New Music and the Claims of Modernity

Alastair Williams

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351556477
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Médias et arts de la scène
• Subtopic: Musique

Since 1945 the emphasis in new music has lain in a desire for progress, a concept challenged by postmodernist aesthetics. In this study, Alastair Williams identifies and explores the recurring issues and problems presented by post-war music. Part one examines the German philosopher, Theodor Adorno's portrayal of modernity and his understanding of modernism in music. This is followed by a survey of the developments in music from late Beethoven to Schoenberg, the two composers whose works provided the main anchor points for Adorno's philosophy of music. Parts two and three indicate the ways in which Adorno's aesthetics are pertinent to an understanding of new music. Part two comprises a close examination of the music of Pierre Boulez and John Cage, composers who represent extreme, though related, aspects of contemporary music thought: the primacy of structure versus dissolution. Williams' views the music of Ligeti as an exploration of the interface between these two extremes, personifying Adorno's advocation of an aesthetic which attempts to embrace all its dissimilar parts. In part three the consequences of modernism and the aesthetic approaches of Derrida and de Mann are considered, together with the music of Wolfgang Rihm. Williams concludes with a survey of contemporary music and the postmodernist desire to include a range of compositional references.

Part I Modernity

1 Critical Theory and Aesthetic Modernity

Modernity

Kant’s three critiques effect a division of modernity into scientific and philosophical knowledge; ethics and law; aesthetics and expression. The two-edged quality of the dynamic force which, to varying degrees, drives processes within these spheres and affirms their separation is encapsulated by Baudelaire as a tension between creation and destruction: something of the past is destroyed in order to create the new.¹ The proximity of these opposing forces is embodied in the refashioning of natural resources essential to modernization, and the inherent instability of the formula is intensified by the profit motive of commodity production. This volatility is revealed in the modes of thought characteristic of modernity and is unremittingly drawn out by Adornian critical theory.

Modernization becomes a recognizable phenomenon with the rise of market economies at the end of the eighteenth century and facilitated the arrival of bourgeois, autonomous art. Artistic autonomy occupies a crucial place in Adorno’s aesthetics because autonomous art is able to maintain a distance from the prevalent rationality, but at the same time it protests at the containment of expressive needs within a defined area. The material of art participates in the process of creative destruction, since previous material is partly destroyed in the process of renewal, but artistic invention is also attuned to remembrance of what is lost. The illusion of wholeness found in bourgeois, autonomous art – though challenged by late Beethoven – confirms an ideal of synthesis upon which modernity is founded but rarely achieves. That which cannot be achieved in everyday life can, seemingly, be found in art. Just as the concept should grasp its object, so artistic form apparently contains its content. The other pole of this dialectic is that aesthetic truth content, a distillation of subjectivity under prevailing social conditions, resides stubbornly in the gap between artistic form and the diverse particulars it seeks to control, thereby challenging the chimera of seamless form. The illusion of bourgeois art is more intensely disputed by modernism in two main ways: by a reworking of the relations between form and content, as heard in the pre-serial music of Schoenberg where tonality is subjected to a disintegrative force; and by an attack on autonomy itself, as theorized by Peter Burger (1984), which is seen in modernist avant-garde movements such as Dada and Surrealism. Against this process, the idea of wholeness is inflated into a quasi-scientific dogma by the innovations of post-Second World War high modernism.

It is the progressive rationality of modernity, which finds aesthetic expression in a limited understanding of modernism, that much postmodernism reacts against. In recent years capitalist methods of production and profit accruement have shifted away from the relatively transparent methods of what is frequently known as Fordism to the occluded strategies of flexible accumulation, which are triggered by the contingencies of the market. Because this process can be understood as an intensification of capitalism, it is questionable whether so-called postmodernity does represent a paradigm shift away from modernity, since both phases are underpinned by similar economic configurations. Nevertheless, this latest phase of modernity is marked by fast reponses to situations and a rapid exchange of information, and it is not far fetched to argue that such a flux of activity is also apparent in the discourse of ideas that characterizes contemporary theoretical debates and aesthetic practices. Pitted against the axioms of modernism, postmodernism asserts itself as an alternative to the fixation on progress and often comprises an eclectic mixture of styles and practices. It is, however, perhaps more fruitful to posit postmodernism as the other side of modernism than as its opposite; to understand postmodernism as a reassertion of earlier aspects of modernism, hitherto submerged beneath the path of historical advancement.

Adorno died before the postmodernism debate became aware of itself as such, but many of its hotly-contested issues find a pre-echo in the contortions of his cultural analysis. The emergence of postmodernism on the theoretical stage has forced us to reconsider what exactly we understand by modernism and modernity, and Adorno’s work represents one of the richest seams for such an investigation: his writings constitute a major attempt to understand aesthetic modernity and his projection of philosophical argument into the understanding of modernist art, particularly music, is incisive. It is, therefore, essential to examine his ideas before proceeding to trace the capillaries linking contemporary thought and music. Habermas’s critique of Adorno’s one-dimensional understanding of modernity provides a crucial sounding board against which to test developments in critical theory since Adorno’s death. From this point, one can examine ways in which Adorno’s understanding of modernism and his aesthetics of music might be reworked.

Dialectic of Enlightenment and the Culture Industry

The work of the Frankfurt School during its formative years in the 1930s can be understood as an attempt to enrich the stream of thought, central to the writings of Hegel and Marx, that seeks to establish a critical theory of society rooted in immanent critique. Such a critique aims to scrutinize the conditions and ideals of a society in terms of themselves, without bringing outside values to bear, in order to reveal the ideological distortions often present. Two moments of immanent critique are found in Hegel and Marx: Seyla Benhabib identifies these as ‘explanatory-diagnostic’ and ‘anticipatory-utopian’ (1986: 142). The first approach is geared to revealing unacknowledged social assumptions and to releasing their blocked potentials; it functions by detecting contradictions inherent within the norms of a society, diagnosing their causes and seeking fulfilment of existing possibilities. The second moment of critique attempts to understand such immanent crises with regard to individual responses and needs; furthermore, it offers a utopian dimension in the form of a future ideal capable of transcending the current state of affairs. In the critical theory of Hegel and Marx these two moments of critique work alongside each other in an uneasy manner, but become somewhat dissociated in Frankfurt critical theory. For the first-generation Frankfurt theorists (particularly Adorno, Horkheimer and Marcuse), the utopian dimension was of paramount interest; but the second generation (led by Habermas) is preoccupied with diagnostic research and the establishment of normative view points.

The research programme of the Institut für Sozialforscbung stemmed from the attempt to subject Hegelian-Marxism itself to immanent critique, and broadened the field of enquiry so that it would incorporate cultural and psychological analysis. From approximately 1932 to 1937 research focused on ‘interdisciplinary materialism’; this approach was followed by the ‘critical theory’ of 1937–40; finally attention moved to the ‘critique of instrumental reason’. The latter emerged in the aftermath of the war and was to remain a touchstone for the work of Adorno in particular. As is frequently pointed out, these shifts in emphasis away from the ambitious programme of interdisciplinary materialism reflect Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s attempts to come to terms with three historical experiences that were disastrous to the socialist project: ‘The Soviet-Russian perversion of the humane content of revolutionary socialism, the collapse of the social-revolutionary labour movement in all industrial societies’, coupled with the growth of fascism in Europe, ‘and the socially integrative accomplishments of a rationalization that had penetrated into cultural reproduction’ (Habermas 1984: 367).² Experience of the third tendency can be attributed to Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s years of exile in the United States. It was against this desolate background that utopian aspects of critical theory fused with the messianic tradition of Judaism for first-generation Frankfurt school thinkers such as Adorno and Benjamin.

The uncompromising depiction of contemporary society presented in Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s critique of instrumental reason cannot, however, be reduced entirely to the historical events against which the development of Frankfurt critical theory took place. At an early stage, Adorno detected an affinity between the exchange value system of commodities, based on the equivalence and fungibility of goods, and the identity principles of the philosophy of consciousness. In his inaugural lecture at Frankfurt University in 1931 Adorno had already raised the problem of an identity logic which must exclude the non-identical; an issue that was to occupy him for the rest of his life (Adorno 1977b). Negative Dialectics relentlessly draws attention to the impoverished quality of formations of identity that exclude the claims of the non-identical, or non-conceptual, and this theme pervades the author’s last work, Aesthetic Theory.

Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment is a key text for first-generation critical theory, but the argument also feeds the later concerns of Adorno’s philosophy. The authors maintain that Western rationality is distorted by a narrow pursuit of instrumental and technological ends that shows scant regard for ethical or expressive considerations; and they trace the dark vein that threads its way through the European Enlightenment, mirroring the development of reason and ideals of social freedom with a subterranean history of violence and repression. By harnessing the dark writers of the Enlightenment – notably the Marquis de Sade and Nietzsche – Horkheimer and especially Adorno take the radical step of locating the Janus-faced quality of enlightenment in the non-contradictory premisses of formal logic itself. (Opposition by the Frankfurt school to these axioms of reasoning reached a head in the positivist dispute of the 1960s.) Reason increasingly appears as purposeful manipulation of nature guided by the motor of self-preservation, but loses sight of its own ends and eventually becomes a means-oriented rationality. The environment is divided into non-reflective facts, and the particularity of objects is eliminated by a prevailing mode of equivalence. Awareness that subject and object are mediated, in material terms, is obfuscated by the forces of ‘reality’.

Dialectic of Enlightenment attempts to fuse the insights of Max Weber with a Marxist tradition of immanent critique, already heavily indebted to Lukács’s theory of reification (and this itself was influenced by Weber). The pessimistic tone of Weber’s theory of history is well known: as rationalization moves away from mythical modes of consciousness towards distinct spheres of understanding, it hypostatizes into institutional systems that undermine the ideal of human autonomy. For Adorno and Horkheimer, Weber’s theory provides a good working description of contemporary society, but relies on a ‘truncated’ conception of rationality that closes down reason’s utopian dimension (see Wellmer 1985c: 44). Thus, while incorporating Weber’s portrayal of an administered society, Adorno and Horkheimer attempt to show that, from the vantage point of utopian reason, the symptoms are linked closely to dysfunctional processes within modernity. Weber’s theme concerning the disenchantment of mythical world views is a key issue in Dialectic of Enlightenment, especially in the chapter devoted to Homer’s Odyssey where the argument demonstrates that reason is already cursed by duplicity within the configurations of a mythical outlook. Odysseus recognizes the superior strength of brute nature and is canny enough not to confront it head on: instead, he eludes violent manifestations of the natural world and manipulates them towards his own ends by cunning. He forges an individual identity, at the expense of his own desire, by adapting to the mythical world of which he is afraid.

The conflict that Adorno and Horkheimer tease out of rationality is evident in the Sirens episode of the Odyssey, during which the hero, in order to dominate external reality, must repress his inner nature. The lure of the Sirens ‘is that of losing oneself in the past’ (Adorno 1979: 32); it is the call of a womb-like origin and demands an integrated ego in order to resist it – an ‘I’ constituted from the fettering of inner nature. The longing for happiness and fear of the self disintegrating into continuous nature are locked and embattled together. Given the physical constraint that Odysseus’s ship must pass the Sirens, there are two ways in which the fate exacted by the Sirens can be avoided, one of which Odysseus prescribes for his crew, the other he adopts for himself: the crew have their ears blocked with wax and are instructed to look only straight ahead, thus avoiding the hazard; their captain, meanwhile, is lashed to the mast, and, while fully able to drink in the Siren’s song, is incapable, despite his pleas, of satisfying his craving to draw closer to them. In Adorno’s and Horkheimer’s analysis, the situation of the oarsmen is that of an industrial workforce of whom maximum efficiency is required: in the pursuit of instrumental goals, they are denied and eventually deny themselves distracting experiences outside their lifestyle – the very experiences in whose name the work is often performed. On the other hand, the plight of Odysseus is that of a successful manager who having pursued and achieved instrumental aims, allegedly with the goal of a better lifestyle, is impotent to fulfil them because of his or her own social fixedness. ‘The servant remains enslaved in body and soul, the master represses’ (Adorno 1979: 35). Adorno regards the dilemma of the Sirens episode, in which pleasure is simultaneously yearned for and denied, as inherent within the ‘emotional power of all art music’ (1979: 60).

The subtext drawn by Adorno and Horkheimer out of Homer’s interplay between myth and epic – in which nature is mastered by adaptation but always at the cost of repression, whether at the level of the self or society – is developed, they argue, into a celebration of power, of the indisputable superiority of the strong over the weak, in the writings of the Marquis de Sade and of Nietzsche at his most nihilistic: the umbra of enlightenment is empowered with a validity equal to that of liberal ideals. In their most pessimistic vein, Adorno and Horkheimer are unable to shake off this heritage; instead, they weakly appeal to the vantage point of a utopian critique increasingly unanchored in present tendencies. This aspect of the authors’ work has been keenly criticized by subsequent critical theorists, as will be apparent from the discussion later in this chapter.

The manipulative side of rationality already present in myth, and which can be traced through the history of enlightenment, appears in a particularly barbed form in the authors’ analysis of twentieth-century culture and their depiction of the ‘culture industry’. The insidious advance of instrumental reason creates the smooth surface of a purposive rationality that administers the public and private sphere, and which is fully capable of engulfing dissent. The culture industry organizes people’s free time in ways commensurate with the system of exchange value: fatigued workers who wish to be passively entertained at the end of a day’s work are provided for, and end up reappropriating the instrumental means-oriented rationality to which they are subjected during working hours. The invasion of private desire by administered rationality completes the seamless continuum called ‘reality’. Human beings are subjugated by their own apparatus of production.

In the bleak outlook presented by Adorno and Horkheimer, modern society is distinguished by slick uniformity: they note that ‘even the aesthetic activities of political opposites are one in their enthusiastic obedience to the rhythm of the iron system’ (Adorno 1979: 120). Having developed its identity by rejecting mythological and superstitious modes of consciousness, reason returns, ironically, to a monolithic world view: the environment appears schematized, or packaged, for the individual by a dysfunctional reason. As Habermas reminds us, this thesis is a variant of Max Weber’s well-known vision of ‘the ancient, disenchanted gods rising from their graves in the guise of depersonalized forces to resume the irreconcilable struggles between the demons’ (Habermas 1987: 110). The return of myth is a theme that must be addressed by any theory of modernism; it is central to Adorno’s critique of Stravinsky.

Paradoxically, the homogeneity of the culture industry achieves the total unity sought by high bourgeois art, but at a terrible price: cultural products comply with rigorous formulae designed to ensure that one item is more or less the same as, and hence exchangeable with, another. Adorno and Horkheimer point out that popular cinema, by and large, constitutes a string of familiar situations, tacked together by a flimsy plot, with the intention of initiating standardized responses from the well-trained viewer. This theme underlies Adorno’s critique o...