MUSIC, PHILOSOPHY, AND MODERNITY

adorno 357

This role for music can be explored via the idea of ‘judgementless

synthesis’, which will also enable us to look further at how Adorno

connects music and language. The following passage makes clear that

a less rigid view of the idea of musical material can allow music to reveal

history in its own way:

Music is similar to language as a temporal sequence of articulated sounds

which are more than just sound. They say something, often something

human. They say it all the more emphatically the more elevated the music

is. The sequence of sounds is related to logic: there is right and wrong.

But what is said cannot be separated from the music. It does not form a

system of signs.

( 16 : 251 )

Adorno’s insistence on strong evaluation, which will not accept that

lesser kinds of music that have not assimilated technical and expressive

possibilities developed in serious music, can be a real source of truth,

seems here to be more defensible.^24 In the Beethoven book, Adorno

extends the conception of music and logic when he claims that he must

‘decisively determine the relationship of music and conceptual logic’

(Adorno 1994 : 31 ), and embarks on an intriguing attempt to do so:

The ‘play’ of music is play with logical forms as such, of positing, iden-

tity, similarity, contradiction, whole, part, and the concretion of music

is essentially the power with which these forms articulate themselves in

the material, in the notes... The threshold between music and logic

does not therefore lie with the logical elements, but rather with their

specific logical synthesis, thejudgement. Music does not know judgement,

but rather a synthesis of a different kind, a synthesis which constitutes

itself purely from the constellation [i.e. the particular configuration of

musical material], not from the predication, subordination, subsump-

tion of its elements. The synthesis also stands in relation to truth, but to

a completely different truth from apophantic truth...Thereflections

would have to terminate in a definition likeMusic is the logic of judgementless

synthesis.

(ibid.: 32 )

InAesthetic TheoryAdorno extends this idea to art in general: ‘In the

work of art judgement as well is transformed. Art works are analogous to

judgement as synthesis; but the synthesis in them is judgementless, one

24 This insistence does not, however, have to entail all the consequences he draws from it
in relation to Schoenberg and new music.