MUSIC, PHILOSOPHY, AND MODERNITY

330 music, philosophy, and modernity

and reveal differences from those contexts. An actor performing their

part in a play requires technical abilities which can be taught, but also

an understanding of the words in question in relation to the context of

the play as a whole, which goes beyond the technical level. Such under-

standing is not just of the meaning of individual utterances, but of their

rhythm, tone, contextual function, etc. This understanding can be con-

strued in similar terms to those required in everyday language use, but

the circumscribed verbal material of the play makes one kind of for-

mal normative demands, whereas everyday usage might, for example,

make normative demands in terms of local standards of tact, accuracy,

etc. Both language and music can be thought of here in terms of the

continuum in musical interpretation which moves from reproducing

something to some extent fixed, such as occurs when playing a role in

a Shakespeare play or playing a Beethoven sonata, to improvising in a

dramatic or musical context, which brings one in certain respects closer

to everyday practice.^16 In both cases an understanding of ‘meaning’,

which results from successful connections of the material of communi-

cation, is essential to interpretation, and truth has to do with fulfilling

the normative demands of the particular form of articulation.

The ultimate aim in the case of art, which need not apply when

pragmatic success in communication can be the criterion, would be

to make such connections in the most thoroughly integrated manner.

However, this is precisely what is ‘in principle unrealisable’: by putting

emphasis on one element, one can fail to do justice to another. The

link between the linguistic and the musical senses of interpretation

and truth can therefore be seen to result from holistic demands that are

made on understanding. The appropriateness of employing the notion

of a regulative idea relates, then, to Adorno’s idea that ‘interpretation

measures itself by the level of its failure’. Rather than being thought of

as a positive goal, the regulative idea becomes the result of the inherent

failure involved in attempting to fulfil holistic demands. The question

is how this failure applies to differing human activities and forms of

articulation.

In contrast with the kind of holism at issue here, much of the liter-

ature on truth in the analytical tradition relates to the understanding

of the truth of single utterances. What Adorno is concerned with in

relation to music might therefore, as Nelson Goodman ( 1978 ) argues

16 Adorno argues that there are elements of each end of the continuum in any real instance
of the notional extremes.