Adorno's Listening to Stravinsky - Towards a Deconstruction of Objectivism

摘要

Adorno's Philosophie der neuen Musik has given rise to much controversy and misunderstandings. Many seem to interpret the book as a choice pro Schönberg and contra Stravinsky. This is primarily due to Adorno's coloured use of words, which, unintentionally, evoke certain moral or ideological connotations. Furthermore, in literature much more attention has been paid to the chapter of Schönberg, while the attention for the Stravinsky-section remains rather slight. The reason for this may be due to the fact that Adorno, in his tome on Stravinsky, doesn't present a comprehensive and systematic discussion on musical parameters, but rather analyses Stravinsky's music from a psycho(patho)logical frame of mind, which is not uncontroversial. Not only the truthfulness of Stravinsky's work, but also the veracity of Adorno's own analysis seems to consist in the fact that Stravinsky's objective purpose is subjectively posited by Adorno, giving way to alternative interpretations. After the First World War, the climate has been created in which the Second World War could arise. To Adorno's mind, those sociological conditions are expressed in the musical material of the time, which tends to a rigid determinism, flirting with fascism. That does not mean, however, that the same holds for the concrete works or the musical intention: the truth of authentic artworks lies indeed within a tense dialectic between the particular (the musical intention) and the general (the musical material). Yet the musical material, as "pure musical essence", is in Stravinsky's work always present, and rises in his neoclassical work even very much to the surface...In spite of his own "work-immanent" research method, Adorno begins his analysis from the axiom that Stravinsky wants to recover the authenticity of music by means of stylistic procedures. Successively, he analyses Stravinsky's early objectivist works, his infantilistic works and his neoclassical works. Although alternative interpretations are possible, Stravinsky's music inspires Adorno to interesting philosophical and sociological reflections, which point forward to the philosophical thoughts of, among others, Jean-François Lyotard, Hannah Arendt, René Girard and Georges Bataille. If it is possible to criticize Adorno's "technical analyses", one can hardly blame him for lack of philosophical insight or psychological understanding.