adorno 313entailed by any systemandwhat the system enables, which is precisely
what is exemplified by Weber’s account of the freedom made possible
by the tempering of the scale.
The dynamic nature of his construal of the relationship between
constraints in music and what they enable makes Adorno’s work on
musical reproduction particularly illuminating. Because his main focus
is the Western classical, notated, musical tradition he might seem likely
to present the issue simply in terms of a dialectic between the fixity
of the notated score and the flexibility of the attempt to realise the
score in performance. This would fit a model – that can be linked
to philosophical versions of the relationship between necessity and
freedom – in which a musical object is confronted with the freedom
of the performer-subject. However, Adorno’s avoidance of fixed con-
cepts, which can lead to questionable results, here leads to important
insights concerning both music and philosophy.
Consider his remarks on coloratura, which he terms the ‘ballet of
the voice’. It is essential to the success of coloratura, and to musical
virtuosity in general, that ‘the most difficult must sound “easy”, without
effort’; there has to be more to it than the overcoming of a technical
obstacle, more than just ‘control of nature’ (Adorno 2001 : 172 ). He
continues:
Here a chink is opened up in metaphysics – as well as opening up the
salvation (‘Rettung’) of the virtuoso element. For it is not just control of
nature as command of the material and of the mechanism of playing, but
rather, because that command can, by virtue of its completeness, [itself]
be played with, it loses its violence, its seriousness, and becomes imag-
ination and is thereby reconciled: control of nature appears ‘natural’,
becomes aware of itself as nature.
(ibid.: 173 )Compare this with the following remark from his lectures onProblems
of Moral Philosophy:‘Weare really no longer ourselves a piece of nature
at the moment when we notice, when we recognise, that we are a piece
of nature’ (Adorno 1996 : 154 ). In both these passages freedom has to
do with the realisation that in certain cases our subjective command of
something initially appears as an overcoming of nature, but can be the
opposite. Freedom in this sense is nature itself in us – Adorno, echoing
aspects of Schelling, does not accept Kant’s idea of nature as just the
causal realm – but in a form which transcends self-preservation. Most
importantly, what may seem abstract in the philosophical formulation