Apparitions: Essays on Adorno and Twentieth-Century Music

301 Pages·2005·2.68 MB·English

by  Berthold Hoeckner

Apparitions
Studies in Contemporary Music and
Culture
Joseph Auner, Series Editor
Associate Professor of Music
The State University of New York at Stony Brook Advisory Board:
Philip Brett, Susan McClary, Robert P. Morgan, and Robert Walser
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edited by Siglind Bruhn
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edited by Walter Everett Disruptive Divas Feminism, Identity and Popular Music
edited by Lori Burns and Melisse Lafrance John Cage Music, Philosophy, and
Intention, 1933-1950
edited by David Patterson Music of Louis Andriessen
edited by Maja Trochimczyk
The New York Schools of Music and the Visual Arts
edited by Steven Johnson Postmodern Music/Postmodern Thought
edited by Judy Lochhead, Joseph Auner Apparitions: New Perspectives on Adorno
and Twentieth-Century Music
edited by Berthold Hoeckner
Apparitions
New Perspectives on Adorno and
Twentieth-Century Music
Edited by
Berthold Hoeckner
Published in 2006 by Published in Great Britain by
Routledge Routledge
Taylor & Francis Group Taylor & Francis Group
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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Apparitions: new perspectives on Adorno and twentieth century music / edited by Berthold Hoeckner.
  p. cm. -- (Studies in contemporary music and culture)
 Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.
 1. Adorno, Theodor W., 1903-1969--Criticism and interpretation. 2. Music and philosophy. 3.Music--20th century--Philosophy
and aesthetics. I. Hoeckner, Berthold. II. Series.
ML3845.A66 2005
780’.92--dc22         2005011643
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Contents
Preface: On Apparition
BERTHOLD HOECKNER
Authors
Drifting: The Dialectics of Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music
1.
DANIEL K. L. CHUA
Labor and Metaphysics in Hindemith’s and Adorno’s Statements on
2.Counterpoint
KEITH CHAPIN
Dire cela, sans savoir quoi: The Question of Meaning in Adorno and in the
3.Musical Avant-Garde
GIANMARIO BORIO, Translated by Robert L. Kendrick
“The Elliptical Geometry of Utopia”: New Music Since Adorno
4.
JULIAN JOHNSON
Wolfgang Rihm and the Adorno Legacy
5.
ALASTAIR WILLIAMS
Frankfurt School Blues: Rethinking Adorno’s Critique of Jazz
6.
James Buhler
“Die Zerstörung der Symphonie”: Adorno and the Theory of Radio
7.
LARSON POWELL
Music, Corporate Power, and the Age of Unending War
8.
Martin Scherzinger
Notes
Index
Preface: On Apparition
BERTHOLD HOECKNER
Adorno needs no introduction.1 Instead, as a preface to this volume, let me offer a
brief meditation on the word apparition. It will become apparent, I hope, that this
meditation is an exercise in self-reflection that resonates with the way Adorno
appears on the cover of this book in the 1963 photograph “Selbst im Spiegel” (Self
in the Mirror) by Stefan Moses. New is not the man or his philosophy but the
perspective from which they are seen in these eight essays.
“The artwork as appearance” said Adorno in his Aesthetic Theory “is most
closely resembled by the apparition, the heavenly vision.” The original German is
as follows: “Am nächsten kommt dem Kunstwerk als Erscheinung die apparition,
die Himmelserscheinung.”2 The translation by Robert Hullot-Kentor nicely
preserves the resemblance between Erscheinung and Himmelserscheinung in the
resemblance between appearance and apparition. But despite its appearance in
italics, apparition inevitably loses in English its status as a “foreign word.” In the
German text it appears as a Fremdwort, marked in the original by its spelling in
lower case. This Fremdwort is my point of departure.
Foreign words are, as Adorno said in Minima Moralia, “the Jews in
language.”3 The aphorism was meant to expose the problematic equivalence
between linguistic and racial purity. This equivalence between speaking German
and being German was propagated by anti-Semitic ideology, perhaps most
infamously in Wagner’s essay “Judaism in Music.” Adorno’s aphorism goes to the
center of his conflicted German–Jewish identity. On one hand, he criticizes the
notion of the Fremdwort as a mark of alterity; on the other, he prized the qualities
of the German language as being capable of expressing what other languages
cannot. This contradiction surfaces in Adorno’s essay “On the Question: What is
German?” Surely, the essay is a response of sorts to Wagner’s “What is
German?”, another notorious anti-Semitic tract that appeared in the Bayreuther
Blätter. And surely, Adorno knew Nietzsche’s spot-on remark that “[i]t is
characteristic of the Germans that the question: ‘What is German?’ never dies out
among them.”4 In his own reflections on the question, Adorno explained his
desire to return to Frankfurt after World War II, by pointing, among other things,
to the “elective affinity” between the German language and German philosophy.
He noted that “the specific quality of the German language could be made
apparent in the prohibitive difficulty to translate philosophical texts of the
highest pretensions, like Hegel’s Philosophy of the Spirit or Science of Logic, into a
different language.”5 For Adorno, German “has retained more of the power of
expression” than other Western languages — a fact that only someone not raised
in those languages will be able to observe. Only someone who subscribes to the
assertion “that presentation [Darstellung] is essential for philosophy … will refer
to German.”6 Hence it is not surprising that the number of studies Adorno wrote
in English during his exile in England and America was small compared with
those written in German, many of which certainly remained a foreign body of
words long before being translated into English decades later. Yet at the same
time Adorno’s texts are sprinkled with foreign words. The appearance of these
words in his own writings, I suggest, does precisely and paradoxically what he
claimed only the German language could offer to philosophy: namely, an
authentic form of expression and presentation. The Fremdwort becomes Adorno’s
performance of the aesthetic.
The word apparition, then, works in Adorno’s philosophical writings like an
apparition. This apparition turns Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory inside out and
provides a somewhat emphatic answer to the question, once posed by Rüdiger
Bubner: How can theory become itself aesthetic?7 Adorno seeks to create
aesthetic experience himself by having the word apparition “appear” in his prose
as a Fremdwort. Glossing the word apparition with “celestial vision”
(Himmelserscheinung) is nothing less than a translation into his own language.
Later in the Aesthetic Theory, Adorno also compares the apparition to fireworks,
which are a “script that flashes up, vanishes, and indeed cannot be read for its
meaning.”8 The foreign word is like a fleeting poetic moment in philosophical