Are your systems more Plato or Aristotle?

Viggen: It is the German philosophers like Kant, and Hegel in their Idealist philosophy who decribe nature as timeless. Adorno, who is not a true Hegelian dialectic philosopher, but a dialectical Marxist. It is Adorno, through Benjamin through Marx through Hegel, that the dialectical process produces nature as myth as history. Adorno states " the retransformation of the historical, as that which has been, into nature, then here is the other side of the phenomenon:nature itself is seen as transitory nature, as history." Thus as seen through Adorno's analysis, nature and its form, its content, its objectivity are all socially conditioned. It is reified history. A way of understanding nature and history is through the dialectic process of art and artworks. Art acts as a cipher of the historical process within society mediated through the myths society has created. Art as cipher needs to be deciphered, and what art says about us individually and collectively is the key. Art is not conceptually utopian but a mimetic of the individual and the collective that needs to be deciphered. Adorno writes," there is no longer beauty or consolation except in the gaze falling on horror, withstanding it, and in unalleviated consciousness of negativity holding fast to the possibilty of what is better." Adorno, a Jew was expelled from his position at Frankfurt University in 1933 , asks can art say anything after Auschwitz? The Enlightenment, perhaps man's greatest achievement, brought us both Beethoven and Hitler.

I've not heard of Adorno, however, I get what you are saying in regards to art being the cipher between the person and the temporal. However, just a matter of semantics, I rather see the examination of how the person deciphers art rather than how art deciphers the person as the key to understanding "history." Cuz, as you said, nature/history is a myth. But, and here is my assertion, human nature remains static.

Naw, my speakers are more like Studs Terkel.

Viggen: Dialectics would state that it is a two way street, art comes to you as much as you come to art in a mediated manner. When I am in that "zone", say, listening to Schubert's last string quartet, I can sense the musical forms engulfing me, the particulars ( first theme, second theme, exposition, recap. etc), and the whole, the sonata form that add up the particulars and build upon each other, collide with each other, and cancel each other. Then you might, just might, maybe a little understand the universal that Schubert is trying to express through his music. Hegel might say you have encountered the absolute geist(spirit). For me, ah, the old light bulb in the old brain lights up, and just smiles, a smile of understanding.

As for Theodor Adorno, his musical circle included, Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Weill, Brecht, and Krenek. He studied composition with Berg. His doctorate adviser was the great theologian Paul Tillich. He worked with the fine sociologist Paul Lazarfield at Princeton while exiled in the US. Was the musical advisor and close friend to the eminent novelist Thomas Mann. Adorno is arguably a great thinker on aesthetics. If you write about aesthetics today, in some way you will come across the thoughts of Adorno.
His four great works are:
Negative Dialectics
Aesthetic Theory
Dialectics of the Enlightment(with Max Horkheimer)
Philosophy of Modern Music

His collection of essays are incredibly numerous. The best for music is one edited by Richard Lennart, which you can usually find at Borders.

I would love to learn more about the theories of dialectics/aethetics. My self education of these probably stopped at around the 19th century. Thanks for the heads up. Rereading old reprints/reinterpreted books on epistomology and the like just doesn't do it for me anymore. Perhaps these will. I will "borrow" the books/essays you suggested next time I frequent Borders.