Are your systems more Plato or Aristotle?

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.