124 music, philosophy, and modernity
suggests, there may well be contexts which are philosophically illumi-
nating that a concern with the established problems in the analytical
tradition may obscure.
Hegel’s accounts of music in many respects transcend the limita-
tions brought about by their historical context and by Hegel’s con-
tingent adherence to classicism in music. However, the accounts also
involve some instructive tensions that relate to their being contempo-
raneous with what many people think is probably the greatest music
ever written, that of Beethoven (music which Hegel does not men-
tion, at least by name – see chapter 5 ). On the one hand, there is the
waning of Hegel’s influence in the period following his death, which
is linked to announcements of the ‘end of philosophy’ by the Young
Hegelians that have been a significant aspect of philosophy ever since
(see chapter 6 below). On the other hand, Beethoven and others help
to bring about a change in the very ways in which sound is understood
as relating to the world. Music gains an – admittedly precarious – free-
dom from extraneous social and other demands, allowing it to develop
according to a logic which is, to some extent at least, autonomous,
but which also enables it to respond more fully than previous music
to social, historical, and psychological transformations. Think of the
expansion of the formal and expressive range of the symphony that is
inaugurated with theEroicaand reaches a shocking intensity with the
nihilistic aspect of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, or of the development
of musical expressionism out of the work of Mahler, Wagner, and oth-
ers, by Berg and Schoenberg. Western music’s ability to respond to
the extremes of the experience of the modern world in ways which
feed into the rest of culture is one of the most striking aspects of
modernity. One way to gauge these responses is in relation to the
initial rejection of works or ways of playing which then come to be
seen as definitive of a new way of doing things and as disclosing new
dimensions of the dislocations that characterise modernity. It tends
only to be philosophers like Marx and Nietzsche, who think in terms
of the end of philosophy, that have a similar wider effect on modern
culture.
Modernity is also characterised by interactions between the musical
and the philosophical – some of which, though, are a result of a loss
of faith in philosophy’s ability positively to achieve metaphysical aims.
Music itself is, of course, not spared the crises which occur at some point
in all spheres of modern cultural life. The idea of the demise of phi-
losophy as what could restore or replace the meanings hollowed out by