Music Philosophy After Adorno

• Applicant: Dr. Richard Klein
• Subject Area: Theoretical Philosophy
• Term: from 2011 to 2021
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 201041883

This interdisciplinary research project develops outlines of a music philosophy based on a critical engagement with Adorno. It came about in 2011 to argue the case for a philosophical approach in which musicology and philosophical theory enter a reciprocal relationship, one based neither on hierarchies nor on the methodological distinction of experiencing topics according to categories of disciplines. 2014 saw the emergence of a conflict that changed the project and now forms the reason to apply for a continuation. It can be characterized as a conflict between a ‘technical’ and a ‘speculative’ element. The first of these proceeds from the musical work, developing its categories through an analysis and critique of the work’s own specific nature. Research is not an area outside of philosophy, but rather a mode of philosophical work itself. Then one also finds an increasing emergence of a speculative problematics which goes beyond the systematic musicological approach. It is ignited by the fact that Adorno, in his engagement with Beethoven, discloses specific experiential elements of his thought, meaning that he not so much transfers them onto music but rather experiences and unfolds them through music. This brings into play a new area of discourse which modifies the interdisciplinary element and presents the relationship between philosophy and music in a different light. If Beethoven is more than an outstanding object of examination for Adorno, however, and rather a form of basic event underlying his thought in advance, then an immersion in details, in the works, is no longer enough. It must therefore be shown what aspects of the programme of negative dialectics are originarily made visible through an engagement with Beethoven, and how the discourse of »dialectical logic« in music can be hermeneutically differentiated from Adorno. Time is both the central problem of Adorno’s music philosophy and its omitted centre. What is necessary is to give shape to this centre through interpretations of Beethoven and Wagner. In the works of both composers, time is an object of musical forms in an excitingly plural, yet relatively systematizable way. A philosophical theory of time can learn from such temporal research. Independently of this, the fragments on Beethoven refute the myth of the »philosophical disenfranchisement of art« more profoundly and specifically than do most aesthetics of recent times. Philosophical thought here forms in an intimate engagement with diverse musical elements. Yet this is not some romantic evasion of the tasks of philosophical reason, but rather the entirely reasonable insight that philosophy becomes impoverished if it reduces art globally to »difference« »otherness« etc., and thus ultimately rids it of any wider meaning and worldly weight – historically, politically and existentially.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants