ABSTRACT
This chapter explores how musical materials, called to our attention by contemporary materialist thinking, can be conceived of as sites of aesthetic and critical intrigue. The spirit of Adorno’s work seems to suggest a constant need to liquify the solidity of its own knowledge, to find renewal and life only in its encountering of something other to it, rather than yet again be posited as an key for the interpretation of a few composers’ works, predominantly located in the first half of the last century. The emergence of so-called new materialist theory provides an urgent context – as well as fertile resources – for (re)conceptualising musical material after Adorno. Musical material for Adorno is all that faces the composer in the present as inherited from the past: formal schemes, instrumental forces, harmonic and melodic formulae and expectations, and so on.
