conclusion 393an ‘Adagioindicates distress, aLamentolamentation, aLentorelief, an
Andantehope, anAffetuosolove, anAllegrocomfort, aPrestoeagerness,
etc.’ (Strunk 1998 : 699 ).
Music is not straightforwardly illocutionary, but it can, as Adorno
claimed, become determined by convention in such a way that it func-
tions in proto-illocutionary manner, as ceremonial music or the clich ́ed
music of the culture industry does. The very fact that something can be
felt to be questionable about proto-illocutionary uses of music indicates
how Cavell’s concern with ‘encouraging’ rather than ‘weeding’ expres-
sion in verbal language gains another dimension when music comes
into the picture. Music can be perlocutionary, and often in a fruitful
manner – what else could make music therapy successful, for example? –
but it cannot just be translated into the terms of perlocution as they
apply to verbal language. Whereas music both with and without words
can, and can be meant to, inspire, cheer up, make melancholy, or even
offend, it cannot, and cannot be meant to, embarrass or shame in any
direct sense, though the circumstances of its production may do so.
Music may only, like Rilke’s caged panther, shame us by conveying a
sense that ‘You must change your life.’ This lack of direct, specifiable
effect – which should not be equated with insignificance – has to do
precisely with music’s ‘intentionless’ nature. For Adorno this meant
that music may be critical of social reality because it does not employ
the reified terms of intentional language. His version of this idea is
flawed, but the tension between the musical and the verbal can still be
instructively connected to cultural politics. Music can encourage and
inspire, but its relationship to encouraging or inspiring someone to do
something specific is not the same, for example, as that of a political
speech.^16
Similar specifiable effects to that of a speech can, however, result
from music, albeit at a rudimentary and very context-dependent level,
as the example of martial music shows.^17 As a part of a whole mode
of existence martial music is capable of intensifying the motivation of
members of an army and of weakening the motivation of their oppo-
nents. It is because music can function in a manner which comes close to
convention-based illocution that the example of Mahler’s ironic use of16 Note also how music, as we saw Dahlhaus argue in chapter 1 , may just evoke some of
what is designated by such verbs, without the listener necessarily undergoing an actual
perlocutionary effect.
17 More encouraging examples would include the sort of music which binds together an
oppressed community, such as South African township music or some kinds of jazz.