Adorno links music’s origin to the gesture of weeping and release

Evidence

The origin of music is of the nature of gesture, and closely related to the nature of tears. It is the gesture of release. The tension of the facial muscles, the tension which both directs the face into action on the environment and seals it off from that environment, is released. Music and tears open the lips and set the arrested human being free … One who lets himself go in tears, or in a form of music no longer resembling him in any way, at the same time lets the stream of everything he himself is not, everything which had been dammed up behind the wall of the objective world, flow back through him. As one who weeps, or one who sings, he goes forth into alienated reality … The gesture of someone returning, not the expectancy of someone waiting, describes the expression of all music, even in a world which deserves to die. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1262

Categorization

• XREF: This passage relays Adorno’s own text, which is famously echoed in the Dialectic of Enlightenment’s Odysseus chapter and in later critical aesthetics. — connects to: Music’s origin is the gestural release of tears, not meaning — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1262; Adorno read lyric poems as recordings of a historical moment of loss — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 2222; Music represents Adorno’s utopia of reconciled mind and nature — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1263
• corroborated: 2 independent passages support this claim — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1262

Broader Connections

• Music represents Adorno’s utopia of reconciled mind and nature #expands (0.80) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1263
• Adorno read lyric poems as recordings of a historical moment of loss #expands (0.78) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 2222