Abstract This chapter examines Adorno’s concepts of riddle-character and dialectical image in relation to the development of his “interpretive philosophy” (later known as negative dialectics) and his theory of musical interpretation as performance. It draws on the early essay “Die Aktualität der Philosophie” (“The Actuality of Philosophy,” delivered as a lecture to the Kantgesellschaft in Frankfurt in 1931 and published posthumously in 1973), as well as his two most important late works, Negative Dialectics (1966) and the unfinished Aesthetic Theory (1970). His conception of interpretive philosophy is also considered in relation to the case of musical performance, drawing on the fragmentary notes collected by Henri Lonitz from Adorno’s unfinished project, Zu einer Theorie der musikalischen Reproduktion (Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction), which was published posthumously in 2001. In brief, the intention is to show that it is musical interpretation as performance that provides the model for Adorno’s conception of philosophical interpretation as the construction of “interpretive images.” At the same time, it becomes clear that this also carries with it implications for musical listening as a mode of interpretive experience.

This chapter examines the problem of meaning in Western art music, its entwinement with the idea of “autonomy,” and the confusions surrounding the concept of meaning itself. The argument is in three parts. The first takes a philosophical-historical approach to the relation between autonomy and the problem of musical meaning, considering Kant’s reservations regarding instrumental music’s non-conceptuality. The second analyses the concept of musical meaning in the context of the philosophy of language and argues for the priority of meaning as “sense” over meaning as “reference” in the understanding of autonomous music as a mediated “complex of meaning.” The third takes a critical hermeneutic approach to the problem of interpretation in view of each work’s idiosyncratic rationality, its temporality, and its non-conceptuality. In conclusion it argues that hermeneutic interpretation also requires engaged “mimetic understanding” in the process of making sense of the ambiguity and polyvalence of the autonomous musical work.

This article proposes that it is the notion of the “image” that provides the key to how Adorno understands interpretation in both philosophy and art. It seeks to show that it is especially music, and musical interpretation as performance, that provides the model for Adorno's conception of philosophical interpretation. It argues that interpretation is a practice that also involves the making of something, as poesis, and that Adorno's ideal for this is interpretation as musical performance. Through a rereading of the concepts of riddle-character (Rätselcharakter), interpretation (Deutung), and image (Bild) in Adorno's philosophical and musical texts from the early 1930s to the late 1960s and material from the Nachlass, the case is made that his conception of interpretation involves not only the decipherment of the riddle-character of art but also the construction of further “interpretive” riddle figurations, as “dialectical images.”

This article is a response to issues raised in the theoretical and aesthetic writings of Mathias Spahlinger, most notably his two extended and related articles published in Contemporary Music Review, the first in 2008 and the second in 2015 (the latter in the present issue). It argues that the composer conceives his compositional praxis as a form of critique that exists in the tension between aesthetic autonomy and political commitment, and that this force-field is central to his poetics. The aim is to identify the conceptual context of Spahlinger's theoretical writings, and particular focus is given to the composer's idiosyncratic use of the terms open' and closed' forms and their relation to his notion of new music'. It is also argued that there is a utopian dimension to Spahlinger's concept of openness' that is both exploratory and critically reflexive, and which shows a strong affinity to Adorno's aesthetics of negation.

Journal Article Adorno, Time, and Musical Time: Response to Stephen Decatur Smith Get access Max Paddison Max Paddison Durham University m.h.paddison@durham.ac.uk Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The Opera Quarterly, Volume 29, Issue 3-4, summer-autumn 2013, Pages 244–252, https://doi.org/10.1093/oq/kbt034 Published: 06 February 2014

ABSTRACTThe aim of this article is threefold: first, to ask what we mean when we use concepts like imitation, representation and expression; second, to broaden the concept of imitation to take on the implications of the dynamic, historical and anthropological notion of mimesis as opposed to the largely static, ahistorical conceptions of mere ‘representation’ and ‘resemblance’ common to musicology and to analytic philosophy; and third, to show the dialectical relationship of mimesis to concepts of expression, construction, rationality and form in Adorno's later aesthetics and in his theory of musical reproduction. The concept of mimesis that is the focus of this article has as its key features embodiment, mimetism and adaptation. It is argued that concepts of expression are seen to retain features of mimesis, and that expression in artworks is a structural phenomenon. The claim is made that mimesis can be seen as an embodied impulse, a mode of ‘identifying with’ rather than primarily as ‘imitation of’ or ‘representation of’ something external to itself. The argument draws on anthropological theories of mimicking and miming, in particular those of Caillois and Benjamin, which had considerable influence on Adorno's thinking. It is argued that music (whether as musical work or as musical event) oscillates between its own internal rationalised constructional ↔ unrationalised mimetic moments, and that the experience of its expressivity arises from this tension.