It is in the dialectic between what is pre-formed and what is re-formed that Adorno finds the mediated social critique that music can perform. Radical new music does not paint a musical picture of social relations programmatically. Rather, to make a
contemporary analogy, it can be likened to the way hand-made local goods produced from recycled materials and environmentally conscious processes—through their very materials and social relations of production—provide a critique of a society obsessed with low-quality, low-cost goods that is happy to ignore both the social and
environmental exploitation necessary for their production. The form of the goods themselves (their materials and shape) makes an immanent critique because of the concealed (or perhaps today no longer so concealed) relations of their production. This is essentially the Marxist materialist argument that Adorno turned to the service of
cultural critique.89 In other words, musical material is also material that has been
‘formed’ by the rationality of its time and the ‘form’ it takes is either critical or affirming of that rationality. Paddison says that according to Adorno: “Authentic autonomous works function as a critique of the instrumental rationality of the outside world, although they are mediated by that same rationality through the logicality of their
form.”90 Below I will look at some of the difficulties that Paddison in particular
88 Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster
(New York: Seabury Press, 1973), 32. Quoted in Scherzinger, “In Memory of a Receding Dialectic,” 74.
89 Paddison, “Music and Social Relations: Towards a Theory of Mediation,” 262-4. See also Witkin,
Adorno on Music, 178.
90 Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music, 158. The complexity, and to some extent circularity, of this
identifies with the question of mediation, or the linking of inner musical structure and outer social reality, in Adorno’s aesthetic theory. But to return for the moment to Berg’s Op.1, the disintegration of sonata form—Enlightenment reason’s most emblematic of musical forms—was seen by Adorno as homologous to the disintegration of social relations and bourgeois rationality that characterized twentieth-century modernism. The thinking that produced sonata form was being challenged. And it is the particular way that this experience is reproduced in Berg’s handling of the old and the new that gives it, for Adorno, its critical quality. For example, Horton discusses Adorno’s analysis of the significance of Berg’s treatment of the ending of the piece, contrasting it with a composition historically situated at the beginning of this process of disintegration, namely Beethoven’s ‘Tempest’ Sonata:
In Berg’s Op.1, the embedding of antinomies has progressed to a point of almost inconceivable density. (…) The ultimate sense that no overarching synthesis can draw all of these conflicts into a higher unity—in brief, the work’s negative-dialectical posture—is basic to its expressive trajectory, and it is this above all that locates it as one historical end-point to the manner of composition introduced in the first
movement of Beethoven’s ‘Tempest.’ Unlike Beethoven, however, Berg supplies no finale that might take up his movement’s dualities and resolve them; the Sonata’s manifold teleologies are simply left hanging with its closing chord. This is Adorno’s fractured totality in nuce: resolution persists here as an aspiration with no prospect of fulfilment.91
In other words, in Berg’s Op.1 the fragmentation of musical material is not falsely unified or made to cohere, thereby concealing its true state, but instead is left in a semi- coherent state of confusion with a question mark hanging over its future. The workings of this material dialectic are found back in the dialectic of social relations at that point in history. Unlike the way the aspiration of the bourgeoisie masked social reality (e.g. the claim that social change is undertaken for the freedom of its citizens), Berg’s music critically demonstrates the lack of possibility of its attainment.
In his essay, Horton attempts “to add more analytical flesh to Adorno’s philosophy” by re-examining some canonical studies in the analytical literature, including analyses of
of society, and saw freedom of form and its corresponding critique of pre-given form as a metaphor for an ideal, free society, and, simultaneously, as a critique of existing society. But at the same time, through the fetishization of form, music becomes assimilated to society.” (p.183)
91 Horton is comparing Adorno’s analysis of Berg’s Op.1 with Dahlhaus’s analysis of Beethoven’s
Berg’s Sonata Op.1 by Adorno, by Schmalfeldt and by Paddison but also analyses of Beethoven’s “Tempest” Sonata by Dahlhaus and by Schmalfeldt. He further offers his own dialectical reading of large-scale formal processes in Bruckner’s Symphony
No.5.92 These analyses are outstanding examples of dialectical interpretations of form
and content in pieces that each work quite differently with their materials and that furthermore can be interpreted as making quite different types of mediated social critique. Beethoven’s “Tempest,” for example, thwarts the expectation that theme and harmony support formal function. Instead, motivic development is initiated at the very start of the piece and drives the whole formal idea of the movement, dialectically struggling with its sonata form frame and ultimately failing to fulfil the historical convention of a synthesising recapitulation. In Horton’s words: “The mediation of a social dialectic is tangible: the failure to contain the music’s subjectivity [its motivic development] within sonata conventions parallels the failure to generate social and
political order from rational individuality.”93
According to Horton, Bruckner’s Symphony No.5 comes to a different conclusion. Horton’s analysis offers an interpretation of continuity and discontinuity (Horton refers to parataxis and hypotaxis) across the large-scale sonata form designs of the paired First movement and Finale movement. A dialectical interplay of theme and “topical”
elements (such as march, chorale, dance, processional) works to contradict the sonata form of both movements in a variety of ways. Unlike the Beethoven example,
Bruchner’s Finale resolves the problem of its oppositional material definitively: the struggle between secular and sacred musical material is concluded in favour of a Christian world view as the secular march theme “is drawn into the service” of a final
chorale.94 That a religious conclusion still had validity at the time of Bruchner’s Fifth
Symphony serves to highlight the inauthenticity that such a conclusion would have in a twentieth-century context.
Horton argues that these analyses exemplify the Adornian notion that a composition consists of a musical problem to be worked out and critically responded to in the process of the composition. Each resolution posits a different type of social critique mediated through its materials. The notion that a musical composition involves the
92 Ibid. 93 Ibid., 127. 94 Ibid., 136.
working out of a problem in its compositional unfolding recalls Carter’s idea of a “field of operations” that he said he exposed at the beginning of a composition and from
which the rest of the composition drew its impetus.95 I will argue that Carter’s
appropriation of ritornello form presents a compositional problem to which the musical content is itself a solution. However, the musical terms of reference relevant for a discussion of Carter’s music are very different those in Horton’s examples. Horton’s essay highlights the significance that thematic-motivic material played in Adorno’s conception of musical content and form and at the same time the inadequacy of thematic-motivic material as a way of approaching music of the second half of the twentieth century. This point made by Julian Johnson when he notes that “[t]he primary status of harmonic-motivic working in Adorno’s theory reflects, of course, a
fundamentally classical view. It is one, moreover, that restricts Adorno to categories derived from tonal practice which makes problematic his approach to music that works
by quite different principles.”96 As such, Horton’s chapter impresses the need for
analysis of post-1945 music to work with different categories of material and their dialectical disposition if it is to show dialectical processes and mediated social critique at work in this music.