346 music, philosophy, and modernity
term here is the ‘state of the material’ in music. This refers to the formal
and technical dilemmas in the music of their time to which composers
have to respond if they are to fulfil the demand that music should con-
vey truth, rather than offer mere culinary enjoyment. The plausible
aspect of this idea is exemplified when contemporary musicians try to
compose by employing a musical vocabulary from the past. The result-
ing music may be technically competent and musically satisfying, but
it will fail to challenge its audiences in the way that the original music
did. There can, though, be situations when a revival of something from
the past may, in a particular context, be highly significant, whether it be
Mendelssohn’s revival of Bach, or the return, at a time when free jazz
itself tended to settle into a routine, to chord- and scale-based improvisa-
tion which incorporates some of the possibilities opened up by free jazz.
The problem with Adorno’s extreme position in these matters is that he
pays too little attention to the differing contexts of musical activity. He
does so largely because of the Hegel-influenced way in which he relates
music to philosophy and because of his too exclusive concentration on
modern European music.
Take the following well-known passage fromPhilosophy of New Music,
on the idea that ‘the confrontation of the composer with the material
is the confrontation with society’:
The demands which go from the material to the subject derive...from
the fact that the ‘material’ is itself sedimented spirit, something social,
which has been preformed by the consciousness of people. As former
subjectivity which has forgotten itself this objective spirit of the material
has its own laws of motion. What seems to be merely the autonomous
movement of the material, which is of the same origin as the social process
and is always once more infiltrated with its traces, still takes place in the
same sense as the real society when both know nothing of each other and
mutually oppose each other.
( 12 : 39 – 40 )If one did not know that this was a passage about music it would be
easy to think that Adorno was talking about verbal language. This is
also in one sense ‘preformed by the consciousness of people’, as well
as forming that consciousness, and involves demands – think of Bran-
dom’s inferential commitments – that confront the subject with ‘objec-
tive spirit’. The remarks could, moreover, apply to philosophy itself,
where the idea of the ‘confrontation of the philosopher with the mate-
rial’ of philosophy, in the form of the texts, problems, and arguments