The New Music. Theodor W. Adorno

and that what remains as the essence are only the inner workings of the musical fabric. Unfortunately there is no time left for me to analyse these few bars – I think it is ten bars – I cannot analyse them now as I had originally intended. One could spend hours discussing only these few bars, to say nothing of the entire song. These few bars consist of three little sections, the second of which, the middle section, also shortens the rhythm. This abbreviation of the rhythm is in turn a consequence of the rhythm in the accompaniment, which anticipates such a two-beat rhythm. And this anticipated two-beat rhythm also has consequences for the melody, but at the end it leads into a resolving passage that forms the cadence, although this middle section is a radical variation on the antecedent, in that the characteristic intervals [plays] are repeated faithfully but are no longer comprehensible as such because of the altered rhythm and the insistent tempo; and then the consequent, the cadential consequent seems entirely fresh, even though the three elements that form this mini-movement actually all hang together. But once again – let me say this again in closing – once again it is the case that Schoenberg does not take a rationalized thematic approach, deriving one motif directly from another, for here too the motivic connections lie beneath the surface. From the start, one is dealing with such wide-ranging variations that one can no longer say in a rationalist manner that this or that motif returns somewhere, for the same intervals have their own innate tension and their effects continue, but they are not simply repeated stubbornly and mechanically; and that is precisely what creates this impression of extraordinary tension and vehemence.

      So, ladies and gentlemen, we have reached the end – regrettably, I must say, for I have the feeling that we had only now got into the matter properly, and that this was actually just the beginning. But all I can do is to hope that a little of what I have told you, especially the composers among you, will give you food for thought, and that you have perhaps seen from what I have told you that I presented the young Schoenberg not so that you would return to the young Schoenberg but to rejuvenate our aging new music a little with the help of the young Schoenberg. That was my intention, at any rate. Many thanks.

Notes

      1 1. ‘The Aging of the New Music’ was first presented as a lecture on 26 April 1954 during the Contemporary Music Days in Stuttgart; South German Radio (SDR) broadcast it for the first time two days later. A revised version was broadcast by RIAS on 9 February 1955 and by Hessian Radio (HR) on 15 February 1955. Adorno also gave the lecture at the Darmstadt Academy of Musical Art and in Munich. Regarding the published version, see above, lecture 1, note 4.

      2 2. The concept of pointillism [das Punktuelle] in music was precisely articulated when Herbert Eimert introduced the term in a lecture at Darmstadt in 1953. What was meant is a compositional approach that isolates the individual elements of composition in such a way that the relationships and proportions between them can be perceived; the opposite of this is the statistical concept, which was developed in music whose complexity no longer permits the discrete perception of those individual elements, instead challenging overarching perceptual categories relating to the average density, pitch, duration or intensity of passages or rising, falling, increasing or decreasing tendencies, and so forth. This conceptual pair expresses the dialectical circumstance that music organized in a more complex or subtle fashion is punished by cruder perception. Some of the most significant works of recent years are specifically conceived to address this dialectic; but critics spoke of pointillist music as if they were able to perceive even a single event in isolation within the statistical swarms of notes in those compositions. (Heinz-Klaus Metzger, ‘Gescheiterte Begriffe in Theorie und Kritik der Musik’, in die Reihe 5 [Vienna: Universal Edition, 1959], pp. 41–9, here p. 45; repr. in Metzger, Musik wozu: Literatur zu Noten, ed. Rainer Riehn [Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1980], pp. 277–93, at p. 285)Metzger is presumably referring to Eimert’s lecture ‘Die kompositorischen Grundlagen der elektronischen Musik (mit musikalischen Demonstrationen)’ [The compositional foundations of electronic music (with musical demonstrations)] from 28 July 1953. According to Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht (Handwörterbuch der musikalischen Terminologie, 1972, entry ‘Punktuelle Musik’), Eimert first referred to ‘pointillist music’ on 21 July 1952 in the presentation ‘Probleme der elektronischen Musik’.

      3 3. Adorno is referring to Pierre Boulez and Karlheinz Stockhausen.

      4 4. Although Sinn is usually translated here as ‘sense’, the word Sinnzusammenhang is rendered as ‘context of meaning’ owing to the established status of the term (Trans.).

      5 5. Giulio Caccini (1551–1618) was one of the leading composers, singers and lutenists at the Florentine court. His opera Euridice was premiered in Florence in 1602. Jacopo Peri (1561–1633), Caccini’s rival in Florence, and likewise a singer and composer, also wrote a Euridice opera; at the premiere, a number of songs were sung in Caccini’s versions. Both men’s operas are among the oldest surviving works of the genre. Adorno also names the two composers in his sketch for the fictional music in Thomas Mann’s novel Doctor Faustus: ‘The lamenting of nymphs already found in the settings of Orfeo by Peri and Caccini’ (Theodor W. Adorno and Thomas Mann, Correspondence 1943–1955, ed. Christoph Gödde and Henri Lonitz, trans. Nicholas Walker [Cambridge: Polity, 2006], p. 125).

      6 6. Every instance of the word ‘spiritual’ corresponds to geistig, and should thus be taken in the more encompassing sense of Geist as a combination of intellect and (artistic) spirit, rather than anything theological or metaphysical (Trans.).

      7 7. See Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2002), p. 28: ‘The elimination of qualities, their conversion into functions, is transferred by rationalized modes of work to the human capacity for experience, which tends to revert to that of amphibians.’

      8 8. In 1950, the Viennese art historian Hans Sedlmayr had presented the arguments from his controversial polemic of 1948 against modern art, Verlust der Mitte [The loss of the centre], at a discussion in Darmstadt. Defending his position, Sedlmayr said:In a description formulated from an entirely different perspective, I found an excellent presentation of eminent dangers that I have not mentioned here: in the book by Adorno on the philosophy of New Music. Here he describes the extremely dangerous nature of this situation [the endangerment of humans and thus art at this time] in a way that made even me shudder, and it is all the more powerful because Mr Adorno’s worldview is otherwise worlds apart from mine. He presents the dangers of the situation with great mastery and relentless acuity. If Hindemith and Stravinsky cannot escape Mr Adorno’s judgement, which of the contemporary visual artists can do so? (Darmstädter Gespräch: Das Menschenbild in unserer Zeit, ed. Hans Gerhard Evers [Darmstadt: Neue Darmstädter Verlagsanstalt, 1951], p. 206)Sedlmayr also instrumentalized a passage from the Philosophy of New Music in his 1954 book Die Revolution der modernen Kunst [The revolution of modern art] and sought to invoke Adorno as a witness to the ‘shift towards senselessness’.

      9 9. See, for example, the analysis of the andante from Brahms’s String Quartet in A minor:[It] contains six phrases in eight measures. The length of these phrases is 6+6+6+4+4+6 quarter notes. The first three phrases occupy four measures and three eighth notes (or four and a half measures). The first phrase ends practically on the first beat of measure 2. […] In Brahms’s notation these subcutaneous beauties are accommodated within eight measures; and if eight measures constitute an aesthetic principle, it is preserved here in spite of the great freedom of construction. (Schoenberg, ‘Brahms the Progressive’, in Style and Idea, pp. 435f.)

      10 10. Owing to lack of time, this did not occur.

      11 11. In a text from 1937 entitled ‘Zweite Nachtmusik’ [Second night music], Adorno writes:The first atonal works are transcripts in the sense of psychoanalytical dream transcripts. In the earliest book publication on Schoenberg, Kandinsky truthfully and shockingly called his pictures ‘brain acts’. Their substance carries all later form. But the wounds of that expressive revolution are the blotches that, on the pictures as much as in the music, entrench themselves almost against the compositional will as messengers of the id, disrupting the surface; like traces of blood in fairy tales, they cannot be magicked away through compositional corrections. The twelve-note technique still faithfully contains these blotches. (Theodor W. Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann et al. [Frankfurt