Bloomsbury Revelations
2 total works
In this classic work, Adorno revolutionized music theory through an analysis of two composers he saw as polar opposites, Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky. Philosophy of Modern Music presents a profound study of key musical works of the twentieth century. But it is more than this because, as always with Adorno, a wide range of social and cultural questions are brought to bear on the analysis. In many ways, Philosophy of Modern Music is a product of Adorno's exile in the United States, where he wrote the book while National Socialism fell apart in his European homeland.
Theodor Adorno (1903-69) was undoubtedly the foremost thinker of the Frankfurt School, the influential group of German thinkers that fled to the US in the 1930s, including such thinkers as Herbert Marcuse and Max Horkheimer. His work has proved enormously influential in sociology, philosophy and cultural theory. Aesthetic Theory is Adorno's posthumous magnum opus and the culmination of a lifetime's investigation. Analysing the sublime, the ugly and the beautiful, Adorno shows how such concepts frame and distil human experience and that it is human experience that ultimately underlies aesthetics. In Adorno's formulation 'art is the sedimented history of human misery'. Edited by Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedeman Translated by Robert Hullot-Kentor.