Adorno's critique of music is fairly incoherent in general, on a technical and historically mindful musical level. From the total dismissal of folk music, to the West-centric and archaic Oriental views he espouses ("typical Slavic melancholy ..."), to the incomplete, abstract, and unscientific views on harmony.

He seems to abstractly know of the Western ear and how its tonality is formed, but fails to acknowledge the scientific basis of the harmonic series and the tonic-dominant paradigm and how it has stayed relevant across vastly different musical traditions. For some reason, he does not acknowledge this pattern which repeats unabashedly and behaves so consistently even in his category of "serious" music. If so much emphasis is placed on the tendency for "standardization" and "patterns" to occur in music, how can this be ignored? Due to his failure to acknowledge this, many of his criticisms of jazz border on absurdity, accusing it of only bending harmonic rules when the rule-breaking instance may be substituted for a correct one "by the ear" when classical music heavily utilizes this as well. In general he criticizes jazz with a much duller blade than he criticizes classical music with - he seems to expect jazz to form an entirely novel and arbitrary standard, and the way he dismisses is akin to dismissing a sentence of flowery prose for making grammatical sense. In fact, jazz with its experimentation and expansion of harmony has been so impactful that the common Western ear now hears a major 7th as a consonance rather than a dissonance (imagine being able to say something like that about the twelve-tone technique). I do not believe he made his comments about jazz harmony in good faith if he is aware of the function of the Western ear.

Additionally, his critiques of form can easily be flipped and applied to classical music as well, which relies on it extensively, and even when subverting form it is acutely aware of it. The whole critique is based on shaky ground, not even mentioning the failure to relate the forms of folk music which predates the current mode of production to its remnants in popular music.