9 - Adorno: musical philosophy or philosophical music?

Summary

Dialectics of music

Adorno probably wrote more involving the relationship between music and philosophy than any other leading modern thinker. One strategy in considering him might therefore just be to outline and analyse his ‘philosophy of music’. A version of this – extensive – task has, however, already been undertaken by Max Paddison in his Adorno's Aesthetics of Music (1993), which should be the starting point for anyone engaging with this topic (see also Witkin 1998). My aim here is just to pursue aspects of the philosophy-music relationship in Adorno which affect the themes that we have investigated so far. Many familiar themes in his work on music will therefore either not be dealt with at all, or will be dealt with in a fairly cursory manner. The advantage of this approach is that certain issues get a more extensive treatment than they have so far received.

Adorno is a very uneven thinker. Some of his texts, such as Dialectic of Enlightenment (DoE) (1947), written jointly with Max Horkheimer near the end of the Second World War, and his Philosophy of New Music (1949), have become more well known than they really deserve to. Ironically, this is not least because, despite the considerable demands these texts make on the reader, they also advance sometimes quite schematic positions. These can appeal to precisely the kind of undifferentiated thinking which the texts themselves regard as a symptom of a culture determined by the commodity structure's erosion of critical awareness. One of the problems in interpreting Adorno lies, therefore, in reconciling this schematic side of his thinking with his more discriminating approaches to specific phenomena.