Newness and silence in music. Unfashionable observations on Theodor Adorno’s notion of ‘truth content’

Abstract

Adorno introduced the notion of “newness” into philosophy of music (§ 1), a notion he later intertwined with the notion of “truth content” (§ 2). To release the two notions from the critical theory, the paper links both notions to a philosophy of music, though radically conceived. A correct ontology of newness allows one to extend music’s truth content plus their material (§ 2.1.) and formal (§ 2.2.) axes to the negative time of the listener. Musical creation involves immanent listening to history and society, but at the same transcendent listening, a response “to the unconditionality of the eternal in the negative of the occasion” (§ 3). Webern’s musical language seeks to reach the utopian place of newness itself. The paper seeks to extend newness to the listener’s artistic creation, regardless of his or her place in what the paper dubs “music listening triangle.”