184 music, philosophy, and modernity
a grain of truth, as new music’s reception by the Nazis suggests. The
very fact that music evokes disturbing aspects of life in a way which does
not seek just to redeem them is a modern phenomenon, unthinkable
in pre-modern societies, where music is still fully integrated into the
other practices of that society (see Hewett 2003 ).
It is, of course, precisely the most demanding modernist works,
likeTristan, Stravinsky’sSacre du printempsand Schoenberg’sErwartung,
which are most reliant on the technical and intellectual development of
Western music, that tend initially to be heard as though they come clos-
est to a ‘rule-less’ barbarism. Adorno claims in relation to modern art’s
connection to myth that ‘The unstoppable movement of mind towards
what is removed from it speaks in art for what was lost from the oldest
times’ (Adorno 1997 : 7 , 181 ). The combination of myth and techni-
cal mastery in Wagner’s work can be understood as an illustration of
Adorno’s idea that the most advanced music is connected to what he
terms ‘primal history’ (‘Urgeschichte’). For Adorno increases in techni-
cal mastery and the emergence of new forms of barbarism in modern
societies are substantially related. On the level of the production of mil-
itary weaponry, for example, this may be unexceptional. How, though,
does the connection apply to music?
Adorno is concerned to explore what can be salvaged in a secular
form for modernity from theology. He therefore wants to show how
music responds to what may otherwise be unreflectively and uncriti-
cally expressed in ‘mythical’ ways. The term ‘myth’, in Adorno’s par-
ticular sense, designates cultural forms which express the supposed
impossibility of transformation of the human and natural world. The
belief underlying myth is in an essential reality that was expressed by
the primal forms of human thinking, subsequent forms being mere
masks that disguise the purportedly ‘ever-same’. The twist in Adorno’s
argument is that he contends that some of the most modern aspects
of human culture also produce ‘myth’. In a commodity-based society
of mass-production, ‘The new, sought for its own sake, so to speak pro-
duced in the laboratory, hardened into a schema, becomes in its sudden
appearance the compulsive return of the old, not unlike traumatic neu-
roses’ (Adorno 1997 : 4 , 270 ). Adorno thinks that the most significant
new music, in contrast, absorbs, symbolically articulates and transforms,
damaging aspects of modern societies, but does not regress into myth.
In this connection he often uses the psychoanalytical idea that music is
a defense against paranoia, understood as a form of pathological nar-
cissism, because it can take the subject beyond itself into an affective