392 music, philosophy, and modernityexpression – readable in every sound and gesture – their every word
and act apt to betray their meaning’ (ibid.). This readability, which can
be both a burden and a gift, and which is conveyed in many different
ways, is central to my concerns. That expression of this kind is part
of music is evident when Cavell says, echoing the Romantic tradition,
that he is ‘prepared to persist... in regarding cries of pain, or pro-
longed silences, or sobs, as “preverbal” calls for help, or as traces of
rage’ (ibid.: 187 ).^15 All these expressions have important correlates in
music as a ‘language of gestures’: think of the importance of the timing
of silences in so many kinds of music. Cavell’s extension of the notion
of language beyond what the analytical tradition countenances is based
on the fact that ‘my view of the role of ordinary language in relation to
the imperative of expression, is that it is less in need of weeding than
of encouragement’ (ibid.: 188 ). The phrase ‘imperative of expression’
offers a good way of characterising what lies behind the change in the
status and nature of music in modernity, which, as we just saw, has to
do with the phenomena that Cavell examines in relation to scepticism.
Music is both imbued with an intrinsic contingency, which points to
sceptical worries, and yet offers, as the idea of praise suggests, a way
beyond a sceptical relationship to the world. It does so, moreover, by its
verylackof the conceptual determinacy demanded by someone seeking
a philosophical way out of epistemological scepticism. This point will
be important again below, when I discuss Daniel Barenboim’s remarks
on the cultural role of music.
The division between illocution and perlocution here makes possi-
ble some distinctions between uses of differing forms of articulation
and expression which are largely absent from analytical approaches
to these issues. These distinctions need not be regarded as concep-
tually fixed, not least because musical intentions, challenges, etc., are
not best interpreted as just proceeding from one individual to another
individual, being rather part of the symbolic vocabulary that is caught
up in the dynamic of cultural practices at a particular time. Whereas
one can quite usefully try to list verbs which can be illocutionary or
perlocutionary, and the use of the verbs is likely to remain stable for
considerable periods, music’s effects and functions are often essentially
contestable, as the history of the ways in which music has been under-
stood suggests. Remember Mattheson’s representationalist talk of how15 The fact that he even has to persist tells one something important about the failings of
the approach advocated by Wright.