Abstract

Adorno's philosophical writings on music are notably focused on the new, invested in positioning the challenging avant‐garde works of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern as the modernist mainstream. Nevertheless, Adorno's relationship with this “Second Viennese School” of composers was characterized by ongoing complexities, contradictions, and dissonances. His conflicted position is theorized here on multiple levels, considering not only Adorno's mature philosophy of the New Music, but his own musical‐creative output, and his relationships with the members of the Second Viennese School; a group he was intimately connected to and distinct from at once. As his composition teacher, Berg was particularly influential in shaping Adorno's compositional activity and stance as simultaneously a champion and critic of Schoenberg. Adorno attempted to apply Schoenberg's twelve‐tone technique within his own compositions, recognizing its promise, yet from early on he had growing critical and compositional reservations concerning the method's restrictions. Though Adorno's writings from the 1930s defend Schoenberg and the twelve‐tone technique, by the end of the following decade, his Philosophy of New Music (2006 [1949]) expounds his critique of the method for its eschewal of the freedom of Expressionism. The impact of the Philosophy of New Music in the wake of the Second World War was both greater than and different from what Adorno could have expected. His message that the twelve‐tone method came at the cost of expressivity was largely missed by the subsequent generation of avant‐garde composers, the “Darmstadt School,” who understood the book as philosophical and theoretical basis for their extended exploration of music's serial systematization.