Aesthetic theory Book

Bracing.

This work is at once approachable and hermetic. Familiarity with Schoenberg and Stravinsky seems to be the only real price of admission, yet behind the matter at hand is Adorno's broader philosophical battle ground: Hegel and the legacy of German Idealism (through to Marx and the critique of capitalism); arguments with Lukács and Benjamin on the political stakes of art, in production and reproduction; and themes from his (and Horkheimer's) recently completed Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, which permeate the text. Progress and restoration, enlightenment and myth... there is not, of course, a simple way of mapping one set of concerns onto the other, but as ever with Adorno, brandishing his Hegelian stripes, there is no way of grasping the stakes of what these two composers are doing without articulating the social totality in which they figure.

This is Adorno at his most acutely critical. The section on Schoenberg has an eye to his later works and the total serialism of the fledging Darmstadt composers, diagnosing tendencies toward to the domination of the musical materials, an analogue to the domination of nature by reason; on Stravinsky, limb-tearing of the highest order, a philosophical slasher work, condemning the tendency towards sacrifice and regression found within appeals to a previous time: paganism and classicism.

Once the attentive reader has found their breath, they should proceed directly towards "Stravinsky: A Dialectical Portrait", which drives the knife in further as much as it applies a tourniquet, and "Vers une musique informelle", Adorno's late meditation on what could be a way forward in this dangerous game of musical creation.