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Adorno and the Semantics of ModernismAuthor(s): Alastair WilliamsSource: Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 37, No. 2 (Summer, 1999), pp. 29-50Published by: Perspectives of New MusicStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/833510

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ADORNO

ANDTHE SEMANTICS OF MODERNISM

ALASTAIRWILLIAMS

O NEOF THE THINGS postmodernism has taught us (when viewed as a

transformation of modernism rather than its antithesis) is that mod-

ernism is a multifaceted phenomenon.' Thus postmodernism is as mucha rereadingof modernism as its replacement. From this position, the per-ceived opposition between abstract modernist procedures and inclusive,referentialpostmodernist practices is rendered less stark. For, when oneunderstands that all artifactssignify, modernism is immediately placed ina wider semantic field than one obsessed with pure technical innovationand structuralrelationships.As a consequence, highly structured music isnot insulated from the social circumstances and institutions that nourish

it, though it remains true that a semantic dimension is encountered more

directlywhen music uses materialwith established associations.



Perspectivesof New Music

This article investigates these two notions of materialby examining thepost-serial music of Brian Ferneyhough and the inclusive aesthetic of

Wolfgang Rihm. As a way of showing that art can both retain formal

interest and reference its own semantic codes, the work of Rachel

Whiteread, a contemporary British sculptor, is also discussed. My search

for a way to overcome the binary division between abstract and semanti-

cized music is rooted in the work of Theodor W. Adorno. If, by arguingthat music can both be innovative and tied to particularsemantic con-

cerns, I bend some strands of Adorno's thought beyond their acceptedpositions, it is with the intention of continuing in spirit the debates he

instigated. Despite the limitations of some of his specific aesthetic judge-ments (his views on Stravinsky spring to mind), he offers significantresources by consistently reading modernist art as encoded subjectivity-thus as a semantic medium-and thereby challenging the narrow view of

musical material, characteristic of institutionalized modernism, that

describes it solely in terms of internal configurations. At the same time,Adorno's

critiqueof Mahleroffers a view of a material that includes a sec-

ond level of meaning derived from established conventions-a level of

meaning that we might now call semiotic-while bearing in mind that

such meanings for him are historically,rather than linguistically,derived.

We can now examine in more detail how these conceptions of material

arisein Adorno's writings on music.

The conflicting currents in modernism spawn both explicit dialectical

tensions and less deliberate inconsistencies in Adorno's responses to

music. He never ceased to advocate the importance of advanced tech-

nique (most famously in Philosophyof New Music), but alongside thiscommitment is an insistence that construction should release subjectivity,or work from a semantic core, instead of eliminating the subject in struc-

turalist fashion. Thus what one might call a semanticized reading of

modernism operates in Adorno's music criticism-a tendency that

enables us to reconsider some of the strands in modernism that Adorno

himself was predisposed to dismiss. Such a reading is compatible with

Peter Burger's suggestion that we try to free categories of modernism

"from their modernist rigidity and bring them back to life."2 Adorno'sown preferencesnotwithstanding, he holds together in a notion of music

as both technical advance and embodied subjectivitytwo dimensions thatbecome separatedin the crudest manifestationsof modernism as abstrac-tion and of postmodernism as cultural text. Before exploring further the

idea of postmodernism as a continuation and rereading of modernism, itwould be instructive to consider how Adorno's understandingof the newin music fares alongside his sensitive account of characterization in

Mahler.

30



Adorno and the Semanticsof Modernism

For Adorno, the new embodies the idea of historicallyadvancedmate-rial, by which he means a material subterraneanlyconnected to the con-ditions of its time. An artist, he contends, will encounter these conditions

by following the logic of the material,ratherthan by direct social engage-ment. It is, perhaps, surprisingthat the notion of advanced materialplayssuch a dominant role in Aesthetic Theory,when one considers thatAdorno had qualified it at various stages of his career. He vacillates onwhether Schoenberg's retention of phraseology and motivic working

from tonal music is a positive attribute,3and elsewhere admits that Jan-acek and Schreker were able to find latencies in material that appearedexhausted.4 Most notably, he acknowledges that "Mahler's progressive-ness does not reside in tangible innovations and advanced material."5Mahlerpresents a special case because, despite talk of an Austrianaccent,his nondependence on advanced materialis more an aesthetic preferencethan a whim of geo-historical circumstance: that is, the music's socialcontent is an active part of the signifying process. Adorno's suggestionthat traditionalmusical elements assume the role of characters n Mahlerindicates that there is a secondary level of semantic play in his music,which might be called semiotic. In Adorno's words,

What characterizes s, for that very reason, no longer simply what is,but, as the word character intends, a sign. Mahler drew his func-tional characters-what each individual part contributes to theform-from the stock of traditionalmusic. But they are used auton-

omously, without regard to their place in the established pattern.6

Reading the Mahler monograph in the context of Adorno's writings onnew music leads one to conclude that there are two Adornos: one is anadvocate of progressive material, while the other is prepared to track

multiple layers of signification. He seldom acknowledges this ambiva-

lence, which is more indicative of simultaneous possibilities than outrightcontradiction.

A variant of this dilemma emerges in an important article, "The Age-

ing of the New Music," in which Adorno wavers between accusing com-posers of hiding behind prefabricated material and hinting that the

category of the new itself is in decline.7 Put another way, he suggestedthat the new as a vehicle for critical consciousness was fading while thenew was on the ascendant as a prevailing ideology, pursued in a mecha-nistic fashion, driven more by a desire for invention than by a need to

convey a situated subjectivity. Carl Dahlhaus, meanwhile, renders the

high modernist aesthetic less threatening by suggesting it espouses anattitude

close to scientific experimentation, whereby the solving of one

31




problem leads to the posing of another;8a view that resonates with Jiir-

gen Habermas's opinion that modernity understands its own history as a

process of problem-generating and subsequent solving on a temporalaxis.9Described in this way, modernity appearsmore susceptible to inter-

vention and control than a modernity dominated by Adorno's brand of

instrumentalreason. But likening musical modernism to scientific experi-mentation fails either to resolve or to eliminate the Adornian tensionbetween a newness driven by subjectivity in search of expression and

newness generated by automated procedure. Put another way,Adorno issaying that problem-solving cannot be pursued in isolation from a social

dimension, a point that is not lost on Habermas who, in a discussion of

architecture, criticizes the once prevalent assumption that stylistic inno-

vation could be achieved in a purely technical dimension.10Adorno pro-vides a permanent reminder that music pursued as automated procedure,oblivious of its social content, fallsvictim to an etiolated subjectivity.

Adorno's rejection of a technocratic modernism that has little time for

subjectivitybearsa curious relation to postmodernism and its varying cri-tiques of modernism. Yet when modernism is conveyed as a celebrationof hardened abstraction or postmodernism as a welcome turn to the sub-

ject, he fits neither caricature. The two movements become a separationof technical and aesthetic needs that he had sought to understand assimultaneous moments dependent on each other. When advocates of

postmodernism jettison notions of the new, they typicallyportrayit in itsmost hardened formulations, rather than as represented by Adorno'sview of modernism, which is more multidimensional than his most

uncompromising statements suggest. High modernism certainly did

embody the arrogances of modernization (routed through educationaland cultural institutions) in its elitism, in its attempts to establish serial-ism as an international style, and in its willingness to mask gender forma-tions behind a doctrine of abstraction, leaving mass culture to deal withthe fallout." But the existence of these criticisms is itself indicative of

modernity's reflexive capacity, and suggests a critical transformation of

modernism, not its annihilation.

The postmodernist critique of high modernism, which takes its leadfrom critiques of the international style in architecture,12can be under-stood as a rebuttal from within modernity of a one-dimensional responseto modernity-as a way of reading and mobilizing the complex strandswithin modernity, rather than as an invitation to relinquish them. Thesame can be said of a musicology willing to criticize the formalist

approaches to composition and analysis that exerted such a grip on the

academy, and prepared to encounter music through the complex, multi-

dimensional strands of modernity. Far from abandoning modernity, we

32



Adorno and the Semantics of Modernism

are experiencing its intensification and acceleration, indeed globalization,with its procedures reaching deep into patterns of cultural transmission.

This is not to deny that mutations have taken place:the ongoing dynamicof modernity certainlyhas dissolved its older forms and a blinkered belief

in technological progress is widely challenged. It is now broadly acceptedthat cultural (and scientific) outlooks are constructed and negotiated, yetthis information is entirely commensurate with modernity's inherent self-

reflexivitysince it looks to itself for normativity,not to external values.13

Thus, to take a specific instance, when we understand that serialism isculturallyembedded, and is more than-as we were once told-a partic-ular method of pitch organization, then we are nearer to understandingthe semantic resources that feed it: that is, we are not condemned to an

exclusively technocratic view of it. We are also nearerto understanding it

as embodying a particularmusical subjectivitythat does not possess uni-

versalvalidity.Modernization is transgressive in its willingness to destabilize tradi-

tion, but has a blanduniformity

in itsability

to turn difference into

equivalence, to make objects fungible. The process thereby produces a

certain randomness, whereby objects lose their individualityand become

arbiters of exchange-value. Highly organized music, or, more specifically,music that has been rationalized by an external process, is vulnerable to

the tension ingrained in this prevailinglogic: events start to assume arbi-

trary relationships and to generate secondary configurations. When this

happens, the noncoercive dialogue of part and the whole that Adorno

hopes for in art becomes an uneasy alliance of control and chance. The

tension between form and the particularhas, perhaps, been the central

problem of new music, and it is a reflection of Adorno's core concernwith rendering concepts permeable to our inner nature.

The two prevalentcontemporary responses to this demand both seek a

gestural syntax:one representsit by means of internal configurations, theother by a semanticized modernism, with a more ambivalent attitudetowards the category of the new. The two paths touch on the dialecticaltension that runs through Adorno's work between increasing technical

mastery and the expressive needs of the subject. (Both routes coexist inMahler's expanded notion of material that can simultaneously reflect on

symphonic progenitors and draw cafe and folk-derived sources into art

music.) With a broader view of material, the perceived oppositionbetween a so-called abstract music bent on advancing technique and amore referentialmusic is blurred. The autonomy of the former is weak-ened when it is shown to be dependent on institutions and acceptedcommunicative practices, while the latter has the capacity to be morethan derivativeand has the

potential to articulatesubjectivities informed

33




by specific social and geographical situations. The next section examinesthe survival and continuation of the new, asking what it might mean

beyond its own discourses, while the final section looks at the idea of asemanticized modernism, both for our historical understanding of mod-ernist music and for current practice.

II

The dialectic of form and particular, which plays a crucial role in

Adorno's understanding of modernism, lies at the heart of Pierre

Boulez's aesthetics, and his responses to it have kept faith with a belief in

advanced material.'4 Likewise, the music of Brian Ferneyhough attests

that innovation and invention remain realistic goals; that if newness can

no longer function as the sole criterion for the production and apprecia-tion of music, particularlywhen associated with a particular composi-tional

technique,it can nevertheless remain a

realistic aesthetic goal.Indeed, he perceives less of a crisis in the idea of new music and progress-than Adorno because he is less preoccupied with the idea of a singleadvanced material.'5But in many respects, his understanding of a critical

subjectivityin contemporary composition is Adornian.

Remaining true to the modernist notion of an immanent unfolding of

material,he pursuesan idea of mediated materialpast the logjam of auto-mated and aleatoric practices while understanding that "fluctuatingboundary-states"are part of the process.16 Sensitive to the elimination of

the subject in the objectified procedures of serialism, Ferneyhough has

sought, as Adorno advocates, to subsume subjectivity within the mate-rial'sobjectivity so that, acting as a filter, the materialprevents expressionemerging in standardized form. And his music is commensurate withAdorno's notion of an art that generates its own form, since the various

gestures establish their own associations and do not depend on a precastmold. The consistency with which Ferneyhough discusses fields of con-fluence and divergence, intersection and collision suggests that this music

may have invented its own categories,17which replace and neutralize tra-ditional ones such as "tension and resolution, continuation, develop-ment, contrast and reassertion," as Adorno's material theory of form

predicted.18This said, Adorno's notion of working from the bottom up,with form emerging from the particularseems to have more obviously incommon with Boulez's preference for the multiplication of a single ideathan with Ferneyhough's predilection for an undifferentiatedmass focus-

ing down to the given.19 But this apparent discrepancy is generated by

Adorno's limited experiences and anticipations of musical material, not

34




by aesthetic disagreement. Passing an unformed mass through varioussieves and grids until it becomes distinct material is a process very much

akin to criticalconsciousness seeking to reveal the constituents of amor-

phous concepts. Finding new ways to sieve creativevolition is itself a pro-cess of modernization, but it also facilitates critical reflection on

modernity: it helps to break down apparentlyimmutable and unnego-tiable givens.

Describing his compositional practice, in a recent essay, Ferneyhough

talks of the simultaneous unfolding of multiple, conflictually interactive"time-line vectors," or local histories. Though he does associate life his-

tory with the experiences of the composer,20what he seems to mean in

this instance is that musical events pursue crossing trajectories, just as

people carryunfolding life histories within themselves. This idea is to beunderstood in a more than metaphoricalsense, since musical material car-

ries traces of subjectivity.He continues by suggesting that multiple and

conflicting processes will tolerate, indeed be enervated by "the accep-

tance of irrational,locally-determined states which germinate, grow anddisbalance in the intersticesof the dominant paradigm of reason, takingtheir nourishment from it, adapting and subverting its vocables to illicit

purposes-purposes not directly responsible to the referentialwhole."21If we take these two proposals together, then the locally determinedstates are those aspects of life histories that do not conform to overridingcontrol, hence the music explores the tensions of modern subjectivity.This creative dialogue between structuraldeterminacy and local contin-

gency is matched by an understanding of thedialogue

between continu-

ity and transformation in modernism. Put another way, Ferneyhoughconsiders that the judgmental autonomy of the Enlightenment subjectacceptswhat he calls the "wounding presence of its Doppelgdnger,"22hat

is, new music is willing to critique the rationalitythat once undergirdedit.

Without yielding to pluralistnotions of a world museum captured bythe camera-wielding tourist, he knows that the structure-oriented per-ception of a composition as a map, as once proffered by Boulez,23 needs

to be enriched by the unfolding life histories that occupy this space.Indeed, by pushing musical material beyond the seeming impasse pre-sented by the extremes of determinacyand indeterminacy,and their asso-ciated splitting of production and reception, Ferneyhough encourageslisteners to pursue various tracksthrough the multiple events in his com-

positions. In Terrain for violin and wind octet (1992), to give an ex-

ample, one responds to the energy generated by the interacting and col-

liding gestures, and drawsshapes from the profusion of information. The

sheer virtuosity and physicality of the performance-evident even on a

35




recording-is palpable, while the density of information in the scoreforces performers to make interpretive decisions and to break through

accepted playing techniques. Thus by exceeding accepted conventions,the music does, as the composer suggests, challenge normative behavior.

But for Ferneyhough life histories are deeply sedimented, almost to the

point of metaphor, within a musical material that generates its own

codes. This unfurling is an immanent process.The validityof this approachis self-evident, but it does not exclude the

possibility of life histories and semantic issues being referenced moredirectly.While total pastiche and assemblages of objects with thoroughly

predefined meanings hardly encourage critical reflection, there is spacefor a compositional practice-admittedly always unpredictable-thatincludes objects with semantic associations, facilitating intertextual or

multitextual levels of meaning as well as those deriving from internal con-

figurations. Indeed both layersof signification can coexist and multitrack

at several semantic levels.24 Such a possibility ties in with the alternative

pathfor musical modernism offered

byAdorno's

hearingof Mahler.

But it is not only Mahler that semanticizes modernism for Adorno,since his readings of music consistently socialize the most abstractproce-dures. In so doing he often pushes against the grain of music assumed to

embody self-determining autonomy, and hence works hard as a reader.

What Mahler seems to offer is the possibility of a music in which a

semantic dimension will not need to be so arduously dug out, since an

intersection of meanings is already part of a material that assumes an

active reader.In Mahler, institutional affiliationand genre expectation are

explicitly foregrounded in a way they seldom are in music solely depen-dent on an aesthetic of newness and progress.

My intention is not to suggest that Ferneyhough's aesthetic is miscon-

ceived, but to blunt the opposition he makes between his own construc-

tional procedures and more overtly semanticized music. In making adistinction between progressive and pluralist music, Ferneyhoughchooses to say,in a revealing phrase, "there is alwaysroom for a languagewhich offers the listener a rich panorama of life-forms in motion."25

These words are telling because the metaphors he uses to describe sup-posedly abstract processes are equally applicable to referential music.

They hint that his own music is indebted to social processes that aremore

directly accessed in other musics, and place its technicality within thearena of such discourses. By distilling social processes, Ferneyhough maybe able to invent material and processes with less restrictions than com-

posers working with embedded codes; but when he talks of an imbalancewithin the interstices of the dominant paradigmof reason, he is referring

to something that can be accessed more directlyby other musics, particu-

36




larlyby some criticalpopular musics.26 And it is important that modern-ist and popular musics are understood to be working in a shared social

space, even though material has greater freedom when it is not burdened

by obvious semiotic conventions. Working with explicitly semantic

objects is not an automatic recipe for success, nor indeed failure, but itdoes encourage active engagement with the semiotic codes always atwork in musical perception, making a sometimes implicit process more

explicit. The fluctuations of identity and difference that mark our age can

be explored immanently through material innovation or through semi-otic reference. Both approaches, or interactions between them, hold the

possibility of formulating subjectivities that are neither rigidly identical

nor vacuously pluralist;neither has monopoly over the future.

III

Reconcilingmodernist abstraction with lived

spaceis a task more

easilyachieved in visual arts, and is certainly a dominant theme in the work ofRachel Whiteread, a contemporary sculptor, or caster, and winner of the1993 Turner prize. To bewildering effect, she solidifies empty spaces,most famously in House, a concrete cast of a terraced house in the EastEnd of London marked for demolition (see Example 1). Injecting new

potential into WalterBenjamin's meditations on the dialecticalswitchingbetween new and old, we are confronted with an inverted house,

stripped of its external structure. This found object-a "terrace

informelle"-opens a stubborn gap between knowledge and perception:we struggle to register the outside of the inside. The space in which liveswere conducted, the air they breathed is transformed and solidified byimpenetrable facades. The interior of a rejected object has become asource for the new, a modernist abstraction: instead of semanticizingmodernism, the cast has modernized, or abstracted,a community and its

interpretive horizon. The project simultaneously estranges a familiar

object and crystallizes its social code, in a manner congruent with

Adorno's and Benjamin's desire to break open the embedded historiesand memories of objects passed over by modernization. Defying all the

perceived limitations of modernist art, it combines an intellectually bril-liant transformation of time and space with popular appeal, and has the

audacity to manage all this on a brown-field site. No doubt fired byBaudelaire's view of modernity as creative destruction, the authorities

quickly demolished one of the few pieces of post-war sculpture to have

gained popular interest (notably in the extensive coverage it received inthe British

press);thus

Housenow survivesonly in documentation.27

37




Photographby Sue Ormond,courtesyAnthonyd'OffayGallery, ondon

EXAMPLE 1: RACHEL WHITEREAD, UNTITLED (HOUSE) (1993),

COMMISSIONED BY ARTANGEL SPONSORED BY BECKS

38




Whiteread's resin cast of the interior of a hot-water bottle- Untitled(Torso)-also successfully subverts expectations. It creates a translucent

shape, both solid and unstable, while generating perceptual disarrayand

reversing the neutralization of mass production. A common object has

been converted into a presence, something with an aura that drawsus to

its space. In a complex series of perceptual mismatches, an object that

warms the body now exudes a sense of solidified fluid; it visually glowsand mimes the torso. A latex mattress cast also mimes its use-value:

slumped against a wall this installation is worn out (exhausted) and inneed of support.

Bridging the divide between aesthetic experience and subjectivity by

rendering abstractiontangible, Whiteread's successful casts fulfil many of

Benjamin's hopes for modern culture, but skew his portrayalof art in the

age of mechanical reproduction. Neither fully autonomous nor fullyautomated, casts imbue mass-produced objects with individuality anddraw us into the lives with which they are indelibly stamped. Drawing on

specifichuman situations for aesthetic

purposesis

not, however,without

risk.In a chapterentitled "The Artist as Ethnographer,"Hal Foster com-

ments, as follows: "Killed as culture, the local and the everyday can berevived as simulacrum, a 'theme' for a park or a 'history' in a mall, and

site-specific work can be drawn into this zombification of the local andthe everyday, this Disney version of the site-specific. Tabooed in post-modernist art, values like authenticity, originality and singularity canreturn as properties of sites that artists are asked to define or to embel-lish."28

Casting imbues abstractobjects with a human presence, the solidified

space alluding to the absent lives that endow it with meaning. Music isless able to signify concrete lives, but it can (though at risk of heritage-type trivialization) allude to subjectivities and meanings by referencingparticular"objects." Such objects may include the sound worlds broughtinto music by the sampler, while film music provides a vocabulary ofestablished semiotic associations. A convention linking triadic hornthemes with heroic subjectivity, for example, extends from the Austro-

German symphonic tradition to the film scores of John Williams. Suchcustoms can be formulaic in film music and are even more so when usedin less practically constrained circumstances to provide utilitarian, pre-formed meanings. When sensitivelyconceived, however, referentialmusichas the capacityto find affinities and to enable intersections between dif-ferent traditions. In such cases the traditions themselves are changedbecause the meanings of the objects yielded are touched by compositionand reception strategies that may awakennew latencies.

39




Recently many composers (including George Rochberg, HenryckGorecki, and Wolfgang Rihm) have chosen to work with established

codes drawn mainly from the reservoir of western art music, while

eschewing a neoclassical irony. Others (including Steve Reich and Sofia

Gubaidulina)have combined both western and nonwestern frames of ref-erence. Adorno was, of course, damning of neoclassicism and tells us that

polystylism and intertextualityare risky strategieswith a capacityfor spec-tacular failure. Indeed, diachronic relations-or links and transitions as

Adorno would call them-present a significant challenge for pluralistmusic, since ingrained in pluralismis the potential to substitute synchro-nicallyone object for another without reflecting on the diachronic conse-

quences.29 And, as Ferneyhough points out, there is a contradiction in

using an object to provide semantic content without the context that

provided that content.30 Yet it is a potentially productive contradiction

because an object associated with a certain meaning can simultaneouslyevoke its own memory trace and its decay. This possibility is mentionedin Adorno's

writingson

Mahler,where he describes the transformation

of social codes; and similar themes are even broached in his discussion ofHistoire du soldat.31The search for associations between apparentlydis-crete objects sparksone of the most troubling terms in Adorno's aesthet-

ics: "mimesis,"defined as "the non-conceptual affinityof the subjectivelyproduced with its unposited other."32Without dwelling on the full impli-cations of this statement, we can conclude that an art form willing to

explore affinities between the memory tracesembedded in objects wouldtouch on a form of cognition that does not generate identity thoughexclusion. Such a practice would enable differing subjectivities to findmutual affinitieswithout one identity distorting or expelling the others.It would also bring the conservative traits in Adorno's music criticisminto collision with the radicalpossibilities envisaged in his aesthetics.

An affinity between objects is dimly anticipated by John Cage'sattempts to release the inner nature of sounds. His embargo on the com-

posing subject, which bears the mark of a constructionist aesthetic, doesnot obviously sit comfortably alongside a semanticized modernism, but

the weakening of the composing subject simultaneously creates space forlistening subjects to pursue various interpretivestrategies.The absence ofa particularnotion of the author allows semantic resources other thanauthorial intention to be mobilized, potentially accessing the sort ofhuman specificityfound in Whiteread's casts. Composers less worried byauthorial intention than Cage can breakdown semantic objects and syn-tacticallyrelate them to other objects, generating an interesting processof semantic decay and transformation, as Gyorgy Ligeti's Horn Trio

demonstrates. Form in such music is not entirely syntactic, since it also

40




deals with memory traces and associations. In an age when the gapbetween what might be called the phenomenological experience of lifeand its structuraldescription often looks like a chasm,33reference to an

apparentcloser correlation between the two dimensions is appealing and

possibly creative, nostalgic and possibly progressive.Much of Wolfgang Rihm's music works on the basis of affinitybetween

different materials, moods, and associations, in an attempt to think a

range of intensities at once that does not simply collapse back into

accepted habits and create pastiche with predetermined meanings. Thesemantic associations of his derived materialsclearlyhark to another con-

text, but (rebutting Ferneyhough's concern) they occupy a logic other

than the one from which they originate. Materials return as forms of

memory, hence they refer to a stylistichorizon but are not wholly depen-dent on it. Such memories can be juxtaposed with unexpected materials,and subjected to a different logic. Accordingly, Rihm's references to

tonal music often occur as islands in a modernist style.As

mentioned,Adorno's

interpretationof Mahler tracks the

memorytraces and characterizations n his music, concluding that it releasesmate-

rialized social codes into a second dimension of signification. There is nota direct equivalent to this in Rihm, since although traditional functionssuch as climaxes or transitions are sometimes reworked, their social codeis not completely transformed, but by isolating objects he does perhapsintensify their formal meaning for a contemporary audience. The secondmovement of Rihm's Third String Quartet, Im Innersten, for example,contains a wide arrayof tonal references, ranging from the Mahlerian

slow music with which it closes (see Example 2) to smallerdetails.34Thelatter include fragments of a Janacek-type melody (demonstrated in

Example 3, which shows the opening bars of the movement), a windowin which pitch-class A emerges as a center (bar 10), and a D-majorcadence (bar 17).

Understanding of these processes is not adequatelyserved by standardnotions of intertextuality and multitextuality; it is more productive tothink of different objects wrapping one another, that is, taking the shape

of one another but remaining separate. Parallels can be drawn betweenthis type of experience and Fredric Jameson's description of multimedia

installations, where elements form unstable alliances and where the

whole, which will not fuse into a single viewpoint, tilts the normal per-ception of other components.35Aspects of this perceptualdisarraycan befound in Whiteread's casts, which confuse standardnotions of inside and

outside, and establish a dialogue between the social expectations associ-ated with objects and their new-found form. In visual art, wrapper and

wrapped can take one another's shape without surrenderingidentity; in

41



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43




music they can take on affinities without merging, and this is how the sty-listic references in Im Innersten operate. The slow music that concludes

the second movement (see Example 2) is wrapped by the fragmentedmodernist style that precedes it and follows it in the opening of the new

movement, and a similarprocedure occurs in the fourth movement. In

the sixth movement, however, the situation changes and predominantlystill music wrapsviolent eruptions.

Rihm rejects the new as an overriding compositional objective, and

seeks instead expressive spontaneity and energy, but has clearly learnedfrom high modernism while seeking a more inclusive aesthetic (indeedDahlhaus suggests that there is a smooth transition from experimentswith timbre to using it as an expressive resource).36As mentioned, the

logic of affinities found in Rihm's best works has much in common with

a component, at least, of mimesis, while challenging the frame Adorno

applies to issues of pastiche and pluralism. This music neither collapsesinto comfortable formulae nor provides an amusing stylistic array.A fur-

ther strand of Adorno's modernist aestheticsquestions

whether the

immediacy Rihm strives for is attainable. Sometimes Rihm's expressivedirectness is indeed crude, suggesting we can side-step modernity; but

sometimes it is successful-indicating that musical latency is less

exhausted than Adorno sometimes implies. The music switches betweenthe memory of immediacy and attempts to convey it directly, rebuffingmodernity's capacityto generate a dysfunctional gap between the techni-cal know-how of systemic functions and aesthetic feeling. Rihm addressesthe issue in an eclectic and sometimes semanticized manner, but, as indi-

cated earlier,it can also be approachedon an immanent level, suggestingthat the advanceof material remains a realisticstrategy.Both possibilitiesemerge from Adorno's writings on music, though he is normally associ-ated with the first. Neither need cancel the other and both seek affinitiesbetween diverse gestures.

The paradoxes of modernity propel the struggle to connect musicalstructure with experiential particularity,exacting demands not just on

composers, but also on listening strategies. The current emphasis on the

readerhelps to reorient our understanding of high modernism, and neednot relativize a sense of immanent meaning in a work, or text. Instead of

processing literature entirely for form, readers now ask how they mighthave reacted to a situation depicted; comparably, listeners can inquireintersubjectivelyhow musical events touch their lives. This is not to sug-gest that social environments must alwaysbe explicitly part of music, butthat the play of difference and identity in music is not insulated from thisdomain. Living in paralleland intersecting cultures requiresa recastingof

subjectivity that is still incomplete, and musical creativity,whether com-

44




positional or reflective, is but a part of this process. Pursued in eitherdirection, musical materialexacts demands: simply referencing social con-structions creates a jumbled pluralism, while cleanly partitioning them

deprivesmusic of vital semantic resources.37

The current interest in musical identities alerts us to the multiplestrands of modernity, many of which were repressed by a particularbrand

of high modernism. The post-war emphasis on technique and construc-

tion (both compositional and analytical)bracketsout many components

that contribute to musical subjectivity(such as the social circumstancesinwhich music is produced, performed, and heard), and in doing so creates

an idiosyncratic reception history of modernism, valued more for its

technical advancement than its cultural resources. In this reading

Schoenberg's innovations are neatly severed from the intellectual milieu

that instigated them (which includes many nineteenth-century residues),and used to buttress a narrowlyconstructionist history of music that links

his innovations directly to the early Darmstadt preoccupations with

material.Similarly,

Pierre Boulez'sanalysis

of TheRiteof Spring

tells us

plenty about his compositional preoccupations at the time,38 but little

about issues of identity and nationality in Stravinsky.It may well be appropriatefor composers to take only what they can

use from other musics, but it is equally appropriateto redress the balanceand to explore the cultural conditions and discourses of early twentieth-

century modernism. At the same time it is as well to recognize that this

process of resemanticization, or rehistoricism, derives in part from ourown millennial concerns about identity and tradition, and such assess-

ment is therefore far from disinterested. By uncovering its own earlier

strands,modernity transformsitself; a renewed understanding of the pastoffers creative resources that were bypassed by predominantly technical

interpretations. Yet sharp distinctions between technical and semantic

reception histories, like sharp distinctions between modernism and post-modernism, encounter problems with Adorno's modernist aesthetics,which, I have argued, pull in both directions. Schoenberg's innovations,for Adorno, are placed in a culturalcontext that he sharedwith the com-

poser; his Stravinskycritique, on the other hand, which links him toregressive forces in modernity, is insensitive to the traditions Stravinskydraws on that lie outside the central European canon. One wishes thatAdorno had applied the same powers of differentiation to Stravinsky hathe harnessed in his Mahler critique. Nevertheless, if Adorno is read

against the grain of some of his unexamined preferences, then his willing-ness to semanticize and to historicize supposedly abstract proceduresprovides a resource for contemporary concerns, and implies we are

undergoing a reassessment of modernity, not its abandonment. One

45



46 Perspectivesof New Music

manifestation of this transformation is that critical theory has grown inimportance for both the reception and production of music. Musicologyis increasingly aware of music's dependence on networks of discourses

and composition is increasingly willing to engage its mechanisms for

semantic production.




NOTES

1. An earlierversion of this paperwas presented as the keynote address

at a conference organized by the Society for Music Analysisat Gold-

smiths College, University of London, February 1998, entitled "The

Category of the New: Adorno, Analysis,and Contemporary Compo-sition." I am grateful to Ian Phillips-Kerr for setting the music

examples.

2. Peter Burger, "The Decline of the Modern Age," Telos62 (Winter

1984-85): 127. My notion of a semanticized modernism is indebted

to Peter Burger's suggested dialectical continuation of modernism

(as an alternative to anti-modernist and pluralist readings), and what

he calls the "re-semanticization of art," 130.

3. Theodor W. Adorno, "The Ageing of the New Music," Telos77 (Fall

1988): 101.4. Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophyof Modern Music, trans. Anne G.

Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster (London: Sheed and Ward, 1973),35 [I have modified the translation to Philosophy f New Music in the

present article]; Theodor W. Adorno, "Schreker," n Quasi una fan-tasia, trans. Rodney Livingstone (London: Verso, 1992), 130-44.

5. Theodor W. Adorno, Mahler:A Musical Physiognomy,rans. Edmund

Jephcott (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1992), 19.

6. Theodor W. Adorno, Mahler,48.

7. Theodor W. Adorno, "The Ageing of the New Music," Telos77 (Fall1988).

8. Carl Dahlhaus, "Progress and the Avant Garde," in Schoenberg ndthe New Music, trans. Derrick Puffett and Alfred Clayton (Cam-

bridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 20.

9. Jiirgen Habermas, "The New Obscurity: The Crisis of the WelfareState and the Exhaustion of Utopian Energies," in TheNew Conser-

vatism, trans. S. Nicholsen (Cambridge: Polity, 1989), 48.

10. The intersection of form and function in architecture is a centraltheme in Habermas's "Modern and Postmodern Architecture," inTheNew Conservatism.

11. For discussion of modernism's gendering, see Susan McClary, "Ter-

minal Prestige: The Case of Avant-Garde Music Composition,"

47




Cultural Critique (Spring 1989): 57-81; see also Andreas Huyssen,"Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism's Other," in After the Great

Divide (London: Macmillan, 1986).

12. For a discussion of modernism in music informed by debates in

architecture, see Nikolas Kompridis, "Learning from Architecture:

Music in the Aftermath to Postmodernism," Perspectivesof New

Music 31, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 6-23.

13. For a discussion of modernity's self-dependence and normativity,seeHabermas, "The New Obscurity,"49.

14. In my New Music and the Claims of Modernity(Aldershot: Ashgate,

1997), I argue that the formal structuring of space seen in Boulez's

Third Piano Sonata has led to the experientialsense of space and sur-

face contingency characteristicof Repons.

15. For a discussion of musical languages, see Brian Ferneyhough,

"Form-Figure-Style:An Intermediate

Assessment,"in Collected

Writings,ed. JamesBoros and RichardToop (Amsterdam:Harwood

Academic Publishers, 1995), 27. (All references to articles by Fer-

neyhough are contained in his CollectedWritings.)

16. BrianFerneyhough, "ParallelUniverses," 77.

17. Brian Ferneyhough, "Responses to a Questionnaire on 'Complex-

ity,"' 67.

18. Theodor W. Adorno, "Vers une musique informelle," Quasi unafantasia, 282. Adorno refersin various places to a materialtheory of

form. For discussion of this issue, see Max Paddison, Adorno's Aes-

thetics of Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993),

chapter4.

19. Ferneyhough compares his method of sieving an unformed mass to

Boulez's technique of multiplication in an "Interview with Richard

Toop," 253 and 264.

20. BrianFerneyhough, "ParallelUniverses," 81-82.

21. BrianFerneyhough, "ParallelUniverses," 83.

22. "ParallelUniverses," 83.

23. Boulez mentions this in a discussion of his Third Piano Sonata.

Pierre Boulez, "Sonate, que me veux-tu," in Orientations, trans.

Martin Cooper (London: Faber, 1986), 151.

48




24. Ferneyhough talks about "'structural multi-tracking' (by which Imean the simultaneous unfolding and transformation of multiple,

conflictuallyinteractive "time-line vectors" or local histories)," "Par-

allel Universes," 82.

25. BrianFerneyhough, "Form-Figure-Style: An IntermediateAssess-

ment," 27.

26. Eyerman and Jamison argue that the 1960s folk revival, which fed

into later developments in rock music, was a form of cognitive praxisthat resisted a dominantly utilitarian culture. Ron Eyerman and

Andrew Jamison, Music and SocialMovements:Mobilizing Traditions

in the TwentiethCentury (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1998), chapter 5.

27. Rachel Whiteread, James Lingwood (ed.), House, (London: Phaidon

Press, 1995), includes a photographic essay by John Davies. The

evolution of House was documented on video by John Kelly and

Helen Silverlock of Hackneyed Productions.

28. Hal Foster, The Return of the Real (Cambridge, Mass., and London:

MIT Press, 1996), 197.

29. Ferneyhough draws attention to this problem when he commentsthat "we're back at the stage where the only form-building means

available seem to be either the banal contrast principle, or some kindof chain principle, putting things together in some sort of more-or-

less interesting order whereby very often the events could bechanged round without a great deal of interference to the generalemotional patterning." "Interview with RichardToop," 283.

30. See Brian Ferneyhough, "Form-Figure-Style: An Intermediate

Assessment," 21-28 and "IITempo della Figura," 34.

31. Adorno, Philosophy f ModernMusic, 183.

32. Theodor W. Adorno, Aesthetic Theory, rans. Robert Hullot-Kentor

(London: The Athlone Press, 1997), 54.

33. I am paraphrasingFredric Jameson, Postmodernism,or, the Cultural

Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso; Durham: Duke UniversityPress, 1991), 410.

34. See my New Music and the Claims of Modernityfor more extensivediscussion of Rihm. In particular,see 141-44 for discussion of ImInnersten.

49



50 Perspectivesof New Music

35. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of LateCapitalism; see in particular chapter 6 for a discussion of Robert

Gober's installations and chapter 4 for a discussion of architectural

wrapping.

36. Carl Dahlhaus, "A Rejection of Material Thinking?" in Schoenberg

and the New Music, 279.

37. A similarpoint is made by Nikolas Kompridis, "Learningfrom Archi-

tecture: Music in the Aftermath to Postmodernism," 20-21.38. Nattiez makes this point, in Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Music and Dis-

course:Towarda Semiologyof Music, trans. Carolyn Abbate (Prince-ton: Princeton University Press, 1990), 183-84. The Boulez essay is

"StravinskyRemains" in Stocktakings rom an Apprenticeship, rans.

Stephen Walsh (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).

Documents

Adorno and the Semantics of Modernism_Williams Alastair