music, freedom, and metaphysics 183one explains important aspects of historical changes in the production
and understanding of music via these disciplines, the question remains
as to whether there are dimensions of music which are not susceptible
to this kind of explanation. The idea that the demand for philosophi-
cal transparency is the sole valid demand in relation to human culture
can too easily lead to a failure to engage with some of culture’s most
revealing manifestations.
Traumatic experiences and extreme affective states of the kind asso-
ciated with aspects of modernist art, for example, involve causes of
the kind investigated by the social sciences, from rapid urbanisation,
to the disintegration of social bonds, to modern warfare, exile, and
so on. However, the manner in which trauma increasingly becomes a
part of the most advanced modern music, fromTristan,toMahler (e.g.
in the first movement of the Tenth Symphony), to Berg’sThree Pieces
for OrchestraandWozzeck,tothe work of Shostakovich and others, is
not just explicable in terms of these disciplines. Indeed, it is arguably
the case that music sometimes articulates in advance things which, ini-
tially, lead to silence. Think of Walter Benjamin’s argument, in his
essay ‘The Storyteller’, that the capacity for telling meaningful stories
about experience is profoundly damaged by events like the First World
War. There are elements of Mahler’s and Berg’s music which seem to
articulate the experience characteristic of that war even before the
events take place. These elements, which often gave rise to initial puz-
zlement and rejection, became more comprehensible in the light of
the real events, and so establish a repertoire of new symbolic forms.
Schelling’s idea of ‘that which can never, even with the greatest
exertion, be dissolved into understanding’ can, then, be speculatively
interpreted as pointing to why music incorporates aspects of modernity
which may resist other means of articulation. The music which develops
from Beethoven’s integrated formal dynamism to Schœnberg’s expres-
sionism is indeed unthinkable without the transformations summed
up in Marx’s dictum that ‘All that is solid melts into air’ in capitalist
modernity. However, this music reveals dimensions of that experience
which take on a different aspect because of the music itself. Why oth-
erwise does the music bring about such strong responses on the part,
in particular, of its first listeners? Adorno’s comment that dissonances
in the music of the Second Vienna School disturb listeners because
they ‘speak of their own state: only for this reason are they unbearable
to them’ (Adorno 1997 : 12 , 18 ) may not be adequate to the differing
ways in which people can react to such dissonances, but it does contain