DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2249.2009.00279.

alastair williams

New Music, Late Style: Adorno’s ‘Form in the New Music’

‘Form in the New Music’ is one of several lectures and presentations Adorno
gave at the Darmstadt summer courses during the nine visits he made there
from 1950 to 1966 (1950, 1951, 1954, 1955, 1956, 1957, 1961, 1965 and
1966).1 The recently established summer courses gave Adorno a chance, on his
return from the United States to West Germany in 1949 (the year in which
Philosophy of New Music appeared), to engage with new developments in post-war
music. In Darmstadt he was able to influence current approaches to composition
to some extent, and also to reconsider his thinking about aesthetics in the light
of recent developments in music.This two-way process is evident in ‘Form in the
New Music’, which explores one of the main threads in Adorno’s writings on
music: musical form as an embodiment, and potential reconfiguration, of social
antagonisms. musa_279 193..200

Adorno’s essay takes its title from a symposium of the same name held
in 1965, which also included lectures by Pierre Boulez, Earle Brown, Carl
Dahlhaus, Roman Haubenstock-Ramati, Mauricio Kagel, György Ligeti and
Rudolf Stephan. These contributions, with the exception of the talks given by
Boulez and Stephan, constitute the whole issue of Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen
Musik 10 (1966). Boulez’s presentation, ‘Periform’, is less substantive than his
1960 Darmstadt lecture on form. It was first published in Lettres françaises
(16 June 1966) and then in Darmstädter Beiträge 6, Pierre Boulez, Musikdenken
heute II, which did not appear until 1985, and was also included in Boulez’s
Orientations.
In addition to ‘Form in the New Music’, the main publications to emerge
from Adorno’s Darmstadt contributions were ‘Criteria of New Music’ (1959),
‘Vers une musique informelle’ (1961) and ‘Funktion der Farbe in der Musik’,
which was delivered in 1966 but not published until 1999 and does not appear
in the Gesammelte Schriften.2 Adorno’s first published comment on developments
in music after the war, ‘The Aging of the New Music’ (1955), did not stem from
a Darmstadt lecture, although the figures associated with the summer courses
constituted the article’s principal readership. These essays continue to be of
interest because they deal with possibilities in new music which have still not
been exhausted. Beyond that, though, they are important because they show
Adorno developing and modifying topics from Philosophy of New Music while also
working through – in a more compelling manner, at times, than the systematic
demands of a large book permit – some of the most influential ideas of Aesthetic
Theory, his posthumous magnum opus.

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The critical tone of ‘The Aging of the New Music’ provides an important
context for ‘Form in the New Music’, as does the more conciliatory mood of the
later ‘Vers une musique informelle’. ‘The Aging’ was criticised for its lack of
specific examples and for its apparent lack of familiarity with recent develop-
ments.3 And yet, its central claim proved to be rather tenacious: Adorno main-
tained that technical advances should derive from subjective need, as they did in
the case of Schoenberg’s innovations, not from abstract planning.This argument
is in many ways an expansion of Adorno’s critique in Philosophy of New Music of
Webern’s ‘fetishism of the row’, which informs the article’s central claim that it
is delusional to imagine that a focus on technique transcends subjectivity,
because the apparent objectivity of an overriding devotion to technique is
nothing but an atrophied and impaired form of subjectivity (Adorno 2006,
pp. 86–7). Although Adorno gradually became more accepting of later musical
developments, he never relinquished this basic tenet: it is repeated, for example,
in ‘Music and Technique’; in Aesthetic Theory, where Adorno attributes to Boulez
a reflexive response, which extends beyond technical criteria, to the ‘fatal aging
of the modern’; and in ‘Form in the New Music’, where he comments that ‘the
reduction of music to any supposedly raw material in fact stands in need of
subjective legitimation’ (Adorno 1999c, p. 202; 1997, p. 342; and 2008, p. 209).
The idea of the relationship between technique and subjectivity also recurs in
‘Vers une musique informelle’, the essay which reconciled Adorno with his
Darmstadt critics and which exerted the greatest impact on the first generation
of post-war composers, perhaps because its ambiguity allowed for a range of
interpretations. In order to avoid a language of atrophied objectivity, ‘Vers une
musique informelle’ famously envisaged a practice in which form would arise not
from pre-established categories, but from the needs of the material. This claim is
upheld in ‘Form in the New Music’ when Adorno states: ‘Integral form would
emerge from the specific tendencies of all musical details.With the liquidation of
musical types, integral form can arise henceforth only from bottom to top, not
the other way round’. And he combines the critique of objectivity with the search
for flexibility when he states, in his concluding comments: ‘A sense of form
means: listening for the music and following it where it wants to go; staying as far
away from an imposed will, an imposed architecture, as from alien necessities in
which for the most part an arbitrary subjectivity which has gone blind has
become entrenched’ (Adorno 2008, p. 213 and p. 215). Music which derives its
form from the inner life of its material would, then, avoid the restrictions not only
of traditional schema, but also of rigid compositional systems.
Given this background, it is not surprising to read in Adorno: ‘[I]t may be
precisely the inconsistent work of art which can lay claim to the higher substan-
tiality; its inconsistency becomes the motor driving it beyond its fallible form’.
With this observation he provides a sense of how the problem of musical form
embodies a social truth. What is more, he nuances this remark by preceding it
with a comment which embodies one of the principal preoccupations of Aesthetic
Theory: ‘For the paradox and dilemma [Not] of all art is that according to its own

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definition it must raise itself above what merely exists, above human conditions
in their actually restricted nature, but it can achieve this only by internalising
these conditions in their unvarnished reality and by giving expression to their
antinomies’ (Adorno 2008, p. 204). This comment offers a version of the central
idea that although art cannot transcend the world, it can reconfigure its social
antinomies, by following the material where it wants to go, because, released
from its normal constraints, the sedimented subjectivity embodied in the
material can realign itself in unplanned ways.
One of the main ingredients which nourish this hope is Adorno’s understand-
ing of the dialectic of rationality and the mimetic impulse, which finds its way
into ‘Form in the New Music’ when Adorno notes that ‘[a]rt assists the latter [the
mimetic impulse] to fulfil itself by means of techniques and rational procedures.
It represents suppressed nature solely by virtue of everything it has developed in
the course of the domination of nature’ (Adorno 2008, p. 209).4 It is because
rationalised subjectivity has the potential to encounter a repressed dimension of
itself that musical material can embody a reconfigured subjectivity.
As well as overlapping with Aesthetic Theory in a general way, ‘Form in the New
Music’ reveals how Adorno was influencing and absorbing specific ideas current
at the time at which he was writing. Directly related to the problem of how to
organise material, for instance, is the interdependence of determinacy and inde-
terminacy, a strand of thinking which Adorno owed to Ligeti, although the essay
is dedicated to Boulez.When Adorno states that ‘[i]ntegration and disintegration
are wholly intertwined’, he is no doubt reflecting Ligeti’s understanding of the
matter, as expressed in his articles ‘Pierre Boulez: Decision and Automatism in
Structure 1a’ and ‘Metamorphoses of Musical Form’. In the latter, Ligeti writes:
‘The more integral the preformation of serial connections, the greater the
entropy of the resulting structures’ (Adorno 2008, p. 208, and Ligeti 1965, p.
10). This idea was obviously central to Ligeti’s thinking at the time, because he
espouses a comparable view in his ‘Form’ essay (Ligeti 1992, p. 973). It was also
important to Adorno’s general approach in the 1960s, for when the interdepen-
dency of integration and disintegration is broached in Aesthetic Theory, this time
directly attributed to Ligeti, it is as part of a larger discussion about how the
particular resists the embrace of the whole (Adorno 1997, p. 156).
In a planning session for a congress on time in the new music, which took place
at the 1966 Darmstadt summer course, Adorno suggested that the idea of the
congress had sprung from the unplanned convergence between his presentation
and Ligeti’s paper (Adorno, Ligeti, Stephan, Brün and Rosenberg, 1999, p. 313).
This overlap is, perhaps, less surprising than Adorno indicates; after all, he was
undoubtedly familiar with Ligeti’s ideas, as we have seen, and Ligeti’s own ‘Form’
article refers to Adorno’s material theory of form.The latter challenges orthodox
theories of musical unity by indicating that because formal processes such as
‘themes, bridge passages and development’ have qualities which are not entirely
dependent on their position in the music, they can be used to signify traditional
functions in unexpected contexts (Ligeti 1992, p. 784).5 This was not an abstract

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point for Ligeti at the time, given his subsequent propensity for referring to
established music by means of non-traditional techniques. (Arguably, though,
Adorno’s material theory of form had less resonance in 1965 than it was to
acquire in the 1970s, not least in the compositions of Wolfgang Rihm,
who created a kind of musique informelle by retaining the memory of traditional
elements while detaching them from the associated organising syntax.6) Ligeti’s
essay also affirms the continuing influence of Adorno’s ‘The Aging of the New
Music’, arguing that Adorno’s concerns became more pressing around 1960 than
they had seemed in 1954 (Ligeti 1992, p. 792).
Ligeti may have been on Adorno’s mind during the planning session, not only
because the composer was a participant, but also because in the days previous to
the planning session Adorno had given a series of talks entitled ‘Funktion der
Farbe in der Musik’, the last of which turned to Ligeti, as well as to Boulez and
Stockhausen. Certainly, the conclusion from Ligeti’s ‘Form’ essay – that ‘what is
primarily given is not the compositional procedure but the conception of the
form’s totality, the imagination of the music as sound’ – seems to have influenced
Adorno’s conviction that sound colour becomes a crucial part of structure when
music, as he puts it, has ‘cut its connecting cables’ (Verbindungsdrähte), by which
he means when it has dispensed with established methods of organising com-
ponents such as pitch and rhythm (see Ligeti 1992, p. 796). He chose to illustrate
this claim with the example of Ligeti’s Atmosphères, maintaining that the score
remains highly articulated music, even though it dispenses with distinguishable
pitches (Adorno 1999b, pp. 310–11).
In their contributions to ‘Form in der Neuen Musik’, Ligeti, Dahlhaus and
Kagel talked more extensively about open form than Adorno ventured in his
article, and they agreed on one thing, at least: however open the form may be on
paper, it is closed in performance because the listener hears only one version at
a time. Nevertheless, the issue of open form also led Dahlhaus to make a slightly
exasperated response to Earle Brown’s suggestion that form can be created in
performance, because this idea erodes the work concept. By arguing that large-
scale form cannot be heard unless it is composed, Dahlhaus also resisted Kagel’s
attempt to shift the emphasis away from composed form to articulation by the
listener. Although Adorno’s notion of musique informelle did not encourage such
shifts in perspective, Dahlhaus also directed criticism at Adorno’s concept,
pointing out that the approach overemphasises isolated details.7 It is hard com-
pletely to rebut this point, since a degree of ambiguity is one of the attractions of
Adorno’s approach to musique informelle; even so, it is likely that Adorno had in
mind something more sophisticated because the relationship between the par-
ticular and the whole is an abiding concern of his philosophy. Although his
approach to form, whether musical or conceptual, is resolutely attuned to indi-
vidual elements, it does not envisage the separation of particular details from
larger forms.
As is typical of Adorno’s essays dealing with post-war music, ‘Form in the
New Music’ approaches its topic by way of older music, enabling the latter to be

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considered from the perspective of newer techniques, and vice versa. In doing so,
Adorno seeks a way of emulating the achievements of the past, without burden-
ing the future with outmoded restrictions.8 This dual vision reveals itself when
a discussion of the tension between development and recapitulation in
Beethoven’s symphonies leads to the observation that new music cannot ‘shake
off all repetition’. In a comment worthy of Jacques Derrida, Adorno adds: ‘Even
the postulate of non-repetitiveness, of absolute difference, calls for an element of
sameness without which the different cannot be seen to be different’.9 The
context of this remark leaves little doubt that Adorno’s experiences of recent
music influenced his understanding of longer-established works.
Although ‘Form in the New Music’ does not engage in the polemics found in
Philosophy of New Music, it is still a critical text. Moreover, it exhibits the
characteristics of Adorno’s late style by bringing back ideas familiar from else-
where in the author’s writings, but doing so with altered nuances which create an
incremental shift in perspective. Significantly, while Adorno does not surrender
his influential insistence that innovation should spring from subjectivity, he is
more willing to look beyond the achievements of the Second Viennese School,
and in doing so engages many of the key themes in Aesthetic Theory. Like the
latter volume, the article is about a search for a form of subjectivity which is
liberated from established conventions, and yet is not restricted by technocratic
objectivity.

NOTES
1. For a chronicle of the summer courses between 1946 and 1966, see Borio and
Danuser (1997). For further details of Adorno’s presentations, see Borio (1987),
pp. 163–4.
2. Adorno (1999c) is less closely related than its title would suggest to Adorno’s paper
‘Musik, Technik und Gesellschaft’, which was presented at the 1951 Darmstadt day
conference ‘Musik und “Technik” ’. I am grateful to Gianmario Borio for advice on
this matter; see also Borio (2006), p. 43.
3. See Metzger (1960). The German title is ‘Das Altern der Philosophie der Neuen
Musik’.
4. For more on mimesis and rationality, see Adorno (1997), p. 53.
5. Borio (2006, p. 50) considers that, with this essay, ‘Ligeti began a kind of long
distance dialogue with Adorno’. For more on Adorno’s relationship with the musical
avant garde, see also the informative discussion on pp. 47–53.
6. For more on Rihm and musique informelle, see Williams (2006).
7. For the critique of Brown and Kagel, see Dahlhaus (1992), p. 812; for the critique of
musique informelle, see Dahlhaus (1992), pp. 813–14.
8. For more on this issue, see Borio (2007), p. 57.
9. See Adorno (2008), p. 205. For an illuminating discussion of this passage in relation
to a material theory of form, see Paddison (1993), pp. 178–9.

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REFERENCES
Adorno, Theodor W., 1992: ‘Vers une musique informelle’, in Quasi una fantasia:
Essays on Modern Music (1963), trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso),
pp. 269–322.
______, 1997: Aesthetic Theory (1970), ed. Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann,
trans. and ed. and with an introduction by Robert Hullot-Kentor (London:
Athlone Press).
______, 1999a: ‘Criteria of New Music’, in Sound Figures (1959), trans. Rodney
Livingstone (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), pp. 145–96.
______, 1999b: ‘Funktion der Farbe in der Musik’, in Heinz-Klaus Metzger and
Rainer Riehn (eds.), Darmstadt-Dokumente I, Musik-Konzepte Sonderband,
Die Reihe über Komponisten (Munich: Edition Text + Kritik), pp. 263–312.
______, 1999c: ‘Music and Technique’, in Sound Figures (1959), trans. Rodney
Livingstone (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), pp. 197–215.
______, 2002: ‘The Aging of the New Music’ (1955), trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor
and Frederic Will, in Richard Leppert (ed.), Essays on Music (Berkeley and
Los Angeles, CA: University of California Press), pp. 181–202.
______, 2006: Philosophy of New Music (1949), trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor
(Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press).
______, 2008: ‘Form in the New Music’ (1966), trans. Rodney Livingstone, this
volume, pp. 201–16.
Adorno, Theodor W.; Ligeti, György; Stephan, Rudolf; Brün, Herbert; and
Rosenberg, Wolf, 1999: ‘Internes Arbeitsgespräch. Zur Vorbereitung eines
geplanten Kongresses mit dem Themenschwerpunkt “Zeit in der Neuen
Musik” ’, in Heinz-Klaus Metzger and Rainer Riehn (eds.), Darmstadt-
Dokumente I, Musik-Konzepte Sonderband, Die Reihe über Komponisten
(Munich: Edition Text + Kritik), pp. 313–29.
Borio, Gianmario, 1987: ‘Die Positionen Adornos zur musikalischen Avantgarde
zwischen 1954 und 1966’, in Brunhilde Sonntag (ed.), Adorno in seinen
musikalischen Schriften (Regensburg: Gustav Bosse Verlag), pp. 163–79.
______, 2006: ‘Dire cela, sans savoir quoi: The Question of Meaning in Adorno
and in the Musical Avantgarde’, in Berthold Hoeckner (ed.), Apparitions:
New Perspectives on Adorno and Twentieth-Century Music (New York and
London: Routledge, 2006), pp. 41–67.
______, 2007: ‘Work Structure and Musical Representation: Reflections on
Adorno’s Analyses for Interpretation’, trans. Martin Iddon, Contemporary
Music Review, 26/i (2007), pp. 53–75.
Borio, Gianmario and Danuser, Herman (eds.), 1997: Im Zenit der Moderne. Die
Internationalen Ferienkurse für Neue Musik Darmstadt 1946–1966, vol. 3
(Freiburg im Breisgau: Rombach).
Boulez, Pierre, 1986a: ‘Form’ (1960), in Jean-Jacques Nattiez (ed.), Orientations:
Collected Writings by Pierre Boulez, trans. Martin Cooper (London: Faber),
pp. 90–6.

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______, 1986b: ‘Periform’ (1966), in Jean-Jacques Nattiez (ed.), Orientations:

Collected Writings of Pierre Boulez, trans. Martin Cooper (London: Faber,
1986), pp. 100–5.
Brown, Earle, 1966: ‘Form’, Form in der Neuen Musik, special volume, Darm-
städter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik, 10, pp. 57–69.
Dahlhaus, Carl, 1992: ‘Form’ and ‘Concluding Remarks’ (1966), trans. Stephen
Hinton, in Carl Dahlhaus and Ruth Katz (eds.), Contemplating Music: Source
Readings in the Aesthetics of Music, vol. 3, Essence (New York: Pendragon
Press), pp. 797–814.
Haubenstock-Ramati, Roman, 1966: ‘Form’, Form in der Neuen Musik, special
volume, Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik, 10, pp. 37–9.
Kagel, Mauricio, 1966: ‘Form’, Form in der Neuen Musik, special volume, Darm-
städter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik, 10, pp. 51–6.
Ligeti, György, 1960: ‘Pierre Boulez: Decision and Automatism in Structure 1a’
(1958), trans. Leo Black, Die Reihe, 4, pp. 32–62.
______, 1965: ‘Metamorphoses of Musical Form’ (1960), trans. Cornelius
Cardew, Die Reihe, 7, pp. 5–19.
______, 1992: ‘Form’ (1966), trans. Stephen Hinton, in Carl Dahlhaus and Ruth
Katz (eds.), Contemplating Music: Source Readings in the Aesthetics of Music,
vol. 3, Essence (New York: Pendragon Press), pp. 781–96.
Metzger, Heinz-Klaus, 1960: ‘Just Who Is Growing Old?’ (1957), trans. Leo
Black, Die Reihe, 4, pp. 63–80.
Paddison, Max, 1993: Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press).
Williams, Alastair, 2006: ‘Wolfgang Rihm and the Adorno Legacy’, in Berthold
Hoeckner (ed.), Apparitions: New Perspectives on Adorno and Twentieth-
Century Music (New York: Routledge), pp. 85–101.

ABSTRACT
‘Form in the New Music’, which was originally published in a volume of
Darmstädter Beiträge zur Neuen Musik devoted to the issue of form, engages with
most of Adorno’s earlier essays on new music, modifying and developing those
ideas. In it, Adorno maintains the important perspective that a focus on tech-
nique cannot transcend subjectivity, but he depends less on the achievements of
the Second Viennese School than in some earlier articles. He also contemplates
contemporary approaches to composition, particularly as expressed by György
Ligeti, drawing out the wider aesthetic implications of these ideas. Furthermore,
as in many of Adorno’s writings in the 1960s, the author explores themes that
were to become prevalent in the posthumously published Aesthetic Theory. In
general, the essay exhibits the characteristics of Adorno’s late style: it returns to
ideas located elsewhere in the author’s oeuvre, but does so with altered nuances,
which create an incremental shift in perspective.

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