adorno 349rock music industry can involve what Adorno is talking about. However,
more general fears about the socialconsequencesof the commercial music
industry’s effects on people’s ability to discriminate need to be carefully
handled. Even the fact that Schoenberg et al. did not change the course
of music in the way that they intended should be interpreted in a num-
ber of different ways. A reading in terms of Adorno’s most stringent
conception of the relative failure of this music would, then, only suc-
ceed if the philosophical story that he relies on were really convincing.
The odd thing is, however, that Adorno’s approach to philosophy is
often different from his most stringent approaches to music.
Schoenberg seems to play the role of ‘philosophical music’ in
Adorno’s conception, being interpreted within a framework, derived
from Hegel, Marx, and Weber, which leaves too little space for the free-
dom that the modern period has seen as inherent in the very idea of
interpreting ‘intentionless’, autonomous music. The proximate expla-
nation of this role for Schoenberg is that music which moves away
from tonality lends itself very easily to being incorporated into Adorno’s
philosophical story. Thomas Mann’s novel,Doktor Faustus, adopts from
Adorno the idea of a crisis of musical form being linked to historical
crisis, notably in the composer Leverk ̈uhn’s assertion that ‘Even a silly
order is better than none at all.’ For Adorno, Hegel’s conception of
objective spirit and Weber’s ideas about rationalisation pose the prob-
lem of post-theological order in terms of how modernity generates new
and potentially dangerous universal forms to which the subject that
has been freed from traditional orders is subordinated. His manner of
connecting this idea to music is apparent in the following, concerning
Beethoven:
What has been called the obligato style, which is already adumbrated in
a rudimentary form in the seventeenth century, contains teleologically
within itself the demand, following the analogy to philosophy, for com-
pletely integrated, systematic composition. Its ideal is music as a deductive
unity; what lacks connection to and is indifferent to this unity determines
itself first of all as a break and as a mistake. That is the aesthetic aspect
of the basic thesis of Weber’s music sociology, the thesis of progressing
rationality. Objectively Beethoven adhered to this idea, whether he knew
it or not. He creates the total unity of obligato style by dynamisation. The
individual elements are no longer joined in a discrete sequence, but are
transformed into a rational unity by a process which is without any gaps
and is occasioned by the elements themselves.
( 14 : 416 )