Digital Currents of Music

– A digital music project in cooperation with JAS –

The reception of Theodor W. Adorno's writings on music confronts the reader with the almost unsolvable problem to acoustically envision the large number of works and musical examples Adorno has mentioned. Reading and listening diverge epistemologically.

The current availability of reproduced music does not change the fact that in practise the reader is hardly able to collect and locate all the musical works or passages cited by Adorno in an analogue or digital way and to prepare them accordingly, the latter would be impossible in any case without any knowledge of the work and its context. Adorno's associative and allusive way to write about music further complicates the comprehensibility. 

"Streaming Adorno“ aims to counteract these reception difficulties of classical scriptural reading with a multimedia project that transforms Adorno's text into a new technological Tontext by implementing sound examples.

The title of his little-received radio theory "Current of Music" (1938-41), to which the subtitle of the project refers, is enough to invalidate the still widespread prejudice of Adorno's hostility to technology: the double meaning of current describes that momentary and present on the one hand and the electronic stream on the other. Far from condemning radio in a culturally pessimistic manner, for Adorno the medium embodies the most advanced state of technological productive forces, which he himself used for his own purposes - central texts of his musical writings (e.g. "Beautiful passages") werenot least conceived or reformulated as lectures for radio, because the music samples could be synchronized with the lecturing voice.

Under digital conditions, the electric current has become the stream, which can now recursively bring Adorno's reception up to date with the latest technology. In the interlacing of writing and sound samples, the project "Streaming Adorno" attempts to radiofy the reading of Adorno himself and thus to wrest the reception of Adorno and the music he negotiated from its elitist hermeticism, as well as to transmedially open the boundaries between scripture and sound, between reading and listening.

Head of the project: Han-Gyeol Lie

Associates: Gabriele Geml and Antonia Hofstätter

The project will start 2024/2025