adorno 351them directly in music. What, though, makes this claim more than a
version of the objection to using art as a form of political propaganda,
rather than regarding it as an expression of freedom? The answer is that
Adorno is trying to attend both to the constraints inherent in music as
a situated historical practice, and to the sense that music should have
to do with freedom.
One version of the Adorno’s response to the problem of combining
freedom with the awareness of historical constraint is what one can term
the ‘avant-garde thesis’. The truth of avant-garde music ‘seems rather
to be contained in the fact that it denies the meaning of organised
society, of which it wishes to know nothing, by organised emptiness of
meaning, rather than being capable of producing meaning of its own
accord’ ( 12 : 28 ). In the face of the appalling history which informs this
remark, the idea that composers might resort to a deliberate refusal to
console or to make sense in established musical terms is understand-
able. The difficulty is that this stance must eventually fall prey to the
inherent problem of the aesthetic avant-garde. Radical music eventu-
ally becomes assimilated into the domain of the culturally normal. This
is largely what happens (not least via the influence of Adorno him-
self) in the case of the Second Viennese School – to the point where
composers, like Hans Werner Henze, end up revolting against it as the
musical norm among serious composers in Germany in the 1960 s and
1970 s. The alternative is that music must continually find new ways of
‘denying the meaning of organised society’, and this can become a mere
empty refusal of communication. Adorno says in the same passage that
music can ‘in the present circumstances’ only be ‘determinate nega-
tion’, i.e. it can only be a response to existing forms of music, which
seeks to avoid what is untrue in them. This applies, though, to any seri-
ous music in the modern period. It is therefore the utopian idea that
in radically changed social circumstances music couldceaseto be deter-
minate negation which is specific to Adorno’s conception, and which
gives rise to the idea of the present denial of meaning.
Adorno’s interpretation of Schoenberg as determinate negation
depends on the idea that his music’s integration of musical material,
which does not rely on established forms, is a ‘cryptogram’: ‘Authentic
music, and, indeed, all authentic art is just as much the cryptogram
of the unreconciled opposition between the fate of the single person
and their human vocation, as it is the representation of the however
questionable connection of antagonistic single interests in a whole,
and finally of the hope for real reconciliation’ ( 14 : 251 ). What these