MUSIC, PHILOSOPHY, AND MODERNITY

32 music, philosophy, and modernity

practice, rather than as predominantly a means of representation. If
one tries to isolate music as an object in the world in the same way as
one isolates the object of an explanatory theory, the first step causes
the problem, because music and the world relate in ways which affect
whatbothare understood to be. Hence my desire to see what happens
if one experiments with a reversal of the priorities between music and
philosophy.
If one tries to remain at the level of the physical description of a
piece of music as an object in the world, the decision as towhatis purely
objective comes up against intractable difficulties. Does the quality of
the acoustic space in which a piece is played come into the objective
description, for example? Questioning of this kind of objectivity does
not, however, render the issue merely ‘subjective’, because norms are
inescapably in play in relation both to physical and to aesthetic aspects
of music. Indeed – and this is crucial – there is a dimension of music
in which norms have to beshown, rather than stated. The evaluation a
performer makes concerning the rightness of how something is to be
played is essential to music, and it is not merely arbitrary. It exists in a
‘space of reasons’, even though this space can often only be constituted
by adverting to inferential relationships between different manners of
playing something – thus in terms of comparative showing or doing,
rather than in terms of verbal assertions. Verbal assertions will play a
role in this, but they are not always decisive, and more is often achieved
by gesture. Some great conductors do not say a great deal in rehearsal,
but what they communicate by gesture has considerable complexity
and intellectual cogency. The really fundamental questions are how the
understanding of somethingasmusic and how musical understanding
itself relate to other ways of articulating and understanding the world,
on the assumption that each of these ways may disclose something that
the others do not. The very fact that music changes its nature in relation
to the development of human societies, so that, for example, certain
kinds of sound either begin to be or cease to be culturally acceptable,
cannot be understood without seeing music holistically as part of a
world, rather than as an object.

Metaphysics and music

One way of exploring this issue is via a consideration of the relation-
ship between music and ‘metaphysics’. Pythagoras assimilated music
and metaphysics to each other, the essential order of the universe itself