Sound Figures (review)

Sound Figures. By Theodor W. Adorno. Translated by Rodney Livingstone. (Meridian.) Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1999. [ix, 229 p. ISBN 0-8047-3557-3 (cloth); 0-8047-3558-1 (pbk.). $49.50 (cloth); $16.95 (pbk.).]

This first complete translation of Theodor Adorno's Klangfiguren (in Musikalische Schriften I-III, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, vol. 16 of Gesammelte Schriften [Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1978]; originally published 1959) is a valuable addition to the body of Adorno's writings on music now available in English. It is a publication that should do much to dispel anxiety about the "difficulty" of reading Adorno. Rodney Livingstone is an experienced translator of his writings, having produced the English versions of Versuch über Wagner (In Search of Wagner [London: NLB, 1981) and Quasi una Fantasia (London and New York: Verso, 1992), and this latest volume succeeds in presenting an English text that reads smoothly throughout while preserving something of Adorno's style. The publisher emphasizes the relative accessibility of the twelve essays contained in Sound Figures, pointing to an unusually "colloquial" tone. It is certainly true that the reader will find central Adorno themes addressed more briefly and approachably here than in some of his book-length studies. It is also true that there are instances of a rare personal tone. In any case, these are important writings that show no relaxation of philosophical rigor nor any obvious concession to a less specialized audience.

Editorial commentary is kept to a minimum, with Adorno's text left largely to speak for itself. Livingstone does, however, provide endnotes (some contributed by Rick Graebner) to explain a number of Adorno's passing allusions. For many, these notes will provide useful assistance in reading an author whose sweeping knowledge of Western culture is apt to become intimidating. It might have been helpful to include the original dates of publication for the various essays--most were published separately before appearing together as Klangfiguren in 1959--and an index would certainly have been welcome, especially if it included key concepts.

As in other collections by Adorno, the individual essays of Sound Figures are clustered around a central theme: the relation of music (its inner, purely musical aspects) to contemporary society. This is addressed most directly in the first essay, "Some Ideas on the Sociology of Music," which insists on a historically informed understanding of musical language as "the precondition of a productive sociology of music" (p. 4). The social meaning inherent in a musical work, Adorno argues, is by no means identical with the outward function of that work: "The two do not even need to be in harmony with each other, and indeed nowadays are often in conflict" (p. 2). This tension, central to Adorno's aesthetics, has lost none of its critical potential over the last forty years. If anything, its value to contemporary theory is highlighted today, opposed as it is to a dominant approach in cultural studies that tends to read the social meaning of music entirely in terms of a composition's immediate reception.

This essay works well as the first of the collection, coming close to a statement of principles that find more detailed application in successive chapters. Despite the diverse subject matter, Adorno's concern is consistently that of music in the contemporary world. Although the second essay, "Bourgeois Opera," inevitably includes discussion of the nineteenth century, its predominant focus is the legacy of that tradition. And the order of the essays more generally suggests a very particular logic, moving from consideration of musical reception and performance "back" toward composers and their musical language and technique.

It is this consistency of focus, and the ever present dialectic between the outer, social practice of music and its inner, immanent construction, that binds together what might otherwise seem to be rather disparate essays. There are two on performance practice, for example, one of which is a critique of the Toscanini phenomenon. Here Adorno interprets the cultural values of an entire society from an apparently innocuous detail of its contemporary musical life. With Toscanini, the...