Adorno held that artistic material should be liberated from tonal myths by humanizing consciousness.
Evidence
It may be that, in present social conditions, works of the dignity of Beethoven’s or even Bach’s are radically excluded … the material has become brighter and freer, and has escaped for ever from the mythical restrictions of number dictated by the overtone series and by tonal harmonics. The image of liberated humanity, which we were once able to picture so clearly, can apparently be suppressed in today’s society, the mythical basis of which it challenges. But it can never be forgotten or destroyed … What cannot be changed in nature may be left to look after itself. Where it can be changed, it is up to us to change it. But a nature which stubbornly sticks to its own gloomy and heavy-hearted ways, and which has to shun the light of brightening, warming consciousness, can be justifiably mistrusted. In the art of genuine humanism there will be no more place for it. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 366
Categorization
- XREF: Extends the Dialectic of Enlightenment theme: mastery of nature as both releasing productive forces and Enlightenment domination shifting into myth. — connects to: Adorno read twelve-tone music through humanity’s domination of nature; Adorno demanded that art offer animated forms born from the ego, not borrowed ones.