This passage, which is more sublime than words can tell, says that this most transient of things, the ineffable sound of disappearance, holds more hope of return than could ever be disclosed to any reflection on the origin and essence of the form-seeking sound. This is clear in his reflections on the three bars from Les Adieux: Yet Adorno’s writing is shot through with metaphysical currents that today give it an anachronistic feel. Moreover, Adorno’s concept of the constellation-‘a juxtaposed rather than integrated cluster of changing elements that resist reduction to a common denominator, essential core, or generative first principle’ (Jay 1984, 14–15), and which ‘posits a relation on the basis of observable proximity a certain … arbitrary quality’ (Leppert 2002, 64)-prefigures the notion of an assemblage that is central to some of the articles that follow. All three convictions remain germane, and they recur, inevitably transformed, in the papers in this collection. he materialist determination of cultural traits is only possible if it is mediated through the total social process’ (Adorno 10 Nov. The first two are at work in his rebuke to Walter Benjamin regarding the latter’s study of Baudelaire: ‘your dialectic is lacking in one thing: mediation … .
In at least three ways, Adorno’s idea of mediation remains relevant to this collection: music’s material and social mediation were among Adorno’s foremost preoccupations he was relentless and virtuosic in moving analytically across scales-from the analysis of fleeting sonic figures like the ‘galloping of horses’ in three bars of Beethoven’s piano sonata Les Adieux (Adorno 2002, 141) to music’s mediation by industrial capitalism and the institutions of mass entertainment and concert life and his concern was with how mediation diagnoses not only the actual condition of music but its potential transformation. Building on Marx’s account of the antagonisms constitutive of the social totality, he depicts music as a ‘fractured whole’, the locus of a dialectic between history and nature, subject and object, human consciousness and musical materials. Its most famous proponent, Theodor Adorno, drew his theory of mediation from ‘a Hegelian interpretation of Marx filtered through Lukacs’ (Paddison 1993, 121). The concept of mediation in relation to music has a rich history and varied meanings.