The subjective liberty behind the notion of material progress:

a chapter of the German musical aesthetic of twentieth century

Abstract

The following article is about a decisive chapter in the German sociological and philosophical thinking about music in the context of the first three decades of twentieth-century modernism, the chapter regarding the pertinence of the incorporation of the notion of progress by the music aesthetic discourse. The positions of three fundamental authors are examined, those of Ernst Bloch, Max Weber and Theodor Adorno, the contribution of this last one being our focus. The main objective of the text is to show the central role of Adorno’s thinking around the question of the subjective freedom vis-à-visthe notion of the progress of the material, that it depends not only on his close contact with the compositional problems of the avant-garde, but emerges also from his dialogue with other important authors of his time, whose reflections aren’t always remembered by the commentaries of adornian philosophy of music. In the other hand, we would like to show how Adorno’s materialist stance resolves, dialectically, decisive theoretical questions about the aesthetic pertinence of the notion of progress that were pointed out earlier by Bloch and Weber.