ABSTRACT

Theodor Adorno (1903–69) is the most important writer on aesthetics of music in the twentieth century. Brought up in a rarefied artistic milieu, Immanuel Kant, G. W. F. Hegel and Karl Marx were his primary philosophical influences. He studied at Frankfurt University, and in 1925–28 was a composition student of modernist composer Alban Berg. He eulogized Berg’s teacher Schoenberg as the paradigm modernist. Teaching philosophy at Frankfurt University, he became associated with the Institute for Social Research, but after the Nazi rise to power in 1933 he left for England then the United States, where he began sociological research on popular music. In 1949 Adorno returned to co-direct the re-established Institute for Social Research, becoming a leading member of the so-called Frankfurt School of contemporary Marxist philosophy. Philosophy of Modern Music (1949) made him famous; it represented Schoenberg and Stravinsky as opposed poles of modernism, with Stravinsky the reactionary. Adorno died in 1969. Adorno’s classic work Aesthetic Theory was published posthumously in 1970.