Apparitions

Essays on Adorno and Twentieth-Century Music

Berthold Hoeckner

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781135577728
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Música

Apparitions takes a new look at the critical legacy of one of the 20th century's most important and influential thinkers about music, Theodor W. Adorno. Bringing together an international group of scholars, the book offers new historical and critical insights into Adorno's theories of music and how these theories, in turn, have affected the study of contemporary art music, popular music, and jazz.

1

Drifting: The Dialectics of Adorno’s
Philosophy of New Music

DANIEL K. L. CHUA

The Philosophy of New Music is a message in a bottle.¹ After all, shipwreck is one of the central images in the book. New music, claims Adorno, aims for oblivion; it is the surviving cry of despair from the shipwrecked, a message in a bottle (Flaschenpost) tossed meaninglessly on the currents of history.² The question is: what is the message scrawled inside the bottle? If it were simply a cry of despair, new music would merely state the obvious and it would hardly demand the strenuous reflection of Adorno’s philosophy. The means of communication may speak of total oblivion (the bottle may sink without a trace), but the scrap of paper inside carries a very different message. New music is not a note of despair but a note of hope in the face of despair, for without hope it would never have been written. And given Adorno’s catastrophic worldview, this message urgently needs to be deciphered; for him, it is the riddle on which the fate of humanity depends.³ So locked within the fragile vessel of new music is a cry for salvation. And the task of philosophy is to rescue this bottle from total oblivion.

As an S.O.S, the philosophy of new music can no longer be an aesthetic philosophy; beauty is hardly relevant to the shipwrecked.⁴ Rather Adorno replaces Hanslick’s The Beautiful in Music with what he calls the “responsible” in music, turning the question of aesthetics into one of ethics.⁵ His verdict on Schoenberg and Stravinsky is a moral judgment; their aesthetic and technical competence is not in doubt; what counts, claims Adorno, is the “attitude” behind the scores.⁶ This seemingly tiny inflection turns out to make all the difference between Stravinsky’s illusory “objectivity” (Sachlichkeit) and Schoenberg’s “objective logic of the matter” (objektive Logik der Sache).⁷ Thus his analysis of their technique is not a formal exercise but a moral physiognomy of the music. And the attitude Adorno demands is precisely the ethic contained within the Flaschenpost: not the imposition of a moral law, as if there were answers to the human crisis, but a surrender to the currents of history in an aimless search for an ethic that “is ever present but not yet defined.”⁸ Drifting, then, is the moral attitude required of new music, involving a kind of material agnosticism where the composing subject cedes to the tendency of the musical material. Thus it is not a static position but one that blindly bobs up and down on the waves without any will power. Adorno’s term for this abandonment is sich überlassen. ⁹

This means that there is no vantage point from which to philosophize; to drift is to lose all bearings. The only compass available is an internal dialectic within the historical material of new music that points to possibilities and tendencies — but there are no fixed points. The result, as Adorno puts it in Minima Moralia, is “micrological moral myopia”;¹⁰ Schoenberg’s music “surrenders itself (sich überläßt),” writes Adorno, “with closed eyes”;¹¹ it cannot see the way ahead in the “windowless quality” of this movement but hands its future over to the dialectical currents of history sedimented within the musical material.¹² Thus the Flaschenpost cannot be observed from the shore; the musical material has to be tracked, “step by step,” as a process of thought with all its “exasperating antinomies.”¹³ Dialectics is not “a particular philosophical standpoint” writes Adorno, but “the sustained attempt to follow the movement of the object under discussion and to help it find expression.”¹⁴ In other words, you have to drift along with it, as if one were passing judgment “in the dark.”¹⁵

Darkness also shrouds Adorno’s text. Its obscure dialectical maneuvers do not yield the kind of clarity demanded by modern reason. There is no immediate result. Rather it drifts, forcing a myopic tracking of its movements. Adorno’s dialectical struggle is a way of conscripting the reader on an odyssey of disaster in which our survival is not guaranteed — only hoped for. But not everybody wants to embark on such a hazardous voyage. In fact, the immediate success of the book following its publication in 1949 registers its failure. The composers at Darmstadt who thought the Philosophy of New Music provided the “theoretical and philosophical legitimation for their experiments with multiple serialism” simply didn’t get the drift.¹⁶ They took the moral high ground instead, rehearsing the very attitude that Adorno condemned in Stravinsky. So if the book “played its part in causing the demise of neo-Classi-cism,” as Adorno claims, then the triumph of the avant-garde serialists was based on a misunderstanding that failed to grasp the dialectical movement of Adorno’s Flaschenpost;¹⁷ they heard the rhetoric and not the message, mistaking a philosophy for merely a polemic. Of course, the polarized structure of the book didn’t help;¹⁸ the contrast, neatly arranged by Adorno as two essays, one on Schoenberg and the other on Stravinsky, is supposed to provoke a dialectical voyage between extremes, but it has been more tempting — and, indeed, less Titanic — to read it as a binary opposition. There is a thesis: “Schoenberg and Progress.” And an antithesis: “Stravinsky and Restoration.” But their negative synthesis is missing. It is no wonder that the advocates of serialism unfurled the book as their banner, as if Schoenberg’s “method” was the way forward. But what is the consequence of this way of reading? You only need to produce a crude list of contrasts from the book to see the results (see table 1.1).

Table 1.1 Binary oppositions in Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music

	SCHOENBERG	STRAVINSKY
SOCIAL ATTITUDE
	subjective	objective
	individual	collective
	ego	pre-ego
	freedom	repression
	victim	perpetrator
	social critique	social conformity
	outsider	insider
	isolated	sociable
	tragic	ironic
	serious	witty
	diagnostic	symptomatic
	responsible	deceitful
	progressive	regressive
COMPOSITIONAL TECHNIQUE
	dynamic	static
	temporal	spatial
	dialectical	hierarchical^19
	developing variations	block-juxtaposition
	internal structure (idea)	external style
ORIGINS
	spirit	body
	voice^20	percussion (rhythm)
	language	dance (ballet)
	intentional	automatic reaction

These oppositions flatten Adorno’s dialectics into a kind of cardboard politics where Schoenberg too easily triumphs over Stravinsky. In this reading, Schoenberg cannot fail, for he represents the individual subject, whose quest for freedom Adorno admires. So, like that subject, Schoenberg’s music develops dynamically in time as it engages with the dialectics of history. Stravinsky, in contrast, represents the social object; his music is static, like juxtaposed blocks in space that impede the historical progress of humanity. Whereas Schoenberg reveals the expressive condition of the human spirit whose origin is in song, Stravinsky reflects the rhythmic mechanism of the social body that dances to the savage pounding of drums.²¹ Hence Schoenberg suffers; his music identifies with the traumatized victims of political and cultural repression.²² Stravinsky, on the other hand, oppresses; he identifies with the collective, watching his victims with a chilling objectivity. Stravinsky’s music therefore reflects an irresponsible, authoritarian society that imposes an external totality on the lives of individuals;²³ he colludes with its lies, espousing an “authenticity” in a world where there is none.²⁴ Schoenberg, in contrast, is too truthful to ingratiate himself to society; his “responsible” music bears the guilt of the world.²⁵ If Stravinsky composes from the outside for the in-crowd, Schoenberg is the outsider who constructs his music from the inside, pursuing the dialectical laws latent in the material to fashion a language so hermetic in its search for meaning that society can only shun his work as incomprehensible and arbitrary.²⁶ As the tragic outsider, he hones his work as a critique of the social totality, which is merely a façade of wholeness.²⁷ In this way, Schoenberg registers the diseases of a sick world, as if his compositions were psychoanalytical case studies.²⁸ Stravinsky’s music, on the other hand, is too sick with the delusions of authenticity to formulate a critique of anything. Indeed, his music requires psychoanalysis, and Adorno obliges by diagnosing it as schizophrenic, hebephrenic, catatonic, infantile, and depersonalized.²⁹

It is not that these contrasts are inherently untrue; it is just that they constitute the basis for a dialectical journey. A static reading of the text, in effect, nullifies the meaning of the book both as philosophy and as new music. As philosophy, truth, for Adorno, has to be figured in the tension of a dialectic that refuses to synthesize the truth, for the Hegelian definition — “truth is the whole” (Das Wahre ist das Ganze) — can only be a lie in an unreconciled world.³⁰ As Adorno famously puts it: “The whole is the untrue” (Das Ganze ist das Unwahre).³¹ A nondialectical reading of the Philosophy of New Music would not only be devoid of truth, it would positively falsify it. Second, as new music, this truth, formulated from extreme forces of repulsion, must be understood as one antithetical “essence,” and not as two alternative possibilities.³² Progress and regression are the twin results of a single “process of rationalization” in modernity.³³ Thus neither Schoenberg nor Stravinsky has a monopoly on the truth; each is its symptom. As Adorno explains in the opening pages, his extreme and exaggerated position on the two composers is a provocation to dialectical thought through “the object of music itself.”³⁴ He is not concerned with exonerating Schoenberg or condemning Stravinsky per se, as if he were toeing some party line on the quality of their music. In fact, it is quite the opposite; this is Adorno’s most negative text on Schoenberg. His criticism of the twelve-tone technique is so severe that Adorno’s invectives on Stravinsky fail as an effective antidote for Schoenberg: “Another disloyal person” was Schoenberg’s reaction to the book, and not unjustly; Adorno had secret “misgivings” about the twelve-tone technique, suspecting it to be a “totalitarian resolution.”³⁵ So Adorno’s exaggerations do not polarize the two composers. Rather, as we will see, there is an internal dialectic within the Schoenberg essay that almost “merges” the dialectical Schoenberg with the nondialectical Stravinsky; their impossible synthesis is the negative truth of new music, which must be experienced as unresolved tension.

Thus there is something necessarily incomplete and provisional about this process; the tension creates a movement rather than an arrival; it is, after all, a message in a bottle and not a specimen behind a glass case. This means that the message in the Philosophy of New Music is subject to constant change, otherwise Adorno’s ideas “would be irreconcilable with a [his] theory which holds that the core of truth is historical, rather than an unchanging constant to be set against the movement of history.”³⁶ It...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Full Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface: On Apparition BERTHOLD HOECKNER
• Authors
• 1. Drifting: The Dialectics of Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music DANIEL K. L. CHUA
• 2. Labor and Metaphysics in Hindemith’s and Adorno’s Statements on Counterpoint1 KEITH CHAPIN
• 3. Dire cela, sans savoir quoi: The Question of Meaning in Adorno and in the Musical Avant-Garde1 GIANMARIO BORIO, Translated by Robert L. Kendrick
• 4. “The Elliptical Geometry of Utopia”: New Music Since Adorno1 JULIAN JOHNSON
• 5. Wolfgang Rihm and the Adorno Legacy1
• 6. Frankfurt School Blues: Rethinking Adorno’s Critique of Jazz1 JAMES BUHLER
• 7. “Die Zerstörung der Symphonie”: Adorno and the Theory of Radio LARSON POWELL
• 8. Music, Corporate Power, and the Age of Unending War1 MARTIN SCHERZINGER
• Notes
• Index