188 music, philosophy, and modernity
philosophy was to seek a timeless account of the nature of things. Time
can be related to the Dionysian, being both inherently divided against
itself, each moment gaining its identity inferentially, by not being what
precedes and follows it, and yet unified, because the totality of time
consists of all of these differences. The question is how meaningful
connections are made between moments – someone unable to make
such connections is threatened with madness, just as one who structures
time too rigidly can be regarded as being in a pathological condition –
and how such particular connections relate to the idea of the whole.
Music exemplifies the question of time, as we saw when consider-
ing the relationship of rhythm to self-consciousness. When traditional
metaphysical conceptions of a timeless true world are eroded, musical
forms are therefore also affected. In particular, the relationship between
music and text changes. Two aspects of temporality come into play here.
On the one hand, the disintegration of dogmatic metaphysical concep-
tions opens new horizons of temporality, which are influenced by the
new potential liberated by modernity. The sheer speed and diversity of
change alters the way in which time is experienced, and this creates new
musical possibilities. Modern jazz, for example, is unthinkable without
the impact of the temporality of urban life: Parker, Coltrane and others
improvise more complex configurations of notes at higher speed and
more coherently than in most of the previous history of music. On the
other hand, the redemptive aspect of metaphysical conceptions, which
either gave value to particular moments by seeing them as part of a
divinely authorised whole, or which directed attention to that which is
beyond the transient empirical world, is lost. Music consequently can
come to be regarded as where such redemptive experiences of time
are preserved, either by its ability to connect moments together into an
intelligible larger whole, or by its evoking in a temporal medium what
is supposedly beyond time.
One symptom of the tension between these aspects of temporal-
ity is apparent in the development of the symphony. From Beethoven
to Mahler and beyond, the symphony integrates new ideas about
humankind’s relationship to the world and increasingly disparate musi-
cal material, taking up possibilities which emerge from the challenging
of existing forms, at the price of making the integration ever more dif-
ficult. (Something similar happens in the novel and the other arts, as
Hegel’s conception of ‘Romantic art’ suggests.) At the same time, dur-
ing the nineteenth and into the earlier part of the twentieth century,
the conclusions of some major symphonies become ever more oriented