MUSIC, PHILOSOPHY, AND MODERNITY

340 music, philosophy, and modernity

Adorno wishes, by extending the scope of the notion of truth, to

sustain the idea that music plays a role in kinds of awareness which are

not verbal. These kinds of awareness can also affect what we say and

how we say it, and so can play a role in developing moral perception,

e.g. by enabling the articulation and expression of emotions.^17 Such

transitions between the non-verbal and the verbal relate to the two-way

relationships between performance and score, as cases of the tension

between the mimetic and the analytical or the semantic. The difficulty

here becomes apparent in a remark by Adorno on philosophy’s relation-

ship to the mimetic. He seeks to distinguish philosophy from science via

the demand for philosophy to be ‘expressive’. The demand is to be ful-

filled by applying what we have considered via the idea of ‘these words

in these positions’ to philosophical writing. Indeed, Wittgenstein’s

Philosophical Investigationsthemselves offer an example (albeit one that

Adorno seems not to have recognised) of what is meant. Wittgenstein’s

text is not best understood as a series of arguments, and the ways in

which it moves without coming to definitive answers are essential to

an adequate understanding of it (see Eldridge 1997 ). Adorno main-

tains that ‘the moment of expression integral to philosophy, which is

non-conceptual, mimetic, is only objectified by representation (‘Darstel-

lung’) – by language’ ( 6 : 30 ). Without language the expressive moment

remains unarticulated. Language is, though, also inherently generalis-

ing, and this militates against expression, which has to be realised by the

way in which linguistic elements are combined. Thought is, for Adorno,

constantly confronted with this dilemma, which echoes the dilemmas

of musical performance. The aspects of human life addressed by music

are evidently entwined with the social, cultural, and political forms in

which that life is lived, and many of these forms are necessarily discur-

sive. What, then, of Adorno’s claim that music can offer an interpretative

key to those forms which is not available to many discursive forms?

Consider the following example of this claim. In an outline of ca.

1949 for a never-written work onThe History of German Music from 1908

to 1933Adorno remarks that, when the Nazis took over, they hardly

needed to suppress ‘cultural-bolshevist’ music – i.e. ‘new music’, such

as that of Berg or Schoenberg – because the suppression had already

17 The philosophical idea that music is in general a stimulus to moral improvement is
the sort of thing that I am arguing we should get away from. Music can indeed help to
promote moral behaviour in certain contexts by, for example, enabling new channels
of communication between people of differing cultural backgrounds, but it can also be
morally dangerous, as suggested in chapters 6 and 7.