9 Adorno: musical philosophy or philosophical music?
Dialectics of musicAdorno probably wrote more involving the relationship between music
and philosophy than any other leading modern thinker. One strategy
in considering him might therefore just be to outline and analyse his
‘philosophy of music’. A version of this – extensive – task has, however,
already been undertaken by Max Paddison in hisAdorno’s Aesthetics of
Music( 1993 ), which should be the starting point for anyone engaging
with this topic (see also Witkin 1998 ). My aim here is just to pursue
aspects of the philosophy-music relationship in Adorno which affect
the themes that we have investigated so far. Many familiar themes in his
work on music will therefore either not be dealt with at all, or will be
dealt with in a fairly cursory manner. The advantage of this approach
is that certain issues get a more extensive treatment than they have so
far received.
Adorno is a very uneven thinker. Some of his texts, such asDialec-
tic of Enlightenment(DoE)( 1947 ), written jointly with Max Horkheimer
near the end of the Second World War, and hisPhilosophy of New Music
( 1949 ), have become more well known than they really deserve to. Iron-
ically, this is not least because, despite the considerable demands these
texts make on the reader, they also advance sometimes quite schematic
positions. These can appeal to precisely the kind of undifferentiated
thinking which the texts themselves regard as a symptom of a culture
determined by the commodity structure’s erosion of critical awareness.
One of the problems in interpreting Adorno lies, therefore, in recon-
ciling this schematic side of his thinking with his more discriminating
approaches to specific phenomena.
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