Modern music cannot be forced into inherited formal categories like theme and development.
Evidence
Contemporary music cannot be pinned down, even to categories as apparently general as theme and continuation, as if they were unalterable. It is nowhere laid down that it must, a priori, contain traditional elements of this sort, or even fields of tension and resolution, continuation, development, contrast, confirmation. All the less so in that reminiscences of these in the new material often produce serious inconsistencies, correcting what is itself a mainspring of development. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 544
Categorization
- DEFINE: Clarifies how Adorno treats the traditional formal vocabulary of theme, continuation, and development as historically contingent rather than a priori.
- XREF: Connects to Adorno’s broader critique of musical material and the philosophy of new music elsewhere in the Critical Theory literature. — connects to: Connections between musical complexes can plausibly compel without any preordained order or repeating theme. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 544; Advanced music’s immanent development abolishes bourgeois expressive categories. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 490; Music’s temporal medium makes forward development and freedom immanent necessities — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 541 (+1 more)
- yield-rescued: below the book’s yield-target cutoff, included anyway for connecting to: Connections between musical complexes can plausibly compel without any preordained order or repeating theme. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 544; Advanced music’s immanent development abolishes bourgeois expressive categories. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 490; Music’s temporal medium makes forward development and freedom immanent necessities — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 541 (+1 more)
Broader Connections
- Music’s temporal medium makes forward development and freedom immanent necessities
#complicates(0.78) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 541