172 music, philosophy, and modernity
existing normative constraints. How, then, is freedom in this latter sense
to be understood at all, given that it entails a constitutive indeterminacy?
One way is via art, where the demand for the radically new becomes the
crux of the modernism which begins around the 1840 sinEurope. It is
noticeable, of course, that Beethoven in particular had already carried
out in practice some of what becomes an explicit theoretical demand in
the subsequent period, and that what he did was perceived by the likes
of Goethe as being intimidating.^4 The worry which Dahlhaus attributes
to Hegel – that Beethoven will lose touch with a wider audience – can
therefore be related to the constellations now to be explored, in which
awareness of the dangers of modern freedom is connected to music.
Will, freedom, and musicIn order to show how conceptions of freedom connect to music we
need first to examine some implications of what Kant and Schelling
say about evil, in texts which affected the later thinkers whom we
shall be investigating. The reason for considering this topic has to
do with the concern with the inaccessibility of freedom to concep-
tual determination. The fact that music is largely non-referential and
non-representational, which constitutes its chief deficiency for some
thinkers, becomes for others what is most essential about it. In thelast
chapterI cited Dahlhaus’ remarks, that ‘Indeterminacy through lack of
an object and determinacy in the sense of differentiation do not exclude
each other at all’, and that ‘musical expression gains in connotations
what it loses in denotations’. This contrast can be mapped onto the
tension between the objectifying, ‘denoting’ aims of natural science,
and the aesthetic, ‘connoting’ desire to keep open new affective and
other possibilities of relating to the world. This tension suggests how
music can become a focus for fundamental differences concerning the
aims of modern culture, and these differences will relate closely to the
issues now to be examined. The underlying theme in the following is,
then, how understandings of freedom in an increasingly secular culture
affect music and are affected by music.
InReligion Within the Bounds of Mere Reason( 1793 ), Kant considers
difficulties that emerge from the notion of spontaneous, free ‘will’ in his
4 This might seem to underestimate Beethoven’s classicism, but the alternative danger
is the failure to grasp his modernist concern with radical innovation, which is not just
evident in the late works.