Theodor W. Adorno on New Music

As certain as it is that New Music must bring the language of music and the material of music into full congruence, this congruence is not to be achieved by simply abrogating the language of music and abandoning the remains — shorn of every qualitative distinction — to their own devices, nor by simply spinning a web of schemata around this remainder instead of penetrating it. One is reminded of that popular etymology that translates “radical” as “radically empty.” Artistic consistency, the fulfillment of the work’s own obligations — without which esthetic seriousness is inconceivable — is not there for its own sake, but in order to present what was once called the artistic idea, and what in music might be better called the composed. In music, however, that is all construction, nothing at all is composed any more. Music regresses to the pre-musical, the pre-artistic tone. Many of its adepts logically pursue musique concrète or the electronic production of tones, But to date, electronic music has failed to fulfill its own ideas; even though it theoretically disposes over the continuum of all imaginable sound colors, in actual practice — similar to the musical tin-can taste familiar from the radio, only much more extreme than that — these newly won sound colors resemble one another monotonously, whether because of their virtually chemical purity, or because every tone is stamped by the interposition of the equipment. It sounds as though Webern were being played on a Wurlitzer Organ. The compulsion toward leveling and quantification seems in electronic music to be stronger than the goal of qualitative freedom and release. Of course it is quite possible that the narrowness and limitation of technological development in contemporary society bears more responsibility than does technology itself for the present state of affairs.

Theodor W. Adorno in “The Aging of the New Music”