conclusion 401educated people to have things to say about the other arts, but they
will have little or nothing to say about serious music. The real cause of
this situation is, though, not primarily music itself – there is more than
enough of it of outstanding quality – but the way it is taught, produced
and distributed. This has in turn to do with distorted cultural priorities
of the kind which are reflected in certain aspects of the philosophical
approaches that I have been criticising. These give far too little sense of
why music matters, which should be the prior philosophical question
with regard to music. Another complicating factor here is the sense that
we may also have come to the end of a tradition of philosophical think-
ing about music and other art which was certain of its ability to make
substantial connections of Western music to a wider story about history
and philosophy. Who can now justifiably feel secure in venturing the
kind of judgements that Adorno makes when in his most critical and
schematic frame of mind? In an era of perceived incommensurability
between philosophical traditions and of ‘decentred’, globalised artistic
production, such judgements are very likely to underestimate the diffi-
culty of establishing large-scale links between the theorisation of music
and the movement of history.
These are important objections and they should not just be dis-
missed. If philosophy and music are to have a productive relationship
in the face of such objections, one needs to make distinctions between
the different levels involved in their contemporary entanglements. One
way of doing so is to map out a notional continuum between, at one
end, the kind of music which connects most readily to philosophy, of
the sort that enabled Adorno to link Beethoven to Hegel and to con-
struct the narrative of musical modernism which parallels the ideas of
Dialectic of Enlightenment, and, at the other, the kinds of popular music
that people play and listen to in their everyday environment. The lat-
ter can only be connected to the large-scale philosophical story which
Adorno proposes if one accepts the extreme interpretation of how the
‘context of delusion’ is inherent in all modern culture except advanced
musical modernism. The shortcomings of this extreme conception are,
as we saw in chapter 9 , all too clear.
Wealso saw, though, that there is still a degree of truth in the worry
to which Adorno points by his critique of the culture industry. Very
many people today have no meaningful contact with the best music –
be it Mozart or Sonny Rollins – even though it is more readily avail-
able to more people than ever before in history. This situation is diffi-
cult to evaluate with regard to its concrete social, political and cultural
consequences, but theethicalsense that peoples’ lives are likely to be