Book contents
13 - The Philosopher as Theorist: Adorno’s materiale Formenlehre
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 26 May 2021
Summary
Practitioners of the theory of formal functions have never been shy to acknowledge the origins of their enterprise in Schoenbergian Formenlehre of the midtwentieth century. Right at the beginning of the preface to Classical Form, William E. Caplin emphasizes his debt to Schoenberg and Erwin Ratz—as well as to Carl Dahlhaus—and reference to Ratz in particular is made in almost every one of the book's chapters. The influence of Schoenbergian thought on form (which also includes writings by Josef Rufer, Erwin Stein, and Anton Webern) manifests itself in many of the theory's central concepts and terminology, and even the very notion of “formal function” draws directly upon Ratz's funktionelle Formenlehre. Not coincidentally, Caplin's earliest publication on classical form appeared in German.
Like Caplin, Janet Schmalfeldt—his principal interlocutor in the early development of the theory of formal functions in the 1980s—repeatedly invokes Schoenberg, Ratz, and Dahlhaus in her writings on musical form. One further author she mentions, but about whom Caplin remains silent, is Theodor W. Adorno. Schmalfeldt first brings up Adorno in her 1995 article on Beethoven's “Tempest” Sonata.5 There, he figures as part of the philosophical strand of what she calls the “Beethoven-Hegelian” tradition—a strand that is paralleled by a music-theoretical one leading from A. B. Marx to Dahlhaus. Yet it is not difficult to see how Adorno, as both a philosopher and a writer on music (not to mention a composition student of Alban Berg in the 1920s), really stands at the crossroads between these two lines. Schmalfeldt does not explore this matter in her 1995 article, but she does in her later book, In the Process of Becoming. She writes:
Scholars of both Adorno and Dahlhaus have tended either to neglect or to disparage the capacities of these two for genuine music-analytical insight—a position to which I take strong exception; in particular, Adorno's unfinished Beethoven fragments reveal a philosopher-musician grappling over the course of his maturity with highly sophisticated aspects of Beethoven's music. But [my] study employs analytic techniques developed beyond the lifetimes, and maybe even the interests, of both Adorno and Dahlhaus; and so the presence of both recedes as the book proceeds.
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- Information
- Formal Functions in PerspectiveEssays on Musical Form from Haydn to Adorno, pp. 411 - 433Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2015
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