Adorno’s aesthetic position shifted repeatedly across four distinct phases of modern music.

Evidence

In Adorno’s early contribution to the ZfS, there had been a sentimental sense of uninterrupted enlightenment: music that was enlightened and had, in its own sphere, achieved complete domination over nature was to be a provocation for unenlightened society. In the Philosophy of Modern Music he had pinned his hopes on the invigorating barbaric element in the dodecaphonic Schoenberg, who had returned to a sense of order. In `The Ageing of the New Music’ 89 he had been sceptical towards post-war developments in serial music. In Vers une musique informelle he had made a plea for a new, post-serial departure in music. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 680

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the earlier discussion of the Horkheimer-Adorno culture industry texts and Adorno’s Schoenberg reading. — connects to: Adorno mapped literary avant-garde stages onto the stages of musical technique. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 552; Adorno read twelve-tone technique as progressive rationalization and demythologizing of music
• yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Adorno mapped literary avant-garde stages onto the stages of musical technique. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 552; Adorno read twelve-tone technique as progressive rationalization and demythologizing of music