The Mediations of Music: Critical Approaches After Adorno

Adorno believed that a circular relationship was established between immediacy and mediation. Should we now say that this model with its clear Hegelian influence is outdated? Or does it need some theoretical integration? This volume addresses these questions by covering the performance of music, its technological reproduction and its modes of communication - in particular, pedagogy and dissemination through the media. Each of the book’s four parts deal with different aspects of the mediation process. The contributing authors outline the problematic moments in Adorno’s reasoning but also highlight its potential. In many chapters the pole of immediacy is explicitly brought into play, its different manifestations often proving to be fundamental for the understanding of mediation processes. The prime reference sources are Adorno’s Current of Music, Towards a Theory of Musical Reproduction and Composing for the Films. Critical readings of these texts are supplemented by reflections on performance studies, media theories, sociology of listening, post-structuralism and other contiguous research fields.

Gianmario Borio is professor of Musicology at the University of Pavia and director of the Institute of Music at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice. In 1999 he was awarded the Dent Medal by the Royal Musical Association. In 2013 he was Distinguished Visiting Professor at The Italian Academy for Advanced Studies in America. Since 2013 he has been member of the Academia Europaea, since 2016 corresponding member of the American Musicological Society, and since 2019 corresponding fellow of the British Academy. He is the director of the book series Musical Cultures of the Twentieth Century (Routledge) and the online-journal Archival Notes.His publications deal with several aspects of the music of the 20th century (theory and aesthetics, political background, the audiovisual experience), with the history of musical concepts and the theory of musical form.