MUSIC, PHILOSOPHY, AND MODERNITY

400 music, philosophy, and modernity

A number of interpretations of the state of music in the contempo-

rary world can be seen as making the very idea of challenging philos-

ophy through music itself seem very questionable. There clearly is a

crisis affecting the music that has so far been most likely to be afforded

philosophical dignity, i.e. the Western ‘classical’ tradition, whose devel-

opment has in many respects taken it away from the kind of cultural

importance attributed to Beethoven and Wagner. At present it would

hardly be controversial to claim, for example, that the best jazz from

Louis Armstrong to Wayne Shorter is aesthetically more significant than

much of what has been produced in the classical music of the same

period.^22 Dahlhaus makes it clear that the crisis of ‘art music’ is not just

a result of the effects of the culture industry’s neglect of challenging art.

He observes that, whereas the music aesthetics of the nineteenth cen-

tury aimed to explicate the musical experience of the educated lay per-

son, the music aesthetics of the twentieth century becomes an aesthetics

for experts, and this reflects upon the legitimacy of the new techniques

for composing music (see Dahlhaus and Zimmermann 1984 ). Much

of the ‘advanced’ music of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, like

much of the innovative visual art (as Danto contends), can seem to

depend upon philosophical or proto-philosophical explications, of the

kind which I questioned when discussing Adorno and ‘philosophical

music’. Is it not strange, then, in the light of what Adorno talked of

in terms of music’s ‘becoming linguistic’, to try to emphasise music’s

contemporary significance in the manner that I propose? If advanced

music now needs philosophy to sustain its intelligibility, why claim that

philosophy needs music for it to constitute a more adequate response to

modernity? The answer has to do with how we understand the cultural

roles of music today.

The conditions of contemporary musical production and reproduc-

tion mean that the most important and challenging music, be it ‘classi-

cal’, ‘jazz’, or from the end of the spectrum of ‘popular music’ not pri-

marily determined by commercial considerations, often plays a minor

role in the public sphere, in comparison with the music promoted by the

culture industry.^23 As Edward Said observes, one can these days expect

22 Rock music obviously has more social effects, but that is not the same thing as having
great aesthetic significance.
23 This might sound dismissive with regard to what is sometimes very good popular music,
but the conditions of production and distribution often have far more to do with what
music is successful in this sphere than does musical quality or cultural value. BBC Radio
3 ’s recent offer of free downloads of new performances of all the Beethoven symphonies,
which was taken up by large numbers of people, suggests a degree of hope that new
technologies can also make things better.