(MTO 23.4: Neidhöfer, Review of Theodor W. Adorno, Kranichsteiner
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Review of Theodor W. Adorno, Kranichsteiner Vorlesungen , edited by Klaus Reichert and Michael Schwarz (Suhrkamp, 2014) Christoph Neidhöfer KEYWORDS: Darmstadt, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Wagner, counterpoint, twelve-tone technique, serialism, timbre, informal music, material theory of form Received November 2017 Volume 23, Number 4, December 2017 Copyright © 2017 Society for Music Theory [1] The close connection between the music philosophy of Theodor W. Adorno (1903–69) and the developments of the post-World War II musical avant-garde is as well known as it is complex. The influence went both ways: on the one hand, Adorno’s advocacy for the music of the Second Viennese School—his pointed criticism of twelve-tone technique notwithstanding—and his notion of “integral composition” constituted a strong force behind the proliferation of pluridimensional serial techniques. On the other hand, the paths taken by the musical avant-garde in the 1950s and 1960s drove Adorno continuously to revisit and expand his music philosophy. He tried to keep up with the most recent music and actively sought a critical dialogue with younger composers, but struggled at times to grasp the full extent of the latest advances in compositional technique and style. Among the locations where this dialogue took place were the “Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik” in Darmstadt, where Adorno served on the faculty or appeared as guest speaker several times between 1950 and 1966 ( Tiedemann 2001 ). In five of these summer courses, Adorno was invited to present a series of lectures, which have been preserved in live recordings at the International Music Institute in Darmstadt. While Adorno reworked the second through fourth lecture cycles into articles that are well known (with a full transcription of the fifth cycle published posthumously), the content of the often more extensive lectures themselves had remained inaccessible outside the archives until the recent publication of these talks under the title Kranichsteiner Vorlesungen (“Kranichstein Lectures”), part of the edition of Adorno’s unpublished texts issued by the Theodor W. Adorno Archive. [2] Kranichsteiner Vorlesungen , superbly edited by Klaus Reichert and Michael Schwarz, presents transcriptions of Adorno’s mostly freely spoken talks. (Kranichstein is the name of the hunting castle where the Darmstadt courses initially took place, from 1946 on, outside the almost completely destroyed city.) The 672-page volume is copiously annotated with 353 often extensive footnotes. It reproduces the notes from which Adorno gave the first, second, and fifth lecture cycles, and concludes with an editorial afterword, index, and detailed list of topics for each lecture. Furthermore, the book is accompanied by a DVD that contains the audio recordings of the lectures. 1 of 11 [3] Kranichsteiner Vorlesungen features all multi-lecture series that Adorno gave at the Darmstadt festival; Figure 1 lists for each of these the year, title, number of lectures, and subsequent reworking in print, where applicable. (1) Not all of the lectures are documented in their entirety on the archival recordings, and hence in the editors’ transcriptions, due to tape changes or other circumstances. Most recordings last between 70 and 110 minutes each, adding up to over 24 hours of lecturing documented on the DVD. In what follows, I will survey a few of Adorno’s core arguments that run through these talks. Since virtually all of the topics are familiar, in one fashion or another, from Adorno’s writings, I will focus on how he presents his ideas in the Darmstadt context, on the occasionally provisional character of his argument, and on interesting details that Adorno eventually omiIed fro print versions of his talks. 6%7 This edition is a real delight in how it brings alive the thought processes and argu ents of the principal music philosopher associated with the Second 0iennese School and the musical avant. garde. The recordings capture Adorno speaking quite slowly and choosing his words carefully, and while his sentences are often rather long, they are easier to follow than the characteristically long clauses in his writings because his vocabulary and sentence structures tend to be more straightforward in speech than in print. Occasionally, Adorno allows hi self to put things more si ply than beFts an issue, or to choose a ter that he says he would not use in writing, in order to ove swiftly to the heart of a maIer. He is quick at citing, see ingly spontaneously at ti es, speciFc musical features and passages to clarify a theoretical point, but he then so eti es o its such references later in the published version of an article, presu ably for fear of underrepresenting the co plexity of an issue. In the first two lecture series, Adorno de onstrates nu erous musical examples at the piano, mostly fro scores by Arnold Schoenberg. If ever anyone doubted Adorno’s musicality, these recordings of hi perfor ing excerpts fro tonal and free atonal works with agility, superb touch, and evocative phrasing, as well as acco panying hi self singing through songs by Schoenberg, will put such doubts to rest once and for all. Adorno—who, after his doctorate in philosophy in Frankfurt, had studied co position with Alban -erg and piano with Eduard Steuer ann in Vienna fro 1925 on—clearly loves this repertoire and is inti ately familiar with it. Ce shows hi self here at his best as a hands.on, practical music analyst when it co es to nuts.and.bolts analytical questions. He was critical of positivist music analysis and often shied away fro it, but as we know fro his monographs on -erg, Mahler, and Wagner and other writings, and as we can now witness here in his Dar stadt lectures, this was not for lack of analytical skill. The analyses he presents at the piano are generally straightforward to follow with the scores, which are easily available and not excerpted in this edition. Also not provided are transcriptions into staff notation of Adorno’s illustrations at the piano, where he alters a chord or a phrase in a passage in order to make an analytical point. So e of these illustrations are particularly insightful and I will discuss a few below. 6B7 Since his Dar stadt audience consisted largely of co posers, perfor ers, music critics, and usic theorists and analysts—the kind of practice.oriented audience he was indeed eager to address—Adorno li ited the amount of abstract philosophical discourse, anchoring larger aesthetic issues to concrete musical questions and repertoire. Two broad issues run as leit otivs through these lectures: the constant challenge of deFning aesthetic categories in ter s of concrete co positional techni/ues, and Adorno’s skepticis toward syste atized techni/ues such as twelve.tone procedure, which in certain for s he found regressive. His take on these maIers would have been familiar to readers of his Philosophy of New Music , Frst published in 1949 ( Adorno 619%87 2006 ), but in 1950s Dar stadt his views entered a wider context, and gained fresh o entu , vis.K.vis the rapidly expanding procedures of integral serialis . These procedures, Adorno maintained, only exacerbated the dile a of twelve.tone techni/ue that he had already identiFed in Philosophy of New Music ; he took the recent develop ents in serial techni/ue as a sign that new music was growing old. His first lecture cycle in Kranichsteiner Vorlesungen followed the aack on integral serialis that he had presented recently in 1954–55 under the title of “The Aging of the 2ew Music” ( Adorno [1954/5B7 2002 ), and in the face of the backlash against his criti/ue, he 2 of 11 returned repeatedly to this topic in his lectures. (2) 6:7 It is in this context that we need to understand Adorno’s choice of topic for the 1955 lectures? the young (i.e., tonal) Schoenberg—a topic that, one might think, would hardly have been of burning interest to young avant.garde co posers at the ti e, who were focused more on the latest serial achieve ents and who were, in ter s of co positional techni/ue, decidedly moving beyond Schoenberg. (Think of Boulez’s then recent Structures I fro 1951–52 or Stockhausen’s Kontra- Punkte fro 1952–53, for instance, and of Boulez’s 1951 article “Schoenberg is Dead” [-oulez [1952] 1991 7). In “The Aging of the New Music,” Adorno had argued that the avant.garde had taken refuge in co positional techni/ues that no longer came with the “explosive powerA that once characterized atonal music such as Webern’s Five Move ents for String Quartet op. 5: “In the leveling and neutralization of its material [through integral serialis 7, the aging of the New Music beco es tangible: it is the arbitrariness of a radicalness for which nothing is any longer at stakeA (Adorno [1954/BB7 2002 , 185). For Adorno, the avant.garde’s obsession with serialis was missing out on the kind of musical depth that is not guaranteed by that techni/ue in the first place: “While 2ew Music, and particularly Schoenberg’s achieve ent, is stamped as twelve.tone co position, and thus handily pigeonholed, the fact that a very large [part7 and perhaps, qualitatively, the decisive part of this production was co posed prior to the invention of this techni/ue or independently of it, should give reason to pause” (ibid.). Adorno’s point was taken at the ti e to be regressive, which he contested and sought to clarify in his Dar stadt talks. What he meant was that the avant.garde needed to develop its own new categories to reach deeper musical meaning rather than perpetuating a techni/ue that, in his opinion, had lost its original i petus.