wittgenstein and heidegger 297that each would ‘fuse with’ the other (ibid.: 77 ). Making music ‘as such
does not have the tendency to understand itself with its own means’
(ibid.), whereas conceptual understanding of music involves ‘an alien
new approach that is added from the outside’ (ibid.: 78 ). The tension
between making music, and objectifying conceptual understanding is
not something to be overcome by an overarching theory, or by a simple
privileging of one over the other. Instead the tension constitutes the
field within which the relationships between ‘tradition, the historical,
music theory, and music education’ (ibid.) are played out.
Heidegger’s influence on people like Besseler has to do with their
perception that his work gets in touch with aspects of human existence
which other contemporary philosophy was regarded as having failed to
bring to light or as having repressed. This perception was accentuated
by the War and the ensuing social, political, and economic disintegra-
tion. How, though, is one to connect the historical situation and the
philosophical response? The former has a specific immediacy and con-
tingency, and the latter, if it is to count as ‘philosophical’ at all, must seek
to go beyond historical contingency, because it is precisely the source of
the need for a new orientation. The main problem here becomes appar-
ent when Besseler questions the modes of performance and reception
of the nineteenth-century classical music tradition. He regards these as
relying on the idea of transcendent values communicated by music. His
conception echoes the questioning of Platonism in Heidegger’s tem-
poralisation of the question of being, which seeks to get away from the
idea of truth as the timeless ‘presence’ of an independently existing
objective world.
Besseler’s anti-Platonism, which regards music’s positive social role
as involving an active, participatory response to human existence, leads
to an informative version of one of the issues we have been pursuing. He
argues that Heidegger’s idea of mood is better characterised by the term
‘attunedness’ (‘Gestimmtheit’) (ibid.: 62 ), which makes the musical con-
notation more explicit. Attunedness is not to be equated with affect. We
are always already attuned, whereas affects are, as Nussbaum’s account
of them as a kind of judgement indicates, largely intentional in char-
acter, and interrupt our underlying attunedness, by directing attention
to specific objects of love, hate, etc. In this sense received ‘Romantic’
ideas, which regard the meaning of music as relating predominantly
to the emotions of the I, are a special case, not the historical norm.
Besseler is interested in musical practices, like dances, marches, collec-
tive singing, etc., which are external to the I, yet inextricably related to its