306 music, philosophy, and modernity
If one looks, for example, at Besseler’s accounts of the history of
Western music, which are based on the interplay between verbal lan-
guage and music, a different story emerges of how to understand the
subject’s relationship to language and music. Can this relationship be
encompassed within the later Heidegger’s story? Heidegger repeatedly
questions the primacy of visuality in epistemology, regarding it as linked
to objectification in modern philosophy, in the name of the ‘listening’
we encountered above. However, he says very little about the actual
history of listening. Besseler, on the other hand, outlines an essential
contrast between the musical listening of the modern period and what
preceded it, and this contrast has instructive echoes in the later Hei-
degger. Gregorian chant and sixteenth-century song depend on ‘prose
melody’, which ‘always brings something new’, and this gives rise to
‘a peaceful, more passive hearing: the acceptance of the music in its
objectivity’ (Besseler 1978 : 99 ). The listeners engage in what he terms
‘vernehmen’: this now just means to ‘hear’, but it originally meant to
‘take possession of’, and is linked to ‘Ver nunft’, ‘reason’. Jacobi makes
much of this etymology in his critique of Fichte, whose early philoso-
phy he sees, in an anticipation of Heidegger, as the modern becoming
narcissistic of subjective reason: ‘Pure reason is a listening which only
listens to itself’ (Jacobi 1799 : 14 – see Bowie 1997 : ch. 1 ). Besseler’s
idea, in contrast, is that ‘reason’ is linked to hearing in terms of the
grasping of an existing order of things which the text conveys: text and
music form an inseparable unity, and the subject receptively takes in
this order, rather than constituting it.
He contrasts this kind of listening with the ‘active-synthetic listening
of the modern period’ (Besseler 1978 : 99 ), outlining the concept of
such listening in relation to Descartes’ account of hearing a melody in
theCompendium Musicae, and also to Kant. The classical music of Haydn,
Mozart, and Beethoven, which consists of linked, but contrasting ele-
ments, depends upon the listener, who has to synthesise the elements
into a whole. However, this kind of listening then gives way in turn to
the Romantic ‘mystical immersion in the work’ in Carl Maria von Weber
and in Wagner (ibid.: 153 ), which echoes the ‘passive hearing’ of the
sixteenth century: in both the subject does not impose an order on the
music, but rather surrenders itself to the music. Passive hearing of this
kind relates, as Besseler says, to the early Heidegger’s idea of ‘mood’,
where there is no subject–object division, whereas active-synthetic hear-
ing involves the intentional directedness of particular subjective feeling
towards an object. The former requires a ‘preparedness to let oneself