the war to East Berlin, where he was active as a musicologist and critic. The article which provoked Adorno and Stockhausen’s irritation (they were directly cited) was published in a journal printed in Munich and financially supported by the communist regime, functioning as a propaganda tool in West Germany.18 It represented one of the most explicit polemics against the musical avant-garde to be formulated within socialist realism. Boulez, Nono, and Stockhausen were portrayed as the supporters of an artistic progress based on the emphasis on technology and the cutting of ties to social context, as the “existentielle Geworfenheit des ratlosen Bürgers” (the existential anxiety of the helpless citizen).19 For Goldschmidt, Gesang der Jünglinge and Il canto sospeso represented the two sides of an antirealism which negated the possibility of art’s influence on social structures.20 Stockhausen’s and Nono’s fragmentation of the texts, even if procedurally different, was interpreted as a technical–compositional alibi for neutralizing the conflicts present in both the Old Testament parable and in the letters of the condemned members of the European Resistance. Stockhausen was portrayed as arriving at a cosmic spirituality, and Nono at an intellectualizing esotericism. The anger that Goldschmidt’s essay provoked in Stockhausen and Adorno is documented in their letters and reflects the political tension that preceded the construction of the Berlin Wall. Few traces of the original motivation are to be found in the radio debate which, at Adorno’s suggestion, concentrated on the “essential questions”: the responsibility of artists, the goals of their production, and the expectations of musical consumers and the public sphere.21
The difficulty of understanding experimental music and the prejudices of the listening public are central elements, as well, in the controversy between Adorno and Erich Doflein. Adorno’s long correspondence with Doflein, a professor of music education at the Musikhochschule of Freiburg im Breisgau, began with the preparations for a discussion broadcast by the Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk in 1951.22 Here Adorno turned his critique to the category of historicism, one which, at that time, was dominant in various spheres of German musical life: in concert organization outside the major institutions, in music education, in the “objectivist” style of sacred and choral music as well as Jugendmusik and Hausmusik, and not least in academic musicology. Some of the most influential university professors — Hans Mersmann, Walter Wiora, Siegfried Borris, and Hermann Erpf — were also the leading figures at the meetings of the Institut für Neue Musik und Musikerziehung, the other institution in Darmstadt concerned with contemporary music. Doflein asked for Adorno’s participation at one of these conventions in 1952. Adorno’s criticism of the figure of the “Musikant” provoked misunderstanding and disdain among the participants; for his own part, Adorno had occasion to confirm that aspects of fascist ideology persisted in the world of music education, now linked to Heidegger’s “jargon of authenticity.”
Doflein was alone in seeking a dialogue with Adorno and worked to get him an invitation to the 1954 meeting. On this occasion the philosopher presented his theses on music education, to which Doflein responded the following year with a talk on gains and losses in musical history.23 Thus the controversy moved away from the sociological and political ground of its origin, turning to basic questions of contemporary composition and its transmission. Doflein’s reading of historical process ended up by tracing a theory of musical pluralism which anticipates in many respects the debates on postmodernism thirty years later. Doflein maintained that the evolution of bourgeois music was marked by the growing presence of the “obbligato style,” a process which had forced the gradual elimination of those flexible compositional elements previously defined in performance. From the compositional point of view, the absolutism of the “obbligato style” created an ever more pressing need to justify every note of a piece. Doflein thus agreed with the idea of a progressive rationalization of music which Adorno had formulated, using Max Weber as a point of departure. The process leading from the “obbligato style” to the integration of all parameters of a composition syncronically correlated with the progress of technology and of civilization; it was thus inevitable in a certain way. On the other hand, these “profits” found a counterbalance in no less salient “losses.” These had to do above all with the dimension of play — and it was no accident that Doflein perceived a more than temporal coincidence between Huizinga’s Homo ludens and Orff’s Carmina Burana. Pluralism of genre and style, the coexistence of recuperating the past and experimenting with a new musical language, was thus seen as an achievement of the contemporary age. This was a privileged moment in musical history, since the multiple constitution of sensibility and intellect, freed from the ideological domination of the “obbligato style” could thus fully manifest itself.
Doflein restated this problem when he spoke at the end of the second of four talks which Adorno dedicated to the criteria of new music during the 1957 Ferienkurse.24 In his reply, Adorno underscored the fact that aesthetic pluralism (which Herbert Read had already propounded for the visual arts) was unacceptable because it ignored the criterion of quality. The idea of a neutral display of life’s fullness and personal richness belonged to a naïve conception, because such fullness is never expressed abstractly but always in a determined and specific way. For Adorno, it manifests itself as the ability to differentiate itself within the framework of a rigorously prefigured norm. An eloquent example is that of the differences among Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert which made Viennese Classicism sublime; the multiplicity of the contemporary situation was not comparable, but rather socially sanctioned, deriving from the subdivision of musical life into watertight compartments whose products are not commensurable.25 The emergence of personalities of such character and distinctiveness is possible only on the basis of the quality of their production. Still, aesthetic objectivity does not have the same characteristics as that of science or industry, insofar as there is no direct relationship in a composition between the coherence of its construction and its aesthetic quality. Precisely this equation was the one that Adorno deemed the most fragile moment of musical thought at the time.
These lectures on the criteria of contemporary music represent a deepening of the critique of the avant-garde formulated in “The Aging of the New Music” (“Das Altern der Neuen Musik”). Adorno discussed various aspects of this, dwelling above all on the relations between science and music, music and language, expression and construction, means and realization, as well as time and form. Still, the inevitable comparison that the participants drew with the seminars of Pousseur, Stockhausen, and Nono showed that Adorno’s contributions no longer enjoyed the same burning relevance and immediate impact which had characterized his statements in previous years inside and outside the Ferienkurse. The perception of his waning influence may have been the reason for the lack of an invitation in the following two years, a period in which Adorno instead deepened his friendship with Boulez, Metzger, and Stockhausen. After an annoyed refusal of Steinecke’s 1960 invitation, Adorno decided to return to the international composers’ forum in 1961, responding to a request from the director to make a statement about the “music of the present.”26 He did so with a series of talks whose title, “Vers une musique informelle,” showed a more positive attitude, most importantly for the fact that their author had abandoned the hypothesis of a stasis or “aging” of contemporary music.27 The opening passages of these talks show that Adorno’s intent was to contribute to the transition from serial thought to a profoundly different music; for this, he used the heuristic term informel, which had grown up in the figurative arts of the time.28
This turning point had already been widely presaged in the reality of musical life and in the changes in compositional technique. Many consider Cage’s presence at the 1958 Ferienkurse as the fundamental caesura in European music of those years, although the tendencies toward formal openness and to indeterminacy can also be seen as results internal to serial thought. Whether these were direct connections or coincidences, the fact remains that pieces were premiered at Darmstadt in 1959 and 1960 whose salient features are mobility, indeterminacy, and openness: Stockhausen’s Zyklus and Refrain, Bussotti’s Piano Pieces for David Tudor, Kagel’s Transition II, Nono’s Composizione n. 2: Diario polacco ’58, Pousseur’s Répons, and Boulez’s Pli selon pli. These composers (who had become regular teachers at Darmstadt) introduced new themes in their seminars (Stockhausen), proclamed a rupture with the recent past (Nono), or made historicist arguments about serial technique (Boulez).29 This was the context for the talks called “Vers une musique informelle,” stressing their evolutionary tendencies and designing the utopia of a liberated and liberating music. In the trajectory of Adorno’s aesthestics, this text plays a catalyzing role for certain concepts and arguments: the question of the creation of aesthetic meaning, the specific and indeciferable rationality of a work of art, and the tension between expression and construction take on crucial roles, while, at the same time, his criticisms of pseudo-objectivism, mathematical formalism, and the technicalization of the artwork diminish.
Adorno’s discussions with Metzger in the preceding years contributed decisively to the change in his thinking that crystallized in these lectures. The hefty correspondence between the two shows without a doubt how Metzger’s polemical response to Adorno’s theories of aging had in no way jettisoned his attachment to critical theory, and how Adorno’s admiration for the young iconoclast grew from day to day, so much so that Adorno considered him one of the most genuine interpreters of his own thought.30 It was precisely to Metzger (who, together with Stockhausen, had publicly expressed, during the 1960 Ferienkurse, the need for Adorno’s return to Darmstadt) that the philosopher would turn for suggestions of scores and writings that could be considered in relation to the problem of “informal music.” In his response, Metzger designed a detailed constellation whose center was Cage and the idea of the liberation of sound.31 The basic hypothesis linked to this map was that “informal music” had already been realized — in the works of Cage himself, as well as in the works of Wolff, Feldman, Bussotti, Schnebel, and Nam June Paik — and that the only thing lacking was a theory capable of describing it. Metzger mentioned his own essay “John Cage oder Die freigelassene Musik” (“John Cage or The Liberated Music”) as the only effort thus far in such a direction.32 According to Metzger, pointers for comprehending fundamental questions of “informal music” could be found in various essays by Stockhausen, Boulez, Evangelisti, Kagel, and especially in Cage’s Lecture 30’00”.33 The episode about a jukebox which seemed to accompany the movements of swimmers in a distant pool alludes to the possibility of relating processes absolutely foreign to one another. In contrast, Christian Wolff’s observation that, “No matter what we do it ends by being melodic” put forth the idea that the course of history would determine the restoration of musical relationships even in those pieces, like Winter Music, intended to negate them.
It cannot be said that “Vers une musique informelle” is the logical development of Metzger’s suggestions. Nonetheless, various new elements (which in part transcend the criticisms expressed in “The Aging of the New Music” and which presuppose a rectification of certain passages in the Philosophy of New Music) can for the most part be traced back to the exchange of ideas with Metzger. In Adorno’s theoretical framework, the concept of liberty occupies a position without precedent. “Informal music” is characterized by its liberation from external form; that is, from the residuum of traditional categories as well as from abstract forms that are invented ad hoc and lack foundation in a genuinely musical language. Thus Adorno creates an imaginary lineage from Schoenberg’s Erwartung and the Six Pieces for Orchestra, op. 16 to Stockhausen’s Gruppen or Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra. The idea of a hidden connection between Schoenberg’s monodrama and Cage’s Concert is also found in the letter by Metzger cited above; however, Adorno did not tire of underlining the fact that recent compositions should be understood only as the symptoms, not as the reality, of “informal music.” In the citation from Beckett affixed to the opening of the essay, “dire cela, sans savoir quoi,” Adorno outlines the utopia of an “antiart,” in which the representation of meaninglessness is transformed not into something positive, but rather into a continual questioning of how a meaningful world might be structured.
The two following lectures at the Ferienkurse, that of the 1965 meeting on form and the 1966 session on the function of timbre, represent further evidence of Adorno’s reception of features found in the avant-garde. Adorno’s approach was still molded by the aesthetics of the Second Viennese School, yet the possibility of further evolution with new emphases and new goals was not only admitted but also thematicized. For instance, when he considered the superimposition of different formal structures as a possible reconciliation of static and dynamic principles, he referred not only to “Mondfleck” from Pierrot lunaire and to the last movement of Berg’s Kammerkonzert, but also to orchestral works by Stockhausen and Boulez.34 As for the question of functional instrumentation under conditions of loose or, in contrast, hyper-differentiated polyphony, it was Ligeti’s Atmosphères which seemed a remarkable experience of subtly articulated music “without sounds.”35 If around 1960 the question of meaning had seemed to be at the core of Adorno’s aesthetic reflections (as evident in the three closely linked essays written almost simultaneously, namely those on “informal music,” on Beckett’s Endgame, and on Hans G. Helms36), now the center of argumentation shifted to the phenomenon of the “Verfransung” (unraveling) of artistic genres, that is, of the exchange of constructive principles among the linguistic, sonic, and plastic arts.37 This is the context for Adorno’s interest in mixed media composers such as Bussotti, Kagel, and Schnebel.
During these years, various composers picked up on the relevant parts of Adorno’s aesthetics in their writings. In the last section of his essay “Metamorphoses of Musical Form” (“Wandlungen der musikalischen Form”), a retrospective of the development of serial technique, Ligeti referred to the idea of the “Pseudomorphose an Malerei” which Adorno had formulated in an important passage in the chapter on Stravinsky in the Philosophy of New Music.38 For Ligeti, both his work with the “Aggregatzustände” (aggregate states) of the musical material (the basis of Apparitions and Artikulation) and the direct production of sound in electronic composition constitute an intensification of the tendency toward spatialization.39 However, what had first seemed neutral or even positive would become, a few years later, an obstacle to be removed. This change in Ligeti’s view was brought about by his reflection on those compositional experiments fundamentally linked to spatialization which he had carried out in the years after his emigration to Western Europe, in which he was probably guided by a deeper and more thoughtful reading of Adorno’s writings. In his 1965 Darmstadt lecture on form, Ligeti began a kind of long-distance dialogue with Adorno. Criticizing the idea of “informal music,” he considered it impossible to establish a relationship between action painting or tachisme and contemporary music, given that the development of the two arts was unequal. Rather, in contemporary music he distinguished phenomena which he called “malgré lui-Formen,” that is, forms which imposed themselves in spite of the combinatory or aleatoric principles designed to neutralize them — exactly the opposite of what Adorno had foreseen with the idea of “informal music.”40
Nonetheless, despite the differences of detail, the basic convergence between Adorno’s aesthetics and Ligeti’s poetics can be reaffirmed. This is evident in the internal discussion leading up to a 1966 Darmstadt conference on musical time, held after the end of the Ferienkurse. Here Adorno made explicit reference to the concept of “vectoriality” which Ligeti had introduced in his essay on form as having a critical function with respect to the loss of directionality common to serial and aleatoric works.41 The moments of greatest accord with Ligeti are likewise those in which the Central European roots of Adorno’s thought become tangible, moments in which the points of coincidence with Cage’s poetics seem like a transitory episode in a theory whose internal drive aims at unification and reconciliation.
A wide-ranging discussion among German-language composers had developed around the concept of musical material whose implicit point of departure was the Philosophy of New Music, and probably also “Vers une musique informelle.” Their acceptance of the critique of the idea of musical material untouched by history42 was the premise for a notable extension of this idea, which, for Dieter Schnebel, included the treatment of the instruments and the behavior of the players, while for Helmut Lachenmann it was defined by the ever-varying relationship between sonic material and its temporal organization.43 During the 1960s, personal contacts between Adorno and composers multiplied with his frequent participation in round tables and festivals. In 1966, he became an honorary member of the association Nuova Consonanza44 in Rome and in 1967 he attended the Palermo Settimane internazionali di nuova musica. Italy was one of the countries in which Adorno’s ideas had their widest diffusion, partly a result of the translations of Philosophy of New Music and Dissonanzen. Sylvano Bussotti, Franco Donatoni, Franco Evangelisti, Giacomo Manzoni, and Camillo Togni were among the composers who assimilated the philosopher’s ideas.
Adorno’s relationship with Boulez, however, would come to have the deepest influence on the philosopher’s thinking. During the Darmstadt Ferienkurse of 1963, the composer held a seminar with the title “Necessité d’une orientation ésthetique,” which was intended as integration and complement to the lectures on compositional techniques of 1960; this seminar originated a text whose first half was published in the Festschrift for Adorno’s sixtieth birthday.45 This essay represents one of the first and most significant proofs of the changing perspective of the musical avant-garde at the beginning of the 1960s; at the same time, it can be seen as a reaction (even if indirect) to Adorno’s criticisms of the preceding years. Boulez distanced himself from the priority of the technical dimension which had been legitimized by the theory and practice of serial music. This is especially significant since Adorno had directed a notable part of his criticism precisely at the “technicalization of the work of art.”46 However, rather than condemning it as a simple error of perspective resulting from arbitrariness, Boulez considered it to be an obligatory transition toward a definition of new musical thought. The second part of the essay (not, however, published in the Festschrift) is dedicated to the elaboration of this point. The generation of composers which had grown up during the war had found itself faced with a musical language that had dissolved both technically as well as ideologically; this historical situation had imposed a formalist turn toward “the pure problems of musical language.”47 To exemplify this point, Boulez illustrated the fundamental principles of one of his own compositions: Structures I. The three parts illustrate the flow from automatism (deployed so as to eliminate “any trace of musical heritage”48) toward the progressive reclaiming of an “organic discourse”49 (which differed from the traditional) through the creation of syntactic unities and directional paths. At the beginning of the 1960s, Boulez maintained that the time was ripe to accelerate this process of linguistic recognition, substituting the need to reflect on the aesthetic project for that of technical clarification.
Adorno’s reaction to Boulez’s challenge was immediate, going well beyond his satisfaction in having seen some aspects of his critique of serial poetics accepted by the composer. He cited “Necessité d’une orientation ésthetique” in a prominent passage of the early introduction to the Aesthetic Theory. The task of this introduction (later excluded from the book’s project) was to redefine the status of philosophical reflection on art at a historical moment in which the dissonance between traditional aesthetics and artistic practice was evident. In this context, Boulez’s demands seemed of great import precisely because “aesthetic orientation” could be identified with neither a normative aesthetic nor its “critical counterpart,” a historical-philosophical theory of art.50 The importance of Boulez’s essay was to have envisioned an alternative prospective to the rigid divide between aesthetics and craftsmanship which Schoenberg had laid out, so as to place limits on a speculative and self-referential aesthetics. Between will and action, intention and realization, Boulez inserted the idea of knowledge which presupposes an analysis of the situation of compositional techniques and the definition of the composer’s place in history.
In 1966 Adorno asked Boulez to coproduce a radio program for the Norddeutscher Rundfunk entitled “Avantgarde und Metier.”51 A series of notes arose from these discussions with Boulez which Adorno used to complete the section “Metier” in Aesthetic Theory. 52 This concept entered Adorno’s vocabulary in the mid-1950s, and there is every reason to think that he took it from Boulez. Indeed, in a 1954 article, Boulez related the “young composer’s profession” to his or her simultaneous connection to and distancing from tradition.53 When Adorno transformed it into a primary aesthetic category for contemporary art, it was no accident that he linked it to the gesture of cutting the “umbilical chord of tradition.”54 A chapter is dedicated to métier in a section of the Aesthetic Theory, entitled “Parolen” (Slogans); here it occupies that intermediate place between craftsmanship and aesthetics to which Boulez’s essay on aesthetic orientation had seemed to refer. Adorno returns to this idea once again in the chapter on technique which is largely based on musical questions.55 In this context, métier is advanced as a mediation between mimesis and rationality. Insofar as it is rational, it is transmissable by teaching and reconstructable by analysis, but it has some aspects of intuition in as far as it envelops the artwork like an aura. One could define métier as that which makes technique something different from pure technique. Adorno had already discussed this idea of artistic technique as “second-order” technique in his reading of Boulez’s passages in which the composer dealt with compositional process. Adorno observed that in artistic technique there was no rigid distinction between plan and realization as existed in craft or industrial production. An index of métier was the artist’s critical corrections, sometimes contrary to the original idea, “in the work … the potential presence of the collective” (potentielle Gegenwart des Kollektivs im Werk).56 This was to be distinguished from craftsmanship because it was not the acquisition of prefabricated ideas. As a result of experience, métier thus functions as a control mechanism for sonic quality and formal level, as well as protecting against the fetishism of means, naiveté, and regression to the preartistic sphere.
Adorno’s first essay on serial music, “The Aging of the New Music,” develops for the most part several ideas which he had set out in the Philosophy of New Music, especially those concerning the tendency toward the “integral work” in twelve-tone technique and toward expressionless constructivism in Stravinsky’s Neoclassicism.57 His unsettling encounters with young composers starting with the 1951 Ferienkurse presented Adorno with a paradox. In dedicating themselves unconditionally to twelve-tone technique, Goeyvaerts, Stockhausen, Boulez, Nono, Pousseur, and others showed their awareness of the Second Viennese School’s role in defining twentieth-century musical language. If, on the one hand, this reevaluation seemed a kind of a posteriori compensation for the marginality to which Schoenberg’s circle had been relegated in prewar Europe, on the other hand, it was precisely those aspects of the School which Adorno deemed problematic that these composers emphasized, or else certain specific ideas (the “unity of musical space”) were reinterpreted so idiosyncratically as to distort their original meaning. For Adorno, the leading role that Webern’s twelve-tone works had assumed was confirmation that the Viennese School was understood from an objectivist and formalist perspective; that is, deeply foreign to the intellectual world from which it was born. The acquaintance of the new generation’s works forced a review of these aspects; in this sense, Adorno’s essays of the 1950s can be considered a continuation of the Philosophy of New Music.58 For Adorno, the dialectic of history had fostered a system constraint (Systemzwang) as early as Webern’s op. 24 and 28, and this would become evident and even dominant at the beginning of the 1950s: the musical composition was derived from the row thanks to automatic procedures in which no mediation by the subject was foreseen.
This idea has enjoyed the favor of large and varied fringe areas of the musical public up until today, but it has never been really demonstrated. It is true that some serial pieces were written whose objective was to reach a kind of ground zero of composition. Yet, as Boulez explained with regard to Structures Ia, these were limited cases whose meaning became clear only within the context in which they were situated, not at all to be identified with the primary objective of serial thought.59 An important part of Adorno’s polemic returns to a dichotomy which Ernst Bloch had formulated in the 1930s, namely the opposition between the mathematical and the dialectic fundament of music, postulating a kind of inversion in which mathematics, not dialectics, was to now take on the role of “Organon der Musik.”60 But this argument describes perhaps only a superficial aspect of the debate which led the editors of die Reihe to make an irreverent comparison between passages of “The Aging of the New Music” and statements of the ultraconservative critic Hermann Kotschenreutter.61 The central problem which Adorno attempted to address was that, in rethinking the function and use of serial principles, a hard core was touched, one which no representative of Schoenberg’s school had ever discussed, but which formed the nerve-center of his theory; Adorno defined it as “das Musiksprachliche,” the linguistic dimension of music.62 It is no accident that his first essay on music after “The Aging of the New Music” should represent an examination of the multiple relationships between music and language and that large sections of Aesthetic Theory are dedicated to the linguistic dimension of the arts.63
To propose a comparison, or even to formulate the idea, of an affinity between music and language (an essential, not simply metaphorical affinity) presumes not only clarity regarding the inescapable norms of composition but also regarding the philosophical foundations of verbal language. Here, matters become rather complex, since Adorno’s philosophical writings do not immediately evince a discussion of the foundations of language, and his thought was always recalcitrant to issues of analytic philosophy or the ontological foundation of language. The only sure point of reference in this regard is Benjamin’s “theological” conception of language.64 Yet, to proceed in chronological order, the first step that would lead Adorno to postulate a crisis in the linguistic dimension of music was one of the most important events in postwar Europe: the structural interpretation of Webern.65 Boulez’s statement of 1953 is exemplary:
Only one composer from among the composers of the recent musical epoch was conscious of a new dimension of sound; eliminated the opposition between horizontal and vertical; and viewed the row as nothing else than a means of “structuring a sonic space” in order to make it, as it were, vibrate. That single composer is Webern. Above all, Webern searched for a new pitch structure that was binding: this is indeed the most important problem of our epoch, and only Webern addressed it in contemporary music. For the first time, in fact, the architecture of the work is directly deduced from the row.66
For Adorno, on the other hand, it was precisely in Webern’s twelve-tone technique that the tendency to consider the structuring of musical material as a linguistic configuration became evident, to the detriment of a theory which held fast to the intrinsic affinity of music and language:
These last works attempt to organize the musical-linguistic means so entirely in accordance with the new subject-matter, the twelve-tone rows, that he occasionally comes very close to renouncing the musical material altogether and reducing music to naked processes in the material, to the fate of the rows as such, though admittedly without ever completely sacrificing musical meaning entirely. Recently a group of composers have pursued this direction farther. At their head stands Pierre Boulez, student of Messiaen and Leibowitz, a highly cultured and exceptionally gifted musician, with the highest sense of form and with a power that is communicated even where he disavows subjectivity altogether. 67
In the radio discussion between Metzger and Adorno, which followed the former’s response in die Reihe, Adorno was asked to clarify what he meant by “—musical-linguistic means.” But his reply was rather evasive.68 His essay on the relationship between music and language opens up more problems than it offers solutions; nevertheless, it represents a critical juncture in the evolution of his thought by laying out the premises for the discussion of enigma and the communication of the incommunicable later to be found in Aesthetic Theory. The first part of the essay can be understood as a development of Benjamin’s “theology of language” with the view of applying it to musical aesthetics. The second part considers the ways in which the relationship between music and language had been addressed by compositional production. When Adorno addresses this latter problem, his point of departure is the pre-twelve-tone works of Schoenberg, with their play of two different meanings of the concept of language. Above all, the linguistic dimension is correlated with the search for expressivity whose epiphenomenon is the “emancipation of dissonance.” In this light, Schoenberg is the continuation of a trajectory from Wagner’s Tristan to Strauss’s Elektra, in which dissonance is the historical bearer of expressive elements and seems capable (despite the dissolution of syntactic relationships) of shouldering the burden of the linguistic dimension. Still, Adorno holds that Schoenberg had perceived the transitory nature of this solution which exploits the semantic layers “sedimented” in the musical material. Examples of materials not linked to a historically determined expressive sphere include the quartal chords of the Kammersymphonie: “those extraterritorial chords that had not yet been occupied by musical–linguistic intentions — a kind of musical new-fallen snow in which the subject had not yet left any tracks.”69
Adorno was well aware of the fact that the situation in which the linguistic reconversion of the unexpressive was absolutely exceptional and perhaps unrepeatable. But to define an element as linguistic or nonlinguistic proved to be a move that was fundamentally historical. Between these two spheres, Adorno discerned a dialectic which unfolded in ever-changing ways. If, in twelve-tone music, the constructivist part, that is, the nonlinguistic, seemed predominant, it was also true that Schoenberg had used it in the service of a linguistic operation on a higher level, the “articulation of the whole” (Artikulation des Ganzen).70 With this consideration the argument passes from rhetoric to syntax. The ever-increasing importance which Adorno’s subsequent essays give to the questions of meaning, logical connection, and communication suggests that the syntactic sphere (i.e., the question of the construction of meaning in music) was to become one of his central concerns during the last decade of his life. The moment that I have called “rhetorical,” namely the expressive sphere, would continue to play a role, but it would be more closely connected to issues of phenomenology and to the subject/object dialectic. In contrast, the themes centered around the creation of meaning would begin to travel in an orbit commonly belonging to the philosophy of language; this includes the truth of assertions, the coherence of logical structures, and the norms of interpretation. Adorno seems to be envisioning a philosophy of musical language, or even one of artistic language in general. The distancing from Wittgenstein, evident in Aesthetic Theory, impedes the establishment of a relationship between the two. From Adorno’s writings, it is not evident that he had read Philosophical Investigations, a book focused on the formation and interpretation of meaning which could have contributed interesting suggestions for dealing with the problem. But the reception of late Wittgenstein would also have mandated a revision of the ideas of “truth content,” “enigma,” and “comprehension” which play so fundamental a role in Aesthetic Theory.
Instead, Benjamin’s theological view of language leads Adorno to emphasize the metaphysical aspects of his argument. This occurs in his treatment of semantics: how the nonconceptual discourse of music might refer to an object. The higher level of the linguistic analogy deals with the area that Benjamin had discussed while considering the name; for him, language begins when humans name things and especially when “the spiritual essence of man is communicated to God in the name.”71 Transferring these ideas to the realm of music, Adorno works along the path of secularization: the linguistic gesture of music mimes that impulse with which man seeks to enter into communication with the Supreme Being by means of prayer, as “the human attempt, futile, as always, to name the name itself, not to communicate meanings.”72 Benjamin’s theory is thus contaminated with a pillar of Romantic aesthetics: the idea of music as a nonconceptual language, capable of capturing the absolute even without denoting anything in particular. Thus Adorno obtains a triple result: (1) he resolves the issue of referentiality by rescuing music from both the compensatory function given to it in bourgeois society and from the task of forming a revolutionary consciousness prescribed by communist ideology; (2) he saves music from the reified communication typical of technological and mass-media capitalism; and (3) he brings aesthetics into play, which works not as a decoder of the signified but as the linguistic articulation of the “force field” outlined in the composition; this articulation is meaning itself. The issues of “how” and “what” in the work of art begin to mix.
Beckett’s fragment “dire cela, sans savoir quoi” shows how the enigma also regards the subject who literally “unknowingly” produces that which is being produced.73 From the point of view of artistic consumption, this paradox is found in the tension between understanding and nonunderstanding: “The afterlife of artworks, their reception as an aspect of their own history, transpires between a do-not-let-yourself-be-understood and a wanting-to-be-understood; this tension is the atmosphere inhabited by art.”74 In two essays from 1963 and 1966, Adorno extensively considered the problem of understanding new music.75 While the first approached it from the perspective of listening and of understanding a music that was outside convention, the second underscored its social implications. The progressive distancing from a paralinguistic logic is viewed as the obligatory path for composers so as to confront the leveling of tonal language which was the premise of music’s com-modification. The dialectic of universal and particular, once dissolved, was to be reconstructed case by case within the compositions themselves, and this would create friction which would reverberate on the level of reception. In these two essays, Adorno barely touches the wider realm of the problem to which the partial factors of perceptive difficulty and hermeticism can be traced, and reserves a wider treatment for the context of aesthetics. Indeed, it seems that not only serial and atonal music, but also the theater of the absurd and informal painting had raised the category of meaninglessness to the level of a component of communicative structures. At the end point of the process of modernity, whence Adorno would argue in the 1960s, one of the fundamental problems of modern art appears incontrovertible, all the more so as it was artistic production itself to place it on the order of the day. This core problem is circumscribed by the term enigma character (Rätselcharakter).76
Contemplating the difficulties of constructing meaning while distanced from the linguistic dimension of music provoked in Adorno reflections on the concept of understanding (Verstehen) which, in various ways, touch on the territory of hermeneutics. In the idea that art works are enigmas, nonunderstanding is dissociated from the behavior of reified consciousness and assumes a positive value, capable of being considered as a propulsive phase of aesthetic experience. This also implies that, in the relationship between artwork and consumer, a structure of question and response unfolds. When in Aesthetic Theory the Sich-Erschliessen disclosure of works before their interpreters is compared to the attainment of the “figure of the question” (Fragegestalt), it becomes evident that interpretation can only be the reproduction of this question in verbal language.77 Thus an inextricable circle of understanding and nonunderstanding is created. The more a listener is competent and the composition seems to be understandable from within, the more distant it becomes from the enigma character. In other words, the adequacy of the solution to the puzzle (which is the work) is to be measured by the fact that such a resolution determines a regeneration of the puzzle itself.
One might raise the paradox that the goal of the interpretation is not to grasp the substance of the response but rather to circumscribe the figure of the question. Adorno’s writings provide no evidence that he had even read, let alone received positively, Gadamer’s Truth and Method. The notion of hermeneutics, which in any case he rarely used, was rather primitive and certainly not up-to-date.78 It is therefore not entirely implausible to think that Adorno had begun to reflect on the problems characteristic of hermeneutics precisely after having been given the impetus by those avant-garde works that employed meaninglessness as a means of communication. In this context, Beckett’s production is central, and Adorno underlined its simultaneity, not only temporal but also ideological, to that of the musical avant-garde, starting with the moment that Beckett “meets the most recent tendencies in music, not least in that he, the one from the West, combines traits from Stravinsky’s radical past (the oppressive stasis of a shattered continuity) with the expressive and constructive means of Schoenberg’s school.”79 In Endgame Adorno spoke of the “construction of the meaningless” and described the action of understanding as the observation of the ways in which the logical nexus is undermined.80
But Adorno did not miss the difference that exists between staging the meaningless and the abolition of the linguistic dimension. Also here, a circle is created: in order for the meaningless (i.e., the “antilinguistic”) to be aesthetically realized, the linguistic dimension must be activated, which, in a certain sense, should be thought of as its own dialectical negation and not as a distancing. The architectonic hypothesis of Stravinskian Neoclassicism is not sustainable, because a moment of previous linguisticity occurs in the deployment of the idiomatic constituent fragments. At the end of the essay on music and language Adorno seems to concede possibilities only to the intonations, recurrent in Boulez’s constellatory logic, and the idea of an “immediacy of every moment” (Gegenwärtigkeit eines jeden Augenblicks), which refers to Debussy. 81 Adorno would repeatedly return to the other possibility, from “Vers une musique informelle” onwards, with its origin in the language of the instantaneous found in Viennese Expressionism.
The relationship between the loss of the linguistic dimension and its reconquest belongs to those polarities subject to an infinite dialectic that are so characteristic of Adorno’s thought, especially after the completion of Negative Dialectics. The most faithful reading possible of his intentions mandates a constant tracking of the dialectic movement between extremes. Still, at least in principle, there exists the possibility of isolating one of the elements and developing it independently up to a certain point. This operation — defined as “stereoscopic reading” by Albrecht Wellmer — permits us to study the issue of understanding in music, noting those moments of tangentiality with the philosophy of language in late Wittgenstein mentioned above.82 My argument begins with three hypotheses: (1) that Adorno’s recourse to Benjamin’s theology of language aimed to avoid all theories of language based on structuralism and analytic philosophy; (2) that Benjamin’s idea, however, was perceived by Adorno as the source of problems, which he attempted to remove via theorems (and not via a general theory of language) taken from his experience with the avant-gardes of the 50s and 60s; and (3) that, in the end, the pragmatic–communitarian component of Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations can function as the ideal complement to the question of understanding as Adorno posed it in the 1960s. Once arrived at the end of its trajectory, this “stereoscopic reading,” based on the enlargement of a detail in Adorno’s discourse and aimed at exploiting its potential, determines a modification of other parts of the discourse, especially that relating to public opinion.83 In order to avoid an expansion of this reading into realms totally foreign to its context, I shall not only use Wittgenstein for simple corrective (and thus partially impure) purposes, but I shall simultaneously attempt to highlight the communicative propensity of the musical avant-garde, a trait often ignored because of the suspicion of its extreme hermeticism.
At a key point in his study of the relationship between music and language, Adorno states:
This brings us to interpretation. Both music and language require it in the same degree, and entirely differently. To interpret language means to understand language; to interpret music means to make music. Musical interpretation is the act of execution that holds fast to the similarity to language, as synthesis, while at the same time it erases every individual incidence of that similarity. Hence, the idea of interpretation belongs to music essentially and is not incidental to it. But to play music properly means, above all, to speak its language properly. This language demands that it be imitated, not decoded. It is only in mimetic practice — which may, of course, be sublimated into unspoken imagination in the manner of reading to oneself — that music discloses itself, never to a consideration that interprets it independent of the act of execution. If one wished to compare an act in the signifying languages with the musical act, it would more likely be the transcription of a text than its comprehension as signification. 84
Here Adorno seems to play with the dual meaning that the verb “to interpret” has in music, namely, to perform the musical text and to objectivize its aesthetic experience via verbal language. The idea of interpretation is thus coessential to music, both because without its sonic realization the musical work is incomplete and because the receivers of the music are individuals in possession of language and this linguistic faculty is determinant in the constitution of the work’s essence.85 It is evident that “to interpret” in the first sense means “to make music,” but perhaps there exists a specific “making” with regard to the second sense, that of “interpreting music.” Adorno drew a parallel between these two modalities, stating that a mimetic process was at work in both. In particular, the “silent reading” of a score was comparable to the transcription of a literary text. Many texts by Adorno from these years engage this kind of mimesis; in them, Adorno speaks of “execution through listening” (hörender Mitvollzug) or “Nachkomponieren,” a kind of execution or cocomposition of the musical text being read or heard. But the framework remains personal: it is the individual who carries out this act of transcription and thus grasps meaning, while the community cannot do so because it is a manipulated collective. I believe that on precisely this point, Adorno did not succeed in drawing the consequences of the challenge launched by the musical avantgarde. Serialism and aleatoric procedures not only signified a revolution in the way music was conceived, performed, and listened to, but they also created the foundations for a completely new linguistic community. Pieces like Stockhausen’s Momente, Schnebel’s Glossolalie, and Nono’s La fabbrica illuminata explicitly aim to construct this new community of hearing and understanding. Even the most hermetic compositions of the previous decade seem to promote the formation of a new community of hearing, precisely in the display of their enigmatic configuration. In this sense, the act that Adorno intuits in the equation of “interpreting” with “making” music can also be understood as a communicative act, and in this context, Wittgenstein’s reflections on linguistic games and their foundational rules take on important meaning. As is well known, Wittgenstein defined the understanding of a language as “to be master of a technique” and understood language as a public entity or institution whose functioning cannot be explained by occult or impenetrable processes, but rather by a group of practiced, shared, and transformable rules.86 Not only did he connect the following of a rule to the capacity for understanding and applying it (linguistic competence) but he also discovered a nexus between the identity of a rule and its intersubjective validity.87 In order to constitute a linguistic community there must thus be at least two subjects capable of behaving in conformity with the rule and of judging the correctness of this behavior. If the musical avant-garde found itself in a situation of redefining the fundamentals of musical language, then the metalanguage of this language (i.e., the criteria of understanding and criticism) is also involved in such a process. New systems of rules are born which must be learned and gotten used to. Alongside the large-scale public sphere, subject to the communicative standards of commodities, small-scale public spheres are formed which participate in other kinds of interaction.
In Aesthetic Theory, the idea of form “from below,” one of the identifying features of musique informelle, is interwoven with the problem of aesthetic nominalism, which is a historical process achieved in and by means of form. The critique of general categories carried out in artworks themselves here reaches such intensity that the particular assumes normative functions: “The nominalistic artwork should become an artwork by being organized from below to above, not by having principles of organization foisted on it.”88 For Adorno, this battle of the particular versus the universal is already evident in many works of the Second Viennese School. In the introduction to his analysis of the Berg Violin Concerto, Adorno notes that:
Berg’s artwork wants both to reconcile what is plainly contradictory and to dissolve, yet remain in control. Only with the utmost effort of his formative power can he realize the idea of being hostile to form, the truly informal, without letting his powerless music be swallowed by this idea, without letting the artwork, which objectifies chaos, sink into chaos.89
A subtle equilibrium between norm and freedom is at the heart of musique informelle: liberty creates from itself a set of laws, within which the unforeseen and the other can also emerge. Without this lawfulness the life of the particular would not even be possible; on the other hand, pure lawfulness would be sterile without the energy that arises from unplanned detail. Adorno’s points of reference are the compositions of so-called “free atonality.” But Berg represents an important case in that he was the only composer to continue to maintain this freedom under the conditions of twelve-tone technique. Total serialism eliminated the remnants of motivic–thematic development, thus excluding the categories of opening, continuation, transition, development, and conclusion. New typologies did not replace the old ones, and so the composition risks dissolving into formlessness at every moment. For Adorno, to compose musique informelle would mean to try to resolve the problem of form in a positive way, without being mere epigones of free atonality (or of its remnants in twelve-tone Berg).
What is musique informelle on the compositional level has an analogue in music theory, materiale Formenlehre, a material theory of form. Adorno had noted that in Mahler’s symphonies, entirely new formal categories — such as breakthrough (Durchbruch), suspension (Suspension), fulfillment (Erfüllung) and collapse (Einsturz) — coexisted with traditional models, in which the earlier categories of statement, contrast, development, transition, and recapitulation were also active. These new categories, however, cannot be traced back to formal functions of a preexistent model; rather, their function is defined inside the specific context in which they are found. The relationship between form and character, so basic for Classic and Romantic instrumental music, is modified. The formal schemes, or, more precisely, the internal organization of musical time, no longer function as vehicles to transport character. Here, the characters are so specific as to be forced themselves to produce the formal categories that support them. It is obvious that a redefinition of formal function on such a large scale also mandates rethinking the conceptions at the basis of overall Formenlehre. The relationship between formal norm and its application, the creation of formal unity given the multiplicity of materials, and the succession of the constituent parts in conformity with a logical plan are all problems that cannot be taken for granted:
Mahlerian categories like suspension or fulfillment suggest an idea that could contribute, beyond the scope of his work, to endowing music with speech through theory: the idea of a material theory of form, the deduction of formal categories from their meaning. This is neglected by [an] academic theory of form, which operates with abstract classifications such as first theme, transition, second or closing theme, without understanding these divisions in terms of their functions. In Mahler the usual abstract formal categories are overlaid with material ones; sometimes the former become specifically the bearer of meaning; sometimes material formal principles are constituted beside or below the abstract ones, which, while continuing to provide the framework and to support the unity, no longer themselves supply a connection in terms of musical meaning.90
Adorno is aware of the fact that the farewell to tonal language was achieved not only by banishing traditional harmonic functions (the emancipation of dissonance and the use of irregular chordal structures), but was also evident on the level of internal structure and the succession of formal sections. What happened at the time of Mahler showed the structural weakness of academic Formenlehre. Even when studying pieces of great formal complexity (Beethoven and Schubert), this approach limited itself to finding confirmation of those universal structures mandated by theory. Even in its terminology, Adorno put forth a materialist change in Formenlehre, which would permit a liberation from Platonism so as to consider questions of form in relation to the musical materials at hand. That which was the focal point of early twentieth-century compositional technique could also have repercussions for the study of music fifty or a hundred years earlier. In this sense, the concept of a materiale Formenlehre (material theory of form) is not very distant from Erwin Ratz’s functional Formenlehre, which attempts to study forms from the perspective of their individual and concrete manifestations.91
The ideas of Ratz and Adorno constitute the most recent stage of a theoretical tradition whose origin is the system of forms found in Adolf Bernhard Marx.92 The basis of Marx’s system is a mixture of Goethe’s plant morphology with Hegelian dialectics. It arranges forms according to complexity and differentiation; Marx reads the trajectory from strophic lied through the various rondo forms to sonata form as equivalent to a gradual transition from the principle of coordination to that of subordination.93 The primacy of sonata form is based precisely on the fact that its sections are not simply juxtaposed with equal meaning, but rather follow one another according to the specific function they must fulfil within the large-scale formal dynamic: the internal structure of a specific section, its position in the temporal flow and the logic of succession of the sections are all closely connected. Marx’s organic conception of form is founded on a marked differentiation of the parts, which, precisely because of their individuality, are able to perform functions specific to the ends of the constitution of the whole. This ideal of the organic also indirectly conditions a predilection for evolutionary forms over circular ones: the interactions among functionally specific parts determine a dynamic and structuring of formal succession closely linked to the piece’s temporality and character.
Even in his basic transformation of the concept mandated by the involvement of the materials in the definition of form (and despite his critique of scholastic ideas), Adorno never abandons the fundamental principles of Formenlehre, first and foremost the ideal of the organism. In “Vers une musique informelle,” he was sensitive to the kind of “aesthetic antinomy” which any uncritical supporter of this ideal disguises: the organization of the relations between parts and whole imitates the constitution of living organisms, so much so that the artifact winds up looking like Nature and not like a linguistic creation. 94 This historical process experienced a crucially evident moment in Wagner’s chromaticism and ended in serial composition which, not unlike “informal” painting, appears to be the “image of organic.”95 For Adorno, the most adequate response to this loss is the renewal of the organic–linguistic concept in accordance with the current state of the material. In this context, Adorno mentions Boulez’s “parenthetical” procedure, a reference which further complicates the question rather than clarifying it. In fact, parenthesis, along with gloss and comment, belongs to the formal procedures used by Boulez in Trope, one of the “formants” of the Third Piano Sonata, with the aim of constructing a form without any reference to traditional models. The basic thesis of Boulez’s biting article “Schönberg est mort” was that the inventor of twelve-tone technique had failed to draw all the consequences of the serial principle, as he continued to work in accordance with a traditional perspective, for instance, in the area of phrase structure.96 Still, as Formenlehre teaches, the formation of phrases and periods is simply the micrologic equivalent of macrological form.97 Boulez’s critique, which intensified the criticism of tonality and accelerated the process of aesthetic nominalism, had to extend perforce to form. In Debussy’s late piano works and in Jeux, Boulez had perceived features of a different conception, which he called “interwoven form.”98 Such an idea responded to the exigency of a “nonunivocal” form which, in its continuous becoming, was closely related to the transformation of the material. If the first book of Structures could be criticized for having equated form with structure (in the sense that the large-scale form of the pieces was the immediate result of the treatment of its materials), matters changed notably in Le marteau sans maître, whose large-scale form can be understood as a realization of “interwoven form.” Its three basic components — L’artisanat furieux, Bourreaux de solitude, and Bel édifice et les pressentiments — can appear either in their primary version or in variants whose specificity is designated by Boulez with the names avant, après, commentaire, and double. The primary versions and the variants are set out in such a way that a primary form is never directly flanked by one of its variants. This is not a purely abstract formal plan. From a linear reading of the score (dictated by the composer’s prescription of the specific sequence of sections), a trajectory emerges whose logic derives from the interaction among structural procedures, temporal realization, instrumentation, and setting of the text.99 The issue, at least for Boulez, was not even that of new formal types which replace the old ones, reflecting the spirit of the present day; rather, it was precisely this spirit which proscribed the establishment of typologies and fostered the correlation of form with the case-by-case treatment of the material. For traditional theory, this might seem a change of aesthetic level, but for the composer, form could only be defined as “general structure” and its shaping as “the construction of topical structures.”100
Late twentieth-century reception of Debussy has not yet been studied systematically (as has that of Webern). A historically and philologically grounded investigation of this issue would certainly enrich our perspective on serial thought. In Olivier Messiaen’s teaching, the study of Debussy played an absolutely primary role.101 Among Messiaen’s pupils was Jean Barraqué, who devoted a considerable portion of his own theoretical work to Debussy. His analysis of La mer is explicitly guided by his intention to discover the historical antecedents of open form in music:
With Debussy, the form can no longer be understood as a succession or a progressive accumulation achieved through a concatenation of ideas. It is rather achieved through amalgams, through elliptical passages. The opposition of forces does not necessarily rest on the recognition of literal thematic structures but rather implies the passing from one structure to another by way of poetic mutations in which the placing of “object-themes” creates zones of neutrality.102
In our context, Debussy is of interest for his role as a catalyst of questions posed in their full weight only when serial practice came to maturity. In that sense, it seems significant that, during the last years of his life, Adorno had planned an essay on the composer in which the questions of form and of the relationship of music to painting reemerged. Adorno never wrote this essay, but his notes for a 1963 conference at the Frankfurt Musikhochschule, along with the references to Debussy in his lectures at the 1966 Ferienkurse, offer points for reflection on his changing perspective. For present purposes it is particularly interesting that the idea of “Pseudomorphose an Malerei” (pseudomorphosis of painting) one of the most virtuoso moments of the critique of Stravinsky in the Philosophy of New Music (an idea formulated primarily by taking Debussy as a point of departure), is now treated decidedly more positively, this, presumably, also spurred on by recent events in composition.103 Adorno no longer reads the reversal of dynamics to stasis as a symptom of the loss of the temporal dimension (and thus as a phenomenon of rigidification), but rather as part of a long-term process of the critique of organic form. The “constructive principle,” which works by subdividing material in a way similar to Pisarro’s painting, now appears as an alternative to developing variation, one which must be taken seriously if only because it anticipates the composition of sonic fields in the second half of the twentieth century.104 In this light, Schoenberg’s Phantasy for Violin and Piano Accompaniment and Debussy’s late works seem to share a similar ideal of form.105 Debussy had criticized the large scale as grandiose, and turned ascetically to the small scale; he composed the Charakterstück to its limit and thereby superseded it.
For Adorno, Debussy took a major step in the direction of twentieth-century thought by liberating timbre from contingency and reviving the desideratum of the unification of dimensions. In his orchestral works, timbre fuses with nonfunctional harmonic structure and becomes an essential component of a sonic unity, simultaneously discrete and complex, formed by the interaction of the parameters:
Following the example of Impressionism in painting, Debussy broke up the thematic and motivic material into smallest juxtaposed particles. Thus the task of organization passes on to sound [Klang], which had withdrawn this organization from the particular melodic form and the motivic–thematic work. Sound itself becomes a substrate of musical coherence, whose traditional means of construction are sacrificed in a process of reflection by the ear that no longer tolerates what exists in an unmediated, quasi naively realistic way. The extreme process of music’s subjectivication makes sound fully available as material and thus available for objectivation through constructive composition. For the first time, sound becomes independent not as a stimulant, but as a compositional event. This would have to be demonstrated in the orchestral works of Debussy, especially Jeux and this has just been accomplished in the circle of the Cologne school of serialism.106
Thus there is a close tie between the abandonment of motivic–thematic thought and the incorporation of timbre in the work’s organization. The detaching and the constructive reunification of sounds can happen only if the rules for phrase-structure are so loosened as to affect even the motive, that (once irreducible) final unit formed by the nexus of duration and pitch. Timbre is added to polyphony, with value equal to the other parameters, as a means of producing a sonic space not previously heard. Its emancipation thus proceeds equally with the advancement of space to an independent (not merely metaphoric) dimension of the composition. If formal organization — with and after Debussy — tends ever more to coincide with sound construction, then the possibility for an extension of its effect is opened, one which would include the disposition of space alongside that of time.
The discussion of the spatialization of music is one of the areas of argument whose features, outlined in Philosophy of New Music, were gradually (and sometimes imperceptibly) redefined during the years of the Aesthetic Theory. In the labyrinthine paths of this great torso, previous formulations often coexist with more recent ones, and thus only a comparison with more specifically practical texts allows us to differentiate the strata of the arguments. Adorno reconsidered the problem of the pseudomorphosis of music in a 1967 essay dedicated to the Parisian art collector Daniel-Henry Kahnweiler.107 In view of recent developments in music and painting, the phenomenon that Adorno had discerned in Debussy and Stravinsky was reinterpreted as the first harbinger of a process of convergence among forms of artistic representation, one which had to do as much with structural procedures as with aesthetic principles. In this process, the concept of musical form was emptied of its content and at the same time lost its metaphoric character; it becomes real. Ligeti, in the 1965 conference, had underlined the basic analogy between musical form and space: “‘Form’ is originally an abstraction of spatial configurations, of proportions of objects extending in space.”108 A piece like Volumina exhibits, quite literally, what remains of musical form when all the configurations which gave it functionality are eliminated. Probably on the basis of works like these, Adorno observed that now form was made up of sonic points, clusters, surfaces, or blocks that are juxtaposed, counterposed, and combined according to a geometric plan. The imaginary space of music — once evoked by Bruckner’s orchestra with its quality “of the forest of tones that arches over the listener” — manifests itself in Stockhausen’s disposition of orchestral groups or in Schnebel’s Sichtbare Musik.109
Still, we cannot ascertain a decisive step in Adorno toward a conception of form (and hence of musical logic) openly opposed to that of tonality. He limited himself to illustrating the process which led to open forms, providing solid historical and philosophical foundations upon which to discuss them. In a certain sense, the ideal complement of this attempt to update these ideas is represented by the musical poetics of the 1950s and 1960s. The dialogue between Adorno and composers, reconstructed a posteriori, could furnish the basis of a theory of atonal form which can be constructed perhaps only now. In the specific interweaving of the study of the past with expectations for the future, composers’ theoretical reflections stand halfway between the articulation of an individual poetic and the establishment of superpersonal theoretical laws. Using their own procedures, composers showed how to realize formal plans which eschew the teleology of organic form and can be placed within the framework of the “materiale Formenlehre” sketched out by Adorno. Their work is strongly marked by studies of musical time and its perception, a compositional dimension at the heart of every formal conception insofar as form is nothing other than an abstraction of temporal events. The traditional oppositions of static-dynamic and continuous-discontinuous were dissolved in a myriad of interweaving, coexisting, and mutually nourishing temporal forms.110 This multiplicity reflects the complexity of contemporary life and the different ways in which humans experience and create form for themselves. It would greatly benefit music theory to develop this perspective to include both the origins of the new formal principles of the first half of the twentieth century as well as more recent developments. The aesthetic categories which Adorno worked out in the 1960s would supply a first-class philosophical basis for such a study.