Abstract
At the height of his intellectual powers as one of West Germany’s most famous philosophers, Theodor W. Adorno fondly recalls his family’s summer home in northwestern Bavaria in the autobiographical essay, “Amorbach” (1966). As a young man, he remembers playing an old guitar with missing strings that was hanging in the town’s post office. Adorno writes how he was “intoxicated by the dark dissonance” of its sounds—a haunting synaesthetic experience that preceded any knowledge of similar tones in the music of his acquaintance and future sparring partner, composer Arnold Schoenberg. Foreshadowing his valorization of the revolutionary soundscapes of the twentieth-century avant-garde, he believed that one would need to “compose how these guitars sound.”1 Because these sonorities later reverberated in the alternative music of the Velvet Underground, the Sex Pistols, and Sonic Youth, philosopher Roger Behrens cleverly uses this anecdote to mythologize Adorno—with no small amount of irony—as the very first punk rocker. The dissonances of these bands, when compared to those of the Second Viennese School of Alban Berg, Schoenberg, and Anton Webern, also represented the liquidation of human agency in a totally administered world. Behrens even proposes that this instrument be officially memorialized with a brass plaque and the following inscription: “With this guitar... Adorno invented the music that became a symbol of resistance for the people. With its dark dissonances, [it] fought for a free society.”2
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Notes
Roger Behrens, Adorno-ABC (Leipzig: Reclam Verlag, 2003), 31.
Robert Hullot-Kentor, “Right Listening and a New Type of Human Being,” in The Cambridge Companion to Adorno, ed. Tom Huhn (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 181.
Robert W. Witkin, Adorno on Popular Culture (New York: Routledge Publishing, 2003), 3.
Calvin Thomas, “A Knowledge That Would Not Be Power: Adorno, Nostalgia, and the Historicity of the Musical Subject,” New German Critique 48 (Fall 1989): 174.
Joseph Auner, A Schoenberg Reader: Documents of a Life (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 337.
Theodor W. Adorno and Thomas Mann, Correspondence 1943–1955, ed. Christoph Gödde and Thomas Sprecher, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2006), 24.
Rose Rosengard Subotnik, “Adorno’s Diagnosis of Beethoven’s Late Style: Early Symptom of a Fatal Condition,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 29 (Summer 1976): 247–48.
See Robert W. Witkin, Adorno on Music (New York: Routledge Publishing, 1998), 28–49.
See Theodor W. Adorno, Negative Dialectics, trans. E. B. Ashton (New York: Seabury Press, 1973).
Rose Rosengard Subotnik, review ofAdorno’s Musical Aesthetics, by Max Paddison, Journal of the Royal Musical Association 122 (June 1997): 139.
See Roger W. H. Savage, “Dissonant Conjunctions: On Schönberg, Adorno, and Bloch,” Telos 127 (Spring 2004): 79–95.
Theodor W. Adorno, Quasi una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso Press, 1998), 319.
Theodor W. Adorno, In Search of Wagner, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso Press, 2005), 89.
Theodor W. Adorno, “The Actuality of Philosophy,” Telos 31 (Spring 1977): 120–33.
Karl Ekman, Jean Sibelius: His Life and Personality, trans. Edward Birse (New York: Alfred A. Knopf Press, 1938), 191.
Theodor W. Adorno, Alban Berg: Master of the Smallest Link, trans. Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 63.
Quoted in Jay, Adorno, 138. For the entire passage, see Theodor W. Adorno and Ernst Krenek, Briefwechsel, ed. Wolfgang Rogge (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1974), 38.
Theodor W. Adorno, “On Tradition,” Telos 94 (Winter 1992/1993): 78.
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© 2014 Mirko M. Hall
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Hall, M.M. (2014). Theodor W. Adorno and Radical Music. In: Musical Revolutions in German Culture. Studies in European Culture and History. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137449955_4
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