Gaining Recognition for Critical Theory 397for what for the first time he termed musique informelle. By this he
understood a further step towards musical emancipation.^153 He conceived
of a future in which the avant-garde would be overtaken by a more
precisely defined practice of absolute freedom. He wished to liberate
composers from traditional forms, and aimed at the autonomous shap-
ing of all musical parameters. He called for a mode of composition
at the most advanced level of current musical material, an absolutely
autonomous art, distinguished by its ability ‘really and truly to be what
it is, without the ideological pretence of being something else. Or rather,
to admit frankly the fact of non-identity and to follow through its logic
to the end.’^154
Adorno wished for musical freedom instead of a flight into the
adventitious, which appeared to him, as to György Ligeti, as absolute
determination. In contrast, an aleatory approach to music freed from
the constraints of musical form leads to a static cul de sac. Adorno
issued an explicit warning in his Kranichstein lecture: ‘I am unable to
discern any guarantee of truth in this eternal recurrence of the need for
an order based on known systems; on the contrary, they seem rather
to be the symptom of perennial weakness.’^155 The composer must free
himself from the fear that freedom will lead to chaos by placing his trust
in the reflective impulses of an informal music.
By testing out his own musical ideal in the Kranichstein lecture,
and by attempting to make his own conception of future composition
sound plausible, Adorno opened the door to a highly relevant post-
avant-garde form of music, one that would avoid the usual pitfalls of
affirmation and escapism. ‘In a musique informelle the deformation of
rationalism which exists today would be abolished and converted to a
true rationality.. .. Musique informelle would be music in which the ear
can hear live from the material what has become of it.... The musical-
ity which a musique informelle would require for this would both carry
the constituents of the old music in itself, but would also recoil from the
demands of the conventions.’^156 Adorno’s programme contains the call
for composers to give shape to difference, for example the difference
between construction and expression, between repetition and variation,
in order to achieve mediation between the extremes. If in the course of
his lecture he kept returning to the freedom to shape the composition,
he did so not with the ‘emphasis of the aesthetician of expression’,^157
but so as to procure for the artist the breathing space he needs if he is to
liberate himself from the preforming authority of a reified material and
the internalized tendency to revert to conventional values. Admittedly,
this freedom should also imply the integration of tradition by sublating
it, as Adorno had shown in his analysis of Mahler. Elsewhere, he argued
that the traditional tools of music should not be restored but that instead
‘equivalents should be developed to suit the new materials.... The
secret of composition is the energy which moulds the material in a
process of progressively greater appropriateness.’^158