Since the early years of this century, the Theodor W. Adorno Archiv has brought to the attention of a wide readership many of the German philosopher's previously unpublished texts: a considerable amount of material including incomplete projects, fragments of books, cycles of lessons and correspondence.Footnote ¹ Access to these sources in philologically irreproachable editions, provided with an ample apparatus of notes, has given scholars a deeper understanding of Adorno's thought in all its variety, and in relation to its original contexts and the various phases of its development. Musicological studies in particular have benefited from three projects that Adorno left unfinished: the monograph devoted to Beethoven; the theory of musical performance; and the studies on the diffusion of music in radio.Footnote ² The Kranichsteiner Vorlesungen, albeit not the fruit of a unitary project, are no less engaging in the way they bear witness to Adorno's activities in the field of music. As a whole, the lessons deal with salient aspects of musical language and compositional technique in the twentieth century; due to its peculiar angle, this book represents a contribution to present-day music theory. One element that constantly emerges is in fact the relevance that Adorno gave to score analysis and to the theoretical foundations of the various areas of composition. The strength of a philosophical argumentation grounded in compositional problems, identified through in-depth study and supported by historical reflection, is all the more striking in a time such as ours, in which musical aesthetics is often marked by subjective whims or slogans coming from the culture industry.

The Kranichsteiner Vorlesungen brings together the cycles of lessons held by Adorno at the Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music; during their early decades, these took place at the Kranichstein castle, a few kilometres from the city (hence the title of the book). The texts are transcriptions of the tape recordings conserved at the Internationales Musikinstitut Darmstadt, and the volume is accompanied by a DVD with copies of these recordings. The contents of ‘Kriterien der neuen Musik’ (1957) and ‘Vers une musique informelle’ (1961) are already well known to Adorno's readers, due to the versions he prepared for publication, and a transcript of the lessons entitled Funktion der Farbe in der Musik (1966) had already been published in the monograph issue of Musik/Konzepte dedicated to the fiftieth anniversary of the Darmstadt courses.Footnote ³ The content of the 1956 and 1957 lessons, on the contrary, had not yet appeared in any form: ‘Der junge Schönberg’ and ‘Schönbergs Kontrapunkt’. Among their more interesting features, two in particular should be emphasized: (1) the disclosure of the technical bases underlying Adorno's Philosophy of New Music; and (2) the role attributed to Schoenberg by Adorno in his critique of serial poetics. This ‘tendentious’ element is explicitly mentioned not only in a letter to Wolfgang Steinecke, who directed the courses, but in various passages of the lessons themselves.Footnote ⁴ For example, at the beginning of ‘Der junge Schönberg’ Adorno cautions his listeners as follows:

His critique of serialism is no doubt ridden with problematic elements, and yet one fact stands out: Adorno, who had studied composition with Alban Berg, does not interpret his own role as that of an intransigent guarantor of the principles on which the members of the Viennese School founded their compositional methods, nor does he offer a perfunctory defence of Schoenberg against those who claim that he is also musically ‘dead’. He rather attempts to recuperate the aspects of musical thinking which gained the public eye thanks to Schoenberg's works and that, at the peak of the most radiant phase of his influence, were being quickly put to the side.

The double format of the Kranichsteiner Vorlesungen, containing both text and recording, is a further attractive feature. These lessons were conceived for oral communication; in the transcription, they not only lose their immediacy, but here and there a certain tortuous or redundant use of language emerges, which is generally not typical of Adorno's texts. Their original characteristics can, however, be recovered at least in part by listening. Adorno was a first-rate orator who knew how to use the right word at the right moment, direct his argumentation towards its climax with perfect timing, and capture his audience's attention. Their performative nature is therefore part and parcel of these texts. The reader/listener will in any case notice that here the border between oral communication and written text is blurred; some passages, while emerging like the rest in the midst of an extemporary elaboration of a few written notes, could well appear in a theoretically substantial text without the least modification.Footnote ⁶ The recordings present a further advantage: the two cycles on Schoenberg are full of musical examples that Adorno plays on the piano, taking up a method that was common among music theorists of his generation and that consisted in discussing theoretical problems while adhering to their phenomenal qualities. These musical illustrations tangibly demonstrate how rooted his philosophical thought was in specific instances of compositional technique. At times, Adorno engages in structural analyses, proposing illuminating explanations of complex procedures. One example consists in the parallel he draws between two passages from Verklärte Nacht: the motive from the transition that begins at b. 75 (G–F♯–C–E♭–D) and the model of five notes from which the main theme unfolds (A–G–B♭–D–C♯). Adorno expresses their relationship in terms of an ‘axial rotation’ (Achsendrehung) or even a ‘serial identity’ (reihenmäßige Identität), suggesting an anticipation of dodecaphonic technique.Footnote ⁷ The intervals of both motives can indeed be traced to the pitch-class set 5-Z18, whose primary form is [0, 1, 4, 5, 7]; the two derived sets are related by inversion and permutation.

The Kranichsteiner Vorlesungen presents such a multitude of observations, interrogatives, and theses that it would be impossible to offer an adequate portrayal in the space of a book review. I will limit myself to three concepts, whose treatment could be considered to be paradigmatic of Adorno's approach to the problems of post-tonal composition: Jugendstil, counterpoint, and timbre. Adorno mentions the need for a ‘philosophische Theorie des Jugendstils’ just before analysing the Lied ‘Erwartung’, the first of the Op. 2 cycle.Footnote ⁸ Jugendstil is one of those concepts that functions as a crossroads, particularly dear to Adorno and instrumental in the development of his thought, through which elements of compositional technique can be connected to a certain cultural climate and its social structure. The heuristic way in which he uses this concept, moreover, has implications for musicology, if one recalls that scholars as distinguished as Carl Dahlhaus and Reinhold Brinkmann (who, however, assimilated various aspects of Adorno's philosophy into their own thought) looked towards it with a decidedly critical eye.Footnote ⁹ For Adorno, the driving force of the concept of Jugendstil appears to be the fact that it easily crossed over to different realms of artistic production, in a discontinuous and changing way. Adorno insists on its potentiality, suggesting that a common basis exists for the work of such disparate figures as van Gogh, Munch, Maeterlinck, Dehmel, Debussy, Strauss, and Schoenberg. His reasoning can in turn be related to a broader historiographical issue that involves delineating, with a flexible but solid concept, the movement that Jim Samson later defined as ‘music in transition’.Footnote ¹⁰ In the first lesson dedicated to Schoenberg's early works, Jugendstil comes across as an oxymoron: ‘the attempt to break out of the circuit of conventionalized bourgeois forms, yet, at the same time, to stick to the circuit of the forms predetermined by the bourgeois world’.Footnote ¹¹ The analyses that Adorno puts forward in the following lessons can be interpreted as demonstrating this tension between a desire to flee and the reassuring stability of a social form.

Jugenstil allows Schoenberg's early production – that for Adorno is the root of all that he was later to compose – to be freed from the label of ‘late Romanticism’ and the implicit suspicions of passive imitation and decadence. The reference to youth is revealing for its being set within a social dynamics as well for its modes of expression. This as yet undomesticated instinct is precisely what Adorno, in Aesthetic Theory, sees as one of the roots of artistic modernity: ‘As is evident in its name, Jugendstil is a declaration of permanent puberty: It is a utopia that barters off its own unrealizability.’Footnote ¹² ‘Exuberance’ (Überschwang), one of the traits that Adorno ascribes to Verklärte Nacht and Pelleas und Melisande, is tied to Jugendstil because it establishes a positive link with happiness. And he argues that the obscure and often tragic element found in the majority of Schoenberg's later works does not break away from it stylistically, but is an almost natural reaction to the fact that the world did not return this positive momentum.Footnote ¹³ A desire for beauty, voluptuous lines, and irrepressible passion are features that emerge in the technical construction of these early works as well, not only in the Lieder in which the choice of poetic texts bears witness to Schoenberg's interest in this current.

A twofold thesis emerges from the 1956 lessons: on the one hand, Adorno maintains that counterpoint is the most important aspect of Schoenberg's compositional technique in all of the phases of his production; and on the other, he suggests that a backslide with respect to the level of contrapuntal elaboration achieved by Schoenberg is one of the main causes of the decline in the level of new music. Put briefly, it is a matter of providing a new foundation for a discipline with centuries of history, and at the same time reviving a practice that has been neutralized by integral serialism. The topics treated in these lessons are closely related to an article that Adorno published the following year; compared to the decidedly theoretical approach found in the latter, this hitherto unpublished source offers a series of references to specific procedures, often illustrated with examples from the First String Quartet, Op. 7.Footnote ¹⁴ His approach also reveals an excellent familiarity with the theories elaborated by Schoenberg, even though it is unlikely that Adorno was acquainted with the sketches for the treatise Das Komponieren mit selbständigen Stimmen (Composing with Independent Voices) drafted immediately after the Harmonielehre, or with the notes dating to 1917 for a treatise on counterpoint.Footnote ¹⁵ In these fragments, Schoenberg shows an inclination to overcome the primacy that Hugo Riemann and other theoreticians of his time gave to harmony as a means to regulate the way in which voices are set out in musical space; for him, counterpoint is founded on the notion of the motive, and harmony acts as a simple means of coordination or control.Footnote ¹⁶ Adorno develops this postulate coherently. A number of new questions thus emerge, concerning the criteria with which Schoenberg moulds the voice added to a cantus firmus or a Hauptstimme, establishes a hierarchy and finds a balance within the interlacing of the voices and, lastly, identifies the driving force that sets each single voice in movement. To all of this, Adorno adds a general consideration: ‘the form [is] nothing [. . .] but the unfolding of the implicit contrapuntal possibilities, which are suggested by a theme or themes and their principal counter voices’.Footnote ¹⁷ This point of view is important not only because it offers an explanation of the central role played by counterpoint in Schoenberg's music, but also because it is related to the idea, mentioned time and time again by Adorno in his lessons over the following years, of a ‘bottom-up form’, a form that in forming itself creates its own rules.Footnote ¹⁸

One of the sources of inspiration for this theory of atonal counterpoint was Ernst Kurth's Grundlagen des linearen Kontrapunkts.Footnote ¹⁹ Even though Kurth is only mentioned in passing, he is no doubt responsible for the idea that each single line is not the simple result of a string of notes added to one another, but contains a kinetic energy of its own. According to this outlook, the fundamental question posed by counterpoint would seem to be how to shape a second voice that counterbalances and yet integrates itself within the primary voice, creating a further level of unity that in turn has a tension of its own. For Adorno, these characteristics are linked to the emancipation of dissonance, which appears to a greater degree in ‘music in transition’ thanks to its highly differentiated and dynamic lines.Footnote ²⁰ Adorno also shares with Kurth a scepticism towards the ‘point against point’ principle, that conveys an atomized vision of voice-textures. As a correction to this, Kurth had introduced the term ‘paralinear writing’, that is quite appropriate in describing a simultaneity of individual paths.Footnote ²¹ Adorno follows through with this objective of recognizing a composition's unity in the multiplicity of its voices, highlighting several of Schoenberg's procedures: in particular, the way in which a secondary voice is derived from the cantus firmus by manipulating its intervals, or again the idea of a ‘combination of themes’, that is, the ties between the main motive of a given theme and the characteristic motive of one of its counterpoints. This is also the realm of ideas to which Adorno's conjectures as to the ‘roots of contrapuntal thought’, put forward in the last lesson, belong. Alongside the almost natural, anthropologically founded, inclination to add one's own voice to a song one is listening to, Adorno adds a further motivation that is decidedly contemporary. Counterpoint in fact took on a different meaning within the framework of large symphonic forms: a ‘combination of themes’ is one means to recall elements that, due to the extended timescale, can no longer be grasped by the ear and therefore can no longer be put to the service of ‘Integration im Simultanbewußtsein’ (integration within an awareness of simultaneity).Footnote ²² This second ‘root of contrapuntal thought’ furthermore allows one to recognize the intimate relations between counterpoint and dodecaphonic technique, understood as integral composition in sonorous space.

If in 1956 Adorno considered the simultaneous perception of a unity of lines to be the most pressing issue in compositional technique, he reacted in a way that was both critical and constructive to the conception of multilinearity found in the works of Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Luigi Nono. Ten years later, in 1966, a different question had become the order of the day: how timbre could be composed. Adorno reacted to recent developments in musical language in the way that came most naturally to him, representing, that is, current composers’ research as the result of a historical process that began with instrumentation in the classical period. His approach is therefore decidedly different from those followed by Stockhausen and Pierre Schaeffer, for whom, in different ways, the structural functions of timbre pivoted around the notions acquired through the use of electronic instruments in analysing and generating sound.Footnote ²³ As the reader/listener of these lectures will be able to note, Adorno recognizes a genealogy that is decisive in understanding the composition of timbre in the ‘post-serial’ phase and therefore cannot be ignored; at the same time, he does not fail to notice the cursory treatment given to some aspects whose importance was to increase in later phases, especially with the appearance of the ‘spectral school’.

Adorno takes into serious consideration the idea of a gradual emancipation of timbre, without, however, aligning himself with one of the main theses of serial thought: the ‘equal rights’ given to each of the parameters. As regards timbre, the history of compositional technique and musical listening bring him in fact to apply Hegel's distinction between essence (Wesen) and phenomenon (Erscheinung): timbre does not belong to the substance of a composition, but has the function of making this substance perceptible, or making it ‘appear’.Footnote ²⁴ For Adorno, while the history of the use of timbre in musical construction begins with the classic orchestra, timbre's tendency to become an autonomous dimension manifests itself only in romanticism. He explains the distinction between these two approaches in a similar way to what Egon Wellesz maintained in his treatise on instrumentation: in classicism, timbre has the function of ‘implementing or clarifying motivic-thematic events’, while the romantic orchestra aims at giving the status of an event to combinations of instruments, or to the quality of a single sound.Footnote ²⁵ An inversely proportional relation therefore obtains between the loosening of motivic-thematic procedures and the advancement of timbre as a dimension of composition strictly speaking. Here, as elsewhere, Wagner seems to be the point of departure for new music: ‘No longer would there be a single bar not heard in the same way as it was composed.’Footnote ²⁶ The process triggered by Wagner brought about the need for a theory of instrumentation that goes beyond a simple apprenticeship in the use of instruments and establishes relations with the other disciplines of composition (counterpoint, harmony, and form). Wagner's ‘auratic orchestra’ set off a process that ramified throughout the following generation: Debussy, Mahler, Strauss, and Schoenberg drew different consequences on a theoretical level, all of which were, however, aimed at giving sound a meaningful presence. His lessons on timbre are therefore connected to the issue of the ‘spatialisation of music’ that Adorno had set out in the chapter on Stravinsky in his Philosophy of New Music.Footnote ²⁷ This tendency, that led music to converge with painting and that during the war Adorno had condemned as a submission to the mechanization of society, is now considered to be an objective fact. A crucial role was played in this transformation by avant-garde compositions, above all György Ligeti's Atmosphères, that is repeatedly mentioned in these lessons.