Abstract

Adorno's music criticism continues to haunt Critical Theory. Those writings are among the few developments of this entire theoretical orientation which remain largely unexplored. Unlike his philosophical writings, Adorno's works on music achieve their inscrutability not solely because of the inherent esoteric nature of the discipline (the background needed in musical theory helps keep these writings often cited but little read). Adorno's strategy was to defend the formalist avant-garde of his day, while maintaining a sometimes crude sociological account of reflection between music and social structure. (While at his best, Adorno rejected reflectioin theory, his neunced accounts of microstructured particularity were often framed by residual elements of historical materialism.) This strategy turned out to be quite clever.