The New Music. Theodor W. Adorno

I want to tell you myself. To formulate it precisely, the point is not that I am discarding or rejecting some new compositional methods that have crystallized in favour of some ‘absolute’ standard. There is no such thing, and naturally any compositional method that arises from the sense, the musical sense, and is employed for its sake, is legitimate. Rather, what I am arguing against and consider a danger is really just for work on certain, to an extent, even non-artistic methods to replace the representation of the artistic idea or that which is composed. That is, I think that the methods must be a function of the artistic sense, not the other way around. And, most of all, I do not think it is an artistic, a genuinely artistic approach first to come up with methods and then wait to see if the sense will perhaps come along from somewhere. [Applause] This is something that is particularly hard to imagine occurring on a grand scale today. Here too, please do not misunderstand, I wish to be cautious. It is fair to say that, with the methods of the figured bass period, as introduced around 1600, the first works really showed more of a joy in the material than any great sense. So one should not rule out this possibility a priori. If you play through operas by Caccini or Peri⁵ today, you will find a very modest amount of musical sense, to put it mildly. On the other hand, I would say that a few things have happened in the world since then, and that we cannot simply cast aside all notions of a meaningfully constituted work of art organized by means of its own sense and now think that when we turn towards new materials we are doing the work of pioneers, and that these materials will gain sense later; rather, in these three hundred and fifty years of music history, the relationship between the musical sense and the material has become so infinitely close that reverting to the cult of the mere material, in my view, truly involves the danger of regression. This means that the element of a somewhat infantile tinkering is actually replacing mature, self-aware composition. And this, this danger of a regression in music, which had truly reached maturity in a particular sense with Schoenberg, to something that seeks refuge in a system that is alien to it, external to it, that no longer has the courage to obey its own sense absolutely and instead plays with the ability to employ some methods imposed from without – that is really what I am warning of. And if I may be completely honest, I have the feeling that the position I am taking is really not the most backward one, but that I am attempting to caution a little and to put a check on a process of regression, of a loss of spiritual [geistig]⁶ meaning in general, that I think is by no means restricted to music today; I constantly observe it, most of all in the realm of philosophy, but also that of sociology, where there is a current tendency to absolutize so-called fact finding – that is, the enumeration and statistical processing of mere facts – and to denigrate any question about the meaning of these phenomena as mere metaphysics. But there is truly a form of enlightenment that, as we once wrote in the Dialectic of Enlightenment, is in danger of reverting to the language of amphibians.⁷ [Laughter in the auditorium] In other words, if history does not progress in a straight line, then exactly the same applies to these matters. It is certainly possible that methods seem advanced in the sense of rationalization but are actually something narrower, more limited and regressive in their function. I simply wanted to point that out once more, to clarify the positions and, above all, to prevent any of you from thinking that, because I am not following this trend and do not consider it the business of the theoretical thinker to receive everything that is out there in a sympathetic manner but, rather, to advance things through thought – that my attempt to retain this form of independence constitutes a solidarity with some or other restorative tendencies in music. Ladies and gentlemen, I am well aware that everything that is said today to criticize whatever modern music can immediately be misused by greybeards of all varieties to say, ‘Well, Adorno too is saying that modern music is no good any more.’ Now, an independent thought can never be safe from such misuse in any case, but I would say it is also a feature of our times that there is no truth that cannot, within the context we inhabit today, take on a function that perverts it and turns it into its own opposite. And if one is at all serious about the truth – and I presume that all of us who have come together here, or at least most of us, are very serious about the truth – then we cannot let ourselves be terrorized by the fact that some old Bayreuthian or similar fossil [laughter in the auditorium] is rubbing his hands with glee every time I am unimpressed by an integral serialist composition. I am happy to run that risk, and if the Bayreuthian insists on invoking my name then he is free to do so, just as Mr Sedlmayr has occasionally cited me despite my protests;⁸ but that is an occupational hazard, and I would simply ask that I can trust you, as I feel I can expect in the light of our work together, to see things as they are really meant, to be entirely independent from the idea of a training course and, rather, to share some of the concerns that I have, and to genuinely take on something of the interest that I am representing. [Applause]

Well, now I would like to return directly to Schoenberg. I will choose a piece from Gurrelieder that could be considered a ‘hit’ – that is, it is extremely popular and many people are inclined to say how beautiful it is, and I also think it is especially beautiful. But I will show you a few things in this piece that perhaps contradict its outwardly enchanting character somewhat; and, indeed, there is an extremely strong tension in Schoenberg’s youthful works – he would speak later of the ‘subcutaneous’ element⁹ – between the musical surface and the subcutaneous events, that is, what is happening underneath. So I will take the famous song of Waldemar from Gurrelieder, which is on page 37 of the piano reduction: ‘So tanzen die Engel vor Gottes Thron nicht’ [Thus the angels dance not before the throne of God] [plays]. So, this is an eight-bar song, and is completely in D major. And it is a very beautiful melodic idea, as they say. I must say, the more closely I have looked at these eight bars, the more alien they have become to me. As you know, one of the most fundamental elements in Schoenberg’s Theory of Harmony, and consequently in the entire development of Schoenberg’s music until the twelve-note technique, is the awareness of scale degrees – that is, the awareness of a stepwise motion with strong root progressions. Now, there is essentially none of that here; instead, it always stays, it always hovers around this D. And the tonic has an extremely strange weight here. The tonic seems as if it were seizing this entire phrase – not in the manner of a pedal tone, as things do progress harmonically, but in such a way that the music keeps reverting to the tonic. Take note of it, this peculiar dominance of the tonic, which really goes against everything we would have learnt in Schoenberg’s school. Schoenberg’s freedom from his own doctrine is something I would like to point out to you quite emphatically [plays]. Now the D major returns, and this is very odd, because he could have continued like this [plays] or with something similar. But he eschews that; one might say that he follows this gravity and stays there [plays]. Yet again the tonic [plays]. Now, that leads to something I have already touched on, but which I wanted to tell you more about, namely the fact that the development that drove Schoenberg beyond tonality is connected precisely to an extremely heightened awareness of tonality. And this is an awareness in which the tonic is taken much more seriously, much more emphatically than in all the other neo-German music from the same period. For example, you can find something very similar in a song whose material is actually far more advanced, such as ‘Traumleben’ [Dream life], which I will discuss later,¹⁰ from op. 6 [plays], where the music also locks into the tonic, and in the second period it ends in exactly the same way on the tonic rather than moving away from it. Now, I want to examine this aspect because I think that, precisely in this, in this very strong awareness of the autonomous value of the scale degree beyond its mere functional purpose in Riemann’s sense, the function of dominance – that, paradoxically, it is precisely here that we find the element that subsequently broke through the boundaries of tonality. For if you listen properly to something like the passage from Gurrelieder that I played for you, then the individual chord seems to take on a life of its own in relation to the context in a way that it never really does with the other neo-German composers of the Wagnerian school, with Hugo Wolf, with Reger, with Richard Strauss, not with any of these important composers. The chord, the first degree, becomes a form of absolute here. It becomes an existent [Daseiendes], not merely an element in a state of becoming. And precisely this reinforcement of the individual constitutive degrees in the harmonic writing, this is really the precondition for the emancipation of harmony in later Schoenberg and the way the individual sound takes on this peculiar meaning of its own, which then enables it to step out of the tonal context. So I would say that here too, in this harmonic dimension of Schoenberg,