Adorno and Performance: Thinking with the Movement of Language

Abstract

If one searches for the term “performance” in Adorno’s collected notes on musical reproduction one does not look in vain. “Performance,” understood in a broad sense as the physical act of making music, appears for instance when Adorno discusses the shortcomings or merits of particular interpretations of music in relation to which he develops and refines his theoretical points. This very broad notion of performance, however, does not take us to the heart of Adorno’s account of musical reproduction. Indeed, in that account Adorno is much more interested in the process of reading music, understood as a cognitive (geistig) activity of following through the inner development of musical compositions, than he is in performance, broadly construed. This should hardly be surprising. After all, Adorno’s interest in musical reproduction is primarily critical: he is concerned with the possibility of a reproduction that would be true to the objective demands of a work. Whilst Adorno, of course, does not refer to “reading music” in terms of “performance,” I contend that contours of the former are revealed when seen through the lens of the latter (and vice versa). When looked at in this way, what emerges is a conception of performance as an embodied mode of thought that constitutes as much a practice of critique as a critical practice. Practice, however, is never a mere “doing” but is crucially also receptive — it involves mimetic comportment in which the material and experiential fabric of things and thought resounds.