276 Part III: Emigration Years
one element. It is defined by the desire to suspend ‘the fundamental
contrast upon which all Western music is built – the contrast between
polyphonic fugal structure and homophonic sonata-form.’^11 The accom-
panying suspension of thematic work and a teleological development of
formal constants has its basis in the idea of the twelve-tone method, in
which ‘every single tone is transparently determined by the construction
of the whole work.’^12 The variation, likewise, no longer appears. Variation
is relegated to the material, preforming it before the actual composition
begins. In order to describe what was novel in the dialectical process
of composition, Adorno had recourse to a metaphor he frequently uses:
twelve-tone music ‘makes the inescapable claim that it is equidistant
in all its moments from a central point.’^13 This principle can only be
satisfied if every single note is determined by the construction of the
entire composition. As in his correspondence with Ernst Krenek in the
1930s, Adorno argued that the highly innovative aspects of Schoenberg’s
method of composition were squandered by the ‘omnipresence’ of the
row. The multiplicity of relationships which were intended to be dynamic,
he went on, inevitably ends in making the music static. ‘Once again,
music subdues time, but no longer by substituting music in its perfection
for time, but by negating time through the inhibition of all musical
moments by means of an omnipresent construction.’^14 At this juncture,
musical freedom reverses into the composer’s unlimited domination
of the material. ‘Accuracy or correctness, as a mathematical hypothesis,
takes the place of that element called “the idea” in traditional art....
Structure as such is to be correct rather than meaningful.’^15 If the
dodecaphonic principle degenerates into a mathematically predetermined
scheme, then the musical material will end up being totally preformed
from the outset.
The point of Adorno’s argument was to demonstrate the two
antinomian sides of the historical stage reached by the musical domina-
tion of nature. As he put it, ‘The conscious disposition over the material
of nature is two-sided: the emancipation of the human being from the
musical force of nature and the subjection of nature to human purposes.’^16
He left it in no doubt that the only way for music to develop internally
was through the progressive domination of the sound material, through
its total construction by means of a system of rules that ‘then stands
opposed to the subjugated material as an alienated, hostile and domin-
ating power’. This power ‘degrades the subject, making of it a slave of
the “material”, as of the empty quintessence of rules, at that moment in
which the subject completely subdues the material, indenturing it to its
mathematical logic.’^17 At the same time he maintained, provocatively,
that ‘the integral work of art... is absolutely senseless.’^18 As a way out
of this dilemma, Adorno envisaged a new kind of attitude on the part
of the composer, one which abandons ‘fidelity to the universal domina-
tion of the material’.^19 For ‘this growing indifference of the material’,
we must look at Schoenberg’s late style. With exemplary logic