The Musical Absolute

Musicality What is living and what is dead in writings on music? In recent years, ways of answering this question have changed. In 1977, musicologist Rose Rosengard Subotnik published a groundbreaking article, provocatively entitled Is Music Criticism Way It Is?' This initial question immediately divided into three: Why, it is asked, does Adorno show next to no informed awareness of music before Bach? Why is he so reluctant to engage in purely musical analysis? And why is his language so impossibly contorted?2 In subsequent 15 years, Subotnik's work on Adorno, inclusion of references to Adorno in basic musicological and music historical texts, most notably those of Carl Dahlhaus, and continuing interest in Frankfurt School and its aesthetic theories have combined to lend these questions a rhetorical quality. The answers Subotnik gave seem correct and are generally accepted: focus is on the modern or post-Enlightenment cultural system; especially German music, feels called upon to provide an explicit, comprehensible, and generally accessible demonstration of its own necessity and significance; Adorno's conception of music as one element in a cultural structure would seem to go far in accounting not only for his avoidance of early music but also for his characteristic avoidance of strictly musical analysis; Adorno's esoteric effect is in large measure a by-product of

Absolute (philosophy) · Art · Epistemology · Literature · Musical · Diverse Musicological Studies · Musicology and Musical Analysis · Philosophy