FORMPHANTASIE: FORM AND FORMS IN ADORNO’S DARMSTADT LECTURES
FORMPHANTASIE: FORM AND FORMS IN ADORNO’S DARMSTADT LECTURES

Summary/Abstract: This article presents Adorno’s remarks on musical form at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse as a late turn in his musical thinking. Texts such as Vers une musique informelle and Form in der neuen Musik are notable not only for their particularly practical engagement with technical problems of composition, but also for their reconsideration of Adorno’s critique of traditional and abstractly schematic (e.g. serial) musical forms. Increasingly, Adorno comes to understand form itself as a sphere of musical material and advises composers to develop their “Formphantasie”: an ability to inventively imagine particular forms, treating form as composers had traditionally treated other domains of music material such as melody or rhythm. In contrast to Adorno’s earlier thought, composing ‘with’ forms as a technique of composing form offers itself as a way forward. By contextualizing Adorno’s call to “Formphantasie” within his theory of articulation, within the history of the musical genre of the fantasy, and within Adorno’s shifting reception of formal innovations in the music of composers such as Schönberg, Webern, and Stravinsky, this essay considers some of the implications of this late turn for Adorno’s musical thought.

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