Music’s temporal medium makes forward development and freedom immanent necessities

Evidence

As an art that occurs within time, music is tied by its very medium to the forms demanded by successiveness. It is, therefore, like time, irreversible. Simply by commencing, it has already committed itself to continue, to become something new, to develop itself further. What may be called transcendence in music is the way in which, at each moment, it has become somethingsomething different from what it is. The way in which it points beyond itself is not a metaphysical law that has been forced upon it, but an essential quality, which it cannot avoid … It does not relinquish its anti-mythological essence even when, in a state of objective despair, it makes that despair into its own concern. Music does not guarantee the existence of the Other; but, to the same extent, sound cannot evade the fact that it has promised that existence. Freedom itself is an immanent necessity for music. That is its dialectical essence. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 541

Categorization

• DEFINE: Adorno’s core aesthetics: transcendence and freedom in music as immanent to successiveness rather than imposed metaphysical law.
• XREF: Connects to Adorno’s dialectical aesthetics elsewhere — art’s law of form as both constructed and necessary.