ABSTRACT
An increasing body of established opinion has come to recognize Theodor W. Adorno as the apostle and apologist of avant-garde music, as the major opponent of the reflection theory, and consequently as the critic who has done most to loosen up the causal relationship between art and society. Or to view the matter on the simpler level of personalities, Adorno is seen as the antipode of Georg Lukacs, the father of representative Marxist aesthetics. Adorno is simply unwilling to acknowledge antinomy, and this compulsive disregard leads to those consequences of his negative dialectics which are most problematic with regard to music. It means the appropriation of Karl Marx’s concept of alienation as mediated by History and Class Consciousness. Totality, the result of the actions of free individuals, becomes an alien power dominating them. During the process the free individual loses his freedom and is degraded to the level of the “fortuitous individual.”
