Philosophy of New Music

by Theodore Adorno; Translated, edited and with an Introduction by Robert Hullot-Kentor
University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, London, 2006
208 pp. Paper, $22.72
ISBN-13: 978-0-8166-3666-2; ISBN-10: 0-8166-3666-4.

Reviewed by Jonathan Zilberg
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

jzilberg@illinois.edu

“For all the thinkers in history, Pythagoras included, Adorno is the only philosopher of world importance whose musicological expertise was in every regard of a caliber equal to his philosophical expertise: Nietzsche would by comparison be an amateur.” Hullot-Kentor 2006:xvii

“That Theodore Adorno’s book The Philosophy of Modern Music, for largely ideological reasons, disgracefully misrepresents the work of Stravinsky is generally recognized, but it is not often realized how unconvincing is Adorno’s treatment of Schoenberg.” Rosen 1996: vii.

“All of these [Shostakovich, Stravinsky and Britten] have in common a taste for bad taste, a simplicity founded in ignorance, immaturity that fancies itself clear minded, and a lack of technical capacity. In Germany, the Reichsmusikkammer has left behind a rubbish heap. The universal style, after World War II, is the ecelectism of the shattered.” Adorno in Hullto-Kentor 2006: 10.

In light of the ever-expanding interest in Adorno, Robert Hullot-Kentor’s edited translation of Theodore Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music will provide a useful contribution for those who might now attempt or re-attempt to read Adorno’s all-important foundational work [1]. Above all, Adorno’s book is a manifesto against the world and there the history of the manuscript’s rejection and reception is a fascinating example of sustained intellectual combat, this combined work on Schoenberg and Stravinsky being in Schoenberg’s words “an act of vengeance” (pp. xxi).

This new edition is however best critically read with the aid of Charles Rosen’s Arnold Schoenberg (1975, 1996) and Alex Ross’ The Rest is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century (2007). In doing so, these combined works will allow scholars to better understand Adorno’s obsession with atonal music, his unreciprocated adoration of Schoenberg who “violently disliked” the book, particularly the title, his abhorrence of Stravinsky, and his passionate hatred of popular music or any musical compositions that attracted his atonal vengeance.

While the debate over atonal music has long since evolved far away from the polemical antagonisms incited by Adorno’s intense words, the larger question at hand might be this: If Adorno’s musicological analysis is demonstrably wrong, as Rosen authoritatively claims and as Schoenberg also believed, then what consequences does this have not only for Hullot-Kentor’s preface but for Adorno’s subsequent work as one of the leading cultural critics and philosophers of music of his time? But for the sake of the constraints of this review, and philosophy aside, the most important point to make, as I see it, is to note that without an intimate knowledgeable of Schoenberg and Stravinsky’s music it is impossible to engage Adorno’s discussion of Schoenberg’s atonal work in the first half of the book and his critique of Stravinsky in the second half [2].

That being said, it will be interesting to see whether the publication of this new edition will encourage scholars and graduate students in music departments to attempt to do so. For other audiences such as historians and anthropologists interested in the interwoven contexts of the arts in the late 19th century and early Twentieth Century, if one reads Hullot-Kentor against Ross and Rosen rather than on its own, one can at least gain a historical perspective on the musicological problems at hand and the fascinating history of the first performances of such music in Europe and America. For instance, one might be surprised perhaps to learn that Schoenberg at one point considered himself both a painter and composer, so much so that he was a member of Der Blaue Reiter (Rosen 1996, pp.10-11). These texts will inspire one to learn something of the long term musicological consequences of Debussy’s visit to the Paris Exposition of 1889 and Satie’s contemporaneous and more radical inspiration in European folk and bar music, of the shock and awe of the performance of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, the faun Nijinsky you may recall captured in clay by Rodin, of Schoenberg’s adoration of Strauss and break with Mahler and how his marital crisis and the impending Genocide (which he predicted) all influenced his invention of atonal music that we now associate with horror movies.

For the musically inclined, should one be fortunate enough to have the time and the requisite intellectual skills one could re-listen to the music at issue while studying the transcriptions and competing commentaries so as to collectively critically re-assess each of Adorno’s tendentious value judgments. Therein, one should keep in mind the problem in which he claimed that the “truth” about music can only be reached through subjective means. Attempting to make sense of this in graduate seminars would bring the debate over Adorno down to one of specificity rather than philosophical abstraction. The value of such an interpretive exercise is that this is the only way to critically assess Adorno’s musicological legacy in a rigorous musicological and intellectual fashion while taking into account issues of subjectivity and objectivity in assessing the expressive qualities of music.

Adorno’s claims as regards Stravinsky and Schoenberg have a hardheaded certainty to them. They are laid down as absolute truths [3]. Indeed, what strikes one about Adorno’s book above all is its unrelenting tendentious nature[4]. In this, Hullot-Keller’s preface and notes are informative in what they relate about Adorno’s long struggle to publish the English translation, which he began work on in 1941 [5]. The brief discussion as to why it was important to publish this third translation of Philosophy of New Music originally published in 1973 but insufficiently elaborated upon in terms of the said problems with the earlier editions. In the final analysis, Hullot-Kentor’s argues that it is the issue of musical discernment and not a philosophy that is at stake.

As he situates it for musicology, the central problem lies in assessing musical quality in terms of how it is decided through making right versus wrong compositional decisions and wherein musical quality is judged as simply being a matter of knowledge and conceptual work. As an outsider in music theory and critical theory, I can only suggest that one take Rosen’s as opposed to Hullot-Kentor ’s position very seriously and accordingly read Adorno for the way in which he uses musical analysis to advance philosophical and ideological positions in great leaps of imagination from highly debatable claims for the discernment of “quality” as something absolute. For that Hullot-Kentor’s book is fascinating, even if one only reads the preface and the footnotes and the especially the wonderful inclusion of “Misunderstandings,” Adorno’s response to Walter Harth’s article “The Dialectic of Musical Progress.” There, in clear language, Adorno is at pains to defend his use of mimetic appropriation of psychotic behavior in his analysis of Stravinsky’s Fauvism as representing the “capitulation” of new music. In all this, it would be interesting indeed to be able to witness a debate between the likes of Ross, Rosen and Hullot-Kentor over Adorno’s defense. Regardless of Adorno: Philosophy of New Music’s musicological flaws which I cannot attest to, for those interested in primitivism, fetishism and mimesis, reading “Stravinsky and The Restoration” will be sure to excite in its apparent brilliance (or baffling bullshit) and its intellectual orchestral nature.

What we really need now is for someone of Rosen’s caliber to deconstruct these newly translated and edited chapters on Schoenberg and Stravinsky in enough instances to demonstrate whether Adorno was right or wrong and to what consequence to the philosophical claims based on these judgments. It would also be important for Hullot-Kentor to comment upon the disparities between this translation, the earlier versions and the German original rather than simply dismissing the first two translations. If that is what comes out of Hullot-Kentor’s book this new edition would have proven invaluable. In the meantime to return to the opening epigraph, if Ross is right then the claim Hullot-Kentor makes for Adorno is hubris of the superhero comic book variety [6].

Notes

[1] Adorno has become something of a fashion, even downright popular in recent years so much so that David Beer in reviewing Tia DeNora’s After Adorno: Rethinking Music Sociology (2003) writes that it is precisely because Adorno’s work has become foundational for contemporary social theory that “a reappraisal of Adorno’s legacy has become near essential for the future of the sociology of music, and, more broadly, I would argue, for a sociology of technology and culture.” Terry Eagleton in Determinacy Kills, a review of Detlev Claussen’s recent study Theodor Adorno: One Last Genius in the London Review of Books , 19 June, 2008 (at www.lrb.co.uk/v30/n12/eag/01-.html) makes a similar call and more specifically, at the philosophical level, Sean Cubbitt in his on-line Leonardo review of Michael Chanan’s From Handel to Hendrix: The Composer in the Public Sphere (1999), writes that ”the “bleak pessimism of his [Adorno’s] negative dialectics . . . needs rethinking . . . .” http://www.muse.jhu.edu/journals/leonardo/0034/34.2cubbitt.html).

[2] Atonalism and serialism or 12 tone music are often used inter-changeably. For a discussion of serialism and neo-classicism, see Rosen (1997: 70-105). For an instance of why the reader will need a profound knowledge of such issues in order to assess Hullot-Kentor’s book, consider the discussion on page 59, Adorno’s discussion of Schoenberg’s Fourth String Quartet. Reading this one page will give one a stark sense of the difficulty in reading this book and any discussion of how serialism affects melodic quality, as one musicological instance under attack. I thank John Brownlee for the months of meetings to listen to and discuss such music and study the scores without which writing this review would have proved impossible.

[3] This is in stark distinction to Terry Eagleton’s view in “Determinacy Kills” where he writes:

“Adorno’s is a language rammed up against silence, a set of guerrilla raids on the inarticulable, in which the reader has no sooner registered a truth claim than the opposite is instantly advanced. Each proposition loops back on itself, struggling to avoid a bald presentation of the isolated object, but also to avoid swallowing it up in some ghastly concentration camp of the Absolute Idea."

[4] As Schoenberg said, Adorno’s writing was “blathering jargon, which so warms the hearts of philosophy professors” (Ross 2007: 358).

[5] Take for instance the quote in note 13 (page 172) from a letter of Adorno’s to Leo Lowenthal: “… last spring Runes had the idea of publishing the Philosophie der neuven Musik in his journal and had me do a rough translation, which I finished in December. Now he suddenly writes me, blatantly breaking a verbal and written commitment, to say that several experts have decided the work can not be published and returned it to me.” See Erhard Bahr’s Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism (2007) which sheds additional useful light on the social context in which Adorno began his long and acrimonious struggle to publish the English version, also see http://lea.mit.edu/reviews/sept2008/zilberg_weimar.html

[6] Consider Michael Mosher’s Leonardo review of Jenneman’s Adorno in America (2007) in Leonardo 41(4), 407-08 where he discusses Jenneman’s comparison of Adorno as a Jewish exile from a doomed foreign world to the comic book superhero Superman at http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri-journals/leonardo/v041.4.mike-mosher.html. One might add that one could read Adorno in German history as a mythic hero as Joseph Campbell describes it, a person struggling against overwhelming odds. It seems however, that at least for musicology as opposed to philosophy, Adorno’s mythic status as a hero or anti-hero will remain in contest, depending on whether one finds Charles Rosen more convincing than Robert Hullot-Kentor.