Really, Is it just “Backwards”?—Reevaluating Adorno's Multifaceted Analysis of Stravinsky

With Adorno playing a significant role in academic debates, Chinese musicology has placed a greater emphasis on the study of the connections between music and philosophy as well as between music and society since the 20th century. This work aims to demonstrate Adorno's multifaceted view of Stravinsky and dialectical assessment of him. This article is based on domestic scholars' research on Adorno's “retrogressive” assessment of Stravinsky. It finds that scholars primarily elaborate on Adorno's critical assessment of Stravinsky, ignoring the dimensions of the critique as well as the correlation between his multifaceted critique of musicianship, sociability, and philosophicality and his affirmative premise of Stravinsky as a representative of new music. The use of musical form as a critical social mediator in Adorno's social critique. In his assessment of Stravinsky, Adorno highlights the musical material's historical nature while also drawing a comparison between the musical work's internal formal components and external social phenomena. Stravinsky insists on using the harmonic character of classicism, which Adorno views as the same as the bourgeois ideology, a sort of hypocrisy, evasion, and regression. He is adamant that only Schoenbergian atonal music can save the unconscious social group under the brutal and broken social phenomenon, and he uses the break of atonal music against tonal music as a metaphor to identify the false bourgeois ideology. According to Adorno, Stravinsky's insistence on the use of classical harmonic features is hypocritical, an escape from, and a regression from the identity of bourgeois ideology. The only way to achieve the preservation of the social status quo and human freedom is to remain non-identifiable with the society's ideology. The affirmative premise of retrogression, Stravinsky's “return” to the use of classical music elements, and a pejorative retrogression that contrasts with Schoenberg's progressive and socially non-critical function are the three dimensions that retrogression also points to within the field of retrogressive evaluation. In order to provide a dialectical perspective of great comprehensiveness to the study of musicology, Adorno bases his musical evaluation process on the analysis of musical works, combines sociology and philosophy, emphasizes the correlation between the inner and outer musical works, and investigates the cognitive function of musical works in the correlation process.