334 music, philosophy, and modernity
such background understanding of tone and its relationship to feeling,
mood etc. In Adorno one can analogise the blunt statement to the ana-
lytical getting the notes technically right, and the apt communication
of the truth to the appropriate combination of this with the mimetic
element. From many perspectives in analytical philosophy this analogy
will be seen as ignoring the fact that truth is a semantic concept, and
cannot be affected by the non-semantic elements of communication,
which belong in the realm of psychology or pragmatics. That, though, is
likely to involve precisely the Platonism that Wellmer rejects in his claim
that ‘the meaning of utterances or texts has some kind of being-in-itself
beyond interpretation’. There may be purposes for which restricting
the understanding of truth to a deflationary semantic conception can
be appropriate, but that conception omits too much that is essential
to how we understand truth. What is important, then, is that Wellmer’s
hermeneutic approach permits a link, in a way that the deflationary
concept of truth cannot, to what leads Adorno to sustain a regulative
idea of true musical interpretation based on the relationship between
analysis and mimesis.
The core question here is the association of the everyday functioning
of truth, of the kind that we encountered in Brandom’s inferentialism,
with what Adorno intends with regard to the demands of music. Fol-
lowing on from remarks about interpretation as an ‘idea’ which is ‘not
even purely knowable, let alone realisable’, Adorno says: ‘Even if the
true interpretation is unknown and unrealisable – false interpretation
can always be concretely identified’ (Adorno 2001 : 120 – 1 ). False inter-
pretation makes the music ‘meaningless’ (ibid.) by failing to realise
it in an adequate manner. One can, for example, show this by point-
ing out the elements that are dead in an interpretation because their
connections to other elements are not made manifest. Much the same
applies to criticism of a score, or an improvisation, which has notes that
are merely ‘filling in’ musical space, rather than being justified by their
adding to the piece’s meaning. Even if we don’t agree on when this
occurs, without the sense that this is part of the normative aspect of
music, one loses, as one does in relation to the understanding of truth
if one tries to be sceptical about all one’s beliefs, any way of talking
about understanding and interpreting music at all.
These last remarks on false interpretation might be seem to involve
the metaphysical notion of a regulative idea that Wellmer rejects. So
why are Adorno’s observations not open to that rejection? Discussion of
truth always raises the problem of circularity: what makes the discussion