Adorno defined the new music as structured longing for vanished meaning

Evidence

Wozzeck became the work typifying expressionism in music, and the most successful work of the Schoenberg school. It seemed to Adorno that the fragments were `Schoenberg and Mahler together all at once, and it was in my mind that this really was the new music’. Schoenberg and Mahler together all at once meant, for him: structured longing, a music of longing for vanished meaning, the longing to break out of a baneful and, at the same time, self-satisfied world. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 285

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines Adorno’s core aesthetic criterion of ‘new music’ as structured longing — a key concept for the school’s musical theory.
• XREF: connects to: Music represents Adorno’s utopia of reconciled mind and nature — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1263; Adorno read lyric poems as recordings of a historical moment of loss — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2222; Unresolved music can express longing detached from any remembered object of faith — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1303

Broader Connections

• Music represents Adorno’s utopia of reconciled mind and nature #expands (0.75) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1263