Appeared in the Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology, Vol. 5, No. 1, 2018, 67–78.

Abstract

Theodor W. Adorno (1903–1969) is a gigantic figure in musical aesthetics, and many still consider
his views relevant, not only for analyzing the modernist music he was inspired by and that he
inspired himself, but also for more contemporary developments in classical music. John Adams (b.
1947) is arguably the foremost contemporary composer who has tried to break away from the
modernist musical language that was still very much dominant when he began his career as a
composer, and he has been very outspoken about his antipathy toward the Schoenbergian-inspired
compositional techniques that are at the background of Adorno’s musical aesthetics, particularly his
Philosophy of New Music. By presenting an interpretation of Adams’s music that draws on some
key aspects of John Dewey’s aesthetics – aesthetic experience, rhythm, and his appreciation of
common culture – I raise the question of how relevant Adorno’s seminal book still is for
understanding the aesthetics of the new music of today.

Keywords: Adams, Adorno, aesthetic experience, contemporary music, Dewey, modernism

Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music. A Thing of the Past?

I Adorno: The Philosopher of Atonality

“Adorno needs no introduction,” so begins the foreword of an anthology, published in 2006,

probing the contemporary significance of Theodor W. Adorno’s vast philosophy of music.1 This
beginning line aptly reflects Adorno’s position. Regardless of one’s attitude toward his ideas, few
would deny that Adorno is a towering figure, who has a unique relationship to music that is not
matched by any other philosopher, past or present. His writings on music are vast and encompass an
unbelievable number of topics, from Wagner to radio music, from Beethoven to jazz. His work
inspired avant-garde serialist composers of his day and affected their work – though Adorno
actually thought they had misunderstood him.2 He was also well-taught in composition, writing
pieces in the free atonal mode he so admired. It really is no surprise that Adorno has been called “by

1
Hoeckner, “Preface: On Apparition,” vii.
2
China, “Drifting,” 2.

1
far the most important writer on musical aesthetics” of the 20th century.3 Some 10 years later, in
2010, Irène Deliège and Max Paddison, in a preface to a collection of articles on the theory of
contemporary music, in turn, write that Adorno “has set in motion a train of thought that is still
alive and seems far from being exhausted.”4

Adorno is arguably best known for his account of atonal music – that is, music composed outside
the major and minor key systems – a compositional technique that marked a decisive turning point
in classical music and that formed the background for the later developments of 20th century
musical modernism. As a student of Alban Berg, Adorno had first-hand contact with the Second
Viennese School in music formed around the notorious figure of Arnold Schoenberg, the father of
atonality. Adorno’s views on music emerge heavily from this musical soil and they also play a key
role in his aesthetic theory as a whole. His interpretation of this radical musical innovation,
however, differs from Schoenberg’s in some important respects. Schoenberg believed that the
incomprehensibility of his works was only temporary; listeners’ ears will catch up in time with the
music and the audience will eventually receive pleasure from his works, as they do from their most
beloved Romantic classics. In Adorno’s view, Schoenberg’s own understanding of his music
downplays its most radical aspects. The challenge the music places on the audience does not
concern the adaptation of the ears, but rather Schoenberg’s pieces hold the possibility for a more
radical rearrangement of our habits of listening and the expectations we place on the experience of
music.5

It is precisely in this radical aspect of atonal music where Adorno believes its equally radical social
significance lies. His conception of the social value of atonal music is linked to his largely
pessimistic assessment of the society of his time. He saw the late capitalist society as a fully
administrated totality, which left very little room for any type of human freedom and critical
thinking. The phenomenon Adorno termed “the culture industry” is one example of this
development. His famous analysis attempts to show that contemporary mass and popular culture is
underpinned by a mechanism that reduces the audience from active agents into passive consumers.

Against this background, Adorno saw atonal compositions as one of the few remaining elements of
resistance in a late capitalist society: “regardless of the cunning naïveté of the culture industry, these

3
Leppert, “Preface and Acknowledgments,” vii.
4
Deliège and Paddison, “Preface,” xix.
5
See Goehr, “Dissonant Works and the Listening Public,” 225–233.

2
works not only become offensive for the sake of their truth, as antitheses to the total control aimed
at by the industry,” writes Adorno.6 Somewhat paradoxically, Adorno locates the social value of
atonal music to its autonomous character and to its utter lack of function. In other words, even
though there are no social intentions behind atonal works – in which respect they are autonomous –
they nevertheless carry high social significance for Adorno. Unlike political theorists such as
Brecht, Adorno does not locate the critical potential of artworks to their content, but rather to their
form, and it is precisely the form of atonal compositions that make them into voices of resistance in
a consumerist, thoroughly commodified society.7 The fragmented, non-progressive, and dissonant
character of atonal music makes it a “determinate negation”8 to the idea of commodification. Atonal
music thereby stands against the logic of the culture industry. Atonal works resist any form of
totalizing, and, by so doing, serve as critiques, at least indirectly, of the status quo as Adorno sees it.
This is how Adorno combines the seemingly irreconcilable ideas of social value and autonomy; it is
the lack of function of atonal works that constitutes their social critical edge with regard to the late
capitalist society. They criticize society by “merely existing,” as Adorno explains. For Adorno,
atonal musical compositions, particularly the free atonal works of Schoenberg composed between
1907 and 1914, serve as the primary examples of such art.9 They were the primary instances of
what Adorno termed “New Music.”

II Adorno Today

Adorno still has a strong presence, particularly in philosophically and sociologically oriented music
research.10 Applying his ideas to the music of today is, however, not a straightforward matter. As
Julian Johnson points out, “it is clear that music itself and the wider world in which it takes place
has changed much since Adorno… [his] new music is… not identical with our new music.”11 The
contemporary relevance of Adorno has raised interest and commentators have taken different
attitudes to the issue. Max Paddison has arguably been the strongest spokesman for Adorno in
contemporary music research. Adorno, for example, is the leading philosophical figure in an

6
Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 16.
7
Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 99–102.
8
Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 20.
9
For a very lucid account of the social value Adorno attaches to atonal music, see Hamilton, Aesthetics and Music,
Chapter 6. The monodrama Erwartung (1909) and the one act opera Die Glückliche Hand (1913) seem to be among the
works by Schoenberg Adorno values highly. See Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 30.
10
Richard Leppert, in the mammoth 2001 volume of new English translations of Adorno’s texts on music, for example,
talks about Adorno’s “increasing force in music studies.” See Leppert, “Preface and Acknowledgments,” vii.
11
Johnson, “New Music since Adorno,” 70. Emphasis in the original.

3
anthology he co-edited on contemporary music in 2010.12 Lydia Goehr’s work does not include as
detailed musicological analyses as Paddison’s, but she evidently shares the aesthetically and
politically radical vision inherent in Adorno’s account of New Music and develops it further.13

The attitude amongst commentators is generally quite respectful toward Adorno. Even though many
admit the limits of his position from a contemporary perspective, his vast work on music is still
seen to provide useful aesthetic and philosophical tools for analyzing more recent composers and
musical phenomena.14 Julian Johnson is a good example of this line of interpretation.15 Then there
are, of course, the detractors. Perhaps the most famous of these is Roger Scruton, who sets
Adorno’s Marxism as the leading opposition to his own conservative aesthetics of music that also
includes, as an essential element, a defense of tonality.16 However, at least in the literature cited
here, Scruton’s critique has elicited virtually no interest. Although almost 70 years has passed from
the publication of Philosophy of New Music, Adorno still has genuine followers, as well as a host of
sympathetic commentators.17 Even those criticizing him nonetheless see Adorno as a figure worthy
of critique.18

A weak spot in this contemporary response has, however, been that there are no systematic attempts
to re-evaluate Adorno’s work from the perspective of those strands of contemporary music that
explicitly seek to detach themselves from the tradition of musical modernism springing from
Schoenberg’s innovations which inspired Adorno.19 Below, I present an interpretation of one
important contemporary musical figure, John Adams, who is arguably the most vigorous
embodiment of these antimodernist tendencies in contemporary music and argue that it presents an
intriguing case for considering the scope of Adorno’s relevance today. It is also important to bear in

12
For Paddison’s views on Adorno’s contemporary relevance see his “Introduction: Contemporary Music: Theory,
Aesthetics, and Critical Theory.”
13
Here, in particular, I have her text “Dissonant Works and the Listening Public” in mind. Goehr gives an interesting
description of her relationship to Adorno’s critical theory in Elective Affinities, x–xiv.
14
See, especially, Williams “Wolfgang Rihm and the Adorno Legacy.”
15
Johnson, in his “New Music since Adorno,” mentions the late compositions of Boulez and Feldman as embodying
“aspects of the aesthetic theory suggested by Adorno’s late writings,” 75. On the other hand, he also points out that, as
Adorno saw harmony and motivic development as the key elements of music, Adornian tools cannot be that well
applied to compositions, which use sonority as a key musical material. Among such composers, Johnson lists Debussy,
Messiaen, Ligeti, and Varése. “New Music since Adorno,” 78–82. Of more recent composers, I guess one could add
Kaija Saariaho to this list.
16
Scruton, Aesthetics of Music, Chapter 15.
17
Among these types of commentators I would include at least Chua “Drifting” and Borio “Dire cela, sans savoir quoi”.
18
Andrew Bowie’s extensive critical account of Adorno in his Music, Philosophy, and Modernity could be considered a
good example of this type of approach to Adorno. See, in particular, Chapter 9 of the book.
19
It should, of course, be kept in mind that Adorno’s relationship to Schoenberg’s music is very complex in its own
right, and he had serious doubts about the twelve-tone technique that Schoenberg went on to develop after his free-
atonal period. See, for example, China “Drifting,” 5

4
mind that Adorno did not intend his analysis of New Music to be a systematic overview of the
music of his times. His claim was also very much normative; it expressed a hope about the future of
music. Adams’s music shows how far some important parts of our new music have drifted from
Adorno’s ideas and hopes.

In particular, Adams’s many earlier pieces are direct reactions against the aesthetic principles of
musical modernism. Together with his writings, Adams puts forth a very different view of
contemporary music’s relation to the musical audience and to the surrounding society from the one
Adorno develops in his critical theory. Indeed, it is difficult to find two more conflicting musical
figures than Adams and Adorno. Adams’s music embodies the optimism and energetic spirit of the
San Francisco Bay Area where he resides, which seems to be in complete opposition to the
pessimism characterizing Adorno’s philosophy of culture.

Adorno has already briefly figured in the reception of Adams’s music, and the tone has not been
positive. In his autobiography, Hallelujah Junction. Composing an American Life, Adams recalls
the reviews of the 2006 Vienna premiere of his Indian folk tale based opera, A Flowering Tree,
which tells the story of “a young couple undergoing rituals and trials to discover the transfiguring
power of love." Adams writes about the reception:
The Viennese press found A Flowering Tree symptomatic of everything that was
wrong with American culture. One reviewer sarcastically likened it to an end-of-term
student project at some multicultural Afro-Asian university. Indeed, ‘multi-kulti’ was
the preferred moniker for many of these critics, a dismissal that more often than not
came hand in hand with a stern aesthetic scolding in which the name Adorno seemed
to begin and end each paragraph.20

This reception shows that Adorno’s ideas are still very much alive, not just amongst philosophically
oriented music theorists, but also in music criticism. On the other hand, this critique suggests deep
differences between the musical figures of Adorno and Adams. A closer look at Adams’s music,
however, shows these to be even more substantial, and I cannot see how contemporary musical
Adornians can leave Adams’s music untouched.

20
Adams, Hallelujah Junction, 308.

5
III Adams and the Return of Tonality

That Adams’s music caused severe displeasure in Adornian-inclined critics is understandable, for it
has been almost a mission of Adams’s to bring back into classical music elements that Schoenberg,
Adorno’s musical inspiration, tried to eradicate, such as rhythmic pulse, repetition, and, most
importantly, tonality, as well as “the steadiness of the harmonic flow” and “the unbroken melodic
line” that comes with it.21 This compositional technique was already deemed by Adorno to be
“irretrievably lost.”22 It was precisely atonality that dominated the atmosphere of Adams’s student
days at Harvard where both of his composition teachers, Leon Kircher and Earl Kim, were pupils of
Schoenberg. Adams, however, had trouble in finding value in the composition techniques that
defined the curriculum of his school. He was genuinely baffled why the Schoenbergian model “had
become so prestigious.”23 Adams writes: “My own personal narrative was about extricating myself
from what I felt to be the cold, dead hand of the academic avant-garde, from the theory-bound
orthodoxy that held sway in the sixties, and from the fealty paid to European serialism and its
offshoots.”24

Another feature that made the musical ideas dominating the classical scene of his student days off-
putting for Adams was the contempt they exhibited toward common and popular forms of culture.
“What particularly offended me about the European serialists and post-war composers like Boulez,
Stockhausen, and Berio was their absolute deafness to popular music: to rock and to jazz. I just
couldn’t believe that somebody could be a composer in the United States and not want to absorb all
the Dionysian energy and color in the world of pop music and do something with it.”25 The result
was music deprived of any “cultural connectivity.”26 This was one of the elements Adams wanted to
re-establish into classical music. However, this meant going against the flow of his place of study,
and his many important sources of inspiration lay outside the academic setting. He has been said to
have “counted twelve-tone rows by day and listened to the Beatles in the dorm by night.”27

Adams eventually found a musical home of sorts from minimalism that had gradually emerged, via
the work of La Monte Young, Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and Terry Riley, as an alternative to the

21
Adorno, The Philosophy of New Music, 37.
22
Adorno, The Philosophy of New Music, 9.
23
Quoted in May, “John Adams Reflects on His Career,” 7.
24
Adams, Hallelujah Junction, 256–257.
25
Quoted in May, “John Adams Reflects on His Career,” 10.
26
Adams, Hallelujah Junction, 228.
27
Ross, “The Harmonist,” 35.

6
Schoenbergian model of composing. For Adams, it signified “a profound breath of fresh air”28 to
the “grim and pessimistic world of avant-garde music.”29 However, despite finding in minimalism a
musical language that he found to be suitable for reaching his artistic aims, in its obsession with
long repetitive musical patterns that exhibit minimal change, the style nevertheless left him cold.
Adams wanted to find a way to build into his works “big architectural spaces,” large-scale
expressive patterns; put simply what he was after was a musical language “that was formally and
emotionally much more malleable [than minimalism], much more capable of a sudden change of
mood, one that could be both blissfully serene and then violently explosive within the same
minute.”30 This was the kind of music that he thought could be achieved only by utilizing tonality.

These ambitions led Adams to look back to the classics of Romanticism, such as Beethoven,
Schumann, and Wagner, who used tonality to create large-scale expression. Adams writes: “What
was creating such a deep impression upon me in the music of these German composers was the pure
expressivity of their art… The harmonies, restless and forever migrating to a new tonal center,
moved between tension and resolution in an uncanny way that constantly propelled the listener
forward.”31 Despite a degree of dissatisfaction with minimalism’s expressive potential, Adams by
no means left this musical technique behind, but rather immersed the insistent pulse and the
technique of building works around recurring small musical cells at the heart of it with the
expressive structures of the Austro-German tradition in music. The always insightful Alex Ross
gives this great description of the music Adams formed from these diverse sources:
If you had to sum up his music in a single metaphor, you might say it sounds like
Highway 1. It is a cut-up paradise, a sequence of familiar elements arranged in
unfamiliar ways. A gaudy Hollywood fanfare gives way to a trancelike sequence of
shifting beats, billowing clouds of Wagnerian harmony dispersed by a quartet of
saxophones. Adams is not the only composer who has combined classical education
with a pop sensibility, but he is the only one who has made the synthesis stick.32

Adams’s vast early 40-minute orchestral work Harmonielehre (1985) perfectly embodies these
different strands of his musical persona. It is also Adams’s most fierce musical statement against the
principles of modernism that he found stuffy. Its title, Harmonielehre, is a witty reference to a text

28
Steinberg, “Harmonium,” 82.
29
May, “John Adams Reflects on His Career,” 24.
30
May, “John Adams Reflects on His Career,” 22.
31
Adams, Hallelujah Junction, 101.
32
Ross, “The Harmonist,” 30.

7
by Schoenberg of the same name, where the father of atonality attempts to show the decadent
character of the tonal system of composing. Adams himself calls Harmonielehre “a statement of
belief in the power of tonality at a time when I was uncertain about its future.”33 Tonality did not, of
course, totally disappear from late 20th century music. Far from it. Still, only a few have been
considered to have been able to “breathe” tonality with such “animal life” as Adams. 34 What also
sets Adams apart from some other prominent tonal composers of the late 20th century, such as Arvo
Pärt and Einojuhani Rautavaara, is that his music forms an explicit musical defense of tonality. This
fact just emphasizes how very different the musical and aesthetic ideals behind Adams’s and
Adorno’s thinking on music ultimately are.

IV Adams: The Musical Deweyan

There is, however, an aesthetic tradition, which I believe is well-positioned to illuminate the
aesthetic language of Adams’s music, as well as its underlying spirit as a whole, namely John
Dewey’s pragmatism. When it comes to music, Dewey would seem the clear underdog compared to
Adorno. Not only did Dewey lack any first-hand contact with music, but he even speculated of
being tone-deaf.35 Nevertheless, Dewey’s major work in aesthetics, Art as Experience, contains
some insightful remarks on the experience of music and his well-known analysis of aesthetic
experience can be used to illuminate the “tremendous energy,” which has been considered the very
“thumbprint of the Adams sound.”36

For Dewey, aesthetic experiences are specific kinds of cumulative experiential wholes that involve
such features as intensity, unity, rhythm, development, and a sense of fulfilment. This sense of
fulfilment is not just an experiential quality that closes the experience, but it is “anticipated
throughout [the experience] and is recurrently savored with special intensity.”37 In aesthetic
experience, one has the sense that the experience is moving toward some specific endpoint that can
be felt in the experience. This is what gives aesthetic experience its life and energy.

33
Adams, Hallelujah Junction, 139.
34
Ross, “The Harmonist,” 37.
35
Leddy, “Dewey’s Aesthetics,” Introduction.
36
May, “John Adams Reflects on His Career,” 25.
37
Dewey, Art as Experience, 55.

8
All of these qualities are essential features of the Adams sound. Many of Dewey’s descriptions of
aesthetic experience can, in fact, be directly used as descriptions of Adams’s music. For example,
according to Dewey, in aesthetic experience “resistance accumulates energy; it institutes
conservation until release and expansion ensue.”38 This is a type of experience that any keen listener
of Adams’s music will surely recognize to have undergone while listening to his music – think of,
for example, the ending of City Noir (2009). Moreover, the terminology that Adams uses to
describe his works overlaps with the central conceptual arsenal of Dewey’s aesthetics.39 Adams and
Dewey also have a similar understanding of the aesthetic object. Adams writes:
The formal idea with my music is that something appears on the event horizon, and
then it increases in importance as it begins to dominate the screen, and then it passes
you and it’s gone. Meanwhile, several other events have arisen and are at various
stages of moving towards you. I think that is the essence of how I compose and it’s the
way I experience my own music…40
This parallels well with Dewey’s idea of aesthetic experience as an organic unity that gradually
develops from individual elements.

The similarities between Adams’s music and Dewey’s aesthetics are amply summed up in the
latter’s notion of rhythm. Dewey opposed ideas of rhythm that identified it with the steady
repetition of identical elements. This notion – a view Dewey called the tick-tock theory of rhythm –
understands rhythm “analytically” and “statistically.” Instead, Dewey insists, rhythm should be
understood as a kind of felt underlying energy of aesthetic experience that drives the experience
forward. The rhythm characterizing aesthetic experience, in other words, has an inner drive that is
very far removed from the mechanical ticking of a clock.41

A distinctive kind of rhythm is also an essential quality of Adams’s music. One critic has praised
him for the unique capacity to build “a sense of motion within a constantly and evolving texture.”42
The background of the rhythmic quality of his music is in the recurring musical cells central to the
minimalist style of composing. As already noted, though initially inspired by minimalism, Adams
gradually started to crave a more expressive, emotional, and large-scale musical language than
minimalism made possible. The rhythmic elements he incorporated from minimalism into his style

38
Dewey, Art as Experience, 155.
39
May, “John Adams Reflects on His Career,” 27.
40
May, “John Adams Reflects on His Career,” 25.
41
Dewey, Art as Experience, 163.
42
Cahill, “Fearful Symmetries and The Wound-Dresser,” 122.

9
of composing, however, are not some isolated elements of his works, but instead they are
interwoven with the music’s other features. The pulse of Adams’s music is an essential part of the
unfolding of the piece’s emotional and expressive structure; the piece’s form is, in a way,
constituted by its rhythmic elements in much the same way Dewey believes the type of rhythm he
explicates gives life to aesthetic experience. Many of Adams’s pieces indeed seem like perfect
embodiments of Dewey’s ideas on rhythm and I cannot really think of more perfect examples than
his foxtrot for orchestra The Chairman Dances (1985) and the orchestral fanfare A Short Ride in a
Fast Machine (1986). In these pieces, one encounters the sense of rhythm, central to Dewey, where
“each step forward is at the same time a summing up and a fulfillment of what precedes, and every
consummation carries expectation tensely forward…”43

According to Adams, composing has a great deal to do with giving a musical work a “purpose-
driven life.”44 Such a sense of life and inner-drive are also central separating qualities between
aesthetic experience and those experiences Dewey sees as non-aesthetic. All in all, Dewey’s
aesthetics provide a very accurate blueprint of the experience of Adams’s music.

V The Praise of Common Culture in Adams and Dewey

Along with similar aesthetic ideals, there are also significant overlaps between the larger cultural
ideals behind Adams’s music and Dewey’s aesthetics. One of the most famous parts of Dewey’s
theory is the critique of the so-called “museum conception of art” that connects the notions of the
aesthetic and of art tightly to the institutions of art. According to Dewey, this view has had the
unfortunate consequence of spiritualizing art “out of connection with the objects of concrete
experience.”45 It has made aesthetic experience a distant phenomenon from everyday life or even
something opposed to it. This is a line of thinking Dewey’s Art as Experience, as a whole, seeks to
eradicate from aesthetic theory by showing how the roots of aesthetic experience lie in the
interactional relationship reign between ourselves and the surrounding environment. For Dewey,
thus, “the esthetic is no intruder in experience from without, whether by way of idle luxury or
transcendent ideality, but that it is the clarified and intensified development of traits that belong to

43
Dewey, Art as Experience, 172.
44
Adams, Hallelujah Junction, 86.
45
Dewey, Art as Experience, 11.

10
every normal complete experience.”46 And, of such a complete experience, I take Adams’s music to
be a perfect example.

As is well known, Dewey has been widely used in aesthetics to defend the aesthetic status of
everyday, common, and popular forms of culture.47 But such goals are also important to Adams’s
compositional work and many of his important works seek to restore a connection between classical
music and people’s common experiences. Again a contrast opens up with Adorno’s modernism.
Adams writes:
I think of culture as the symbols we share to understand each other… When we
communicate, we point to symbols that we have in common. If people want to make a
point, they reach for a reference. It might be a Woody Allen movie, or a John Lennon
lyric… When I was young, I came to realize that twelve-tone music, or, for that
matter, all contemporary music, was so far divorced from communal experience that it
didn’t appear on the national radar screen. It would be nice to hear someone say,
‘Look at that gas station in the moonlight. It’s pure John Adams.’48

One of Adams’s most important background figures is Charles Ives, sometimes considered the
father of American classical music. Ives was also a highly experimental composer, an aspect of his
work that reached a culmination in his notoriously difficult Fourth Symphony. By experimenting
with novel ways of composing, Ives resembles his European counterparts. However, what Adams
thinks sets him apart from them was that Ives did not attempt to purge his works of all “cultural
connectivity” as did such European modernists as Boulez, Xenakis, and Birtwistle. “Ives, for all his
experimentalism, kept the commonplace roots of his inspiration largely intact…,” in which respect
he resembles such composers as Bartok and Copland.49

The vernacular roots of Adams’s music are still far wider than those of Ives, and incorporating
elements of common culture as central parts of his works has been an important part of his critical
reaction toward modernism. Jazz elements are, of course, important to Adams’s compositional work

46
Dewey, Art as Experience, 46.
47
See, for example, Shusterman, Pragmatist Aesthetics.
48
May, “John Adams Reflects on His Career,” 33. For a more detailed investigation of the communal aspects of
Adams’s works, see my “Public Art and Dewey’s Democratic Experience: The Case of John Adams’s On the
Transmigration of Souls.”
49
Adams, Hallelujah Junction, 228. The link between Adams’s music and Dewey’s aesthetics is interestingly
reinforced by the fact that there exists a Deweyan analysis of Ives’s music. See Spurgeon Hall “The Deweyan Aesthetic
of Charles Ives.”

11
as a whole. But the forms of popular and common culture that Adams draws upon are ultimately
extremely varied. Adams, for example, describes working on Grand Pianola Music (1982):
“Dueling pianos, cooing sirens, Valhalla brass, thwacking bass drums, gospel triads, and a Niagara
of cascading flat keys all learned to cohabit as I wrote the piece.”50 His Chamber Symphony (1992),
is, in turn, composed in a style reminiscent of music found in old Looney Tunes cartoons and,
together with its “funky bass line,” it is hard to take it in any other way as poking fun to the piece
by Schoenberg of the same name.51

Adams writes: “I think one problem of twentieth-century music is that composers feel they have to
be serious, unforgiving, and grim. We have lost the kind of composer who is able to use his or her
art not only to elevate, but to entertain and amuse as well.”52 This description nicely encapsulates
the different attitude Adams takes toward music making compared to the view involved in the high-
brow modernist tradition in the background of Adorno’s philosophy of music. Not only do they
embody very different aesthetic principles, but their views on how classical music should relate to
wider culture also differ drastically.

Coda

The above investigation shows that it is indeed hard to exaggerate the differences between Adorno’s
and Adams’s approaches to all aspects of music. Adams’s music, therefore, presents a very
interesting case for all those interested in Adorno’s philosophy of music. In particular, it fortifies
the topicality of the question some have already posed: how relevant Adorno’s ideas on new music
still are for analyzing our new music. It should not be forgotten that Adams is a truly prolific figure
in classical music today; some think he is currently the most popular classical composer in the
world.

As tonality is the fundamental building block of Adams’s musical language, an easy response from
the Adornian would, of course, be to criticize Adams of misgivings similar to those Adorno already
attached to tonality. Adorno described the mode of experiencing tonal music by such terms as

50
Cahill, “Grand Pianola Music,” 89.
51
Ross, “The Harmonist,” 41.
52
Quoted in May, “John Adams Reflects on His Career,” 24.

12
“conformity”53 and “consolation.”54 His treatment of tonality also has very clear political
undertones: “the idea of the rational organization of the work”55 implied by tonality is a reflection
of the “bourgeois society,” “fully organized and driven to subsume everything as totality.”56 Tonal
works, in other words, do not raise any critical awareness, but they conform to the expectations
listeners have prior to hearing the music. Tonality is therefore, for Adorno, the “premise of music’s
commodification.”57

However, merely condemning Adams’s music on similar grounds would not do justice to it.
Adorno’s account of the contrast between atonality and tonality is arguably overly simplified.58 In
the case of tonal works, the listener is not necessarily just a passive consumer who expects the piece
to unfold according to some established, previously known general principles that would make the
experience of surprise and shock impossible.59 Adams’s music shows that Adorno’s critical account
contains a far too rigid understanding of the relationship between the general tonal system and the
individual works relying on it. One noteworthy feature in this context is that Adams’s pieces do not
conform to the sonata form, as did classical tonal concertos and symphonies, for example. Instead,
many of them are marked by a kind of all-embracing teleology. While listening to Adams one often
has the experience of what Adorno called “the gravitational pull of tonality.”60 But in Adams’s
music this sense really pierces whole movements of works, not just parts of them – think of the final
movement of Harmonielehre, for example. The music has, in many cases, a huge forward-driving
energy that holds a grip on the listener. An end point to the music is felt, but listeners, nevertheless,
encounter many unexpected twists and turns as the music unfolds and the end point itself turns out
to be something they could really not have predicted, even if possessing a substantial knowledge of
how the tonal system works. The following description beautifully captures this characteristic
feature of Adams’s works:
Adams’s music enters the ear easily, but it is not simple, certainly not simple-minded,
and never predictable. At no point, were the music suddenly to stop, could you foresee
with certainty what comes next, even when the sense of pattern seems at its clearest.61

53
Goehr, “Dissonant Works and the Listening Public,” 230.
54
Johnson, “New Music since Adorno,” 70.
55
Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 45.
56
Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 23.
57
Borio, “The Question of Meaning in Adorno and in the Musical Avant-Garde,” 57.
58
Scruton also makes the claim that Adorno’s critique of tonality is far too sweeping. See The Aesthetics of Music, 479.
59
Borio, “The Question of Meaning in Adorno and in the Musical Avant-Garde,” 61.
60
Goehr, “Dissonant Works and the Listening Public,” 230.
61
Steinberg, ”Nixon in China,” 114,

13
Conformity and consolation are, therefore, highly inappropriate epithets for describing Adams’s
music. His works indeed form unities. But they are highly complex and dynamic unities, again
finding a good parallel in Dewey’s aesthetic ideas.

Another important factor to bear in mind is that Adams’s music is no isolated phenomenon. Other
influential composers have also expressed similar antipathies toward modernist principles. One such
figure is the Finnish conductor and composer Esa-Pekka Salonen. In an interview, he describes a
strange “vision” he had one morning in the early 1990s, which turned out to be pivotal for his
subsequent career as a composer:
I woke up early, and my two little daughters were still asleep and so was my wife, and
I saw the hummingbirds outside my window, and the sun was shining. And I felt this
very strange thing. I couldn’t quite know what it was. I went to the kitchen and I made
myself a cup of coffee. As I was sitting there, I thought: Why do I feel like this? What
is it? and then I realized that I felt – free. Nice feeling.

And the thing Salonen felt all of a sudden to be free from were “the totems and taboos of
modernism.” He suddenly realized of being “free to investigate new canons in music and art; free to
become himself.”62 The musical language Salonen went on to develop shares many fundamental
elements with that of Adams: rhythm, energy, developing pulse, and a color palette that is far
removed from the greyness and blackness that Adorno found the only true colors of all modern
art.63

In this essay, I have tried to bring an important new twist to the issue of the contemporary scope of
Adorno’s philosophy of music, by drawing attention to an important phenomenon in recent classical
music that is basically squarely opposed to Adornian principles of new music. There are still a
number of philosophers and theorists who believe Adorno gives highly valuable tools for analyzing
our new music and our musical culture as a whole. Still, they have said nothing about how Adams’s
music fits into the picture. This is, hopefully, something my essay will encourage them to do.
Moreover, if the tendencies represented by Adams and Salonen become even more central to
contemporary music, then it might very well be that it is Dewey’s pragmatism rather than Adorno to
which music theorists should turn for a deeper understanding of the aesthetics of new music.

62
Ross, Listen to This, 102.
63
Johnson, “New Music since Adorno,” 78.

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