332 music, philosophy, and modernity
situations, even if it also necessarily involves a moment that transcends
the subjective aspect inherent in such historical determinacy (see e.g.
5 : 283 – 4 ). Moreover, far from seeing works of art in Platonising terms,
he is concerned with the way in which the ‘process-character of works
of art is nothing but their temporal core’ ( 7 : 264 ). Indeed, this con-
cern goes as far as the idea that works which seek to transcend time are
attempting to become like concepts that aim to fix their object defini-
tively, and so are doomed to fail more rapidly than works which ‘rush
towards their destruction (‘Untergang’)’ (ibid.: 265 ). Music is in this
sense the key to art, because it constitutively involves transience and
non-identity. So why does Adorno still talk of ‘true interpretation’ of
music as an unrealisable ‘idea’?
Truth, mimesis, and historyThe answer has to do with how Adorno conceives of the demands of
musical interpretation, which require fulfilment but which can never
all be fulfilled together. Failures of realisation in music are an index
of music’s relationship to history. What Adorno wants is a critical per-
spective which can consider music and its performance to be true or
not, hence his opposition to relativism in aesthetics. The basis of this
is the following reflection: ‘Of course there are several layers of false
interpretation, one is the material layer of not-bringing-things-together
(from wrong notes, etc., to crude sound etc.), the other is that ofuntrue
interpretation, i.e. of missing what is composed’ (Adorno 2001 : 119 ).
These two levels are, though, not separate: ‘everything to do withGeist
[‘alles Geistige’inthe sense of what has to do with the spontaneity of
interpretation] in music has something that represents it in sound; one
must differentiate the two in order to negate [‘aufheben’inthe Hegelian
sense of negate, preserve, and elevate] the difference’ (ibid.). He else-
where insists that ‘Every musical work [‘Arbeit’, which suggests activity,
rather than ‘Werk’, which suggests a completed object] presupposes
the possibility of the differentiation between right and wrong...the
apperception of all musical meaning consists in precisely this distinc-
tion’ (ibid.: 72 ). This possibility pertains both at the level where the
notes being wrong makes the piece ‘wrong’, and at the level of inter-
preting a piece truly.
A correct analytical grasp of the identity and function of the notes
played might seem to be the essential source of doing it right. How-
ever, this leads to a further decisive opposition: ‘true reproduction is