This book collects together Adornos manifold implications for musical interpretation. His reflections lead to a fundamental study of the nature of notation and musical sense. However, it is the quality of uncertainty in his reflections that indicates the scope of the discourse and its continuing relevance to musical thought today.

'My dears: this is but a brief note to welcome you to the new world, where you are now no longer all too far away from us. ' So begins Adorno's letter to his parents in May 1939, welcoming them to Cuba where they had just arrived after fleeing from Nazi Germany at the last minute. At the end of 1939 his parents moved again to Florida and then to New York, where they lived from August 1940 until the end of their lives. It is only with Adorno's move to California at the end of 1941 that his letters to his parents start arriving once more, reporting on work and living conditions as well as on...

"Dreams are as black as death."
--Theodor W. Adorno

Adorno was fascinated by his dreams and wrote them down throughout his life. He envisaged publishing a collection of them although in the event no more than a few appeared in his lifetime.

Dream Notes offers a selection of Adornos writings on dreams that span the last twenty-five years of his life. Readers of Adorno who are accustomed to high-powered reflections on philosophy, music and culture may well find them disconcerting: they provide an amazingly frank and uninhibited account of his inner desires,...

Beethoven is a classic study of the composer's music, written by one of the most important thinkers of our time. Throughout his life, Adorno wrote extensive notes, essay fragments and aides-memoires on the subject of Beethoven's music. This book brings together all of Beethoven's music in relation to the society in which he lived.

Adorno identifies three periods in Beethoven's work, arguing that the thematic unity of the first and second periods begins to break down in the third. Adorno follows this progressive disintegration of organic unity in the classical music of Beethoven...

The surviving correspondence between Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, which appears in this volume in its entirety in English translation, documents one of the most remarkable and intense intellectual relationships of modern times. In over 100 letters, which range from brief and cordial exchanges to dense and detailed theoretical elucidations, it is possible to trace the complex and developing character of Benjamin's and Adorno's attitudes to one another, and not least to many of their mutual friends, like Sholem, Bloch and Brecht. The correspondence also reveals the considerable...

This volume presents Adorno's lectures on metaphysics. It provides an introduction not only to metaphysics but also to Adorno's own intellectual standpoint, as developed in his major work Negative Dialectics. Metaphysics for Adorno is defined by a central tension between concepts and immediate facts. Adorno traces this dualism back to Aristotle, whom he sees as the founder of metaphysics. In Aristotle it appears as an unresolved tension between form and matter. This basic split, in Adorno's interpretation, runs right through the history of metaphysics. Perhaps not surprisingly, Adorno finds...

Despite all of humanity's failures, futile efforts and wrong turnings in the past, Adorno did not let himself be persuaded that we are doomed to suffer a bleak future for ever. One of the factors that prevented him from identifying a definitive plan for the future course of history was his feelings of solidarity with the victims and losers. As for the future, the course of events was to remain open-ended; instead of finality, he remained committed to a Holderlin-like openness. This trace of the messianic has what he called the colour of the concrete as opposed to mere abstract possibility....

* Adorno is one of the most important philosophers and social thinkers of the 20th Century. He was the leading figure in the Frankfurt School, along with Walter Benjamin and Max Horkheimer. * This book is the next volume in the series of his unpublished lectures, now made available in English for the first time by Polity.

During the occupation of West Germany after the Second World War, the American authorities commissioned polls to assess the values and opinions of ordinary Germans. They concluded that the fascist attitudes of the Nazi era had weakened to a large degree. Theodor W. Adorno and his Frankfurt School colleagues, who returned in 1949 from the United States, were skeptical. They held that standardized polling was an inadequate and superficial method for exploring such questions. In their view, public opinion is not simply an aggregate of individually held opinions, but is fundamentally a...

This is a study of Ludwig Beethoven's music. Throughout his life, Theodor Adorno wrote extensive notes, essay fragments and aides-memoires on the subject of Beethoven's music.