Adorno

Music Criticism and Compositional Practice 115

and continued into old age. Taken together, there are no fewer than
five song-cycles with opus numbers. In addition, there are almost twice
as many pieces for piano and voice from the unpublished works, as well
as the setting of seven French folksongs for voice and piano. Stylistic-
ally, the texts Adorno uses vary little: poems by Stefan George, Georg
Trakl, Georg Heym, Else Lasker-Schüler, Theodor Däubler, Oskar
Kokoschka, Franz Kafka, Bertolt Brecht, as well as earlier poets such as
Friedrich Hölderlin and Theodor Storm. The songs of his productive
phase between 1925 and 1929 have the following characteristics: the
principle of polyphony, the advanced treatment of different voices, many-
layered rhythms and twelve-tone technique. A further important fea-
ture is what he calls ‘complementary harmony’.^17 Without attempting at
this juncture to give a more detailed picture of, say, the George Songs,
op. 1, or the Four Songs for Voice and Piano, op. 3, it is worthwhile
pointing to the parallels with his instrumental pieces.^18 What character-
izes Adorno’s compositions is a tension^19 between the total autonomy
of free atonality, the refusal to abandon spontaneous expression on the
one hand,^20 and compliance with the norms of the twelve-tone method
on the other. Adorno was never an orthodox practitioner of twelve-
tone technique, and nor did he adhere rigidly to its basic rules. In the
same spirit and at the same time, his criticism of twelve-tone orthodoxy
became steadily more outspoken.^21

Theorizing the twelve-tone method:

Adorno’s debate with Krenek

The starting-point for Adorno’s critique of twelve-tone technique was

given by particular considerations of music theory that also make clear

that early in the 1930s he was beginning to effect the transition from

music critic to music theoretician. At the same time they reflect his

own experience of composition.^22 In the article already referred to,

‘On Twelve-Tone Technique’, in the September/October 1929 issue of

Anbruch, he explains: since there can be no metaphysical certainties

and universally binding norms in a contingent history of modernity,

contemporary music is forced to free itself from all pre-existing

traditions. The recourse to the forms of the past, as for instance in the

neo-classicism of Igor Stravinsky and Arthur Honegger, was simply

reactionary.

Adorno reconstructs the history of music as a process of disintegra-

tion. In the course of it, first the fugue and the sonata, and then tonality,

along with its harmonic structures and cadences, ceased to be sacrosanct

frames of reference. In his view the dynamic nature of the progressive

process of rationalization had led to the emancipation of human con-

sciousness from the bonds of myth. As a result atonality became crystal-

lized as the absolutely new and uniquely valid form of composition.^23