Theodor W. Adorno (1903–69) was the author of In Search of Wagner, Aesthetic Theory, and Negative Dialectics, among many other books. Wieland Hoban is a British composer who has translated several works from German, including Night Music, a collection of essays by Theodor W. Adorno.

• 1. Without Model2. Amorbach3. On Tradition4. Scribbled at the Jeu de Paue5. From Sils Maria6. Non-Conciliatory Proposal7. The Culture Industry: A Résumé8. Obituary for an Organizer9. Transparencies on Film10. Chaplin Times Two11. Theses on The Sociology of Art12. Functionalism Today13. Luccan Memorial14. The Misused Baroque15. Vienna, After Easter 196716. Art and the Arts

"Without Model is Adorno at his most relaxed, a sequence of short, sometimes fragmentary texts on aesthetics – a ‘Parva Aesthetica’ – assembled by the author in late life and published in 1967, two years before he died. . . . Adorno’s commitment to being without a ‘model’ – a Leitbild – is rooted in one of his most appealing dislikes, for the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. . . . the ‘small aesthetics’ in Without Model will defend ‘the zone that conformism seeks to proscribe as experimental’, which for Adorno, as ever, ‘is the last refuge of the possibility of aesthetic truth’."