MUSIC, PHILOSOPHY, AND MODERNITY

360 music, philosophy, and modernity

way round? For Adorno to be able to advance his claims, he must pre-

suppose the existence of logical forms. However, this does not explain

why these also occur in music, and function differently from the way

they function in apophantic language. The Romantic position I have

been developing does not start from the primacy of logical forms, but

rather from the involvements with the world which give rise to them.

Schlegel suggested that rhythm was a form of being in the world that

was a condition of possibility of repetition and identity, from which

philosophy’s ability to abstract from particularity was derived. Similarly,

the early Wittgenstein’s idea of ‘logical form’ could not be analysed into

its logical components, because it was the basis on which logical com-

ponents generated intelligibility. These ideas connected with Taylor’s

Heidegger- and Merleau-Ponty-related account of our pre-conceptual

engagement with the world.

The more plausible aspects of Adorno suggest how the advance of

conceptual ways of grasping the world gives rise to a compensatory

revaluation and rearticulation of more immediate contacts with the

world. These are then expressed in – mediated – harmonic, rhythmic,

and other ways, which are connected both to emotions and to con-

ceptual advances. Hence, for example, the ways in which Beethoven’s

music can be understood in relation to the revolutionary era. Martin

Geck has termed this ‘music as philosophy’ (Geck 2000 : 97 ): Beethoven

produces work that ‘does notrepresentsounding philosophy, butisit’

(ibid.: 88 ). His symphonies ‘do not just show what music can do in

an advanced state of material, but also what it should demand of the

material in order to be understood as spirit of the spirit of the time’

(ibid.: 97 ).^26 The tension between the mimetic impulse and the forms

in which it is articulated becomes the motor of musical development,

which connects to philosophical and other conceptual developments,

but which cannot be reduced to them.

Adorno’s most powerful response to these issues relates to the con-

trast between ‘convention’ and ‘expression’, which echoes that between

analysis and mimesis. In ‘On the Present Relationship between Philoso-

phy and Music’ of 1953 Adorno maintains, in a manner not so far from

either Wittgenstein or Besseler, that ‘In music it is not a question of

meaning but of gestures. To the extent to which it is language it is, like

26 The use of ‘advanced state of the material’ here is more appropriate than it usually is in
Adorno, because of Beethoven’s desire to make music part of social, moral and cultural
advance.