Persistent Enlightenment

Virgil Thomson & Gertrude Stein

At first glance, the American composer Virgil Thomson would seem an unlikely recipient of what may be the only surviving copy of Theodor Adorno’s revised translation of the Philosophie der neuen Musik. There is an understandable tendency to see them as inhabiting different musical universes. Like Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter, Paul Bowles, Roy Harris, Walter Piston, and Robert Russell Bennett, Thomson was one of those Americans, born a decade before or after 1900, who journeyed to Paris to study with Nadia Boulanger.¹ He made his name thanks to a series of collaborations with Gertrude Stein, the famous of which was his 1934 opera Four Saints in Three Acts. While Thomson’s “modernism” revolved around Stein and Satie, what Adorno saw as “neuen Musik” was defined by the work of the Second Vienna School.² He studied composition with Alban Berg and championed Schoenberg’s work in the pages of Anbruch. As far as I can tell (the indexing in Adorno’s Gesammelte Schriften is not friendly to casual readers) Adorno never discussed Thomson’s music and one will search in vain for any mention of Adorno in Tim Page’s comprehensive collection of Thompson’s musical criticism from the 1940s and early 1950s.³

But a few scattered clues that complicate this picture have long been available. Adorno turns up twice in the 1988 edition of Thomson’s Selected Letters: once in a June 25, 1941 letter to a third party (which I will discuss below) and again in a July 29, 1942 letter from Thomson to Adorno (discussed by Alex Ross in The Rest is Noise) advising Adorno against publishing an attack on Sibelius because its tone was “more likely to create antagonism towards yourself than toward Sibelius.”⁴ But beyond their shared dislike of Sibelius, it has been hard to see what else they might have had in common.

The “Bright Little Man” and the Music Critic

Their relationship becomes somewhat clearer once we realize that a few pieces of the puzzle have been missing. If we look more closely at the only one of Thomson’s letters to Adorno that has been published,  a few questions begin to emerge:

I find on clearing out my desk of the season’s unanswered mail that I have never done anything about your Sibelius article. I am sending it back to you, partly because our Sunday musical space has been so cut down that I would not have room to do much about it anyway, and partly because I don’t really like it very much. The article has good ideas and good phrases in it, but there is too much indignation. The tone is an aggravated one more likely to create antagonism towards yourself than toward Sibelius (181-182).

Perhaps because the last sentence jibes so well with the received image of Adorno — a critic of tonal music whose furious critiques were more likely do more damage to him than to their targets — we tend to gloss over the obvious question: prior to concluding that he didn’t really like the article all that much (and, in any case, no longer had the room “to do much about it”) just what was Thomson planning on doing with it?

The other letter included in the Selected Letters casts further light on what seems to have been going on. Responding to a letter from the poet and film critic Parker Tyler, Thomson wrote:

You are wrong in assuming that either the author or myself considers popular music to be wholly different as an art form from the highbrow stuff. Quite the contrary, many of the factors involved, both the psychological and the industrial ones, are identical in the two fields. Certain others, such as the formal esthetics of lengthy symphonic works or the merchandising procedures of radio companies, are utterly different, though the line of demarcation is not always sharply drawn. In any case the symphonic concert business, both on the air and off, is the subject of other studies by the same author and his associates at Columbia University. I hope to publish from time to time excerpts from those because I consider them of very great interest to musicians (167).

The “author” to whom Thomson refers is Adorno. He went on to explain to Tyler that

It isn’t that I am invariably in agreement with Adorno. It is rather that in the field of radio research, especially in so far as such research departs from strictly empirical procedures and ventures into the field of esthetics and psychology, it is more important right now that all the possible questions be raised than that they be answered with finality. Naturally, a good many of the conclusions stated in the studies are conclusions that persons like ourselves have arrived at many years ago by private judgment or intuition. I think it is not entirely without interest that such judgment should be given a new form of publicity, not one depending on wit or personal prestige, or one backed up by the sacred mumbo jumbo of scholarly research. At any rate, that is why I printed the excerpts (167-168).

He closed the letter by advising Tyler that, if he found himself in disagreement with Adorno, he should “write to him personally at the Institute for Social Research.”

You will find him a very bright little man indeed. He is both a professional philosopher and a trained composer, and his mind has all the best and the worst Germanic qualities (168).

So, it would seem that the Institute for Social Research’s “bright little man” had been sending the music editor of the Herald Tribune manuscripts since at least the summer of 1941 and that, while Thomson may have concluded that there wasn’t anything to be done with Adorno’s Sibelius article, he had found uses for earlier manuscripts.

The Thomson Papers at Yale contain seventeen letters (and one telegram).⁵ Nine of the letters (and one telegram) are from Adorno to Thomson, the remaining seven are responses by Thomson or his secretary. All but one of the letters date from the period 1941-1943; the outlier is a letter from Thomson to Adorno dating from 1957. Finally, Thomson’s papers contain two cards that Maragete Adorno sent out announcing Adorno’s death, along with the draft of letter he wrote expressing his condolences.

Much of the early correspondence between Thomson and Adorno has to do with the Sunday columns Thomson wrote shortly after he became the Tribune‘s chief music critic in October 1940. While Thomson incorporated many of his columns — along with reviews and material from other publications — into the three books that he published during his time at the Herald Tribune, only one of the columns drawing on Adorno’s work appeared in these collections.⁶ The other three were never reprinted. To understand how Thomson used the manuscripts that Adorno sent him, we can begin with a brief look at these columns.

Thomson’s Columns

Between January 1941 and May 1943 Thomson wrote four columns for the Herald Tribune that made use of Adorno’s work.

1. “The ‘Hit’ Trade,” January 26, 1941.
2. “How Popular Music Works,” June 15, 1941.
3. “Radio Examined,” February 8, 1942
4. “Processed Music,” May 16, 1943

Aside from an introductory paragraph by Thomson, the first and second columns consist of extensive quotations from texts that Adorno produced during the period when he was working on Paul Lazarsfeld’s Radio Research project.⁷ The first does not mention Adorno

Paul Lazarsfeld

by name but instead assigns credit to “Dr. Paul Lazarsfeld and his assistants” and goes on to quote sixteen paragraphs from Adorno’s 1939 “Plugging Study”.⁸ The second column quotes ten paragraphs from “On Popular Music,” an article by Adorno (and ”written with the assistance of George Simpson”) that appeared in the Institute for Social Research’s journal in 1941.⁹ Thomson wrote a brief introduction that cited the article, recommended it “to the serious attention of musicians,” and hailed it as “packed with meaty matter.” The third column is a discussion of Radio Research 1941, a collection of papers from the radio project edited by Lazarsfeld and his co-director Frank Stanton.¹⁰ Thomson gave pride of place to Adorno’s chapter on “The Radio Symphony.” He characterized it as “lengthy and recondite” but also criticized it for having skipped “over several matters that, though explicable, are nowhere sufficiently explained.” Ultimately, he was impressed by Adorno’s “terrifying” thesis — “It amounts to saying that the indiscriminate propagation of culture (from whatever noble motives) can operate easily, if not inevitably, toward the destruction of that culture” — and concluded that the “publications of Dr. Lazarsfeld and his associates make more cultural sense than any other writing on the subject I have yet encountered.”

In contrast to the first three columns, the fourth avoided quotation and instead provided a summary of Adorno’s discussion of the limitations of recordings of symphonic works. Though the column (the only one of the four that Thomson included in his collections of writings) does not mention Adorno by name, it does note that “these matters and their implications for culture are discussed in the published reports of Columbia University’s Institute for Social Research.” ¹¹

So much for the published record.  To understand how Thomson learned of Adorno’s work, as well as the relationship that grew out of it,  we must turn to their correspondence.

Adorno’s Letters

The first of the letters from Adorno preserved in the Thomson Papers dates from April 24, 1941 — three months after the appearance of the first column — and was accompanied by a copy of Studies in Philosophy and Social Science — the continuation, in English, of the Institute’s house journal, the Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung.¹² The volume Adorno enclosed was a special issue on mass communication, jointly produced by the Institute and the Office of Radio Research.  It included Adorno’s article on popular music. As Adorno explained,

After the kind interest you took in our study on Plugging I hope you will also be interested in the study on Popular Music which has grown out of the same field of critical thought. Two more studies of mine, one on the changes serious music undergoes by radio and one a critical analysis of the Damrosch Music Appreciation Hour, are going to be published during this year.

Thomson did not respond to Adorno’s letter until two weeks before the publication of his column “How Popular Music Works” (June 4, 1941). His letter thanked Adorno for the copy of the journal, expressed the hope that Adorno would continue to “supply” him with such material, and explained that he would “welcome the occasion to give it, through mention or discussion in Sunday column as wide a dissemination” as he could. He went on to stress that he found “all the musical articles in it of the most absorbing interest” — Adorno would like have found it hard to overlook the fact that his was only “musical article” in the issue.

The day after the publication of “How Popular Music Works” Adorno wrote to thank Thomson “wholeheartedly” for his letter of June 4 and for the prominence Thomson had given his work in his June 15 column.

It goes without saying that your action does not only help considerably, in spreading the ideas I suggest, but it is also very important for the continuation of my studies in this field. I am, of course, most curious to discuss with you some of the problems involved. Would you kindly let me know whether and when I could see you?

At the same time Adorno sent Thomson, under separate cover, a mimeograph copy of a paper he had read “about two years ago” at the Office of Radio Research: “Sketchy as it is, it may give you an idea of the total approach which I pursue in the music study on radio.”¹³ He informed Thomson that his discussion of “the structural changes serious music undergoes through radio” would be appearing shortly in the volume Radio Research 1941 and that his “extensive critical analysis of the Damrosch Appreciation Hour” was slated to appear in the “the third volume of our Studies in Philosophy of Social Science.” As it turned out, the journal ceased publication in the spring of 1942 and Adorno’s article on Damrosch would not appear until 1994.¹⁴ Adorno closed the letter by noting, “Further studies are going to be completed soon and I shall be delighted to let you have any study on music which I regard as tolerably satisfactory.”¹⁵

At this point the pace of the correspondence began to accelerate. Adorno wrote Thomson again on June 27 (perhaps in response to points discussed in person) to offer his “little contribution to my campaign against the appreciation racket.” Adorno’s “little contribution” was the copy of his study of the NBC Music Appreciation Hour that has been preserved in the Thomson papers along with Adorno’s translation of the Philosophie der neuen Musik. The letter closes with the first reference to the latter: “Incidentally, what do you think about a little article concerning the problem of 12-tone technique?”

Four days later Adorno wrote Thomson again to inform him that Lazarsfeld would have no objections to Thomson’s using the article on the NBC Music Appreciation Hour in one of his future columns. “I hardly need to stress,” he concluded, “how important it would be for me if you should see any possibility either of publishing some excerpts or of discussing it from your point of view.”

Against the “Appreciation Racket”

There is every reason to think that Thomson would have been a sympathetic reader of Adorno’s work, especially his critique of the NBC Music Appreciation Hour. Prior to assuming his position at the Herald Tribune Thomson had mounted a blistering attack on what he dubbed “the Appreciation-racket” in The State of Music, his wide-ranging 1939 account of the “musical profession.”¹⁶

Every composer is approached from time to time by representatives of the Appreciation-racket and offered money to lecture or to write books about the so‐called Appreciation of Music. Unless he is already tied up with the pedagogical world, he usually refuses. If he makes his living as a teacher, refusal is difficult. I’ve seen many a private teacher forced out of business for refusing to “co‑operate” with the publishers of Appreciation‐books. Refusal of public‐school credits for private music-study is the usual method of foreclosure. The composer who teaches in any educational institution except a straight conservatory is usually obliged to “co-operate.” The racket muscles in on him. His name will be useful; his professional prestige will give a coloration of respectability to the shady business. He is offered a raise and some security in his job. He usually accepts.(121)

Thomson had nothing against the sort of “digests of useful information” that other professions regularly offered lay readers.

Simplified explanations of the copyright laws, of general medicine for use in the home, of the mathematics of relativity, of how to build a canoe, a radio‐set, or a glider, of home dressmaking, of garden‐lore, of how to acquaint yourself with classical archaeology in ten volumes, and of how to see Paris in ten days — this literature is in every way legitimate. (121-122)

But problem with the “Appreciation-literature” was that it provided “no firm knowledge and describes no real practice.” The closest analogy to it that Thomson could find were “physical culture” advertisements, which promised to “augment the muscularity and the virile forces of any customer who will buy the book and do what it says for five minutes a day.” Just as “five minutes a day of gymnastics, any kind of gymnastics, with or without a book” might result in a “temporary enlargement of the muscles exercised,” so too a “deliberate listening to music, any kind of music, five minutes a day for a week will sharpen momentarily the musical listening‐ability.”

Had the “Appreciation-racket” presented itself merely as a way of “habituating listeners to musical sounds,” it would have amounted to little more than “a legitimate advertising device, destined, with luck, to swell the number of possible concert-customers” (123). But, in fact, it was nothing less than a fraud.

The basic sales-trick in all these manifestations is the use of the religious technique. Music is neither taught nor defined. It is preached. A certain limited repertory of pieces, ninety per cent of them a hundred years old, is assumed to contain most that the world has to offer of musical beauty and authority. (125).

Like other applications of the “religious technique” the Appreciation-racket excluded any questioning of its basic premises and sought to cultivate in its consumers the conviction that “musical non-consumption is sinful.” And it was ready to supply sinners with a requisite set of penitential rituals, which Thomson summarized as follows:

A. Buy a book.

B. Buy a gramophone.

C. Buy records for it.

D. Buy a radio.

E. Subscribe to the local orchestra, if there is one.

None of these actions, he noted, had anything to do with cultivating an understanding of music: “They are at best therapeutic actions destined to correct the customer’s musical defects without putting him through the labors of musical exercise” (126).

A brief summary of the articles of the faith that readers were likely to find in the typical “Appreciation-book” followed, once again in list form:

A. That the music discussed is nearly all symphonic. Chamber-music (except string‐quartets) and the opera are equally neglected.

B. That the examples quoted are virtually the same in all the books.

C. That they are quoted from a small number of musical authors.

D. That 90% of them were written between 1775 and 1875 and are called Symphony Number Something‑or‐Other. (126-127)

Though the diatribe Thomson offered differed dramatically in style from the account Adorno provided in his studies, the two accounts had much in common, beginning with their affection for the term “racket.”

By the early 1940s, the term had begun to crop up in various internal documents produced by the Institute as a way of characterizing the way class relations had been changed with the advent of monopoly capitalism.¹⁷ In a manuscript dating from 1941 Adorno summarized the transformation this way:

In the image of the latest economic phase, history is the history of monopolies. In the image of the manifest act of usurpation that is practiced nowadays by the leaders of capital and labor acting in consort, it is the history of gang wars and rackets.¹⁸

Like Adorno, Thomson situated his critique of the “Appreciation-racket” within the context of the increasingly active role that large corporations played in the production and dissemination of cultural goods.

The impresario business has begun recently, both in Europe and in America, to follow the big-business pattern of interlocking directorates and mergers. Ninety‐nine percent , at least, of concert engagements in the United States now take place under the direction either of the Columbia Concerts Corporation, an affiliate of the Columbia Broadcasting Service, or of the N.B.C. Artists’ Service, an affiliate of the National Broadcasting Corporation, which in turn is financed by the same sources as the Radio Corporation of America and as Radio‑Keith‐Orpheum, a cinema‐producing‐and‐exhibiting consortium operating under patents controlled by the General Electric Company (State of Music 66).

All that was lacking in Thomson’s discussion was the term that Horkheimer and Adorno would eventually coin to designate this strange new creature: Kulturindustrie.

Promoting Adorno

It is likely that Adorno’s interest in sharing the fruits of his labors at the Radio Research project had something to do with the fact that — after protracted difficulties in reconciling his approaches with those of Lazarsfeld and in the face of Stanton’s opposition to his continued presence on the staff — funding for Adorno’s portion of the project had been terminated in the spring of 1940. With the Institute’s finances in considerable disarray because of questionable investments, the future prospects of its associates were by no means certain. At this point Horkheimer had already left New York for Los Angeles, where he was beginning work with Herbert Marcuse on his long-planned book on “dialectics.” While there were plans for Adorno to come west as well, the question of who would wind up where would not be resolved until the autumn of 1941. All of this may have been more than enough to provide an incentive for Adorno — whose time at the radio project had taught him something about how the game was played — to look for ways to raise his profile.

Thomson’s role went beyond publishing portions of Adorno’s work in his columns. During the spring of 1940 Adorno had cobbled together the work he had been doing on the radio project into a book manuscript entitled Current of Music and unsuccessfully attempted to publish it with Oxford University Press.¹⁹  Adorno’s letter of June 27, 1941 indicates that — presumably acting on a suggestion Thomson had made — he met with Frances Phillips, an editor at Thomson’s publisher William Morrow.²⁰

She was exceedingly nice and seemed to be seriously interested in the matter, but, of course, she could not make any decision before having gone through the material.

The “material” Phillips examined was the manuscript that Adorno had attempted to place with Oxford.

His efforts at William Morrow proved to be no more successful. On July 8 he wrote to Thomson and informed him that “Miss Phillips has declined to publish my book.” He enclosed a copy of the letter Phillips had sent him the previous day:

I have read a good deal of the material you left with me, and I have discussed it with my associates, and I am sorry to tell you that I do not think this is a book for our list. For one thing, this is hard reading for the layman. In talking to you the points came out clearly but in reading this (I am speaking now of On a Social Critique of Radio Music) I had to work hard to make out the meaning. I rather suspect this is the fault of your collaborator, who has an academic style — at least, you do not talk that way. But in this I may be quite wrong.

But even if the excellent ideas expressed quite often in the manuscript were put into livelier and more readable English I do not think there would be a large enough audience for this book to satisfy you as author or justify us as publishers. It would be a valuable book, and in times less grim than these a publisher might feel he could indulge in it.

Thomson also attempted to find a place for Adorno’s study of the NBC Music Appreciation hour. In a letter to Adorno dated October 29, 1941 he informed Adorno that he had spoken with Minna Lederman, the editor of Modern Music (the quarterly journal of the League of Composers) and reported, “She seems to be not unfavorably disposed.”²¹  He mentioned that he had also “interested the editors of a magazine called Tomorrow who think they might like to publish it serially.”

Between 1941 and 1951 Tomorrow was a monthly magazine of literary and public affairs, published and edited by Eileen Lyttle Garrett, a spiritualist and medium who, in the years after 1951, recast the publication as a quarterly journal of psychic research (the mind boggles at the prospect of an article by the author of “The Stars Down to Earth” appearing in what would soon become a journal trading in matters parapsychological). Thomson’s links to the journal seemed to run through Harold Vursell (their paths may have crossed in Paris), who would later go on to have a distinguished career at Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Thomson urged Adorno to provide Vursell with a copy of the music appreciation article, explaining that he had sent his copy of the article (in what may have been yet another attempt to call attention to Adorno’s work) to Mina Kirstein Curtiss, a member of the English faculty at Smith College, who Thomson may have met through his connections with Orson Wells’ Mercury Theater of the Air (the finding aid for Curtiss’ papers at Smith indicate that she may have played a role in 1938 “The War of the Worlds” broadcast).²²

It was not until December 19 that Adorno — now settled in Los Angeles and finally at work with Horkheimer on what would become Dialectic of Enlightenment — got around to responding to Thomson’s October letter. He reported that Ledermann had expressed “her utmost interest” in the musical appreciation article and was “pretty confident” that “a separate publication in Modern Music” could be worked out with the Office of Radio Research. He enclosed a “rough draft of an English version of my little article on Sibelius which, as perhaps you remember, appeared in our periodical three years ago” and — in keeping with what had now becoming their established routine — advised him, “If you think it worthwhile, do with it whatever you please. I know the matter could be in no better hands than yours.”²³

Once again conforming to their settled routine, Adorno responded to the publication of Thomson’s “Radio Examined” with the following telegram:

MSS 29, Series 3, Box 19, Folder 22, Virgil Thomson Papers, Music Library, Yale University

In contrast, the publication of “Processed Music” in May 1943 passed without comment. Their correspondence, however, continued.

“A Little Article Concerning the Problem of 12-tone Technique”

I will have more to say about Adorno’s California correspondence with Thomson in the sequel to this post. For now it may be enough to try to pin down the date when Adorno sent Thomson his draft translation of “The Philosophy of Modern Music” and to speculate on what Thomson made of it.

As noted above, Adorno first broached the possibility of “a little article concerning the problem of 12-tone technique” at the close of his June 27, 1941 letter to Thomson. On July 2 Thomson responded, “An article about the problem of 12-tone technique might be interesting or not. I can’t tell in advance, Why don’t you try?” The article does not turn up again until October 21, 1942 when Adorno closed a lengthy letter to Thomson (about which I will have much more to say next time) by noting,

It may interest you to know that Mr. Runes withdrew from his obligation to publish my “Philosophy of Advanced Music” in an almost incredibly rude and ill-bred manner. Mr. Damrosch still rests, too. ²⁴

With the prospect of publication in Runes’ journal now foreclosed, Adorno forwarded his corrected copy to Thomson. While it is uncertain when he sent it, Thomson must have had the manuscript in his possession by the summer of 1943. On August 14, 1943, Adorno — who, from the letterhead, seems to have been vacationing at the Casa Loma Inn in the Poconos (Note to self: write a post on where the members of the Frankfurt School took their summer vacations!) — wrote Thomson that,

I am happy that you like my study and it will give me great pleasure if you quote from it. I have to ask you only one favor. It concerns Schoenberg. My personal relations to him are rather strained while he, at the same time, is lonely, isolated and in not too great a situation. I do not want to hurt the old man. Would you, therefore, select passages which you regard as not offensive, and make it clear that I regard his work, notwithstanding my criticism, as the world-shaking musical achievement of our time. I should be most grateful if you could put the emphasis in such a way that A. S. does not react antagonistically. Many thanks for the trouble you take, once more, with my tiresome writings.

On September 10, 1944 — three days before Arnold Schoenberg’s seventieth birthday — Virgil Thomson offered an assessment of Schoenberg’s work in his column for the Tribune.²⁵ It is hard to tell whether there was anything in it that might have offended the notoriously prickly Schoenberg and it is even harder to determine what it might have owed to the manuscript that Adorno had sent him. But while Adorno’s name is never mentioned in Thomson’s brief discussion, there are passages — for example, “This preponderance of methodology over objective is what gives to Schönberg’s work, in fact, its irreducible modernity” — that, perhaps, would not have been out of place in the “manuscript in a bottle” that has been resting for the last several decades in Thomson’s papers.

To be continued …

MSS 29, Series 3, Box 19, Folder 22, Virgil Thomson Papers, Music Library, Yale University

1. A full list of students is available at http://www.nadiaboulanger.org ↩
2. For a sketch of the various influences on Thomson, see Peter Dickinson, “Stein Satie Cummings Thomson Berners Cage: Toward a Context for the Music of Virgil Thomson,” The Musical Quarterly 72:3 (January 1986): 394–409. A 1941 article in the Herald Tribune drew a parallel between the “the three German B’s—Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms” and the “three S’s of modern music—in descending order of significance, Satie, Schönberg, and Stravinsky”, Virgil Thomson : Music Chronicles 1940-1954, ed. Tim Page, (New York, NY: The Library of America, 2014) 126. ↩
3. Adorno is also absent from Thomson’s State of Music, (New York, W. Morrow and Company, 1939), an important text that falls outside the period covered by the Musical Chronicles collection. ↩
4. Virgil Thomson, Selected Letters of Virgil Thomson, ed. Tim Page and Vanessa Weeks Page (New York: Summit Books, 1988) 167-8, 181-2; for Ross’ discussion see The Rest Is Noise : Listening to the Twentieth Century, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007) 173-74 and, more recently, “The Happy Infamy of Virgil Thomson.” ↩
5. Thomson’s correspondence with Adorno can be found in MSS 29, Series 3, Box 19, Folder 22, Virgil Thomson Papers, Music Library, Yale University. ↩
6. “Processed Music” , initially published on May 16, 1943 was subsequently incorporated into The Music Scene (1945). It is now available in Music Chronicles  249-252. ↩
7. For a brief overview of the project and Adorno’s role in it, see Thomas Y. Levin and Michael von der Linn, “Elements of a Radio Theory: Adorno and the Princeton Radio Research Project,” The Musical Quarterly 78:2 (July 1994): 316–24. Other useful discussions include Robert W. Witkin, Adorno on Popular Culture (New York & London: Routledge, 2003) 116-134 and David Jenemann, Adorno in America (University of Minnesota Press, 2007) 47-104. Some of this work is now available in Theodor W. Adorno, Current of Music:  Elements of a Radio Theory, ed. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Cambridge: Polity, 2009).↩
8. Since Adorno’s first letter to Thomson was written several months after the publication of the column, it is unclear whether there is an earlier letter from Adorno that was not preserved or whether Thomson received the publication from another source. ↩
9. Theodor W Adorno and George Simpson, “On Popular Music,” Studies in Philosophy and Social Science IX, no. 1 (1941): 17–48. In his introduction to Current of Music, Robert Hullot-Kentor calls attention to Thomson’s use of Adorno’s article ↩
10. Radio Research 1941 (New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1941). ↩
11. It appeared in The Music Scene (1945) and is now available in Music Chronicles. ↩
12. Horkheimer’s Preface to the journal is dated April 1941, which suggests that Adorno may have delayed writing Thomson until the issue was available. ↩
13. It would appear that Adorno was referring to “A Social Critique of Radio Music,” which was presented in 1939 and later published in Kenyon Review 7:2 (Spring 1945): 208–17. ↩
14. The Institute ceased publication of Studies in Philosophy and Social Science with Volume IX and the study of Damrosch did not appear until 1994 — see Theodor W. Adorno, “Analytical Study of the NBC ‘Music Appreciation Hour,’” The Musical Quarterly 78:2. ↩
15. Scribbled on the letter — perhaps by either Thomson or his secretary — were several telephone numbers, presumably the numbers at which Adorno could be reached (the main Institute number was on the letterhead). ↩
16. Virgil Thomson, The State of Music. (New York, William Morrow and Company, 1939). There is, to be the best of my knowledge, no evidence that Adorno was aware of the book. ↩
17. I have more to say about this in a discussion of Horkheimer’s essay “On the Sociology of Class Relations” that will be allegedly appear on Nonsite.org (or, if all else fails,  here). ↩
18. Theodor W. Adorno, Can One Live after Auschwitz? : A Philosophical Reader, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press, 2003) 100. ↩
19. For a discussion, see Hullot-Kentor’s introduction to Theodor W. Adorno, Current of Music 30-34. ↩
20. I have not yet had the opportunity to examine Thomson’s correspondence with Phillips. ↩
21. Prior to coming to the United States, two of Adorno’s articles had appeared in the journal: a review of George Antheil’s opera Transatlantic (Modern Music VII, no. 4 (July 1930): 38–31) and “Berg and Webern — Schönberg’s Heirs,” Modern Music VIII, no. 2 (February 1931): 29–38. ↩
22. There is a brief appreciation of Curtiss on the Smithipedia.↩
23. The article in question was a review of Bengt Törne’s Sibelius: a Close Up that appeared in Zeitschrift für Sozialforschung 7:3 (!938) 460-463. To the best of my knowledge, Adorno’s translation has not been preserved. ↩
24. As noted in my previous post, Adorno had begun his translation of Zur Philosophie der neuen Musik (a German manuscript dating from 1940-1941 that corresponds to the Schoenberg chapter of Adorno’s 1949 book Philosophie der neuen Musik) in response to a solicitation from Dagobert Runes, the editor of the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. ↩
25. Thomson, Music Chronicles 470-472. ↩

In the introduction to his 2006 translation of Adorno’s Philosophie der neuen Musik, Robert Hullot-Kentor notes that the book (or, more accurately, the first part of it) had been translated into English twice before: in 1973 by Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster and in 1941 by Adorno himself, who prepared an English version of the Schoenberg portion of the manuscript (which, at that point, was the only part of the text that had been completed). Hullot-Kentor explains that the translation was prepared at the instigation of Dagobert Runes, for publication in the Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism. But, in the end, Runes opted not to publish the text and the manuscript itself seems to have been lost.

Hullot-Kentor finds its disappearance

exceptional since from early on Adorno saved drafts of almost every page he wrote. But if that draft is somewhere, it is not be found in Frankfurt (xxi).

Based on Adorno’s description of the manuscript in a letter to Lowenthal — “I’ve translated the music essay into pidgin English and so fundamentally castrated it that Schoenberg will not be able to be mad about it …” — Hullot-Kentor concludes,

The unrevised draft, then, was a substantially compromised manuscript and it may be just as well that it disappeared, accidentally or not, for its vanishing plausibly spared unavailing arguments over authenticity and precedence of translated statement. But still one would like to know at least how Adorno translated the title. For its translation is, in fact, not obvious ….

But, for better or worse, it turns out that the manuscript was not lost: it has been hiding in New Haven. And Adorno translated the title as Philosophy of Advanced Music.

Philosophy of Advanced Music (1941), 106, MSS No. 29A, Series XI.A. Miscellaneous Writings by Others, Box 191, Folder 1, Virgil Thomson Papers, Yale Music Library.

This post will discuss the path that led me to my encounter with this supposedly lost manuscript and say a few things about it. A subsequent post will say more about why it wound up in New Haven.

Of Finding Aids and Photographs

In October 2012 I spent some time looking at the Norbert Guterman’s papers at Columbia, in hopes of shedding some light on what had become of another allegedly lost manuscript: the article that Max Horkheimer wrote in response to the “New Failure of Nerve” exchanges in Partisan Review.¹ I’d been interested in Guterman for quite some time. Along with Henri Lefebvre, he had been active in various Parisian circles that brought surrealists and Marxists together during the 1920s and had been friends with Max Jacob, André Breton, André Malraux, and Francis Steegmuller. He came to the United States around 1930 and began a career as a translator (which is how I first became aware of him: when I was in graduate school, it seemed that he’d translated a fair number of the books that interested me the most). By the 1940s he was working for the Institute for Social Research where, among other things, he was responsible for putting the Horkheimer lectures that eventually became The Eclipse of Reason into passable English.

I found nothing about Horkheimer’s response to the Partisan Review exchanges in Guterman’s papers, but I did find a handwritten letter from Adorno, dated September 14, 1946 (to the causal reader, it might appear that the year is 1940, but it is written on stationary that gives Adorno’s address as 316 So. Kenter Avenue and Adorno did not leave New York for California until November of 1941.) Since Adorno’s handwriting was sometimes difficult to decipher — and, in any case, I was looking for something else — I was content to skim the letter and jot down a few notes. Fortunately, I also photographed it.

Norbert Guterman Papers, Columbia University, Box 2

Here’s the note I took at the time (it consists of extracts from the text along with a few comments in square brackets):

From Adorno (in LA), September 14, 1946

I add the German original of the “Philosophy of the Modern Music” (1940-1941), together with my rough [rough is underlined] (and possibly [word unclear]) draft of a translation. The English, of course, is abominable … If the publication of my essay were being [word unclear], I should like to make some modifications, especially on Stravinsky.

I didn’t get around to looking at the letter again until a few weeks ago, when I was reviewing the notes I took on the Guterman papers.  I began to wonder whether the allegedly lost manuscript might have wound up in Box 7 of Guterman’s papers, which carry the laconic designation “Manuscripts — Translations by Guterman.”

It was only at this point that I took another look at my photograph of the letter and realized that it contained a postscript, which I’d skimmed, but not fully understood (there is a lesson here: the past is a foreign country and when you visit it you should take lots of snapshots; you’re likely to miss things):

P.S. I just find that the most recent copy of the English translation of the “Philosophy of Advanced Music” is left [sic]. The only one which I corrected is in the possession of Mr. Virgil Thomson, music editor of the Herald Tribune. In case a positive decision has been reached with regard to publication, you could certainly obtain this copy from him, by explaining to him the situation. Please forgive the mess.  The copy of the manuscript which I enclose is entirely uncorrected and I do not know whether you can use it at all.

Norbert Guterman Papers, Columbia University, Box 2

The letter suggests that there might be at least two surviving copies of Adorno’s translation, though it was conceivable that neither of them would have been in Adorno’s possession when he packed up his papers and returned to Frankfurt. He sent an unrevised version of the text to Guterman in September 1946, which might still be residing in Box 7 of Guterman’s papers at Columbia (if anyone wants to wander over there and take a look, let me know what you find). But since this was an unrevised version of the manuscript, Adorno might not have had a great deal of interest in getting it back. The more significant version would be the revised draft that he sent to the composer and critic Virgil Thomson. So, might the “lost” copy of Adorno’s translation have remained with Thomson?

A quick search revealed that not only had Virgil Thomson’s papers been archived in the Yale Music Library, but that there was an exhaustive online finding aid available. It indicated that a manuscript by Theodor Adorno carrying the title “Philosophy of Advanced Music” resided in Box 191, Folder 1.²

The Text Itself

What, in honor of the institution that has sheltered it for these many years, might be designated as the “Yale Manuscript” is a 108 page typescript, with extensive annotations. Most pages contain corrections, alternate formulations of passages, queries, and requests to (or, perhaps, from?) unknown parties — e.g., “please check against the German” (100) and “please check with English translation of Faust I” (103). There are also a few deletions (some of which involve entire paragraphs) and some additions.

The German text from which Adorno worked appears to have been the version of Philosophie der neuen Musik that he circulated among friends and colleagues in the early 1940s, including Rudolf Kolisch (a typescript of a German version can be found among Kolisch’s papers at Harvard) and Max Horkheimer (who responded enthusiastically to the manuscript when he read it in the summer of 1941).³ This was also the text that Thomas Mann read while working on Doctor Faustus.⁴ With minor alterations, the German original became the first part (i.e., the section “Schoenberg and Progress”) of the book that — with the addition of a second section on “Stravinsky and the Restoration” — was published as Philosophie der neuen Musik in 1949.

Adorno’s English translation also includes a two-page preface, dated “New York City, September 1941,” which provides a brief account of the genesis of the work, along with an acknowledgement of Adorno’s ongoing collaboration with Horkheimer and of the role that Dagobert Runes played in providing the impetus for publication of a work that had, as Adorno explained, “been written without any thought of publication.” The expression of thanks to Runes, however muted, suggests that, at this point, the text had yet to be rejected. Adorno went on to note, that it was all “the more seemly” for him to acknowledge Runes’ “initiative” in soliciting the manuscript since the author,

is only too well conscious of the provocative features of his attempt. Not only does he enter circumstantially into the most esoteric questions of the technique of composing in a situation in which it must appear almost cynical to devote any time to matters of that kind, he also treats these questions thus as if they were identical with reality in spite of their isolation and exclusiveness.⁵ Yet perhaps this very absurdity may justify the undertaking. This is only music. What must a world be like in which even questions of contrapunct [sic] give evidence of unbearable contradictions. How thoroughly disturbed must the existence of man be, if impasse and deadlock are still reflected by a realm so far aloof from the sphere of immediate experience, a realm the function of which is supposed just to take away men from the sphere of immediate experience.

Perhaps because Adorno was unable, in English, to do what he was capable of doing in German, his explanation of the aim of this peculiar text is uncharacteristically candid: looking at matters that involve “only music”, he sought to grasp the “unbearable contradictions” that defined an entire social order.

One Passage, Three Translations

In the introduction to his translation Robert Hullot-Kentor observes that Adorno was likely “well aware that his recently acquired English was still inadequate to the task” of translating the German text. I suspect that a close examination of the Yale manuscript (which, I hasten to add, I have neither attempted nor am likely to carry out) will confirm this judgment. Even a limited reading makes it clear that the manuscript that Adorno sent to Virgil Thomson was very much still a work in progress.

For the moment, it may suffice to compare the closing sentences of the German original with the translations by Adorno, Mitchell and Blomster, and Hullot-Kentor.

First, Adorno’s German:

Die Schocks des Unverständlichen, welche die künstlerische Technik im Zeitalter ihrer Sinnlosigkeit austeilt, schlagen um. Sie erhellen die sinnlose Welt. Dem opfert sich die neue Musik. Alle Dunkelheit und Schuld der Welt hat sie auf sich genommen. All ihr Glück hat sie daran, das Unglück zu erkennen; all ihre Schönheit, dem Schein des Schönen sich zu versagen. Keiner will mit ihr etwas zu tun haben, die Individuellen so wenig wie die Kollektiven. Sie verhallt ungehört, ohne Echo. Schießt um die gehörte Musik die Zeit zum strahlenden Kristall zusammen, so fällt die ungehörte in die leere Zeit gleich einer verderblichen Kugel. Auf diese letzte Erfahrung hin, die mechanische Musik stündlich durchmacht, ist die neue Musik spontan angelegt, auf das absolute Vergessensein. Sie ist die wahre Flaschenpost.⁶

Adorno’s translation:

The shocks of being ununderstandable dealt by artistic technique during the age of their senselessness tilt over. They enlighten the senseless world. Advanced music sacrifices itself for this purpose. It has all its happiness in gaining the cognition of unhappiness. It has all its beauty in renouncing the illusion of beauty. It is liked by nobody, by individualists as little as by collectivists. It resounds [dies away, lingers] (verhallt) unheard, without an echo. If time gleamingly (strahlend) crystallizes around music that has been heard, unheard music falls into the empty time like a pernicious ball (globe) (Kugel). Advanced music aims spontaneously though unconsciously at this last experience which is made hour by hour by mechanical music, the experience of being totally forgotten. Its hope lies with the doom of the world. It is the true manuscript in the bottle.⁷

*Philosophy of Advanced Music* (1941), 106, MSS No. 29A, Series XI.A. Miscellaneous Writings by Others, Box 191, Folder 1, Virgil Thomson Papers, Yale Music Library.

Mitchell and Blomster:

The shocks of incomprehension, emitted by artistic technique in the age of its meaninglessness, undergo a sudden change. They illuminate the meaningless world. Modern music sacrifices itself to this effort. It has taken upon itself all the darkness and guilt of the world. Its fortune lies in the perception of misfortune; all of its beauty is in denying itself the illusion of beauty. No one wishes to become involved with art — individuals as little as collectives. It dies away unheard, without even an echo. If time crystallizes around that music which has been heard, revealing its radiant quintessence, music which has not been heard falls into empty time like an impotent bullet. Modern music spontaneously aims towards this last experience, experienced hourly in mechanical music. Modern music sees absolute oblivion as its goal. It is the surviving message of despair from the shipwrecked.⁸

Finally, Hullot-Kentor:

The shocks of the incomprehensible — which artistic technique in the age of its meaninglessness dispenses — reverse. They illuminate the meaningless world. New music sacrifices itself to this. It has taken all the darkness and guilt of the world on itself. All its happiness is in the knowledge of unhappiness; all its beauty is in the denial of the semblance of the beautiful. No one, neither individuals nor groups, wants to have anything to do with it. It dies away unheard, without an echo. Around music as it is heard, time springs together in a radiant crystal, while unheard tumbles perniciously through empty time. Towards this latter experience, which mechanical music undergoes hour by hour, new music is spontaneously aimed: towards absolute oblivion. It is the true message in the bottle.⁹

What is perhaps most immediately obvious is how little help Adorno can provide in the text’s most difficult passages: his solutions are generally no more successful than those who followed him.

His rendering of the verb at the close of the first sentence does manage to capture something that the other translations don’t quite get — the sense that an entire order is being overthrown. Yet “tilt over” misses the violence implicit in umschlagen — but then, so does Mitchell and Blomster’s “undergo a sudden change” and Hullot-Kentor’s concise “reverse.”

There is almost complete unanimity on what to do with second sentence — “Sie erhellen die sinnlose Welt”. The only difference is that where his Anglophone translators — perhaps sensing that “enlighten” has to be reserved for “aufklären” or “erleuchten” — do not follow Adorno in having the shock of the incomprehensible serve the cause of enlightenment (for reasons that should be obvious to readers of this blog, I rather like Adorno’s use of “enlighten” here).

Hullot-Kentor doesn’t clutter “Dem opfert sich die neue Musik” with unnecessary words and translates it as “New music sacrifices itself to this” (one of the many strengths of his translation is that it conveys something of the concision of Adorno’s German). Mitchell and Blomster’s translation echoes Adorno’s in wanting to find a noun to put in place of “this”. And here we also see the diverging ideas about what to do with “neuen Musik”: “advanced music” (Adorno), “modern music” (Mitchell and Blomster, or “new music” (Hullot-Kentor).

The remarkable sentence “Schießt um die gehörte Musik die Zeit zum strahlenden Kristall zusammen, so fällt die ungehörte in die leere Zeit gleich einer verderblichen Kugel” appears (understandably) to have stumped everyone. Hullot-Kentor succeeds in coming up with a sentence that resembles English while preserving something of the otherworldly character of the German: “Around music as it is heard, time springs together in a radiant crystal, while unheard tumbles perniciously through empty time.” But “as it is heard” plays down the contrast between “heard music” and “unheard music” by framing the distinction as temporal — and, perhaps, temporary (i.e., music as it is being heard vs. music that is not now being heard). Might this be a place to steal a trick from Keats and use “heard music”?

The rest of the sentence — “fällt die ungehörte in die leere Zeit gleich einer verderblichen Kugel” — is the sort of thing that drives translators to despair. To begin at the end: every Anglophone reader must struggle (in vain, I suspect) to banish the image of a baked pudding falling through empty time and try to figure out which of the many other things that Kugel designates Adorno might have had in mind [Update: shortly after this post was published, Lesley Chamberlain came up with a convincing account of what Adorno was doing in the sentence — see her comment below]. They can take some solace in the fact that Adorno wasn’t quite sure either: he initially went with “ball”, then added “globe” in parentheses and — apparently to remind himself that there was still work to be done — put the German in as well. Mitchell and Blomster’s “bullet” is an intriguing choice, though it might have been better to use “spent” in place of “impotent.” Like Adorno, Hullot-Kentor concludes that verderblichen can only be “pernicious”, but — having (sensibly) banished Kugel from the text — he is forced to attach the word to the action of tumbling, rather than to whatever it is (ball, globe, bullet, or pudding) that falls through empty time. The problem with “while unheard tumbles perniciously through empty time” is that it sounds uncomfortably close to Chomsky’s “colorless green ideas sleep furiously”: grammatically correct but (depending on one’s taste) either semantically nonsensical, poetic, or metaphysical. Faced with a phrase like this, all translators can do is resist the urge to put a bullet through their own heads.

Unless I’ve missed it, there is nothing in the published German text that corresponds to Adorno’s penultimate sentence, which suggests that either there was a sentence in the text of the original German manuscript that was subsequently cut or that this was one of the additions to the English text.

And finally we come to the last sentence, which contains the now familiar word Flaschenpost. As heirs to a tradition of reading Horkheimer and Adorno, Mitchell and Blomster and Hullot-Kentor know that Adorno is, of course, conjuring up the famous “message in bottle.” But Adorno, at sea in a language that was not yet (and probably could never fully be) his own, translates Post as “manuscript”, leaving the reader with the peculiar image of a “manuscript” stuffed into a bottle and set adrift. But, while strange, the image is strangely appropriate — at least for the peculiar manuscript that closes with it: for here is a manuscript cast off in the closing years of Adorno’s exile in Los Angeles that, somehow or other, washed up among the papers of an American composer and music critic.

I’ll have more to say in a subsequent post about why Adorno sent the manuscript to Virgil Thomson. But readers are on their own in dealing with that tumbling Kugel.

1. The editors of Horkheimer’s collected works note that parts of the manuscript were later inserted into Horkheimer’s Eclipse of Reason, but have been unable to locate the manuscript itself. At this point, I’m inclined to think that the reason why the manuscript is missing is that it became the second chapter of the Eclipse of Reason. (In other words, the second chapter is the “Hook Paper.” But I won’t try to defend this conclusion here. ↩
2. For the full citation, see below. The same folder also contains a copy of the Analytical Study of the NBC Musical Appreciation Hour. ↩
3. See Horkheimer’s letter to Adorno of August 28, 1941 in Horkheimer, Gesammelte Schriften XVII:146-152. ↩
4. I’ve discussed this in some detail in “Mephistopheles in Hollywood: Adorno, Mann, and Schoenberg,” in The Cambridge Companion to Adorno, ed. Thomas Huhn (Cambridge University Press, 2004), 148–80. ↩
5. In the typescript, in place of the word “reality” Adorno had written “in a world which takes as little notice of them as they do of it” — which is enough to suggest that not all of his modifications were for the better. ↩
6. Theodor Adorno, Philosophie der neuen Musik, in Rolf Tiedemann, ed., Theodor W. Adorno Gesammelte Schriften 12:126. ↩
7. T. W. Adorno, Philosophy of Advanced Music (1941), 106, MSS No. 29A, Series XI.A. Miscellaneous Writings by Others, Box 191, Folder 1, Virgil Thomson Papers, Yale Music Library. ↩
8. Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music translated by Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster (New York: Seabury, 1973) 133. ↩
9. Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, translated, edited, and with an Introduction by Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006) 102. ↩