rhythm and romanticism 83series of issues that arise from that account in subsequent philosophy.
The connection to Kant is crucial because at the time when the idea
of a ‘ready-made’ world which is represented in a pre-existing ‘logos’
is dissolving, a concern with attempting to account for the world’s
intelligibility develops in relation to a re-thinking of the nature of
music. This shift occurs, moreover, at much the same time as music
moves away from more static polyphonic forms, which can be under-
stood in terms of the idea of the universe as a logos-imbued, sta-
ble totality, towards the harmonically and rhythmically more dynamic
and expressive forms of the great classical music from Haydn to
Mahler and beyond.^2 The development of both music and philoso-
phy at this time can be interpreted via the idea that if verbal lan-
guage loses the privilege accorded to it by the divine origin, or by
the assumptions of Enlightenment rationalism, it can no longer just
be assumed to have a grounding role in the world’s intelligibility. Lan-
guage becomes open to the new awareness of its contingency that is
apparent in Herder’s account of it as generated by the contacts of a
culture with its environment, and this awareness also relates to the sus-
picion that feelings are not reducible to what can be articulated in
verbal language.^3
Some thinkers in German Idealism and Romanticism now become
prepared to accept, in a manner not previously contemplated, that the
alternative to the development of the intelligibility expressed in natural
languages is a chaotic, undifferentiated state. Already by the 1790 s this
state becomes associated with the ‘Dionysian’ and with music. Music
both communicates the nature of that state, and, by communicating it,
brings it into the domain of ordered thinking. Language can then be
seen as either a necessary means for preventing dissolution into inartic-
ulacy or as an arbitrary projection of forms of identity onto something
which has no inherent form at all. Music is also thought of as relating
to these alternatives. These ideas might seem far from what concerns
Kant, but I want to consider now how what Kant says about music in
2 Bach is hard to fit into this framework. His failure to do so could, though, be seen as
a justification of my reversing the priorities between philosophy and music, because his
music transcends the philosophical story one can tell about musical development in
his era.
3 Even if the capacity for language were genetically hard-wired into us, this would not
explain how it is that language developed in the first place, or explain all the expressive
and other dimensions of language which depend on the particular histories of cultures
and individuals.