Adorno Reframed by Geoff Boucher

Author:Geoff Boucher [Boucher, Geoff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: I.B.Tauris

Stravinsky and authenticity

The opposite pole to ‘rationalisation’ is ‘authenticity’, and in the second half of Philosophy of Modern Music, Adorno launches a polemic assault on Igor Stravinsky’s work, especially the Rite of Spring (1913). For Adorno, Stravinsky deploys the techniques of modernism against the intentionality of the alienated subject, seeking to recover authentic expression by regression to the primitive, infantile and collective. Adorno’s highly critical treatment of Stravinsky is motivated by three considerations:

(1) Instead of bringing alienation to self-consciousness and actively seeking reconciliation, intellectual regression accepts alienation and seeks compensation in collective rituals, something with frightening political implications in the 1930s.

(2) Instead of developing the musical material through rational construction, aesthetic regression merely raids the existing repertoire of techniques in search of overpowering effects, revealing an accommodation to popularity.

(3) Instead of disclosing perceptions and feelings through wringing new expressive possibilities from the rationalised materials, emotional regression rejects the complexity of adult desires for the simplicity of infantile reactions.

Stravinsky, in other words, finds himself in the fallen condition of modernism, unable to imagine that a return to the Eden of classical harmony is possible. His response is to eliminate lonely individuality and replace it with collectivist conformity, which preserves the modernist sensibility without modern anxiety. Stravinsky’s use of folkloric and neo-classical elements in this context appears to Adorno as an aesthetic pastiche lacking any critical dimension, animated by deep nostalgia for a pre-modern community. That strikes Adorno as something with fascist connotations, and he hones in on the formal and substantive features of Stravinsky’s work, intent on proving that this is politically concerning and psychologically disturbing.

In Stravinsky’s work, Adorno argues, the features of atonal music suggestive of a fresh cage – its polyphonic structure and resulting lack of tonal contrasts; its mathematical exhaustion of a sound space determining a combinatorial aesthetic – dictate reliance on rhythm to introduce variation into the music. In Petrouchka (1911) and The Rite of Spring, this takes the form of primitive drumbeats that tend to split away from the musical material in the direction of an external envelope, emanating from the primitive past and directing development from the outside.

[Stravinsky] is drawn in that direction where music – in its retarded state, far behind the fully developed bourgeois subject – functions as an element lacking intention, arousing only bodily animation instead of offering meaning…In Schönberg, everything is based on that lonely subjectivity which withdraws into itself…In Stravinsky’s case, subjectivity assumes the character of a sacrifice, but – and this is where he sneers at the tradition of humanistic art – the music does not identify with the victim, but rather with the destructive element…Both [Petrouchka and Rite] have a common nucleus: the anti-humanistic sacrifice to the collective – sacrifice without tragedy, made not in the name of a renewed image of man, but only in the blind affirmation of a situation recognised by the victim. (Adorno, 2007b: 103–7)

Consequently, the music (and the jerking, spasmodic dance that accompanies it) mimes the disintegration of the bourgeois ego into schizoid

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