Cooking up a Theory of Performing

Abstract

In amongst some miscellaneous notes for a seminar on “New Music and Interpretation” that Adorno taught with Rudolph Kolisch and Eduard Steuermann at Darmstadt in the summer of 1954, there appears a list of “Various problems” marked out for further attention. The third of the problems is this: “3) Against culinary music-making, beauty as an end in itself. Atomistic music-making. Smoothing out. Colour, tone as means of representation” (Adorno, Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction 231). This pithy collection of phrases and mnemonics summarises a fair amount of the terrain that Adorno wished to cover in his study of performing, the extensive aphorisms, notes, schemata and drafts for which are published as Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction (here-after TTMR). In this third “problem” alone there arises the critical stance against configuring the physical sound of music as the primary goal of performing; the failure of some performances to grasp properly the task of structural interpretation and in particular the relation between part and whole and between surface and depth; the misguided tendency of some performers and schools of interpretation (aided and abetted by the culture industry) to settle on medium, median, midpoint, and in all senses “average” levels of intensity, dynamics and articulation; and so on — and all of these are refracted by Adorno’s usual negative dialectical framework (mostly not on show).