2nd International Congress of Musicology

Athens Concert Hall, 4-6 November 2003

Paper Abstracts

Olivier Revault d’Allonnes

On the Traces of Adorno: What is Social in the Tonal System?

Translation in Greek: Panayiotis Tsoumas

In his introduction to the Sociology of Music, Th. W. Adorno notices that the difficulty is not to situate music into society, but to understand what is social in music, in the score itself. Adorno tempted to do this with composers such as Mahler, Schoenberg, Beethoven, Wagner, Stravinsky, in jazz etc. We shall try to examine here the partly close, partly loose bond between the historical constitution of the tonal system and the numerous masterpieces on the one side, and the philosophical and possibly religious (Christian) vision that marks the European culture on the other. We shall examine also the meaning of the rupture (Schoenberg) with the tonal system.

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