Adorno, Theodor (Ludwig) W(iesengrund)

Adorno, Theodor (Ludwig) W

(iesengrund)
(b Frankfurt, 11 Sept 1903; d Brig, Switzerland, 6 Aug 1969). German writer
on music and philosopher. The son of a businessman of Jewish extraction,
Oscar Alexander Wiesengrund, and a professional singer of Catholic Corsican
origin, Maria Calvelli-Adorno della Piana, he adopted his mother's name in the
1920s, initially as Weisengrund-Adorno, dispensing with the hyphen in 1938.
In 1937–8 he also wrote briefly under the pseudonym Hektor ‘Rottweiler’.
Strongly influenced by Ernst Bloch's Vom Geist der Utopie and Georg
Lukács's Theorie des Romans while still at school, and having had a musical
upbringing, with piano, violin and composition lessons from an early age, in
1921 he went on to study philosophy (with Hans Cornelius) at the University of
Frankfurt with musicology, sociology and psychology as subsidiary subjects,
continuing composition studies with Bernhard Sekles and piano with Eduard
Jung. During his student years he became friendly with the philosopher Max
Horkheimer and the literary critic Walter Benjamin, who both had considerable
influence on his development. Three years after starting university he took the
doctorate with a dissertation on Husserl (Die Transzendenz des Dinglichen
und Noematischen in Husserls Phänomenologie, 1924, published 1956).
Further composition studies followed in Vienna from 1925 with Berg and piano
lessons with Edward Steuermann; he also became acquainted with
Schoenberg and Webern and was in contact with Krenek, Hindemith and
Bartók. He became editor of the journal Musikblätter des Anbruch (after 1929
Anbruch), 1928–32, and was a regular contributor of articles and reviews to
the contemporary music journals Pult und Taktstock, Die Musik, Zeitschrift für
Musik and Neue Musikzeitung in the 1920s and early 30s. While his career as
a composer was brief and his output small, its significance in the light of
Adorno's later theoretical works has been argued (by René Leibowitz). His
output included songs, chamber music, orchestral pieces and choral settings.
The music is characterized by a close motivic working within a freely atonal
idiom. His Sechs kurze Orchesterstücke op.4 (1929, published 1968) show
the strong influence of Berg and Schoenberg. There are also sketches for an
opera on Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn, entitled Der Schatz des Indianer-Joe
(1932–3). By the early 1940s, however, Adorno had virtually ceased
composing as his philosophical interests came to dominate. His compositions
were published posthumously in two volumes (ed. Heinz-Klaus Metzger and
Rainer Riehn, 1980).

file:///F|/download/The%20New%20Grove%20Dictionary%...Version%203-%20Version%203/Grove/Entries/S00216.htm (1 of 7) [07.03.2008 21:21:24]

Adorno, Theodor (Ludwig) W(iesengrund)

In 1927, again under the supervision of Hans Cornelius, Adorno submitted his
Habilitationsschrift, a critique of Kantian idealism which showed the increasing
influence of Marx and Freud (Der Begriff des Unbewussten in der
transzendentalen Seelenlehre, 1927, published 1973); it was not accepted. In
1931, now under Paul Tillich, he submitted a second Habilitationsschrift, a
critique of Kierkegaard's existentialist argument for ‘subjective
inwardness’ (Kierkegaard: Konstruktion des Ästhetischen, published 1933).
This was successful and he joined the philosophy department of the University
of Frankfurt and also became associated with the Institute for Social
Research, of which Max Horkheimer had just become director. His first large-
scale article on music, ‘Zur gesellschaftlichen Lage der Musik, which
appeared in 1932 in the first issue of the institute's journal, Zeitschrift für
Sozialforschung, put forward an extensive sketch for a sociology of music. In
the late 1920s and early 30s he was involved in an intensive correspondence
and public debates with Krenek on free atonality and serialism, and on
problems of form, genre and material in the music of the early 20th century
(Briefwechsel, 1974). At the same time he was engaged in developing a
theory of musical performance with the violinist Rudolf Kolisch.
When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Adorno's right to teach at the
University of Frankfurt was withdrawn. Initially he moved to Berlin to be with
his future wife, Gretel Karplus; his circle of acquaintances there included Kurt
Weill, Lotte Lenya, Bertolt Brecht, Hanns Eisler, Otto Klemperer, Siegfried
Kracauer, Walter Benjamin, Ernst Bloch and Moholy-Nagy. In 1934 he went
into exile, first to England, where he began to study for an Oxford DPhil (it was
never completed). He continued to concentrate on the aesthetics of music,
producing the essay ‘Über Jazz’ in 1936 and, as an outcome of an intensive
correspondence with Benjamin, his long article ‘Über den Fetischcharakter in
der Musik und die Regression des Hörens’ (1938). In 1937 he married Karplus
and in 1938, at Horkheimer’s invitation, they moved to the USA. There Adorno
became a full member of the Institute for Social Research, which had moved
to New York. From 1938 to 1941 he collaborated with the sociologist Paul
Lazarsfeld on the Princeton Radio Research Project, doing empirically
orientated research on radio listeners (‘The Radio Symphony’, Radio
Research 1941, 1941), popular music (‘On Popular Music’, with George
Simpson, Studies in Philosophy and Social Sciences, 1941), and later, at the
New School for Social Research, he collaborated with Eisler on a film music
project, Composing for the Films (in its original American edition under Eisler's
name alone, 1947). In 1941 he moved to Los Angeles, where he worked with
Horkheimer on Dialektik der Aufklärung (1947). He also collaborated with R.
Nevitt Sanford on the Berkeley Public Opinion Study and with Thomas Mann

file:///F|/download/The%20New%20Grove%20Dictionary%...Version%203-%20Version%203/Grove/Entries/S00216.htm (2 of 7) [07.03.2008 21:21:24]

Adorno, Theodor (Ludwig) W(iesengrund)

on musical aspects of Doktor Faustus. The Frankfurt School in exile in the

USA had kept alive aspects of German cultural and intellectual life that Hitler
had destroyed in Germany.
Two ambitious projects came to a culmination at the end of Adorno's
American years. One was his dialectical study of Schoenberg and Stravinsky
as the polarized extremes of the ‘New Music’, begun in 1941 and completed in
1948, Philosophie der neuen Musik (1949), a seminal influence on the post-
war Darmstadt avant garde. The other was the large-scale, multi-authored,
empirical psychological study of intolerance, prejudice and authoritarianism
that he had organized (and to which he contributed), The Authoritarian
Personality, 1950. The sense of displacement and fragmentation with which
the years of exile, the encounter with American mass culture and the effects of
the Hitler period marked him are crystallized in what is perhaps his literary
masterpiece, Minima Moralia (1951), significantly subtitled ‘Reflections from
Damaged Life’.
In 1949 Adorno was invited to return to Germany to a chair of philosophy at
the University of Frankfurt; he also became co-director with Horkheimer of the
re-established Institute for Social Research. With this began a new period of
influence of the Frankfurt School, and Adorno in particular, on post-war
German academic and cultural life. During the 1950s and 60s Adorno was
also a regular contributor to the Darmstadt summer courses, where he taught
composition and lectured on music criticism and serialism. He influenced the
debates surrounding ‘New Music’ and the avant garde, with the implications
this had for the music of Stockhausen, Boulez, Ligeti and Cage. He produced
many articles, essays, papers and books on music during these years, many
of them appearing either in collections of short pieces, including revisions of
pre-war essays, and as larger-scale studies of single composers, including
Wagner, Mahler and Berg. His lecture series on philosophy and sociology at
the University of Frankfurt continued (his course in winter 1961–2, on the
sociology of music, was published as Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie, 1962),
and he gave occasional talks at the Frankfurt Hochschule für Musik und
Darstellende Kunst. Public recognition of his achievements was marked by the
award of the Arnold Schoenberg Medal (1956), the Berliner Kritikerpreis and
Deutscher Kritikerpreis für Literatur (1959) and the Goethe Prize of the City of
Frankfurt (1963). He became visiting professor at the Collège de France in
Paris (1961) and chairman of the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziologie (1966).
This was a period of intellectual debates and disputes: Adorno's attacks on
positivism and empiricism (the so-called ‘Positivist Dispute’ in German
sociology, between Adorno and Habermas on the one side and Karl Popper

file:///F|/download/The%20New%20Grove%20Dictionary%...Version%203-%20Version%203/Grove/Entries/S00216.htm (3 of 7) [07.03.2008 21:21:24]

Adorno, Theodor (Ludwig) W(iesengrund)

on the other, published in Der Positivismusstreit in der deutschen Soziologie,

1969), and on phenomenology and existentialism (Adorno's critique of
Heidegger and Jaspers in Jargon der Eigentlichkeit, 1964), as well as a public
dispute with the playwright Rolf Hochhuth (1967). His critique of positivism is
to be detected in his thinking on music analysis and aesthetics of music, to be
seen particularly in the ‘Berg and Analysis’ section of his book on Berg (1968)
and in the late talk ‘On the Problem of Musical Analysis’ (1969). In the two
major philosophical works that occupied him in his last decade, Negative
Dialektik (1966) and the unfinished Ästhetische Theorie (published 1970),
Adorno set out to address the twin problems of how to philosophize in the
absence of philosophical givens and how to write an aesthetics after the
demise of aesthetic norms. During his last 20 years he worked on a
substantial book on Beethoven; at his death it remained a collection of
disconnected fragments. Sensitively edited by Rolf Tiedemann, this was
published as Beethoven: Philosophie der Musik (1993).
A product both of the German tradition of Idealist (in particular Hegelian and
Nietzschean) philosophy and of the artistic experimentation of the Weimar
years, Adorno was well placed to act as the theorist of musical modernism. At
the same time he developed an influential theory of mass culture, drawing on
Marx, Freud and Max Weber, which formed the other pole of his theory of
aesthetic modernism. His work is characterized by an interdisciplinarity of
approach, extreme density of formulation, and an antisystematic, fragmented
expression. It resists easy categorization and can best be described as a
critical sociological aesthetics of music. His aim is to decipher the historical
and social content of music from the interior of the musical work. The concept
of musical material is central to his thinking, because it is within the material
that he sees the mediation of music and society taking place. His theory of
musical material, as historically mediated ‘second nature’, is also a theory of
form – a concept that needs to be understood on two levels: the historical ‘pre-
formation’ of the material, as handed-down genres, formal schemata and
musical gestures; and the critical re-formulation of this pre-formed material
within the structure of the autonomous work. Furthermore, Adorno's theory of
musical material is also a theory of the avant garde, in that the material of
music is always taken as that of the present, at the furthest point of
convergence of expressive needs and technical means, while music of the
past is to be understood from the avant garde's position. Beyond that, it is a
theory of mass culture (although Adorno avoided that term, preferring the
concept of the ‘culture industry’) in that it emphasizes the effect of patterns of
consumption on musical production. Adorno saw a split in 20th-century music
between a progressive, self-reflective and critical music which resists its fate

file:///F|/download/The%20New%20Grove%20Dictionary%...Version%203-%20Version%203/Grove/Entries/S00216.htm (4 of 7) [07.03.2008 21:21:24]

Adorno, Theodor (Ludwig) W(iesengrund)

as commodity at the level of its form, while in the process alienating itself from
its public, and a regressive, assimilated music that uncritically accepts its
commodity character, in the process becoming absorbed by the culture
industry as entertainment. Adorno's position has been criticized on the one
hand as theoretical mouthpiece for the aesthetics of the Second Viennese
School and its heirs, and on the other hand as élitist avant-garde rejection of
popular culture. A detailed and critical reading of his work, however, reveals a
nuanced and complex theoretical approach of relevance to a wider range of
musical contexts.

See also Sociology of music, §2

WRITINGS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

MAX HALLE PADDISON

Adorno, Theodor W.
WRITINGS
R. Tiedemann, ed.: Gesammelte Schriften, i–xx (Frankfurt, 1970–86) [T]
with H. Eisler: Composing for the Films (London, 1947/R; Ger. trans.,
1949/R)
Philosophie der neuen Musik (Tübingen, 1949, 3/1967; Eng. trans., 1973/
R) [T, xii]
Versuch über Wagner (Berlin and Frankfurt, 1952, 2/1964; Eng. trans.,
1981) [T, xiii]
Prismen: Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft (Frankfurt, 1955/R, 3/1969; Eng.
trans., 1967/R) [T, x/1]
Dissonanzen: Musik in der verwalteten Welt (Göttingen, 1956, enlarged
3/1963) [T, xiv]
Musikalische Schriften, i: Klangfiguren (Berlin, 1959) [reprs. of selected
essays pubd as Nervenpunkte der neuen Musik (Hamburg, 1969)]
Mahler: Eine musikalische Physiognomik (Frankfurt, 1960/R, 2/1963;
Eng. trans., 1992) [T, xiii]
Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie: zwölf theoretische Vorlesungen
(Frankfurt, 1962, 2/1968; Eng. trans., 1976) [T, xiv]
Der getreue Korrepetitor: Lehrschriften zur musikalischen Praxis
(Frankfurt, 1963) [T, xv]

file:///F|/download/The%20New%20Grove%20Dictionary%...Version%203-%20Version%203/Grove/Entries/S00216.htm (5 of 7) [07.03.2008 21:21:24]

Adorno, Theodor (Ludwig) W(iesengrund)

Musikalische Schriften, ii: Quasi una fantasia (Frankfurt, 1963; Eng.

trans., 1992) [T, xvi]
Moments musicaux: neu gedruckte Aufsätze 1928–1962 (Frankfurt, 1964)
[T, xvii]
Ohne Leitbild: parva aesthetica (Frankfurt, 1967, 2/1968) [T, x/1]
Berg: der Meister des kleinsten Übergangs (Vienna, 1968, 2/1978; Eng.
trans., 1991) [T, xvii]
Impromptus: zweite Folge neu gedruckter musikalischer Aufsätze
(Frankfurt, 1968) [T, xvii]
Ästhetische Theorie (Frankfurt, 1970; Eng. trans., 1984, 1997) [T, vii]
ed. W. Rogge: Briefwechsel [with E. Krenek] (Frankfurt, 1974)
Musikalische Schriften, iii–vi (Frankfurt, 1978–84) [T, xvi–xix]
ed. M. Paddison: ‘On the Problem of Musical Analysis’, MA, i (1982),
169–87 [trans. of unpubd talk ‘Zum Problem der musikalischen Analyse’,
1969]
ed. R. Tiedemann: Beethoven: Philosophie der Musik (Frankfurt, 1993;
Eng. trans., 1998)
Adorno, Theodor W.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
KG (T. Phleps; incl. list of compositions)
R. Leibowitz: ‘Der Komponist Theodor W. Adorno’, Zeugnisse: Theodor
W. Adorno zum sechzigsten Geburtstag, ed. M. Horkheimer (Frankfurt,
1963), 355–9
K. Oppens, ed.: Über Theodor W. Adorno (Frankfurt, 1968, 4/1973)
H. Schweppenhäuser, ed.: Theodor W. Adorno zum Gedächtnis
(Frankfurt, 1971) [incl. incomplete list of writings]
Zeitschrift für Musiktheorie, iv/1 (1973) [Adorno issue]
W. Gramer: Musik und Verstehen: eine Studie zur Musikästhetik Theodor
W. Adornos (Mainz, 1976)
M. Zenck: Kunst als begriffslose Erkenntnis: zum Kunstbegriff des
ästhetischen Theorie Theodor W. Adornos (Munich, 1977)
S. Buck-Morss: The Origin of Negative Dialectics: Theodor W. Adorno,
Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute (New York, 1977)
G. Rose: The Melancholy Science: an Introduction to the Thought of
Theodor W. Adorno (London, 1978)
L. Sziborsky: Adornos Musikphilosophie: Genese, Konstitution,
Pädagogische Perspektiven (Munich, 1979)
O. Kolleritsch, ed.: Adorno und die Musik (Graz, 1979)
B. Lindner and W.M. Lüdke, eds.: Materialen zur ästhetischen Theorie:

file:///F|/download/The%20New%20Grove%20Dictionary%...Version%203-%20Version%203/Grove/Entries/S00216.htm (6 of 7) [07.03.2008 21:21:24]

Adorno, Theodor (Ludwig) W(iesengrund)

Theodor W. Adornos Konstruktion der Moderne (Frankfurt, 1979)

G.P. Knapp: Theodor W. Adorno (Berlin, 1980)
Adorno-Konferenz: Frankfurt 1983
M. Jay: Adorno (London, 1984)
W. Notter: Die Ästhetik der kritischen Theorie (Frankfurt, 1986) [on
Wagner and Mahler]
A. Tatsumura: Musik zwischen Naturbeherrschung und Naturideologie:
Theodor W. Adornos Theorie und die heutige musikalische Situation
(diss., U. of Berlin, 1987)
J. Ritsert: Vermittlung der Gegensätze in sich: dialektische Themen und
Variationen in der Musiksoziologie Adornos (Frankfurt, 1987)
T. Müller: Die Musiksoziologie Theodor W. Adornos: ein Modell ihrer
Interpretation am Beispiel Alban Berg (Frankfurt, 1990)
L. Zuidervaart: Adorno's Aesthetic Theory: the Redemption of Illusion
(Cambridge, MA, 1991)
R.R. Subotnik: Developing Variations: Style and Ideology in Western
Music (Minneapolis, 1991)
M. Paddison: ‘The Language-Character of Music: some Motifs in
Adorno’, JRMA, cxvi (1991), 267–79
R. Klein: Solidarität mit Metaphysik? Ein Versuch über die
musikphilosophische Problematik der Wagner-Kritik Theodor W. Adornos
(Würzburg, 1991)
M. Paddison: Adorno's Aesthetics of Music (Cambridge, 1993) [incl.
extensive list of writings on music and bibliography]
L. Sziborsky: Rettung des Hoffnungslosen: Untersuchungen zur Ästhetik
und Musikphilosophie Theodor W. Adornos (Würzburg, 1994)
M. Paddison: Adorno, Modernism and Mass Culture: Essays on Critical
Theory and Music (London, 1996)
R. Klein: ‘Musik als Gegenstand philosophischer Reflexion: zur Aktualität
und vergänglichkeit Adornos’, Musik & Ästhetik, i/1–2 (1997), 105–18
R. Klein and C.-S. Mahnkopf, eds.: Mit den Ohren denken: Adornos
Philosophie der Musik (Frankfurt, 1998)
A. Williams: New Music and the Claims of Modernity (Aldershot, 1998)

file:///F|/download/The%20New%20Grove%20Dictionary%...Version%203-%20Version%203/Grove/Entries/S00216.htm (7 of 7) [07.03.2008 21:21:24]