Adorno On Music

More than half of the published works of Theodor Adorno were devoted to his studies in music. As his reputation has grown in recent years, however, Adorno’s work on music has remained a neglected area because of its musicological complexity. This account of Adorno’s texts on music takes a sociological perspective. In non-technical language, Robert Witkin guides the reader through the complexities of Adorno’s argument about the link between music and morality and between musical works and social structure. It was through these works more than any others that Adorno established the right of the arts to be acknowledged as a moral and critical force in the development of a modern society. By recovering them for non-musicologists, Witkin adds immeasurably to our appreciation of this giant 20th-century thought.