FRANKFURT SCHOOL

The group of intellectual left-wing German thinkers known as the Frankfurt School, active in Frankfurt from the late-1920s and later in the US and Germany, focused their critical attention on culture, asking how it affected people's political outlook and activities. Their powerful admixture of philosophy, sociology, and cultural critique played a key role in modernism in the German cultural sphere.Their conception of culture as a repository of new values continues to impact and influence how we in the twenty-first century think about art and culture. Music is particularly significant for the work of two members of the Frankfurt School-Theodor W. Adorno and Walter Benjamin. It occupies a central place in the writings of Adorno who seems equally at home in philosophy, sociology, and music. Benjamin wrote comparatively little on music, yet his theories on seventeenth-century baroque drama put forward in the seminal book Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels have exerted considerable..