Mis vaevab Adornot?

Abstract

Despite the controversies it has caused, Theodor W. Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music (1949) is one of the fundamental texts of modernist musical aesthetics. The article discusses the complex personal background of the author as well as the historical context of this work, which can be understood at least partly as a complement to the Dialectic of Enlightenment (1947), co-written with Max Horkheimer. The problems of the dehumanization of art and the relation of modernity to mass culture, as well as the loss of communicativeness in 20th-century musical modernism, are discussed. Attention is paid to the background of the national ideology of Adorno’s music philosophy, which sprouts from the German cultural ideology formed at the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries. In the 19th century, music in general and the idea of the primacy of German music particularly played a significant role in the construction of German national identity, and at the beginning of the 20th century, both the defenders of the German musical tradition and the modernists started from a similar ideological base. The totalitarian cultural ideology of Nazi Germany was also formed on this ideological base, and its equivalent can be seen in Eastern Europe in the 20th century.