PAULO CERRUTI DE ARRUDA SAMPAIO

Course
Master's degree
Research title
Expression in Theodor W. Adorno's philosphy of music
Research abstract

We intend to discuss the question of expression in Theodor Adorno's philosophy of music. We will see how, in Adorno's understanding, expression changes function in the context of new music and its rejection of tonality. In Arnold Schoenberg's expressionist compositions, expression no longer affirms the reconciliation between the expressive impulses of the musical subject and the conventions of tonality, but takes on a negative function, denouncing the antagonistic nature of social life instead of concealing it through the fraud of harmony. We will also see how the critical stance of new music, inseparable from expression understood as a counter-tendency in relation to the logic of form, is put at risk in the post-war period. By rejecting expression in totum and opting for compositional systems that tend to exclude the subject, avant-garde music recovers the ideological character that it had overcome by criticizing traditional expression. Finally, we argue that Morton Feldman's work is capable of overcoming the impasses that Adorno identifies in the production of his contemporaries. His critique of traditional expression does not lead him to musical systems alien to the subject, but to a systematically a-systematic music, in which the critical impetus of new music survives.

Graduate Advisor
Vladimir Pinheiro Safatle
Funding
CAPES
Date of defense
27/11/2023