Editors' Introduction: Adorno, Music, Modernity

Abstract

“As a temporal art,” Adorno observed, “music is bound to the fact of succession and is hence as irreversible as time itself. By starting it commits itself to carrying on, to becoming something new, to developing. What we may conceive of as musical transcendence, namely, the fact that at any given moment it has become something and something other than it was, that points beyond itself—all that is no mere metaphysical imperative dictated by some external authority. It likes in the nature of music and will not be denied.”