Philosophy of New Music

With the exception perhaps of "On Popular Music," no work of Adorno's critical aesthetics of music has received more attention, both laudatory and derisive, than his Philosophie der neuen Musik, com- pleted just three years after the end of World War II during Adorno's exile in Los Angeles. As detailed in Philosophie der neuen Musik and elsewhere, music for Adorno was a source of knowledge and truth, one of modernity's most lamentable victims, as well as the artform that holds the greatest potential for social transformation. Music, espe- cially new music (which is understood here as "contemporary art music"), was to illuminate "only by convicting the brightness of the world of its own darkness" (16). Seeing "particular constellations of compositional tasks" (33) as the best way to elucidate the speciWc social position and potential of new music, Adorno engages in a detailed, if sometimes short-sighted, discussion of the works of Arnold Schoen- berg and Igor Stravinsky, the two Wgures that best exempliWed the social position and potential of new music at that historical juncture. In "Schoenberg and Progress," Adorno densely traces the nega- tive and afWrmative characteristics of the atonal and twelve-tone music of Schoenberg, as well as his students Alban Berg and Anton von Webern. While Adorno's verdict of advancement in "Schoenberg and Progress" is not reached easily, in the end, Schoenberg composes his