Volume 49, Number 16 · October 24, 2002
Should We Adore Adorno?
By Charles Rosen
Philosophy of Modern Music
by Theodor W. Adorno, translated from the German by Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster
Continuum, 220 pp. (out of print)
Essays on Music
by Theodor W. Adorno, selected and with an introduction, commentary, and notes by Richard Leppert, and new translations from the German by Susan H. Gillespie
University of California Press, 743 pp., $75.00; $34.95 (paper)
Beethoven: The Philosophy of Music
by Theodor W. Adorno, edited by Rolf Tiedemann, translated from the German by Edmond Jephcott
Stanford University Press, 268 pp., $40.50; $17.95 (paper)
No art appears as remote as music from the life and the society that produce it. Painting and sculpture reflect some aspects of the figures and objects or at least the forms and colors that we encounter; novels and poems convey experiences and aspirations that recall, however distantly, the world that we know. The sounds of music, however, are artificial and set apart: even sung music does not give the sound of speech, and instrumental music has little to do with the noises that we come upon in our daily life, and can seem to be even more abstract than abstract painting. That is why Charles Lamb compared a piece of instrumental music to a poem made up entirely of punctuation. Nevertheless, as Diderot remarked, even though the signs of music are more ephemeral and less easily definable than those of painting or literature, their emotional impact upon our senses is even greater. We would consider it unreasonable to think that music does not, in many ways, reflect the culture and the age in which it was made.
Review, 6590 words
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