Composition and adorno’s rhetoriC of the new

In this article I will be exploring Adorno’s treatment of the concept of the new with a view to proposing a pattern in the rhetorical tone of his thinking on this matter. In brief, I will show that Adorno’s critique of New Music in the post-war period operated on two rhetorical registers: these I will term the exoteric and the esoteric. By exoteric, I mean to portray the process whereby Adorno produced an open philosophical scrutiny of the cognitive claims of New Music, with the act of composition itself being redescribed with the resources of dialectical philosophy. Adorno deployed both immanent and normative techniques of evaluation, but in every case he assumed that the philosophy of subject and object, and the critique of rationality and capitalism that the Frankfurt School had already thoroughly rehearsed, could be redeployed in the context of composition with confidence and with sufficient force to reorientate – and for the better – the fundamental approach of composers. Criteria of successful composition could (and probably should) be devised directly from philosophical principles. On the other hand, a more speculative treatment of the new is also in evidence in his writings, a tendency which arguably deepens in his later work. This I characterize as esoteric. I intend by this term to locate the new as a dimension of the internal experience of composition