The work outlined above exemplifies some of the cutting-edge of Adornian scholarship in musicology in that it aims at rethinking and renewing elements of Adorno’s aesthetic theory in order to respond to the context of the newer music which it examines.
However, there is another question that needs to be examined in relation to Adorno’s legacy and that is its usefulness and possibility for analysis known as formalist, technical, or empirical.
Adorno’s own position on the role of technical analysis was somewhat contradictory.108 While Adorno insisted that technical analysis had to be the starting point of any
analysis, in itself it was too narrow and restrictive in what it looked at and alone could not access the enigmatic, “riddle-character” of art/music. According to Paddison, Adorno “accuses technical analysis of a narrowness of focus which excludes that which
is left over after analysis—what he calls the remainder, the “surplus” (Rest)—as
irrational, because not susceptible to its methods.”109 Technical analysis as “mere note-
counting” cannot provide a complete “interpretive understanding” of a work. Paddison contextualizes Adorno’s response to empirical analysis and positivism within the period post Second World War when empirical data collection had all but taken over
sociological research in the United States to the detriment of a more speculative Critical Theory. Adorno’s requirement for immanent analysis of music was the combination of musical data with “social reflection.”
In an extensive essay titled “Immanent Critique or Musical Stocktaking? Adorno and the Problem of Musical Analysis,” Paddison unpacks precisely some of the difficulties with respect to the combining of empirical analysis and philosophical and sociological analysis in Adorno’s own writing. He articulates the problem of analysis in Adorno’s theory as that of mediation; in other words, connecting the inner workings of the musical composition with the outer workings of social relations (a question already raised above). As mentioned, Adorno placed conceptually a high priority on technical analysis but he saw it only as useful if undertaken in tandem with socio-historical interpretation. There exists, however, no one-to-one correspondence between these inner and outer relationships. How, then, to make connections between the two? Examples such as the break-down of tonality and its related musical forms that we saw in Berg’s Op.1 seem more self-evident, perhaps because of the ubiquity of sonata form in the previous era and the relative proximity of that transitional music to its historical precedents. But how can this problem of mediation be solved to enable applicability of “immanent analysis” beyond that limited historical context?
Paddison goes in pursuit of a methodology for Adorno’s “immanent analysis.” The crux of Paddison’s interpretation of Adorno here is that the musical materials of an authentic modernist work mediate their own critique immanently:
108 See Adorno, “On the Problem of Musical Analysis.”
The extent that the structure of the individual work is a critical reflection upon the historically preformed material (which is not the same for all historical periods), the work may be considered to “contain its own analysis,” to use Adorno’s own phrase. … it is this self-contained analysis [performed by the composition] that needs to be revealed by the process of immanent technical analysis [performed by the music analyst/theorist].”110
In other words, it is for the analyst to answer how are the ‘universal’ pre-formed historical musical materials (such as formal schemes, tonality, rhythmic systems, etc.) are particularized, re-interpreted, given new functions in the composition, organized in a way that they perform a critical reflection upon those materials. What is the nature of the dialectical interaction between what is given and how it is shaped anew? Paddison concludes that “[t]he work is seen as authentic to the degree that its structure is the
outcome of this inner dialectic.”111 Thus, instead of looking for social meaning through
analogy, the organisation of the musical materials themselves contains the sedimented
socio-historical content “mediated through [the work’s] form”.112
To provide a more concrete model of how to go about such an analysis, Paddison argues “it is necessary to be able to envisage the direction of Adorno’s thinking here at a theoretical level” because of Adorno’s lack of specific examples. Paddison define a model of “a dialectical theory of form” following Adorno’s concept of “second
reflection.” To begin with, Paddison outlines what might constitute a ‘first’ reflection in the analytical process as follows:
A first level of reflection would be one where material is uncovered, a content is analyzed, relations are identified, a factual account of the structure can be given. I suggest that the aim of such an analysis is to establish the technical consistency
(Stimmigkeit) of a work, its correspondence to its dominating idea as unity of form and
content (Form/Inhalt).113
The process of “first reflection” as articulated here touches on some problems for analysis. The aim of establishing “technical consistency … as unity of form and
content” is central to Adorno’s theory and distinct from the idea of organic unity, as we have already seen in the discussion of the form-content dialectic. Adorno’s concept of
Stimmigkeit Paddison defines as “the full realization in the structure of the work of its
110 Ibid., 225. 111 Ibid., 224. 112 Ibid., 223. 113 Ibid., 222.
motivating ‘idea’ or concept” which additionally must include the composer’s response
to the “historical demands of the material.”114 These ideas are tied up with a
constellation of concepts in Adorno’s theory, including that the idea of each work is in fact centred on the working out of a “problem” that is both material and historical (as
seen in the Berg and Beethoven examples above).115 However, as it is articulated in the
quote above, “a factual account of the structure” can easily be mistaken for the notion that a purely formalist (objective) analysis is possible, something that today’s self-
reflective music analyst has already been taught is illusion.116
Some of the difficulty is resolved in Adorno’s “second reflection” which Paddison outlines as involving a number of different types of engagements with the work and with the analysis of the “first reflection”:
A level of second reflection involves both critique and interpretation, not only in terms of the inner relations of the closed world of the musical work revealed through immanent analysis, which is an aspect on “first reflection,” but in terms of the
relations between the work and its social and historical context—a context which also constitutes, if I understand Adorno correctly, the work’s structure, as socially and historically mediated content (Gehalt).117
Thus, a “second reflection” requires that both the analysis of the ‘first reflection’ as well as the socio-historical context of the materials are critically re-interpreted. This does not resolve the problem of what constitutes “empirical data collection” in relation to music analysis, which, as we will revisit below, became/remains a site of contention in the music discipline. Equally, how to uncover what is historically sedimented meaning within the materials remains unanswered and subject to the same contentions as the analysing of material relations themselves. Despite Paddison’s model remaining somewhat abstract for practising analysts, “first reflection” and “second reflection” actually provide a very useful breakdown of a possible way of proceeding with
114 Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music, 89. Possibly best illustrated in the Dahlhaus and the Schmalfeldt
analyses of Beethoven’s “Tempest” Sonata discussed in Horton, “Dialectics and music analysis.”
115 See Alastair Williams, New Music and the Claims of Modernity (Ashgate, 1997), 78.
116 Despite what I see as difficulties for practical analysis, Paddison’s careful and detailed development of
“a dialectical theory of form” is extremely useful for understanding how musical analysis fits into Adorno’s larger philosophical and sociological project. That this account highlights challenges for analysis is very useful for finding ways in which analysis can repond to Adorno. For example, on the possibility of “objective analysis,” see Edgar, “Adorno and Musical Analysis.” Similar issues are discussed in Klumpenhouwer, “Late Capitalism, Late Marxism and the Study of Music,” 392. Paddison himself also makes a full exploration of Adorno’s objections to positivist analytical pursuits in Paddison, Adorno’s Aesthetics of Music, 218-22.
immanent analysis. In fact I structure this current study around a two-part reflection, Part 2 being a “formal analysis” and Part 3 being a “second reflection” that engages in particular with Paddison’s theory of mediation which he outlines in a complimentary essay “Music and Social Relations: Towards a Theory of Mediation” and which I
discuss at the start of Chapter 7: A critical interpretation of Boston and ASKO
concertos.
A good example of some of the problems for analysis which are higlighted by Paddison
can be found in a special issue of 19th-Century Music which presented four analytical
responses to Adorno’s “Schubert” essay and one commentary on these responses from
Kofi Agawu.118 The analytical essays are extremely interesting in themselves, engaging
specifically with Adorno’s hearing and interpretation of Schubert but also with Schubert’s music in various ways. What is of most value to my present study is Agawu’s response. Agawu reflects on the attempts in the other four essays to provide concrete analytical examples to Adorno’s “verbal-poetic” insights into what constitutes Schubert’s unique musical style. Most interesting is his claim that “[a]nalysts who seek to domesticate Adorno’s thought by aligning the more or less explicit methodology of canonical analytical techniques with the implied methodology of his peculiar
philosophical or poetic formulations are always rewarded with a deficit.”119 And yet, he
argues, Adorno’s insights should at the same time not be ignored by analysts because in fact they are so strongly supported by the music itself, thereby acknowledging what he calls a “double impossibility” in approaching empirical analysis through Adornian thought. Agawu seems to lead us to a dead-end, but in fact what he does is urge the analyst to suspend certainty and retain the provisional, the speculative, the poetic in writing about analytical observations (as Adorno did) because it gives access to imaginative understanding that falls outside the “technical baggage” carried by conventional analysis (as Adorno also argued). What we can take away from his critique is that the inherent conflict between empirical analysis and the speculative philosophical mode of analysis that Adorno practised ought not be resolved into one another but rather “[i]n order to begin to make good on Adorno’s legacy, music analysis
must be willing to take nothing for granted …”120
118 Kofi Agawu, “What Adorno Makes Possible for Music Analysis,” 19th-Century Music 29, no. 1
(Summer 2005).
119 Ibid., 50. 120 Ibid., 55.
While on the one hand this conclusion puts into question Paddison’s notion of an analytical first reflection providing a “factual account of the structure,” on the other hand it points to a way in which the analytical insights can become fruitfully contingent on imaginative rethinking about that which lies outside the music, of sociocultural contradictions not only of the music but of the analytical method. Frederic Jameson writes “the dialectic proceeds by standing outside a specific thought ... in order to show that the alleged conclusions in fact harbour the workings of unstable categorical
oppositions.”121 This speaks to Agawu’s call to retain the provisional within the
empirical. Adorno himself rejected any a priori method that can be applied to the
analysis of music that will get to “the fact” of it:
… methods cannot be separated from the subject and treated as something ready-made and external, but must be produced in the course of a process of interaction with their subject. … Hegel understood dialectics not as a particular philosophical standpoint, but as the sustained attempt to follow the movement of the object under discussion and to help it find expression.122
This “attempt to follow the movement of the object under discussion” is an important
notion that I take up in a different guise in Chapter 4: Analytical prelude where I outline
in detail methodological considerations for my analysis of Carter’s Boston and ASKO
concertos.