MUSIC, PHILOSOPHY, AND MODERNITY

324 music, philosophy, and modernity

other rationalised aspects of modernity, and the very loose framework

in some free jazz or other improvised music.^11 Despite the differences

in the sense of ‘interpretation’, there is a continuity between these

extremes, insofar as they can be seen in terms of the activity ‘measuring

itself by the level of its failure’, a failure which means that something

important is not achieved. This is, then, a normative issue, but the norms

in question cannot be said to pre-exist the specific music to which they

pertain – that would entail the kind of metaphysical assumption which

Wellmer criticises with regard to truth as a regulative idea. A crucial

aspect of the history of art consists precisely in the continual trans-

formation of norms by aesthetic practice. This transformation is what

leads to the idea that judgements in aesthetics are merely subjective,

and hence merely relative to historically contingent norms. However,

while Adorno would not deny the historical element in aesthetics, he

rejects what he terms ‘aesthetic relativism’ (see Bowie 2004 a).

The obvious problem with musical interpretation is that agreement

about how to do it rightisoften local, and transient. There must,

though, for the issue of interpretation to be controversial, be some

underlying agreement on the aim of getting it right, even between those

with opposed views of what this concretely consists in. This situation is

echoed by Putnam’s claim with regard to ethics that ‘There is no recog-

nition transcendent truth here; we need no better ground for treating

“value judgements” as capable of truth and falsity than the fact that we

can and do treat them as capable of warranted assertibility and war-

ranted deniability’ (Putnam 2004 : 110 ). It is the relationship between

the norms informing necessary background agreements, without which

truth is incomprehensible, and the norms invoked in contingent dis-

agreements about specific cases that matters here. One way in which

a disagreement might be dealt with, as we saw, is for each participant

to play the music to the other as they think it should go, making their

differences at least in part non-verbally apparent. This playing might

also be accompanied by gestures – and verbal remarks – that under-

line or clarify the differences. Especially in the modern period concern

with the right interpretation of music becomes part of a wider inter-

rogation of the rationality of norms and of what is gained and lost by

the insistence on such rationality. Theideaof a right interpretation

seems, then, both to be inescapable, and yet also at odds with the actual

11 I exclude here the score which is then ‘played’ by a computer because the constitutive
tension with which Adorno is concerned is not strictly relevant in this case.