MUSIC, PHILOSOPHY, AND MODERNITY

284 music, philosophy, and modernity

suggested, generally the same, public, words as everybody uses, so it is

the unique form of combination which is decisive, and this has to do

with the ‘musical’.^11 Although music may greatly extend the range of

sounds that can be combined, as Schleiermacher claims of the history

of musical instruments, the idea of a ‘musical vocabulary’, that con-

sists of material which can be used in habitual ways but which can be

configured in unique ways, indicates another way in which any fixed

language/music boundary can be questioned. How is it, though, that

poetry has a specific kind of value that lies in its unique combination

of words? Wittgenstein repeatedly connects this value to the idea of

the musical theme which cannot be replaced by another. Why is this so

important?

An important test for assessing differing philosophical construals of

language is to ascertain whether the basis of language is regarded as

established usage, from which ‘poetic’ usage is a deviation, or whether

what is significant in poetic usage constitutes the ground of standard

usage. There is a temptation to think, as Herder does, in terms of lan-

guage having initially involved a uniqueness of expression and of com-

bination which subsequently becomes ordered into more and more

schematised forms, even though this idea is in tension with his holis-

tic idea of language, which presupposes a shared public world.^12 Such

ordering can be seen as repressing certain aspects of language’s capacity

to reveal the particularity of the world or to express the subject’s spe-

cific feeling, at the same time as enabling the world to be manipulated

and feelings to be articulated more precisely. This contrast between

repressive and enabling functions of language connects issues of lan-

guage, poetry, and music to the idea of cultural criticism. Wittgenstein’s

roots in turn-of-the-century Vienna locate him in a context where

‘Sprachskepsis’, scepticism about language’s connection to the world,

became a major theme. The context was also the one in which some

of the major developments in Western music from Mahler to Schoen-

berg took place. A characteristic theme in thinking about modernist

poetry is that language is becoming debased, and that a poetry which

refuses to use language in the manner of the dominant society is the

11 Manfred Frank has analysed this issue in terms of ‘style’ as the individual combination
of linguistic elements. Why such combination should be significant in the first place is,
though, not explained by style as the expression of the individuality of the subject: why
should others be interested in this individuality?
12 When babies move from a pre-verbal, but highly expressive state to a verbal state they
arguably lose something even as they gain the new possibilities of verbal language.