Adorno's interpretation of Mahler's music would seem to legitimize as ‘authentic’ a very different relationship to material and a very different conception of form from that suggested by his interpretation of Schoenberg. This difference, which has the character of a contradiction, calls for examination, as it has implications both for the concept of musical material since the ‘demise of modernism’, and for the theoretical consistency of Adorno's dialectical aesthetics. As a conclusion to this study I shall focus the discussion particularly on issues arising from Philosophie der neuen Musik, drawing also on the views of a number of Adorno's critics.

In very general terms, I suggest that the contradictory character of Adorno's work needs to be seen in two ways. On the one hand, as has been emphasized throughout this study, contradiction is a calculated feature of Adorno's methodology. He understands the object of enquiry itself to embody the contradictions of the social forces and relations of production, and his interpretative method aims to reveal and decipher this ‘contradictoriness’ as the ‘mediation of opposites through their extremes’. The concepts he employs can themselves only be understood when seen within the larger conceptual context which, I have argued, underlies all his writings, and which is itself characterized by the idea of the ‘constellation’ of opposites within which each concept takes its meaning.