Adorno

Adorno’s Years in California 275

Horkheimer first read the numerous pages of this manuscript, he could
not restrain his excitement:

If I have ever in the whole of my life felt enthusiasm about anything,

then I did on this occasion.... If there are literary documents

today that give any room for hope, then your book must be one of

them. The entire work appears to me to provide proof that you do

not merely feel the sense of responsibility of which you spoke after

Benjamin’s death, but that you are able to live up to it in your work.

I cannot tell you how pleased and happy I am to know that this

document exists. If we succeed in directing the observer’s incor-

ruptible gaze... away from knowledge of society to society itself,

and if we can confront the categories which inform your account,

despite your openness to the subject, with reality itself, we shall

have achieved what theory expects of us today.... This piece of

work will go a long way to underpinning our common efforts.^6

There could have been no better start for the discussions and sub-
sequent writing than Horkheimer’s approval of Adorno’s philosophy
of music. In that spirit, Adorno welcomed his friend’s idea that, instead
of concentrating on art, he should ‘at long last speak of society itself....
I myself had the feeling as I wrote about music that I was really taking
leave of the theory of art, for a considerable time at least.’^7
Adorno believed that the philosophy of modern music was basically
nothing but ‘the attempt... to explicate the dialectics of the particular
and the general in concrete terms.’^8 Adorno had anticipated topics that
he wished subsequently to discuss with Horkheimer at a more general,
philosophical level. This applied with particular force to his central
thesis that the twelve-tone method begins with a rational technique
which is then transformed into an irrational system that stifles the
constructive impulses of the composer. Adorno criticized Schoenberg
as remorselessly as he defended him, and both criticism and defence
occurred in the same breath. He argued that Schoenberg like no one
else had succeeded in maintaining the tension between expression and
construction. And yet, the perfected twelve-tone system turned out to
be a ‘system by which music dominates nature’ and that runs contrary
to the ‘musical style of freedom’.^9
In his discussion of Schoenberg, Adorno drew a distinction between
three phases in the composer’s works: atonal expressionism, twelve-tone
technique, and his late style. In the early period of the Second Viennese
School, the revolutionary idea of ‘the rational total organization of the
total musical material’^10 occupied pride of place. Later on, a common
denominator for all the dimensions of music was sought and found in
twelve-tone technique. This twelve-tone method, which attempts to bring
all the elements of a composition into a relationship of equivalence
with one another, thus dissolves the traditional idea of the primacy of