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This article explores Adorno’s engagement to tackle a concept of culture, avoiding the Scylla of historicizing its products as a cultural heritage and the Charybdis of their reification as a commodity. In this perspective, musical pedagogy is crucial in checking the possibility of art education understood as a production of sense. Drawing on the recent critique of Adorno’s aesthetics (Georgina Born, Tia De Nora, Antoine Hennion), the article claims that Adorno’s perspective – despite the obvious anachronisms – still represents a viable alternative to two opposite leading positions regarding the function of music education: music as a tool for social inclusion and the individual and social construction of the self, and music as sheer conservation of cultural heritage.

This article explores Adorno’s engagement to tackle a concept of culture, avoiding the Scylla of historicizing its products as a cultural heritage and the Charybdis of their reification as a commodity. In this perspective, musical pedagogy is crucial in checking the possibility of art education understood as a production of sense. Drawing on the recent critique of Adorno’s aesthetics (Georgina Born, Tia De Nora, Antoine Hennion), the article claims that Adorno’s perspective – despite the obvious anachronisms – still represents a viable alternative to two opposite leading positions regarding the function of music education: music as a tool for social inclusion and the individual and social construction of the self, and music as sheer conservation of cultural heritage.