Apparitions

Chapter 1

1 On the origin of the term among the Frankfurt School see Leo Lowenthal, “The Utopian Motif in Suspension: A Conversation with Leo Lowenthal,” trans. Ted R. Weeks, in An Unmastered Past: The Autobiographical Reflections of Leo Lowenthal, ed. Martin Jay (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 237–46, at 237.

2 See Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophie der neuen Musik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1976; first published, 1949); GS, 12:126. The book has been translated by Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster as Philosophy of Modern Music (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), 133. Although the proper title is Philosophy of New Music (a title that I will use in the main text), I will refer to or cite the translation with the German page numbers in parentheses, indicating whether the translation was modified.

3 Ibid., 132–33 (125–26).

4 Or as Adorno puts it: “Whoever … claims that the new art is as beautiful as the traditional one does it a real disservice; he praises in it what this music rejects so long as it unflinchingly follows its own impulse”; Adorno, “The Aging of the New Music,” in EoM, 181–202, at 181.

5 Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, 135, 213 (127, 193). See also Eduard Hanslick, The Beautiful in Music, ed. Morris Weitz, trans. Gustav Cohen (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1957).

6 Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, 212 (192).

7 Ibid., 172, 214 (158, 194, translation modified). Whereas “Sachlichkeit” resonates with the idea of a style (new objectivity), “die Sache” or “die Sache selber” (ibid., 111 [107]) refers to both the object and the objective qualities of an artwork (its “matter”), as opposed to subjective agencies, such as intention.

8 Ibid., 133 (126).

9 Significant uses of the term sich überläßt or sometimes just überläßt can be found in Philosophie der neuen Musik on pages 120, 123, and 193 (twice), variously rendered in the English translation as “at the mercy of” (126), “entrusts itself” (129), “surrender itself” (212), “relies upon” (213).

10 Adorno, MM, 182.

11 Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, 212 (193).

12 Ibid. (translation modified). Also see the discussion of the hermetic work of art as “blind” in ibid., 124–25 (118–19).

13 Ibid., 213, 212 (193).

14 Adorno, “Criteria of New Music,” in SF, 145–96, at 145 (emphasis added).

15 Ibid., 148.

16 See Max Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 265.

17 Despite its initial impact, Adorno himself felt that the book had been largely misunderstood, in particular the chapter on Stravinsky. See Adorno, “Stravinsky: A Dialectical Portrait,” in QuF, 145–75, at 147–48; quotation from 147 (the book was originally published in 1963); see also “Mißverständnisse,” GS, 12:203–6, which was published first in Melos 17, no. 3 (1950). In fact, Adorno’s essay “The Aging of the New Music” was highly critical of post-Schoenbergian serial procedures.

18 See Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music, 265–70.

19 In the late essay “Stravinsky: A Dialectical Portrait,” Adorno finally grants the composer a dialectical status which is denied here.

20 By voice Adorno is not referring to vocal music but to a vocal origin which is integral to the development of instrumental music. See Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 172–73.

21 See Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, 197–201 (179–83).

22 Ibid., 41–48 (46–52).

23 Ibid., 157–60 (145–48).

24 Ibid., 135–36, 212–17 (128–29, 192–96).

25 Ibid., 213, 133 (193, 126).

26 Ibid., 30, 136 (36–37, 127–28).

27 Ibid., 30 (36–37).

28 Ibid., 37–41 (42–46).

29 Ibid., 167–81 (154–66).

30 See Adorno, Beethoven, 13–14. Also see Daniel K. L. Chua, “Believing in Beethoven,” Music Analysis 19 (2000), 409–21.

31 Adorno, MM, 50 (GS, 4:55, translation modified).

32 Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, 3 (13).

33 Adorno, “Some Ideas on the Sociology of Music,” in SF, 1–14, at 5.

34 Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, 3 (13, translation modified; Gegenstand in this context means “object” and is related to die Sache.)

35 Letter to Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt on December 5, 1949, in Stuckenschmidt, Schoenberg: His Life, World and Work, trans. Humphrey Searle (New York: Schirmer, 1977), 508; Adorno, Beethoven, 25.

36 Horkeimer and Adorno, DoE, ix.

37 Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, 219 (199).

38 Ibid., xiii–xiv (11).

39 Adorno, MM, 209.

40 In turn, both the Dialectic of Enlightenment and the Philosophy of New Music are themselves messages in bottles.

41 Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, 13 (21).

42 Ibid., 20 (28).

43 Adorno, MM, 113.

44 Horkheimer and Adorno, DoE, xiii. Adorno is not advocating a displacement of reason as some kind of resolution to this dialectical tension. As J. M. Bernstein writes, Adorno “unswervingly affirmed the values of Enlightenment, and believed that modernity suffered from a deficit rather than a surplus of reason and rationality.” It is the irrationality of reason — its regression — that is problematic. Stravinsky’s music is the symptom of the latter, whereas Schoenberg attempts to search for what Bernstein calls “an expanded conception of reason … [that] can lead to a restoration of ethical meaning.” See J. M. Bernstein, Adorno: Disenchantment and Ethics (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 4.

45 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (London: Routledge, 1973), 281. Also see 241 on modern freedom and schizophrenia.

46 Horkheimer and Adorno, DoE, 32–33.

47 Ibid., 33.

48 Art for Adorno contains traces of its mimetic origins; it refuses to be totally subsumed under the leveling processes of modern rationality: “If art has its roots in mimetic, prerational behavior, if it represents the memory of that behavior in the midst of the process of rationalization, this element of the qualitative, of difference, of whatever is not entirely subsumed into the rational, never relinquishes its claims”; “Classicism, Romanticism, New Music,” in SF, 106–22, at 108. The song of the sirens is never totally silenced in art.

49 Horkheimer and Adorno, DoE, 43.

50 Ibid., 57

51 Ibid., 59.

52 Ibid., 34

53 Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, 136–37 (128, translation modified).

54 Ibid., 141, 196, 174 (132, 178–79, 160).

55 Ibid., 145, 156, 170 (135, 145, 156–57).

56 Ibid., 176 (161–62).

57 Ibid., 153 (142); see also 137 (128–29).

58 Ibid., 200 (182). See also ibid., 156, 164 (144–45, 151–52).

59 Adorno, MM, 231.

60 Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, 158–59 (146–47).

61 See Igor Stravinsky, Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons, trans. Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl (London: Oxford University Press, 1947), 121–35; as is well known, these Norton lectures given by Stravinsky at Harvard were ghost written by Pierre Souvtchinsky.

62 See note 59. See also Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, 156 (145).

63 Igor Stravinsky, An Autobiography (New York: W.W. Norton, 1962), 53.

64 Horkheimer and Adorno, DoE, 51–55.

65 See Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, 157, 201–2 (145, 183–84).

66 Ibid., 172 (158, translation modified).

67 Ibid., 109 (105).

68 Ibid., 99, 66–67 (96, 67–68).

69 Ibid., 41–42 (46–47). Adorno is rehearsing Hegel’s critique of Romantic subjectivity. See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 1:64–69.

70 Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, 48 (52).

71 Ibid., 68 (68).

72 Ibid., 68 (69); see also 64 (65).

73 Ibid., 133 (126).

74 Ibid. The original, of course, speaks merely of “the true message in the bottle” (die wahre Flaschenpost).

75 Ibid., 117–29 (112–22).

76 Ibid., 128 (122).

77 See Adorno, MM, 181. The sudden appearance of the humane at the moment of its disappearance is an idea that Adorno personifies in the figure of Eurydice who vanishes as soon as Orpheus gazes upon her; hence the reference to Eurydice in the extended quote below.

78 Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, 128–29 (122). Translation modified. The phrase in brackets is an interpolation by the English translators.

79 Ibid., 27 (34).

80 Adorno, MM, 86.

81 See Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music, 265–66.

82 Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, 71 (71).

83 Ibid.

84 Ibid., 60, 156, 187 (62, 144, 171).

85 Ibid., 187, 150 (171, 139–40).

86 Ibid., 60 (62).

87 Ibid., 163–64, 190 (150–52, 173–74).

88 Ibid., 204 (185); see also 80, 180–81, 203–205 (79, 165–66, 184–87).

89 Ibid., 99 (96). Adorno only refers to history failing Schoenberg, but by implication it must also fail Stravinsky.

90 Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music, 266.

91 See Arnold Gehlen, “Die Säkularisierung des Fortschritts” [1967], Gesamtausgabe: Einblicke, ed. Karl-Siegbert Rehberg (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1978), 7:403–12, and “Post-Histoire” [1962], in Zur geisteswissenschaftlichen Bedeutung Arnold Gehlens: Vorträge und Diskussionsbeiträge des Sonderseminars 1989 der Hochschule für Verwaltungs, wissenschaften Speyer, eds. Helmut Klages and Helmut Quaritsch (Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1994), 885–95.

92 Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity: Nihilism and Hermeneutics in Post-modern Culture, trans. Jon R. Snyder (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 7.

93 Adorno, MM, 218.

94 For an exploration of the notion of standstill or suspension in Adorno, see Lydia Goehr, “Adorno, Schoenberg, and the Totentanz der Prinzipien — in Thirteen Steps,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 56 (2003): 595–636.

95 Horkheimer and Adorno, DoE, 88.

96 On the promise of music, see Adorno, Mahler, 5, and Adorno, “Stravinsky: A Dialectical Portrait,” 151.

97 Adorno, MM, 235.

98 Ibid., 218.

99 Adorno, AT, 32; my italics.

100 Adorno, “Classicism, Romanticism, New Music,” 121.

101 Adorno, MM, 247.

102 Richard Wagner, “Beethoven’s ‘heroische Symphonie’,” in Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen (Leipzig: E.W. Fritzsch, 1887–88), 5:169–72, at 172, translated as “Beethoven’s Heroic Symphony,” in Judaism in Music and Other Essays, trans. William Ashton Ellis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 221–24, at 224. Adorno reverses the stoical, military morality of German Kultur inspired by the Eroica and embodied in Nietzsche’s “Superman”; German Kultur assumes a Christlike “weakness,” an ethics of submission that overcomes the world as victim rather than victor. On the military ethics of German Kultur see, for example, Thomas Mann’s essay “Gedanken im Kriege,” in Von Deutscher Republik: Politische Schriften und Reden in Deutschland, ed. Peter de Mendelssohn (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1984), 7–25. On the morality of Beethoven’s heroic music see Scott Burnham, Beethoven Hero (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1995).

103 Simon Jarvis, Adorno: A Critical Introduction (New York: Routledge, 1998), 212.

104 Adorno, MM, 247.

105 Adorno, Beethoven, 174.

106 Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, 136 (127).

107 Ibid., 202 (183).

108 As Horkheimer and Adorno write in DoE, 23–24: “Jewish religion allows no word that would alleviate the despair of all that is mortal. It associates hope only with the prohibition against calling on what is false as God, against invoking the finite as the infinite, lies as truth.… The justness of the image is preserved in the faithful pursuit of its prohibition.” In this sense, what Adorno hears in Schoenberg is a Semitic morality that refuses to depict the authentic or the objective as truth: as with Adorno’s philosophy, what is true in new music only proceeds by way of negation. The consequence of such a prohibition is exile; drifting is an ethics of homelessness. Indeed, as Anson Rabinbach points out, the nomadic Odysseus of the Dialectic of Enlightenment is not merely “a prototype of the bourgeois individual” but a “Hellenic prototype of Ahasuerus, the wandering Jew” — an image that may not have been that far from Schoenberg’s own creative identity, as Julie Brown suggests. See Horkheimer and Adorno, DoE, 43, Anson Rabinbach, “‘Why Were the Jews Sacrificed?’: The Place of Antisemitism in Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment, ” in Adorno: A Critical Reader, ed. Nigel Gibson and Andrew Rubin (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 132–49, at 143, and Julie Brown, “Schoenberg’s Early Wagnerisms: Atonality and the Redemption of Ahasuerus,” Cambridge Opera Journal 6 (1994), 51–80; also see Goehr, “Adorno, Schoenberg, and the Totentanz der Prinzipien,” 604 and 613.

109 As Adorno states: “Schoenberg translated the Old Testament ban on images into music”; Adorno, “Toward an Understanding of Schoenberg,” trans. Susan H. Gillespie in EoM, 627–43, at 638.

110 Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, 30 (36).

111 Ibid., 133 (126).

112 Ibid.

113 Ibid., 117 (112).

114 Ibid., 115–16 (111–12).

115 Ibid., 33 (36).

116 Ibid., 121 (116).

117 See Horkheimer and Adorno, DoE, 88.

118 Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, 213 (193, translation modified).

119 Ibid., 15 (23–24).

120 On Adorno, Schoenberg, vision, blindness, and insight see Berthold Hoeckner, Programming the Absolute: Nineteenth-Century German Music and the Hermeneutics of the Moment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), 189–223.

121 See note 11 above.

122 See Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), 35–36.

123 Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, 124 (118).

124 Adorno, “Criteria of New Music,” 148 (emphases mine).

125 Paul Guyer, Kant and the Experience of Freedom: Essays on Aesthetics and Morality (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 18. See also Adorno, Negative Dialectics, 211–99, and Bernstein, Adorno, 136–87.

126 Horkheimer and Adorno, DoE, 86. On Kant morality and totalitarianism see Slavoj Žiûek, For They Know Not What They Do: Enjoyment as a Political Factor (London: Verso, 1991), 229–35, and John Milbank, Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon (London: Routledge, 2003), 1–25.

127 Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, 214 (194).

128 Ibid., 122 (117).

129 Ibid., 213 (193, translation modified).

130 Ibid., 132–33 (125–26, translation modified).

131 Ibid., 212 (192–93, translation modified).

132 Ibid., 219 (199).

133 Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, 135, 213 (127, 193).

134 See Adorno’s late essay “Difficulties,” trans. Susan H. Gillespie, in EoM, 644–79, at 658–59.

135 In “The Aging of the New Music,” 181, Adorno writes: “The concept of New Music is incompatible with an affirmative sound, the confirmation of what is[.] … When music for the first time came to completely doubt all that, it became New Music.”

136 Adorno, MM, 27.

137 Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, 16 (24).

138 Ibid., 19 (26).

139 Ibid., 20 (28).

140 See, for example, Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music, 270; indeed, Paddison points out Adorno’s own acknowledgment of this failing in the Philosophy of New Music in Adorno’s essay “Über das gegenwärtige Verhältnis von Philosophie und Musik” [1953], in GS, 18:149–76, at 165.

141 See, for example, Leonard Bernstein’s criticism of Adorno’s “nasty, turgid book” in The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), 270; see also 329–30.

Chapter 2

1 This essay was first presented as a paper at the 69th Annual Meeting of the American Musicological Society, November 13–16, 2003 (Houston, Texas). I would like to thank the panel and public there, as well as Berthold Hoeckner, Daniel Barolsky, and Stephen Hinton for comments and criticisms.

2 Adorno, “The Function of Counterpoint in New Music,” in SF, 123–44, at 124; “Die Funktion des Kontrapunkts in der neuen Musik,” in GS, 16:145–69, at 146–47. Translations are mine unless indicated otherwise. Where I cite the translation, page numbers of the original are added in parentheses.

3 Ibid., 143 (169).

4 Ibid.

5 Paul Hindemith, A Composer’s World: Horizons and Limitations (Garden City, NY: Double-day, 1961), 117.

6 Paul Hindemith, The Craft of Musical Composition: Theoretical Part, trans. Arthur Mendel, 4th ed. (New York: Schott, 1970), 113; Unterweisung im Tonsatz: Theoretischer Teil, rev. ed. (Mainz: Schott’s Söhne, 1940), 141.

7 Wolfgang Lessing, Die Hindemith-Rezeption Theodor W. Adornos (Mainz: Schott, 1999).

8 Andres Briner, “Hindemith und Adornos Kritik des Musikanten. Oder: Von sozialer und soziologischer Haltung,” Musik und Bildung 6 (1974): 353–58.

9 Rudolf Stephan, “Adorno und Hindemith: Zum Verständnis einer schwierigen Beziehung,” in Adorno und die Musik, ed. Otto Kolleritsch (Graz: Universal, 1979), 180–201, at 197.

10 He borrowed but also diverged from his discussion of counterpoint in the Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), 90–95 (PnM, 88–93).

11 When Willy Strecker wrote to Hindemith that works such as the cello sonata and the piano concerto had been thrown out with old iron, Hindemith replied on July 19, 1949, “Darmstädter Musiktage, hahaha. Das ist ganz so, wie ich’s mir denke. Zum alten Eisen gehören ist Ehrensache. Die Musikgeschichte ist voll altem Eisen, und dieses war von jeher dauerhafter als neuer Bockmist. Die falsche Begeisterung war sowieso sehr peinlich.” Cited in Norbert J. Schneider, “Phasen der Hindemith-Rezeption 1945–1955,” Hindemith-Jahrbuch 13 (1984): 122–42, at 131.

12 Hindemith, “Sterbende Gewässer,” in Aufsätze, Vorträge, Reden, ed. Giselher Schubert (Zurich: Atlantis, 1994), 314–46.

13 Reinhold Brinkmann, “Über Paul Hindemiths Rede ‘Sterbende Gewässer,’” Hindemith-Jahrbuch 13 (1984): 71–90.

14 “Umgekehrt hängen manche Älteren mehr oder minder forciert und hilflos sich ans jeweils Jüngste, um nicht zum alten Eisen geworfen zu werden.” Adorno, “Vers une musique informelle,” in GS, 16: 493–94.

15 Adorno, “The Function of Counterpoint,” 123 (145–46, translation modified).

16 Arnold Schoenberg, Theory of Harmony, trans. Roy E. Carter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), 7–12; Harmonielehre, 3rd ed. (Vienna: Universal, 1922), 1–7.

17 Hindemith, A Composer’s World, 246.

18 Ibid., 247.

19 Adorno briefly discussed this distinction and attributed it to Heinrich Jalowetz, another Schoenberg disciple. However, even in the course of the essay, he himself frequently uses the term polyphony when he seems to mean “counterpoint.” Adorno, “The Function of Counterpoint,” 126 (148).

20 On these first two types, see Rudolf Stephan, “Schönbergs Entwurf über ‘Das Komponieren mit selbständigen Stimmen,” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 29 (1972): 239–56; Giselher Schubert, “Über Hindemiths Kontrapunkt,” Hindemith-Jahrbuch 5 (1976): 146–63, esp. 146–56.

21 Hindemith, Craft of Musical Composition, 113–15 (141–44).

22 For this reason, Günther Metz could dedicate a study entirely to the “polyphony” in Hindemith’s music. Günther Metz, Melodische Polyphonie in der Zwölftonordnung: Studien zum Kontrapunkt Paul Hindemiths (Baden-Baden: Koerner, 1976).

23 Adorno, “The Function of Counterpoint,” 143 (168).

24 Adorno’s emphasis on opposition derives from a tradition of modernist counterpoint that dates to the early decades of the twentieth century. See Karen Painter, “Contested Counterpoint: ‘Jewish’ Appropriation and Polyphonic Liberation,” Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 58 (2001): 201–30.

25 Adorno, “The Function of Counterpoint,” 140 (165).

26 On the shift of music from the mathematic quadrivium to the linguistic trivium, see Paul Oskar Kristeller, “Origins of Aesthetics: Historical and Conceptual Overview,” in Encyclopedia of Aesthetics, ed. Michael Kelly (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998): 3: 416–28, at 418–19; Daniel K. L. Chua, Absolute Music and the Construction of Meaning (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 35.

27 Giselher Schubert, “Vorgeschichte und Entstehung der ‘Unterweisung im Tonsatz: Theoretischer Teil’,” Hindemith-Jahrbuch 9 (1980): 16–64.

28 Hindemith, The Craft of Musical Composition, 53 (75).

29 David Neumeyer, The Music of Paul Hindemith (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), 29, see also 23–34 passim; Giselher Schubert, “Polemik und Erkenntnis: Zu Hindemiths späten Schriften,” Neue Zeitschrift für Musik 156 (1995): 16–21.

30 Hindemith, A Composer’s World, 8–9, 117, 170.

31 Ibid., 8.

32 Ibid.

33 Ibid., 5.

34 lbid., 254.

35 Ibid., 257.

36 Günther Metz, “Ein Spätstil Hindemiths?” Hindemith-Jahrbuch 13 (1984): 16–28, at 19; Dieter Rexroth, “Wirke mit mir! Anmerkungen zu Hindemiths Harmonievorstellung,” Hindemith-Jahrbuch 13 (1984): 29–43; Hermann Danuser, “Notizen zu Hindemiths ‘Die Harmonie der Welt’,” in Musikalisches Welttheater: Festschrift Rolf Dammann zum 65. Geburtstag, eds. Susanne Schaal, Thomas Seedorf, and Gerhard Splitt (Laaber: Laaber, 1995), 203–11, at 210.

37 Hindemith, A Composer’s World, 257.

38 Karl Philipp Moritz, “Über die bildende Nachahmung des Schönen,” in Beiträge zur Ästhetik, eds. Hans Joachim Schrimpf and Hans Adler (Mainz: Dieterich, 1989), 27–78, at 70.

39 Paul Hindemith, “Das private Logbuch”: Briefe an seine Frau Gertrud, eds. Friederike Becker and Giselher Schubert (Mainz: Schott, 1995), 75, 77–78.

40 Adorno, “The Function of Counterpoint,” 133 (157, translation modified).

41 Ibid., 126–27 (149).

42 Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), 408 (GS, 6: 400, translation modified).

43 Adorno, “The Function of Counterpoint,” 144 (169).

44 Ibid.

45 Ibid., 143 (168–69).

46 Ibid., 124, 143 (146, 169).

47 G. W. F. Hegel, Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Clarendon, 1975), 1: 40.

48 Adorno, “Music and Language: A Fragment,” in QuF, 1–6, at 4.

49 Hindemith, A Composer’s World, 6.

50 Ibid., 14.

51 Ibid., 7.

52 Ibid., 8.

53 Cited in Oliver Strunk (ed.), Source Readings in Music History, trans. William Strunk Jr. and Oliver Strunk., rev. trans. James McKinnon, rev. ed. Leo Treitler (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), 138.

54 Hindemith, A Composer’s World, 243.

55 Ibid.

56 Ibid., 71.

57 Ibid.

58 Adorno, “The Function of Counterpoint,” 126 (148).

59 Ibid., 143 (168).

60 Ibid., 125 (147–48).

61 Paul Hindemith, Johann Sebastian Bach: Heritage and Obligation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1952); “Johann Sebastian Bach: Ein verpflichtendes Erbe,” in Aufsätze, 253–70. See Stephen Hinton, “Hindemith, Bach, and the Melancholy of Obligation,” in Bach Perspectives 3, ed. Michael Marissen (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1998), 133–50.

62 Hindemith, A Composer’s World, 113.

63 Hindemith used Bartók’s quartet as material for a public lecture on the art of listening. Hindemith, “Hören und Verstehen unbekannter Musik,” in Aufsätze, 293–309.

64 Diether de la Motte, “Kontrapunkt,” in Terminologie der Neuen Musik (Berlin: Merseburger, 1965), 7–16.

65 Adorno “The Function of Counterpoint,” 135 (158, translation modified).

66 Ibid., 129 (152, translation modified).

Chapter 3

1 The English term meaning denotes “Sinn” as well as “Bedeutung”; in the following essay, it indicates “Sinn.” This double meaning and the problems that arise in a discussion of “meaning” in the English-speaking spheres are among the main themes touched upon in my article “Über Sinn und Bedeutung in der Musik. Ein Blick aus Adornos Musikphilosophie,” in Die Lebendigkeit kritischer Gesellschaftstheorie, ed. Andreas Gruschka and Ulrich Oevermann, forthcoming. Many thanks also to Robert L. Kendrick for his translation of this text from the Italian. Dates in brackets following titles indicate year of publication.

2 See René Leibowitz, Schoenberg, et son école: L’étape contemporaine du langage musical (Paris: J.B. Janin, 1947); ibid., Qu’est ce que la musique de douze sons?: le concerto pour neuf instruments, op. 24, d’Anton Webern (Liège: Editions Dynamo, 1948); ibid., Introduction à la musique de douze sons: les Variations pour orchestre, op. 31 d’Arnold Schœnberg (Paris: L’Arche, 1949).

3 Letter from Leibowitz to Steinecke of November 15, 1949 (Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt, henceforth IMD).

4 See the letters from Steinecke to Adorno of January 6, 1950 and of May 23, 1950 (IMD).

5 See the letters from Steinecke to Adorno of July 18, 1950 and of July 28, 1950 (IMD).

6 See Klaus Wagner, “Im Zeichen der Dissonanz,” Musica 4 (1950), 387–90, reprinted in Im Zenit der Moderne: Die Internationalen Ferienkurse für Neue Musik Darmstadt 1946–1966, ed. Gianmario Borio and Hermann Danuser (Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach, 1997), 3:392–97. Philosophie der neuen Musik had been published by J.C.B. Mohr of Tübingen in 1949. It has been translated by Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster as Philosophy of Modern Music (New York: Seabury Press, 1973). The book, cited in the text as Philosophy of New Music, provoked critical reactions upon its publication: see Walther Harth, “Die Dialektik des musikalischen Fortschritts. Zu Theodor W. Adornos Philosophie der neuen Musik,” Melos 16 (1949): 333–37, and Adorno’s reply, “Mißverständnisse,” Melos 17 (1950): 75–77 (later in GS, 12: 203–6); see also Joachim Kaiser, “Musik und Katastrophe,” Frankfurter Hefte 6 (June 1951): 435–40.

7 In the 1950s, the topics of technique and technology had a high profile, evident among other things in the series of lectures published as Die Künste im technischen Zeitalter, ed. Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1954) with contributions by Martin Heidegger, Werner Heisenberg, and Walter Riezler.

8 See Theodor W. Adorno, “Analytical Study of the NBC Music Appreciation Hour,” The Musical Quarterly 78 (1994): 325–77. Some ideas of this talk were further developed in “Musik und Technik,” Gravesaner Blätter 4 (1958): 36–50. Also in GS, 16:229–48.

9 See Max Horkheimer, “Traditionelle und kritische Theorie,” in Traditionelle und kritische Theorie: Vier Aufsätze (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1970), 12–56.

10 See Theodor W. Adorno, “Das Altern der Neuen Musik,” a lecture for the Süddeutscher Rundfunk on the occasion of the 1954 Stuttgarter Woche Neuer Musik, first published in Monat 7/80 (May 1955), then in 1956 in Dissonanzen: Musik in der verwalteten Welt (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1956), and finally in GS, 14:143–67. For a translation see “The Aging of the New Music,” trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor and Frederic Will, in EoM, 181–202.

11 The set of talks from 1955, 1956, and 1957 are preserved on tape in the archive of the IMD. Adorno developed the content of the last two in “The Function of Counterpoint in New Music” and “Criteria of New Music,” in SF, 123–44 and 145–96. Only notes for the seminar on musical interpretation survive, published in Adorno, Zu einer Theorie der musikalischen Reproduktion, ed. Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), 317–26; Adorno and Kolisch presented a synthesis of their most important ideas in the radio program Interpretation und Neue Musik broadcast by the Hessischer Rundfunk on November 24, 1954 (Theodor Wisengrund Adorno Archive (TWAA)). On this topic, see Gianmario Borio, “Werkstruktur und musikalische Darstellung. Reflexionen über Adornos Interpretationsanalysen,” in Musikalische Analyse und kritische Theorie, ed. Adolf Nowak und Markus Fahlbusch, forthcoming.

12 See Adorno, PnM, 107.

13 See Karlheinz Stockhausen, “Von Webern zu Debussy: Bemerkungen zur statistischen Form,” in Texte zur elektronischen und instrumentalen Musik, vol. 1, ed. Dieter Schnebel (Cologne: M. DuMont Schauberg, 1963), 75–85; Pierre Boulez, “Claude Debussy et Anton Webern” [1955], in Darmstadt-Dokumente I (Musik-Konzepte Sonderband), ed. Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn (Munich: edition text+kritik, 1999), 72–79; Herbert Eimert, “Debussy’s ‘Jeux’,” die Reihe 5 (1961): 3–20; Dieter Schnebel, “… Brouillards. Tendenzen bei Debussy,” in Denkbare Musik: Schriften 1952–1972, ed. Hans Rudolf Zeller (Cologne: M. DuMont Schauberg, 1972), 62–69; Jean Barraqué, “La Mer de Debussy, ou la naissance des formes ouvertes,” in Écrits, ed. Laurent Feneyrou (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 2001), 277–386.

14 See Luigi Nono, “Die Entwicklung der Reihentechnik” [1958], in Luigi Nono: Texte, Studien zu seiner Musik, ed. Jürg Stenzl (Zurich and Freiburg i.Br.: Atlantis, 1975) 21–33; Henri Pousseur, “Webern’s Organic Chromaticism,” die Reihe 2 (1958): 51–60; ibid., “Da Schönberg a Webern: una mutazione,” Incontri musicali 1 (1956): 3–39; ibid., “Webern und die Theorie,” Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik 1 (1958): 38–43; Stockhausen, “…wie die Zeit vergeht…” [1956], Texte, 99–139.

15 Adorno, “Criteria of New Music,” 154–61.

16 See Adorno’s essays “Die gegängelte Musik,” “Kritik des Musikanten,” and “Zur Musikpädagogik,” in Dissonanzen, GS, 14:51–66, 67–107, and 108–126.

17 See Harry Goldschmidt, “Musik und Fortschritt: Zur Problematik des Avantgardismus,” Periodikum für wissenschaftlichen Sozialismus 10 (1959): 27–42; Theodor W. Adorno and Karlheinz Stockhausen, “Der Widerstand gegen die neue Musik,” a discussion broadcast in a shortened version by the Hessischer Rundfunk on April 22, 1960 and published in its entirety in Neuland: Ansätze zur Musik der Gegenwart 5 (1984–85): 7–23.

18 Goldschmidt had previously participated in a radio discussion with Adorno: Ist das noch Musik?, broadcast by the Nordwestdeutscher Rundfunk on July 25, 1958.

19 Goldschmidt, “Musik und Fortschritt,” 37.

20 As to Stockhausen’s works, Goldschmidt repeatedly referred to the criticisms in Hanns Eisler’s 1955 article “Über die Dummheit in der Musik” [1958], in Hanns Eisler, Materialien zu einer Dialektik der Musik, ed. Manfred Grabs (Leipzig: Reclam, 1973), 267–81.

21 See the letter of Adorno to Stockhausen of March 21, 1960 (TWAA).

22 See Theodor W. Adorno and Erich Doflein, Vereinsamung oder Historismus, recorded on April 23, 1951 and broadcast on June 14, 1951 (TWAA).

23 Besides Adorno’s previously cited essays, see Erich Doflein, “Gewinne und Verluste in neuer Musik und Musikerziehung,” in Vorträge und Programm der VIII. Arbeitstagung Lindau 1955 (Hagnau/Bodensee: Generalsekretariat des Instituts für Neue Musik und Musikerziehung, 1955), 5–33.

24 Tape in IMD.

25 Adorno, “Criteria of New Music,” 149–52. See also the letters between Doflein and Adorno of January 3, 1956 and January 7, 1956 (TWAA).

26 See the letters from Adorno to Steinecke of January 4, 1960 and Steinecke’s reply on March 9, 1961 (IMD).

27 Adorno, “Vers une musique informelle,” in QuF, 269–322.

28 See Gianmario Borio, Musikalische Avantgarde um 1960: Entwurf einer Theorie der informellen Musik (Laaber: Laaber, 1993), 102–8.

29 See Karlheinz Stockhausen, “Musik und Graphik” [1959], in Stockhausen, Texte, 176–88, and “Vieldeutige Form (Kommentare: Heinz-Klaus Metzger)” [1960], in Darmstadt-Dokumente I, 184–207; Luigi Nono, “Geschichte und Gegenwart in der Musik von heute” [1959], in Luigi Nono: Texte, 34–40; Pierre Boulez, Musikdenken heute 1 (Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik 5), ed. Ernst Thomas (Mainz: Schott, 1963).

30 See Heinz-Klaus Metzger, “Das Altern der Philosophie der Neuen Musik” [1957] (translated by Leo Black as “Just Who Is Growing Old?”, die Reihe 4 [1960]: 63–80), “Disput zwischen Theodor W. Adorno und Heinz-Klaus Metzger” [1957] and “Zur Verdeutlichung einer Polemik und ihres Gegenstandes” [1958], in Heinz-Klaus Metzger, Musik wozu: Literatur zu Noten, ed. Rainer Riehn (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1980), 61–89, 90–104, and 105–12. Letter from Adorno to Metzger of July 7, 1961 (TWAA).

31 Letter from Metzger to Adorno of July 13, 1961 (TWAA).

32 “John Cage oder Die freigelassene Musik,” in Musik-Konzepte. Sonderband John Cage, ed. Heinz-Klaus Metzger und Rainer Riehn (Munich: edition text+kritik, 1978), 5–17.

33 Lecture 30’00” was published in die Reihe 5 (1961): 84–120 with the directions for the time breaks in its reading.

34 Adorno, “Form,” in GS, 16:620–24. The second book of Boulez’s Structures was also cited in this context; Adorno had heard it played by the Kontarsky brothers at the 1964 Bremen festival.

35 Theodor W. Adorno, “Funktion der Farbe in der Musik” [1966], in Darmstadt-Dokumente I, 311.

36 See Theodor W. Adorno, “Trying to Understand Endgame,” in ibid., Notes to Literature, vol. 1, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 241–75; ibid., “Presuppositions: On the Occasion of a Reading by Hans G. Helms,” in Notes to Literature, vol. 2, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 95–108.

37 Besides the previously cited set of talks on timbre, see also Adorno’s “On Some Relationships between Music and Painting,” trans. Susan Gillespie, The Musical Quarterly 79 (1995): 66–79; and “Die Kunst und die Künste” [1966], in GS, 10.1:432–53.

38 See Adorno, PnM, 174–76.

39 See György Ligeti, “Metamorphoses of Musical Form,” die Reihe 7 (1965): 5–19. In this essay (9–10) Ligeti underscored a marked affinity (at least on the level of the acoustic result) between early serial compositions and Cage’s chance scores; Adorno repeatedly recalled Ligeti’s observation: see Adorno, “Schwierigkeiten I. Beim Komponieren,” in GS, 17:270 and Adorno, AT, 156.

40 György Ligeti, “Über Form in der Neuen Musik,” Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik 10 (1966): 23–35, at 33.

41 See Ligeti, “Form,” 29–30; “Internes Arbeitsgespräch (1966),” in Darmstadt-Dokumente I, 313–29; Adorno, AT, 156.

42 See Heinz-Klaus Metzger, “Die geschichtliche Wahrheit des musikalischen Materials” (1962), in Musik wozu, 137–44; Gottfried Michael Koenig, “Das musikalische Material — Ein Begriff und seine Fragwürdigkeit” (1963), in Ästhetische Praxis: Texte zur Musik 2 (Saarbrücken: Pfau, 1992), 143–53; Ligeti, “Form,” 27.

43 See Dieter Schnebel, “Das musikalische Material — Verhältnisse und Aktionen” [1963], in Denkbare Musik, 286–88; Helmut Lachenmann, “Der Materialbegriff in der Musik” (talk at the Hochschule für Gestaltung Ulm, 1964, unpublished); see also Lachenmann’s “Bedin-gungen des Materials” [1978], in Musik als existentielle Erfahrung: Schriften 1966–1995, ed. Joseph Häusler (Wiesbaden: Breitkopf & Härtel/Insel, 1996), 35–47. For Adorno’s influence on these discussions, see Gianmario Borio, “Material — zur Krise einer musikästhetischen Kategorie,” in Ästhetik und Komposition, eds. Gianmario Borio and Ulrich Mosch (Mainz: Schott, 1994), 108–11.

44 On the 1967 program, Adorno’s Lieder op. 1 and op. 6 were performed; the evening was introduced by a talk by Sylvano Bussotti published as “T. W. Adorno, l’extra e la linea della vita,” Marcatré 5/34-35-36 (1967): 118–22.

45 Pierre Boulez, “Nécessité d’une orientation esthétique,” in Zeugnisse: Theodor W. Adorno zum sechzigsten Geburtstag, ed. by Max Horkheimer (Frankfurt am Main: Europäische Verlagsanstalt, 1963), 332–54. The text corresponds to section I of the version published in Pierre Boulez, “Nécessité d’une orientation esthétique,” in Points de Repère (Paris: C. Bourgois, 1995), 529–79, at 529–52. Only the first part has been translated into English, as Pierre Boulez, “Putting the Phantoms to Flight,” in Boulez, Orientations: Collected Writings, ed. Jean-Jacques Nattiez, trans. Martin Cooper (London: Faber & Faber, 1986), 63–83.

46 Adorno, “Musik und Technik” [1958], in GS, 16:231.

47 Boulez, “Nécessité d’une orientation esthétique,” in Points de Repère, 561.

48 Ibid., 564.

49 Ibid., 569.

50 I cite from a typescript in which Adorno remarked on various passages of Boulez’s essay, sketching the trajectory of the section of Aesthetic Theory which, in its published version, bears the title “Nötigung zur Ästhetik.” A philological and interpretive problem emerges from the comparison of the two sources: the corresponding passage in the published version reads: “Auch Boulez hat gewiss keine normative Ästhetik üblichen Stils vor Augen sondern eine geschichtsphilosophisch determinierte Kunstthetorie” (Even Boulez most certainly does not have a normative aesthetic of conventional style in mind, but rather a theory of art that is determined by the history of philosophy. [p. 508, my emphasis]). In Adorno’s notes that I have checked, instead of the conjunction “sondern” (but rather), the passage has the double negative “weder … noch” (neither … nor) which gives a completely different (and to my mind, more coherent) meaning to the sentence.

51 Of this project there remains only a tape recording whose poor quality does not permit consideration in this essay.

52 Adorno, AT, 43–44.

53 Pierre Boulez, “‘… Near and Far’,” in Boulez, Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship, trans. Stephen Walsh (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), 144. Boulez developed this idea further in Jalons (pour un décennie): dix ans d’enseignement au Collège de France, 1978–1988, ed. Jean-Jacques Nattiez (C. Bourgois: Paris, 1989), 48–49.

54 Adorno, AT, 43.

55 Ibid., 212–17.

56 Ibid., 43.

57 See the chapters “Musikalische Naturbeherrschung” and “Umschlag in Unfreiheit” in PnM, 65–71. At the end of the latter, Adorno posited a point of convergence between the two extremes of Schoenberg and Stravinsky in their objectivist conception of music.

58 In “Zur Vorgeschichte der Reihenkomposition” (GS, 16:68–84, at 69, note 1) Adorno, speaking of twelve-tone technique’s dependency on the principle of variation, noted: “The essays about the prehistory of row composition as well as about the function of the counterpoint, the criteria of new music, and music and technique are closely connected with the Philosophy of New Music. What was only hinted at in the latter these essays unfold and they pursue further dialectical motives. The older text remains a premise, so that there are no individual citations.”

59 See Pierre Boulez, Boulez on Music Today, trans. Susan Bradshaw and Richard Rodney Bennett (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971).

60 See Ernst Bloch, “Über das mathematische und dialektische Wesen in der Musik” (1925), in Gesammelte Schriften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969), 10:512, where Bloch’s principle is the exact opposite: “Nicht die Mathematik also, sondern die Dialektik ist das Organon der Musik, als der höchsten Darstellung historischer, schicksalgeladener Zeit” (Thus not mathermatics, but rather dialectics is the organon of music, as the highest portrayal of historic and fated time).

61 See “Intermezzo II,” die Reihe 4 (1960): 81–84. “Intermezzo II” is signed with the letter “E” (meaning Eimert), but only in the original German (“Intermezzo II: Adorno und Kotschen-reuther,” die Reihe 4 [1958]: 81–84) and follows “Intermezzo I,” which is the quoted article “Das Altern der Philosophie der neuen Musik” by Metzger. In a letter of September 30, 1960 (TWAA) which contains a copy of a letter to Alfred Schlee of Universal Edition, Metzger removed all doubts as to his own authorship of this linkage.

62 See Anton Webern, “Der Weg zur Neuen Musik,” in ibid., Wege zur neuen Musik, ed. Willi Reich (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1960), 15–17.

63 On relationships between music and language see Adorno, “Music, Language, and Composition,” trans. Susan H. Gillespie, in EoM, 113–26.

64 See Walter Benjamin, “Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen,” in Gesammelte Schriften, eds. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp: 1977), 2: 140–57.

65 In reality, the question of the loss of the linguistic dimension had already been sketched in one of the closing chapters of the Philosophy of New Music. For Adorno, the composer is like a writer “… who is called upon to create a unique vocabulary and syntax for every sentence he writes,” Philosophy of New Music, 104.

66 Cited in Herbert Eimert, “Junge Komponisten bekennen sich zu Anton Webern” (1953, with statements by Boulez, Goeyvaerts, Nono, and Stockhausen), in Im Zenit der Moderne, 3:60.

67 Adorno, “The Aging of the New Music,” 187.

68 See “Disput zwischen Theodor W. Adorno und Heinz-Klaus Metzger,” 102–4.

69 Adorno, “Music, Language, and Composition,” 119.

70 Ibid.

71 Benjamin, “Über Sprache überhaupt und über die Sprache des Menschen,” 144.

72 Adorno, “Music, Language, and Composition,” 114.

73 The Beckett fragment recurs in various essays of the 1960s; see Adorno, “Die Kunst und die Künste,” 450; Adorno, “On Some Relationships Between Music and Painting,” 71. Adorno, AT, 114.

74 Adorno, AT, 302.

75 See Adorno, “Anweisungen zum Hören neuer Musik,” in GS, 15:188–248, and “Schwierigkeiten II. In der Auffassung neuer Musik,” in GS, 17:273–91.

76 Adorno, AT, 118–27.

77 Ibid., 121 (translation modified, for the original see Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, GS, 7:184).

78 The three places in Aesthetic Theory (pp. 8, 118, 139) where Adorno uses the term hermeneutics show a restricted conception of the term, considering it only as an effort to grasp the psychic changes of a work’s author. This idea was at the basis of the critique of hermeneutics expressed as early as 1937 in the fifteenth of the “Musikalische Aphorismen” in GS, 18:19–20.

79 Adorno, “Versuch, das Endspiel zu verstehen,” 313.

80 Ibid., 283.

81 Adorno, “Music, Language, and Composition,” 124.

82 See Albrecht Wellmer, “Wahrheit, Schein, Versöhnung. Adornos ästhetische Rettung der Modernität,” in Adorno-Konferenz 1983, ed. by Ludwig von Friedeburg and Jürgen Habermas (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1983), 138–76, at 173.

83 See Adorno, Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie, GS, 14:331–48.

84 Adorno, “Music, Language, and Composition,” 115.

85 “However, if finished works only become what they are because their being is a process of becoming, they are in turn dependent on forms in which their process crystallizes: interpretation, commentary, and critique. These are not simply brought to bear on works by those who concern themselves with them; rather they are the arena of historical development of artworks themselves, and thus they are forms in their own right” (AT, 194). See Albrecht Wellmer, “Sprache — (Neue) Musik — Kommunikation,” in L’orizzonte filosofico del comporre nel ventesimo secolo [The Philosophical Horizon of Composition in the Twentieth Century], ed. Gianmario Borio (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2003), 249–81.

86 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 3rd ed., trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (New York: Macmillan, 1958), 81e.

87 See Jürgen Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987), 2:32–34.

88 Adorno, AT, 220.

89 Adorno, Der getreue Korrepetitor, 340.

90 Adorno, Mahler, 44–45.

91 See Erwin Ratz, Einführung in die musikalische Formenlehre (Vienna: Universal Edition, 1973).

92 Adolf Bernhard Marx, Die Lehre von der musikalischen Komposition, praktisch theoretisch, vol. 3 (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1848).

93 See Carl Dahlhaus, “Ästhetische Prämissen der ‘Sonatenform’ bei Adolf Bernhard Marx,” in Klassische und romatische Musikästhetik (Laaber: Laaber, 1988), 347–59.

94 Adorno, “Vers une musique informelle,” 306.

95 Ibid., 307.

96 See Pierre Boulez, “Schoenberg Is Dead,” in Stocktakings from an Apprenticeship, 209–14.

97 It is no accident that Schoenberg dwelled on the forms of presentation (or exposition) of musical ideas in the entire first part of Fundamentals of Musical Composition. See Arnold Schoenberg, Fundamentals of Musical Composition, ed. Leonard Stein (Boston and London: Faber & Faber, 1967), 1–118.

98 See Pierre Boulez, “Claude Debussy et Anton Webern” [1955], in Darmstadt-Dokumente I, 72–79; and Id., “Corruption in the Censers,” in Stocktakings, from an Apprenticeship, 20–25.

99 That the sequence was planned is shown by the first, provisional, and incomplete score which, on the contrary, foresaw continuing, not interwoven, trajectories; see Pierre Boulez, “Speaking, Playing, Singing,” in Orientations, 330–43.

100 Boulez, “Form,” in Orientations, 90 (a 1963 Darmstadt course which was intended as the fourth chapter of Penser la musique aujourd’hui, translated as Boulez on Music Today, see n. 59). Here Boulez returned to the passage from Lévi-Strauss previously cited in “General Considerations” in Boulez on Music Today, 32.

101 See Jean Boivin, La Classe de Messiaen (Paris: C. Bourgois, 1995), 276–81, and Olivier Messiaen, Traité de rythme, de couleur, et d’ornithologie, 1949–1992, vol. 7 (Paris: Alphonse Leluc, 2001).

102 Barraqué, “La Mer de Debussy, ou la naissance des formes ouvertes,” 280; trans. Keith Chapin.

103 See Adorno, PnM, 174–76.

104 See Adorno, Debussy, notes for a talk at the Frankfurt Hochschule fur Musik on February 28, 1963 (TWAA).

105 See ibid., 3.

106 Adorno, “Funktion der Farbe in der Musik,” 288.

107 See Adorno, “On Some Relationships between Music and Painting,” 67. Adorno traded important ideas with Kahnweiler which had a certain influence on his conception of the informal. A conversation between the two with the title Über abstrakte Kunst was broadcast by the Hessischer Rundfunk on November 20, 1959; in a letter to Kahnweiler of January 18, 1960 (TWAA) Adorno dwelled on the difference between French and German conceptions of the informal.

108 Ligeti, “Form,” 23–24.

109 Adorno, “On Some Relationships Between Music and Painting,” 70.

110 See Brian Ferneyhough, “Il Tempo della Figura” [1984] and “The Tactility of Time” [1988], in Collected Writings, ed. James Boros and Richard Toop (Amsterdam: Harwood, 1995), 33–41 and 42–50; Gérard Grisey, “Tempus ex machina,” Contemporary Music Review, vol. 2, part 1, 1987, 239–75; and Salvatore Sciarrino, Le figure della musica: da Beethoven a oggi (Ricordi: Milano, 1998), 97–148.

Chapter 4

1 The first part of my title is not my own, but borrowed from Pierre Boulez, himself no doubt half-remembering a line of Adorno’s. A more direct version occurs in a proverb Boulez quoted from Claudel — “God writes straight with crooked lines,” in Pierre Boulez, Orientations: Collected Writings, ed. Jean-Jacques Nattiez, trans. Martin Cooper (London: Faber & Faber, 1986), 525. Translations are mine, unless noted otherwise.

2 Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, “Editors’ Afterword,” in Adorno, AT, 361–66, at 366.

3 Adorno, “On the Problem of Musical Analysis,” trans. Max Paddison, in EoM, 162–80.

4 Theodor W. Adorno, Hegel: Three Studies, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1993), 2.

5 See Adorno, “Music and New Music,” in QuF, 249–68, at 249.

6 Ibid., 275.

7 This list consists of phrases quoted directly or condensed from Adorno’s formulations in “Music and New Music,” 256–58. See also AT, 39–40.

8 Adorno, “Music and New Music,” 265–66.

9 Adorno, AT, 39.

10 Ibid., 4.

11 Adorno, “The Aging of the New Music,” trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor and Frederic Will, in EoM, 181–202, at 183.

12 Ibid., 183.

13 Ibid., 185.

14 Adorno, AT, 40.

15 Ibid., 32.

16 Adorno, “Vers une musique informelle,” in QuF, 269–322, at 303–4.

17 Ibid., 272.

18 Martin Zenck, “Auswirkungen einer ‘Musique informelle’ auf die neue Musik: Zu Theodor W. Adornos Formvorstellung,” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 10 (1979): 137–65. Zenck gives persuasive evidence of the relation to traditional formal elements in both op.11 and Erwartung.

19 Adorno, “Berg’s Discoveries in Compositional Technique,” in QuF, 179–200, at 182; “Vers une musique informelle,” 283.

20 Adorno, “Berg’s Discoveries in Compositional Technique,” 194

21 Ibid., 195. This is the premise of Gianmario Borio’s Musikalische Avantgarde um 1960: Entwurf einer Theorie der informellen Musik (Laaber: Laaber, 1993). Borio considers a wide range of composers and works of the 1960s and the following in more detail: Dieter Schnebel’s Glossolalie, Mauricio Kagel’s Match für drei Spieler, Morton Feldman’s Extensions 3, Franco Evangelisti’s Random or not Random, and Aldo Clementi’s Informel 3.

22 Adorno, “Berg’s Discoveries in Compositional Technique,” 195.

23 Adorno, “Vers une musique informelle,” 303.

24 Ibid., 303–4.

25 Ibid., 304.

26 See Brian Ferneyhough’s discussion of his own works in Collected Writings, ed. James Boros and Richard Toop (Amsterdam: Harwood, 1995), especially 85–164.

27 Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, “Adornos Kritik der Neueren Musik,” in Mit den Ohren denken: Adornos Philosophie der Musik, eds. Richard Klein and Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1998), 251–80, at 279. This passage is quoted by Max Paddison who would seem to concur with Mahnkopf. See Max Paddison, “Der Komponist als kritischer Theoretiker: Brian Ferneyhoughs Ästhetik nach Adorno,” Musik & Ästhetik 3 (1999): 95–100, at 100.

28 Adorno, “Vers une musique informelle,” 319–20.

29 Theodor W. Adorno, “Subject and Object,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, eds. Andrew Arato and Eike Gebhardt (New York: Continuum, 1982), 497–511.

30 Adorno, “Vers une musique informelle,” 322.

31 See the quotation of Beckett (“The kind of work I do is one in which I’m not master of my material”) in Heinz Knobeloch, “Jenseits des Identitätsprinzips: Morton Feldmans Neither,” Musik & Ästhetik 2 (1998): 5–11, at 10.

32 Adorno, AT, 224.

33 A typical example occurs in a thought on music and painting in Morton Feldman, Essays (Kerpen, Germany: Beginner Press, 1985), 90: “Music is not painting, but it can learn from this more perceptive temperament that waits and observes the inherent mystery of its materials, as opposed to the composer’s vested interest in his craft.…The painter achieves mastery by allowing what he is doing to be itself. In a way, he must step aside in order to be in control. The composer is just learning to do this.”

34 Adorno, AT, 32.

35 Adorno, “Stravinsky: A Dialectical Portrait,” in QuF, 145–75, at 152–53.

36 Adorno, AT, 30.

37 Ibid., 30 (my emphasis). The implication of course, is that now, things stand differently.

38 Ibid., 135.

39 Ibid., 224.

40 Adorno, “Stravinsky: A Dialectical Portrait,” 174.

41 Knobeloch, “Jenseits des Identitätsprinzips: Morton Feldmans Neither,”8 .

42 Ibid., 9.

43 Ibid., 9. Further support is given by Christian Kemper’s essay on Feldman and Schubert, in which he suggests that a key task of the twentieth century, to find “a new concept of continuity, defined in opposition to coherence” is seen at work in the move toward what he calls the autonomy of sound in Feldman. See Christian Kemper, “Franz Schubert — Morton Feldman: Tangenten,” Musik & Ästhetik 1 (1997): 22–35, at 35.

44 See Constantin Floros, György Ligeti: Jenseits von Avantgarde und Postmoderne (Vienna: Verlag Lafite, 1996), 172.

45 See György Ligeti, György Ligeti in Conversation with Péter Várnai, Josef Häusler, Claude Samuel, and Himself (London: Eulenberg Books, 1983), 13–14.

46 David Osmond-Smith, Playing on Words: A Guide to Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia (London: Royal Musical Association, 1985), 55.

47 Ibid., 39.

48 Adorno, AT, 135.

49 Adorno, “Berg’s Discoveries in Compositional Technique,” 195.

50 See Gianmario Borio’s comments on Adorno and Debussy in “‘Dire cela, sans savoir quoi’: The Question of Meaning in Adorno and in the Musical Avant-Garde,” chap. 3 in this volume.

51 Adorno, AT, 40.

52 Adorno, “The Aging of the New Music,” 189.

53 Adorno, “Vers une musique informelle,” 277.

54 For a very useful discussion of Boulez’s Répons in terms of Adorno’s theory, see Alastair Williams, New Music and the Claims of Modernity (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1997), 104–18.

55 Adorno, “Music and Technique,” in SF, 197–214, at 212.

56 “Notes are of course more than just directions for performance; they are music objectivized as text. This is why they exert a gravitational pull towards being read silently.” Adorno, “Vers une musique informelle,” 296.

57 Adorno, “Stravinsky: A Dialectical Portrait,” 167–68.

58 See Adorno, Mahler.

59 Adorno, “Vers une musique informelle,” 314.

60 Ibid., 282.

61 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Introductory Lectures on Aesthetics, ed. Michael Inwood, trans. Bernard Bosanquet (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1993), 14.

62 In a few rare moments, such as discussing the idea of a Naturlaut in Mahler and Webern, Adorno acknowledges that a radical critique of a received soundworld can produce something that functions, like nature itself, as a critical Other to cultural forms. I discuss this at some length in Julian Johnson, Webern and the Transformation of Nature (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 225–29, and “Mahler and the Idea of Nature, in Perspectives on Gustav Mahler, ed. Jeremy Barham (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2004), 23–36.

Chapter 5

1 Many of the ideas in this chapter were formulated in 2002 while I was an Alexander von Humboldt Fellow at the Music Department of the Humboldt University, Berlin. During this time I also consulted the Sammlung Wolfgang Rihm at the Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel. I wish to thank Hermann Danuser and Ulrich Mosch for the support they offered to my research. Translations are mine unless noted otherwise.

2 Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Bloomster (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), 54. The work is cited here as Philosophy of New Music.

3 See Adorno, “Vers une musique informelle,” in QuF, 269–322, at 320.

4 Adorno, “The Aging of the New Music,” trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor and Frederic Will, in EoM, 181–202. Adorno’s shift in emphasis is vigorously challenged by Heinz-Klaus Metzger, “Das Altern der Philosophie der neuen Musik,” die Reihe 4 (1958): 64–80; translated by Leo Black as “Just Who is Growing Old?” die Reihe 4 (1960): 63–80. For more discussion of this debate, see my New Music and the Claims of Modernity (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 1997), 47.

5 Adorno, “Music and Technique,” in SF, 197–214, at 202.

6 For a recent study of Webern, which contrasts with the primarily formalist postwar reception of his technical achievements, see Julian Johnson, Webern and the Transformation of Nature (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

7 Adorno, “Vers une musique informelle,” 311.

8 The open work in relation to Adorno’s “Vers une musique informelle” is discussed by Gianmario Borio in “Informelle Kunst oder ‘Werk in Bewegung’?” in Im Zenit der Moderne: Die Internationalen Ferienkurse für Neue Musik Darmstadt 1946–66, eds. Gianmario Borio and Hermann Danuser (Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany: Rombach, 1997), 1: 458–69. The debate over aging in the new music is also covered in “Der Streit ums Altern der Neuen Musik,” ibid., 432–40. For more on this essay, see Martin Zenck, “Auswirkungen einer ‘musique informelle’ auf die neue Musik: Zu Theodor W. Adornos Formvorstellung,” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 10 (1979): 137–65.

9 Adorno, “Vers une musique informelle,” 322 (translation modified). Wolfgang Rihm, “Laudatio auf Pierre Boulez: Anläßlich der Verleihung des Theodor W. Adorno-Preises 1992,” in Ausgesprochen: Schriften und Gespräche, ed. Ulrich Mosch (Winterthur, Germany: Amadeus, 1997), 1:301–10, at 301.

10 Adorno “Form in der neuen Musik,” in GS, 16:607–27, at 617.

11 Adorno, AT, 156. György Ligeti, “Pierre Boulez: Decision and Automatism in Structure 1a,” (1958), trans. Leo Black, die Reihe 4 (1960), 36–62.

12 Albrecht Wellmer, “The Dialectic of Modernism and Postmodernism: The Critique of Reason since Adorno,” in The Persistence of Modernity: Essays on Aesthetics, Ethics, and Postmodernism, trans. David Midgley (Cambridge, UK: Polity, 1991), 36–94, at 81.

13 Max Paddison suggests, in a discussion of Adornian truth content, that reconciliation might be understood as hope. “Adorno’s Schubert in the light of Benjamin’s Trauerspiel study.” Paper presented at Adorno’s Schubert: Winter Study Day of the Society for Music Analysis, in association with the Cambridge Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities, February 2003.

14 Wellmer, “The Dialectic of Modernism and Postmodernism,” 89.

15 Wolfgang Rihm, “Musikalische Freiheit,” in Ausgesprochen, 1:23–39, at 23.

16 For more on this score see my “Voices of the Other: Wolfgang Rihm’s Music Drama Die Eroberung von Mexico,” Journal of the Royal Musical Association 129 (2004): 240–71.

17 See Wolfgang Rihm, “Der geschockte Komponist,” in Ausgesprochen, 1:43–55, at 45. For a brief discussion of the German reception of Rihm in the 1970s in relation to the dominant perception of Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music, see Hermann Danuser, “Neue Musik,” in Die Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart: Allgemeine Enzyklopädie der Musik: Sachteil, ed. Ludwig Finscher (Kassel, Germany: Bärenreiter, forthcoming), 7:75–122, at 109–10.

18 Brian Ferneyhough, “Leaps and Circuits to Trail: A Conversation on the Texts and Music with Jeffrey Stadelman,” in Collected Writings, eds. James Boros and Richard Toop (Amsterdam: Harwood, 1995), 464–509, at 470.

19 I expand on this argument in my “Adorno and the Semantics of Modernism,” Perspectives of New Music, 37 (1999), 29–50.

20 Reinhold Brinkmann, Musik Nachdenken: Reinhold Brinkmann und Wolfgang Rihm im Gespräch (Regensburg, Germany: ConBrio, 2001), 29.

21 “On the Contemporary Relationship of Philosophy and Music,” trans. Susan H. Gillespie, in EoM, 135–61, at 146. The passage is quoted in Wolfgang Rihm, “Tonalität: Klischee — Umwertung —Versuch,” in Ausgesprochen, 1:194–209, at 204.

22 Ibid. 205.

23 Wolfgang Rihm, “Notizen zum Chiffre-Zyklus,” in Ausgesprochen, 2:343–45, at 343.

24 Adorno, “On the Contemporary Relationship of Philosophy and Music,” 146.

25 Wolfgang Rihm, “Spur, Faden: Zur Theorie des musikalischen Handwerks,” in Ausgesprochen, 1:69–77, at 72.

26 Adorno, “Music and Technique,” 207.

27 Rihm, “Musikalische Freiheit,” 25.

28 Ibid., 26. Beate Kutschke refers to “wild thinking” in the title of her Wildes Denken in der neuen Musik: Die Idee vom Ende der Geschichte bei Theodor W. Adorno und Wolfgang Rihm (Würzburg, Germany: Königshausen & Neumann, 2002).

29 Rihm, “Musikalische Freiheit,” 27.

30 Theodor W. Adorno, Zu einer Theorie der musikalischen Reproduktion, ed. Henri Lonitz (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), 209.

31 Rihm, “Musik — das innere Ausland,” in Ausgesprochen, 1: 403–15, at 403.

32 Rihm, “Mexiko, Eroberungsnotiz,” in Ausgesprochen, 2:387–91. The English translation I am using, which appears in the booklet accompanying the recording of Die Eroberung von Mexico, is by Susan Marie Praeder. Since the booklet is unpaginated, I give page numbers for the German version, in this case, 388.

33 Roland Barthes, “The Grain of the Voice,” in Image — Music — Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill & Wang, 1977), 179–89.

34 For more on this aspect of Adorno’s aesthetics see Andrew Bowie, From Romanticism to Critical Theory: The Philosophy of German Literary Theory (London: Routledge, 1997), 260–61.

35 Wolfgang Rihm, “In den Spiegel gelauscht…” in Ausgesprochen, 2:285–86, at 285.

36 Ibid.

37 A similar point is made by Siegfried Mauser, “Primäre Ausdrucksformen: Anmerkungen zum Klavierstück Nr. 7 von Wolfgang Rihm,” in Der Komponist Wolfgang Rihm, ed. Dieter Rexroth (Mainz and New York: Schott, 1985), 153–59.

38 Theodor W. Adorno, “Parataxis: On Hölderlin’s Late Poetry,” in Notes to Literature, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Shierry Weber Nicholsen (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 2:109–49, at 132–33.

39 Wolfgang Rihm, “Fremde Szenen I–III, Versuche für Klaviertrio, erste Folge (1982–84),” in Ausgesprochen, 2:333.

40 For an interesting discussion of the inseparability of immediate and mediated experience, see Andrew Bowie, “Music and the Rise of Aesthetics,” in The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music, ed. Jim Samson (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 29–54.

41 For an informative discussion of Rihm and visual art, see Ulrich Mosch, “‘…das Dröhnen der Bild- und Farbflächen…’ Zum Verhältnis von Wolfgang Rihm und Kurt Kocherscheidt,” in Brustrauschen: Zum Werkdialog von Kurt Kocherscheidt und Wolfgang Rihm, ed. Heinz Liesbrock (Ostfildern-Ruit, Germany: Hatje Cantz, 2001), 70–87.

42 This is perhaps a humorous rejoinder to the tempo marking Luciano Berio uses in the Mahler movement of his Sinfonia: “In ruhig fliessender Bewegung.”

43 The plans for fleuve V are held at the Paul Sacher Foundation, Basel.

44 Wolfgang Rihm, note on fleuve I–IV, trans. Robert Lindell, in the program for the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2000, 31.

45 Adorno, Mahler, 72.

46 Ibid., 48.

47 Häusler asks Rihm about this issue. “Wolfgang Rihm in Conversation with Joseph Häusler,” trans. Stewart Spencer, liner notes to recording of Jagden und Formen, DGG 471 558–9, CD 2.

48 Ibid., 11.

49 Ibid., 12.

50 Ibid., 11.

51 For a commentary on this debate, see Joakim Tillman, “Postmodernism and Art Music in the German Debate,” in Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought, eds. Judy Lochhead and Joseph Auner (New York: Routledge, 2002), 75–91.

52 Wellmer, Introduction to The Persistence of Modernity, vii. This view is endorsed by Danuser when he speaks of “the postmodern as the modern of the present.” Hermann Danuser, “Postmodernes Musikdenken: Lösung oder Flucht?” in Neue Musik im politischen Wandel, ed. Hermann Danuser (Mainz, Germany: Schott, 1991), 56–66, at 63. The quotation is a subheading for a section of the article in which Danuser refers to Wellmer’s book.

53 Fredric Jameson, A Singular Modernity: Essay on the Ontology of the Present (London: Verso, 2002), 157.

Chapter 6

1 Preliminary research on this essay was undertaken for a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar on “The Dialectic of Enlightenment after Fifty Years,” directed by James Schmidt at Boston University in 1997. An early version of this article was read at the 1997 annual meeting of the American Musicological Society in Phoenix, Arizona. The final version of the article was drafted while I was a Fellow at the Humanities Institute at the University of Texas in the fall of 2003. I would like to thank the many readers who have commented on the manuscript over the many years, especially Leslie Bush, who has read nearly every version of it; Michael Morse, who has extensive experience performing and composing jazz and is just the sort of open-minded opponent of Adorno that one needs; and Steve Kelly, who early in this project lent me his extensive notes on jazz history and to whom this essay is dedicated.

2 Adorno, MM, 50.

3 J. Bradford Robinson, “The Jazz Essays of Theodor Adorno: Some Thoughts on Jazz Reception in Weimar Germany,” Popular Music 13 (1994): 1–25. Though not as historically nuanced as Robinson, other essays premised on the division into legitimate and commercial jazz include: Wolfgang Sandner, “Popularmusik als somatisches Stimulans: Adornos Kritik der ‘leichten Musik’,” in Adorno und die Musik, ed. Otto Kolleritsch (Graz: Universal, 1979), 125–32; Max Paddison, “The Critique Criticised: Adorno and Popular Music,” in Theory and Method (Popular Music 2), eds. Richard Middleton and David Horn (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 201–18; Bruce Baugh, “Left-Wing Elitism: Adorno on Popular Culture,” Philosophy and Literature 14 (1990): 65–78; Ulrich Schönherr, “Adorno and Jazz: Reflections on a Failed Encounter,” Telos 87 (1991): 85–96; Theodore A. Gracyk, “Adorno, Jazz, and the Aesthetics of Popular Music,” The Musical Quarterly 76 (1992): 526–42; Lee B. Brown, “Adorno’s Critique of Popular Culture: The Case of Jazz Music,” The Journal of Aesthetic Education 26 (1992): 17–31; Joseph D. Lewandowski, “Adorno on Jazz and Society,” Philosophy & Social Criticism 22 (1996): 103–21. Though not as rigid in opposing commercial and legitimate jazz and sympathetic to Adorno’s critique, the articles by Robert W. Witkin, “Why Did Adorno ‘Hate’ Jazz?” Sociological Theory 18 (2000): 145–70 and by Catherine Gunther Kodat, “Conversing with Ourselves: Canon, Freedom, Jazz,” American Quarterly 55 (2003): 1–28, both end up redirecting the critique toward popular music and away from jazz per se. The most principled opponent to this view has been Robert Hullot-Kentor. See, in particular: “Popular Music and Adorno’s “The Aging of the New Music,” Telos 77 (1988): 79–94; “The Impossibility of Music: Adorno, Popular and Other Music,” Telos 87 (1991): 97–117.

4 Adorno indeed specifically rejects any distinction between jazz and commercial dance music as fundamentally untenable. In his exchange with the German jazz expert, Joachim-Ernst Berendt, Adorno states explicitly: “Zur Kontroverse steht vielmehr die Unterscheidung des ‘echten’ vom kommerzialisierten Jazz, die Berendt für ‘grundlegend für jede Beschäftigung mit dem Jazz’ hält. Er meint, sie sei mir unbekannt; mein Aufsatz aber hat sie angegriffen und kann darum Berendts Folderung nicht gelten lassen.” “Replik zu einer Kritik der ‘Zeitlosen Mode’,” in GS, 10.2:805–09, at 805. (“The real conflict is about the distinction between ‘authentic’ and ‘commercial’ Jazz, which is, according to Berndt, ‘foundational for any study of jazz’.” He thinks that this discussion is not known to me, but my essay attacked it and therefore cannot accept his demand.) That the distinctions between commercial and hot music are less than clear is well documented in the jazz literature. See, for instance, Jeffrey Magee, “Revisiting Fletcher Henderson’s ‘Copenhagen’,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 48 (1995): 42–66. It is simply not possible to separate out the currents of hot and sweet, legitimate and commercial music as though they existed in spheres apart, with everyone clear as to what was commercial and what was legitimate. All the best bands played both commercial and hot arrangements. Players and audiences made distinctions, of course; but the distinction was never clear cut.

5 The invocation of Whiteman in particular is mere wishful thinking, since Adorno wrote little, if anything, about him, despite the fact that Adorno could hardly have been unaware of Whiteman’s band. When writing about ersatz jazz, as in the culture industry chapter of Dialectic of Enlightenment, Adorno directs most of his barbs at Guy Lombardo.

6 Witkin, to be fair, is far more nuanced, and for the most part avoids this particular trap, reading “hate” only as a symptom of Adorno’s general concern with what Witkin calls “structuration.” But hate, according to Witkin, does not refer to “the man’s musical tastes” but is a product of “the structural imperative underlying his opposition to identity thinking.” Even so, the formulation is particularly ill-chosen, and ripe for misunderstanding, especially since it serves as a title. See, Witkin, “Why Did Adorno ‘Hate’ Jazz?” 148.

7 Horkheimer and Adorno, DoE, 123.

8 Evelyn Wilcock, “Adorno, Jazz and Racism: ‘Über Jazz’ and the 1934–7 British Jazz Debate,” Telos 107 (1996): 63–80.

9 Ibid., 70.

10 Wilcock cites the following statement of Charlie Kunz as evidence: “[J]azz music of the South[ern] American Negroes could have a real future in civilized countries only if it were stripped of its barbarity and crude rhythm” (quoted in ibid.); that is, only if the white Europeans played the material in a proper and civilized manner.

11 Quoted ibid., 71, n. 46.

12 Quoted ibid., 72.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid., 64.

15 Harry Cooper, “On Über Jazz: Replaying Adorno with the Grain,” October 75 (1996): 99–133, at 101.

16 Drawing brilliantly on Marshall Stearns’s admittedly dated account of the prehistory of jazz in New Orleans, Kodat makes the following pertinent observation: “The market is also the inescapable horizon of jazz, and not just because jazz is an aspect of life: when we consider New Orleans’s Congo Square as the originating locus of American jazz, the connection between jazz and exchange starts to appear more than merely accidental. Marshall Stearns places the beginnings of jazz in the Congo Square dancing and socializing permitted African slaves in antebellum New Orleans; the dances, which records indicate began as early as 1817, became an important tourist attraction for the city. One could even say that the links binding freedom, commodification, and jazz music were first forged in these highly structured and supervised stagings of the musical expressions of ‘property,’ and that jazz’s later, complex relationship to mechanical reproduction in the Fordist (and post-Fordist) culture industry largely follows from these historical conditions of its emergence.” Kodat, “Conversing with Ourselves: Canon, Freedom, Jazz,” 2 and 22 where she cites the following titles: Marshall Stearns, The Story of Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 50–55; Marshall and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (New York: Da Capo Press, 1968), 19; Herbert Asbury, The French Quarter (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1936), 269.

17 Adorno with the assistance of Eunice Cooper, Review of Wilder Hobson, American Jazz Music (New York: W.W. Norton, 1939) and Winthrop Sargeant, Jazz Hot and Hybrid (New York: Arrow Edition, 1938), Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9 (1941): 167–78, at 167.

18 Ibid., 169.

19 A sympathetic reading of Ellington’s “jungle music” might emphasize the fruitful tension between the “wild,” “primitive” images developed in the solos by individual members of Ellington’s band, especially Miley and Nanton, and Ellington’s intricate arrangements, which set the solos off as representations, as self-conscious constructions. Ellington had an uncanny ability to devise arrangements that not only allowed the solo to speak in all its particularity but also, by introducing odd wrinkles such as unusual voicings, undermined the domesticating function of the arrangement; something is always set awry and in a way that helps call into question the very premise of arrangement as a socially responsible order. Ellington’s arrangements rarely seem to celebrate domestication, but indeed through the wrinkles and the placement of the solos struggle against it, and in this way they become compositions, in the emphatic sense of the term. Adorno, needless to say, hears only a bald opposition between the primitive as ornament and its domestication as schema and so can only understand it as the form of a commodity.

20 See Karen C. C. Dalton and Henry Louis Gates Jr., “Josephine Baker and Paul Colin: African American Dance Seen through Parisian Eyes,” Critical Inquiry 24 (1998): 903–34; and Kathryn Kalinak, “Disciplining Josephine Baker: Gender, Race, and the Limits of Disciplinarity” in Music and Cinema, eds. James Buhler, Caryl Flinn, and David Neumeyer (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 316–35.

21 Decca, for instance, most matter-of-factly, announced in Radio & Electrical Appliance Journal that “the popular music of blacks sells to [white] record collectors as ‘primitive’.” (“Decca Plans to Create New Record Buyers,” Radio & Electrical Appliance Journal [November 1934]: 28; quoted in William Howland Kenney, Recorded Music in American Life: The Phonograph and Popular Memory, 1890–1945 [New York: Oxford University Press, 1999], 172).

22 Adorno, “On Jazz,” trans. Jamie Owen Daniel, in EoM, 470–95, at 477.

23 Ibid., 477–78.

24 Ibid., 488.

25 Ibid., 478.

26 Theodor W. Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Continuum, 1988), 33–34.

27 Ibid., 34.

28 Scott Deveaux expertly and systematically traces ambivalences over bebop and its relation to the culture industry in The Birth of Bebop: A Social and Musical History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). The emergence of bebop parallels both the decline of the big bands as a commercially viable enterprise and the consolidation of a jazz canon in the public imagination in the 1940s. The success of bebop, especially its aesthetic of virtuosity, can be explained at least in part by the way it fits with both trends. The virtuosity appeals to, and so helps capture, the much smaller audience of jazz aficionados and so is a way for the bebop musicians to grab a larger share of a shrinking market. At the same time, the valorization of virtuosity in bebop reinforces the codification of a jazz canon on the basis of improvisatory prowess and imagination. Bebop thus positions itself as the jazz avant-garde with respect to a “classical” tradition. The existence of bebop as an avant-garde serves to justify in ideological terms earlier jazz as art.

29 Gary Zabel, “Adorno on Music: A Reconsideration,” The Musical Times 130 (1989): 198–201, at 200.

30 Nor, for that matter, is Zabel’s account of jazz particularly accurate inasmuch as it presumes a pristine moment when jazz escaped mediation by the culture industry.

31 Brown, “Adorno’s Critique of Popular Culture,” 22–23.

32 Cooper, “On Über Jazz,”100.

33 Jay M. Bernstein, “Introduction,” in Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, ed. Jay M. Bernstein (London: Routledge, 1991), 1–25, at 15.

34 Ibid.

35 Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, trans. Michael Shaw (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), 40.

36 Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Judgement, trans. James Creed Meredith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952), 43.

37 Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde, 43.

38 Gregg M. Horowitz, “Art History and Autonomy,” in The Semblance of Subjectivity: Essays in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory, eds. Tom Huhn and Lambert Zuidervaart (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997), 259–85, at 274.

39 Ibid., 279.

40 Ibid., 277.

41 Ibid., 279.

42 While not exactly contextualist in the terms I lay out here, Lydia Goehr’s The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992) likewise makes the claim that jazz is best not approached using the work-concept.

43 Adorno, Review of Hobson and Sargeant, 170.

44 James Martin Harding, Adorno and “A Writing of the Ruins”: Essays on Modern Aesthetics and Anglo-American Literature and Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997).

45 Adorno, “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, 85–92, at 85.

46 Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 217–51; Theodor W. Adorno, “Letters to Walter Benjamin,” in Aesthetics and Politics, ed. Ronald Taylor (London: Verso, 1980): 110–33.

47 Horkheimer and Adorno, DoE, 135.

48 Adorno, “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” 85.

49 See, in particular, Adorno, Mahler.

50 Horkheimer and Adorno, DoE, 121. “It is alleged that because millions participate in it, certain reproduction processes are necessary that inevitably require identical needs in innumerable places to be satisfied with identical goods.”

51 Adorno, “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” 85.

52 See Adorno, “The Schema of Mass Culture,” in The Culture Industry: Selected Essays on Mass Culture, 53–84, at 53.

53 Adorno, “On the Social Situation of Music,” in EoM, 391–436, at 392.

54 Fredric Jameson, Late Marxism: Adorno, or, the Persistence of the Dialectic (London: Verso, 1990), 147), glosses the problem this way: “This is, then, one crucial thematic differentiation between ‘genuine art’ and that offered by the Culture Industry: both raise the issue and the possibility of happiness in their very being, as it were, and neither provides it; but where the one keeps faith with it by negation and suffering, through the enactment of its impossibility, the other assures us it is taking place.”

55 Gracyk, “Adorno, Jazz, and the Aesthetics of Popular Music,” 527.

56 Adorno, “On the Fetish-Character in Music and the Regression of Listening,” in EoM, 288–317, at 293.

57 Horkheimer and Adorno, DoE, 135.

58 Adorno, “On the Fetish-Character in Music,” 289. Hullot-Kentor summarizes an argument on this point from Adorno’s unpublished manuscript, Currents of Music: “it would be senseless to gesture toward that other world of ‘classical’ music as preserving a niche for new music. The polarization of ‘popular’ and ‘classical’ music was an act of consolidation: the category of ‘classical’ music was itself an invention of popular music” — or at least the culture industry (“Popular Music and Adorno’s ‘The Aging of the New Music’,” 81).

59 Hullot-Kentor, “Popular Music and Adorno’s ‘The Aging of the New Music’,” 81.

60 Adorno, “On the Fetish-Character in Music,” 293. “Even as a tax write-off, classical music is no less for sale than popular music, and in this regard more ideological because, unlike popular music, it claims to be beyond all that” (Hullot-Kentor, “The Impossibility of Music,” 113).

61 Adorno, “The Schema of Mass Culture,” 62–63.

62 Max Paddison, “The Critique Criticised,” 204.

63 Ibid., 206.

64 Jameson, Late Marxism, 147.

65 On this point, see Horkheimer and Adorno, DoE, 157–59; Adorno, AT, 225ff.; Adorno, “On Jazz,” 473–74.

66 Paddison helpfully defines commodity fetishism as the moment when a commodity’s “value in exchange — its marketability — is reified into an objective characteristic of the commodity itself” (“The Critique Criticised,” 206).

67 Adorno, “On the Social Situation of Music,” 430.

68 Adorno, “On Jazz,” 492.

69 Theodor W. Adorno, “Perennial Fashion — Jazz,” in Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 119–32, at 123.

70 Adorno defines an aesthetic program as “claims made for and judgments pronounced on music.” Adorno, “On the Problem of Musical Analysis,” trans. Max Paddison, in EoM, 162–80, at 168.

71 Robert W. Witkin, “Why Did Adorno ‘Hate’ Jazz?” 153–54.

72 Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, 33.

73 Adorno, “On Jazz,” 488–89. Cf. J. Bradford Robinson, “The Jazz Essays of Theodor Adorno,” 15.

74 Adorno, “On Jazz,” 488.

75 In fact, Adorno only rarely analyzes individual pieces in isolation, even when he is dealing with composers in the high art tradition (though he does, of course, make reference to specific pieces when writing about the latter). He prefers the oeuvre of the composer as his unit of analysis. Since Adorno believes that the products of the culture industry are essentially corporate, and the names attached to them (e.g., Ellington, Armstrong, Basie, etc.) mere labels that are invested with the aura of individual distinction for marketing purposes, “jazz” is his unit of analysis in the culture industry that corresponds to the unit of analysis of the composer in the realm of high art.

76 See Theodor W. Adorno et al., eds., The Positivist Dispute in German Sociology, trans. Glyn Adey and David Frisby (London: Heinemann, 1976). Adorno’s principal opponent in this dispute is Karl Popper, who is best known as a philosopher of science and importantly is not, strictly speaking, a positivist.

77 Adorno, “Introduction,” in ibid., 1–67, at 48–49.

78 This is a point on which Adorno’s analysis is most vulnerable in the terms he sets for his own critical practice. For it is not clear that if Adorno had started with an immanent analysis of the pieces and performances, he would have ended with the same conclusions. At the same time, such analysis would have necessarily treated the pieces and performances as “works” whereas it seems that jazz practice might be the more relevant object of analysis.

79 Jamie Owen Daniel, “Introduction to Adorno’s ‘On Jazz’,” Discourse 12 (1989–90), 39–44, at 40–41.

80 Adorno distinguishes “dropping out” from “suspension.” The latter entails the notion of a schema that is no longer operative whereas dropping out does not. Dropping out serves the self-preservation of the individual in the face of the collective, whereas suspension is transformative, presenting an image of a noncoercive social totality. Jazz might be relocated out from under the point of Adorno’s critique by uncovering such signs of suspension.

81 Witkin suggests that, for Adorno, “there is an overlaying of superficial change upon underlying musical elements that are repeated more or less unaltered in jazz. This underlying rigidity of the elements — the regular beat or a continuous tone, for example — is masked by displacement, syncopation, vibrato, and so on; by various interferences which, although they help to disguise its unrelenting rigidity, are always beaten into conformity” (“Why Did Adorno ‘Hate’ Jazz?,” 146).

82 Theodor W. Adorno, “Richard Strauss: Born June 11, 1864,” trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber, Perspectives of New Music 4 (1965): 14–32, at 29.

83 Adorno, “Perennial Fashion — Jazz,” 129.

84 As Witkin describes it, “[s]omething unchanging — the beat or tone, is ornamented with changes. The elements that would normally develop out of each other sequentially, each bearing a necessary relationship to its antecedent and consequent, are instead strung out beside each other, a juxtaposing of co-incidentals” (“Why Did Adorno ‘Hate’ Jazz?” 146).

85 Adorno, “Perennial Fashion — Jazz,” 129.

86 “[W]hat I objected to in Stravinsky was not order but the illusion of order” (Adorno, QuF, 148).

87 Adorno, “On Jazz,” 488–89. “A Song is Born,” a song from the film by the same name that recounts the history of jazz in highly compressed form, neatly sets the conditions of improvisation this way: “They played what they liked/as long as it fit.” Adorno indicts Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring on similar grounds for valorizing the sacrifice of the individual to the collective. See Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster (New York: Seabury Press, 1973), 157–60. Much of Adorno’s opposition to jazz would seem to have to do with his resistance to the ideology of assimilation — the “fitting in” or cultural adjustment required of immigrants — that is at the heart of much American cultural production. (See also Theodor W. Adorno, “Scientific Experiences of a European Scholar in America,” in The Intellectual Migration: Europe and America, 1930–1960, eds. Donald Fleming and Bernard Bailyn [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969], 338–70, at 339.) Adorno likewise finds the serial method suspect because its systematic constraints endanger free expression. The unifying figure of thought behind each of these critiques is the dialectic of freedom and enslavement that haunts Dialectic of Enlightenment.

88 Robinson, for instance, charges that “[i]t never occurred to him [Adorno] that this ‘straitjacket’ was in fact a prerequisite to improvisation” (“The Jazz Essays,” 10).

89 Theodor W. Adorno with the Assistance of George Simpson, “On Popular Music,” Studies in Philosophy and Social Science 9 (1941): 17–48, at 25. Also in EoM, 437–69, at 445.

90 Adorno, Review of Hobson and Sargeant, 168. The disjuncture between the appearance of spontaneity and the reality of social constraint is most pronounced in the amateur. See Adorno, “On the Fetish-Character in Music,” 310: “He [the amateur] shines by a capacity for rough improvisations, even if he must practice the piano for hours in secret in order to bring the refractory rhythms together. He pictures himself as the individualist who whistles at the world. But what he whistles is its melody, and his tricks are less inventions of the moment than stored-up experiences from acquaintance with sought-after technical things. His improvisations are always gestures of nimble subordination to what the instrument demands of him.… Thus, the sovereign routine of the jazz amateur is nothing but the passive capacity for adaptation to models from which to avoid straying. He is the real jazz subject: his improvisations come from the pattern, and he navigates the pattern, cigarette in mouth, as nonchalantly as if he invented it himself.” Yet Adorno retains hope even for the amateur: “Perhaps a better hour may at some time strike even for the clever fellows [i.e., amateurs]: one in which they may demand, instead of prepared material ready to be switched on, the improvisatory displacement of things, as the sort of radical beginning that can only thrive under the protection of the unshaken real world” (ibid., 314).

91 Adorno, “On Jazz,” 473.

92 Ibid., 472–73.

93 Adorno, “Perennial Fashion — Jazz,” 122–23; Review of Hobson and Sargeant, 176.

94 Adorno “Culture Industry Reconsidered,” 90. As Sargeant puts it, “The interruption of rhythmic regularity produces a feeling of unrest. The listener’s rhythmic faculties are thrown off balance, and he gropes instinctively for a re-orientation. His groping is attended by a certain sense of stimulation or excitement. A resumption of regularity is greeted with a feeling of relief,” quoted in Adorno, Review of Hobson and Sargeant, 177.

95 Ibid. 171.

96 Ibid.

97 Ibid., 176.

98 Adorno, “On Jazz,” 490.

99 The worried tones, or blue notes, are vocal gestures transported to the instrumental realm, a means, Adorno thinks, of enchantment, of making the instrument appear as if it had a voice. “The instrumental music behaves as if it were vocal, the mechanism as if it had a voice of its own.… If there is a specific difference between jazz and ragtime, it lies within this pseudo-morphosis [of singing, speaking, and playing]. Ragtime was exclusively instrumental, in fact, limited to the piano.… The pseudo-vocalization of jazz corresponds to the elimination of the piano, the ‘private’ middle-class instrument, in the era of the phonograph and radio” (Review of Hobson and Sargeant, 169). This shift from instrumental to pseudovocalization is important because it masks not simply the instrument itself, but the apparatus that transmits the sound. “The vocalization of instrumental sound means the introduction of certain irregularities into the realm of the instrumental. The characteristic ‘dirty tones’ … and ‘worried notes’ … are effects of the deceptive ‘humanization’ of the mechanism” (169). “The vocalization of the instrumental serves not only to produce the appearance of the human, it serves also to assimilate the voice into the realm of the instrumental: to make it, as it were, an appendage to the machine” (170).

100 Adorno, “On Jazz,” 480.

101 Adorno, “Perennial Fashion — Jazz,” 131.

102 Ibid.

103 Adorno, “On Jazz,” 480.

104 Adorno, “Perennial Fashion — Jazz,” 123.

105 Ibid., 131.

106 Adorno and Eisler suggest that the loss of sonic presence through the recording process also contributes to what they call the “neutralization” of the new music. Theodor W. Adorno and Hanns Eisler, Composing for the Films (London: The Athlone Press, 1994), 85–86.

107 Ibid., 117.

108 Richard Taruskin notes a similar difficulty in interpreting the irony of Shostakovich: “Guns go bang whether wielded by Czarists or Soviets, and all Shostakovich put in his score (that is, into ‘the music itself’) was the bang” (“Double Trouble,” The New Republic, December 24, 2001, 30).

109 “A successful work, according to immanent criticism, is not one which resolves objective contradictions in a spurious harmony, but one which expresses the idea of harmony negatively by embodying the contradictions, pure and uncompromised, in its innermost structure,” Theodor W. Adorno, “Cultural Criticism and Society,” in Prisms, 17–34, at 32.

Chapter 7

1 Adorno, “Wissenschaftliche Erfahrungen in Amerika,” in GS, 10.2:702–38, at 716–19. An exception to this would be the 1944 publication of Dialektik der Aufklärung, which was however only a mimeographed volume. Translations are mine unless noted otherwise.

2 Jürgen Habermas, “Die Moderne — Ein unvollendetes Projekt,” in Die Moderne — Ein unvollendetes Projekt: Philosophisch-politische Aufsätze 1977–1990 (Leipzig: Reclam, 1990), 32–54 at 50.

3 Friedrich Kittler, “Copyright 1944 by Social Studies Association, Inc.,” in Flaschenpost und Postkarte: Korrespondenzen zwischen Kritischer Theorie und Poststrukturalismus, ed. Sigrid Weigel (Cologne: Böhlau, 1995), 185–93.

4 Ibid., 185, 186. See also Jürgen Habermas, Theorie des kommunikativen Handelns, 4th ed. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987), 1:497.

6 For a recent example, see Stefan Rieger, Die Individualität der Medien (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2001), 14–21 (with references to other pertinent articles by Hans Ulrich Reck, Rudolf Maresch, and others).

7 Niklas Luhmann, Die Politik der Gesellschaft, ed. André Kieserling (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2000), 363 (emphasis added).

8 It will also be distinct from Thomas Levin’s part-Benjaminian, part-Derridean rereading of Adorno’s theory of musical reproduction, which stresses Adorno’s willingness “to embrace the inscription produced by the mechanical reproduction of music,” but precisely “as figures of an Ur-language, a ‘true’ or ‘divine’ language.” See Thomas Levin, “For the Record: Adorno on Music in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility,” October 55 (1990): 23–47, at 35, 41. Although Levin’s essay is a healthy corrective to many misreadings of Adorno, it stays clearly on one side of the Adornian aesthetic paradox of autonomy versus social function, namely the side of the “sovereignty of art.” See also Christoph Menke-Eggers, Die Souveränität der Kunst: Ästhetische Erfahrung nach Adorno und Derrida (Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum, 1988).

9 I have used this term in preference to the neologism “mediatization,” in part because “mediation” also bears along with it resonances from German Idealism’s Vermittlung; the suggestion being that Vermittlung, the social mediation of the subject, may be seen to have contained in it some of the germs of media theory. Unfortunately, it is just this social Vermittlung in its larger, that is, systemic, sense which much media theory seems oddly to exclude.

10 Theodor W. Adorno, “The Radio Symphony: An Experiment in Theory,” in Radio Research 1941, eds. Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Frank N. Stanton (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1941), 110–39, at 119; the part after the ellipsis stems from ibid., 126.

11 Ibid., 126.

12 His dependence on the medium of German was one of the strongest reasons given for his postwar return to Germany. See Adorno, “Auf die Frage: Was ist deutsch,” in GS, 10.2:691–701, at 699–700.

13 It is indicative of the reading practices necessary for Adorno’s English texts that one must partly “retranslate” them back into a nonexistent German “original,” in order to bring out the full force of their concepts — concepts for which English has no specific historic equivalent.

14 Adorno, “Wissenschaftliche Erfahrungen in Amerika,” 716–17.

15 Niklas Luhmann, Die Realität der Massenmedien (Opladen: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1996), 133; and Niklas Luhmann, Die Politik der Gesellschaft, 375–81.

16 Adorno, “Über die musikalische Verwendung des Radios,” in GS, 15:376–77, at 376; see also Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie, GS, 14:279–80.

17 Luhmann, Die Politik der Gesellschaft, 222.

18 Niklas Luhmann, Die Kunst der Gesellschaft (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1995), 215.

19 In the preface of Die Kunst der Gesellschaft, Luhmann announces programmatically that its “theoretical presuppositions … cannot be drawn from an observation of artworks, but can however be shown in the communicative use of artworks” (see ibid., 9, emphasis mine). Against this, one would have to acknowledge the nuanced detail of Luhmann’s lifelong attention to historical semantics.

20 Niklas Luhmann, Political Theory in the Welfare State, trans. John Bednartz, Jr. (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1990), 75–76; see also Luhmann, Die Politik der Gesellschaft, 253–54, 425.

21 Adorno, “Kultur und Verwaltung,” in GS, 8:122–46, at 137.

22 Adorno, “Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft,” in GS, 10.1:11–30; Negative Dialektik, in GS, 6:359.

23 Adorno, “Theorie der Halbbildung,” in GS, 8:106.

24 In Luhmann’s terms, this would be “interpenetration” (cf. Niklas Luhmann, Soziale Systeme [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1984], chap. 6) or “structural coupling” (Niklas Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1997], 1:92–120, and 2:776–88).

25 Among the critical responses to Adorno’s Studies, one would have to list Studies in the Scope and Method of “The Authoritarian Personality,” eds. Richard Christie and Marie Jahoda (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1954), along with Milton Rokeach, The Open and Closed Mind: Investigations into the Nature of Belief Systems and Personality Systems (New York: Basic Books, 1960), and H. J. Eysenck, The Psychology of Politics (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1954). Noteworthy in this connection are also Bruno Bettelheim and Morris Janowitz, The Dynamics of Prejudice: A Psychological and Sociological Study of Veterans (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950) and Nathan W. Ackerman and Marie Jahoda, Anti-Semitism and Emotional Disorder: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1950). Both these last, like Adorno’s Studies, were sponsored by the American Jewish Committee. The American historian Richard Hofstadter was also influenced by these studies in his book on McCarthyism, The Paranoid Style in American Politics and other Essays (New York: Knopf, 1965). It is indicative of Adorno’s American presence that his essay on television was included — together with work by Lowenthal, Kracauer, Gunther Anders, and McLuhan, among others — in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, ed. Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1957). See now also Martin Roiser, “The American Reception of The Authoritarian Personality,” in In Practice: Adorno, Critical Theory and Cultural Studies, eds. Holger Briel and Andreas Kramer (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2001), 129–42.

26 Adorno, Studies in the Authoritarian Personality, in GS, 9.1:149.

27 See Adorno, “Die revidierte Psychoanalyse,” in GS, 8:20–41 (1952, contra Horney), and “Zum Verhältnis von Soziologie und Psychologie,” in GS, 8:42–85 (1955, against Parsons).

28 Adorno, Studies in the Authoritarian Personality, 197 note 4.

29 Adorno, “Wissenschaftliche Erfahrungen in Amerika,” 718, emphases mine.

30 Ibid., 719.

31 Edward A. Suchman, “Invitation to Music: A Study of the Creation of New Music Listeners by the Radio,” in Radio Research, 1941, 140–88, at 159–60.

32 Ibid., 174 note 16.

33 Ibid., 174.

34 Ibid., 179 (italics original).

35 Adorno, Studies in the Authoritarian Personality, 191, see table 1.

36 Ibid., 194.

37 Ibid., 185.

38 Ibid., 187.

39 Sigmund Freud, Die Traumdeutung, in Studienausgabe in neun Bänden, eds. Alexander Mitscherlich, Angela Richards, and James Strachey (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1970), 2:287. Or, see Sigmund Freud, The Interpretation of Dreams, trans. James Strachey, (New York: Avon, 1998), 318 (translation modified).

40 Adorno, Studies in the Authoritarian Personality, 336.

41 Ibid., 335.

42 Rokeach, The Open and Closed Mind; and Eysenck, The Psychology of Politics.

43 Adorno, Einleitung in die Muziksoziologie, 173.

44 Adorno, Studies in the Authoritarian Personality, 471.

45 Ibid., 472.

46 Adorno, Einleitung in die Muziksoziologie, 184–85.

47 Suchman, “Invitation to Music,” 170–73.

48 Adorno, Studies in the Authoritarian Personality, 483–84.

49 Ibid., 485.

50 Adorno, Einleitung in die Muziksoziologie, 190.

51 Ibid., 188.

52 Adorno, Studies in the Authoritarian Personality, 475.

53 Ibid., 477.

54 Adorno, Einleitung in die Muziksoziologie, 196.

55 Adorno, Studies in the Authoritarian Personality, 479–80.

56 Adorno, Einleitung in die Muziksoziologie, 191.

57 Ibid., 182–83.

58 Ibid., 183.

59 Adorno, Studies in the Authoritarian Personality, 505.

60 Ibid., 506.

61 Peter Dews, The Limits of Disenchantment: Essays on Contemporary European Philosophy (London: Verso, 1995), chap. 11.

62 Adorno, “Über die musikalische Verwending des Radios,” in GS, 15:377. To the politics of radio and its mediation between the German ideology of Gemeinschaft and bourgeois individual privacy, one should compare the work on television done by Monika Elsner, Thomas Müller, and Peter M. Spangenberg, “The Early History of German Television: The Slow Development of a Fast Medium,” trans. Gertrud Rath-Montgomery, in Materialities of Communication, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), 107–43.

63 Adorno, Jargon der Eigentlichkeit: Zur deutschen Ideologie, in GS, 6:417; and “Schöne Stellen,” in GS, 18:695–718.

64 Adorno, Jargon der Eigentlichkeit, 424.

65 For a reading of how this political ideology of the symphony was redeployed in the Soviet Union, see Larson Powell, “Sozialer Hohlraum: Moderne und Modernisierung in Prokofieffs Symphonien,” Musik & Ästhetik 14 (April 2000): 5–24.

66 Adorno, “Wissenschaftliche Erfahrungen in Amerika,” 703.

67 Ibid., 734.

68 Ibid., 735–36. One might compare this to the central excursus on subjectivity in Adorno, Negative Dialektik, 277, where it is asserted that “Schizophrenie” is “die geschichtsphilosophische Wahrheit übers Subjekt.”

69 “Die Allgemeinheit des transzendentalen Subjekts aber ist die des Funktionszusammenhangs der Gesellschaft, eines Ganzen, das aus den Einzelspontaneitäten und — qualitäten zusammenschießt” (Adorno, Negative Dialektik, 180). (Negative Dialects, 178: “Yet the generality of the transcendental subject is that of the functional context of society, of a whole that coalesces from individual spontaneities and qualities…”) This relationship is precisely what is allegorized by Beethoven’s classicizing symphony in the earlier quote.

70 For Adorno, this functional unity was still one of exchange (Tausch); today one might instead tend rather to see it (after Parsons and Luhmann) as a unity of communication.

71 Adorno, “Über die musikalische Verwending des Radios,” 401.

72 Luhmann, Die Politik der Gesellschaft, 310–11. For a definition of structural coupling, see Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, 1:97–120.

73 Adorno, Einleitung in die Muziksoziologie, 284.

74 Ibid., 272.

75 Ibid., 286. This is an obvious echo of Kant’s “Zweckmässigkeit ohne Zweck,” as of the German Idealist notion that becoming free is more important than freedom as static state, or even of Schelling’s distinction between natura naturans and natura naturata.

76 Luhmann, Die Politik der Gesellschaft, 375–78; Luhmann, Die Realität der Massenmedien, 133, 69, 74.

77 Luhmann, Die Realität der Massenmedien, 57–58.

78 Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, 1:306–8.

79 Luhmann, Die Realität der Massenmedien, 140–41, emphasis added.

80 Luhmann, Die Gesellschaft der Gesellschaft, 1:307.

81 Ibid., 86–91; Luhmann, Die Realität der Massenmedien, 80, 87. This even holds true in art; see Niklas Luhmann, Die Kunst der Gesellschaft, 459.

82 Jürgen Habermas, Zur Logik der Sozialwissenschaften (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1982), 409.

83 Sigmund Freud, “Psychoanalytische Bemerkungen über einen autobiographisch beschriebenen Fall von Paranoia (Dementia paranoides),” in Studienausgabe, 7:181–82.

84 Adorno, Eingriffe, in GS, 10.2:593. At this point Adorno is quite close to Lacan’s critique of the traditional bourgeois strong ego (see Jacques Lacan, Le Séminaire de Jacques Lacan. Livre III, Les Psychoses 1955–1956 [Paris: Seuil, 1981], especially chap.10 and 11).

85 Adorno, “Meinungsforschung und Öffentlichkeit,” in GS, 8.1:532–37, at 533.

Chapter 8

1 I would like to thank Richard Leppert and Berthold Hoeckner for their careful reading of early incarnations of this essay, and also for their incredible support without which this essay would not have been possible. I would also like to gratefully acknowledge support from the American Council of Learned Societies, who afforded me the time to begin research on this project in the spring of 2003. This essay was first published in the special Adorno issue of Cultural Critique 60, Spring 2005, pp. 23–67. Reprinted with permission of the University of Minnesota Press.

2 Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, DoE (New York: Continuum, 1997), 167.

3 Ibid., 120.

4 Robert W. McChesney, Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy (New York: Seven Stories Press, 1997), 43.

5 Stephen Marshall, “Prime Time Payola,” In These Times, May 5, 2003, 23–24.

6 Horkheimer and Adorno, DoE, 122.

7 On corporate marketing strategies, see Richard A. Peterson, Creating Country Music, Fabricating Authenticity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1997; as well as Keith Negus, Musical Genres and Corporate Cultures (New York and London: Routledge, 1999), 47.

8 Horkheimer and Adorno, DoE, 122–23.

9 See Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America, (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1994).

10 See David Brackett, “‘Where’s It At?’ Postmodern Theory and the Contemporary Musical Field,” Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought, ed. Judy Lochhead and Joseph Auner (New York and London: Routledge), 2002.

11 See Negus, Musical Genres and Corporate Cultures.

12 Horkheimer and Adorno, DoE, 123.

13 Negus, Musical Genres and Corporate Cultures, 47–51.

14 Personal communication, 2003.

15 See Lola Ogunnaike, “The Voices Sing Opera, the Looks Scream Pop,” New York Times, Arts Section, February 2, 2004, 1.

16 Horkheimer and Adorno, DoE, 163.

17 Robin Pogrebin, “Corporate Donation Buoys Home for Jazz,” New York Times, January 14, 2003.

18 Matthew P. McAllister, The Commercialization of American Culture (Thousand Oak, CA: Sage, 1996), 221.

19 See Pogrebin, “Corporate Donation Buoys Home for Jazz.”

20 Naomi Klein, No Logo (New York: Picador, 2002), 185.

21 See Manuela Hoelterhoff, “Fill ‘Er Up with Opera,” New York Times, May 25, 2003.

22 Tyler Cowen, In Praise of Commercial Culture (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1998), 14.

23 Ibid., 15.

24 Ibid., 15, 18.

25 Ibid., 18.

26 Ibid., 24.

27 Ibid., 142.

28 Ibid., 178.

29 John Densmore, “Riders on the Storm: Why the Doors Don’t Open When Corporate Ads Come Rolling In,” The Nation, July 8, 2002, 33–35, at 35.

30 Ibid., 33, 35.

31 Klein, No Logo, 47.

32 Ibid., 47.

33 Ibid., 48.

34 Ibid., 46.

35 See John Seabrook, “The Money Note: Can the Record Business Survive?” The New Yorker, July 7, 2003, 42–55, at 48.

36 McChesney, Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy, 29.

37 Quoted in John De Graaf, David Wann, and Thomas Taylor, Affluenza: The All-Consuming Epidemic (San Francisco: Berrett-Koehler, 2002), 151.

38 Erik Parker, “Hip-Hop Goes Commercial: Rappers Give Madison Avenue a Run for Its Money,” Village Voice, September 11–17, 2002, 40–43, at 43.

39 Horkheimer and Adorno, DoE, 163.

40 Adorno, “On Popular Music,” in EoM, 437–69, at 443.

41 Ibid.

42 Michael Bracey and Jenny Toomey, Press Release: “Commercial Radio Station Ownership Consolidation Shown to Harm Artists and Public, Says FMC Study,” posted on November 18, 2002. http://futureofmusic.org/news/PRradiostudy.cfm.

43 Quoted in Negus, Musical Genres and Corporate Cultures, 157.

44 Adorno, “The Radio Symphony,” in EoM, 251–70, at 252.

45 Seabrook, “The Money Note,” 45.

46 Adorno, “On Popular Music,” 445.

47 Ibid., 449.

48 Ibid., 449–50.

49 David Gordon, “Rock’s Big Bounce,” Newsweek, May 17, 2004, 48–50, at 49.

50 Christopher Stern, “Radio Receives Rivals by Satellite,” Variety, June 28–July 11, 1999, at 5.

51 See Future of Music Coalition: FMC Research: Details of Radio Survey Results, June 19, 2002, http://futureofmusic.org/research/radiosurvey.cfm.

52 See Lewis H. Lapham, “Tentacles of Rage: The Republican Propaganda Mill, A Brief History,” Harper’s Magazine, September 2004, 31–41, at 32, 35, and 37, and Eric Alterman, What Liberal Media? The Truth About Bias and the News (New York: Basic Books), 2003, 249.

53 Alterman, What Liberal Media?, 259.

54 See Jerrold Nadler’s remarks made at the Forum on Media Ownership Rules held at Columbia University on January 16, 2003; Webcast of proceedings available on http://www.law.columbia.edu.

55 See the official Clear Channel website at http://www.clearchannel.com/radio.

56 Jenny Toomey, “Empire of the Air,” The Nation, Special Double Issue, January 13/20, 2003, 28–30, at 29.

57 See Eric Boehlert, “Radio’s Big Bully,” June, 2001: http://dir.salon.com/ent/feature/2001/04/ 30/clear_channel/index.html, at 5.

58 Ibid., 1, 5.

59 See http://www.clearchannel.com/radio.

60 Quoted in Eric Alterman, “Bad News, Film at 11,” The Nation, posted on February 20, 2003: http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i-20030310&s=alterman.

61 Marc Fisher, “Sound Familiar for a Reason,” The Washington Post, Sunday, May 18, 2003, B1, B5, at B1.

62 See Thomas Carpenter, Remarks made at the Forum on Media Ownership Rules held at Columbia University on January 16, 2003; Webcast of proceedings available on http://www.law.columbia.edu.

63 Fisher, “Sound Familiar for a Reason,” B5.

64 Ibid.

65 See James L. Winston, Remarks made at the Forum on Media Ownership Rules held at Columbia University on January 16, 2003; Webcast of proceedings available on http://www.law.columbia.edu.

66 Klein, No Logo, 45–50.

67 Michael Powell, Remarks made at the Forum on Media Ownership Rules held at Columbia University on January 16, 2003; Webcast of proceedings available on www.law.columbia.edu.

68 See, for example, comments by Lewis W. Dickey Jr., Chief Executive for Cumulus Media, in John Schwartz and Geraldine Fabrikant, “War Puts Radio Giant on the Defensive,” New York Times, March 31, 2003, Business Section, 1; or Martin D. Franks, Senior Vice President of Viacom, Inc., at the Forum on Media Ownership Rules held at Columbia University on January 16, 2003; Webcast of proceedings available on http://www.law.columbia.edu.

69 Quoted in Jenny Toomey, “Empire of the Air,” 29.

70 See David F. Poltrack’s remarks made at the Forum on Media Ownership Rules held at Columbia University on January 16, 2003; Webcast of proceedings available on http://www.law.columbia.edu.

71 See Dennis Swanson’s remarks made at the Forum on Media Ownership Rules held at Columbia University on January 16, 2003; Webcast of proceedings available on http://www.law.columbia.edu

72 Horkheimer and Adorno, DoE, 122.

73 Adorno, “On Popular Music,” 446.

74 Toomey, “Empire of the Air,” 29.

75 Horkheimer and Adorno, DoE, xiv.

76 Quoted in Seabrook, “The Money Note,” 48.

77 Edward S. Hermann and Robert W. McChesney, The Global Media (London: Cassell, 1997), 6.

78 Horkheimer and Adorno, DoE, 134.

79 Adorno, MM, 200–1.

80 Nina Munk, “Girl Power,” Fortune, December 8, 1997, 137.

81 Horkheimer and Adorno, DoE, 122.

82 Quoted in McChesney, Corporate Media and the Threat to Democracy, 7.

83 Quoted in Naomi Klein, “Interview with Michael Bullock,” Index, February 2002, 41–47, at 39.

84 Horkheimer and Adorno, DoE, 162.

85 See Juan Gonzalez, Remarks made at the Forum on Media Ownership Rules held at Columbia University on January 16, 2003; Webcast of proceedings available on http://www.law.columbia.edu.

86 Posted in early 2003 at http://www.mediareform.net/fcc.php.

87 Horkheimer and Adorno, DoE, 137.

88 Negus, Musical Genres and Corporate Cultures, 48–49.

89 Fisher, “Sound Familiar for a Reason,” B5.

90 Brent Staples, “Driving Down the Highway, Mourning the Death of American Radio,” New York Times, Editorial Observer, June 8, 2003.

91 See Stephen Marshall, “Prime Time Payola,” 23–24.

92 See Alisa Solomon, “The Big Chill,” The Nation, June 2, 2003, 17–22, at 22.

93 See Negus, Musical Genres and Corporate Cultures, 93.

94 J. Whalen, “Rap Defies Traditional Marketing,” Advertising Age, No. 65, March 1994, 12.

95 See Negus, Musical Genres and Corporate Cultures, 100 and Klein, No Logo, 75.

96 Quoted in Klein, No Logo, 77.

97 Quoted in Negus, Musical Genres and Corporate Cultures, 98.

98 Adorno, “On Popular Music,” 459.

99 Slavoj Žiûek, Welcome to the Desert of the Real (London and New York: Verso, 2002), 6.

100 See Neil Strauss, “Christian Bands, Crossing Over,” New York Times, June 10, 2003. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/10artsmusic10CHRI.html?ex=1056261812&ei =099048515ee2a959.

101 John Nichols, “The Boss Defends Dissenters,” posted on The Nation, April 23, 2003. http://www.thenation.com/thebeat/index.mhtml?bid=1&pid+605.

102 Quoted in Nichols, “The Boss Defends Dissenters.”

103 See http://www.witharmswideopen.org/default.cfm.

104 Adorno, “The Radio Symphony,” 251.

105 Quoted in Seabrook, “The Money Note,” 53.

106 Adorno, “On Popular Music,” 462.

107 Ibid., 441.

108 Ibid., 438.

109 Adorno, “The Radio Symphony,” 262.

110 Adorno, “On Popular Music,” 447.

111 Adorno, MM, 201.

112 Horkheimer and Adorno, DoE, 123.

113 Naomi Klein, “Interview with Michael Bullock,” Index, February 2002b, 41–47, at 47.

114 These were made available at http://www.salon.com/audio/music/2003/03/13/protest_music/ index_np.html

115 See Jake Tapper, “Up With Downloads: Questions for Shawn Fanning,” July 2002, 13.

116 See Amy Harmon, “Suit Settled for Students Downloading Music Online,” New York Times, May 2, 2003.

117 See Andrew Ross Sorkin, “Software Bullet is Sought to Kill Musical Piracy,” New York Times, May 4, 2003.

118 See Linda Greenhouse, “Justices to Hear Case on Sharing of Music Files,” New York Times, December 11, 2004.

119 See John Nichols, “Musicians Against Media Monopoly,” The Nation, May 4, 2003. http://www.thenation.com/thebeat/index.mhtml?bid=1&pid=640.

120 See John Nichols and Robert W. McChesney, “FCC: Public Be Damned,” The Nation, May 15, 2003. http://www.thenation.com/doc.mhtml?i=20030602&s=nichols.

121 See Bob Herbert, “Cozy With the FCC,” New York Times, Op Ed, June 5, 2003.

122 Horkheimer and Adorno, DoE, 120.

123 See Jeff Leeds, “Lowering the Volume: With Sales Expected to Fall 10% for 2003, Record Labels are in Survival Mode,” Los Angeles Times, December 29, 2003, Business Section, C1 and C4.

124 Horkheimer and Adorno, DoE, 167.

Notes

Preface