16 music, philosophy, and modernity
unconvincing. TheEroica’s massive expansion of symphonic form is, in
the terms suggested in the Introduction, part of what theEroicameans,
part of its ‘content’. Apprehending this content relies on background
knowledge and language, but so does apprehending anything as music
at all, and, of course, so does understanding any linguistic utterance.
Once one begins to take seriously the necessary role of context in the
understanding of all meaning, it becomes easy to see that there can be
no definitive division between verbal language and other forms of artic-
ulation. Eduard Hanslick’s objection to regarding Gluck’s aria ‘Che far `o
senza Euridice’ as expressing intense grief, because it could be heard as
expressing joy, can just as easily apply to someone’s misunderstanding
verbal and other expressions of grief from a culture with which they are
not familiar. The fact is that we have to learn both language and music,
and we are always capable of misinterpretation if we attach a piece of
symbolic expression to the wrong contexts.^1
Claims about pure form often rely on analogies between mathemati-
cal and musical form. The temptation that results from these analogies
is to limit what is said about form in music to the technical level, as
Kivy claims musicologists do. This limitation has, however, proved to
be notoriously difficult to achieve, not least because the relationship
between mathematics and music is anything but direct. It is not just
‘new musicologists’ who have in recent times moved beyond analysis
towards a more hermeneutic stance. The move is also made because
analysis often comes up against undecidable ambiguities that resist
‘objective’ description and demand ‘extra-musical’ understanding. In
composers like Schubert or Wagner, for example, who employ enhar-
monic changes as an essential part of their musical language, or in
a lot of jazz, that resistance can be precisely what is most significant
about the music. Musicologists therefore also adopt a more interpre-
tative stance because analysis without interpretation cannot do justice
to its object.^2 Attention to form is evidently essential to understanding
music, but Adorno’s dictum that ‘Form is sedimented content’ suggests
a more productive approach to form because it incorporates the sense
that form is inherently ‘impure’.
1 See Cook 2001 , who tries to circumvent models which see musical meaning as being either
wholly inherent in the piece or wholly socially constructed. Cook also makes illuminating
distinctions with regard to the aspects of music that are more likely to be cross-culturally
comprehensible.
2 Adorno claims that it is impossible to perform a piece adequately without some kind of
analysis: the question is the extent to which this can be ‘purely objective’.