Adorno and the New Music

Philosophy of New Music by Theodor W. Adorno; Robert Hullot-Kentor; Roll over Adorno:Critical Theory, Popular Culture, Audiovisual Media by Robert MiklitschReview by: Justin SchellCultural Critique, No. 70 (Fall, 2008), pp. 201-207Published by: University of Minnesota PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25475493 .

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PHILOSOPHY OF NEW MUSIC BY THEODOR W. ADORNO; TRANSLATED BY ROBERT HULLOT-KENTOR

University of Minnesota Press, 2007

ROLL OVER ADORNO CRITICAL THEORY, POPULAR CULTURE, AUDIOVISUAL MEDIA BY ROBERT MIKLITSCH State University of New York Press, 2006

Justin Schell

With the exception perhaps of "On Popular Music," no work of

Adorno's critical aesthetics of music has received more attention, both

laudatory and derisive, than his Philosophie der neuen Musik, com

pleted just three years after the end of World War II during Adorno's

exile in Los Angeles. As detailed in Philosophie der neuen Musik and

elsewhere, music for Adorno was a source of knowledge and truth,

one of modernity's most lamentable victims, as well as the artform

that holds the greatest potential for social transformation. Music, espe

cially new music (which is understood here as "contemporary art

music"), was to illuminate "only by convicting the brightness of the

world of its own darkness" (16). Seeing "particular constellations of

compositional tasks" (33) as the best way to elucidate the specific social

position and potential of new music, Adorno engages in a detailed, if

sometimes short-sighted, discussion of the works of Arnold Schoen

berg and Igor Stravinsky, the two figures that best exemplified the

social position and potential of new music at that historical juncture. In "Schoenberg and Progress," Adorno densely traces the nega

tive and affirmative characteristics of the atonal and twelve-tone music

of Schoenberg, as well as his students Alban Berg and Anton von

Webern. While Adorno's verdict of advancement in "Schoenberg and

Progress" is not reached easily, in the end, Schoenberg composes his

Cultural Critique 70?Fall 2008?Copyright 2008 Regents of the University of Minnesota



202 | BOOK REVIEWS

twelve-tone music "as if 12-tone technique did not exist" (85) and in

doing so, as "representative of the most advanced aesthetic conscious

ness" (94), places his music in diametrical opposition to the dominant

culture, utilizing the instrumental rationality of modernity against itself. In doing so, Schoenberg brings Adorno's dialectical tracing of

his music in relation to modernity to a halt.

Adorno is not nearly as dialectical in the more overtly polemical

"Stravinsky and the Restoration." His argument turns on what he sees

as Stravinsky's purposeful excising of history. In compositions such

as The Rite of Spring, with its paganistic celebrations of death, history is

erased in favor of a musical and social primitivism. Stravinsky also

erases history through the appropriation of previous styles of music,

most notably in his "neoclassical" period, characterized by the re

embrace of tonality, as well as the wholesale quotation of previous works. Through both of these compositional [procedures], Stravinsky's music thus masks the sedimented suffering that has accompanied the history of music in modernity. For Adorno, the subject itself is

liquidated in Stravinsky's work, as the music is tantamount to proto

fascism, identifying as it does "not with the victim but with the anni

hilating authority" (110). Hindsight provides contemporary readers?

who now know of the millions of liquidated bodies in Nazi camps? an understanding, though not a justification, for Adorno's rhetorical

exaggerations.1

For over three decades, English readers seeking to grapple with

the ideas of Philosophic der neuen Musik had to rely on Anne G. Mitch

ell and Wesley Blomster's translation.2 Unfortunately, this edition is

often inaccurate, ranging from idiomatic missteps to misrenderings

of crucial phrases and concepts.3 It is only with the recent publication of Robert Hullot-Kentor's translation of Philosophic der neuen Musik

that a substantially more accurate and faithful translation has been

achieved.4 Indeed, Hullot-Kentor's new translation not only expertly corrects the inaccuracies of the old translation but also allows the

antagonistic, even radical, character of Philosophic der neuen Musik to

re-emerge.

The changes begin with the title, rendered Philosophy of New Music,

rather than Philosophy of Modern Music. For Adorno, music had "come

to the point where, to be music at all" it had to be, both in composi tion and its import, "utterly new" (xxiii). The semantic shift between



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"modern" and "new" evinces a conception of the new as more openly

antagonistic with the world in which it finds itself.5 Hullot-Kentor cor

rectly likens Philosophy of New Music, with "its stark 'for' and 'against,'" to a political manifesto (xix). This is in sharp contrast to Mitchell and

Blomster's translation, which blunts the work's sharpest critical state

ments. Instead of evacuating the antagonistic sting of Adorno's pointed

barbs, Hullot-Kentor sharpens it. For instance, Mitchell and Blomster

often translate "radical" as "modern," as in the title of the introduc

tion's fourth section, "Radikale Musik nicht gefeit." In Hullot-Kentor's

translation, it is rendered as "Radical Music Not Immune," rather than

the strikingly less antagonistic?and less accurate?"Modern Music

Unprotected." Similarly, instead of Mitchell and Blomster's "Attitude

Towards Society," the final section of "Schoenberg and Progress," Hullot-Kentor entitles the section "Stance Toward Society," with the

key word, Stellung, connoting a much more antagonistic, almost mil

itant sense of position.

Turning to the body of the text, not only does Hullot-Kentor give Adorno's famously dense prose a degree of clarity lacking in the 1973

translation but also reinvigorates the sense of agency that Adorno

ascribes to music in the original text. At the end of the preface, Adorno

writes:

How fundamentally disturbed life is today if its trembling and its rigid

ity are reflected even where no empirical need reaches, in a sphere that

people suppose provides sanctuary from the pressures of the harrowing

norm, and that indeed only redeems its promise by refusing what they

expect of it. (5)6

This new translation is much clearer and more direct than the 1973

rendering, which has the potential to lose a reader in its myriad of

personal pronouns.

How disordered is life today at its very roots if its shuddering and rigid

ity are reflected even in a field no longer affected by empirical necessity, a field in which human beings hope to find a sanctuary from the pres sure of horrifying norms, but which fulfills its promise to them only by

denying to them what they expect of it. (xiii)

In addition to the significant gains in readability, Hullot-Kentor's

translation of verstort as "disturbed" rather than "disordered" more



204 | BOOK REVIEWS

accurately reflects Adorno's conception of modernity's schizophrenic

character, its irrationality disguised as the most advanced rationality. The force of Adorno's pithy dialectical reversals, such as the one

that ends the above statement, is sharpened by Hullot-Kentor through out the text. For instance, in the 1973 translation, music is conceived

of as a "case study in expression" that is "no longer expressive" (49);

Hullot-Kentor translates the key word in the passage, Ausdruckproto

coll, as "depositional expression" rather than "case study in expres

sion," giving music a much more active cultural character, rather than

the more sterile and sedate "case study" (42).7 Such gains in clarity,

furthermore, never come at the expense of oversimplifying Adorno's

dense, dialectical thought.

With Hullot-Kentor's masterful translation, readers can now more

accurately debate the place of Philosophy of New Music within today's cultural situation. Nearly sixty years after its original publication, the

accuracy of Adorno's characterization of Schoenberg and Stravinsky should not be the main focus of one's engagement with the Philosophy

of New Music. Within both sections of the Philosophy of New Music, there

are moments that read less like a manifesto and more like an artifact

from a bygone era. Adorno concludes "Schoenberg and Progress" with

an exaggerated flourish characterizing Schoenberg's music as "win

ning freedom for mankind" (96), while the language used to discuss

Stravinsky's music as the manifestation of cultural regression par

excellence is appropriately deemed by Hullot-Kentor as "almost corny

psycho-analytic amateurishness" (173 n. 30).

What is more worthwhile in this book is its negative diagnostic

character?the spirit rather than the letter. In attempting to explicate

Adorno's resonance with the present moment, however, Hullot-Kentor

adopts the position of an Adorno apologist, reproducing Adorno's

more egregious exaggerations. As an example, Hullot-Kentor argues

that "commercial music is truly the snake oil of adolescence, and given

the absurdity of what the bottle dispenses?the music itself?its broad

application would be comic were it not meant to salve the most legit

imate and urgent needs a person has" (xv). Such false music is opposed

to "actual musical experience," yet there is little discussion of what

might actually constitute such experience, and little consideration



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given to the complex dialectics of production and consumption to

which music is manifestly subject. At the opposite end of the spectrum is Robert Miklitsch, and his

recent book Roll Over Adorno: Critical Theory, Popular Culture, Audiovi

sual Media.8 For him, Adorno is "absurdly out of touch with the times"

like a frozen Madame Tussaud wax figure (44). Underlying this ver

dict, however, is a false assumption, namely, that Adorno "stands for

European high culture and all things classical, including and espe

cially music," as opposed to his "wild, dialectical other," Chuck Berry,

representative of the unruly child of American popular music (xviii).

Miklitsch constructs his strawman Adorno as the supreme apologist for bourgeois Western high culture, which, given the intensely criti

cal analysis of art music in Philosophy of New Music and elsewhere, is

a hard conclusion to draw.

Why this book is called Roll Over Adorno isn't quite clear, since lit

tle effort is made to connect the book's second and third parts to

Adorno or the Frankfurt School. The strength of the book, however,

lies in these sections. First, Miklitsch attempts to reposition sound in

post-Screen film theory, especially the element of the suture, as he ana

lyzes how the soundtrack to Set It Off, with its strains of Dr. Dre and

other west coast gangsta rap, foregrounds the dynamics of race, gen

der, and sexuality. Next, he wants to argue for a less overtly politicized

conception of pleasure (specifically his idea of "audiophilia"), in his

reading of the ambiguous diegetic and non-diegetic music in Quentin

Tarantino's Jackie Brown. Finally, Miklitsch explores both the formal

and cultural facets of postmodernism on television shows such as

Melrose Place and The Sopranos, both in its libidinal economy formula

tions by Fredric Jameson as well as the formal self-reflexive and cita

tional devices that structure his detailed analyses of specific Sopranos shots.

At the end of the book, however, Miklitsch seems to go off the

deep end, feeling the necessity to drive a stake in the heart of Adorno

in an attempt to once and for all implode the distinctions between

high and low. In a discussion of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, he likens

Adorno to a zombie, "feeding voraciously every night on the passive, blood-warm corpus of mass culture," laying victims like Buffy "on the

high altar of Kultur" (195). While such exaggerated notions of Adorno's



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attitude towards popular culture are unfortunately legion, Miklitsch

just happens to be one of the most rhetorically graphic.9 A more reasonable middle ground in recent work can be found in

the collection of essays edited by Berthold Hoeckner, entitled Appari tions: New Perspectives on Adorno and Twentieth-Century Music, which

includes recent work by Richard Leppert, as well as music theorist

Adam Krims's discussion of Adorno in his Music and Urban Geogra

phy.10 These and other works take account both of the virtues and vices

of Philosophic der neuen Musik, as well as Adorno's interrogation of

modernity more generally. Many of the problems that Adorno identi

fies in Philosophy of New Music have most certainly not rolled over in

six decades; many have gotten worse instead of better. While the exag

gerated, often apocalyptic character of the Philosophy of New Music

may seem overblown to contemporary readers, so many of Adorno's

diagnoses of contemporary musical culture still ring true today.

Notes

1. For more on the link between Stravinsky and fascism, see Richard Taruskin,

"The Dark Side of Modern Music," New Republic 5 (September 1988): 28-34.

2. Theodor Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and

Wesley Blomster (New York: Seabury Press, 1973).

3. Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophic der neuen Musik (Frankfurt am Main: Suhr

kamp, 1976). See also vol. 12, Gesammelte Schriften.

4. Theodor Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007).

5. As Hullot-Kentor pointedly remarks, "a museum of modern art would

considerably fail the claim of its appellation if it insisted on being redubbed a

museum of 'new art'" (xxiii).

6. Wie von Grund auf verstort ist Leben heute, wenn sein Erzittern und

seine Starre dort noch reflectiert wird, wo keine empirische Not mehr hinein

reicht, in einem Bereich, von dem die Menschen meinen, es gewahre ihnen Asyl

vor dem Druck der grauenvollen Norm, und das doch sein Versprechen an sie nur

einlost, indem es verweigert, was sie von ihm erwarten (11).

7. Musik als Ausdrucksprotokoll ist nicht langer, "ausdrucksvoll" (53).

8. Robert Miklitsch, Roll Over Adorno: Critical Theory, Popular Culture, Audio

visual Media (Albany, N.Y.: State University of New York Press, 2006).

9. This is all the more surprising given Miklitsch's previous book, From Hegel

to Madonna: Towards a General Economy of "Commodity Fetishism" (Albany, N.Y.: State

University of New York Press, 1998), in which he rigorously traces the conceptual

genealogy of negation from Hegel through Adorno and the Frankfurt School.



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10. Apparitions: New Perspectives on Adorno and Twentieth-Century Music, ed.

Berthold Hoeckner (New York: Routledge, 2006); Richard Leppert, "Music Tushed

to the Edge of Existence' (Adorno, Listening, and the Question of Hope)," Cultural

Critique 60 (Spring 2005): 92-133; Adam Krims, "Marxist Music Analysis After

Adorno," in Music and Urban Geography (New York: Routledge, 2007), 89-126.



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Adorno and the New Music