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This paper is an introductory study of the works by the Viennese-born composer Pia Palme, who characterised the community of Austrian female artists as a productive and particularly innovative one. Palme herself is part of this productive and lively scene, but her role in it is twofold, for she is well known not only as a performer and composer but also for her cultural, political, and feminist engagement. From 2007 to 2013, together with the vocalist Gina Mattiello, she organised e_may, a festival dedicated to commissioning and performing pieces by contemporary women composers. Both e_may’s international programme and Palme’s œuvre show that Pia Palme is an internationally oriented artist. Born and living in Vienna, she has been collaborating with artists from all over the world since the beginning of her artistic career. Without a doubt, the exploration of Pia Palme’s works and their specific position in the Austrian music scene relates to gender and women’s studies, as well as to Austrian music studies. Writing a portrayal of Pia Palme means exploring a specific female contribution to contemporary Austrian music. However, at the same time her œuvre raises questions about the terms “female” and “Austrian” themselves: How can these categories be understood? This article’s objective is therefore to illuminate, with the help of Pia Palme’s œuvre, what the label “woman composer” and “Austrian music” might mean in this specific context.

That art functions as a corrective to rational-scientific insights is one of the formative thoughts of art philosophy. The fact that artistic expression represents a corrective to linguistically-rationally affected insight also ranks among the constants of art philosophy in the 20th century. “Expression is the opponent of articulating something” can be read, for instance, in Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory with regards to the character of language in art and Jean François Lyotard wrote on aesthetic experience: “What happens to us is by no means something which we would have controlled, programmed or conceptually apprehended beforehand”. The uneducible, conceptually unattainable is also at the centre of current art production of the 21st century. On the basis of Lyotard’s and Adorno’s positions, the article shows that one should acknowledge a constancy of the topos of art as non-conceptual knowledge on the one hand as the continuing function of a tradition defined from the philosophical aesthetics of modernity to post-modernity and orientated on the artistic avant-garde. On the other hand and beyond this a continuous line of tradition of New Music becomes clear, leading to the expressionistic avant-garde of the 20th century which represented the starting point for Adorno’s music philosophy, through Lyotard’s focus on John Cage, up to the avant-garde of New Music in the era of post modernity. Specific features of contemporary art, such as rebellion against linguistic standards, an understanding of expressivity that opposes the traditional language of music and operates on the verge of silence, as well as the utopian vision of a modified reality which aims at transcendency enable a conception of art as non-conceptual knowledge, corresponding with the positions of art philosophy in modernity and post-modernity in important points. The relevance of focusing on this line of tradition for musicology lies in the fact that it sheds new light on the musical avant-garde and its further function and, last but not least, that it opens new perspectives in understanding contemporary artistic productions.

There is no doubt, that Adomo's critical monographs and essays on Wagner and Strauss, as well as the text on Sibelius, number among the most controversially discussed parts of his oeuvre. One important reason for this controversial reception is the fact that these writings combine philosophical and musical views. As far as the musicologists are concerned, the texts lack a detailed analytical perspective; from the philosophical point of view on the other hand, the deliberations are too much dominated by musical phenomena. This text, which was written for a lecture held at the Musicology Department of the University of Ljubljana in April 2005, aims at placing Adorno's music criticism in the context of his critical aesthetics and in his musical philosophy respectively, which he summed up in his Aesthetic Theory. By doing so the most important criteria, which refer directly to the critical perspective of his thought concerning language and culture in general, shall be focused upon. The article consists of four parts: The first part will focus on Adorno's ideas on 20th century art in general, for these theoretical thoughts constitute the basis of his thoughts on music and musicians. In the second part, Adorno's demands of musical criticism are placed in the centre of interest. The third part discusses Adorno's critique of Wagner by comparing it to his views on Mozart. The fourth and last part provides a detailed analysis of Adorno's two essays on Richard Strauss. Beside Adorno's Aesthetic Theory his writings on music criticism, in particular the paper held in 1967 at the Institute for Musical Criticism and Aesthetical Research of the former Music Academy in Graz entitled »Reflections on musical criticism«, his Essay on Wagner and his two papers on Richard Strauss written in 1924 and 1964 serve as textual basis for the following consideration.