312 music, philosophy, and modernity
as ‘artificial intelligence’. Descartes, of course, plays a role in bringing
music into the new rationalised philosophy. However, music once again
suggests an ambiguity in Heidegger’s story.
Weber’s account depends upon the apparently paradoxical relation-
ship between the new, mathematically based tempering of the scale into
equal semitones in the seventeenth century, and the resulting new free-
dom for the subject in music. He shows how, throughout the history
of music, attempts are made to ‘rationalise’ the relationships between
notes within different octaves, which are asymmetrical if based on the
relationships between natural overtones. The result of modern temper-
ing is the ability to modulate from any key to any other key. This leads
to a considerable extension of expressive freedom, at the price, on
instruments with fixed tuning, like piano or organ, of losing melodic
differentiations between notes such as F-sharp and G-flat, which are
the same in tempered tuning, but different in ‘just’ (Pythagorean) tun-
ing. Weber’s image of rationalisation is summed up by his contention
that ‘Only the tempering of the scale brought complete freedom to
[modern harmonically based music]’ (Weber 1921 ). These reflec-
tions relate to a decisive theme in Adorno’s conception of music and
philosophy.
Adorno maintains that ‘What drives spirit (‘Geist’) in music forwards,
the principle of rationality which was rightly recognised as central by
Max Weber, is nothing but the unfolding of extra-artistic, social ratio-
nality. The latter “appears” in the former’ ( 14 : 409 ). His reasons for
this claim are apparent in the contention that ‘music transforms itself
by control over the natural material into a more or less fixed system
whose particular moments have a significance in relation to the subject
which is independent [of the subject] and at the same time open to
it’ ( 18 : 160 – 1 ). The apparent paradox, in which an objective mathe-
matical order is the condition of possibility of a newsubjectivefreedom,
becomes in Adorno a constitutive contradiction, the interpretation of
which forms the basis of his understanding of music in modernity. The
rationality which is the source of the dialectic of enlightenment is, as we
saw, based on the subject’s domination of the other, and the develop-
ment of modern music consists in the extension of the subject’s control
of ‘musical material’. Presumably, though, this control need not take
place solely in the name of the domination of nature which Adorno
regards as leading both to repressive social effects and to the degrada-
tion of human and non-human nature. The ‘openness’ of the ‘system’ of
music to the subject requires acknowledgement both of the constraints