112 Part II: A Change of Scenework is whatever manifests itself forcefully here and now, and destroys
its deceptive appearances.’ For this reason it is reactionary to object to
the disintegration of works of music in the course of history. This idea
can be put even more strongly: the truth character of a work ‘is tied to
its disintegration’. This disintegration is expressed in the fact that purely
subjective music, music that reflects only interiority, has now lost its
credibility. In the current historical situation, only ‘music’s true exter-
ior, pure form, can survive’.^4
To elucidate this development, Adorno introduced the concept of
‘musical material’. What he meant by it was clarified in the article on
‘Twelve-Tone Technique’ that appeared in the autumn issue of Anbruch.
Twelve-tone technique was a novel, historically developed method for
dealing with musical material in a purely constructive way. Its founda-
tion was created not simply by Schoenberg’s elimination of cadence and
the freeing of chromaticism from tonality. Nor was the avoidance of the
repetition of notes within the rows the decisive innovation. What was
new was the technique of constructive variation, the complete freedom
of variation of motifs and themes ‘so that the same musical event hardly
ever recurs, and that at long last – and this is the crux – musical events
take place not on the surface, but behind the scenes.’^5
At this point Adorno focused on a specific idea of musical material, a
concept of great importance for the future development of music theory.^6
In his view, the material of music was not a natural, neutral phenom-
enon. Because it was moulded by the dialectics of a contingent histor-
ical process, this meant that there could be no universally valid musical
method or process of composition. Instead, if they wanted to achieve
the ‘coherence [Stimmigkeit] that was objectively available in the work’,^7
composers had to work with the existing stock of materials that varied
according to the historical stage in which they found themselves. In his
article ‘Reaction and Progress’, Adorno proposed a concept of progress
that would be valid for every branch of aesthetics that was based on the
assumption of ‘historical appropriateness’, something that would show
itself in the ‘coherence’ of the individual work. What would be ‘coher-
ent’ would be the created unity that has to be quarried from the diverse
materials that lie to hand. This material was in his view the theatre of
progress in art. It meant that the freedom available to composers was
no mere figment of the imagination, but was embedded in the dialectic
of the material. Only the composer ‘who submits to the work and seem-
ingly does not undertake anything active except to follow where it leads,
will be able to add something new to the historical constitution of the
work, to its questions and challenges, something that does not simply
follow from the way it happens to have been handed down historically.
And the power to resolve the strict question posed by the work, by
giving a strict response to it, is the true freedom of the composer.’^8 At
the end of his essay for Anbruch, Adorno comes to the conclusion that
the present age has produced no composers of the stature of Bach or