348 music, philosophy, and modernity
there is technical command of an aspect of art, it loses something by
that very fact. Here technique plays the role of the analytical, and it is
only via a mimetic sense of what technique can obscure that Adorno
avoids progressivism.
When questioning Adorno’s stance one needs to distinguish between
the kind of anti-modernism in music which simply seeks to turn the
clock back, rejecting the experiments begun by Schoenberg and oth-
ers, and what Toulmin’s remark implies. Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern
were indeed radical and important innovators who produced some of
the most important music of their century, but they were not continu-
ing the classical tradition in the way that Beethoven continued it from
Mozart, or Mozart continued it from Bach. They constitute rather a
more local trend in early twentieth-century modernism, which parallels
Frege’s and Russell’s desire for a logically purified language. Although
the idea of such a language now appears strange, it did influence the
tradition of analytical philosophy which still dominates philosophy in
many parts of the world. Atonal and serial techniques are similarly now
part of the vocabulary of concert music, and have played a limited role
in jazz and other kinds of music, but they have not led to the kind of
wholesale change of direction in music and in the patterns of listening
that Schoenberg expected. Adorno approvingly cites Berg’s implausible
remark that ‘the time of Anton Webern would only come in a hundred
years; then his music will be played in the way poems by Novalis and
H ̈olderlin are read today’ ( 17 : 204 ). As Toulmin argues, the revival of
Bruckner and Mahler from the 1970 s onwards is perhaps a more signif-
icant expression of how music can articulate the affective relationship
to modernity experienced by members of technologically developed
societies. Adorno is himself, as we shall see, often more plausible when
writing about Mahler.
In Adorno’s most rigorous terms the relatively marginal status of the
Second Vienna School in relation to contemporary music would have to
be interpreted as a manifestation of the standardising effects of the com-
modification of culture. He talks of people in modernity ‘collectively
carrying out a senseless ritual, following the coercive rhythm of repeti-
tion’ which leads them to be ‘affectively impoverished: with the destruc-
tion of the ego, narcissism or its collective derivates are intensified’ ( 8 :
83 ). Such ideas inform the notorious essays on jazz, and his account of
the regression of hearing. There are some reasons for using the ideas as
a resource for understanding aspects of social conformism of all kinds,
and elements (but by no means all) of the increasingly commodified