362 music, philosophy, and modernity
relationship between convention and expression that was epitomised
by Beethoven’s use of tonality:
The process of the linguistification of music also entails its transforma-
tion into convention and expression. To the extent that the dialectic of
the process of enlightenment essentially consists in the incompatibility
of these two moments, the whole of Western music is confronted with
its contradiction by this dual character. The more it, as language, takes
into its power and intensifies expression, as the imitation of something
gestural and pre-rational, the more it at the same time also, as its rational
overcoming, works at the dissolution of expression.
( 18 : 161 )Without convention music qua expression cannot be a means of creat-
ing symbolic social cohesion that establishes a comprehensible musical
vocabulary, of the kind produced by Wagner’s extension of music in the
direction of referential language. Expression without convention can
cease to have any social significance beyond being a refusal to accept
anything dictated by convention. As soon as expression ceases to con-
stitute such a refusal, however, it must begin to become convention
if it is to be significant at all. Expressivity, like uniqueness, is incon-
ceivable without its counterpart, but convention can cancel out what
makes expression possible by rendering mechanically repeatable what
was formerly expressive. We encountered this situation in the work on
notation. At this level of abstraction the dialectic of expression and con-
vention might seem too general, sounding rather like a version of the
Apollo (convention)/Dionysus (expression) dialectic. However, when
the dialectic is observed in specific phenomena it leads, for example,
to a version of the story of rationalisation in Western music that avoids
some of the problems we have observed in Adorno.
Adorno’s remarks on convention and expression can be understood
in relation to more than just music. Meaning depends on iterability,
but mere repetition raises the question of how the repeated signifying
element can function in very different contexts, and why it may become
worn out. A passage on the convention of sonata form from one of
Adorno’s lectures on Mahler shows how the dialectic of convention
and expression leads to real insight – think of how the same remark
might be applied to a poetic form, like a sonnet:
But Mahler asked himself the question how the sonata, whose outline
his technically not at all rebellious attitude respected, could be organ-
ised from the inside, structurally, so that it was not violently stamped on