MUSIC, PHILOSOPHY, AND MODERNITY

364 music, philosophy, and modernity

like Sibelius. However, his search for ways of interrogating structures of

intelligibility in music which generate historical insights not available

in more traditionally conceived disciplines does, when successful, offer

models for articulating dimensions of experience rarely countenanced

by large parts of modern philosophy.

Music, philosophy, and hope

The idea that, by the end of the nineteenth century, the intellectual,

social and political forms which sought to overcome the contradictions

between universal and particular were exhausted might sound like a

typically vague piece of philosophical speculation. However, when con-

nected to Adorno’s claim that ‘the language of forms of Western music

in Mahler’s epoch’ has become merely ‘convention’ ( 13 : 165 ), i.e. a

form of false universality, the general idea can be addressed via the par-

ticular response of Mahler’s music to both musical and extra-musical

history. Mahler combines irony, based on playing with musical conven-

tions, with a striving for transcendence. This combination can either

lead, as it does in the Sixth and Ninth Symphonies, to break down or

resignation, or to a tonal apotheosis whose brashly affirmative nature is

somehow at odds with the ambivalence which precedes it, for example

in the Seventh Symphony.

This alternative captures something important about a secularised

modernity – which one can associate with metaphysics 1 – that has yet

to find ways of responding to the needs aroused by the decline of

theology – which relate to metaphysics 2. Music’s role in such matters

is suggested by Adorno’s hyperbolic assertion that ‘Mahler provokes

rage from those who are in agreement with the world because he

gives reminders of what they have to banish from themselves’ (ibid.:

153 ). This claim can be backed up more convincingly than his claims

about Schoenberg by historical evidence about the rejection of Mahler’s

music, which was only widely overcome by the 1970 s.^29 Mahler’s music

combines a sense of the loss of a world where hope for a metaphysical

resolution of the contradictions of modernity was still possible with the

29 In the case of Schoenberg the frequent rejection has to do with the degree of dissonance
and the consequent difficulty for non-specialists of hearing atonal music as intelligible.
The rejection of Mahler does have to do with his technical advances, but it was also
based on incomprehension of the apparent banality of some of the music. Adorno
himself contributed to the re-emergence of Mahler by, among other things, persuading
Georg Solti to conduct his work.