"The Child at the Piano, Fumbling": A Hauskonzert

“THE CHILD AT THE PIANO, FUMBLING”: A HAUSKONZERT1 SETH BRODSKY The bourgeoisie defended its last music in the fortress of the piano. —Theodor W. Adorno2 HEODOR W. ADORNO WRITES ABOUT children and childhood often. He writes about pianos frequently. He writes about memory constantly, and the attempt to make new music is a topic never far away from his pen. But there are, as far as I know, only three passages in which Adorno writes about all four things at the same time, and tracing the little changes from the first passage to the last offers an intriguing history of a thought. Here’s the first passage, from Adorno’s second collection of Motive, first published in 1929: The child searching for a melody on the piano offers the paradigm of all true composing. Equally unsure and faltering, yet with a precise memory, the composer searches for what perhaps was always already there, and what he ought now bring back, on the undiscriminating black and white keys of the keyboard from which he must make his choice.3 T 146 Perspectives of New Music A child, a piano, the search for the new, the search for the old: there the thought ends, and Adorno moves on to the next aphorism. Thirtyone years later, in a 1960 monograph, Adorno returns to this constellation of figures, and adds one more: The child, thinking he is composing as he taps around on the piano, entrusts every chord, every dissonance, every surprising turn with unending relevance. He hears them with the freshness of the very first time, as though these sounds, nevertheless mostly formulaic, had never existed before; as if they came to him as all that he actually imagines them to be. This belief is not to be held, and whoever strives to reinstate such freshness becomes the victim of what was always already an illusion.4 A child, a piano, the search for the new, the search for the old, and now, a new figure: impossibility. Six years later Adorno begins work on the never-completed Ästhetische Theorie. Sometime between October 1966 and summer 1968, Adorno returns to his child-at-theimpossible -piano constellation a third and last time. He adds yet another figure: The relation to the new finds its model in the child at the piano, fumbling for a chord never before heard, not yet touched. But the chord was always already there, the possibility of combinations is limited, actually everything already rests within keyboard itself. The new is the longing [Sehnsucht] for the new, hardly the new itself, from which everything new suffers. What feels itself to be utopia remains a negative of what exists, to which it remains in bondage. At the center of contemporary antinomies is this: art must be utopia, and wants to be . . . at the same time art, in order not to betray utopia to appearance and consolation, does not allow itself to be utopia. If the utopia of art fulfilled itself, it would be the temporal end of art. . . . Only through its absolute negativity does art pronounce the unpronounceable: utopia.5 This poor child! He believes he’s only sitting down at the family upright, “searching for a melody,” “tapping around for a chord,” “fumbling for a chord never before heard.” But he is in fact rehearsing the last gasp of German idealist philosophy. Caught up in this figural force field, the child becomes the deified double of the aging writer: the little Teddy of “two mothers” as the Hegelian hope of Seeheimer Straße, the holy fool of dialectical utopianism. “The Child at the Piano, Fumbling”: A Hauskonzert 147 Adorno was fond of displacing metaphysical philosophy, of imagining its death, its disappearance or exile, so as to figure it elsewhere or as something else. “Philosophy,” declares the famous opening line of Negative Dialektik, “which once seemed obsolete, holds on to life because the moment of its realization was missed.”6 Where, in what, does philosophy “hold on to life”? At the end of the Negative Dialektik “metaphysics immigrates to micrology,” finding its “refuge from totality” in the smallest, most diffidently insignificant detail.7 In Ästhetische Theorie, metaphysics immigrates to works of art, where...