Johnson Julian - Adorno's Analysis

Review: Analysis in Adorno's Aesthetics of Music
Reviewed Work(s): Adorno's Aesthetics of Music by Max Paddison

Review by: Julian Johnson
Source: Music Analysis, Vol. 14, No. 2/3 (Jul. - Oct., 1995), pp. 295-313
Published by: Wiley
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/854016
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JULIAN JOHNSON
ANALYSIS IN ADORNO'S AESTHETICS OF MUSIC
Towards the end of Max Paddison's Adorno's Aesthetics of

discussion of Philosophy of Modern Music, the author comments on
Adorno's article 'MiBverstandnisse' [Misunderstandings] of 1950 in which
Adorno admits that he may have used a concept (that of 'objective spirit')
without sufficient explanation to communicate his ideas to his readers:
This concept is as foreign to public awareness today as it is taken for

granted in my own experience. Had I given thought to the
communication of the ideas and not merely to that which seemed to
me to be the appropriate expression of the object, then I would have
had to articulate this concept.2
This kind of refusal to compromise his own style for a readership with
different background from his own has, Paddison suggests, led to a wide-
spread misunderstanding of Adorno's work as a whole. I would suggest
that Paddison's book goes a significant distance towards rectifying that
problem for English-speaking readers and that Adorno's own (rare)
admission points to a gap in the communicative process between writer
and reader that has here been very usefully addressed. Remarkably, this
book is the first in English to focus specifically on Adorno's work on music
rather than subsuming it within a general discussion of his theoretical
writing. This alone makes it a work of considerable value, but not only is it
a book on Adorno and music, it is also one written by a musician. This is an
important point. Musicology has been very slow to embrace a sociological
dimension whereas sociology has been happily annexing art and music for
over a hundred years. Musicology has typically remained cool about the
latter's results, on the grounds that the sociology of music's focus on
context has tended to make the music peripheral rather than central to its
study.' Adorno's work remains significant precisely because it avoids such
a tendency and insists that any valid sociology of music is one rooted in an
MUSIC ANALYSIS 14:2-3, 1995 295

C Basil Blackwell Ltd. 1995 Published by Blackwell Publishers, 108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and
238 Main Street, Cambridge, MA 02142, USA.
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understanding of the musical text. This idea per

extent that, as has often been remarked, both t
the presentation of his ideas are entwined with
interpretation lies at the heart of his cultural
hopelessly insular to suggest that only a mu
standing Adorno, nevertheless so much of his t
and methodologically) is deeply embedded in th
he is part, that a study of his work which neg
becomes somewhat problematic. Of course, the
so: one can hardly imagine a work on Adorno
failed to locate them fully in the philosophic
from which they are, ultimately, inseparable.
Max Paddison has not shirked this responsibil
between the specifically musical and the more broadly theoretical and
sociological with a fluency that reflects that of his subject. Inevitably, this
will not please everybody. In particular, the insistence that one can make
sense of the writings on music only within the wider theoretical context of
Adorno's work results in a book of some 284 pages with an additional 80
pages of notes and bibliographies. This seems too long to serve as an
introduction and yet, at the same time, that is in many ways what the book
seems to offer. There is undoubtedly a tension here between scholarly
exactitude and comprehensiveness on the one hand and, on the other,
accessibility to a readership approaching Adorno's ideas for the first time.
Some passages are particularly 'student friendly' and could well serve as
'introductions to Adorno' on undergraduate courses (the Introduction for
example), while other sections (such as the lengthy sections on sociological
thought in Chapter 3) run obvious risks of alienating the uninitiated. In the
end, I would suggest that the book might be of most use to those who have
already read some Adorno. It works well as a thematic reworking of
Adorno's ideas (often drawn from several different texts), but it needs to
be understood as part of a process whose next stage must be to go back to
Adorno's texts themselves. I would be concerned about the reader who
thought that this book would somehow replace all of that, which i
negative criticism of the book so much as a comment on the na
Adorno's writings, one which Paddison himself makes on several
occasions.
Adorno suggests that the task of philosophy is to interpret that w
resists interpretation, an apt description for the task which this bo
assumes. It not only reworks and reorders Adorno's ideas, it actively
out a systematic framework in which to understand his writings. Th
two problems associated with this approach. The first, which will no
be invoked a great deal, is not really a problem at all. The second, t
apparently less grave, may actually be rather more so. The first co
Adorno's style: above all, the notoriously unsystematic nature of his
'system' (a trait in which he shows himself to be much closer to Nietzsche
296 MUSIC ANALYSIS 14:2-3, 1995

? Basil Blackwell Ltd. 1995
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than to Hegel). Paddison is not unaware of this

and he is quite obviously perfectly sensitive t
'constellation' technique. Nevertheless he quite bluntly side-steps a
favourite taboo of Adorno scholarship and sets about providing neat lists,
charts and flow diagrams that do the unthinkable: apparently systematising
the unsystematic. For this strategy to work, Paddison is of course as
dependent on having a genuinely dialectical reader as is Adorno himself.
He outlines the principal problem at the outset and periodically provides
plenty of caveats lest one miss the point:
The dilemma this presents has a touch of the absurd about it. As we
have established, Adorno's work is anti-systematic and resists
systematization. An analysis of his work must, of its very nature, be
systematic. Put in this way, the problem would seem to be insoluble.
Nevertheless, it is in a sense a false dilemma. Because Adorno's work
resists totalization, this does not mean that it is unsystematic in its own
terms, or indeed that it is irrational and exists outside any conceptual
frame of reference. .... The present study proceeds in the conviction
that Adorno needs - to adapt a phrase of Walter Benjamin - to be read
against the grain ... the strategy adopted here has been to keep the
'totality' of Adorno's thought circulating within each chapter.4
Paddison's 'reading against the grain' is certainly refreshing and I think it

will be broadly welcomed. It works on the understanding that the freezing
of any moment in the system is temporary and that the reader will use such
aids as the book provides only to re-activate the dynamic nature of the
totality of Adorno's thought. In essence, it presumes that the reader
accepts the nature of understanding to be processual and that fixing
conceptual moments as one charts a course through such philosophy is not
to expect those moments to be the same when they are re-encountered
later.
A systematic reading does not, therefore, imply the idea of some final
and static endpoint:
the attempt to reveal the integrative features underlying a body of

writing which otherwise emphasizes fragmentation, both stylistically
and structurally, should not be misconstrued as a search for a 'system',
wherein concepts have fixed positions and function as 'invariants' or
ontological absolutes ... concepts are thus to be understood as
inherently contradictory, defined as much by what they exclude as by
what they encompass, constantly needing renegotiation in relation to
the object they attempt to grasp, but which they ultimately fail to
'identify'. This is Adorno's dialectic of identity and non-identity.5
Paddison's willingness to get his hands dirty exposes a habit of Adorno

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commentary for what it is - a fetish. Not only is there 'a noticeable

tendency to fetishize the prose style itself'6 - most particularly in terms of
'fetishizing their complexity as poetic obscurity" - but, more seriously, a
fetishizing of the lack of finality in dialectics as a refusal to engage
concretely in the process at all.8 The nature of a dialectical process
presumes concrete moments ('form is the form of something'), which is to
say that conceptual positions have to be clearly stated and clearly defined if
they are to work within that process; they have to stand as static moments
in order to be superseded by the process. Mere vagueness and poetic
complexity, a refusal to present concrete concepts, is nothing to do with
dialectics; it is merely abdication from the process. It seems to me that
Paddison's reading against the grain re-establishes this important point and
in doing so suggests that Adorno's real value for musicology might yet lie
in rather more concrete and substantive applications than has hitherto
been the case.
For all that, the second problem with the approach of this book is
because it restricts itself to the role of an exegesis it is curiously uncr
There is plenty of criticism in the shape of pointing to inadequacies
Adorno's presentation of ideas and some larger questions are raised a
Adorno and analysis (more of which later), but ultimately the task
performed here is one of re-presentation: a students' guide to the ideas.
Nevertheless, by focusing on certain aspects of the theory, the book as a
whole underlines wherein lies the importance of Adorno for contemporary
musical thought. In particular, Paddison highlights Adorno's insistence on
the notion of 'musical material' and its mediation, a complex of ideas
without which it would be hard to explain his tenacious presence in
modern musicology. I, for one, would have liked to have seen this point
argued more demonstratively, but it is perhaps unreasonable to ask an
already substantial book to do any more. Paddison's task is somewhat
thankless: while one welcomes the 'ironing-out' of some of Adorno's most
impossible prose, and applauds the achievement of making visible
conceptual connections which are almost wilfully concealed by Adorno, at
the same time one inevitably misses in a commentary the characteristic
experiences of reading the original - the rather breathless, heady quality of
having to exert oneself at high altitude, the conceptual 'neck' of treading
knife-edge ridges between outrageous intellectual abysses and the sheer
thrill of revelation as, after trudging through pages of apparently
impenetrable density, one unexpectedly catches a glimpse of some vast,
unknown landscape far below. Adorno's writing, at its best, has something
of the quality of the Kantian Sublime, which is to say that it points to
something beyond its own capacity for representation. It is perhaps
unreasonable to expect a commentary to preserve this element but it is
hard, nevertheless, not to be left wanting some re-activation of the critical
edge in Adorno.

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Analysis
Paddison's insistence that Adorno's musical aesthetics are rooted in an

understanding of the musical text is underlined by the centrality
analytical considerations in his book: the fourth chapter 'A material th
of form' lies neatly in the centre of a book of seven chapters. This cen
chapter functions, moreover, as an axis for the discussions in the chap
either side of it. One should of course counter such metaphors immedia
by adding that this model does not imply that the centre has some defi
role upon the peripheries but rather that both reflect upon one anoth
Adorno's project and the vision of a critical musicology which it proje
cannot exist without the analytical exercise but - and this is crucial -
insists that such an analytical exercise is bound up with the areas to wh
it relates and that - alone - it would be meaningless. This is an idea I w
to explore below.
In his discussion of Adorno's early writings (Chapter 1) Paddison poin
out that these 'while often taking the form of brief reviews or techn
analyses ... are usually at the same time tightly interwoven with criti
commentary and philosophical interpretation'.9 The simultaneous gene
of the two strands of Adorno's approach is of course highly significant
the nature of his later writing. We are accustomed, in reading Adorno,
moving between the broadly sociological or philosophical and the
specifically musical. However, when pushed, it is hard to cite a single
example of sustained music analysis. It may be useful to ask at this point
just what we actually have in the way of analyses by Adorno?
The immediate answer is very little. In fact there is more material than
is generally known about but most of it would hardly pass the requirements
for what counts today as serious analysis. Most obviously, there are the
monographs on Berg and Mahler, both of which make detailed (if rather
piecemeal) references to the score. There is the late lecture, 'Zum
Probleme der musikalischen Analyse' (1969)10, but this does not actually
include any analyses. In the course of this lecture Adorno refers the listener
to his own earlier analyses of Webern (Op. 3 and Op. 12) in Der getreue
Korrepetitor: Lehrschriften zur musikalischen Praxis (1963)". This work
includes not only analytical commentaries on these pieces but also
Webern's Op. 7 and Op. 9, Schoenberg's Op. 47 and Berg's Violin
Concerto. It also includes the fascinating essay 'Anweisungen zum Horen
neuer Musik' which is full of specific references to musical examples.
Nevertheless, in general, Adorno's comments here are orientated towards
informed performance of the music. Analysis of the work's structure is
given in order to clarify the understanding of the work so as to better reveal
its process in performance - the key, Adorno believed, to bridging the
communication gap between the new music and its reluctant audience. For
all that, in between practical admonitions, Adorno's discussion of the
music occasionally reveals glimpses of an 'interpretational analysis' in the

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wider sense. The chronological list of Adorno's texts on music, which

Paddison gives as the second section of his bibliography (a real goldmine
this!), reveals the extent of such shorter writings, mostly untranslated, on
specific composers and works. Most of these are brief concert review
articles and where they do make analytical references they are notoriously
fragmentary and remain on the level of isolated insights rather than seeking
to reveal the underlying system of the whole work. Some of these are
reprinted in Impromptus (1968) and Moments musicaux (1964). Virtually
all of them are now collected in the Gesammelte Schriften, principally in
Vols. 17, 18 and 19.12
If anyone has been holding his or her breath for the last 20 or 30 years
waiting for someone to reveal that, somehow hidden in the Adorno oeuvre,
there is a blueprint for a new method of analysis, one that is philosophically
and historically critical yet rooted in the scrutiny of the text, one that
would bridge the gap between the aspirations of a sociologically informed
hermeneutics and the stringent expectations of a formalist analytical
school, now is the time to breathe out and accept the bad news: it isn't
there. Adorno himself, at the end of his life, was candid about the
inadequacy of his own analytical method, and was painfully aware of the
need for a different methodology to deal with the processes of
disintegration which he had identified." Most of Adorno's analyses date
from the 1920s and 1930s and the approach he derived largely from
Schoenberg does not seem to have been reappraised until very near the end
of his life. While he shows his awareness of a need for a new methodology
(in 'Zum Probleme der musikalischen Analyse') he does not pretend to be
able to produce one himself. While this text may well be 'in effect, a
critique of analysis - a "philosophy of analysis" through which analysis may
reflect upon itself, question and recognise its various aims and
limitations", for the most part Adorno's actual analyses remain somewh
frustrating. Paddison raises two principal objections: firstly Adorno's
'obvious impatience with the process of detailed technical analysis itself'
and his 'tendency to make sweeping generalizations about the structure of
a work'." This, he suggests, with its attendant vaguenesses and
inaccuracies is 'not such a high price to pay if insights into the music itse
are forthcoming'.' Secondly, and perhaps more seriously, there is the
problem of 'the strange disparity between the sophistication and radicality
of his aesthetics and sociology on the one hand, and the lack of
sophistication and the traditional character of his music-analytical method
on the other'.17
Nevertheless, despite the limitations of his own analytical work, the
significance for analysis of his broader theory remains potentially vast.
Above all, his insistence on the category of history in the analytical process
demands a re-evaluation of the context in which analysis takes place.
Adorno may not offer new analytical methods but his insistence that
analysis should not be separate, that its findings are meaningless except in

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relation to a wider context, should have a particular resonance to

musicology of the last decade or so, the most interesting new directions o
which have consisted precisely in exploring this context. Adorno's work
may well be invoked to support much of this recent work but it should als
be invoked as a critical yardstick: neither pole can be sacrificed if such
work is to succeed, neither the analytical nor the sociological dimension.
Significant work thrives off the tension between these two inseparable yet
irreconcilable concerns.
Their mediation is to be uncovered, if at all, in the historical natu
musical material. It is his insistence on historicity that makes Ador
view of a critical analysis possible, and, by the same token, challeng
assumption that a neutral analysis may be possible, let alone desirab
other words, Adorno's model is not one in which the results of analy
have, somehow, to be taken up by a sociologically informed hermen
in order for the social meaning of music to be extracted. It is, rathe
which suggests that it is the job of analysis itself to be sensitive to
historical character of the musical process, its historically shaped
physiognomy, its accent, its weight.
If so many dismiss that specifically social element as a mere additive of

sociological interpretation, if they see the thing itself in the actual notes
alone, this is not due to the music but to a neutralized consciousness.
The musical experience has been insulated from the experience of the
reality in which it finds itself - however polemically - and to which it
responds.... the method of deciphering the specific social
characteristics of music has lagged pitifully.8
The historical nature of musical material is a central (but no less

problematic) idea in Adorno's work. Its consequences for analytical
practice, however, remain somewhat undeveloped. In considering these, it
might be useful to start with Adorno's own analytical work in which this
idea directs the analytical process.
Paddison, in Chapter 4 of his book, focuses on Adorno's analysis of
Berg's Piano Sonata, Op. 1. This demonstrates clearly the extent to which
Adorno's analytic method is indebted to Schoenberg, proceeding by a
familiar kind of thematic analysis to isolate germ cells and going on to
show how the rest of the piece is constructed from their development. His
emphasis is thus on a dynamic and organic process and is, in this sense, a
traditional account of the formal process of nineteenth-century
instrumental music. What distinguishes it from this, however, is Adorno's
insight that the process of the piece is concerned not so much with the
construction of a larger whole from tiny germ cells but rather with the
gradual liquidation of the larger form through the self-abnegation of the
material.'" The historical component of his analysis lies in the way in which
he shows how the elements which traditionally function to construct the

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musical form are here used to contradict that received historical function.
Thematic identity, in classical practice a means of differentiating the
sections of the form, assumes here an opposite function by so saturating
the fabric of the piece that it blurs functional distinctions between sections.
The harmony of the piece, hardly separate from the motivic function, is
likewise shown to undermine traditional sonata form while nevertheless
articulating its vestigial outline. Paddison expands on Adorno's sugg
that the historical weight of these processes is given specific
characterisation in that the piece relates specifically to sonata form a
filtered through Schoenberg's Chamber Symphony, Op. 9 and to the
harmonic language of Tristan.
For Adorno, a musical work is a 'force-field [Kraftfeld] organized
around a problem'. The problem, or rather problematic, posed by a piece
such as the Berg Sonata is presumably that of sonata form in the context of
the new musical language of the early 1900s. In this connection Adorno
distinguishes between 'bottom up' composition and that written 'top
down'. Developing variation is essentially 'bottom up', a process of
proliferation which potentially threatens to undermine the coherence of the
'top down' imposed architectural form of the sonata.20
Berg's Sonata is used here to demonstrate what Adorno identifies as an
essential strategy of modernist music: the negation of traditional forms
within its own material. This self-negation he terms, in reference to Berg's
music, Auflasung [liquidation].21 The real problem for analysis is that
Adorno requires it somehow to discover and reveal this process of negation
at work in the music. What he suggests is very tempting: negativity is a key
term in the aesthetics and in the wider theory. The implication is that if
analysis could reveal the process of negation in the musical text then this
would somehow tie up with the wider implications of negation as
understood in the philosophical and sociological components of his
discourse. There are two problems here. The first, which is philosophical,
is that even if analysis could reveal a musical negation it remains very
unclear how this would relate to the philosophical concept of negation. But
foremost is the analytical problem: how can analysis reveal the musical
functioning of negation by revealing simultaneously both the deviation
which constitutes the piece and the formal scheme from which it deviates?
In 'Zum Probleme' Adorno is explicit about the difficulties involved in
attempting to reveal simultaneously both the deviation and the scheme.
They are, he suggests, not two separate things. Rather, what is going on in
the music
is in fact mediated by the formal schemata and is partly, at any given

moment, postulated by the formal schemata, while on the other hand it
consists of deviations which in their turn can only be at all understood
through their relationship to the schemata.22

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While Adorno insists that analysis is the investi

deviation to schemata he gives no clue as to how
implication seems to be that, in the case of ref
the formal scheme functions like some invisible
the deviations are measured. Because the tradit
by the presence of some of their elements or si
define its departure from traditional formal n
elements associated with those forms. The new
by 'lack', by what is absent, and its negativity
this approach is particularly well suited to the m
Adorno is primarily concerned and it is no accid
more analytical texts tend to focus on the musi
Viennese School. Nevertheless, there is a very
problem in analysing music in terms of its ref
itself is no longer in evidence. It is hardly su
Adorno, 'every analysis that is of any value ... is
The analyst must deal therefore with a musi
residue, the fused remains of a chemical interaction of scheme and
deviation.
Music is actually only a 'coherence' when regarded as a 'Becoming',

and in this there lies a paradox for musical analysis: analysis is, on the
one hand, limited by what is actually fixed and available to it; but, on
the other hand, it has to translate this back again into that movement
as coagulated in the musical text.24
For Adorno, musical material is formed twice: once historically, and

second time in the specific individual work.25 Analysis should therefor
seek to reveal this double construction and the tension between the tw
rather than reify the appearance of the material in the individual piece.
should be examining 'the consistency of its immanent form in relation
the divergent socio-historical tendencies of its preformed material'.
Analysis therefore has to read a dynamic process within the 'fixed'
moments of the score, locating it as a formation defined against th
invisible background context of the historical musical system of which it
part. Paddison cites this as an example of the langue: parole relationship
but one should add the obvious caveat that langue, in this case as in othe
is to be understood as a historical and therefore dynamic system not an
absolute one. The result of this tension is the specific and unique charact
of the individual work - what Adorno calls the work's physiognomy. H
criticism of Schenker underlines the point that this physiognomy is form
in the dialectical tension between the details and the whole, a tension h
considers lost by Schenker's tendency for reducing as merely fortuitou
what is 'really the essence, the being of the music'.27 In so doing, Ador
suggests, Schenker's theory of levels neutralises the subjective moment

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Ex. 1
Drei Lieder aus
,,Der Gliihende"
Mombert
Langsam (Tempo I) Alban Berg,Op.2. N9 2
&S1. FII I I 1
Schla- fend tr gt man mich in mein H
8--
LA tsOpo (II)
it Fer - ne o ich
-accetl. - L
rV. -
.her, ifi-ber Gip - fel, u-ber Schl~in - - de, i-?er in
-i d m?n.---_-----3-----
1XI 17 Ot
FAUR it f-u i
nin 72 1_M_
dun-kles Meer

C Basil Blackwell Ltd. 1995
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the music and celebrates a universal aspect whi

problematised. In practical terms this refers to the
process in Adorno's analyses and his insistence that this is seen in
constructive tension with the harmonic background. For the period with
which he is primarily concerned (i.e., Beethoven to Berg) the historicity of
musical material and forms is given in this tension.
Of course, the argument over analytical methodology is central to this
debate since it is primarily in its conceptual categories that analysis
encodes its historical perspective on musical material. This was precisely
the problem that Adorno himself had encountered in analysing Berg with
categories such as 'first subject', 'transition' and so forth, categories which
the music itself erodes. On the other hand, it is central to his approach to
demonstrate how the specific character, the physiognomy, of this music
must be understood against these categories. This is a recurrent problem
for musical analysis, and one that has received particular attention in work
on the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century repertoire.
It is exactly this problem that is taken up tor example, by craig Ayrey in
his discussion of Berg's Vier Lieder, Op. 2.28 Ayrey shows how interpreting
the same piece from two apparently exclusive analytical perspectives
'places' the piece differently in respect to tradition. Is the opening of Op.
2/ii 'a mutation of functional tonality', or 'is it a primal example of new
techniques of tonal organization'.29 According to one of these versions the
opening chords are heard as French sixths whose tonal functioning is
understood against an implied background of E? not fully realised until the
end of the subsequent song. According to the other, the sequence of
fourths at the opening of the song forms the bass of a series of whole-tone
formations which permeate the song (see Ex. 1). Ayrey insists that one
needs to read it in both ways since the ambiguity between the two systems
'is in fact the essential strategy of the piece as a signifying structure'."
Analytically, however, he suggests there is scant evidence for a tonal
interpretation. Furthermore, the 'exclusive use' of the whole tone scale (of
which the French sixth chord may be understood simply as one vertical
formation) undermines any possibility of analysing a tonal background: 'to
interpret a piece which apparently resists tonal analysis ... as being
controlled by an external tonal background could only be an analytical non
sequitur'.31 In other words, contra Adorno, it is not possible to talk
meaningfully about a tonal background in terms of a 'lack' against which
the piece is written: 'a tonal background is thus literally insignificant for
Op. 2/ii.2 Significantly, Ayrey (writing in 1982) invokes semiotics to
dismiss the idea of signification being dependent on a pre-existing system
not articulated within the individual piece. Significantly, because semiotics
(in this form, at least) is notoriously a-historical. The opposition of
Adorno's position and that of semiotics underlines the centrality of context
in the far from abstract formalism of his 'immanent analysis'. Adorno
would indeed concur that to understand musical works analysis must

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'reconstruct the system of which they are m

initially, such rules can be perceived as uniqu
he would also insist that the peculiar configu
2/ii, though unique, is nevertheless so only in
defined schemes from which it stands out. In
the musical system of which this piece is a m
simply by its abstract structure or grammar,
tone.34
This historical tone is analytically demonstrable. The tonal background
of this piece is not defined by the presence of the tonic, which is not given
(the E? chord in b.9 does not function as a tonic), but rather by the
functioning of the dominant which repeatedly implies a withheld tonic.
Not only does this provide a simple illustration of Adorno's principle of
delineated lack but it is of course wholly congruent with a standard device
of late romantic harmony. Brahms, for example, employed the same
technique frequently - the Intermezzo, Op. 76, No. 4, is a good example.
The fact that Brahms eventually sounds his tonic unequivocally (though
not until the last bar) does not undermine the argument that Berg's Op.
2/ii is heard in relation to the same strategy. The final chord, though
undoubtedly unstable, no more liquidates tonality than does the end of
Das Lied von der Erde or, indeed, the first song of Dichterliebe. From the
former it inherits the incomplete voice leading of the vocal line suspended
in the final chord, and from the latter the device of 'ending' on a chord
which (more tangentially in Schumann's case) prepares the next song by
means of a dominant seventh function. For Adorno, analysis of this piece
would fail if it neutralised the specifically historical tension between the
two systems which constitutes the essence of the music. The clear separ-
ation of the two (tonal and whole-tone) is everywhere present in the Sieben
friihe Lieder of 1907. In the first of these ('Nacht'), for example, they are
presented in succession as two distinct harmonic strategies. Adorno would
argue that their superimposition in Op. 2 should not be construed as a
reduction but rather as an increase in tension.
The tendency to move fluently between different musical systems is
underlined in Adorno's analysis of the Piano Sonata, Op. 1. He compares
Berg's mediation between the traditional (given here by post-Wagnerian
chromatic voice leading) and the new (given by the exploration of fourt
chords) with Schoenberg's far more 'uncompromising' stylistic purity i
the Chamber Symphony. While Berg is a prime candidate for this
approach, and the characterisation of him as a musical Janus, as wit
Mahler, has become an unfortunate cliche, I would suggest that his case
simply makes the issues more obvious. The approach is just as possib
and just as valid, with less obvious candidates: Webern, for exampl
Kathryn Bailey's book The Twelve-Note Music of Anton Webern35 has as i
subtitle: Old Forms in a New Language. This puts a refreshing emphasis o
the traditional elements in Webern's music, study of which, as Bailey

CRITICAL FORUM
points out, has concentrated almost exclusiv

'innovations' as representing a clean break with
Webern's concern with the formal models of
- sonata form, rondo and variations - poses a
to which there is no simple solution. Bailey'
source of tension, though it is one which the
any depth. Bailey sets out 'to examine the w
preserves these forms and their essential argu
imperatives would seem, on the face of things,
those of tradition'.36 She proceeds to do just this
success, but the concern with how dominates to s
precious little space to ask why this strange ph
about. Its very strangeness should require t
historical question as part of the analytical me
a typical example of the kind of analytical fo
hand with the myth of an a-historical Webern:
One may analyse only what is in the score an

concepts introduced from outside help little, an
for being taken from the golden treasury of fugu
This, Adorno would suggest, is a meaningless a

meaningless. It hardly needs arguing any mor
and 'what is in the score' are separable only as
'in the score and manifest as sound', is not su
While I welcome the analysis of Webern's trad
their articulation by their particular deployme
music is not fully understood (in the sense Ad
until one addresses critically the apparent histo
forms and musical syntax. In Berg's Piano Son
the site of a tension between old and new, th
against the projected background of tradition
tension in, say, Webern's Symphony, Op. 21?
and language dialectical or simply dissociative
a music that projects its historically mediated
archetypes, a projection moreover accomplish
saturated with its own historical self-consciousness? I look forward to an
analysis of the serial works which is able to address such questions.
It is in his discussion of the music of Mahler that Adorno gave the most
explicit account of what he meant by a material theory of musical form, a
theory capable of no less than 'endowing music with speech through
theory'. 38 He defines this theory as 'the deduction of formal categories from
their meaning [within the context of the work]',39 contrasting it with an
academic theory of form 'which operates with abstract classifications such
as first theme, transition, second or closing theme, without understanding

CRITICAL FORUM
these divisions in terms of their functions'.40 F

development of the first movement of the Nin
Adorno suggests, if it is understood as some kin
between the passages either side of it, as a con
prior to the recapitulation. Instead he suggests that such passages are
examples of a category of formal process which one might refer to as that
of 'collapse', and that such passages 'speak for themselves' as characters of
'negative fulfilment'.4' The categories he discerns in Mahler's music -
which include breakthrough (Durchbruch), suspension (Suspension) and
fulfilment (Erfiillung) - make reference to structural functions in his music
which the conventional abstract ones do not. One might well take issue
with the labels themselves, based as they are entirely on the aperfus of
Adorno, but nevertheless they point to the necessity of understanding
Mahler's music in terms of its thematicisation of processes outside those of
conventional structural strategies. Above all, they insist on the material
character of those functions which militate against the abstraction imposed
by the conventional labels. For example, in the first movement of the Sixth
Symphony the synthetic claim of the abstract form is undermined by the
nature of the material itself, as when a clearly 'transitional' section (bs 61-
76) is characterised with unconventional materiality as a chorale, one
moreover that breaks out of any 'transitional' function by becoming
thematically central later in the symphony.
In his writing on Mahler's music Adorno provides plenty of examples of
what he means by analysing the 'lack' in musical scores. Indeed, he
suggests that deviation from presumed schema is here definitive of the
musical style.
Even where Mahler's music arouses associations of nature and

landscape, it nowhere presents them as absolutes, but infers them
the contrast to that from which they deviate. Technically, the na
sounds are relativized by their departure from the syntactical regular
otherwise prevalent in Mahler ... The tormenting pedal point at
start of the first Symphony presupposes the official idea of go
instrumentation in order to reject it.42
This 'positive negation' requires the conventional in order to d

own distance from it. Mahler's music, according to Adorno, would be
quite meaningless without an understanding of the specific historical
tensions embedded in its own material. It constitutes the difference
between the vulgarity and banality of which he was often accuse
understanding of his music as one which offers a critique precisely
these elements. For analysis, the problem remains as to how this
demonstrated in the musical text. How does one demonstrate a historical
tone? How, for example, does one analyse late Strauss in such a way th
reveals its strange historicising relationship to Mozart? How does one

CRITICAL FORUM
locate in the score the 'intertwinement of naiv

'the coupling of immediate and mediated eleme
one demonstrate the 'obsolete' nature of his material?
It is not hard to point to musical devices which signal these things: one
often mentioned is the alternation of major and minor modes. Adorn
discusses this as 'mannerism', a term one might usefully apply to th
deliberate exaggeration and overuse of familiar gestures such as the turn
figure in the last movement of the Ninth Symphony. From this point o
view, one could usefully analyse the horizontal juxtaposition of differen
musical styles (any Mahler scherzo provides plenty of obvious examples),
or perhaps the uncomfortable vertical combination of such apparentl
contradictory uses of musical language. A good example of the latter is th
theme of the Adagio finale of the Ninth, whose diatonic implications coul
hardly be stronger, but which are nevertheless 'subverted' by the use of a
flattened submediant harmony which has gradually proliferated throughou
the symphony (its use in the second movement in particular pre-empts th
finale - e.g., second movement, bs 261ff.). Such passages contain th
historical tension which defines Mahler's musical language but analys
needs to be historically sensitive in order to spot them. It would be entirel
possible, for example, to read the turn figure in the finale of the Ninth as
conventional gesture of romantic melodic writing used here no differentl
from the way it is used throughout the nineteenth century.44 This alon
might serve as an example of why an ahistoric analysis is neither possib
nor desirable.
Mahler, suggests Adorno, 'no longer permits any harmonious synth
with a preconceived totality'.45 He departs from the formal schemes
Beethoven; his music is 'epic' rather than 'classic'. In other words,
music represents the 'renunciation of a synthetic unity of apperception
structural exertion of the subject'46 which characterises Beethoven's mu
and instead places over and against the injunction to form, 'the continge
meaningless, potentially fatuous detail, capable of entering into
stringent relationship'. This is analytically demonstrable. Adorno
example is from the Fifth Symphony, in whose second movement
after one of the slow interpolations, a somewhat secondary figure from

the exposition [bs 43-6, Tpt.] is taken up and reformulated [bs 288ff.],
as if, unexpectedly, a previously unregarded person now entered the
scene to assist development, as in Balzac and, in the earlier Romantic
novel, in Walter Scott.47
It is above all in Mahler's use of the 'variant' that this different formal
strategy is realised. The variant decentres any notion of an 'Ur-Thema'
which provides the basis for the subsequent development and elaboration
of the piece. While it draws on the language of developing variation it
works against the teleological implication which that device suggests.

CRITICAL FORUM
Instead, the proliferation of variant forms 'dive

and in doing so project the music's fulfilment a
of what the theme has not yet become'.48 If on
the function of recapitulation in Beethoven it
attaches so much importance to Mahler's rewor
on this level of form - as realised by the funct
details - that what is revealed by analysis is, p
bringing the music to (philosophical) speech. By demonstrating that a
central identity is no longer constructed by a synthetic temporal process (as
in Beethoven), it underlines that this music constructs an identity whose
unity is materially, rather than schematically, defined. Identity is preserved
in Mahler's music by means of the variant but one which is not the
product of a synthetic process. Instead, it constitutes 'a totality without an
outline'.49 This is exactly what one arrives at after an analysis of all the
variants thrown up in the course of a Mahler symphony - a heterogeneous
collection defined by an absent centre, a result in marked distinction to the
working out of some 'prime cell' (as, for example, in R&ti's reading of
Beethoven). Analytical method and the historical understanding of the
musical process are mutually defining.
Conclusions
There is an obvious danger in any discussion of 'what analysis should be'

which, like discussion of what new music 'should be', rapidly becomes
vacuous if it avoids a concrete engagement with its material. The value of
Adorno for analysis is ultimately demonstrable only through analytical
work - work that insists on approaching the musical object as historically
positioned, as an object constructed in relation to that position and
therefore eloquent about that position. Such an approach resists
formulation and is not reducible to any common code of practice. At the
same time it places a heavy burden upon analysis and requires of it more
than it might feel capable of providing. This points to an apparently
irreconcilable difficulty for contemporary analysis in Adorno's approach:
that immanent analysis serves, but does not itself accomplish, the reading
of music's (historically) cognitive character, a task which philosophy
assumes - thereby (in Adorno's most extreme formulation) redeeming
music. For many, this will be inadequate, because the connection between
the two may appear idiosyncratic to say the least. Certainly, Adorno's
mixing of musical insights with philosophical interpretation appears to be
justified only as another version of his own idea of composition as the work
of a subjective agent embodying objective spirit. Whether such an
approach remains on such unstable foundations very much depends on
what new work is carried out from this perspective. Adorno's work itself
requires criticism; it asks to be gone beyond. I suspect that it is only in new

CRITICAL FORUM
analytical and hermeneutic work that this sta

effected. Above all, it depends on the analytical enterprise being
transformed by becoming more self-conscious of the context in which it is
placed and understanding itself as a stage in the process of understanding
music rather than as a fetished end in itself. For Adorno, analysis was
always a part of a larger process of musical Verstehen, i.e., of an
interpretative understanding which, having grasped the work in the
unfolding of all its immanent details, is able to stand back and understand
it in its entirety. Such concepts in Adorno testify to his attempt 'to restore
the dimension of thought to [aesthetic] experience'
Analysis, properly understood, is a critical activity in that it destroys the
illusion of seamless unity which is the ideology of every work of art. It does
this only in as much as it reveals works as 'having-been-constructed'.5' As
Adorno puts it: 'Art's appearance of being the utterance of creation is
shattered by the recognition of its own reified elements'.52 In as much as
analysis shows this quality of art it re-activates the critical component of all
art works, which is another way of saying that they are thoroughly
mediated: the work of historical agents living and working within historical
contexts. An analysis, or a musicology in general, which fails to approach
its object with this understanding fails to distinguish itself from a popular
conception of art which neutralises it by insisting on its status as an
absolute.
NOTES
1. Max Paddison, Adorno's Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge: CUP

?40.00
2. Adorno 'Mii3verstindnisse', Melos, Vol. 17, No. 3 (1950), quoted in Max
Paddison, Adorno 's Aesthetics of Music, pp.270-1.
3. Carl Dahlhaus makes a useful distinction between the study of music based
upon poesis rather than praxis, in Dahlhaus, Foundations of Music History
(Cambridge: CUP, 1983).
4. Paddison, Adorno's Aesthetics of Music, p.20
5. Ibid., p.14.
6. Ibid., p.13.
7. Ibid., p.14.
8. Paddison quotes 'Lukics's quip about the Critical Theorists taking up
residence in Grand Hotel Abgrund, a luxury hotel on the edge of the Abyss
from where they were able to contemplate the void "between excellent meals
or artistic entertainments."' See Paddison, Adorno's Aesthetics of Music, p.37.
9. Paddison, ibid., p.23.
10. T. W. Adorno, 'Zum Probleme der musikalischen Analyse', trans. Max

CRITICAL FORUM
Paddison as 'On the Problem of Musical Analysis

No. 2 (1982), pp. 169-87.
11. T. W. Adorno, Der getreue Korrepetitor: Interpr
Gesammelte Schriften, Band 15 (Frankfurt: Suhrk
12. Adorno's Collected Writings are published in G
ed. Rolf Tiedemann in collaboration with Gretel A
and Klaus Schultz (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970-8
13. Adorno, 'Zum Probleme der musikalischen Anal
14. Max Paddison, Introduction to 'On the Problem
15 Max Paddison, Adorno's Aesthetics of Music, p. 16
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. Adorno, Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie, quoted in Paddison, Adorno's
Aesthetics of Music, p.277.
19. It is above all the inadequacy of traditional analytical categories to deal with
this insight that Adorno regretted in 'Zum Probleme der musikalischen
Analyse'.
20. These terms are presented in 'Zum Probleme' (p.184): 'All in all, therefore -
if you will allow me a very rough generalisation - two types of music can be
distinguished: 1) the kind which goes, in principle, from "above" to "below",
from totality to detail; and 2) the kind which is organised from "below" to
"above"'. The latter character, especially as demonstrated in new music, is
discussed at some length as 'nominalism' in Chapter 11 of Adorno, Aesthetic
Theory (London: Routledge, 1984).
21. The liquidation of form, which Adorno traces in both Berg and Mahler, is
underlined by Douglas Jarman in relation to Berg's Op. 6: 'In the Marsch of
the Three Orchestral Pieces the three-sectioned sonata design, distinguishable
in the background plan of the piece, is exploded by the constant motivic
development and the unrelenting presentation of apparently new material;
sonata form is here destroyed from within by its own developmental
tendencies'. The Music of Alban Berg (London: Faber, 1983). See also Bruce
Archibald, 'Berg's Development as an Instrumental Composer', in The Berg
Companion, ed. Douglas Jarman (London: Macmillan, 1989), pp.91-139.
22. Adomo, 'Zum Probleme', p.173.
23. Ibid., p.177.
24. This idea is presented in Chapter 4 of Paddison, Adorno's Aesthetics of Music.
25. Ibid., p.150.
26. Ibid.
27. Adorno, 'Zum Probleme', p.174.
28. Craig Ayrey, 'Berg's "Scheideweg": Analytical Issues in Op. 2/ii', Music
Analysis, Vol. 1, No. 2 (1982), pp. 189-202.
29. Ibid., p.189.
30. Ibid., p.190.
31. Ibid., p.191.
32. Ibid.

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33. LUvi-Strauss, quoted in Ayrey, 'Berg's "Scheid

34. Similar problems of analytical interpretation
has been the site of repeated disagreement - on
Analysis (see Anthony Pople, 'Secret Programm
in Recent Berg Scholarship', Vol. 12, No. 3 (1993
by Christopher Wintle and Douglas Jarman, Cri
(1994), pp.310-13).
35. Kathryn Bailey, The Twelve-Note Music of Anton Webern (Cambridge: CUP,
1991).
36. Ibid., p.3.
37. Quoted in ibid., pp.3-4, from Die Reihe, Vol. 2, ed. H. Eimert and K.
Stockhausen (Vienna: Universal, 1955). English edition, trans. L. Black and
E. Smith (Bryn Mawr: Theodore Presser Co., 1959).
38. Adorno, Mahler: A Musical Physiognomy, trans. Edmund Jephcott, (Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 1992), p.44.
39. Ibid., quoted in Paddison, Adorno's Aesthetics of Music, p.175.
40. Adorno, Mahler, p.44.
41. Other examples given by Adorno include the first movement of the Fifth
Symphony (bs 369-400) and the first movement of the Second Symphony
(bs 200-7).
43. Ibid., p.61.
44. For a detailed discussion, see Kurt von Fischer 'Die Doppelschlagfigur in den
zwei letzten Sitzen von Gustav Mahlers 9 Symphonie', Archiv far Musik-
wissenschaft, Vol. 32, No. 2 (1975), pp.99-105.
45. Adorno, Mahler, p. 62.
46. Ibid., p.66.
47. Ibid., p.71.
48. Ibid., p.88.
49. Ibid., p.83.
50. Paddison, Adorno's Aesthetics of Music, p.215.
51. Adorno, Alban Berg, trans. Juliane Brand and Christopher Hailey
(Cambridge: CUP, 1991), p.37.


Johnson Julian - Adorno's Analysis

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Johnson Julian - Adorno's Analysis

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Review: Analysis in Adorno's Aesthetics of Music

Reviewed Work(s): Adorno's Aesthetics of Music by Max Paddison

ANALYSIS IN ADORNO'S AESTHETICS OF MUSIC

Towards the end of Max Paddison's Adorno's Aesthetics of

This concept is as foreign to public awareness today as it is taken for

MUSIC ANALYSIS 14:2-3, 1995 295

understanding of the musical text. This idea per

296 MUSIC ANALYSIS 14:2-3, 1995

than to Hegel). Paddison is not unaware of this

Paddison's 'reading against the grain' is certainly refreshing and I think it

the attempt to reveal the integrative features underlying a body of

Paddison's willingness to get his hands dirty exposes a habit of Adorno

MUSIC ANALYSIS 14:2-3, 1995 297

commentary for what it is - a fetish. Not only is there 'a noticeable

298 MUSIC ANALYSIS 14:2-3, 1995

Paddison's insistence that Adorno's musical aesthetics are rooted in an

MUSIC ANALYSIS 14:2-3, 1995 299

wider sense. The chronological list of Adorno's texts on music, which

300 MUSIC ANALYSIS 14:2-3, 1995

relation to a wider context, should have a particular resonance to

If so many dismiss that specifically social element as a mere additive of

The historical nature of musical material is a central (but no less

MUSIC ANALYSIS 14:2-3, 1995 301

is in fact mediated by the formal schemata and is partly, at any given

302 MUSIC ANALYSIS 14:2-3, 1995

While Adorno insists that analysis is the investi

Music is actually only a 'coherence' when regarded as a 'Becoming',

For Adorno, musical material is formed twice: once historically, and

MUSIC ANALYSIS 14:2-3, 1995 303

Drei Lieder aus

Langsam (Tempo I) Alban Berg,Op.2. N9 2

.her, ifi-ber Gip - fel, u-ber Schl~in - - de, i-?er in

304 MUSIC ANALYSIS 14:2-3, 1995

the music and celebrates a universal aspect whi

MUSIC ANALYSIS 14:2-3, 1995 305

'reconstruct the system of which they are m

306 MUSIC ANALYSIS 14:2-3, 1995

points out, has concentrated almost exclusiv

One may analyse only what is in the score an

This, Adorno would suggest, is a meaningless a

MUSIC ANALYSIS 14:2-3, 1995 307

these divisions in terms of their functions'.40 F

Even where Mahler's music arouses associations of nature and

This 'positive negation' requires the conventional in order to d

308 MUSIC ANALYSIS 14:2-3, 1995

locate in the score the 'intertwinement of naiv

after one of the slow interpolations, a somewhat secondary figure from

MUSIC ANALYSIS 14:2-3, 1995 309

Instead, the proliferation of variant forms 'dive

There is an obvious danger in any discussion of 'what analysis should be'

310 MUSIC ANALYSIS 14:2-3, 1995

analytical and hermeneutic work that this sta

1. Max Paddison, Adorno's Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge: CUP

MUSIC ANALYSIS 14:2-3, 1995 311

Paddison as 'On the Problem of Musical Analysis

312 MUSIC ANALYSIS 14:2-3, 1995

33. LUvi-Strauss, quoted in Ayrey, 'Berg's "Scheid

MUSIC ANALYSIS 14:2-3, 1995 313

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