372 music, philosophy, and modernity
the great musical classics while the victims died in unspeakable agony a
few miles away. However, in other circumstances (or, indeed, for other
people in the same circumstances), the same music might be a means
of sustaining hope when reality otherwise extinguishes it. Only if one
regards music as essentially ‘philosophical music’ could such sustaining
of hope be seen as merely ideological. Is music which has helped many
people live through terrible times, or has brought people together after
conflicts,simplya replacement for something else? Music can also fill a
large part of someone’s life – as, of course, it did Adorno’s. The man
who wrote the following clearly did not always adhere to his own most
stringent views:
music is, as it were, the acoustic objectification of facial expression, which
perhaps only separated itself from it in the course of history. If ‘a shadow
passes over a face’, an eye opens, lips half-open, then that is closest to
the origin of music as well as to expressionless natural beauty, the path of
clouds across the sky, the appearance of the first star, the sun’s breaking
through clouds. Music as it were in the middle between the spectacle of
the sky and of the face. That is the basis of the affinity of music to nature
poetry.
(Adorno 2001 : 237 )In the face of the radical transience characteristic of modern tempo-
rality, great musical experiences which take us beyond the dominant
relationships to time might be said to be ‘illusion’, in so far as they
do not ultimately transform that temporality. However, do such expe-
riences not also offer their own kind of fulfilment, often, as Mahler’s
music does, by temporarily transforming what is in reality irredeemable?
This is another possible interpretation of Adorno’s remark on Mahler
and the ‘last metaphysics’, which hints at the ambivalence in his notion
of ‘Schein’.
This ambivalence has a more general significance for the entangle-
ment of philosophy and music. Adorno claims that ‘The fact that no
[work of art] is a symbol [in the sense of that which manifests the infi-
nite in the finite] testifies to the fact that the absolute does not reveal
itself in any work; otherwise art would not be either appearance or play,
but rather something real’ ( 7 : 147 – 8 ). Only if art were to overcome the
difference between universal and particular, mind and material reality,
would it cease to be ‘Schein’. Being ‘real’ is therefore intended in the
emphatic sense that Adorno associates with Hegel’s claim to attain the
absolute in philosophy. In Adorno’s terms this metaphysical goal, like