Adorno’s dialectical account of musical progress risked dressing up one school’s rise as necessity

Evidence

This was a dialectical view of musical progress which raised the suspicion that it was furnishing the growth of one school in music with the solemnities of dialectical necessity. … On the other hand, Adorno’s recognition of twelve-tone composition as a form of progress forced him to state more exactly what faithfulness to the ideal of free composition might mean under social conditions in which freedom was lacking. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 328

Categorization

• DEEPTHINKING: The collapse of a materialist dialectic into the legitimation of a single artistic faction is a tension worth sitting with.
• SEED: Angle: how ‘dialectical necessity’ arguments smuggle institutional prestige into philosophy of history.
• XREF: connects to: Adorno founded a philosophy-of-history approach to music aesthetics centered on Schoenberg’s school — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 535; Adorno’s music philosophy systematized a movement that already existed — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 539; 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 founded a philosophy-of-history approach to music aesthetics centered on Schoenberg’s school — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 535; Adorno’s music philosophy systematized a movement that already existed — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 539; Adorno read twelve-tone technique as progressive rationalization and demythologizing of music