344 music, philosophy, and modernity
those problems and the responses to them express extra-musical
issues?
Is Adorno’s attempt to interpret music as a form of social theory to
be carried out by seeing musical ‘right and wrong’ really viable as an
index of historical truth? He himself insists that this interpretation has
to be achieved while taking music’s ‘intentionless’ status seriously. The
task might seem hopeless, and in its most emphatic version I think it
probably is: in order to achieve the determinacy required for music to
be a readable historical code, its intentionless aspect has to be subordi-
nated to a philosophical reading of its significance that relies too much
on the extra-musical, intentional domain. Such readings are likely to
fail to take account of the multiplicity of meanings that music’s inten-
tionless status makes possible, in the name of what is supposedly the
essential ‘truth’ of the music, a truth which has to be stated in a verbal
text.
In 1962 ,inIntroduction to the Sociology of Music, Adorno does offer
a rationale for his approach, but it is very questionable. He invokes
the principle of ‘comprehending and analysing subjective responses
towards music in relation to the thing itself (‘zur Sache selbst’) and its
determinable content, rather than ignoring the quality of the object,
treating it as a mere stimulus of projections and limiting oneself to the
identification, measuring and ordering of subjective reactions or of sed-
imented responses to music’ ( 14 : 176 – 7 ). Adorno himself shows why
this principle is questionable in a remark in 1968 on the same theme:
‘It is an open question, which can indeed only be answered empirically,
whether, to what extent, in what dimensions the social implications
revealed in musical content analysis are also grasped by the listeners’
(Dahms 1994 : 252 – 3 ). In the first passage there is an unambiguous
distinction between objective musical content of the kind available to
the right kind of musical analysis, and subjective projection of feelings
onto music by its listeners. The difference between the two implies that
the truth is contained in the objective content of the music, which has
to do with the way it communicates what is repressed by other forms
of articulation. For this truth to be a means of understanding society it
must, though, be connected to the ways in which people in society do in
fact respond. In the second passage the need to connect the two sides
leads to the sense that their connections may be much more complex
and diverse than the first passage suggests. The first passage’s reference
to the ‘thing itself’ arises from a legitimate fear of subjectivism, but if
there is no connection between subjective responses and the objective