adorno 341largely taken place within the realm of ‘so-called new music’ itself, so
that ‘certain late forms of new music (Weill’sBurgschaft ̈ ) could be taken
over almost unchanged by fascist composers (Wagner-R ́egeny)’ (see
also Bowie 2004 b).^18 He continues:
In the historical analysis of this section [of the proposed book] the idea is
to be developed via the model of music that the decisive changes, whose
drastic expression is the seizure of power by fascism, take place in such a
deep stratum of social life that the political surface does not decide at all,
and that these experiences of the depths, as they are connected to the
problem of unemployment and the elimination of the rising bourgeoisie
(crisis of the opera), are strikingly expressed in an area of culture as
apparently derivative as that of music.
( 19 : 628 )
These changes would seem to belong firmly in the realm of the ‘inten-
tional’, i.e. in the realm of what can be the object of predicative lan-
guage. What enables an intentionless language to ‘express’ the changes,
when ‘intentional’ description of the ‘political surface’ will obscure
the essential issues? The centrality of the issue of intentional descrip-
tion and politics to his thinking about music becomes apparent when
Adorno maintains in another context that one will arrive at greater
historical insight by ‘a really technically strict interpretation of a single
piece like the first movement of theEroicathat makes its discoveries
transparent as discoveries about society’ than, for example, by looking
at the broad history of musical styles (ibid.: 615 ).
The demand for ‘really technically strict interpretation’ would seem
to belong to a musical formalism which rejects the idea that music
has ‘content’. The notion that technical interpretation can be a more
effective means of understanding society than locating music in its social
and historical contexts therefore seems paradoxical. Implausible as it
might seem, there is a serious justification for Adorno’s claim. The
point is, as he argues, that it is no good using examples of music to
illustrate what is already known about society. That way the meaning of
the musicquamusic would be lost, because the ascribed meaning would
be merely the consequence of a prior interpretation of society which
does not involve the music. Instead, he maintains, his aim is ‘social
theory by dint of the explication of aesthetic right and wrong in the
heart of the [musical] objects’ ( 12 : 33 ). The rationale for this position18 One or two passages from the essay cited appear in a slightly different form in this
chapter.