Crit­i­cal the­o­rist and musi­col­o­gist Theodor Adorno was a con­trar­i­an, almost con­tra­dic­to­ry figure—a com­mit­ted Marx­ist thinker who was also a cul­tur­al elit­ist. Any­one who’s sat through a the­o­ry class will know his name (most like­ly through his sem­i­nal text Dialec­tic of Enlight­en­ment, writ­ten with Max Horkheimer). For those who don’t, Adorno was an inte­gral mem­ber of what was called the “Frank­furt School,” a group of ear­ly twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry Ger­man schol­ars and social the­o­rists who were high­ly crit­i­cal of both West­ern cap­i­tal­ism and Sovi­et com­mu­nism. Adorno’s work is wide-rang­ing, pen­e­trat­ing, and, at times, abstruse to the point of nigh-unin­tel­li­gi­bil­i­ty.

Despite Adorno’s hope for social trans­for­ma­tion, his influ­ence is (by design) pri­mar­i­ly in the aca­d­e­m­ic and cul­tur­al spheres, and his cri­tiques of pop­u­lar cul­ture and music were scathing and some­times just plain weird. He had a noto­ri­ous­ly irra­tional dis­like of jazz, for exam­ple. (His­to­ri­an Eric Hob­s­bawm said that his writ­ing con­tained “some of the stu­pid­est pages ever writ­ten about jazz.”) Adorno also dis­liked “protest music,” as you can see from the inter­view above, in which he slams the folky, hip­py stuff for its “cross-eyed trans­fix­ion with amuse­ment” that ren­ders it safe. Protest music, Adorno says, takes “the hor­ren­dous,” the Viet­nam War in this case, and makes it “some­how con­sum­able.” Maybe Dylan felt the same way when he gave up his Woody Guthrie act and start­ed writ­ing those bril­liant­ly arcane, poet­ic lyrics.

But Adorno didn’t just preach the virtues of dif­fi­cult art. He prac­ticed them. In addi­tion to cham­pi­oning the twelve-tone music of Arnold Schoen­berg, Adorno com­posed his own music, for piano and strings. The three piano pieces above are his, some­what rem­i­nis­cent of the most dis­so­nant pas­sages in Mod­est Mus­sorgsky. Per­formed by pianist Stef­fen Schleier­ma­ch­er, the pieces are titled “Langsame halbe—Immer ganz zart,” “Heftige Achtel,” and “Presto.”

A much longer, more sub­stan­tial work is Adorno’s Stud­ies for Strings in six move­ments. Move­ment one is above and move­ment two below (hear part 3, part 4, part 5, and part 6).  It’s chal­leng­ing and often quite sub­lime lis­ten­ing. The YouTu­ber who uploaded the music has seen fit to set it to a mon­tage of black-and-white images. I don’t know whether this hin­ders or helps your appre­ci­a­tion, but you may wish to leave the videos run­ning and lis­ten to each move­ment while you work on oth­er things. Or bet­ter yet, close your eyes and for­get every­thing you know, don’t know, or think you know about Theodor Adorno.

Note: You can watch a lec­ture on the Frank­furt School here. It’s part of a Yale Open course on lit­er­ary the­o­ry, which appears in our col­lec­tion of 700 Free Online Cours­es.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Nazis’ 10 Con­trol-Freak Rules for Jazz Per­form­ers: A Strange List from World War II

85,000 Clas­si­cal Music Scores (and Free MP3s) on the Web

Inter­views with Schoen­berg and Bartók

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness