Quasi Una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music

by Theodor W. Adorno, Rodney Livingstone (Translator)

Quasi una Fantasia contains Adorno’s own selection from his essays and journalism over more than three decades. In its analytical profundity it can be compared to his Philosophy of Modern Music , but in the range of its topics and the clarity of its arguments it stands alone among Adorno’s writings on music. At the book’s core are illuminating studies of the founders of modern Mahler, Schoenberg and Berg, as well as sympathetic rediscoveries of Alexander Zemlinsky and Franz Schreker. Especially significant is Adorno’s “dialectical portrait” of Stravinsky in which he both reconsiders and refines the damning indictment he gave in Philosophy on Modern Music . In ‘Vers une musique informelle’, an influential essay, he plots a course for a music of the future ‘which takes up the challenge of an unrevised, unrestricted freedom’. More unexpectedly, there are moving accounts of earlier works, including Bizet’s Carmen and Weber’s Der Freischutz , along with an entertainingly caustic “Natural History of the Theatre.” Which explores the hierarchies of the auditorium, from upper circle to foyer.

‘The positive element of kitsch’, Adorno remarks, ‘lies in the fact that it sets free for a moment the glimmering realization that you have wasted your life.’ Musical kitsch is the target of several of the shorter on Gounod’s Ave Maria or Tchaikovsky’s ‘clumsy naivety’; on the ‘Penny Serenade’ of the transformation of Mozart into chocolate-box rococo. Yet even while Adorno demolishes ‘commodity music’ he is sustained by the conviction that music is supremely human because it retains the capacity to speak of inhumanity and to resist it. It is a conviction which reverberates throughout these writings. For Adorno, music and philosophy were inextricably Quasi una Fantasia will enlarge our understanding of both.

Genres: Music, Philosophy, Theory, Art, Nonfiction, Essays, Criticism

336 pages, Paperback

First published February 1, 1982

About the author

Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno was one of the most important philosophers and social critics in Germany after World War II. Although less well known among anglophone philosophers than his contemporary Hans-Georg Gadamer, Adorno had even greater influence on scholars and intellectuals in postwar Germany. In the 1960s he was the most prominent challenger to both Sir Karl Popper's philosophy of science and Martin Heidegger's philosophy of existence. Jürgen Habermas, Germany's foremost social philosopher after 1970, was Adorno's student and assistant. The scope of Adorno's influence stems from the interdisciplinary character of his research and of the Frankfurt School to which he belonged. It also stems from the thoroughness with which he examined Western philosophical traditions, especially from Kant onward, and the radicalness to his critique of contemporary Western society. He was a seminal social philosopher and a leading member of the first generation of Critical Theory.

Unreliable translations hampered the initial reception of Adorno's published work in English speaking countries. Since the 1990s, however, better translations have appeared, along with newly translated lectures and other posthumous works that are still being published. These materials not only facilitate an emerging assessment of his work in epistemology and ethics but also strengthen an already advanced reception of his work in aesthetics and cultural theory.

Reviews

[Ryan Edwards · Rating 4 out of 5]

Here Adorno surveys the landscape of musical modernity which serves as the battleground for Philosophy of New Music. Not only do we get 'A Dialectical Portrait' of Stravinsky, carrying on the critique elaborated in the aforementioned title, but we get much needed studies of the work of Zemlinsky and Schreker, who are both often neglected figures. The enthusiastic studies of Mahler and Berg are fantastic, and should prove to anybody that Adorno is not only at his best when operating in the realm of scathing critique.

In the last and most intriguing essay, 'Vers une musique informelle', Adorno seems to sketch out a manifesto of sorts, for an 'informal music'. Through philosophical encounters with the works of all significant composers from the Schoenberg school up to Stockhausen and Boulez, Adorno elucidates the problems posed by New Music, and tries to find a way forward. The whole weight of his knowledge and insight is channeled through questions of form, subjectivity and musical material, integral composition, and the primacy of the note. Weaving together all of these complex threads, Adorno produces one of his definitive statements on New Music, but most importantly, one that acts as a theoretical intervention. Onward to Aesthetic Theory.

[Jenna]

Reference book for an article... Well if you like dense music theory, Adorno is you whip master.

[Foley Stocks]

With the exception of three of the essays, the writings here date from the mid-50s and 60s, therefore being part of Adorno's 'later' period, and anyone well acquainted with Adorno will notice this. When considering the impassioned Philosophy of New Music, or some of his popular earlier essays (e.g., "On the Social Situation of Music," or "On the Fetish-Character in Music") the essays in this collection are comparatively calm, measured, and easy to follow.
Don't get me wrong, he still has that signature style, and you'll probably find yourself lost without some degree of prerequisite technical knowledge, but one gets the impression the arguments are much more well-formed and theoretically balanced, which comes through in the writing especially.
Interestingly, I think that to understand why this is we might make reference to one of the essays of his own in this collection, “Berg’s Discoveries in Compositional Technique” (1961).
He uses this essay to explore the way in which Berg's technique came "closer to atonality’s primary impulse, a musique informelle, than to the rationalized forms of atonality.” But it is here that he takes the time, at the end, to grapple with the notion of 'maturity'. For Adorno, maturity refers to the command of the artist's resources and a measured understanding of placing these towards the aims of the artist; but, therefore, it suppresses something: "what goes beyond those aims and refuses to bow to the rules of culture, to its tacit call for works that are self-contained and complete in themselves." And so he argues we cannot passively presume the aesthetic superiority of mature works, that we must appreciate them on balance with what they lose of the younger works, and it is from this that he ends on this beautiful passage:

From this point of view we may with all due sensitivity, reject such a stance in favour of the larger conceptions of Berg's youth, whose imperfections from the standpoint of mastery are easily perceived. For they preserve the traces of what has never existed and it is this that the yearnings of music aspire to. To respond to them would be to inherit the true legacy of Alban Berg.

The later essays of Adorno, whilst beautiful in their own right, tell us something about the earlier ones, which pertained to an attitude that was comparatively urgent, excited, quick, almost sporadic. It is in these essays one feels the absence of what the earlier writing beckoned, hoped, towards; "they preserve the traces of" that which never came to be.

[Alessandro]

the musique informelle chapter is really good

[M · Rating 5 out of 5]

reading “commodity music analysed” instead of going to therapy

[GONZA · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bellissimo, complesso ma ben scritto, una visione dell'arte e della musica in particolare resa con parole semplici e profonde, un respiro per l'anima.

[Emil E · Rating 5 out of 5]

Always a joy to read, even when Adorno is at his most scornful.