MUSIC, PHILOSOPHY, AND MODERNITY

form, feeling, metaphysics, and music 39

by a form of articulation like music cannot be reduced to being part

of how we deal with a world that is thought of as a constant threat,

and insteadattachesus to aspects of the world in new ways, the web of

significances via which we make a life that takes us beyond ourselves

is augmented.^11 The very fact that music can have to do with ‘things

outside ourselves that we do not control’, thus with experiences of tran-

sience, loss, and longing (as well, of course, as love, and joy), connects

us with the world in ways which knowledge may not. The emotions

attached to knowing that we all will die and that nothing ultimately

lasts can be merely paralysing, whereas the musical articulation of the

ways in which the world is disclosed in the light of such emotions seems

to take one somewhere else, even if it does not redeem one from the

facticity that it also evokes. The idea of such redemption is, of course,

what modernity should have taught us to renounce. Having done so,

we then need to pay more attention to the resources in modernity for

responding to the consequences of this renunciation. As we shall see,

this is one of the reasons why Adorno, for all his considerable faults, is

so important to our topic.

Novalis says of philosophy that it is ‘really homesickness,the drive to

be at home everywhere’ (Novalis 1978 : 675 ), but it is a drive which he

does not think can be satisfied: ‘The absolute which is given to us can

only be recognised negatively by acting and finding that what we are

seeking is not reached by any action’ (ibid.: 181 ). Music, in contrast,

allows the mind to be ‘for short moments in its earthly home’ (ibid.:

517 ). One danger often associated with such claims is that music is then

cited as a means of establishing a substantial connection of humanity to

nature, of the kind which relies, for example, on the idea that the har-

monic series is ‘natural’ and therefore resonates with a deeper ‘natural’

part of ourselves. Such ideas have been discredited by musicological,

historical, and anthropological research, which shows that there are no

transcultural aspects of music which can be said to be more ‘natural’

than others. Even if we feel that tonal music is more universally appeal-

ing than atonal, this tells us nothing about music and nature in any

positive sense: second nature, in the sense of the realm of intentional-

ity, is just not reducible to first nature.

At the same time, anthropological evidence also suggests that all cul-

tures practise something that we can regard as music in ways which

11 The same can apply to other arts. The major differentiating factor is the relationship of
the differing arts to verbal language.