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When Adorno characterized the introductory measures of “Entrueckung” in Schoenberg’s Second String Quarter as something “never yet heard,” he pointed to a caesura that was both a breakthrough and also a rupture in the history of music. A decisive break with tonality had occurred. The nature of this break and its consequences for the possibility of grasping meaningfulness in music are a central focus in Adorno's writings about music The rupture poses a dilemma for those working to track musical creativity, or, in Adorno's terms, to listen authentically. For, as we shall see, Adorno thinks of such listening as a form of co-composing (mitkomponieren).The dilemma pertains both to the nature of the creative and to the means of tracking it. On the one hand, if creativity by definition involves the new, but not everything new is necessarily creative, how does not tell the difference? How does one distinguish the new in the sense of a creative advance from the new that is merely arbitrary or mechanical? Further, if something has never yet been heard, how does one “hear” it when the familiar schemata through which one has previously listened are no longer appropriate?

My paper is a reading of Adorno's writings on music from the 1960s and 1960s as a “discourse on method” with regard to these issues. Adorno's thought works dialectically, always mindful of the relationship between the subjective and the objective, the universal and the particular, the identical and the non-identical, and always acknowledging the historical specificity of phenomena. Accordingly, for Adorno methods of analysis are not independent of their objects. Adorno's method as I will outline it here is formulated specifically with the music of the Second Viennese School in mind, and would not necessarily be appropriate for music operating with different fundamental assumptions. With these limitations in mind, I will outline Adorno's conception of the authentic, i.e. creative, in music, the criteria by which it is to be identified, and his method of tracking it via the combination of analysis and spontaneous experience which is the work of what Adorno terms “the speculative ear” and “exact imagination.” In this work the listener tracks the creative process in the music by simultaneously immersing himself in it without reservation and actively “co-composing” or “re-constituting” it. I will also discuss the methodological difficulties inherent in this enterprise of “authentic listening,” difficulties Adorno would ascribe to the objective situation of post-tonal music. I will provide examples of Adorno's approach in connection with his discussion of passages from two of Schoenberg's works.

To elaborate on some of the above: At the most abstract level, Adorno speaks of genuine, i.e. creative music as unfolding an idea, as taking up a problem not solved before and not evading but rather laying out its dialectic, the tensions and contradictions involved in it, in the substance of the composition itself. (For this he uses terms like “auskomponiert” and “durchkomponiert,” i.e. thoroughly composed.) In this sense he speaks of the composition as a force-field, a field of the forces involved in the problem it has taken up. The music of the Second Viennese School takes up problems left unresolved in what Adorno calls “traditional,” i.e. tonal music. In this sense it has critical intent. What is new in it is a determinate negation, in Hegelian terms, of what came before and what has now become dead weight.

As negation of the essentially stereotyping schemata of the tonal system, what Adorno calls “the new music,” i.e. the music of the Second Viennese School, is necessarily specific and individual. As critical, further, the works themselves involve and require reflection and technical analysis if they are to be grasped in their specificity. Given their uniqueness, analysis of what is creatively new in such works, then, has to be immanent analysis – analysis of the composition itself. But at the same time, precisely because of their individual character, to some extent each work sets up its own organizational principles. One sees the dilemma: what principles and categories can be used to analyze something that is a unique case? How can one avoid reducing the new to the old in the very act of analyzing it? This dilemma is articulated in Adorno's discussions of the relations between music and language. He advances the tentative notion of a “material theory of musical form,” in which the language-like categories of coherence in traditional music are extended into more general ones, historically specific but still language-like, though at a higher level of generality. His examples of such categories include statement, continuation, contrast, dissolution, succession, development and recurrence. In other words, some categories representing the general or universal can be used in analyzing the new music. At the same time these categories help to illuminate what Adorno calls the “subcutaneous” structuring in traditional music, that which lies beneath the tonal facade (and is also mediated by and with that facade to bring it to life). As determinate negation of aspects of tonal music, the new music is grasped in part through its similarities and its unanticipatable differences with traditional music.

Ultimately, the creative in music is tracked in the process of listening itself, the living experience of the music. Genuine listening must recapitulate the creative process in the music by what amounts to re-constituting it as it unfolds. Here the difficulty is, how can the ear that is formed by the tonal system hear the genuinely new, precisely what is deviant with regard to the tonal system, as meaningful? Without the familiar scaffolding to establish expectations, what does listening attend to? Adorno's answer formulates an ideal which can only be approached asymptotically. On the one hand, analysis helps to sharpen and refine the listening capacity. Analysis and experience shape each other recursively to develop the capacity for what Adorno calls “structural listening,” which works multi-dimensionally, vertically and horizontally, backwards and forwards, to grasp the relationships between the parts and the parts and the whole created in the new music's technique of radical variation. This is the work performed by the speculative ear. But the work of re-constituting the composition also involves a subjective component that is the correlate of the objective musical process. Adorno's term “exact imagination” points to the combination of objectivity and the subjectivity in the work of listening. Exact imagination not only grasps connections that are not immediately apparent; it is also a receptive organ for the music's expressiveness, so that the authentic listener's subjective response is the correlate of the music's expressiveness. In talks he gave during the 1950s and 1960s Adorno illustrated this conception of authentic listening with analyses of specific musical passages which he played, either on the piano or in recordings. One in particular, the “Anweisungen zum Hören neuer Musik,” or “Guidelines for listening to modern music,” outlines the nature of the demands made on the listener by the new music's transformations of the elements of, for instance, harmony, counterpoint, and melody. Adorno's aim is to show the listener the pathway from “tonal laziness” to the kind of multi-dimensional listening the new music requires. My examples of Adorno's approach will be taken from this talk.