Gaining Recognition for Critical Theory 393Karel Goeyvaerts, Luciano Berio, and Gottfried Michael König. An
initial confrontation was unleashed by Adorno’s lecture that he gave on
‘The Ageing of the New Music’ in April 1954 during a festival for new
music, and which was later broadcast on the radio. It created something
of a sensation among members of the musical avant-garde. In May he
published the lecture in the cultural magazine Der Monat and then
included it in the volume of essays Dissonances: Music in the Adminis-
tered World, that was published a year later. He argued there that the
achievements of freedom in music that were owed primarily to atonality
were being restricted by serialism much as they had been earlier on by
twelve-tone music. Furthermore, he retained his belief in the creative
power of composers and on the idea of music as determined by time
and process, reproving ‘the imitators of modernity’ for having ‘forgot-
ten what the whole thing was supposed to be about’. Their actions
would lead to a growing neutralization and levelling down of the
material, and to a decrease in the ‘quality, the authoritative nature of
musical works’.^124
Adorno was not unaware that this lecture brought him applause from
the wrong camp. In the first edition of Dissonances, he commented:
‘The author feels no need to defend himself from the misuse of his
reflections for restorative purposes. No aspect of dialectical thought is
safe from such misuse. It can only be met... by the force with which
one puts one’s case.’^125 He developed his critique of serialism – ‘Webern
on the Wurlitzer Organ’^126 – in his contribution to the summer course in
- There Adorno gave three lectures with the title ‘The Young
Schoenberg’, which he used in order to attack serial and electronic
music.^127 This he thought was necessary in order to counter the opposition
in Kranichstein and the danger of sectarianism on the part of the group
he described in a letter to Kolisch as ‘twelve-tone hotheads’, who ‘really
would like to follow Boulez’s lead and... abolish music in favour of
stubborn rationalization.’^128 The high point of this debate came with an
essay by the music theorist Heinz-Klaus Metzger,^129 which he had pub-
lished in Die Reihe in 1958 with the title ‘The Ageing of the Philosophy
of New Music’. Over twenty years later, Metzger admitted that Adorno
had been in the right. ‘He had recognized the ageing process in the new
music much sooner than I, at a time when the symptoms were not even
visible. With hindsight, Adorno’s view turned out to be prophetic.’^130
In musical matters, Adorno was close not only to Kolisch, but also
to Eduard Steuermann, his former piano teacher, with whom he had
enjoyed a close friendship since 1925. From the beginning of the 1960s,
Steuermann had distanced himself from the Darmstadt summer courses,
partly for health reasons and partly from disagreement on musical mat-
ters. When Adorno, who had been caught up in a whirlwind of lectures,
learnt that his old friend had died in New York on 11 November 1964,
the news came as ‘an indescribable blow’. It had affected him, he wrote
to Carla Henius, as deeply as Benjamin’s suicide.^131