Abstract

To speak of the aging of the New Music seems paradoxical. Yet music that has its essence in the refusal to go along with things as they are, and has its justification in giving shape to what the conventional superficies of daily life hide and what is otherwise condemned to silence by the culture industry — which threatens to acquire New Music as a wholly owned subsidiary — precisely this music has begun to show symptoms of false satisfaction. The malicious objection of reactionaries that scholasticism has crept into modernism and is spreading can only be met by the critical reflection sedimented in the works themselves.