ABSTRACT
What Adorno meant by 'musical' or 'subjective' time, and why he thought it had normative meaning for composers like Goeyvaerts who were no longer concerned with subjectivity, rests on how his philosophy of time informed his critical response to the Darmstadt school's own discursive biases. At the time Adorno was considered to be an authority on the avant-garde movement: he had just written Philosophie der neuen Musik and in this book had literally destroyed Stravinsky as a reactionary, Schoenberg being the only name he would accept. However, it is necessary to more extensively differentiate a number of different stages of Adorno's philosophy, and emphasize the psychoanalytic themes that he develops in his history of musical time. Adorno latched on to Freud's notion that the dream is basically atemporal, and that time is part of the psyche's way of filtering the myriad experiences of life as it seeks to avoid the potential traumatic shocks of the world.
