social conditions, or changing conditions within the art—suggest such a
mechanism of historical change.
To some extent Popper could be said to offer a unifying model of
these two accounts which attempts to avoid historicist traits.^14 That is,
social forces contribute to the set of “givens” against which a composer
works. In the Middle Ages and Renaissance this included the facts that
the cathedrals were centres of learning for musicians, as well as sources
of income and locations of expert performers, and with that went the
need to work with canonized plainchant which, Popper suggests, was
fruitful for the development of counterpoint. One might thus say that
society is the principal source of the dogmas within and against which a
composer works. In our own time, those social influences might include
the balance between the demands of commercial music-making on the
one hand, and those of academic creation on the other, each with its own
sets of requirements or criteria of success. But the musical problems to
which these social conditions give rise are quite distinct from them, and
are developed in their own turn. Social pressures give us the cantus fir-
mus, but learning to develop the cantus firmus by imitating it at the
interval of a fifth is a purely musical problem, and brings in its train var-
ious other musical problems and possibilities.
This is different from the view that music reflects its society. When
Adorno, say, argues that modern music reflects the alienation of late
capitalist society, we might say he is giving us a collectivist equivalent
of the expressionist fallacy which Popper attacks. On a Popperian view,
music can no more express such a thing than it can personal emotional
states. It might, in some aspects, carry the marks of the social forces
which provided it with the “givens” on which it is built, like the plain-
chant running through a cantus firmusmass. But that is no more expres-
sion than external seams on the bodywork of a car express the spirit of
cheap manufacturing techniques. It is certainly not something that a
composer has any reason for trying to place or find in his music. The
influence of social forces will be present, and might or might not be
fruitful, but this has nothing to do with expression. In this case, a whole
manner of talking about music, and a framework for criticising whatever
type of music seems to be “out of touch” or “irrelevant” or in some way
“inauthentic” turns out to be based on an error: a misreading both of
music as an in expressive art, and of the way in which social forces influ-
ence it.
As to a composer’s sense that a style has become outmoded and
hence unavailable, the Popperian account would presumably say that this
is more likely to reflect modernist preoccupation with innovation and106 Jonathan Le Cocq