Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction Quotes

“It is the innermost nature of true interpretation to contribute to the death of its object.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction: Notes, a Draft and Two Schemata

“In truth, the best works of art are by no means the most perfect ones, but rather those whose imperfection bears the most profound witness to their fundamental contradictions. That is why those works, whose success takes its measure from the failure of the world, assume something helpless, frail and disorganized under the gaze of contemporary cultural administration.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction: Notes, a Draft and Two Schemata

“All reification is a forgetting’—making available what has passed at once makes it irretrievable. Therein lies the desperate utopia of all musical reproduction: to retrieve the irretrievable through availability. All music-making is a recherche du temps perdu.”
― Theodor W. Adorno, Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction: Notes, a Draft and Two Schemata