Adorno overgeneralized Schoenberg’s music as the sole legitimate musical material.

Evidence

The interaction between the relation of society to external nature and the relation of subjects to their own internal nature might have been examined against this background. But what Adorno in fact did was to force all the motifs together into an interpretation of the music produced by Schoenberg and his closest students, seeing this interpretation as the only one which did justice to current objective possibilities of the musical material. This was rather an exaggeration of the thesis that the universal is contained within the particular. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1259

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Adorno’s later defense of atonality as historically progressive while rejecting jazz and other forms. — connects to: Adorno fused Lukács, Kracauer, and Benjamin to justify Schoenberg’s musical revolution. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 365; Schoenberg rejected Adorno because he lacked technical fluency and prolific creativity — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 297