MUSIC, PHILOSOPHY, AND MODERNITY

296 music, philosophy, and modernity

and performance as it does in his questioning of what he sees as the

‘aesthetic’ approach to music.^18

For Besseler the aesthetic approach depends on the idea of the auton-

omy of the musical work and on its concomitant objectification by the

kind of concert listening which develops in the nineteenth century. His

interpretation of this situation is in some respects rather too reliant on

Heidegger’s distinction betweenzuhandenandvorhanden. However, he

is seeking to get at important issues, that will be vital in considering

Adorno’s philosophical contentions about the social and political role

of music. The core of Besseler’s argument is that ethical claims, based

on the idea of music’s purifying function, that are made on behalf of

the ‘classical form of access’ (ibid.: 51 )toconcert music, are founded in

the listener’s ‘devotion/dedication/self-surrender’ (‘Hingabe’), which

‘leads’ the listener without their being actively involved. As such ‘one

cannot talk of there being a community-forming power of the sym-

phonic work of art’ (ibid.: 52 ). In the context of the Weimar Republic

this might sound rather questionable. What he means, though, is the

development of workers’ choirs and instrumental groups, and other

new forms of progressive musical practice, which lead Kurt Weill, in

theDreigroschenoper,tocreate a new kind of opera that is accessible to

a broader audience. Besseler’s decisive claim is that, far from existing

in an objective way, such that ‘music’ would occur when a gramophone

plays ‘in a room empty of people’, ‘Musicisonly if and to the extent

that it is achieved/carried out (‘vollzogen’)’ as a ‘manner/melody of

human existence’ (ibid.: 57 ). Note that Heidegger regardsDaseinas

that which ‘achieves/carries out’ (‘vollzieht’) its existence by relating to

its being.

Besseler’s emphasis on the need for music to be engaged in and

actively brought about is what is most significant for the entanglement

of music and philosophy. His essay on music aesthetics concludes with

reflections on the idea of musical understanding, where he claims that

one of the ‘most important tasks of musicology’ is the overcoming of the

‘traditional opposition between hermeneutics and formal analysis’, so

18 There need be nothing problematic about such criticism of the ‘aesthetic’ approach,
but it may, in a different context, cease to have the force it had in Besseler’s context.
The contemporary crisis with regard to live concerts of ‘classical music’ has very dif-
ferent roots from those addressed by Besseler. A progressive position might now seek,
for example, to involve the passive consumers of much industrially produced ‘popular
music’ in the much more diverse musical possibilities of the major classical traditions,
where the kind of attentive listening not generally demanded by a lot of popular music
is crucial.