pro and contra wagner 259music in modernity continually tries to expand its expressive range.
Like Wagner’s work, much of the most significant modern music, from
different forms of musical modernism to jazz, confronts any sense that
existing cultural forms are self-legitimating. These challenges to the
cultural status quo are admittedly themselves eventually assimilated into
‘official culture’. This does not mean, though, that they cannot still
function as a motor for new critical responses to modernity, as Wagner’s
enduring effect on music suggests. The point of such critical challenges
often lies in their refusal to exclude even the most difficult aspects of
life from music. Think of how Berg’sWozzeckgives a unique voice to its
oppressed proletarian hero, or of the way that the avant-garde in jazz
became a location for opposition to racism.
Nietzsche seems at times not to want music to deal with the deepest
issues, because he thinks this will make it into a substitute for religion.
This attitude is echoed by the Left-wing view (that is repeated in aspects
of new musicology) which sees works like Wagner’s as having no role
to play in new cultural forms and practices because they belong to
‘bourgeois culture’. Modern music need not, though, be understood
as an illusory answer to metaphysical questions, or as merely part of
a reactionary cultural superstructure. The interesting question in all
this is why it is thatmusicis employed as a new means for responding
to things which may previously have been the domain of religion and
metaphysics,notwhy music is essentially another version of the same
thing. The answer has to do with music’s non-representational nature
and its relationship to emotions, which enable it to challenge current
forms of expression and articulation, but it is vital here to make some
careful differentiations.
Consider the following example. Music can indeed play the sort of
ideological role Nietzsche accuses Wagner’s music of playing, but even
this need not be inherently problematic. Why should musicin some
circumstancesnot also be a form of post-metaphysical consolation? The
‘consolation’ offered by music to the concentration camp commandant
admittedly makes it starkly evident that musical consolation can be a
form of deceit. Are we, though, supposed to live without the consola-
tions music may provide, staring brute reality in the face all the time,
in the manner advocated by the most hectoring and obsessive passages
in Nietzsche? These passages are written by a desperate man writing
in a performative manner as a response to his own desperation. Why
can’t the experience of musical consolation itself be real, in the sense
that, as the earlier Nietzsche saw it, it can offer reasons for living on? If