MUSIC, PHILOSOPHY, AND MODERNITY

298 music, philosophy, and modernity

daily existence, and which are both constituted by and help constitute

the nature of attunement.^19 The subject’s attunedness will therefore

also depend upon the kinds of articulation that occur in such musical

practices within a culture.^20 Australian aboriginal culture, for example,

views the natural world as a network of ‘songlines’, so that differing

songs relate to specific features of the landscape and constitute a musi-

cal way of being in the world.^21 The tension between making music,

which, as Besseler’s account of attunedness makes clear, cannot be con-

ceived of in terms of a separation of subject and object, and analysis

of music, which objectifies the music in conceptual terms, is the key

here. This tension has important consequences for the perceived role

of philosophy in Heidegger.

Heidegger’s philosophical enterprise would seem to depend on what

Besseler advocates in his name, namely a conception in which mean-

ing is not the object of a theory, but has rather to be ‘carried out’ –

‘vollzogen’–and can therefore be in tension with the means by which we

objectify it in theories. Heidegger admittedly insists that understanding

in the sense of practical,zuhanden, involvement with the world, which

is required for other forms of verbal and theoretical understanding,

must precede explanation. However, this gives rise to the problem of

characterising the relationship between the ontic and the ontological

with regard to language andDaseinthat we encountered above. A phe-

nomenological ontology is supposed to give an account both of the fact

that and of how the world is intelligible. If this answer itself requires

something which has to be ‘vollzogen’, and involves what Besseler con-

siders in terms of music, a theoretical account which delineates the

Existentialienmust be inherently lacking. Wellmer suggests of this issue

in Heidegger that ‘Understanding of being would rather be under-

stood in the sense of away of beingthan in the sense of a philosophically

articulated understanding of the being-in-the-world ofDasein’(Wellmer

2004 : 322 ). This resistance to a purely theoretical approach has conse-

quences for the understanding of language and philosophy. But there

are also dangers here.

19 Even concert listening, of which he is so critical, is less ‘passive’ than he suggests, as
Schleiermacher’s remarks about the relationship between receptivity and spontaneity in
music indicate.
20 Affects are not irrelevant to the significance of music in this conception. They are located,
though, in collective contexts and practices.
21 My thanks to Cesar Benalcazar at the University of Melbourne who told me about
this.