"The music-philosophical and music-critical work of Adorno becomes accessible through the publication of volume 18 of his Collected Writings. According to their date of origin, they range from Adorno's youth - the earliest ones date back to 1922, when he was 19 years old - to just before his death in 1969. The works are as varied as their literary form: Aphorisms stand next to critiques and reviews; radio lectures next to analyses of individual compositions; encyclopaedia articles next to treatises of a monographic character - as emphatically they document at the same time the unity of the philosophical consciousness from which Adorno's thinking about music emerged almost from the beginning. Central to Adorno's philosophy of music is the effort to develop a theory of new music".