Theodor W. Adorno and Radical Music

Abstract

At the height of his intellectual powers as one of West Germany’s most famous philosophers, Theodor W. Adorno fondly recalls his family’s summer home in northwestern Bavaria in the autobiographical essay, “Amorbach” (1966). As a young man, he remembers playing an old guitar with missing strings that was hanging in the town’s post office. Adorno writes how he was “intoxicated by the dark dissonance” of its sounds—a haunting synaesthetic experience that preceded any knowledge of similar tones in the music of his acquaintance and future sparring partner, composer Arnold Schoenberg. Foreshadowing his valorization of the revolutionary soundscapes of the twentieth-century avant-garde, he believed that one would need to “compose how these guitars sound.”¹ Because these sonorities later reverberated in the alternative music of the Velvet Underground, the Sex Pistols, and Sonic Youth, philosopher Roger Behrens cleverly uses this anecdote to mythologize Adorno—with no small amount of irony—as the very first punk rocker. The dissonances of these bands, when compared to those of the Second Viennese School of Alban Berg, Schoenberg, and Anton Webern, also represented the liquidation of human agency in a totally administered world. Behrens even proposes that this instrument be officially memorialized with a brass plaque and the following inscription: “With this guitar... Adorno invented the music that became a symbol of resistance for the people. With its dark dissonances, [it] fought for a free society.”²