BETWEEN IDEA AND MUSICAL STRUCTURE On the reception of Adorno's notion of 'musical material' in the aesthetic discourse and selected compositions of a prominent contemporary American-German composers' network.

Adorno’s notion of ‘musical material’ is an essential reference in the aesthetic discourse of an American-German composers’ network, centred around two of today’s most prominent composers: Helmut Lachenmann and Brian Ferneyhough. For Adorno, musical material is deeply impregnated with socially established musical conventions and historically determined techniques. The reception of this notion in the Ferneyhough-Lachenmann circle mainly manifests in studies of how the relation between musical conventions and techniques may be exposed and dealt with in contemporary compositions.

While existing research on Adorno’s legacy in new music mostly projects his ideas on compositions, this research starts from an aesthetic discourse heavily relying on Adorno’s terminology. It investigates the actual relation between aesthetic discourse and musical structures with respect to both their individual nature and their historical and social context.

Focussing on two case-studies, this objective will be reached by a study of the evolution, mutual influences and transformation of Adornian ideas in aesthetic treatises and compositions by Lachenmann and Ferneyhough.

The goal of the research is threefold: to gain insight in the Adorno-reception in contemporary music, to understand the compositional practices of one of today’s most prominent composers’ networks and to contribute to our understanding of how aesthetic ideas and compositional practices productively inform one another.