ABSTRACT
Adorno’s essay “Vers une musique informelle” (1961) is one of the most well-known (and maybe one of the most misunderstood) contributions of his musical thought and also considered one of the most significant legacies of his philosophy of music. Initially, this article intends to specify the critical sense of Adorno’s conceptual contribution, which aimed the overcoming of the avant-garde compositional stalemate and the alternative between motivic-thematic thought and serialistic thought, at the time. Then, it describes the intention put forward by Adorno in his “material theory of forms”, a theory that had been fully developed in the monograph on Mahler, published just one year before the essay. Finally, the article tries to show some of the contemporary implications of the concept of informal music, by questioning, on the one hand, Fredric Jameson’s interpretation of the concept, and, on the other hand, briefly examining the methods of two contemporary composers that seemingly set this concept in motion: Helmut Lachenmann and Wolfgang Rihm.
Keywords:
Adorno; philosophy of music; informal music; motivic-thematic thought; serialism