dahlhaus - adorno's concept of musical material

ADORNO'S CONCEPT OF MUSICAL MATERIAL

Carl Dahlhaus

Source: Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht (ed.), Zur Terminologie der Musik des 20. Jahrhunderts, Stuttgart. Musikwissenschaftliche Verlags-Gesellschaft, 1974, pp. 9 -21 . Translated by Nicholas W a l k e r .

It is a commonplace to observe that dialectical concepts are essentially 'fluid' in character, that they intrinsically elude rigidly framed definitions. It is an observation that has also justified 'dialectical' thinkers in rejecting the unreasonable demand that they defend their case on the same ground as thai occupied by their positivist opponents. In claiming that the material (ruth content of a specific category can only be grasped within a broader systematic context, the dialectical philosopher already eschews arguments and considerations which appeal to isolated terms that are artificially detached from a body of theory. It is only as a moment of the whole that tlie individual concept, unintelligible on its own, properly acquires mean-ing in the first place.

Nonetheless, the careful terminological investigation of a dialectical concept or category, like that of 'musical material' in Adorno's aesthetic theory, is not necessarily a futile and inadequate exercise. It is undeniable that the concept of musical material cannot be made intelligible inde-pendently of its connection with other relevant categories. But that does not itself present an insuperable obstacle since the kind of terminological investigation I am suggesting here does not have to proceed by appeal-ing to definitions or artificially isolated concepts. On the other hand, it is certainly an exaggeration to claim that one must first present an entire systematic body of related concepts in order to do justicc to an individual concept with all its aspects, nuances, contradictions and transformations. To determine the significance of a dialectical category, it is almost always sufficient to describe its fixed or variable relations to a relatively small number of other concepts.

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A D O R N O ' S C O N C E P T O F M U S I C A L M A T E R I A L

I

When Adorno speaks of musical material, he is certainly referring to what we also spontaneously think of when we use the term 'material' in this context: the sounds with which a composer works. But he also combines this idea of 'material', a term he adopts from everyday language, with another much less familiar concept. From the Philosophy of Modern Music onwards - though not yet in the essay On the Fetish Character of Music and the Regression of Listening from 1938 - Adorno consistently deployed the expression 'musical material' in a quite specific philosophical and musicological sense.

We can approach this idea in an initial, general and entirely provisional way - one that should not be misinterpreted as an attempt to provide a rigid definition - as follows: musical material in Adorno's sense is the sum of the historically generated properties and characteristics of sounds and the relationships between sounds. It is essential to understand that Adorno, in contrast with the everyday use of the term 'material', excludes the natural properties of sounds from his own concept of musical material. According to Adorno, sound as a natural given, the physically determined substrate of music, is itself 'pre-musical'. The musical properties of sounds, and the relationships between them, are produced by human beings and are thus intrinsically historical in character. 'Thus material is not natural material even if it appears so to artists; rather, it is thoroughly historical' (AT: 223; ET: 195).1 But this restriction of naturally given sound to the 'pre-musical' physical substrate of music appears extremely forced. Adorno mistrusts the 'psychology of music' as a discipline and avoids it altogether: 'music recognises no natural law; therefore all psychology of music is questionable' (PMM: 37; ET: 32). But quite apart from the purely physical aspects of sound, there also appear to be certain psychological aspects of sound which are difficult to dismiss as merely 'pre-musical', but which are nonetheless rooted in the nature of music or of musical hearing itself (like internal octave relationship between fifths and fourths and thirds and seconds). The difference, or antithesis, between consonance and dissonance, on the other hand, can certainly be described as something specifically 'posited', and thus as a historical phenomenon: a matter of compositional technique and active thought. And this interaction between natural and historical features and properties generates a dialectic of material that Adorno denies or fails to grasp when he restricts the concept of material to that which has effectively been produced historically.

Adorno's indifference to the natural properties of sounds and their relationships derives from the fact that the function which he ascribes to musical 'material' is nothing less than that fulfilled by 'objective spirit' in Hegel's system. The musical material, which gives rise to a certain 'tendency' (PMM 36; ET: 32) or even 'constraint' (AT: 222; ET: 194),

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T H E O D O R W . A D O R N O

appears as an active moving principle of historical development. And this means that the idea of some inert, or merely natural, material must be excluded from the start.

Adorno's claim that musical material is 'sedimented spirit' (PMM: 38; KT: 33) initially sounds rather conventional - it even recalls Hanslick's description of composing as 'spirit working upon material that is capable of becoming spiritual' - but it differs from the traditional maxims of Gcistesgeschichte because it strongly emphasises the musical means rather than the results. It is the material from which the works are formed, (lie technique through which they are realised, rather than the works themselves, which effectively appear as the bearer of 'objective' or 'objecti-fied' spirit.

It is impossible to deny the trivial claim that there is a interaction between musical material in Adorno's sense and the accomplished works, that the material itself is the result of earlier works and constitutes the starting point for later ones. But very significant consequences flow from appar-ently very slight differences in the way in which we emphasise one moment or the other. Adorno's remark concerning the 'tendency' or 'constraint' arising from the musical material implies that the tradition on which com-posers depend, and which they in turn transform, is contained in the material, in the substance, in the techniques, with which they work. On this perspec-tive, the usability of the triad or the exhaustion of the diminished seventh is something that can be read off immediately from the chords themselves. Authentic insight into compositional achievement or failure, into what is 'right' or what is 'false', as Adorno says, arises principally from our experi-ence with the material, and only secondarily from our knowledge of the work.

But this one-sided emphasis is highly questionable. The 'current state of the material', the aesthetic and compositional criterion to which Adorno constantly appeals, is nothing but the sum total of traces which earlier works have left upon the musical organisation of sound. It is undeniable thai nothing of any significance can be read off from the 'material' without an adequate knowledge of the works themselves. But it is equally self-evidenl that one does not need to be acquainted with its prehistory in order to clarify its 'current state of the material'.

In Adorno's aesthetic theory musical material appears as an anonymous authority which prescribes certain steps and prohibits others. And the composer can refuse to accept this only at the cost of aesthetic failure. But if we go lo the other extreme, in opposition to Adorno, and emphasise the individual works, rather than the materials and technique, of the musical tradition which itself furnishes both support and resistance to the com-poser, we cannot properly speak of anonymity at all.

Il is our experience with works that determines Ihe character of the material, not (lie oilier way around. The way in which a composer perceives

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A D O R N O ' S C O N C E P T OF M U S I C A L M A T E R I A L

specific musical sounds and their relationship with one another, what the composer rejects as a false and exhausted path, the principles on which the composer relies and exploits for compositional reasons, all this depends upon the actual works which, positively and negatively, form the basis of the composer's musical experience in general. And it seems legitimate to emphasise works rather than 'material' here insofar as since the 19th century, in contrast to earlier periods, musical tradition has been embodied in the individual works that constitute the concert or operatic repertory, rather than in normative conceptions of genre or traditional bodies of compositional rules. The anonymous compulsion of the tradition, of which Adorno speaks, is far more characteristic of the 17th and early 18th cen-turies than it is for the 19th century.

One certainly cannot deny that in more recent times the concept of the 'work' has lost its once clearly defined contours. But this serves to explain rather than justify Adorno's theoretical position. The dissolution of the concept of the work is not so much a consequence of a tendency on the part of the material as the presupposition which first allows us to speak of a 'tendency of the material' at all. But concepts that are effectively based upon the experience of a particular development of the 'new music' provide an inadequate foundation for a universal theory intended to encompass the history of music as a whole.

Yet the one-sided emphasis of particular and individual 'works' would be just as problematic as Adorno's philosophical and historical defence of the priority of the 'material'. We cannot possibly decide on dogmatic grounds whether, or when, to ascribe priority to one or other of these moments. This can only be accomplished by the kind of empirical and historical investiga-tion which traces and explores the transformations of meaning and the shifts of emphasis which have marked the categories of 'material', 'work' or 'norm'. Adorno's concept of material, which undertook to historicise an older and rather naive conception of the natural substance and basis of music, must be historicised in turn.

II

The concept of musical material is a technical and compositional category that must also be considered from an aesthetic, sociological and historico-philosophical perspective. And it would be no exaggeration to speak of an essentially 'interdisciplinary' term in this connection (though Adorno only suspiciously refuses the possible contributions of physics and psychology here, the very disciplines which one would immediately and ordinarily consider whenever the material of music is under discussion).

The different aspects which are involved in the concept of musical material are impossible to distinguish rigidly from one another. In Adorno's theory, which explicitly works against any professional separation of

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different spheres of competence, technical and compositional arguments invariably pass over into sociological and historico-philosophical ones without any clearly demarcated boundaries between them.

In a crucial passage of the Philosophy of Modern Music Adorno writes that 'all the specific characteristics of musical material are marks left by the process of history. But the more they bear this historical necessity within them, the less directly legible they are in this respect' (PMM: 37; BT: 32). 'As an earlier form of subjectivity - now forgetful of itself - this objective spirit sedimented in the material has its own principles of move-ment' (PMM: 38; ET: 33). These observations describe the transformation of musical works, which formerly expressed subjective spirit, into an anony-mous material that eventually confronts later composers as a shape of objective spirit. Conceptual schemata that are drawn from quite different disciplines are all closely interwoven with another in this approach. A par-ticular historico-philosophical category - like the extremely questionable one of 'historical necessity' - is buttressed with psychoanalytic considera-tions: the idea of 'necessity' is grounded in a certain 'forgetting' of its own origins, in the emergence of objective spirit from an 'earlier' expression of subjective spirit (as if the musical works of the 19th century, which repre-sent the prehistory of the material that constituted the 'new music' of the modern age, were not still immediately accessible to us in the concert and operatic repertoire of today).

The compulsive character that Adorno ascribes to the 'tendency of the material' arises therefore from a certain 'forgetting' of its own historical presuppositions. The transition from subjective spirit to objective spirit inevitably appears as a process of alienation or estrangement, and this quite irrespective of whether we interpret Adorno's claims in a Marxist, Hegelian or psychoanalytic sense. We might therefore expect some attempt at overcoming this 'forgetting', this alienation, through a process of critical reflection. But in fact Adorno's analysis leads him to defend the objective or 'covertly social' - spirit of the musical material against the subjective spirit of particular and individual works. What Adorno him-self so anxiously shunned, the transformation of critique into affirmation, is itself the presupposition of the very category of 'material' that constitutes the basic foundation of Adorno's purportedly 'materialist' aesthetics.

The thesis that musical material is a form of objective spirit to whose demands and prohibitions composers have to subject themselves if they are to accomplish anything artistically significant would seem to epitomise an intricate and barely decipherable complex of aesthetic, technical-compositional and historico-philosophical judgements. A serious analysis of the concept of material must attempt to reconstruct, in its broad outlines, the implicit assumptions underlying the claim that the system of tonality has long been obsolete, exhausted and pointless, and that by virtue of an inner 'tendency' of the musical material (in this connection substantive

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claims like this reveal the full meaning and implications of the concept of material far more clearly than any abstract theoretical discussions).

The claim that tonality - and not merely 'classical' tonality but modern 'expanded' tonality as well - stands in fundamental contradiction with the objective spirit sedimented in the history of music is principally a historico-philosophical thesis that recalls the essentially commonplace observation that for art not everything is possible at just any time. The later works of Bartok and Hindemith, which can hardly be dismissed out of hand as irrelevant or unsuccessful compositions despite their meaningful use of tonality, effectively compel us to supplement the original historico-philosophical claim with a further aesthetic one: that compositions which attempt, in explicit opposition to the 'tendency of the material', to preserve or to restore the role of tonality are inevitably fragile or problematic achievements (which does not imply that such music is poor, meaningless, or indifferent).

It is a methodological postulate of Adorno himself that aesthetic judgements must be supported by the relevant analysis of compositional techniques and procedures if they are to amount to more than empty speculation. And it might in principle be possible to demonstrate that the later tonal works of Bartok and Hindemith are internally contradictory from the technical and compositional point of view, though Adorno disdains to provide a detailed analysis in this connection. But in Adorno's view several of Schönberg's dodecaphonic works (like the third and fourth string quartet for example) are no less technically inconsistent, albeit for rather different reasons. Thus the verdict passed on Bartok and Hindemith can only be upheld if we also oppose fruitful or dialectical contradictions that produce further developments (like the serial technique that arose from the alleged inconsistencies of Schönberg's dodecaphonic method) to the moribund and unproductive contradictions that supposedly represent a dead end in the history of music. It is this distinction between dialectical and moribund contradictions which brings the analysis of compositional technique back into the historico-philosophical analysis. In this way Adorno's argument comes full circle. But the historico-philosophical thesis that the value of a musical work is ultimately decided by whether or not it produces significant consequences is a profoundly questionable one. For in contrast to political history, where an event without consequences is effectively a non-event, even a work from which nothing follows can also be significant as far as the history of music. The criteria which govern poiesis, the production of works, are different from those which govern praxis as the realm of human action. But a thinker like Adorno, who underemphasises the importance of the 'work' in music, may well be tempted to overemphasise the aspect of the 'effect' of art, and thus to confuse the categories of poiesis and praxis.

Like the concept of musical material, and indeed in intimate connec-tion with it, the concept of internal 'consistency' is also an essentially

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'interdisciplinary' category which simultaneously involves technical-compositional, aesthetic and historico-philosophical elements. To simplify the matter considerably: 'inconsistency' signifies the self-contradictory character of a musical work from the perspective of compositional tech-nique, although we do not have to interpret such a work either as a total artistic failure or as an aesthetically 'significant' failure. Deciding in such a matter depends on whether the work expresses, as it were grasps in sound, the historico-philosophical situation in which it is produced, or whether it essentially avoids and evades the specific challenge of the hour. Hut if it is not to remain purely empty and speculative, the historico-philosophical judgement here must justify itself through careful examination of the compositional technique of the work in question, thus ensuring that the chain of argument properly returns to its original point of departure.

I l l

Dialectical concepts are thus historical categories. They are tools which we employ in the context of historiography, although of course it is far from clcar whether the latter must be regarded as a 'science' or an 'art ' . ( That is precisely why Johann Gustav Droysen deliberately excluded the 'poetics' of historiography from the 'methodology' of history.) Dialectical categories, whose internal complexity tends to confuse our habitual and direct approach to things, are justified to the degree that they are capable of presenting or interpreting historical processes and developments in a more precise and more differentiated fashion than classificatory concepts typically do. In order to capture the changing character of the objects and states of affairs which they describe, dialectical concepts also change their meaning, sometimes in striking and sometimes in barely perceptible ways, and these shifts in meaning can be detected through the different configurations which they come to form with other related concepts.

As we saw at the beginning, Adorno does not interpret musical material as an unchanging material substrate of music. On the contrary, the con-cept exclusively designates the historical properties of sounds and the relations between them as properties shaped and produced through human activity. The relationship between the material through which Schönberg and Webern compose their works and the material of John Cage - a relationship which first makes it possible to speak of material in reference lo Schönberg and Cage at all cannot therefore be specified by enumerating a range of shared features, which hardly indeed exist, but only by eluci-dating or reconstructing an essentially historical development.

Hul is not simply the material which is different in the cases of Schönberg, Webern or Cage, but even the very concept of material itself: the category o f ' l h c material' in relation to other concepts like technique, language and

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structure. The specific divergence between musical language and dode-caphonic structure in Schönberg generates a different concept of material from that which arises from Webern's attempt to bring about a convergence between pre-formed dodecaphonic structure and composed form itself, not to mention the nature-mysticism of Cage's desire to present sounds which have been 'emancipated' or deliberately detached from any traditionally musical context. On Adorno's interpretation, musical 'language', in both the semantic and expressive sense of the word, which Schönberg opposes to the material, comes to be identified with the material in Webern, and is finally extinguished in Cage: music is no longer expected to speak, but merely to exist.

The terminological investigation of the concept of material thus passes over into a historical one: every attempt to provide a definition is dis-solved in the historical narrative. But this does not itself necessarily exclude lexicographical considerations. For it is not the substance of history, but the central categories, which must constantly remain oriented to that substance, which constitute the object of terminological reflection: categories whose meaning is as mutable as the configurations in which they appear.

Note and references

1 Th. W. Adorno, Ästhetische Theorie, Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 7, Frankfurt 1970, abbreviated as AT; English translation: Aesthetic Theory, tr. by Robert Hullot-Kentor, London: Continuum 2004; Philosophie der neuen Musik2, Frankfurt 1958; English translation: The Philosophy of Modern Music, tr. by A. G. Mitchell and W. V. Blomster, New York: Seabury Press 1973.

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dahlhaus - adorno's concept of musical material

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