Lydia Goehr rereads the thesis she promoted in her first book, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (1992). Focusing on her controversial claim that “Bach did not intend to compose musical works,” she considers what Adorno would have made of such a claim. She re-presents an Adornian movement in the negative dialectic: how the elasticity in the (pre-)work-concept aligned to Bach was used in the light of Schoenberg’s compositional innovations to rescue the tradition of work-performance from the “Beethoven” paradigm that had come in between Bach and Schoenberg to over-regulate the norms of the tradition. What does it mean to rescue a tradition from its tendency to traditionalism? What does it mean for Schoenberg’s “paradigmata of possibility” to release a too-realized or too-administered “paradigm” from itself? What do we learn from these questions about immanent critique, the sort of critique that could make the workings of music’s history relevant [aktuell] to the workings of politics: a century ago and now again today?

Wednesday, June 18, 2025, 6-9 PM, Room SKW 4B-112 (Goethe Universität, Campus Westend, SKW-Building, Musicology Dept., Rostocker Straße 2, 60323 Frankfurt), contact: Jim Igor Kallenberg (J.I.Kallenberg@em.uni-frankfurt.de)

Read in advance: 2021. Lydia Goehr. Did Bach Compose Musical Works? Thinking with Adorno through Paradigms of Possibility. New German Critique 142, 48:1. (Download here)