292 music, philosophy, and modernitymusicologist Heinrich Besseler, did.^15 Besseler shows how the prag-
matic aspect of Heidegger’s earlier work can be explicitly connected to
music.
At this point a by now familiar question arises. Is music just to
be regarded as an illustration of some aspect of Heidegger’s philos-
ophy, or does it lead in directions which his explicit philosophy fails to
countenance? Besseler suggests a way of considering this issue for the
earlier philosophy which can help to circumvent some of the more dif-
ficult questions in the interpretation of that philosophy. Furthermore,
some of Besseler’s ideas about music can be interestingly linked to
Heidegger’slateridea of the history of being as manifested in the work
of the key philosophers, from Plato, via Descartes, to Nietzsche. Here
the question is how an equivalent list of either composers or kinds of
music would relate to the idea of the history of being: would it merely
depend upon the framework given by the key philosophers? Before get-
ting to these issues we need, though, to get to grips with some instructive
difficulties.
Cristina Lafont ( 1994 ) indicates one way of seeing the controver-
sial aspect of Heidegger’s work when she rejects a pragmatist inter-
pretation of the early work, of the kind espoused by Charles Taylor,
Hubert Dreyfus, and others. She claims that Heidegger privileges the
‘world-disclosing’ function of language over its ‘designative’ function
throughout his career. The crux of this claim, which she backs up with
a great deal of detailed textual evidence, is summed up in her remark
that, even inBeing and Time, ‘The “world-disclosure” – the unfolded-
ness – which language “contains in itself” regulates and distributes the
possibilities within which the other sources of disclosure (such, e.g.,
as moods) can move’ (ibid.: 74 ). Language therefore becomes a fixed
horizon that constitutes the possibilities of how the world is to be under-
stood. Even though Heidegger’s conception of the nature of language
changes between the earlier and later work, the idea that language
pre-determines the horizon of intelligibility is, she argues, retained in
a manner which has counterintuitive consequences with regard to the
changing ways in which understanding occurs.15 Besseler does not play much of a role in English-language musicology, because so little
of his work has been translated. He also worked in the GDR until his death, which
may prejudice some people against him. His work is, though, devoid of the dialectical-
materialist dogmatism characteristic of the worst intellectual work in the GDR, and he
played a major part in initiating the still ongoing re-examination of ‘early music’, as well
as in a variety of other areas of music, from Bach to Romanticism and beyond.