Melos-Ethos International Festival of Contemporary Music 2015

Extract

In the closing sentence of an essay titled ‘Music and New Music’, from 1960, Theodor Adorno claimed, with his characteristic lack of equivocation, that the difference between new music and music in general was akin to the difference between good music and bad music. His rather sweeping claim was mitigated somewhat by his definition of ‘new music’, which was highly restricted in terms of its technical and moral imperatives. With respect to technique and style, ‘new music’ for Adorno meant almost exclusively the freely atonal music of Schoenberg and his students. Morally speaking, ‘new music’ was defined as that which embodied a critical resistance to the existing order and preserved the freedom of subjective expression as demanded by a Hegelian view of history.