Abstract

This article aims at shedding some light on the relationship between music and language within Adorno’s Musical writings and especially within the essay “Music and Language: A Fragment”, which opens the selection of Quasi una fantasia (1963). Having in mind the peculiarities of the Adornian comprehension towards the development of modern music, we also hope to raise a hypothesis, which is apparently inconsistent with Adorno’s critical view against the thoughtless confluence between music and other artistic modalities – well known as “pseudomorphosis” in the Philosophy of Modern Music(1949) -, in other to put his critical assessments about it into perspective. For this purpose, we’ll use some of his comments on the so called musical impressionism and particularly on a Debussy’s song.

Keywords: Music – language – pseudomorphosis – musical impressionism - Debussy