320 music, philosophy, and modernity
already objectifies the past, it cannot reach what it seeks: all ‘making of
music is a Recherche du temps perdu’ (ibid.). Underlying this concep-
tion is a plausible example of what Adorno terms ‘non-identity’.
The notation of music is ‘musical domination of nature, and in it
musicalsubjectivityemerges as separation from the unconscious commu-
nity’ (ibid.). The ‘unconsciousness’ of the community is its immersion
in the complex rhythmic and other practices described above, which are
remembered by dint of participating in them, not by their being objec-
tified. When music becomes objectified it creates space for the subject’s
awareness of its difference from the object, hence the loss of collectively
anchored, practice-based memory. This space is the ‘precondition of
aesthetic freedom’, because subjects can now develop the object in
their own manner and communicate what they develop within society.
On the other hand it also involves what is opposed to that freedom:
‘notation always at the same time regulates, inhibits, suppresses what
it notates and develops’ (ibid.: 71 – 2 ). The non-identity consists in the
fact that, in the writing down of music, the difference of what is written
from what is performed is ‘constitutivelyestablished at the same time’
(ibid.: 72 ). It is not, therefore, that the best performance would be the
one which realises what is ‘objectively there’ in the score (a computer
can sometimes do this more accurately than a performer), because that
would simply privilege the objective over the subjective side. Nor is it
that the subject would express itself most completely in the best per-
formance, because that would not do justice to the historical meanings
sedimented in the notated work, which transcend individual subjective
intentions, even as they require them for the music to live.
Adorno’s account of notation leads to ways of considering the inter-
pretation and performance of music which some of this other more
dogmatic work, likePhilosophy of New Music, has tended to obscure.^7
However, we need first to look at how Adorno’s specific attention
to music corrects the one-sidedness ofDoE. Indeed, the structures
7 Adorno was one of the first critics of the idea of ‘authentic/period’ performance (see,
e.g., 10 : 138 – 51 ). The value of the ideas outlined here is that they also allow a non-
dogmatic appraisal of how attention to historical factors can move from the mistaken
attempt to recreate the sound as it was produced in a particular period, which neglects
the subjective side of how listening is constituted, to a new relationship between the
two. An example of this is a notionally ‘period’ performance, like Thomas Zehetmair’s
remarkable recording of the Beethoven Violin Concerto (Philips 4621232 ), which uses
some period playing techniques (faster tempi, reduced vibrato, attention to the rhetoric
of melodic phrasing), but does so in a manner that results in a startlingly new realisation
of the work.