Adorno, heidegger and the meaning of music.pdf

ADORNO, HEIDEGGER AND

THE MEANING OF MUSIC

Andrew Bowie

ABSTRACT T. W. Adorno’s philosophy of music aims to show that music is a

source of important insights into the nature of modern society. This position

leads, though, to a series of methodological difﬁculties, some of which can be

alleviated by using resources from Heidegger’s hermeneutics. The essay takes

the key notion of ‘judgementless synthesis’ from Adorno’s unﬁnished book on

Beethoven and connects it to Heidegger’s account of pre-propositional under-

standing and to Kant’s notion of schematism. This connection is shown to have

consequences for how we conceive of both the meaning of music and meaning

in more general terms, especially with regard to analytical philosophy. The

essay argues that, despite its many important insights, Adorno’s account of the

meaning of music in modernity depends too much on his analogy between

Hegel’s claim to achieve the ﬁnal philosophy and Beethoven’s establishment of

new forms of integration for musical material.

KEYWORDS Adorno • Heidegger • hermeneutics • language • musical

meaning • politics • schematism • semantics • society

In an outline for a never-written work on the history of German music

from 1908 to 1933, T. W. Adorno remarks that, when the Nazis took over,

they hardly needed to suppress ‘cultural bolshevist’ music, i.e. ‘new music’,

such as that of Berg or Schönberg, because the suppression had already

largely taken place within the realm of ‘so-called new music’ itself, so that

‘certain late forms of new music (Weill’s Bürgschaft ) could be taken over

almost unchanged by fascist composers (Wagner-Régeny)’ (Adorno, 1984b:

628). Adorno continues:

In the historical analysis of this section [of the proposed book] the idea is to

be developed via the model of music that the decisive changes, whose drastic

Thesis Eleven , Number 56, February 1999: 1–23

SAGE Publications ( London, Thousand Oaks, CA and New Delhi)

[0725-5136(199902)56;1–23;006939]

2 Thesis Eleven (Number 56 1999)

expression is the seizure of power by fascism, take place in such a deep stratum

of social life that the political surface does not decide at all, and that these

experiences of the depths, as they are connected to the problem of unem-

ployment and the elimination of the rising bourgeoisie (crisis of the opera), are

strikingly expressed in an apparently as derivative area of culture as that of

music. (Adorno, 1984b: 628)

In many approaches to the philosophy of music or to musicology such

statements are, fairly understandably, liable to be treated with more than a

hint of scepticism. Is it seriously possible to legitimate an approach to music

which thinks it is more likely, as Adorno suggests in a related context, that

one will arrive at historical insight by ‘a really technically strict interpretation

of a single piece like the ﬁrst movement of the Eroica that makes its discov-

eries transparent as discoveries about society’ than, say, by looking at the

broad history of musical styles (Adorno, 1984b: 615) or, indeed, at the social

and economic conditions of musical production and reproduction? On what

grounds might one move from such analysis to discoveries about society,

without failing in either musical terms or sociological terms? Now, I do not

have any easy answers to these questions, but neither do I think that all

Adorno’s aims should simply be renounced, despite the fact that some of

them are patently unfulﬁllable. Are we seriously happy to think that the

Eroica is, as Peter Kivy claims, a ‘beautiful noise, signifying nothing’ (Kivy,

1993: 19), in order to avoid making statements which, given that in one sense

the Eroica does not strictly refer to anything, cannot claim to be about

what the Eroica refers to, let alone about its ‘truth’? If the Eroica indeed means

more than Kivy suggests – and even his suggestion that it means nothing

depends on the emergence of the notions of aesthetic autonomy and of

‘absolute music’ in the 18th century – how are we to approach its meaning

without our approach just being dictated by the assumptions we make before

engaging with the music itself?

We are evidently confronted here with problems of a hermeneutic circle

that affects any attempt to explore the meaning of a largely non-semantic

form of articulation with semantic means. However, as we shall see, this cir-

cularity may not be quite as destructive as it ﬁrst appears. It should already

be very obvious that what is at issue leads to a whole series of revealing

philosophical questions about the nature of ‘meaning’ – in the sense of that

which human beings can understand – in relation to music. Before getting

to these philosophical questions, let us, though, brieﬂy take an extreme

example of Adorno’s attempts to see the meaning of music in sociopolitical

terms which makes the dangers of such approaches all too clear. In 1963, a

Frankfurt student newspaper reprinted an unfortunate 1934 review by

Adorno of works for male choir with texts by Baldur von Schirach. 1 The

review at times uses the Nazi jargon of the day, but it does also try to give

an analysis of the music, suggesting, with only slightly disguised critical

intent, that the successful pieces ‘are not concerned with patriotic mood and

Bowie: Adorno, Heidegger and the Meaning of Music

vague enthusiasm, but with the question of the possibility of new folk-music’

(Adorno, 1984b: 331). In response to the republication of the review, Adorno,

while freely admitting he had made a serious error of judgement, rightly

asserts that the rest of his life’s work contradicts this misguided attempt at a

tactical accommodation with a régime which he at the time, like many others,

thought had no chance of lasting. He then insists that ‘Whoever has an over-

view of the continuity of my work could not compare me with Heidegger,

whose philosophy is fascistic in its innermost cells’ (1984b: 638). When asked

in 1939 to speak about ‘What is Music?’, Adorno had already maintained that

If the question wanted to be understood as an ontological one and was directed

at the ‘being’ of music as such, then I believe it would move at a level of abstrac-

tion which would offer the occasion for ‘radical’ questions in the dubious

Heideggerian sense. (Adorno, 1984b: 614)

The radical questions about music in which Adorno is interested are,

then, supposed to be wholly different from the kind of ‘radical’ questions

asked by Heidegger. But are they really?

From the examples cited above it is patent that a lot must be going on

under the surface for Adorno even to begin to contemplate such links

between music and society. Despite his refusal to engage in an ‘ontological’

approach, Adorno has to entertain some at least heuristic notions concern-

ing what it is about music that allows it to be interpreted as an indication of

fundamental social issues. At the same time, some of Adorno’s suspicions of

‘ontological’ accounts of music are plainly valid in relation to approaches to

music which try to convert a phenomenon that can only be understood as a

historical manifestation of human imagination – something which is there-

fore irredeemably ‘intentional’ – into something akin to a part of nature that

would be accessible to scientiﬁc investigation. As Adorno argues, ‘composi-

tional material’ is as different from what is described in a physicalist or

psychological account of acoustic phenomena ‘as language is from the store

of its sounds’ (Adorno, 1958: 35). Carl Dahlhaus makes the essential point:

Instead of beginning with the rules of the musical craft and – for the sake of

their theoretical legitimation – looking for illusory causes of historically based

norms in a ﬁctive nature of music, theory of music would have to ask about

the categories via which a collection of acoustic data could be constituted as

music at all. (Dahlhaus, 1988: 98)

The real question, then, is the status of the categories via which something

is apprehended as music.

Looking at music in terms of its meaning is already much less problem-

atic in these terms: in order to regard something as music at all one must

assume that there is something to be understood in ways that there is not for

non-music. The ways in which we come to apprehend something ‘as’ some-

thing are, of course, as Heidegger shows, the bread and butter of the

hermeneutic enterprise. Given the shifting historical boundaries of the musical

4 Thesis Eleven (Number 56 1999)

and the non-musical, musical understanding cannot be reduced to a series of

methodological rules of the kind that might apply to the scientiﬁc classiﬁcation

of sounds, not least because a major factor in the development of music is dis-

agreement over whether something is music or not. (Something analogous

applies, at least in the modern period, to literature and other forms of art.)

Despite Adorno’s strictures about ‘ontology’, Heidegger explicitly linked his

reﬂections on the issue of ‘seeing as’ to a vital aspect of the philosophical tra-

dition to which Adorno also regards himself as being an heir and which

Adorno uses to interpret the meaning of music. It is here that there will be

some signiﬁcant mileage in bringing the two approaches together.

Adorno’s unﬁnished book on Beethoven contains remarks that make

establishing this link to the tradition to which Heidegger’s hermeneutics also

belongs fairly easy. However, before looking at these remarks, we need ﬁrst

to consider other remarks that Adorno makes, both about his aims in the

Beethoven book – whose subtitle, Philosophy of Music , suggests, in a manner

which I shall investigate more fully at the end, that Beethoven is the para-

digm of ‘music’ – and about philosophical problems involved in under-

standing music. In the introductory material to the book, Adorno asserts that

‘one of the basic motives of the book’ is that Beethoven’s ‘language, his

content, tonality as a whole, i.e. the system of bourgeois music, is irrevocably

lost for us’ (Adorno, 1993: 25). This is supposed to be explained by his more

general comments about the ‘afﬁrmative’ – and therefore ‘ideological’ –

nature of music. This ideological character is present in the very fact ‘that it

begins , that it is music at all – its language is magic in itself, and the tran-

sition into its isolated sphere has an a priori transﬁguring aspect’ which is

the result of music’s setting up a ‘second reality sui generis’ (1993: 25). Music

as whole is, because of its inherently consoling aspect, ‘more completely

under the spell of illusion ( Schein )’, which means that it contributes to exist-

ing injustice by reconciling listeners to reality as it already is. (By this time,

after all, the reality in question does include what leads to Nazism.) However,

in terms of what Adorno calls its ‘immanent movement’, music’s ‘lack of

objectivity and unambiguous reference’ make it ‘ freer than other art’ (1993:

26), because it is less bound to reproducing determinate aspects of existing

reality and is therefore able to perform a critical role in keeping alive an

awareness of how things could be transformed. As such, ‘It may be that the

strict and pure concept of art can only be derived from music’, because great

literature and painting necessarily involve material which cannot be ‘dis-

solved into the autonomy of the form’ (1993: 26).

Now this latter remark might appear to locate Adorno in Kivy’s camp:

the dissolving of the material of the Eroica into the ‘autonomy of the form’

would seem to be what renders it free of the convention-bound meanings of

Bowie: Adorno, Heidegger and the Meaning of Music

a ‘reiﬁed’ reality, of the kind Adorno thinks invade ‘signiﬁcant ( bedeutend )’

(Adorno, 1993: 26) literature via the representational aspect of verbal lan-

guage. 2 Far from making autonomy the basis of music’s lack of meaning,

Adorno’s approach to the philosophy of music is, though, deﬁned by the fact

that it is precisely the great autonomous works which are supposed to com-

municate the important truths, especially, as we saw, about society and

history. In order to be able to make such connections between music and

society Adorno initially relies on the idea of a reconciliation between com-

positional freedom and technical necessity in the great works, and, as we

shall see, on the assumption that this reconciliation relates to a key aspect

of modern philosophy. This connection between music and society, though,

entails some very questionable presuppositions.

The concept of ‘technique’ in art is, for example, related to, but vitally

different from, what is involved in technology in the more usual sense.

Adorno thinks that the subject of ‘instrumental reason’ contributes to the delu-

sions characteristic of ‘bourgeois society which has been driven towards total-

ity and is thoroughly organised’ (Adorno, 1958: 28). Instrumental reason, like

the commodity form, imposes forms of identity onto nature, of the kind

whose effects, it can justiﬁably be claimed, are now apparent in the ecolog-

ical crisis. The artist’s products, on the other hand, offer a model of what an

emancipated employment of historically developed ‘technical’ resources in

other spheres might achieve. Because it requires freedom from instrumental

ends for it to be aesthetic at all, aesthetic production does not necessarily

involve the kind of repression Adorno regards as deﬁnitive of the ‘universal

context of delusion’ of which modern technology is a part. 3

However, Adorno’s account of the utopian aspect supposedly inherent

both in serious modern art’s refusal to ignore the need for innovation and in

its resistance to being used for instrumental ends relies on an indefensible

equation of two different senses of ‘ techne ’. Furthermore, what counts as

‘advanced’ has a different sense in relation to problem-solving technology

from the sense it has in relation to the choice of possibilities in musical com-

position. These objections seem to me pretty damning and they might seem

to invalidate Adorno’s whole approach. However, a passage from Philosophy

of New Music on the idea that ‘the confrontation of the composer with the

material is the confrontation with society’ does offer some hints as to how

Adorno’s conception may involve more than just dubious analogies:

The demands which go from the material to the subject derive ... from the fact

that the ‘material’ is itself sedimented spirit, something social, which has been

preformed by the consciousness of people. As former subjectivity which has

forgotten itself this objective spirit of the material has its own laws of motion.

What seems to be merely the autonomous movement of the material, which is

of the same origin as the social process and is always once more inﬁltrated with

its traces, still takes place in the same sense as the real society when both know

nothing of each other and mutually oppose each other. (Adorno, 1958: 36)

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