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Review - Paddison Max, Adorno's Aesthetics of Music. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993. xii + 378 pp. ISBN 0 521 43321 5.

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Paddison Max, Adorno's Aesthetics of Music. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993. xii + 378 pp. ISBN 0 521 43321 5.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2020

Rose Rosengard Subotnik
Rose Rosengard Subotnik*
Affiliation:
Brown University
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Journal of the Royal Musical Association , Volume 122 , Issue 1 , 1997 , pp. 133 - 147
Copyright
Copyright © 1997 Oxford University Press

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References

1 Subotnik, Rose Rosengard, ‘Adorno's Diagnosis of Beethoven's Late Style: Early Symptom of a Fatal Condition’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 29 (1976), 242–75Google Scholar

2 Adorno, Theodor W., Philosophy of Modern Music, trans Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V Blomster (London, 1973)Google Scholar

3 See Jameson, Fredric, ‘T W Adorno, Or, Historical Tropes’, Marxism and Form. Twentieth-Century Dialectical Theories of Literature (Princeton, 1971), 3–59.Google Scholar

4 The three levels involve formal analysis, sociological critique and philosophical-historical analysis.Google Scholar

5 Theodor W Adorno, ‘Bach Defended against his Devotees’, Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (London, 1967), 133–46 Especially valuable are Paddison's clarification (p 229) of Adorno's reference to the ‘reconciliation of scholar and gentleman ('Bach Defended’, 142) and Paddison's discussion of the fugue (p. 228).Google Scholar

6 Subotnik, RoseRosengard, ‘Toward a Deconstruction of Structural Listening A Critique of Schoenberg, Adorno, and Stravinsky’, Deconstructive Variations Music and Reason in Western Society (Minneapolis, 1996), 148–76.Google Scholar

7 Ibid., 169.Google Scholar

8 See Theodor W Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans E. B Ashton (New York, 1976), 4–6Google Scholar

9 This quotation, which appears on p. 224 of Paddison's book, is his translation of a passage from Adorno's essay ‘Tradition’, as found in Theodor W, Adorno, Gesammelte Schriften, ed Rolf Tiedemann in collaboration with Gretel Adorno, Susan Buck-Morss and Klaus Schultz, xiv (Frankfurt am Main, 1973), 127–42 (p. 133). For more on the snarled publishing history of this article, see below, n. 24 The precise citation comes frustratingly late in Paddison's book (p 322, n. 13).Google Scholar

10 On p 256, Paddison quotes (while editing) my assertion that ‘Brahms actually emphasized the arbitrariness of the connections between this material and its largely traditional forms of organization, which was [sic] not commensurately individualized And individual configurations characterized by arbitrariness cannot be considered necessary ’ Paddison's 'sic' reflects his understanding that the antecedent of ‘which’ is ‘forms'. In fact the antecedent is ‘organization’, what interested me in this context was not so much Brahms's recourse to the specific form of the sonata-allegro as his willingness to sacrifice the individualization of structure in a general sense The source of the quotation can be found in ch. 11, ‘The Historical Structure. Adorno's “French” Model for the Criticism of Nineteenth-Century Music’, of my book Developing Variations Style and Ideology in Western Music (Minneapolis, 1991), 206–38 (p 216)Google Scholar

11 See Paddison, p 195. The reference is to Lucia Sziborsky, Adornos Musikphilosophie Genese, Konstitution, Padagogische Perspektiven (Munich, 1979), 132.Google Scholar

12 See Adorno, Introduction to the Sociology of Music, trans Ashton, 69.Google Scholar

13 See Max Horkheimer and Theodor W Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment, trans John Cumming (New York, 1972), 130–1Google Scholar

14 See Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Judgment, trans. John Henry Bernard (New York and London, 1951), section 10 ('Of Purposiveness in General'), 54–6 (p 55)Google Scholar

15 Of these three page references, only the first appears in Paddison's index On the other hand, that index does provide, under the entry ‘concept (Begriff)’ a subentry for ‘conceptless cognition (begriffslose Erkenntnis)'Google Scholar

16 On the mimetic relationship between art and society see, for example, Paddison, pp 140, 233, and also 261–2 Fora consideration of how Kant's Critique of Judgment points toward structural parallelism, or the relationship of analogy, between the subjective and objective domains within cognition, see Subotnik, RoseRosengard, Developing Variations, ch 4, ‘Kant, Adorno, and the Self-Critique of Reason Toward a Model for Music Criticism’, 57–83 (pp. 67–8), and ch 7, ‘Romantic Music as Post-Kantian Critique: Classicism, Romanticism, and the Concept of the Semiotic Universe’, 112–40 (p 114) Making still another connection between Adorno and Kant, on p 234, Paddison does not render fully clear the source of Adorno's assertion, in connection with Beethoven, that ‘tonality, in Kantian terms, “is thrown into question and has then to be re-created once more by the Subject and its forms” ’ In fact, footnote 55, in the following sentence, governs this quotation as well I had at first thought the reference might be to Adorno's Introduction to the Sociology of Music, where on p. 214 he makes the similar observation that Beethoven ‘seeks to rescue the objective formal canon that has been rendered impotent, as Kant rescued the categories by once more deducing it from the liberated subject'.Google Scholar

17 See Adorno, ‘Bach Defended’, 142–5Google Scholar

18 At issue here is not so much the Missa solemnis, which can be regarded as somewhat exceptional, as the late quartets, piano sonatas and bagatelles. A general but potentially instructive passage appears in Adorno's essay ‘Alienated Masterpiece. The Missa solemnis’, trans. Duncan Smith, Telos, 28 (1976), 113–24 (p. 122) ‘What compelled Beethoven … to self limitation? It was a pressure in the thing itself, which Beethoven, resisting to be sure to the last, obeyed and obeyed with all his energy Here we find something common [both to] the Missa and to the last quartets in their intellectual structuring They share a common avoidance.’ A somewhat more specific rendering of this idea occurs in Adorno's reference to ‘conventions that are no longer penetrated and mastered by subjectivity, but simply left to stand'. Theodor W Adorno, ‘Late Style in Beethoven’, trans. Susan Gillespie, Raritan, 13 (1993), 102–7 (p. 105).Google Scholar

19 The term does appear in Paddison's index, though the one page reference that suggests Baudelaire as the source of this term – pp. 257–8 – does not appear in the indexGoogle Scholar

20 It seems likely that Paddison has in mind the same passage from Adorno's Introduction to the Sociology of Music, 214. as is cited above, n 16.Google Scholar

21 Schultz, Klaus, ‘Vorläufige Bibliographie der Schriften Theodor W, Adornos’, Theodor W Adorno zum Gedächtnis Eine Sammlung, ed Hermann Schweppenhauser (Frankfurt am Main, 1971), 177–239. Though Paddison specifies (p 331) that Tiedemann's postscripts have come collectively to supersede Schultz's landmark effort, the latter continues to offer certain advantages of convenience as a single-volume entity.Google Scholar

22 Subsequently translated by Anson G. Rabinbach as ‘Culture Industry Reconsidered’, New German Critique, 6 (1975), 12–19Google Scholar

23 An example would be an article entitled ‘Oper: Provinz oder Monopol’ that appeared in Der Spiegel on 8 April 1968 (Jg. 22, Nr 15), 178, 180, 182 Paddison takes care to inform readers (p 331) that such items are listed separately and chronologically ‘(unlike the bulk of the musical texts)’ in Rolf Tiedemann's ‘Editorisches Nachwort’ to Adorno's Gesammelte Schriften, xix (Frankfurt am Main, 1984), 648–52. Paddison's expansion of this information, on p. 333, is especially usefulGoogle Scholar

24 'Musik und Tradition’ first appeared in Jahresring 60/61. Betträge zur deutschen Literatur und Kunst der Gegenwart (Stuttgart, 1960), 24–38, and was republished with the same title in Musica, 15/1 (1961), 1–10. (Paddison's reference, p. 343, to Musica, 15/4, is an error.) It was later published under the title ‘Tradition’ in the third, enlarged edition of Adorno's collection Dissonanzen. Musik in der verwalteten Welt (Göttingen, 1963), 120–35; and the shorter title persists in the reprint of Dissonanzen that appeared in Adorno's Gesammelte Schriften, xiv (see above, n. 9)Google Scholar

25 See ch. 11, ‘The Historical Structure’, of my Developing Variations Paddison himself connects aspects of Adorno's work to Saussure's ‘langue–parole’ distinction (p 154)Google Scholar

26 I elaborate on this relation in ch 2, ‘How could Chopin's A Major Prelude be Deconstructed?’, of my Deconstructive Variations, 39–147 (pp 43–55).Google Scholar

27 See, for example, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans Robert Hurley, Mark Seem and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis, 1983), ch. 4, ‘Introduction to Schizoanalysis’, 273–382, esp. section 4, ‘The First Positive Task of Schizoanalysis’, 322–39 I wish to thank a former student, William Hyunjong Lee, now in the Temple University graduate film program, for directing me to this work.Google Scholar