Roberto Schwarz

Adorno, Schönberg, & Combinatoriality


As we know, Schönberg dismantled the tonal system and tried to organize composition in such a way that there would be no privileged or forbidden chords, which he deemed irrational remnants of tradition. All twelve tones of the scale would now have equal prominence, leading to a system of composition, dodecaphony, that transcended previous conventions. The path was opened for so-called serial music, in which composition derives from the mathematical combination of tones. Adorno argues that in Schönberg a tension persists between this conception of the scale and the musical universe it surpassed: between the expressionist and the dodecaphonic Schönberg, between the new and that which it was overthrowing. An incomplete transition, a provisional equilibrium, which is also productive and aesthetically valuable, because historically meaningful. The moment the advance is completed by full mathematization, the tension is lost and the unconventional, deprived of its opposite, grows old. Adorno, theoretician and enthusiast of the avant-garde, arrives at this paradoxical and very interesting way of understanding the crisis of modern art—once the way had been opened, mathematical combinatorics was the inevitable consequence. Yet this did not mean it was aesthetically superior to the forms it left behind. On the contrary, Adorno tends to insist that Schönberg’s work is richer than the serial music that followed it. Between free combinatorics and a combinatorics supported by the history of its materials, the latter is charged with aesthetic (that is, historical) tension.


SOURCE: Schwarz, Roberto. “Adorno/Beckett,” New Left Review 150, November-December 2024, (pp. 131-140,) pp. 137-138.

See also:

Combinatoriality - Wikipedia

Arnold Schoenberg - Wikipedia

Adorno, Theodor W. Essays on Music, selected, with Introduction, Commentary, and Notes by Richard Leppert, New translations by Susan H. Gillespie. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

Dineen, Murray. “Adorno and Schoenberg's Unanswered Question,” The Musical Quarterly, Vol. 77, No. 3 (Autumn, 1993), pp. 415-427.

Ivanova, Velia. Twelve-Tone Identity: Adorno Reading Schoenberg through Kant. M.A. thesis, Musicology, School of Music, Faculty of Arts, University of Ottawa, 2013.


Ars Combinatoria Study Guide

Theodor W. Adorno & Critical Theory Study Guide


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