Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction: Notes, a Draft and Two Schemata - Tapa dura

‘Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction is a series of brilliant notes and drafts on the performance of music and its interpretation. It makes a powerful case for a performance practice that eschews historical “objectivity” and irrational subjectivity in favour of a philosophically trenchant theory of musical notation and interpretation. In his refreshing antidote to the mere collection and measurement of data that too often passes for research into the practice of music, Adorno effectively declares war on the impoverishment of musical performance in the modern era and the shallow empirical investigations that unwittingly reflect it. No other texts document more vividly Adorno’s intimate experience of music through performances of it – including his own – and the central role of that experience in his life and philosophy. This is an astonishing and in some sense superbly untimely book that in the twenty-first century should still make practitioners, scholars and listeners think more carefully about music and its performance than they might have done before.’
                                                                      

 John Deathridge, 

‘Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction addresses the dialectical relation between the musical score (inscription) and its realized sound (performance), the two elements meeting in an act of interpretation, so as to produce what Adorno several times calls “the x-ray image of the work”, the subcutaneous depth that lies beyond surface manifestation. Adorno’s concern is how music means, better how it is made meaningful. The book is a fragment, a set of extensive notes; what survives – more than 200 print pages – is nonetheless very considerable. Adorno’s comments and commentaries, invariably aphoristic, are filled with insight and, into the bargain, are richly provocative and commonly provoking.’
                    

Richard Leppert, 

At the beginning of his career in the 1920s, Adorno sketched a plan to write a major work on the theory of musical reproduction, a task he returned to time and again throughout his career but never completed.  The choice of the word ‘reproduction’ as opposed to ‘interpretation’ indicates a primary supposition: that there is a clearly defined musical text whose precision exceeds what is visible on the page, and that the performer has the responsibility to reproduce it as accurately as possible, beyond simply ‘playing what is written’. This task, according to Adorno, requires a detailed understanding of all musical parameters in their historical context, and his reflections upon this task lead to a fundamental study of the nature of notation and musical sense. 
 
In the various notes and texts brought together in Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction, one finds Adorno constantly circling around an irresolvable paradox: interpretation can only fail the work, yet only through it can music’s true essence be captured. While he at times seems more definite in his pronouncement of a musical score’s absolute value – just as a book is read silently, not aloud – his discourse repeatedly displays his inability to cling to that belief. It is this quality of uncertainty in his reflections that truly indicates the scope of the discourse and its continuing relevance to musical thought and practice today.