356 music, philosophy, and modernity
as an expression of freedom involves constraints which are the basis
of right and wrong in composition and performance. In the course of
modernity many of these constraints come to be seen as non-binding,
when norms which were constitutive of the very nature of music are
abandoned. These norms relate to questions of form and repetition,
but the reasons for their loss of authority cannot be wholly explained in
technical terms of the kind that lead to the analogies with philosophy.
Adorno’s attempt to deal with this issue via the idea of the ‘state of the
material’ seems to me to rely too much on the narrative of the move
from tonality to atonality as an analogy to the breakdown of systems
in modern philosophy. This narrative does illuminate some aspects of
the specific music to which it is applied, but is simply inadequate as a
model for too many kinds of music and for the differing significances
of music in different contexts. Adorno’s ethnocentrism, evident in his
too-exclusive concentration on Western European ‘classical’ music, and
his failure to deal with the complexities of the reception of music, mean
that the strong link between music and philosophy cannot be made in
this manner.
Musical philosophy: judgementless synthesis,
convention, and expressionSome of Adorno’s historical arguments about modern music suffer
from his conviction that it is in fact possible to establish what ‘advanced
state of the material’ is. How, though, are we supposed toidentifythe
state without already possessing total insight into the development of
music? The fact that in some contexts certain kinds of conventional
employment of musical material can indeed be said to become ‘false’
does not allow one to infer that this falsehood reveals the total state of
the ‘technique’ with which the composer must work. This would only be
the case if one made Schoenberg’s atonal music the criterion, because
of the supposedly wholly deluded nature of the world of the culture
industry, which has to be opposed by a radically new kind of cultural
order. Even making allowances for the appalling historical events which
affect Adorno’s conception, and which lead to the idea of the refusal
of musical meaning, the extreme nature of his claims looks these days
more like a failure to differentiate between different contexts. However,
Adorno does also offer more effective resources for understanding ways
in which music reveals limitations in philosophy’s interpretations of
modernity.