But a conservativizing, restorationist assault, which preserved all the basic categories of 19th century tonality while pretending to rebel against such; the musical equivalent of Celine or Wyndham Lewis in the novel, or Riefenstahl in film. As such, something new does get said, but ultimately the reactionary forces retain the upper hand here; Schoenberg, for all his problems, at least moves in the direction of freedom by expressing genuine social contradictions of his work. It's actually something you can hear in the works involved: the acoustic richness and extraordinary scope of Schoenberg's mature works, versus the paltriness of Stravinsky's neoclassical phase.
-- Dennis
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I am at a disadvantage since I am not a musician. But there are enough correspondences between music and painting on some theoretical and formal level to translate. Plus, I haven't read Adorno's work on music.
The argument you (Adorno) are making appears in art through Gertude Stein's critique of Picasso. The argument in painting went like this. Picasso in the analytical cubist works (1908-18) is opening up our concepts of time and space and the assumed stasis of painting as an object through the use of simultaneous and multiple points of view, re-woven together as a new pictorial ground. This allows us to see and depict objects from any and all points of view and achieves a greater freedom of conceptual movement for both the painter and viewer. Critical theory by others goes on about the link between cubism and relativity versus Newtonian space and classical perspective.
In the synthetic cubist work (post-1918-20), Picasso has retreated back to the fixed pictorial plane in which the single point of view is assumed and observed, and the stasis of painting was restored. Such a move was retrograde and reactionary, and reaffirmed the rationalism of pictorial space going back to at least the hated royal authority of Colbert and the academy of Lebrun.
It's very difficult to return to a perceptual state were these kinds of arguments can be given their original impact. We are so over saturated and assaulted by a continual barrage of poly-focal media that blows off its own formal means with such routine, that to acknowledge it, is itself a stale joke. That gesture has become the archaeological signature of modernity.
Joyce's use of heavily re-worked words and sentences that conduct a multi-threaded counterpoint of multiple meanings and sounds in Finnegans Wake, with its weave of religion, nationality, political history achieves a related narrative or temporal effect to the multiple spatial perspectives in cubism. The totality of these effects from Schoenberg (Weber), Picasso, and Joyce is pretty overwhelming, especially considering the level of mastery achieved. When these works are considered in relation to what was going on in mathematics and physics, say from 1900-1930, it becomes obvious that the complete spectrum of the intellectual world was undergoing multiple revolutions. These revolutions all share a similar theme which is the subsuming and supplanting of a traditional formalism by an expanded range of variations and permutations build directly from the formal means and foundational architecture itself. Basically they amended and expanded the rules for doing thought, for looking, and listening--expanded the totality of the conceptual, perceptual and cognitive worlds.
The universal problem among all these activities, is that it is impossible to conceptually master them even as one of the conoscenti. What happens is a diffusion into ever increasedly narrow specializations. In part and as a consequence, these traditions, their modernist expansions and implicit critiques are ignored and one retreats to some habitual mode of thought instead. There is also the problem that each of these revolutions was founded on its own traditional ratio-temporal-spatial configuration--which is considered in some way a prerequisite, an a priori ground against which these activities become the figuration. And again, in part, as a consequence, the mastery and discipline required becomes so great that any participation in these activities is experienced as a kind of tyranny, and far removed from any conceptual freedom.
This doesn't really add much to the conversation, but this was all the further I got the other night.
Chuck Grimes