Philosophy of New Music, and: Roll Over Adorno: Critical Theory, Popular Culture, Audiovisual Media (review)

With the exception perhaps of "On Popular Music," no work of Adorno's critical aesthetics of music has received more attention, both laudatory and derisive, than his Philosophie der neuen Musik, completed just three years after the end of World War II during Adorno's exile in Los Angeles. As detailed in Philosophie der neuen Musik and elsewhere, music for Adorno was a source of knowledge and truth, one of modernity's most lamentable victims, as well as the art form that holds the greatest potential for social transformation. Music, especially new music (which is understood here as "contemporary art music"), was to illuminate "only by convicting the brightness of the world of its own darkness" (16). Seeing "particular constellations of compositional tasks" (33) as the best way to elucidate the specific social position and potential of new music, Adorno engages in a detailed, if sometimes short-sighted, discussion of the works of Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky, the two figures that best exemplified the social position and potential of new music at that historical juncture.

In "Schoenberg and Progress," Adorno densely traces the negative and affirmative characteristics of the atonal and twelve-tone music of Schoenberg, as well as his students Alban Berg and Anton von Webern. While Adorno's verdict of advancement in "Schoenberg and Progress" is not reached easily, in the end, Schoenberg composes his twelve-tone music "as if 12-tone technique did not exist" (85) and in doing so, as "representative of the most advanced aesthetic consciousness" (94), places his music in diametrical opposition to the dominant culture, utilizing the instrumental rationality of modernity against itself. In doing so, Schoenberg brings Adorno's dialectical tracing of his music in relation to modernity to a halt.

Adorno is not nearly as dialectical in the more overtly polemical "Stravinsky and the Restoration." His argument turns on what he sees as Stravinsky's purposeful excising of history. In compositions such as The Rite of Spring, with its paganistic celebrations of death, history is erased in favor of a musical and social primitivism. Stravinsky also erases history through the appropriation of previous styles of music, most notably in his "neoclassical" period, characterized by the re-embrace of tonality, as well as the wholesale quotation of previous works. Through both of these compositional [procedures], Stravinsky's music thus masks the sedimented suffering that has accompanied the history of music in modernity. For Adorno, the subject itself is liquidated in Stravinsky's work, as the music is tantamount to proto-fascism, identifying as it does "not with the victim but with the annihilating authority" (110). Hindsight provides contemporary readers—who now know of the millions of liquidated bodies in Nazi camps—an understanding, though not a justification, for Adorno's rhetorical exaggerations.¹

For over three decades, English readers seeking to grapple with the ideas of Philosophie der neuen Musik had to rely on Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley Blomster's translation.² Unfortunately, this edition is often inaccurate, ranging from idiomatic missteps to misrenderings of crucial phrases and concepts.³ It is only with the recent publication of Robert Hullot-Kentor's translation of Philosophie der neuen Musik that a substantially more accurate and faithful translation has been achieved.⁴ Indeed, Hullot-Kentor's new translation not only expertly corrects the inaccuracies of the old translation but also allows the antagonistic, even radical, character of Philosophie der neuen Musik to re-emerge.

The changes begin with the title, rendered Philosophy of New Music, rather than Philosophy of Modern Music. For Adorno, music had "come to the point where, to be music at all" it had to be, both in composition and its import, "utterly new" (xxiii). The semantic shift between "modern" and "new" evinces a conception of the new as more openly antagonistic with the world in which it finds...