Critical models in Theodor W. Adornos philosophy of music: the category of musical material

This study aims to investigate the category of musical material in the work of Theodor W. Adorno. Starting from the assumption of the mediation between music and society through this category, we support the thesis of a differentiation between two critical-musical models that seek to apprehend the concrete changes in the situation of avant-garde music between the 1930s and the 1960s. In the first model, whose main work is Philosophy of New Music (1949), the category of musical material provides the criteria from which the works of the generation of Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky are aesthetically and socially criticized. On the one hand, Adorno considers that the progressive character of the Schoenberg School is shown in the consistent response to the compositional problems of technically advanced material, opposing the reactionary tendencies of musical neoclassicism in that period. On the other hand, he identifies in the trend toward the flawless rationalization of musical technique as in twelve-tone composition a threat to subjective freedom, characterizing what he called material fetishism. Such a tendency was confirmed for Adorno in the early 1950s through the integral serialism of the young Darmstadt composers - a sign of the exhaustion of the critical potentials of New Music. Changes in the state of musical composition from the mid-1950s onward, in addition to Adorno's active participation in postwar musical debates, however, indicate alternative possibilities to this exhaustion. In the 1960s, Adorno sought to apprehend such possibilities through a new critical model, centered on what he called informal music (AU)