396 Part IV: Thinking the Unconditional
experiences ‘that come into the music from its remotest past, before the
phase of rationality and unambiguous significance.’^148 Adorno describes
this as the expression of negativity that in Mahler ‘has become a purely
compositional category: through the banal that declares itself banal;
through a lachrymose sentimentality that tears the mask from its own
wretchedness.’^149
By way of illustrating Mahler’s polyvalent parody and ambiguity,
Adorno referred to the bells at the start of the Fourth Symphony, which
he interpreted as ‘fool’s bells’ which, ‘without saying it, say: None
of what you now hear is true.’^150 Even if he had reservations about
the Rondo finale in the Seventh Symphony because it appeared over-
theatrical, and the Fourth Symphony which he condemned as a largely
unsuccessful revival of the cultic, his discussions as a whole sought to
prove that the new music of the Second Viennese School emerged from
Mahler’s music in a process of dialectical reversal. Mahler, he claimed,
had shaped his tonal chords as the ‘cryptograms of modernity’, as the
‘guardians of absolute dissonance’.^151
Following his controversies with the serialists and post-serialists,
Adorno attempted to formulate his definitive attitude towards the
musical avant-garde. This was around a year after the appearance of his
successful book on Mahler and the well-received centenary address. He
now gave a lecture on the subject at the Kranichstein Summer Course
for New Music, from which he had been absent since his lecture in 1957.
He had been invited once again by Wolfgang Steinecke and took the
opportunity in September 1961 to give a programmatic talk that was
constructive in the best sense of the word. In it he gave a detailed account
of the project of an informal music that he understood as the logical
development of free atonality. Adorno did not shrink from criticizing
his own past statements, his earlier response to electronic experiments:
In Kranichstein, I once accused a composition, which in intention
at least had managed to unify all possible parameters, of vague-
ness in its musical language. Where, I asked, was the antecedent,
and where the consequent? This criticism has now to be modified.
Contemporary music cannot be forced into such apparently uni-
versal categories as ‘antecedent’ and ‘consequent’, as if they were
unalterable. It is nowhere laid down that modern music must a
priori contain such elements of the tradition as tension and resolu-
tion, continuation, development, contrast and reassertion; all the
less since memories of all that are the frequent cause of crude
inconsistencies in the new material and the need to correct these
is itself a motive force in modern music.^152Following this act of self-criticism as well as a revision of the concept
of the composing subject, on the one hand, and the musical material, on
the other, Adorno (in agreement with Metzger’s ‘aserial music’) called