'New Music' between Search for Identity and Autopoiesis: Or, the 'Tragedy of Listening'.

The article explores the so-called new music in Europe after World War II, which was based on the idea of progress and aimed at a complete rationalization of composing and supposed structural listening. The emphasis of Theodor Adorno on the idea of new music as musical objectivation of dynamic subjectivity is already delineated in Jean-Jacques Rousseau's criticism, namely in the identification pattern which was carried out by a new music, leading from the empfindsam style to the so-called sonata forms, a music which broke with mechanical conception related to the idea of a given Harmonia Mundi. The introduction of the concept of autopoiesis throws new light upon the theory of new music in the 1950s, which is dominated by this concept years before the term was coined in biology and sociology. In fact, while the musical expressionism of around 1910, insofar as it gave rise to a new musical language which should emanate from the depths of subjectivity, led the identification pattern to a most radical level, the serial and aleatoric music from the 1950s aimed, on the contrary, at the suppression of the composer's subjectivity from the process of composition. This clarifies Adorno's critic of serial thinking in his article "Das Altern der Neuen Musik."