Theodor Adorno, Quasi Una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music

The Guardian reviews a new edition from Verso

Theodor Adorno, Quasi Una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music

Nicholas Lezard reviews Theodor Adorno's Quasi Una Fantasia: Essays on Modern Music: 'Adorno wrote about everything, really, but what he wrote most about was music. He knew what he was talking about: he had entertained attainable ambitions to compose, and been taught by Alban Berg. When Thomas Mann, in exile, needed to have a serialist composer in Dr Faustus, it was to Adorno he turned, and his contribution to the book was invaluable. Schoenberg, exiled a few miles up the road at the same time, was seriously miffed for years that he hadn't been asked – understandably, since he had invented the atonality of Mann's composer. But there was something Adorno could bring to the table which Schoenberg couldn't. As George Steiner put it, "what Adorno contributed [to Dr Faustus] was not only the hard-edged technicalities of compositional and instrumental processes, but his own radical perceptions of what it is to compose music under pressure of previous musical history and of social crisis."' [Read More]

Also at A Piece of Monologue:

• Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Towards a New Manifesto
• Travels in Nihilon: Critchley on Beckett and Adorno
• Arvo Pärt on Tintinnabulation
• Will Self on the Symphony and the Novel
• Glenn Gould and Beethoven's Tempest Sonata

Plunged in thought: Thomas Bernhard on Music

An excerpt from Thomas Bernhard's novel, Correction

Thomas Bernhard

From Thomas Bernhard's Correction, translated by Sophie Wilkins:

[...] for even at the age of eleven or twelve Roithamer had instinctively perceived that music and the knowledge of music was a necessary condition for his ability to enter into the natural sciences, and so he had even then seized upon every opportunity to improve his knowledge of music and, with only that basic instruction in musical theory and practice and in piano playing, he had achieved a mastery of his subject all on his own, and had not only retained that mastery all his life but had even managed to expand and intensify it. Listening to music had always meant the same to him as studying music, so listening to music was for him not only a way of raising his spirits but, by the way he combined hearing and studying the music, he became plunged in thought. While others listen to music and, when they hear, they feel it, it was possible for Roithamer to hear music and to feel and to think and to study his science. His chief musical interest had been, on the one hand, Purcell and Handel and Mozart and Bruckner, and on the other hand, the newer and newest music such as Hauer, Webern, Schönberg and their successors. The opening bars of the Webern string quartet which he'd hand-copied on the back of a bill, he'd tacked on the wall above his desk in Hoeller's garret. He loved this opening, it had always meant much to him.