MUSIC, PHILOSOPHY, AND MODERNITY

394 music, philosophy, and modernity

military musical tropes is illuminating for the topic of music, modernity,

and performativity.^18 The fact that the perlocutionary effect of martial

music becomes more and more questionable in a technologically driven

modernity means that Mahler makes his military music self-reflexive,

and so, as Adorno argues, brings it closer to speech. This ‘becoming lin-

guistic’ of music is part of the dialectic between convention and expres-

sion (see Adorno 1997 : 18 , 149 – 76 ) that we looked at in chapter 9. The

opening movement of Mahler’s Sixth Symphony, for example, which

begins with a minor key march, can initially be understood in terms

of a performative environment – militarised Europe which will soon

descend into two world wars – in which the march plays a role as part of

many forms of life that will directly and indirectly contribute to disaster.

The symphonic movement’s questioning of established attitudes to the

march need not, though, be seen in representational terms, as ‘foresee-

ing’ the war-torn world to which it becomes a prelude. Its significance

is better located in how it engages its listeners in a critical relationship

to a conventionalised, performative musical form.

Rather than this critical relationship being conveyed by words, it

results from the specific perlocutionary potential of the music itself.

The vital point is that the music evokes the dangers and seductions

which it at the same time questions. As such, it is both removed from

the sphere of direct perlocution and yet can, by the way in which it

may engage the listener, give an access to that sphere which intentional

language cannot. We can engage with this sphere in an uncritical, ‘culi-

nary’ manner, by simply enjoying – or, for that matter, not enjoying –

the threatening, obsessive feel of the music. Or we may engage with it

in a critical manner, by reflecting in historical or psychological terms

on the meaning of what the music evokes in us. We can also respond

in a variety of other ways. Which of these responses actually occurs will

depend on factors such as one’s education in music, etc., but the contin-

gency that Cavell suggests is inherent in the ‘imperative of expression’,

which connects the aesthetic and the performative, will also play a role,

as will the rational expectation that one can argue about what the music

expresses and how it expresses it. The interaction between subjective

and objective that is so important here was apparent in Dahlhaus’ com-

ment, cited in chapter 1 , that ‘The expressive character [of music]

inheres, looked at phenomenologically, in the object, but exclusively in

18 The different ways in which ironised march music signifies in Shostakovich make it clear
to what extent context is inseparable from adequate musical understanding.