374 music, philosophy, and modernity
‘Schein’ described above cannot be overcome by establishing a philo-
sophical standpoint which resolves the contradiction. Adorno’s prob-
lems in mediating between music, philosophy and history help, then,
to lay bare real contradictions which are carried out in modern music.
In thelast chapterI suggested that, despite the limited amount of
direct reflection on music and society in his work, Wittgenstein was still
able to illuminate the entanglement of music and philosophy. Adorno’s
much more ambitious aims with regard to music, philosophy, and soci-
ety mean that he is open to many more kinds of criticism. However, even
when criticising his diagnoses, we are by that very fact led to confront
vital issues. If we take Adorno’s more radical approaches seriously, the
prevailing forces in modernity will be seen as showing their true face in
Auschwitz and Hiroshima. The continuing rapacious effects of capital,
which decimate the environment, exhaust natural resources, and lead
to cultural impoverishment, without heed for the longer term future,
are then to be regarded as related to such events. The human world
may, therefore, be heading for an abyss created by the dominance of
instrumental attitudes to both human and non-human nature.
Such concerns can be seen as at best peripheral to, and at worst
grossly irrelevant to music. The easy option here is therefore to argue
that music is precisely not a form of instrumental reason, and so con-
stitutes a respite from the ills of modernity, although this argument
itself makes it clear that these ills affect how music is perceived. Adorno
refuses to see music as respite, though his concern with music and
hope does have to do with the exploration of ways beyond modern dis-
enchantment. It is, moreover, clear that, although most music probably
plays the role of mere distraction, the most significant modern music
does not. While insisting on the relative autonomy of music, Adorno’s
most productive conceptions show that the tasks facing composers and
performers are indeed entangled with social issues. Even if one rejects
Adorno’s interpretation of the musical path from Bach to the present,
a rejection of the idea that music still has to do with inescapable issues
like secularisation, the burden of freedom, divisions in the self, techno-
logical command, affective life, changes in language, the experience of
time, cultural identity, the way moods can constitute how we see reality,
and a myriad of issues relating to his critical diagnoses of the prob-
lems of modernity, is not a serious option. The fact that philosophical
understanding of music is often parasitic on extra-musical philosophi-
cal assumptions and so fails to see what it can learn from music, does
vitiate some of Adorno’s emphatic interpretations of music via the ideas