Philosophy of New Music

(Paperback, 1)

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An indispensable key to Adornos influential oeuvrenow in paperback

In 1949, Theodor W. Adornos Philosophy of New Music was published, coinciding with the prominent philosophers return to a devastated Europe after his exile in the United States. Intensely polemical from its first publication, every aspect of this work was met with extreme reactions, from stark dismissal to outrage. Even Arnold Schoenberg reviled it.

Despite the controversy, Philosophy of New Music became highly regarded and widely read among musicians, scholars, and social philosophers. Marking a major turning point in his musicological philosophy, Adorno located a critique of musical reproduction as internal to composition, rather than a matter of musical performance. Consisting of two distinct essays, Schoenberg and Progress and Stravinsky and Reaction, Philosophy of New Music poses the musical extremes in which Adorno perceived the struggle for the cultural future of Europe: between human emancipation and barbarism, between the compositional techniques and achievements of Schoenberg and Stravinsky.

In this translation, which is accompanied by an extensive introduction by distinguished translator Robert Hullot-Kentor, Philosophy of New Music emerges as an essential guide to the whole of Adorno's oeuvre.

Reviews

"A manifesto on how criticism could actively participate in and clarify artistic concerns, immanently complicating solidarity between theory and practice."Platypus Review

"A surprisingly accessible entry point into understanding Adorno the aesthete. Through a well-crafted and detailed introduction, Hullot-Kentor allows us to glimpse Adorno at the time of this writingboth enamored of and bothered by the works of Schoenberg, repulsed by American culture, not yet hardened into the diamond point of negative dialectics."PopMatters

"With Hullot-Kentor's masterful translation, readers can now more accurately debate the place of Philosophy of New Music within today's cultural situation."Cultural Critique

Author Bio

Theodor W. Adorno (1903-1969) was the leading figure of the Frankfurt school of critical theory and a significant postwar European philosopher. He authored more than twenty volumes, including Negative Dialectics (1982), Kierkegaard (Minnesota, 1989), Dialectic of Enlightenment (1975) with Max Horkheimer, and Aesthetic Theory (Minnesota, 1998).

Robert Hullot-Kentor has taught at Harvard and Stanford universities and written widely on Adorno. He has translated various works of Adorno, including Aesthetic Theory, and is the author of Things beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno.