From the senses to reason, and back again: Adorno and Freud on interpretation

Abstract

Between 1935 and 1959, Adorno wrote a series of essays and observations on music performance which werepublished in 2001 in Germanand later translated into Englishin 2006 by Polity Press under the title Towards a theory of musical reproduction: Notes, a draft and two schemata. This collection of fragmentary writings considerably widened the scope of previously published materialsto form a critical theory of performance that garnered significant scholarly attention . Similarly, to his aesthetics and social theory, in relation to which Vieira de Carvalho argues music theory is seminal, Adorno critically elaborates on music performance as a play of dialectical elements . Drawing on prior reflections , we intend to explore the relationship between two of these elements – the mimetic and the rational domains – stressing at the same time the structural similarity between this perspective and Freud’s description of psychoanalytic interpretation, in which direction Adorno apparently seems to point.