The New Music

Kranichstein Lectures

Theodor W. Adorno, Klaus Reichert, Michael Michael, Wieland Hoban

• Publisher: Polity
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781509538089
• eBook ISBN: 9781509538096
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

A year after the end of the Second World War, the first International Summer Course for New Music took place in the Kranichstein Hunting Lodge, near the city of Darmstadt in Germany. The course, commonly referred to later as the Darmstadt course, was intended to familiarize young composers and musicians with the music that, only a few years earlier, had been denounced as degenerate by the Nazi regime, and it soon developed into one of the most important events in contemporary music.

Having returned to Germany in 1949 from exile in the United States, Adorno was a regular participant at Darmstadt from 1950 on. In 1955 he gave a series of lectures on the young Schoenberg, using the latter's work to illustrate the relation between tradition and the avant-garde. Adorno's three double-length lectures on the young Schoenberg, in which he spoke as a passionate advocate for the composer whom Boulez had declared dead, were his first at Darmstadt to be recorded on tape. The relation between tradition and the avant-garde was the leitmotif of the lectures that followed, which continued over the next decade. Adorno also dealt in detail with problems of composition in contemporary music, and he often accompanied his lectures with off-the-cuff musical improvisations. The five lecture courses he gave at Darmstadt between 1955 and 1966 were all recorded and subsequently transcribed, and they are published here for the first time in English.

This volume is a unique document on the theory and history of the New Music. It will be of great value to anyone interested in the work of Adorno and critical theory, in German intellectual and cultural history, and in the history of modern music.

Index

A

• adagio movements 129
  • Schoenberg and 30–2
• Adorno, Theodor W.
  • at Darmstadt 233–4, 403–13
  • discussion with Doflein 181–7, 202
  • dispute about composition 405–7
  • on Hindemith 183–7
  • not invited to Darmstadt 409–10
  • ‘Reaction and Progress’ debate 240
  • traditional and new music 84
  • works of
    • ‘The Aging of New Music’ 4, 49–52, 156–7, 196, 199, 203–4, 206, 406, 409
    • ‘Cohesion and Sense’ 409
    • ‘Construction and Colour’ 412
    • ‘Criteria of New Music’ 404, 409
    • Dialectics of Enlightenment (with Horkheimer) 52, 156
    • The Faithful Répétiteur 293
    • ‘Form in New Music’ 409
    • ‘The Function of Colour in Music’ 411, 412
    • ‘The Function of Counterpoint in New Music’ 408
    • ‘Music, Technology and Society’ lecture 406
    • notes and recordings of 411–12
    • ‘Notes for the 1954 Darmstadt Seminar’ 407
    • Philosophy of New Music 50–2, 83, 167, 241, 265–6, 270...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Overview
• The Young Schoenberg (1955)
• Schoenberg’s Counterpoint (1956)
• Criteria of New Music (1957)
• Vers une musique informelle (1961)
• The Function of Colour in Music (1966)
• Adorno’s Notes for the Lectures
• Editors’ Afterword
• Index
• End User License Agreement