396 music, philosophy, and modernitylanguage and music. This interplay is constituted in different ways in
different historical circumstances. If one construes music solely on the
basis of understanding its relationship to passionate verbal utterance,
this can involve an abstraction that obscures vital dimensions of mean-
ing. It is therefore important that the relationship between music and
verbal utterance should go both ways. The question is how Cavell’s ideas
about the ‘expressive’ relate both to verbal language and to meaning in
the broader, hermeneutic sense, that includes what music can convey
and evoke. Wellmer says that ‘languages, properly understood, are only
what they are as moments of a practical life-context’ (Wellmer 2004 :
461 ): expressivity is ineliminably part of such contexts, so the musical
must be an essential part of our approaches to understanding language,
not just a contingent addition.
At the same time, not all kinds of music can be characterised primar-
ily in terms of their being ‘expressive’, unless the term is so widely
applied that it loses any discriminatory power. This might seem to
weaken the case I have been making. However, for approaches to music
in modernity expressivity does tend to be the norm in relation to which
other aspects of music are assessed. Even when Stravinsky and others
revert to neo-classical forms, in opposition to the idea of Romantic
expression, they depend on what they are opposing: for the difference
that makes neo-classicism significant to emerge it must be related to
what it is not.^19 The importance of expression in this context becomes
apparent if one considers that musical neo-classicism has analogues in
other cultural forms. These include the moves against using expressive
metaphor in some modernist writing (in the later Kafka, for instance),
or some modernist painting’s moves away from expression towards geo-
metrical abstraction, but also (underlining the ambivalence of the idea
of neo-classicism) regressive architecture which simply repeats classical
forms from the past. The linguistic purism in early analytical philosophy
that we briefly considered in chapter 9 – whose effects are still present
in the analytical tradition – can also be construed in relation to the idea
of a move against expression. Within jazz, there have been approaches
where expressiveness directed against the norms of what jazz musicians
characteristically term ‘legitimate’ music has been the dominant aim,19 Something analogous applies to Kivy’s wish to deny that theEroicameans anything: it is
only in relation to the history of interpretations of musical meaning that it makes sense
to deny that theEroicahas any. When this denial is seen historically it emerges as part
of the crisis of meaning inaugurated by logical positivism’s failed attempt to explain
meaning.