Adorno so intelligent it was, as Ansermet was at the opposite end, a very learned and intelligent man and even if i do not partake his catechism about tonality, a way more deeper thinker than Adorno ( i read his mammoth book) They have their clear agendas each one of them ...
And reality had not wait for our agendas... And as i said FREEDOM come right at the same moment through Jazz first or composers as different as Charles Ives or Scriabin for example who cannot be put against Schoenberg as mere neo-classicism reaction .. Then came into the fore right after Jazz , all worlds music "classical" traditions...As in iranian/persian music and Indian classical music among all others.. The first mentor and friend of Philip Glass creating minimalism with other composers , studied american Indian drumming for example...
Adorno was very european centric , and did not understand what is coming in his times , which was FREEDOM , but not in dogmatic atonal dogma AGAINST tonality , ( after all any two foes ressemble each other way more than suggested by their apparent opposition, Atonality is only the reverse of tonality, two faces of the same coin)... Adorno did not understood Jazz as music phenomenon and his analysis is not even wrong but being socially focused beside the musical essential meaningful emerging point... « Adorno’s essay “On Jazz” of 1936 sees jazz as a commodity in the culture industry and as merely a perverted form of symbolic revolt against social injustice.»
And my Biblical metaphor about exile in the desert is spot on, i take it inspired by Ansermet who despise Schoenberg atonality...But unlike Ansermet catechism it was not a return to tonality dogma which came after the war but because of new technologies the world "classical" musics from all world corners... The occidental domination centered in European christian values were already contested by musical traditions which appear as revelations for many of us...Personnally i admired mid eastern music and Iranian and Indian classicals especially... But even didgeridoo australian music can taught us something...
Sound is music by the power of the human brain/body/consciousness... But music in the larger possible meaning of the world , out of humanity, is at the core of mathemathics and then of the cosmos...Music is more than human leisure in esthetic or dogmatic truth... Music is medecine and cosmology and number theory...The greatest thinker in music right now is the creator of non commutative geometry : Alain Connes ...This is one of the deepest lecture in Science i ever heard.., it must be listened to many times.. But it is stunning..
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z52ZAPrRbqE&t=487s
Going in the desert and return with some new truth sounds very biblical, doesn’t it? Likewise in music such new ’truth’ can easily turn into new dogma and serialism certainly was a very strict and even dogmatic system. It became a sort of smokescreen for a whole generation of mediocre composers to hide behind. As long as you rotated your notes with the required serial pedigree you were accepted by academia as a worthy disciple, no matter how boring or ugly your music would sound. Anyone not committing to these lazy dogma’s was not taken seriously and ’cancelled’ as we would probably call it today. Thankfully strictly serial composers are mostly forgotten, while those who resisted the peer pressure and stubbornly developped their own musical language (while even adopting serial devices) are now the ones acknowledged as the true ’originals’.
Adorno put Schoenberg and Stravinsky against each other in an essay on modern music. In his dogmatic view Schoenberg represented the absolute musical truth, while Stravinsky was accused of going commercial by adopting neo classicism. After the powerful ’earthliness’ of Rite of Spring, etc. this stylistic change was felt as a betrayal. In his mind Stravinsky copped out and adopted the ’wrong’ conciousness. I’m not sure if Adorno ever wasted any words on Strauss, but if he had he would probably have condemned him for not having a conscience at all.