Philosophy of New Music
A publishing event—a revealing new translation of Theodor Adorno's manifesto of musical radicalism
Translated, edited, and with an introduction by Robert Hullot-Kentor
Intensely polemical from its first publication in 1946, every aspect of Philosophy of New Music was met with extreme reactions. Marking a turning point in Theodor Adorno's musicological philosophy, this book became highly regarded and widely read among musicians, scholars, and philosophers. In this new translation, Philosophy of New Music emerges as an indispensable key to Adorno's illustrious and influential oeuvre.
In 1947 Theodor Adorno, one of the seminal European philosophers of the postwar years, announced his return after exile in the United States to a devastated Europe by writing Philosophy of New Music. Intensely polemical from its first publication, every aspect of this work was met with extreme reactions, from stark dismissal to outrage. Even Schoenberg reviled it.
Despite the controversy, Philosophy of New Music became highly regarded and widely read among musicians, scholars, and social philosophers. Marking a major turning point in his musicological philosophy, Adorno located a critique of musical reproduction as internal to composition itself, rather than as a matter of the reproduction of musical performance. Consisting of two distinct essays, “Schoenberg and Progress” and “Stravinsky and Reaction,” this work poses the musical extremes in which Adorno perceived the struggle for the cultural future of Europe: between human emancipation and barbarism, between the compositional techniques and achievements of Schoenberg and Stravinsky.
In this completely new translation—presented along with an extensive introduction by distinguished translator Robert Hullot-Kentor—Philosophy of New Music emerges as an indispensable key to the whole of Adorno's illustrious and influential oeuvre.
Related Publications
Kierkegaard
Construction of the Aesthetic
Adorno’s first major published work, which points the way to all of his subsequent writings.
Developing Variations
Style and Ideology in Western Music
Combines into a cohesive statement the author’s pathbreaking critical essays on Western music.
Exotic Parodies
Subjectivity in Adorno, Said, and Spivak
This groundbreaking text begins with the premise that postmodernism, poststructuralism, postcolonialism, and Marxism continue to present certain problems with the self/other distinction. It goes on to offer the first extended critique of the work of Gayatri Spivak; challenge the critical reception of Adorno in the American academy; examine Said's connection to Adorno; and make the first in-depth use of Adorno's Negative Dialectics in the context of postcolonial theory.
Dream Factories of a Former Colony
American Fantasies, Philippine Cinema
How the Philippine postcolonial imagination represents the American colonizer