wittgenstein and heidegger 307be filled by and to be “attuned” [he uses ‘einstimmen’, which means to
‘join in’] by a work’ (ibid.: 163 ).
These ideas are also echoed in Heidegger’s later contrast of the objec-
tification characteristic of metaphysics with his own idea of ‘listening’.
Besseler’s historical typology is rather too schematic, but it does suggest
a dialectic between the subject and the musical material which has to
be investigated both in the detail of the music itself and in terms of
the historical constitution of subjectivity. The later Heidegger’s mono-
lithic story of subjectification as the essence of the history of being
depends on a specific – and contentious – version of the history of
philosophy. There are, in contrast, the beginnings of a very different
history in Besseler. This is because a vital aspect of Heidegger’s story,
namely the listening which ‘lets things be’, is just one aspect of a history
which is neither subjective nor objective, because it involves a dialec-
tic between objective practices and subjective responses. There is in
Besseler’s dialectic, however, no Hegelian sense of spirit realising itself,
which would, in Heidegger’s terms, just make it part of the history
of metaphysics. Besseler’s history is instead based on changing social
practices and their relationship to those who participate in them. The
development of the subjective form of listening is, for example, depen-
dent on the development of dance, which is part of what first gives a
role to wordless instrumental music. Besseler’s use of the early Heideg-
ger suggests, then, how an account of being in the world should be
extended in the direction of what can be understood via music, and
this account need not fall prey to the later Heidegger’s objections to
his own earlier work.
The question that remains is whether what Besseler is concerned
with is in fact merely another phenomenon whose true significance lies
in the technological objectifications that are the manifestation of West-
ern metaphysics. Heidegger’s conception can actually tell us a lot about
the ways in which music becomes subjected to technology. However, the
philosophical story he tells cannot do justice to all the implications of
this process, as Besseler’s story makes clear. The ways in which Heideg-
ger talks about language and poetry, as we have seen, often point in the
direction of music. His failure to do anything with this connection offers
another example of how the entanglement of music and philosophy
should make us question even the most canonical philosophical stories.
Is the story of Western music from Monteverdi to jazz and the avant-
garde of the twentieth century nothing more than another manifesta-
tion of modernity as subjectification? The persistent tension in the story