352 music, philosophy, and modernityaspects have in common are – albeit very different – kinds of relation-
ship between individual elements and a totality, and Adorno’s views of
musical technique as a source of social theory often rely on analogies
between such relationships. In Schoenberg’s music the liberation of
melody from harmony becomes a utopian image of social relations in
which individuals would not be under the pressure of conformity to
traditional or repressive forms of order.^22
However, this kind of analogy can be very easily taken in another
direction. The liberation could, as Mann’sDoktor Faustussuggests, be
interpreted as manifesting the arbitrariness of ‘merely human’, modern
forms of order. Such freedom leads to what is incomprehensible to many
people, both in the social and political domains, and in the domain of
new music. Whilst the incomprehension may be connected to political
and social reaction, it can also be benign: this is again an empirical
issue, not something to be decided by a philosophical theory. Adorno’s
interpretation would therefore only be compelling if one accepted his
esoteric idea that new music is the expression of different kinds of
relationship between part and totality in modernity, from the alienation
of individuals from the systems of capital, to the hope for reconciliation
of individual and totality in a just society. For this interpretation to
work he has to rely on the idea that analysis of the internal workings
of the music produces insights into historical reality that are otherwise
inaccessible. Consequently he necessarily – and explicitly – privileges
musical production over reception, and tends to lose contact with how
music actually affects those who hear it.
Music therefore becomes above all a historical document, whose
truth is located in its relationship to its contexts. Adorno claims, for
example, that Beethoven’s ‘language, his content, tonality as a whole,
i.e. the system of bourgeois music, is irrevocably lost for us’ (Adorno
1993 : 25 ). However, this judgement sums up what is wrong with a
restrictive historicisation of musical interpretation. It is as though lis-
teners at other times could not find other ways of understanding and
appreciating what Beethoven’s music communicates in their own era.
Adorno himself defends this idea elsewhere. The justifiable aspect of22 Whether such music is actually listened to in non-harmonic terms is open to dispute.
Most listeners not schooled in the techniques of atonal and twelve-tone music (and even
some that are) will make sense of it by the degrees of perceived dissonance in the piece,
and by hearing melody based on their sense of tonality. In operas such as Berg’sWozzeck
it seems obvious that much of the dramatic intensification has to do with degrees of
dissonance and with the extent to which melody is heard diatonically.