DRAFT

1

Since antiquity, the teaching of performance has been acknowledged as a part of music theory. In the schema of Aristides Quintilianus, the doctrine of delivery – ‘exangeltikon’ – is considered the equal of composition: together they form the practical discipline of music.¹ But the teaching of delivery, like that of instrumentation, was not developed in such a way as to rival the pillars of compositional theory, namely harmony and counterpoint. It was restricted to describing the conventions of its respective time, formulating traditional rules of experience and codifying judgements of taste, or to technical treatises on vocal and instrumental performance. Its real purpose, to determine how rendition relates to the works, was not fulfilled. This relationship, however, is by no means so straightforwardly predetermined in the technical instruction of music that it could be considered superfluous to reflect upon it, no more than mathematical work can avoid reflecting upon logic. For the practising musician is incessantly confronted by his texts with questions that cannot easily be resolved, either through recourse to the works or to the requirements of his own playing, but only through recognizing the fundamental relationship between the two. No musical text, not even the most meticulously notated modern score, is so unequivocally decipherable as to force the appropriate interpretation of its own accord. No control on the part of the singer, the instrumentalist or the conductor over their respective material, even if it has been developed into an internally cohesive language drawing on all possibilities of musical experience, is sufficient in itself to lend the interpretation that character of truth which directs every performance as an indispensable idea. Even a conscientious musical performance is impaired by a certain non-committal, experimental, even improvisatory element. A form of rendition, however, that sought simply to rid itself of that aspect would automatically constitute a betrayal of the work: it would not be an attempt to manifest it as such, but only its brittle shell, that small part which is self-evident in the text and easily enough melts away as a mere appearance once it is deciphered. The lack of any applied reproduction theory expresses the plight of those who practise reproduction, which is in turn heightened by that same lack. This plight is at the same time the plight of the abandoned work.

This dilemma does not, however, force the responsible musician towards agnostic conclusions. He should no more neglect the distinction between correct and incorrect interpretation than that between a correctly or incorrectly played chord, or a pure and an impure tone. Every step of rendition presents itself to him as either objectively determined or necessary, and he should separate such necessities – however provisional – without reservation from the preferences that are arbitrary and external to the work. This objective trust is certainly conducive not only to technically insecure naïveté. Even the insight into the historical changes in interpretation that has confronted thoughtful musicians, at least since the nineteenth century, has not been able to overturn the idea of true interpretation: on the contrary, historical change as such has been recognized as a natural law, and thus related to the idea of true interpretation. This is implicit in Richard Wagner's view in the text ‘Über das Dirigieren’, the most significant contribution that any composer has made to the theory of reproduction. Newman considers it the objective of that treatise to supply a concise definition of ‘the new demands made upon a conductor's capacity by the changes in music, and the corresponding changes in the sensitive performer's attitude towards music, that had taken place during the nineteenth century’.² This would mean that, during the Romantic era, Wagner did not elevate merely the growing subjective differentiation of the performer, but rather its basis, namely the objective historical changes of the music itself, to the canon of correct presentation. This is indeed how Wagner wanted the core of the text to be understood. He aims for the solution of that interpretative dilemma which he was already aware of in his reflective critique.

First of all, my only concern was to expose the dilemma itself, and to convey clearly to all that since Beethoven there has been a most fundamental change in the treatment and delivery of music in relation to earlier times. Here, elements that had previously been kept apart to lead their own lives in separate closed forms are, at least according to the innermost principle, kept together within the most opposed of forms and developed from one another. Naturally the delivery must now be in keeping with this, and the most central aspect thereof is the realization that the tempo is no less fragile than the thematic fabric itself, which must communicate its movement through it.³

Wagner did not describe the ‘fundamental change’ of musical delivery simply as a fact, but rather confirmed its normative status – namely as a function of changes in compositional technique. Beethoven's characteristics place him in opposition to the ‘pre-classical’ approach, and this in fact applies to the entire Viennese School. The aspect highlighted by Wagner has its historical origin in the incorporation of cantabile melodies into instrumental textures. This comes to fruition as unity within diversity, a construction formed from qualitatively different thematic shapes in a dialectically mediated process. The older German way of making music, which Wagner describes in the treatise and which he experienced with profound aversion during his time as a young musical director, was still lagging behind the structural changes that gave birth to Viennese classicism. It knows nothing of the demand to sing on instruments, as opposed to merely playing them. As yet, beating time firmly and unbendingly was still the rigid mirror image of the dominant compositional approach in the age of figured bass, which arrived at its forms through the layering of identical material, not as a process of synthesis undergone by non-identical elements. The contradiction between the former type of presentation – to whose achievements Wagner was by no means blind – and Beethoven was not one of mere ‘style’ and musical taste, however. Wagner supports his demand that the delivery should also correspond to the new compositional structures by stating that the ‘thematic fabric’, that is to say the diversity within the unity, should ‘communicate its movement’, i.e. become clear, through the tempo, the fundamental category of interpretation. The transformation of interpretation is no mere changing of fashions; according to Wagner, it is a result of the necessity to render audible the nature of the composition as such that lies beneath the notation and the simple tempo marking. The work demands a change of representation for the sake of its own objectivity, and precisely one that is antithetical to the traditional understanding of objectivity: this is the paradoxical aim of Wagner's demand. In making it the basis of the ‘assessment of all our music-making today’,⁴ however, he leaves little doubt that he does not restrict the elastic-functional mode of presentation to the music written since Viennese classicism, but rather means for it to become a general principle. Liszt's pianistic transcriptions of Bach's organ works, for example, testify to this all-encompassing intention. Their decorative quality has meanwhile transpired as antithetical to the clarity on whose behalf the neo-German ideal of presentation was conceived. This latter has itself become a slave to the historical dynamic whose insights spawned it. At the same time, however, it has related the idea of objectively binding interpretation to that very dynamic. Wagner's theory encompasses the conclusion that the truth of interpretation does not lie within history as something that is alien to it and helpless against it; it is rather history that lies within the truth of interpretation as something that unfolds according to the latter's laws. The tendency is towards a negation of both the pre-critical and the non-committal position.

If the reproduction of music should accordingly be understood as a theoretical problem, it is at the same time being put forward as a form of its own kind. All questions of reproduction are converted into technical ones, but in solving them one confronts the function of this technique itself. While interpretation's claim to validity announces and justifies its presence in the relationship between concrete works and empirical performers, it still cannot be decided from the examination of those two poles, or even in a compromise between them, but only through considerations that develop the ideas of interpretation from the concept of the musical work as such and its historical life. A strict idea of the specific laws of reproduction, i.e. insight into its economy, can only be gained through the analysis of that which is fundamentally presupposed by interpretation, namely the existence of works that are fixed through writing and print, and thus independent precisely from empirical music-making. The end of improvisational practice, the work's attainment of independence and its separation from interpretation at once instigate its self-sufficiency. The work can only be rendered once it is estranged. Interpretation, as an autonomous form, is necessarily confronted with its contradiction, the autonomous musical construction. In this, it reminds us directly of the translation of language-texts. ‘Translation is a form; to grasp it as such one must return to the original. For this is where its law is located, contained within the original's untranslatability.’⁵ The fundamental difference between musical reproduction and translation from a foreign language, however, lies in the fact that music requires interpretation to this day, whereas literature has no need of a translator. An untranslated poem loses nothing of its beauty, and it should sooner fear – to follow the pun – the traduttore as a traditore than make use of him. A score, however, which is radically removed from the possibility of its performance at once seems senseless in itself. The accusation that a composition is paper music may often enough be a rationalization of reactionary means of disposal. Its normative core, however, namely that every composition must be feasible in order to prove its coherence and bear its true interpretation within itself, so to speak, is legitimate. It can be expressed in technical categories. Even the strictest view of the objectivity of the work, which relinquishes all consideration for communication and effect, will not allow itself to be deprived of such criteria as proper interpretation, and while such criteria must be separated from all empirical performance, they should not be cut off from the ideal of true performance. The outer extreme, a work entirely emancipated by true performance, can at most be uncovered by the analysis of interpretation as form: this analysis lies within the form's own dialectic, not in the works' uncritically assumed being-in-itself. To be interpreted is fundamental to all existing music, however. But the circumstance that even the most difficult linguistic construction is indifferent to its successful translation, as also to its satisfactory delivery, whereas the simplest of musical texts, entirely suitable to be silently imagined by the understanding score-reader, nonetheless has a sonic image that transcends the notation as its content – this cannot be explained in terms of the recipient, only through the difference between the media. Music and literature can be read equally well, only that reading means something different in each case. In music, reading necessarily demands a sensual image, whereas literature practically forbids that of its true content.⁶ The philosophical treatment of the problem of reproduction thus cannot avoid reflecting upon the relationship between language and music as evident in their similarity as constellations of signs, at the same time as in their opposition regarding the postulate of feasibility. Such reflections must follow from the concept of the musical text, and thus of notation, which constitutes the problem of musical reproduction and simultaneously its specific difference to language. For language, music only becomes commensurable as writing.

2

Like writing in language, musical writing is a sign system. [Marginal note by Gretel Adorno: NB TWA: keep apart: non-intentionality of musical writing + of music. Very important] Riemann views it as a combination of two elements:⁷ one of these is the alphabet, whose first letters have been assigned to the notes of the diatonic scale since time immemorial. Notation thus involves a primitive conceptuality: the sign α specifies the uniform pitch of all notes written using it, or at least always marks – if one is unwilling to assume the use of absolute pitches in early antiquity – the starting-note of the Mixolydian scale. It is no coincidence, however, that conceptuality of this kind is conveyed through letters, not words. It fixes the identity of palpable sounds, but not of things. The analogy between musical and verbal writing relates purely to the layer of acoustic material, whose elements are given signs in both cases – and in the case of music these signs are derived from language. In the former, however, these elements do not combine to form complexes denoting objects: the written language of music is one devoid of intention – a blind nomenclature, so to speak – and the units of sense within which music itself operates have nothing in common with intentionality: music is a non-intentional language. One can indeed speak of phonemes in music, and on the other hand – with good, unmetaphorical reason – about periods and sentences, but never of words. The verbal medium is merely peripheral to its writing; in fact, one could even see musical notation as no more than a pseudomorphosis towards the realm of verbal terms. The fact that it has to borrow its signs from verbal writing shows how alien it is to terms: the letters are imposed on the notes after the fact, in the wilfulness of rationalization, and one can sooner speak of an allegorical relationship between the two than of any merging in the manner of letters and sounds in language. The name ‘A’ can be removed from the note A without the slightest loss of musical definition; it would be a futile undertaking, however, to attempt a separation of the letter a and the vowel a. For uttering the name ‘a’ cites the phoneme a, while naming the note A does not. In other words: the sign system of verbal writing and language itself belong to one homogeneous system, while music and its writing belong to two different ones. Verbal signs protrude into the musical cosmos only as something foreign and broken. It is precisely because music is a non-intentional language that the significative character of its writing, the difference between the signifier and the signified, is heightened to the point of a qualitative rupture.

If the verbal character should accordingly be addressed simply as something external to musical writing that makes only scattered appearances within it, whereas musical writing in fact shows almost the same degree of articulation and logical consistency as verbal writing, then one must presume its origin to lie in some element other than the intentional. But that element is hypokritike, which the Aristidean schema places at the same level as instrumental performance and singing. It is the mimetic element. Riemann objected to the incorporation of mime in the doctrine of musical delivery.

For if language doubtless still contains specifically musical elements in its musical sound, one cannot say the same about mime, which speaks only to the eye. The justification for making use of this art form, however, follows from the intimate connection (which we have observed at the outset and continually since) between all the energetic arts, i.e. those arts which unfold the work of art as a piece of real life before our eyes and ears within the flow of time; not only are poetry and music combined in firm union in song, and gestures and music in dance; all three merge in the choral dance to form a synthesis of the arts to which the Greeks applied the term ‘music’ in its widest sense.⁸

By levelling out language and music, this tortuous defence of Aristides, which takes the difference between the two much too lightly, and which is already refuted in its summary view of all energetic arts as exhibiting ‘real life’ by the mere term hypokritike, completely misses their mimetic element. It suffers from Riemann's fundamental error in the treatment of distant epochs, namely that of hypostatizing later historical tendencies – such as the separation of mime and music – as something dictated by nature and reason, and of cultivating false empathy with phenomena that remain impervious to any modern-day ‘re-experiencing’ by warping them according to categories of the late nineteenth century. He considers the division of labour among the temporal arts so obvious as to insist on creating a synthesis between them after the fact through notions of musical drama, in order to do justice to their inseparability in Greek aesthetics. On the contrary, however, the notion of mime as one component in the doctrine of musical delivery is in fact an archaic rudiment. This is clear from the unity of function between music, dance and mime in the cultic practices that gave rise to the temporal arts – as opposed to the notion that the very gestures of singing, as an intentional play of facial muscles, automatically incorporate a mimic element. Indeed not: rather, music inherently contains a mimic element. Regardless of what share the imitation of nature's sounds may have had in its origin, it has no doubt always stimulated imitation through gestures, whether those of dance or of work, of its own accord: it ‘demonstrated’ gestures at the level of their magical use in order to elicit, or perhaps regulate, those of people, and the difference between its magical and empirical gestures already holds that element of unreality as dissimulation – posited in a most powerful sense by mime – which the name hypokritike reminds us of, and which subsequently develops into aesthetic autonomy. [Marginal note: this is at once the magical element in music, which then becomes its ideology] Music is the echo of the animistic shudder, the mimicry of the invisible, feared facial expressions of the natural deity, a reflex of appeasement that still lives on in the latest delusions about the therapeutic effect of music, while music, this magical mimetic being, was already under critique from the Greek enlightenment as represented by the Epicurean Philodemos. [Marginal note: weak, expand & go much deeper] Whether the mimic element of music, as the earliest harmonic speculations suggest, was related to astral movements is open to debate. But there can be no doubt that music as a language achieves – as no other art does – a pure objectification of the mimetic impulse, free of any concreteness or denotation: nothing but the gesture, codified and placed above the physical world, yet at once sensual. The art of the inner sense imitates the gesture of the spirit. [Marginal note: weak & vague]

But while the development of music as an autonomous art has increasingly marginalized its mimic aspect – and, faithful to that aspect's own principle, in permanent opposition to objectification – perhaps even tabooed it, its trace was held onto precisely where music had itself been subject to the dictate of objectification, namely in its notation. The musical symbols chosen to wrest the music from the ambiguity and transience of its manner were in turn images of gestures. As a rationalization of magic, musical notation held onto mimetic practice at a point when, in the rehearsing of music, the memory of that practice was already beginning to vanish. Statements on the origin of musical notation, whether Greek or neumic, are open to suspicion for as long as their decipherment has itself had no conclusive success. And yet one is assailed by doubts as to the seemingly natural and reasonable view of the matter. This would be the assumption that musical notation came about as an aid to memory, in order to prevent living music, song and dance from being forgotten. But this is rationalistic: later needs are here being projected onto the archaic in the illusion of their universality. Aids to memory become necessary when memory becomes problematic. This occurs only in the phase of a universally transmitted experience that unites subject and object – as separate, objectified elements – once more, while that object which is still close, not yet constituted in its otherness, leaves behind its powerful trace in the memory. Memory, the organon for that which has been, only weakens upon recognizing the irretrievability of what has been, under the burden of countless distant, no longer first-hand information, and in ultimately adapting completely to the momentary. The frailty of the memory is one of the keys to modern consciousness, not to the beginnings of history. Children require no aid to memory; it is not remembering through language that they find difficult, but rather its ‘supporting’ concretion, namely writing. It cannot have been any different among primitive peoples. Whenever playing or singing occurs in the traditional manner, without being bound to a fixed text, the memory proves strong. The rhythmic models retained by savages are so complex that no civilized person, other than an expert, could hope to achieve the same; this is a part of the attraction of jazz. But the modifications to which these models are subject in primitive or traditional music-making are offshoots of the memory, not the mark of its failure. Through the fact that what has passed lives on, rather than falling into estranged isolation, its change testifies to its presence. It is held onto identically and reified only as something virtually forgotten, just as all reification amounts to an act of forgetting. Notation is an aid to remembering and to memory itself only as its enemy, as its restoration through destruction.

In the light of this, notation can hardly have come about as a harmless memo, a mere aide-memoire. Its origin rather points backwards, to the disruption of those primeval circumstances which, in a certain sense, predate the constitution of the memory and its dubiousness, as the states of now and before had not yet been rigidly separated at that time. This disruption, however, is the development of fixed social hierarchies, which, as in the fixed system of logical categories, also take effect in the regulation of temporal relations; in the latter perhaps as the expression of an ordering of property by a generation that simultaneously encompasses the prohibition of incest between mother and son. It seems precisely as if musical notation in itself had offered the strongest resistance against the reification of time: for mensuration only began in that late period of the Middle Ages which the newest research now seeks to present as a pre-Renaissance. What had been achieved by notation since its Greek origins, long before it had attained complete objectification and thus the independence of the construction in relation to practical realization, was not so much the preservation of something already present in tradition as the disciplinary function of the traditional exercise, which serves to prevent the members of the community, that is to say the subjugated masses, from modifying customs according to their own expressive needs, instead learning to improve their obedience through the compulsive repetition of those customs. Indeed, none of the reforms in music theory until the time of Palestrina lack an authoritarian intention, whose most conclusive manifestation can be found in Plato's Republic and Augustine's doctrine of music. From the outset, therefore, musical notation has contained an anti-mimetic, significative, as it were rational, element, which does not simply diverge from the mimic nature of music, however, but is rather profoundly interwoven with it. Notation dispossesses the memory by assisting it: it is the first step towards its socialization. Cultic dances are snatched from the grasp of the inarticulate unity of recollection and change: they are elevated to a state of governance that encompasses the entirety of respective societal details, and at the same time removed from the one affected by this unity, the tribesman: there is no text, let alone any musical one, that does not usurp the claim to sanctity. Herein lies at once an act of formulation: in relation to the concrete societal content of the musical exercise, a constant, yet – for the sake of its societal alienation – never entirely identical element constitutes itself as its form: according to genetic sense, this already implies all that is problematic about musical interpretation in the era of fully objectified texts. Notation wants music to be forgotten so that it can be fixed and driven home: it must make the transition to identical repetition, to that reification of its character which torments the listener's eardrums in all music of barbaric cultures. In seeking to make music its cultic concern, the tribe is at once supposed to divest itself of its own spontaneity: it is supposed to carry out a ritual whose meaning lies precisely in its incomprehensibility, and whose alteration is branded a form of blasphemy, an act of treachery, the violation of a taboo. There is perhaps nothing that reveals the current late phase of musical culture as a regression to the archaic than the taboo character which gave rise to the musical text, and which today, with the perfection of aesthetic profanity, appears once more. If the visual image of musical notation has seemed to imitate and invoke the drumbeats of barbaric-cultic musical practices since the inception of neumic accents, and certainly since mensuration, then it might not be unjustifiable to embark upon a speculation which considers musical notation per se originally an imitation of disciplinary musical systems, as it were a musical mimesis of the anti-mimetic element in music. The spatialization of something temporal, the principle of all musical notation, itself already represents that same dispossession, estrangement and ossification of music which peers out from the almost spatial, symmetrical–asymmetrical repetitions of primitive music; these hold onto the mimic aspect, yet through their unchanging repetition they tear it from its own temporal continuum, disable it, thus rendering it both dead and controllable. Was every musical symbol once the image of a beat, and then of violence itself? The immortalization of music through writing contains a lethal aspect: what it holds at once becomes irretrievable. (Place somewhat earlier, spatializing means being there: an absolute present would be timeless, and only what is entirely there can be controlled. Spatialization is by its nature controllability.) This contradiction dictates the utopia of the reproduction of art music: to retrieve through absolute disposal what became irretrievable through that very disposal.⁹ All music-making is a recherche du temps perdu. This is the key to the dialectic of music up to the point of its liquidation. For it was only able to develop to the stage of autonomy, and thus its entire expression, through its graphic transmission, which makes it practicable, available¹⁰ and reified. Musical writing is the organon of music's control over nature, and only here do we find freedom and musical subjectivity matured as separation from the unconscious community. (What is music's control over nature? If, in a very early stage, music served to control people, probably in the context of sacrificial rites, then through notation control enters music itself; this means that the gestures which music either stimulates or itself imitates become controllable as images within it, to be made and brought forth once more as desired, and it is here that the rationalization of music's material prepares itself, that rationalization which at certain decisive turning-points, such as the tracing of the neumes and then the introduction of fixed note-values, took place as a leap forwards in the development of notation. Writing not only enables the past to become present, but in this state of presence, of ‘being there’, all musical material can be made transparent and be ordered, organized according to uniform principles. Schönberg's intention to give the twelve-tone technique, as the extreme of music's control over nature that gives all musical dimensions a common denominator, its own twelve-tone notation¹¹ testifies unconsciously to an impulse that dominates the whole of occidental music history.) As in real society, it is equally the case in its non-verbal, non-visual reflection – music – that the power principle is the precondition for freedom, reification the precondition for aesthetic immediacy, and estrangement the precondition for intimacy and warmth in art. At the same time, however, musical writing posits something that is by nature contrary to music. Rationalization, the requirement of all autonomous art, feeds off it at the same time. Notation always also regulates, restrains and represses whatever it serves, and all musical reproduction suffers from this twofold nature until its downfall. The writing down of music sets not only its manner of appearance, but according to its purpose also the difference to the same; and the less the music, being a result of development, can be separated from its notation, the more that difference enters the music. The spatialization of the temporal is not merely empirical, but in fact essentially inadequate: autonomy and festishism, the origin of subjectivity and its subjugation by its estranged opposite, the thing, are two sides of the same state of affairs. This is clear to see in the history of reproduction; the obedience that is faithful to the work ultimately destroys it. It is only the social obedience reflected in that fidelity that has enabled music to speak against the existing society, and ultimately it drives it from within into that social activity which is simultaneously preparing to absorb it from without. (In the passage on neumes as accent-markings, say that this has been the basis of neumic interpretation since Coussemaker. – Concerning the power-character of music make reference to the connection between music and the Greek ideal of virility – andreia – and the Socratic maxim that the best dancer is also the best warrior, also Plato's statement that human life in its entirety requires harmony and eurhythmics, Protagoras 326B, cf. Riemann I, 1, p. 5. Is that not a little too much music history G[retel Adorno]?)

The construction of the origin of notation from musical discipline is not entirely lacking in historical support. Riemann concedes the possibility ‘that neumic notation is itself of Greek origin, having developed from cheironomy, the hand-movements of the choral conductor of antiquity, who directed the melodic movement and the corresponding movements of the chorus’.¹² Even if the argument of the cheironomic origin of Greek notation itself remains hypothetical, it was considered far more certain in the Middle Ages. In his ‘Neumenstudien’, Oskar Fleischer looked for the development of mere accent-markings to complicated neumes ‘not as notation, but rather in the practice of the choral conductor who indicates pitch movements through hand-gestures’.¹³ In this case, musical notation would be both an imitation of the aforementioned cheironomy of a gestural element in the literal sense, and the image of a disciplinary element, namely the direction of the choir by the prehistoric conductor. Fleischer and Riemann follow the research of Dom Mocquereau. His belief in the mimic origin of notation seems even to go beyond theirs, in so far as he views the accent-markings themselves – which developed into the neumic virgae, and thus the building-blocks of occidental notation – not only their combinations, as images of gestures. (Perhaps the point of intersection between musical and verbal writing is the punctuation mark, and this could be connected to the passage stating that music knows letters and sentences, but not words. The nature of musical notation treated here – itself mimetic, yet at the same time hostile to mimic expression – must already emerge far more distinctly in the previous section.) Mocquereau

already observes, referring to the Institutio oratoria of Quintilianus, that the truly characteristic form of the acutus, corresponding to the virga of neumic notation, is that in which the line is begun with strong pressure at the bottom left-hand corner, then continuing sharply to the top right-hand corner, while the gravis is conversely that which is begun with strong pressure at the top left-hand corner and extends to the bottom right-hand corner, and describes the accents as a way of tracing the outline of the pitch movement (pictography), and also places clear emphasis on the fact that in the Middle Ages, in both the Greek and the Roman Church, the conductor's hand-movements were used to suggest the raising and lowering of the melody and, at the same time, the rhythm and the tempo, thus directing the chorus in a clear fashion¹⁴

– a practice, incidentally, that has survived precisely with those more differentiated conductors, such as Furtwängler, who fulfil the purpose of beating time with the right hand while tracing the music's progress in the air, so to speak, with the right. (Conducting and the origin of musical notation: the independence of the two hands corresponds to their constitution from the mensural and the mimetic element. Something similar is still true of the two hands in piano-playing, which in a certain sense is also a ‘writing’ of music, its imitation through the accents of the keys.) Fleischer presumes that cheironomy, i.e. the gestural-optic imitation of music ‘without written documentation persisted and developed throughout many centuries, until finally, at the start of the 8th century, the Anglo-Saxon (Neumenstudien II p. 8) or Irishman (ibid. p. 68) Ceolfrid made the first attempt to develop melodic symbols – to be written above the texts – from the beating indications of cheironomy, thus becoming the inventor of neumic notation.’¹⁵ This would therefore make cheironomy the mediating factor between music and writing: it passes in time with the music, but as something visual that can be spatially fixed and ‘written down’. Its fundamental element, the ‘beating sign’, could indeed be considered the image of the beat in barbaric-ritual cultural musics. What makes it all the more fitting to connect it to archaic practices is the fact that the accent-systems were by no means restricted to the Mediterranean cultural area, but were evidently used independently by the Celts, who had been included in the Christian cultural area only late on, and who played a large part in early medieval monastic culture on the continent.¹⁶

In the face of the insurmountable difficulties of decipherment, particularly in the case of the oldest neumic monuments, Riemann resigns himself to the following conclusion: ‘therefore the question of the ultimate roots of neumic notation is of secondary significance for us. We are not primarily interested in the nature and meaning of the musical symbols, but rather in the nature of the songs to which they are supposed to refer.’¹⁷ Aside from the fitting objection that it is impossible to speak meaningfully of the nature of those songs without deciphering the notation, Riemann's consolation is made redundant by his own later insight that ‘the emancipation of musical rhythm from the immanent rhythms of the text through the introduction of symbols for note-values certainly constituted a form of artistic progress at the same time’,¹⁸ i.e. that composition profited from it. But what is good enough for mensural notation is good enough for neumes: the increasing exactitude is the precondition for the ‘rationalization’ and development of composition, as equally for reproduction in taking the musical text, crystallizing in this manner, as its measure. It is only the origin of neumic notation that reveals the truth about the idea of musical writing as such, and thus about the fundamental problem of interpretation. Riemann came close by acknowledging the ‘vividness’ – that is to say the unintentional mimetic element – of modern notation as the heir to neumes. ‘We then recognize with awe and wonder that the aspect of direct vividness, which lifts our musical notation of today to such celestial heights above all other forms of notation, is inherited from neumic notation, that our notation is simply a form thereof that has been developed consistently throughout the centuries.’¹⁹ But not quite. For if the objectifying, tradition-regulating and anti-expressive element of musical notation is based precisely on mimesis, on the visually solidified image of the musical gesture, then conversely the genuine musical concretion in which the mimetic impulse as such lives on is impressed upon writing precisely through its second, abstract-significative element, namely letter-notation. Musical symbol-notation in particular is ‘abstract’, and thus also presupposes, as Riemann expounds with reference to neumes without lines, ‘the assumption of a limited number of melodies passed on through direct transmission by singing and imitating; their purpose lies not in fixing these melodies in a notation that determines every individual pitch, but rather in the particular manner of their adaptation to each respective text’²⁰ – an extremely drastic description of the disciplinary nature of gestural notation. Musical individuation, however, i.e. the fixing of the melody according to its absolutely defined individual notes [alternative formulation: musical elements], as implied precisely by the emancipation from tradition, and thus from the command of the priests, calls for a non-mimetic, reified aspect entirely removed from the music in its immediate state, namely the allegorical aspect of the letter, which places it in a relationship of both the utmost distance and proximity to language. This paradox is inherent in the sensual history of musical notation as its true secret, and it defines the dialectic of expression and construction within which all composing and rendering of music takes place. (In a certain sense, the theory of writing is more important than a knowledge of old music.) Whether the twofold nature of the earliest instrumental notation used by the Greeks, which used letters for the lower octave and the names of the cithara strings for the middle octave, should already be viewed in the context of the duality of the significative and gestural aspects is almost impossible to determine: the string names, which came about in connection with the practice of sound-production, would then represent the gestural element. The twofold root of musical notation in more recent times is beyond doubt, however. For neumic notation was augmented by Latin letter-notation already in Hucbald's day: ‘It is beyond doubt that in the 10th century, it became common practice for any instrumental notation (for organ, rotta etc.) to use the first letters of the alphabet; this began north of the Alps.’²¹ It can hardly be a mistake to assume a connection between the invention or revival of letter-notation for notes and the polyphony ensuing during that same period. For it clarifies that neumic notation, as a purely gestural form of writing, was not adequate to fixing even the most primitive polyphony in organum: complexes of simultaneous musical events can fundamentally not be presented in gestural succession, and demand the unambiguous clarity of every single note, if chaos is to be avoided. It is the clear definition of pitch in synchronous sounds that simultaneously ‘rationalizes’ it and enables it to convey expression: the more the melos objectifies itself in the cultic-ritual sense, the more the mimetic and expressive impulse is transferred to simultaneities, i.e. the harmony, and it is no coincidence that the emancipation of subjectivity in the whole of occidental music history occurred as an ordering of harmonic perspective, as the dimension of depth in simultaneous events, which for its part demands a far more radical form of rationalization than could ever have been attained through gestural notation. Perhaps the unforeseeable difficulties in deciphering older neumes are themselves the result of a projective anachronism, which postulates a type of rationality for a phase of notation to which it was entirely foreign: because the neumes are not ‘symbols’ in the way that letters are, they cannot be deciphered in the same way, they do not offer any unambiguous significative clarity, but only the exemplary regulative of tradition; and where this has perished, they are illegible – not because they lack a key, but because they do not convey any sense outside of that tradition, because the very idea of reading as taken from language contradicts their nature. At the same time, however, only the vividness of gestural notation was suitable for lending musical notation that immediacy which enables it to grasp the music, which, being non-intentional, could not otherwise have been captured by a system of writing that is so intentional by nature. But the entry of intentionality into musical notation is itself far from coincidental: it is the expression of the Christianization of music. One could say that gestural notation invokes music in its immediacy, as nature, so to speak, that it summons it into the ephemeral present and is indifferent to its duration. Intention is concerned with eternity: it kills music as a natural phenomenon in order to preserve it, broken, as spirit: music's survival in its duration depends on the termination of its here and now, while its survival in writing presupposes the spell of its mimic representation. The inalienable element of foreignness contained in musical signification, namely its pseudomorphosis towards language, is synonymous with the ‘inspiration’²² of music, which it manifests only in breaking with its own homogeneity. If the animal phenomenon of music becomes, in the Christian age, a language of the soul whose body passes, which discards in order to gain, then the allegorical element of its signification is nothing other than an expression of the break with its mere material existence through transcendental meaning: in musical writing, therefore, the aspect of expression is intertwined precisely with its direct opposite, namely meaning, and this turns the rationalization of writing into the organ of subjectivity. Pure signification is unattainable through writing, however, as the primal, non-intentional state of being can enter through meaning, but can never as such be dissolved entirely into meanings. This is the task that musical writing must address. The history of musical notation is an attempt to reach a synthesis between unambiguity and immediacy. This provides the historico-philosophical horizon for Riemann's comment that the merging of letter-notation and neumic notation effected by Guido d'Arezzo ‘ultimately gave rise to modern notation’.²³ This synthesis was never achieved, however, and its success would be as unlikely as immediacy in an alienated society. Musical reproduction therefore persists as a problem in the strictest sense. Even the most precise score retains, as an image, an element of neumic ambiguity, and even the most precise specification retains an element of that significative rigidity which threatens to kill the very thing it has resolved to save. (Perhaps invert this: even pictorial fidelity has an element of rigid lettering, and the most precise specification an element of ambiguity). It seems to be a judgement pronounced upon the failure of the superb attempt that musical notation constituted during the entire bourgeois era, since Guido's reform, that finally, with the decline of bourgeois musical culture – and in quite different places at once, without any knowledge of the historical origins – the elements separated once more: efforts to objectify dance, at the same time as the extinction of the ballet tradition, led Rudolf von Laban to his eccentric attempt at a dance notation, which seems like a resurrected form of the neumes, but now restricted entirely to mime without music, while the banjo diagrams enclosed with American pop songs for greater ease dispense entirely with a depiction of the musical curve and invoke the significative letter-element, whether by indicating purely the instrumental fingerings through tablature or going beyond this. Both forms of writing are regressive phenomena in their isolation: dance notation as the nonsensical rationalization of the pure gesture, and diagram notation as enlightenment turned on its head, which reverts to primitive imitation, namely fingering instructions, precisely through pure signification. (In the passage that discusses the originary mimic nature of music, the connection between music and weeping must be considered. Music is mimic in so far as certain gestures, a certain play of facial muscles, automatically produce musical sounds; music is, one could say, the acoustic objectification of facial expressions, which perhaps only came about through a historical separation from the same. If ‘a shadow falls upon a face’, an eye flashes open, or lips half open, then this is the closest to the origin of music, and admittedly also to expressionless natural beauty, the movement of clouds across the sky, the appearance of the first star, the emergence of the sun's rays through the clouds. Music is in the middle, so to speak, between the theatre of the heavens and that of the face. This is the innermost reason for the affinity between music and naturalistic poetry.)

3

A return to the genetic implications of musical writing is called for, because musical works essentially exist only as mediated through writing, because interpretation does not have the direct sound to go on, only its notated form, and because notation is by no means the most obvious method for instructing performers. Interpretation has no rules for the decipherment of texts that is located in the actual phenomena, only in the reflection upon the nature of musical texts as such, as the unity of works in that writing. Yet this reflection at once reveals the differing implications of the ideals of sound, notation and rendition respectively. While the empirical reason for such divergence lies in the ephemerality of sound, whose aesthetic objectification inalienably demands an extra-musical element, the dual historical character of music as mime and language comes to the fore in this division. Being of mimic nature, it is not purely legible or purely imitable as a language. It therefore divides itself into the sound-ideal and the writing, and requires interpretation as the ever-renewed effort to achieve a reconciliation of these divergent elements. This justifies reproduction's claim to the status of a specific form: in its material inescapability, the plight of music – which points to reproduction – is an expression of the nature of music itself.

In other words, reproduction is necessary; music requires it, not simply to escape muteness, but for the sake of its immanent concern – as an answer, so to speak, to the question that music as such appears to pose through its very existence: how can music become a language and, vice versa, how can the symbol become an image? This necessity of interpretation shows a fundamental difference between music and literature. The latter permits interpretation, yet without absolutely requiring it, for as an intentional realm it already contains the interpretation of its sensual suchness within itself, and unfolds within the historical dynamic between the linguistic phenomenon and what is meant, in that layer which Benjamin called the ‘mode of meaning’.²⁴ Music, however, as the paradoxical sign language of something non-intentional, requires something that lies beyond itself and fulfils the signs, yet without betraying the non-intentional to the deception of meanings. It is no more feasible to pretend that music – as a developed art – does not involve systems of classification than to ignore interpretation, something that goes beyond the mere existence of music, its sensual being-in-itself, only thus enabling its aesthetic constitution to begin with. Not only would fundamentally uninterpreted music cease to live; it would be devoid of that element of inspiration²⁵ which fundamentally constitutes its difference from mere sound, and which – as is not the case in the decipherment of its signs – does not naturally ensue.

The necessity of interpretation manifests itself as the neediness of musical texts. It is a law that any such text contains a zone of indeterminacy, a layer of questions that cannot be answered directly through the ideal of sound, and which requires interpretation as something that augments the text in order to achieve its objectification in the first place.

Of course, great composers have superbly transformed their ideas into scores, making the best possible use of musical notation. But it is this very notation that is imperfect and may remain so forever, notwithstanding remarkable contributions to its improvement. There are certain intangibles that cannot be expressed by our method of writing music – vital musical elements incapable of being fixed by the marks and symbols of notation. Consequently, score scripts are incomplete in representing the composer's intentions. No score, as written in manuscript and published in print, can offer complete information for its interpreter.²⁶

Dorian's remark applies to a state of affairs that goes far beyond the trivial distinction between what is living or dead in art, and beyond the questionable notion of the composer's intentions. This touches upon the objective relationship between music and writing. [Marginal note: regarding this probably the Dahl letter from 1949]²⁷ One could say that only interpretation, which augments the text, makes it a text at all. If all musical interpretation views itself as bound to its text in the strictest sense, then this latter becomes binding, becomes a text only through interpretation. The zone of indeterminacy is no mere insufficiency on the part of the notation, but rather the consequence of a sign system designed for the non-intentional. It is enough to play with the idea of a musical text precisely classified in every note and every complex whose rendition is limited to following all instructions; this manner of non-interpretative rendition, so to speak, would – even under ideal circumstances – fall prey to senselessness, to the negative of an aesthetically fulfilled non-intentional. No notation, however complete, could eliminate the zone of indeterminacy, and if rendition simply accepted this, rather than subjecting it to the work of interpretation, the paradoxical language of music would turn into the gobbledegook familiar from so many unfaithful-faithful performances of radically modern works. (Regarding the passage dealing with the invention of polyphony in connection with the emergence of the significative element of writing, it must be said that – extending to the most recent phase of music history – precisely the harmonic dimension of music itself has a quasi-verbal character, one that is similar to words in a certain sense, i.e. that relatively few chords, comparable to words, which always mean the same thing ‘in themselves’, i.e. always serve the same function in their context, form the harmonic material, while the non-verbal, truly alinguistic element in music closest to the manner is always the rhythmic-melodic curve. Until the point of atonality, harmonies were playing-pieces, the only remotely word-like element in music, and this is confirmed by the emergence of the intentional element in the phase of nascent polyphony in so far as each individual chord, a relative constant, ‘indicates’ its function by repeatedly entering in the same guise. Chords have the abstract properties of identity and generality, and these – as will have to be expanded upon – cannot be separated from an intentional aspect that always, however, refers in music to the function within the whole. Schönberg's idea of functional harmony belongs in this context: harmony and form are intimately connected as a totality. Therefore figured bass, the purely harmonically oriented system of writing that developed towards the end of the Middle Ages, is in a certain sense the most rational, intentional, non-pictorial: it consists purely of numbers. It disappeared only once the rebellion against harmonic stereotypes had begun and harmony – precisely through its subjective pervasion – was drawn into the mimic realm. This meant that the basic element of expression contained within it annulled the rigid standardization of harmonic resources. The idea of harmony's expressionless aspect must thus be envisaged more dialectically from the beginning: harmony certainly lent music the dimension of the ‘interior’, of subjective inspiration²⁸ from the outset, but in an abstraction and spiritualization of the mimetic impulse that served precisely to break it, so that it was in fact harmony, on the other hand, that came in turn to have an extreme influence upon the systematic rational and intentional aspect. In harmony, the connection between subjectivity and reification comes to light as an aspect of its originary musical phenomenon. Incidentally, the Greek word harmony refers precisely to that systematic and thus anti-mimetic element.)

But the zone of indeterminacy that is inherent in the work is not, at the same time, an absolute; rather, the unity of the work in its fixed written state always also contains the law of its pervasion. The question nature of musical writing, interpretation as a problem, means nothing other than gaining insight from an immersion in the notation, an insight which is capable of transforming the indeterminacy essential to the work into an equally essential determinacy legitimated by the work's own objectivity. Every musical text is both things at once: a fundamentally insoluble riddle and the principle for its solution.

This contradiction is simply another aspect of the concern of interpretation. For the riddle of the text is insoluble for the sake of its non-intentionality, because it does not ‘mean’ anything that would limit the reading of its ciphers; this act of reading presents itself as a riddle because the non-intentional, congealed to form the work, appears in symbols as if it were something intentional; and this riddle is soluble because the musical text as writing is subject to a law that regulates its relationship to its sound-ideal so strictly that it is ultimately incorporated by interpretation after all. But this law is none other than imitation itself. If musical writing imitates music and carries out such imitation purely through recourse to lingual intention, the positing of a sign system, then interpretation must for its part, in the musical realization of the text, imitate writing in order to fulfil it. But, because musical writing is not purely mimetic – because rather, as soon as it accepts concrete depiction, the constraint of objectification inexorably drives it towards significative writing, which merges with the gestural and at the same time emerges from within it – the imitation of writing equally cannot ensue directly through reproduction, but only by reading the symbols, i.e. mediated through intentionality. Only: the individual intentional elements belong to an entirely different realm than the lingual ones. Their resolution does not yield the ‘sense’ of the music, which can only be discussed at all in metaphorical terms – namely as the entire gestus to be recovered from the writing. Rather, the resolution of the musical symbols provides the elements which join to constitute the imitation of the music, as it were the individual facial expressions and movements, whose correct sequence gives rise to the expression of the whole, the musical form. As opposed to all high-flown words, whose claim is borrowed from the intellectual nature of interpretation, which is but an ephemeral element thereof, and only offers achievements that serve no purpose other than to disappear amid the restitution of the gestus and its expression, the last word is had by common parlance, in which music is ‘made’. Made not simply in the sense of technical production, for this would be no less true of painting than of music – and yet to speak of ‘making a picture’ as compared to ‘making music’ has an element of reflection that almost lends a protesting emphasis to the technical aspect over the expressive. Music, however, is indeed made, because it is imitated,²⁹ and musical experience, if uncorrupted by idealism, knows only too well what is important in singing and playing: not interpretation as an end in itself, but rather the imitation of an archetype, however hidden in the work and however difficult to comprehend it may be. The idea of musical reproduction is the copy of a non-existent original. (Remove or rewrite the passage on painting. Incorporate a sentence stating that the purpose of interpretation is not to discover a work's intention, to feel its way into it and breathe life into it, but rather to liquidate the intention of the text on the basis of an insight into the individual intentions of the musical symbols, and then to sublate it through the restitution of a virtual original that is imitated. Ideal interpretation offers the music itself, in complete similarity, not an indication of its meaning; and the more profoundly the meaningful symbol is grasped, the less interpretation still needs to revolve around meanings.)

Interpretation must pursue the idea of the copy from both poles of the text: from the symbol and from the image. But the two elements of musical writing are so interwoven that interpretation can only be sure of capturing the one through the other. By way of gross exaggeration, one could begin by saying that developed musical writing is a sign language in its details and a language of images in its whole. Whoever reads music in the true fashion must translate every note and every expressive marking into an idea, and then in turn translate this idea into sound. Whoever wishes to imagine the musical gist, the ‘formal breath’ (quotation from Kurth or Lorenz),³⁰ must follow the written image as a totality and convert its curves and caesuras into imitation, rather like a musical director, who must begin by gaining an overall understanding of a score while beating time mentally. Anyone who sight-reads knows the dual view of musical writing: he is constrained to grasp every detail exactly through a form of translation work, and integrate it through anticipation into the flow of the whole, the ‘image’ of the movement. The necessity of reading ahead, which is fundamental to sight-reading technique, is an example of the attempt to achieve equivalence between the two modes of perception. All interpretation consists, one might say, of spelling out and conducting. (Reference to the two compositional types contained in the film book.)³¹ Yet these two modes of perception by no means directly bring to light the mimic and speech-like elements of music by themselves. For if all individual elements in music must be read, and produced in a form of translation work, then it is precisely the gestus itself, the music's immediacy, that is to be thus produced. ‘Expression’, the trace imprinted upon the music by its gestus, clings initially to the individual element, to that detail which appears as significative, not representational: espressivo is without exception a characteristic of passages, not movements; if an entire movement were played espressivo, this would precisely cancel out its expression, which can communicate itself only through contrast. Just as each facial expression and each gesture is momentary, and the ‘play of expressions’ is already mediated through the ego, musical moments are the true scene of music's mimic element, and an eminently mimic composer such as Schubert knew only too well why his most curious forms should bear that name in particular. It is precisely music's mimic innervations that one can read and decipher within it. A pathetic, a restrained or a fading passage does not stand for pathos, restraint and fading as concepts, but rather behaves according to those expressive categories; they depict the physiological and somatic gestures particular to them in musical configurations, and whoever wishes to interpret them correctly must find those same gestures encapsulated within them in order to imitate them. Finding through reading: only through the work of decipherment, the genuinely conceptual element of musical interpretation, can the performer gain access to the realm of mimic characters. The reverse is true of the totality. It is understood as a pictorial phenomenon: the ‘image’ of the score³² always refers to the whole, and its revelation occurs through a glance at the page, not at a particular bar or individual voice. But what appears in such immediacy is itself precisely not the immediate. For the musical totality, as a temporal one, necessarily goes beyond immediacy through recollection and expectation. Understanding a musical form means first of all attaining a synthesis between each musical moment and the epitome of all the temporal relations it inhabits. One could almost say that the pictorial character of musical writing, the spatialization of the flow of time, is opposed to primary mimesis. The spatialization of the gestus, the impulse of neumic notation, at once effects the negation of the gestural element. The preservation of the gestus through an image at the same time constitutes an abstraction thereof, as posited at once through its integration in a self-identical, consistent totality. As, through pictorial fixation, every musical gestus is brought into connection with the others through simultaneity, it stops being a gestus, in a certain sense; it becomes concrete and spiritual, the carrier of the organizational, nature-dominating principle, as determined by pictograms in cheironomy. The musical symbol eternalizes that which is musically ephemeral, namely the mimic impulse; the notes on the page invoke the musically constant, the social objectivity that subjugates natural material. Reading music means imitating it, apprehending its image means understanding it. In other words, the image of the writing is the graphic trace of the construction, as the dialectical counterpart to the expression. And it is the aconceptual work of apprehending musical contexts in the act of cognition that determines the truly mediated, conceptual element of music: that of musical logic, its organization as a temporal continuum.

Since Romanticism, there have been demands for musical interpretation to go back to the original texts. Schumann in particular made this claim, and, in the spirit of the philological history of the nineteenth century, justified it through the distortion of musical texts through printing, as for example in the famous case in the first movement of the Pastoral Symphony, where the simile symbol was mistaken for a rest.³³ Just as Romanticism as a whole went further than any other musical school in exploring questions of musical reproduction – its achievements there are thus scarcely less significant than the literary ones in translation and criticism – it also touched on a central desideratum by espousing the consultation of the original. Admittedly in a different sense to that of philological fidelity. Schumann himself knew only too well that the original manuscript, for example in the shorthand notation used by Beethoven, is not immune to error, and it goes without saying that the zone of indeterminacy is as inherent in the original manuscript as it is in the printed score. Nonetheless, Schumann considered it the final authority in matters of interpretation, and advised constantly comparing the print with the original, which would in fact be generally possible with today's facsimile procedures. But the justification lies neither in the manuscript's infallibility nor in its proximity to the author's intentions, its sentimental personality value, but rather in the fact that the original manuscript captures the pictorial aspects of musical writing, the imitation of the music itself, with incomparably greater precision than the printed version, where not only the symbols but also the writing's truly mimetic characters are subject to a process of objectification and reification that makes even the pictorial apprehension of the musical gestus primarily a matter of reading rather than perceiving. The overwhelming experience had by every musician upon setting eyes on the autograph of a Beethoven movement for the first time³⁴ is not simply the awe occasioned by the empirical trace precisely where it proves most touching in its frailty in the face of its aesthetic ideality. It rather seems as if, in those musical quill-strokes, one finds the copy of the very stirrings copied by the music, as if they were the manifestation of all the laughter and the tears, all the positing and negating of which printed musical scores normally convey only the final shadow. It would therefore be the task of the performer to view the notes until they are transformed into original manuscripts beneath his insistent gaze; not, however, as images of the author's inner stirrings – they are this too, but only accidentally – but rather as the seismographic curves left by the very body of the music through its gestural tremors. Such an interpretation would nonetheless be immune to the harmful irrationalism of a graphological reaction through the other, the significative element, whose decipherment is a precondition for any musical perception. For music is the projection of the spirit's imagination into the non-intentionality that reconciles it by reminding it faithfully of its own corporeal origin.

4

The insufficiency of musical writing, with its ambiguity and its inescapable zone of indeterminacy, is no corrigible weakness, and would not be eliminated by using more appropriate systems of notation, no more than the diatonic stave system, which permits chromaticism only as a deviation, is any longer suited to the presentation of music whose structure fundamentally affords no one scale within the 12 semitones any priority over the others. [Marginal note: too often] This insufficiency stems rather from the relationship between notation and music as such, and ultimately from the nature of all music. Musical writing emphatically falsifies the very thing through which the cultivated philistine's talk of a ‘tone language’ asserts its self-importance: the notion that music is intrinsically a language. For the difference between musical writing and genuine writing is not simply that between the intentionality and non-intentionality of their symbols. For musical letters, as carriers of meaning that are far more independent from the signified than the phonetic symbols of verbal writing, are in a certain sense more intentional than those: their symbolic function is all the more pronounced for developing the difference between the sign phenomenon and what it conveys in a more drastic fashion. The specific difference between the symbols lies rather in what they refer to, namely the fact that words have meanings, but individual notes do not. The verbal sign gains its peculiar lucidity not by evoking the sound of the word, but rather from the word's meaning shining through the symbols, so to speak, from the fact that the meaning lends the word its fixity and its order, which illuminates the sound represented by the symbol. Reading words does not mean imagining visually represented sounds acoustically – developed reading should largely have emancipated itself from such imagination – but rather gaining hold of the signified, as if conjuring it up with one's gaze, in the symbols denoting the sounds, precisely through their own objectification in space: each written character has windows open not to the sound, but rather to the sense. The ray of intentionality described by the phenomenologists is repeated sensorily by the eye in the act of reading, while the phenomenon of signifying through sound moved towards a fundamentally asemantic, mimically expressive medium. For language only really exists as written language: if the world of objects must first of all lose itself in the reflex of the sound, the act of naming, in order to reach apperception at all, then it is reawakened from the depths of mimesis by the letter, which annuls the process of phonogenesis among objects, as it were, and re-creates them as intellectual objects: the sphere of the concrete, the unambiguous and the conceptual is only reached where the sound is represented by the symbol, which always tends towards rendering it superfluous by extracting it in its fundamental abstractness, its temporal expiry. This is characterized by blindness – not because it is meaningless, for it does indeed have the meaning of music, but because music itself knows no intentions that would place the symbol in relief: no note, no written musical image can ever be infused with the same substance as the symbols denoting words in language (hence ‘rationality’ of musical interpretation), and the aconceptually mimic nature of music itself ensures, through writing, that any attempt to present it as intentional is damned precisely to an almost mechanical rigidity and hardness that is clearly an extreme contradiction of that same mimic nature of music. This contradiction – dictated by the matter itself – of being the language symbol for something alingual, the carrier of meaning for something aconceptual, so in truth the paradox of objectifying the absolute non-object itself, yet without, as in language, being made to resemble the objective, dictates the insufficiency of musical writing, which, like a wound, testifies to the violence experienced by the – nonetheless surviving – impulse through its inalienable entwinement in the civilizatory process. Musical writing is a system of fixed symbols for something by its own nature unfixed, which is only conserved at all as an antidote to the fixing of the world.

This, however, causes the musical texts to change in time. The violent, wilful aspect of the relationship between music and its writing only forces the two together ephemerally; their relationship is always one of fluctuation, and the complex layering of rational and expressive aspects in both asserts itself centrifugally. The less that which musical writing eternalizes is itself something eternal, and the more it is rather precisely a solidification of the most ephemeral of all things, the more musical writing comes to resemble obscure hieroglyphics: music, in itself the very rudiment of the ambiguous, becomes reified – against its own impulse, as it were – and therefore continues to move against its reification, and precisely within it. The immanent gestus of music is always that of the present, for the sake of its non-intentionality, and this is why even the most ancient musical symbols apply to the now, not the then: the then, the absolute time-point, would itself amount to that very objectification which opposes music's play of expressions, and the objectification of music seeks not so much to hold on to such a past moment as rather to fix the form of the now. In music, the authentic temporal art, it is precisely this temporal dimension that is left empty, as it were, and this cavity is filled by history, which changes the musical now. If themes are gestures, then these gestures, which are to be imitated from the symbols, can only be imitated as present ones, and it is not so much that they change with their historical location, but rather that this location constitutes the gestural content of music each time in the first place: it is in the innermost cells of music, those that are free of intention, that history resides. Deciphering a theme means no more or less than recognizing the only possible gestures within it, and the possibility of those gestures themselves is historically determined. But one finds the same situation with regard to the image of the musical totality. For the image does not directly reach the level of the construction: though it points to it, the construction only unfolds from within it in a process of rational insight that is itself once again historical. For in history the construction is increasingly revealed, bit by bit, from within the images through insight, and, through the fact that this process is inaugurated by the image itself, it constitutes one of the objective historical unfoldings of the work. The fact that the signs must be transformed into imitation and the image into insight, as both elements are so closely interwoven that neither is purely given, and that musical writing therefore knows neither pure images nor pure meanings, forces – because of the different natures of images and music – a process of questioning that transforms the musical text into a scene of historical dynamics. Music, as that which is signified and depicted, lives within itself, for it is the changing movement motivated by history: and just as the mimetic impulse itself precedes individuation, this movement always remains a collective one, even where it appears as a movement of subjective expression; and the gestural images of music refer, as societal images, not simply to the individual human experience that registers them, but rather to the societal totality and thus the constitutive historical process. But the written notes hardly have less of an independent life than what they represent. For only their first physical elements remain identical – the pure individual notes representing the tone material which, as Kurth has shown,³⁵ does not yet have anything to do with what is genuinely musical (add reference). The morphological connection between the notes, however, is not only subject to change: the images of the notes come about within history to begin with. It seems inconceivable that looking upon a Beethoven sonata, which condenses into a form beneath our gaze, should have been possible at the start of the nineteenth century: the synthesis that places the disparate, mediated elements of such a movement into a totality is possible only as a historical unfolding of its elements as manifest in the configurations of its symbols. In the strictest sense, a movement by Beethoven looked different 100 years ago to how it does today, and therefore also sounded different. For what the image and the symbol are in a text is itself subject to historical dynamics. What is a symbol and what is an image changes. An increasing number of images become symbols, and these in turn join to form ever new images. If even the notehead, that most fixed and rational element of modern musical notation, was perhaps the image of the beat, then the ligature, the neumic image for melodic curves, certainly became the beam, which precisely integrates successive musical shapes, the closest to the gestus, within the music's fixed order. And yet the convulsive demisemiquaver-groups in Schönberg's Erwartung have now precisely become images once more for the anxiety gestus of this music.

The historical character of interpretation, dictated by the changes in the works, applies equally to the writing and the musical content in all its dimensions. This is clearest in the domain of writing and classification. Here there is a continuous, unbroken tendency throughout history towards rejuvenation and diminution. The longest note still known to the modern system, the double semibreve, which itself already seems a diminution of the uniform value upon which modern notation is based, was called brevis in the mensural system. This change relates not to the absolute duration of the notes themselves, but merely to the interpretation of the symbols. ‘The very sight of the old notes, such as the brevis and semibrevis , to a reader unaccustomed to old scores, suggests protraction – a slow atmosphere. The semibrevis, as the name implies, formerly only a subdivision, today occupies the whole measure and has thus become a false clue leading to prolongation. In other words, notes that look long to the modern eye meant something quite different in their day: the brevis , the semibrevis , and the minim are laden with connotations of slowness only in the minds of certain modern interpreters.’³⁶ This tendency, however, goes far beyond the shifts between the mensural system and modern notation. It is clear that a Largo in 3/4 by Handel can absolutely not be understood in the same way as the tempo indication Largo in Beethoven, for example in the Ghost Trio: if one were to play the crotchets even remotely as slowly as in Beethoven, the result would be musical nonsense, as such an excessive stretching of the individual notes upon the simplest harmonic background would completely remove any sense of melodic progress. But this is by no means simply a matter of the change in a convention of writing; the meeting of symbol and image rather becomes visible in that diminution. With the old, gigantic single notes, it is as if the need for their decipherment were still inscribed upon them, whereas this need – and thus true pictoriality – is today found only in the small values, so that the old, long ones have either become banal and obvious, or cannot depict the music directly, but only through their foreignness (careful: the theory is still internally contradictory!). Whatever the absolute durations of the note-values might be, whether the brevis in Palestrina or the dotted minim in Handel were indeed played shorter then than they are now, such problems of decipherment express a change in musical experience that takes place within the structure of the works themselves, and thus by necessity modifies their rendition.

(The modifications in notation create very complicated relationships that must be kept apart. Above all, the view that the absolute values formerly denoted shorter durations than today directly contradicts my view that music has become faster. If it were indeed the case, then a semiquaver figure, for example, would have to have been played more quickly in Handel's time than today, i.e. the music would have become slower. So there are no clear circumstances; the problem of duration can rather be solved only in relation to tempo. Was music not actually slower after all, in absolute terms, and is Dorian's view therefore not a bizarre one that must be criticized? It must also become clear how the historical relationship between the image and the symbol presents itself in its individual aspects in writing. Do symbols really first of all join to form images that in turn revert to symbols, or are images not rather originally transformed into symbols, and these latter then into images? The second option seems true to me, and the change in musical writing must be treated in accordance with it. The process of quickening is essentially the retransformation of the symbol into the image, i.e. the circumstance that larger contexts can, to a degree, be perceived gesturally. This development culminates in the ‘simultaneous’ perception of an entire elaborated musical form, cf. Lorenz).³⁷

Such changes, however, are of an improper nature. They refer to the fact that the same symbol can have different meanings at different times, without necessarily reaching the music itself: if one could reconstruct the length of the note-values in Palestrina's or Handel's time with a degree of exactitude, then one would only have to lend them the duration corresponding to the practice of the time in order to be sure of notated music as an absolute that is untouched by conventions of notation. In truth, the change undergone by the works goes far beyond this. It affects the music itself through the character of the score's appearance and dissolves the notion of something absolute and timeless that is meant by the written notes. One can apply what Benjamin remarks concerning the relationship between literature and translation, where he develops the idea of the ‘original’, to music: ‘… in living on, which would be a meaningless phrase if it were not a transformation and a renewal of something alive, the original changes’.³⁸ If one wishes to speak productively of changes in the style of interpretation, then one cannot say that the music of each period is presented differently to that of a previous one, but rather simply that the past is affected by the present. This is indeed the core of Wagner's treatise on conducting: the fact that the multifarious formal structure of music since Haydn and Mozart unlocks a cognitive dimension in all music, whether earlier or later, that necessarily determines interpretation. The newer works shed light on the older ones: in a movement such as the superficially continuously flowing final movement of Bach's Italian Concerto, one finds – beneath the dense mantle of its activity, and with a delicacy and subtlety that almost makes the explicit formal construction of genuine classical works seem crude – the structure of that rondo which only became fully emancipated with Mozart: the Mozartian rondo changes that Bachian Presto by elevating its latent formal idea, as it were, to a manifest architecture. But there can hardly be any doubt that such changes in music history took place long before the Copernican revolution around the end of the eighteenth century. The absolutist style of presentation, for example, as embodied by the famous stamping in Lully's conducting practice, the gestus of the musical master of ceremonies, must by necessity have altered the entire phenomenon of musical rendition. A remark made by Dorian allows us to reconstruct the process to an extent: ‘Generations later, Jean Jacques Rousseau protested against the noisy beating of conductors in the theaters. Rationalist that this philosopher-musician was, he finally became resigned to the idea that without the noise the measure of the music could not be distinctly felt by the singers and orchestra players’.³⁹ Courtly ceremony, which forms music largely according to ostentation in dance, thus derived rhythmic symmetry from the harmonic symmetries of tonal harmony: it is this period that saw the establishment of the eight-bar period, which seemed second nature to the common consciousness of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It is this experience of rhythmic-harmonic symmetry, still lacking in the first operatic attempts, that affected the whole idea of music, emphasizing the idea of the strong beat, the accent and the precise concurrence of simultaneous events, and caused a form of rational integration of music in the sense of autonomous volition, something that must have been foreign to the collectively hierarchical view extending from medieval polyphony into the seventeenth century. A contemporary of Lully would have seen particularly clearly the chordal characteristics in Palestrina – the weight of each individual triad, so to speak – which were still entirely buried within the part-writing in Palestrina's own day, just as the guise of Mozart's Fantasy in C minor changed once its similarity to certain passages in the Appassionata was reflected upon. Conversely, at a time when the harmonic dimension and its corresponding rhythmic symmetry had already become established, the musical rococo loosened the rigid approach of the seventeenth century. If ‘the Rococo lightened everything up, so the stately court courante gradually developed a moderate and eventually a fast tempo’,⁴⁰ then such a change will not simply have meant that faster courantes were subsequently composed, but rather that this type of tripartite dance in general became more compressed, and that older courantes were also played more quickly. The marvel of single harmonies and accents discovered in the era of baroque opera can hardly any longer have seemed accessible, but rather pompous and old-fashioned, like baroque tragedy at the time of the Enlightenment. To an eye gazing upon a suite around 1750, the bars must have compressed themselves, as it were gathered together in a single glance, while seventy years earlier each single one had to be underlined in order to constitute the form at all, and also underlined for the sake of its own gestus. The violence of forgetting exerted upon the older style by the galant, which brought about a mysterious caesura in the development of great music, must have taken hold of everything baroque and given rise to that character of archaism which has remained present ever since that time. And the closer that past works come to the present, the more clearly constitutive changes of rendition can be determined. The reports of Beethoven's largely improvisatory interpretative style as a pianist leave no doubts that he under-lined expressive characters, which at once moved close towards the composer and alienated him, and that the problem of a motivic-constructive presentation, which today dominates any rendition of Beethoven worth considering, hardly came into view. The state of distension in which Bülow most likely presented Tristan, which was necessitated by the novelty of the individual harmonic events, would seem not only boring and sentimental, but even a distortion of the music's sense. Perceived from a greater distance, Tristan virtually demands slow motion in order to be grasped in its continuity and not disintegrate into mere details which, as details, have been deserted by the power that once allowed them to unite as a whole of their own accord. What subtle, organized conductor or chamber musician, encountering an all-too-familiar theme in a work – such as the second subject in the Allegro of the B minor Symphony or the D minor Quartet by Schubert – would not be forced to let such a theme disappear, as it were, to draw it coyly into the course of the overall form, so as not to turn it over through excessive presence to that sphere which, in visual art, includes the reproduction of Rafael's madonnas in the bourgeois bedchamber (old hat!), and betray it precisely through this? For those Schubertian melodies to be saved from the fame that they owe, after all, to their incomparable beauty, they must be played, or intimated, as if remembered: presented explicitly, they degenerate into theme songs.⁴¹ Music is no more indifferent to the ears of the many who have already heard it than images are to the eyes that have left their trace upon them. But this makes recognition of things past less a matter of empathy than of present experience. Stravinsky came close to this when, speaking for composers in his autobiography (not true, he also says it about reproduction!), he makes a statement that is equally applicable to reproduction:

And this is our conviction: it is impossible for any person to understand fully the art of a previous age and penetrate its being – a being that lies concealed beneath lost forms and expresses itself in a language that is no longer spoken – if that person lacks a living sense and a true understanding of the present, if he does not participate actively in the life around him! For only those who are truly alive can uncover life in those who are ‘dead’. In my opinion, it would be wiser for pedagogical reasons if a student's education began with a knowledge of the present, and one only then moved back step by step into the past.

I openly admit that I have no faith in those who pose as the finest connoisseurs, who admire great art idols with one or more stars in Baedeker, who enthuse over an unrecognizable portrait in an illustrated encyclopaedia, while at the same time lacking even the slightest ability to differentiate between anything contemporary. How seriously can one take the opinion of those who become ecstatic at great names, yet are bluntly indifferent to contemporary works – or at the most express a preference for all things mediocre and commonplace?⁴²

One might add that the connoisseurship nurtured educationally on the past in truth never gains access to those past works, but only to their false present, their conventionalized expression. Whoever does not understand Schönberg today cannot understand Beethoven, but rather obstructs any relationship to the work through the reified guise of its effect. Those musical initiates who form the majority of the audience in the opera and at concerts are like parasites, sucking the juice out of the past that they believe they are preserving, and behind their malicious intolerance lies an intimation of the untruth by which they swear.

This would mean that the changes undergone by works through interpretation are no mere matter of taste, but rather obey some objective law. In other words, that they are predetermined by the works themselves, not dependent on preference or even on the dominant manner among performers. The change undergone by the works is not simply one of their perception, one dependent on changing tastes; such a view would assume that the unambiguous nature of the work's demands is synonymous with an immutable core that presents itself in a different light in each period. The fundamental tension between notation and music, however, reveals the assumption of the works' static content as their core to be an illusion. There is no work-in-itself as such that could be perceived differently in different times, while still imposing drastic limits upon any such perception. History is nothing external to the work; rather, the fact that each work constitutes a problem in the immanent sense makes history its fundamental substrate. The steps towards solving its problem are synonymous with its unfolding in time, and the work's nature can be determined at all only through that unfolding, as its law, and not as a timeless substratum. This ‘inner historicity’ within the works, however, cannot be separated from their outward history. Just as there is no invariant history surviving through the works that appears in the light of different tastes, taste equally changes not as something arbitrary and merely external to the work; modifications in taste rather testify to the content of the works no less than their content testifies to its history. Whenever a style of presentation, such as the late Romantic, pathetic Beethoven, became unbearable, this does not simply tell us that a sobered spirit was resisting the intoxication of self-glorifying subjectivity and its expression, but rather that the attentive ear had become aware of the contradiction between work and presentation. The medium of such insight is first of all notation, for example the fact that the tempo modifications popular among the neo-German conductors as a result of Wagner's theory are not indicated in the scores. But nothing would be more misguided than – as propagated in the organ renaissance and the reconstruction of pre-classical performance practice – viewing a return to the original texts as a historicist reconstruction of the original performance ideal. Wagner's text leaves little room for doubt about that ideal, and if one even remotely believes his descriptions, then the pre-Wagnerian style of interpretation was possibly even more unbearable than the tone-poetic, dramatized one. And not only because of its technical flaws, which would be obvious enough to an ear acquainted with the virtuosity of the neo-Romantic orchestra, but rather because this technical insufficiency – exemplified by the schematic reinforcement of accents for the sake of staying together – would take on that mechanical, nonsensical aspect familiar from certain regressive marginal phenomena in European musical culture, such as the popular concerts given by military and pleasure garden orchestras. This mechanical aspect, however, is no mere subjective incapacity, and attributing it to the ‘unmusical’ nature of the conductor would be no more than a displacement of the problem. One can only call a presentation unmusical if it falls short of its object. But here this would mean: those layers of the constructive context that may still have been hidden in Beethoven's time have meanwhile made their presence known from within to the advanced musical consciousness to such a degree that whoever refuses to obey them falls short of the work. In other words, this is precisely the aspect of the entire musical writing-stroke's mimetic replication, without which the significative understanding of each notational element, i.e. the correct rendition of the text, remains so illusory as to necessitate the golden rule that, wherever this essential historical innervation is lacking in the replication of the whole, the correctness of the written score's rendition is by necessity also lost – the very correctness relied on by precisely that interpretation which is no longer able to replicate the whole. Whoever interprets Beethoven today in the fashion decried by Wagner would not simply be the same philistine the neo-Germans saw him as; he would in fact fall short of the music's structure with every step, and in such a manner that this failure would in turn become apparent through manifest errors. The foremost example of this is Arturo Toscanini's style of presentation. While it constitutes a reaction to that sloppy aspect which made the untruth of the neo-Romantic style of presentation palpable, and subjects it to the judgement which virtuoso conducting richly deserved as a degenerate form of espressivo music-making, in a certain sense it reinstated, at that higher level of extreme precision itself cultivated in virtuoso conducting, the pre-Wagnerian mechanical beating, which has no more been entirely erased from the Italian opera conducting tradition than the Neapolitan form of opera up to Puccini. Toscanini's approach to music-making is not so much a neutralization of subjective wilfulness within the consciousness of the matter itself as the regression to a traditional stage where that matter did not yet appear as the problem, but supposedly corresponded to the sensual façade and the significative side of notation; yet neither is this tradition still a present one nor do the works upon which the orchestral technician projects it either belong to it or allow themselves to be understood from within it. This significative fidelity, dislocated from all structure, is consequently also augmented – as a purely external accident – by the brio, the momentum, the dynamism of the theatrical performer, and the result is an agglomeration of pedantry and effect that only a consciousness estranged from the living music and in itself regressive could perceive as bindingly authentic. Instead of an interpenetration between the mimetic and the significative elements of music-making, this style of interpretation – which has meanwhile spread into a form of radio culture – sees them present only in mutual isolation: a hundred dryly correct details are strung together through the endeavours of a technological temperament to produce escalations and explosions. Through this, however, they even sacrifice their correctness: the Allegretto of the 7th Symphony lapses into an Andante, and in the 9th Symphony not one movement follows Beethoven's metronome markings. Manifest in all this is, on the one hand, the historical nature of the works' core and, on the other hand, the restriction of interpretative change within the historically unfolding objectivity of the work itself. Fidelity to the notation is only one – admittedly indispensable – element here, the barrier to a violation of the work's historical laws by interpretation, but this fidelity alone is not enough. On its own it can neither provide insight into the state of the work, and thus its truth, nor can it satisfy itself if held onto in isolation: mere fidelity of reading, at the expense of an imitation of the eye and the ear, leads to a state of rigor mortis in which the ray of vision that enables the act of reading is itself ultimately extinguished.

(Further details for the critique of Toscanini's style of presentation: notes 3/4. The dialectical relationship must be brought into sharper focus. Compared to the customary romanticized style of presentation, particularly in Germany, Toscanini's method of streamlining⁴³ had an exceptionally progressive side, and helped to clear away some of the ornamental rubble that had covered the works during the Romantic period. The effect of Toscanini's first performances in Germany had something liberating about it, and there is no doubt that he achieved a new level of precision and functionality that is appropriate to the current state of orchestral technique. But in the context of a movement of the intellect where each and every element of sense in the works dies out as a result of a fetishization of the means, of functioning per se, Toscanini's ideal of music-making has taken on an entirely different aspect. It means something completely different in the America of record-breaking, the Tchaikovsky cult and the jazz machine than in Europe. What there had been a demystification in the service of the matter itself here becomes an enemy of that matter and a mystification of the apparatus, and this is expressed in the insufficiency of the endeavour. Theoretically speaking, the same ideal of presentation can take on completely different functions in different social contexts and states of consciousness. Yet these functions are no mere forms of subjective reaction to the works, but rather concern their respective inner constitution.)

The fact that the works change with time and that their change provides a canon of interpretation located within each work itself means that this change should not be understood as an adherence to the contingency of historical progression – for that progression necessarily appears, as something located outside of the work, irrelevant and coincidental from the work's perspective, as a ‘fashion’ – but rather that it takes place according to certain laws. These laws must be sought out in the relationship between the media in which the work appears: of the significative medium of musical writing, the mimetic (find a better word to replace this in the whole study) of the score's appearance, and in that of tone language. Clearly, this adherence to laws is intimately related to a process of increasing rationalization, to an elucidation of the works. In a certain sense, their unfolding in time equals the progress in their transparency: it leads from the phenomenon to its essence. But identifying this general tendency, the transition from a naïve to a conscious relationship to the works, does not bring us very much further. To the extent that this mimetic element, which is peculiar to music itself, manifests itself in the neume-like aspect of notation, the unfolding of the work cannot simply be understood as the dissolution of that element – it would leave behind nothing of the work but its caput mortuum – for what changes is in fact much more than the constellation within which that element appears and its own composition. It reveals that the merely reflective style of interpretation that divests itself of all spontaneity is no more the true, advanced form than the opposite, namely that interpretation which clings stubbornly and regressively to its own naïveté, which it inevitably pays for by giving an improper representation of the matter. A schema that seems closer to the specific laws of change is one that implies, in a certain sense, the opposite to the primitive assumption of interpretative enlightenment, though admittedly it leads back to its idea. For there are two aspects of the works that first reach our perceptions: on the one hand the significative element, i.e. the correct translation of the musical symbol, and on the other hand that of tone language. The latter refers precisely to that layer of naïveté which is critiqued by history. The musical text of more recent times, at the latest since the stile rappresentativo and probably already since the strict Italian polyphony of the sixteenth century, does not appear in isolation, in a vacuum, but rather within a context – whether traditionally mediated or guaranteed through general dissemination – that goes beyond each individual text and, in analogy to dominant styles of instrumental technique and delivery, keeps a watchful eye over how this or that aspect should be understood if it is not unambiguously implicit in the symbols denoting the work. This relation to unproblematically predefined models that are not, however, immanent in the work itself is what characterizes naïveté of interpretation in the customary sense, regardless of whether one is dealing with an execution of figured bass and ornamentation, the modes of delivery in Viennese classicism, the much vaunted unity of stringency and rubato in Chopin or perhaps with jazz, where the appearance of improvisatory freedom and even ‘unnotatability’ is achieved through the omnipresence of the aforesaid medium of tone language. In the works' youth, by contrast, the mimetic element conveyed by the score's appearance – that of its structural, specifically temporal context – steps back, and to the extent that this element asserts an archaic legacy, it is precisely this archaic legacy that always enters history first, just as one can generally apply the paradox to music that its mimetic aspect is fulfilled only through the construction, whereas its significative aspect can emerge only through an imitation of the image, i.e. through a mimetic function, as it were. As far as the significative and the tone-lingual elements of the text are concerned, the former is naturally more or less constant. Certainly the absolute pitch and duration of the notes vary, but such changes initially leave the internal relationships of the musical sign system untouched. It becomes dynamic only in relation to the other two aspects, and in a negative sense, to the extent that its relationship to these proves not entirely free of ambiguity, and that the cavities of signification are filled out by the variability of the other elements, so to speak. If one considers the unfolding of the works according to certain laws a dialectical process, then it is the significative element, namely letter-notation, that asserts the identity of non-identity within this process (perhaps one can replace the significative aspect with the tabulature aspect, or even better the mensural aspect throughout, and equally replace the mimetic with the neumic. There is no appropriate term yet for the tone-lingual aspect). By contrast, the tone-lingual element is the absolutely ephemeral one, and for a pragmatic reason: it is this element that does not enter the text as such, that is not fixed but rather external to the text, and yet the only medium that can meaningfully represent it upon its emergence. If musical practice and society change, then this aspect is irretrievably lost, as it eludes codification: one could say that, in the strictest sense, the medium of tradition in music cannot be passed on.⁴⁴ Through this, however, the text – deserted by the sense it gains from without – becomes problematic, and the neumic element, the question of music's sense as the embodiment of its gestus, arises in the context of the pure text that has largely been divested of its transcendental mediations. The neumic aspect emerges from the decline of the music-lingual, as the representation of the musical gestus through the extinction of the gestures that make it visible. The unfolding of the work is a reconstruction of the music-lingual element from the immanence of the text, and this reconstruction is synonymous with the realization of the mimic impulse buried in the neumic image. The only way to reach it, however, is through analysis.

(Mahler's statement that tradition is sloppiness holds on to that very moment in which the music-lingual element proves problematic and must be replaced by the analytical-constructive aspect. And Mahler's statement indeed implies the precise reason for this transition, namely that the music-lingual element, in so far as it discloses the originally apparent text like a cotyledon, yet is not itself contained within it, increasingly – whether by independent movement or by freezing – turns against the mensural element and literal fidelity. This fidelity becomes a vehicle, as it were, that substitutes the recognition of the musical sense for its music-lingual surrogate. What sets the dialectic of musical interpretation in motion is not simply – and certainly not always – the extinction of the music-lingual element as its attainment of independence from the mensural, which either petrifies it, as reported in the well-known anecdote of the much-too-fast tempo of the Adagio of the Freischütz overture encountered by Wagner, or the music-lingual element, as something external to the text, becomes wild, as it were, and reduces the text to a mere opportunity – which one finds particularly with musical texts of a virtuosic nature, which in a certain sense are dependent on the performer's freedom of play, and thus contain the dissolution of the mensural aspect and consequently of their own identity. This note is the real development of the idea of the laws of change.)

If the music-lingual element has either become extinct or has opposed the mensural (and the music-lingual element is really the factor through which social reification and conventionalization take control of the works; just as it was once the works' carrier in society, it now becomes that which enables society to turn against the work), then the latter lies cold, abandoned by meaning, and insignificant. The demand made time and again at such moments, namely to simply follow what is written, is on the one hand a triviality – as the limits of significative notation must be maintained at all costs – and on the other hand a nonsense, as an interpretation that indeed restricted itself to what is on the paper would not only be deprived of its magic and aura, which would still be conceivable, but would be nonsensical in the precise sense that a musical context would no longer be at all perceptible, precisely because an interpretation of this kind would lose the mimic quality contained in an impure form within the music-lingual element.

(This is an extremely important motif. In the exposition so far, the music-lingual and mimic aspects are distinguished from one another, yet without any emphasis being placed at the same time on their affinity. In musical language, the mimic aspect is bestowed upon the work from without, so to speak. The music-lingual element contains scattered and inarticulate parts of the neumic – in so far as no work constitutes that absolute microcosm as which it must necessarily present itself, rather interacting with tone-lingual elements and general forms beyond its specification. The formal aspects of the musical context are now largely the mimic ones, and these cannot be entirely separated from the social generality that is unmistakable in even the most subjective of artistic production. It is no coincidence that the tone-lingual element partly brings about what is strictly the business of the neumic, for it is connected to that convergence: ‘form’ is both the embodiment of the work's microcosmic gestus, that is to say its mimic expression, and of the socially predetermined types exceeding the individual work. This is why the interpretative construction of the works is by necessity far from ‘pure’ in relation to the music-lingual element, rather containing something of this in itself: this is the supply upon which that construction feeds, so to speak, and in a certain sense the second pole of true interpretation is, compared to literal fidelity, the critical work on the music-lingual element in an awareness of the construction. The music-lingual element is sublated in the Hegelian sense.)

The work of true interpretation is thus of a twofold character. It entails, on the one hand, a knowledge of the text, the mensural element, an act of supplementation through analysis of the context; and, on the other hand, the music-lingual continuum, which as ever confronts it in a problematic manner, challenging it to assess how far it concurs with those analytical results. For to it, both things become problematic once they have separated: the pure text as one emptied of meaning, and mere musical language as something incompatible with the text. The text's zone of imprecision is that in which interpretation takes place: at the same time, however, the musical score itself gives the instruction to fill that vacuum, in so far as all those aspects are directly contained in the notation, in order to analyse them subsequently through interpretation. The untruth of the claim that one should simply play what is written lies in the view that the mensural element can directly provide the canon of interpretation: it is true to the extent that the text contains all those elements which true interpretation must bring forth. In other words, the neumic understanding of the mensural text is not wilful; rather its question – how can the text become meaningful? – is guided by the text itself. The crystallization of the mediate sense is no mere ingredient, but rather the recognition of the context uniting all mensurally classified atomistic elements. The illusion of a natural, ‘organic’ aspect to music, which is brought about by social convention and is nothing other than an unthinking absorption of the tone-lingual element, dissolves in the face of true interpretation.

(Special note: the dialectic touched on in the Philosophy of Modern Music between each individual work and its formal type is of central concern to the theory of reproduction, in terms of the relationship between neumic and music-lingual elements.)

True reproduction is the imitation of an absent original, and this absence, the non-existence of the work-in-itself, at once defines the objectivity located within the subjective spontaneity of the performer. At the same time, however, this imitation of the absent original is nothing other than the x-ray image of the text. Its task is to render visible all the relations, transitions, contrasts, characters, fields of tension and resolution and whatever else the construction consists of, while these things otherwise lie concealed – both under the mensural notation and the sound's sensory surface. This is why a desensualization of musical interpretation becomes necessary from the moment when the music-lingual element begins to become problematic. One could almost define the latter as the unseparated, uncritical entanglement of sensual appearance and musical sense. What occurs in true interpretation is the articulation – extending to even the most hidden detail – of the sensual appearance and an uncovering of the totality of the construction, the gestus of the work and its mimic realization within that, and this presupposes – fundamentally, not as a mere supplement of extra-musical reflection – an analytical engagement with the text. While the sensual aspect of the music is thus preserved and in a certain sense, as Wagner in particular achieved, is even reinforced, it is thus broken at the same time. The more ruthlessly it enters the service of the sense's emergence, the more it exposes itself to the false appearance of being in direct union with that sense: fully expressing the musical context through the sensual phenomenon at once always means depriving the sensual phenomenon of its being-in-itself, making it the image of something else, breaking it. The more completely the musical sense is present in the appearance, the less that appearance is mere presence – or put more drastically: the more completely it is polarized according to its temporal horizon, its protentionality and retentionality, and the less it exhausts itself in the moment of its mere existence. The complete sensualization of music amounts to its desensualization. If interpretation manages to hide rather than underline relationships found through analysis, it is only if structural necessity is recognized once more and allowed to control it: two themes, for example, may have the same motivic core, but whether an interpretation should expose or conceal this motivic core depends on whether the two themes with common note-rows simply serve the purpose of establishing a relationship between two otherwise distant melodic formations – then the identical core must become perceptible – or whether at a later point in the movement, perhaps through an immediate succession of the two latently related complexes, their connection is made evident in the composition itself as the result of the piece's development, as is occasionally the case in Beethoven.⁴⁵ If this is the case, then the similarity must not be emphasized, as its concealment is itself an aspect of the articulation. The idea of clarity is the measure of analytical interpretation: all relationships contained in the mensural text must become clear, but this idea itself must not be primitively understood, as the clarity of every single individual relation that has been uncovered, but rather as a hierarchy of the clear and the unclear in the sense of the clarity of the overall structure, of the mimic gestus. The clarity of true interpretation differs from that of the schoolmasterish and pedantic type in that the latter, despite attempting to bring out everything contained in the ciphers, fails to recognize its function within the organization of the whole and thus emphasizes things that are admittedly contained in the respective elements, but which must in turn give way to the clarity of the whole. Clarity itself is nothing static, but rather a process; true interpretation can certainly call for a lack of clarity, but then this must be realized precisely as such: as something clearly unclear.

(The idea introduced here of the function as compared to the individual event should be pursued further. It is not intended to constitute a fundamentally different category, but rather that element in the interpretation of the text which does indeed emerge from the confrontation with the results gained from an examination of the mensural aspects, but which at the same time exceeds precisely these mensural aspects – in other words, it is precisely that phenomenon in which mensural interpretation is transformed dialectically into neumic interpretation from within itself. This is the genuine centre of all musical interpretation.)

It cannot be denied that, the more complex music up until Schönberg has become, the more the idea of clarity has taken on a concrete, literal sense, namely that one must understand all details of what occurs; and the Wagnerian and Mahlerian view of reproduction is in keeping with this sort of positivism, despite its Romantic pathos and as its complement, so to speak, while structurally simpler music such as Beethoven's confronts the postulate of clarity and the demand for articulation with far more complex circumstances, and is therefore in a deeper sense far more difficult to interpret than modern music, quite aside from the fact that in Beethoven, for example, the tone-lingual element no longer offers any kind of support, but is now only a hindrance. The requirement of articulation – in relation to the ideal-type Beethoven, and Viennese classicism in general, compared to which the ideal of an interpretation based on insight is the prime concern – relates especially to the smallest details, in whose relationships the musical ‘work’ of that period, namely that of themes and motives, is carried out. It is obvious that most performers manage to articulate the form in general terms, to set apart large-scale aspects such as disposition, intensifications, references to earlier parts and resolutions, whereas the official interpretation grasped by mass culture fails with regard to the sub-totalities. The way in which individual themes in large-scale forms are divided into antecedent and consequent, question and answer, for example, escapes the performer who simply follows the music-lingual curve, and the measure in the presentation of such themes is therefore their effect, not their immanent musical sense; this habit then becomes apparent once more in the absurd phrasing of modern music, which is largely to blame for the impression of incomprehensibility it leaves. ‘A classical melody, if interpreted with inadequate phrasing, may lose something of its beauty, whereas Schönberg's would be downright incomprehensible.’⁴⁶ Or: a theme that returns as a continuation or consequent of a different theme has a completely different sense compared to its first appearance, and must accordingly be interpreted completely differently, namely as a consequence rather than as a primary being. The simplest example of such requirements is keeping apart the principal and secondary voices in chamber music. In Beethoven's earlier phases, where the music-lingual element was largely in the foreground and constituted the deciding factor in the realization of harmony, the weighting of the parts – to the extent that one could speak of a ‘thread’ at all – was primitive. Today, when the harmonic dimension is transparent in any case, and it is no longer possible simply to drift along with the music's language, the task is now consistently to represent the network of voices, and not only in truly polyphonic passages; rather, the task is now consistently to uncover the latent polyphony even in seemingly harmonic complexes and thus emancipate the work from mere harmonic generality and render it in all its specificity. The sense of musical forms, their transformation into ‘content’, and thus the truth of interpretation itself, depends on the precision and focus with which such micrological work is carried out, in both directions – first in the analysis of the written score, and then in its retranslation into sound. The constant task of true interpretation is the binding expression of the dialectic between the whole and the parts, where the recognition of the parts leads to an understanding of the whole, and conversely the awareness of the whole lends Ansatz the approach of the parts its specific weight. The true interpretation of integrally composed music – and this is all we are speaking of at present – neither sacrifices the whole for the details nor reduces the details to helplessness and insignificance. In the tradition of occidental music, this is ensured by the unity of tempo – however flexible – in a movement. Whenever tempo modifications, even those of a subliminal kind, endanger the unity of the movement, the articulation must be achieved through other means – phrasing, agogics, dynamics or timbre.

True interpretation is based on insight. This does not mean rationalist views of the work, its style, its historical position and whatever else; nothing that is foreign or external to the experience of the actual work and removed from a relation to the aesthetic object itself. Informational knowledge, the introduction of education into musical interpretation, which Wagner already rejected, is itself a sign of the loss of any spontaneous relationship to the matter itself, just as the informed listener who knows from memory every Koechel Verzeichnis number or the most unimportant Beethoven wind piece's year of composition is frequently the one who understands the actual music least, and who replaces spontaneous listening with the neutralized imprint of a cultural artefact. (Cf. regarding this Wagner, Über das Dirigieren, p. 312 until around p. 316, cite and poss. discuss in detail.) Insight, rather, is nothing other than a critical immersion in the text itself, one whose only expectation is to find a meaningful context. The theme of interpretation, namely to produce that context through analysis and then represent it through sound, is musical sense (?). Its category must be fundamentally distinguished from that of expression, with which it was equated in the Romantic era, and which is not, to be fair, the last among those elements which join to yield the musical sense. Musical sense, as something ‘assigned’ to every interpretation, eludes static definition. Initially it can only be determined negatively, as the neediness of the phenomenon, as that to which the phenomenon refers and which it requires in order to be not merely sound but rather music, but which is nevertheless not absorbed by the phenomenon. Yet one can find it only there, in the phenomenon itself, at the same time both immanent and transcendent. In other words, in its context; and by no means in the temporal one, the succession of complexes – though this succession is a central aspect of musical sense – but rather in all relationships formed by sonic phenomena. The unity of meaningful interpretation in music demands the realization of the totality of all those aspects of the context, and its primary opposite is meaningless music-making, where the work's life comes to an end and nothing but its dead, reified husk manifests itself – that experience which, as the antithesis to the requirement of fidelity, is directly familiar to every performing musician from their work, and which determines the decisions he makes within the mensural text. It is in the shape of this aspect of meaningful connections that the neumic aspect of the text is converted into concrete interpretation, and it is its tendency towards absolutization that leads to unfettered minstreldom, to the virtuoso and the wilful gestus: hence precisely that aspect in which the music's mimetic impulse breaks through, as it were, regressively and unbroken, and turns musical performance over to the realm of play-acting. Musical play-acting is vitality at the expense of its own objectivity, and forcing both these aspects together, the work's objectivity and its vitality, defines the ideal of interpretation. The concept of musical sense as the totality of phenomenal connections unfolds the telos of codified music as that of a non-intentional text, for the sense does not – or only fragmentarily – stand behind that which is mensurally signified, yet it nonetheless refers to the concept of the text as something to be understood in so far as none of the mensurally signified aspects already coincide, purely as such, with the sense: this paradoxism is almost the theoretical formulation of what is forever experienced as the mystery of music, its nature of being only itself and yet more than itself. (A truly conclusive formulation of these thoughts would presuppose the strictest clarification of the concept of the non-intentional text in the opening chapters.) And it is at once the purpose of the x-ray, in the sense that it yields something going beyond the phenomenal layer not by reading it as a symbol, but rather through insight into the structure of the phenomenon itself. The counterpart to intention that enables the notion of a non-intentional text in the first place, however, is the idea of music's mimic nature, i.e. the sphere in which it fulfils itself without pointing to it, and musical sense as context is nothing other than the totality of its gestus. But this implies the inescapable responsibility of musical insight for the sensual phenomenon as its strict object. One could say: a consistent listening-through of the music heightened to the point of self-awareness. (A long passage was inserted before this sentence, this is why there is a jump in the text.) Admittedly, this consistent listening-through does not take place in a vacuum, rather relating in each case to the most advanced state of composition-technical insight, and thus to compositional technique itself. For it is from this point, from the unfolding of the means of musical contextualization, that the light which reveals ever-renewed contexts shines upon the texts. This was already the case in Wagner's theory of interpretation. Constrained by the objectivity of the matter itself, he postulated an interpretation grounded on insight, thus going far beyond the atmosphere of espressivo performance that initially affects his two most important theoretical texts on interpretation. Even the language of hero-worship cannot conceal the requirement of musical insight into the context as the basis of meaningful interpretation.

If we consider duly how uniquely important it is for any musical utterance that the melody – even though the tone-poet's artistry may often reveal it only in its smallest fragments – should captivate us at all times, and that the correctness of this melodic language should in no sense fall behind the logical correctness of the conceptual thinking evident in verbal language, without confusing us through lack of clarity in the same way that an incomprehensible sentence does, then we must recognize that nothing merits the most careful effort more than the attempt to remove the lack of clarity in a passage, a bar, even a note in the musical utterance of a genius, such as Beethoven's, to us; for every manner of shaping applied to a being of such primal truth, however surprisingly new it may be, stems from the divinely consuming urge to unlock the deepest secrets of his world-view for us poor mortals with irrefutable clarity. Therefore, just as one should never pass over an apparently opaque passage in the work of a great philosopher before gaining a clear understanding of it, and if this does not take place, then, upon reading further, one will inevitably misunderstand the teacher, so too one should not simply play through a single bar of a tone poem – for example by Beethoven – without a clear understanding thereof.⁴⁷

The content of Wagner's stipulations for the rendition of the 9th Symphony makes it clear that it is actually not a matter of reflecting upon the genius, but rather upon the text. These stipulations take the concept of ‘clarity’ of delivery⁴⁸ as their point of departure, and in the course of his argumentation this amounts to nothing other than the realization of the musical context through the sonic phenomenon. He sees that, in Beethoven, the relationship between musical context and instrumental sound has become problematic – through a liberated contradiction, one would say today, between the forces and the conditions of production in the music, between the structure of the work and its instrumental means of realization. This is by no means restricted to Beethoven, but rather runs through the entire history of bourgeois music, and today lives on in the fortuity of the connection between the typical composition of the orchestra and the most advanced musical imagination.

We must now marvel at how the master infused his works with ways to realize with the utmost clarity, using exactly the same orchestra, conceptions of such manifold diversity as were still entirely beyond Mozart and Haydn. In this respect his ‘Sinfonia Eroica’ remains not only a miracle of conception, but equally also a miracle of orchestration. Although already here he demanded a manner of delivery from the orchestra that it has proven unable to make its own to this day: for the delivery had to be as brilliant on the part of the orchestra as the orchestral conception of the master himself. The difficulties in judging these symphonies therefore begin from this point, from the first performance of the ‘Eroica’, even to the point of preventing their appreciation, which the musicians of those earlier times were never quite able to feel. These works lacked clarity of performance, as the attainment of this clarity was no longer ensured simply through the use of the orchestral organism, as with Haydn and Mozart, but was only possible through the exceptional musical achievement – to the point of virtuosity – of each individual instrumentalist and their conductor.⁴⁹

The concept of clarity at issue here is obviously not measured according to the incontestable, yet banal idea that every sounding phenomenon must in itself be clear, vivid and precise, but rather the idea that precisely the context created by the sonic phenomenon allows the emergence of that ‘manifold diversity’ which constitutes the structural law of Beethoven's symphonic writing. It is beyond question, however, that the sonic clarification of that structural aspect – probably its mere recognition – was only possible from the perspective of an advanced orchestral technique that already tends towards making itself its own ‘x-ray image of the work’, and therefore allows a retrospective recognition of layers of the structural context in the older work that, though contained in its own sensual mode of appearance, were concealed at the same time. This lends Wagner's examination its fundamental weight.

For now that the wealth of his conceptions demanded far more varied material and a much more delicate structuring thereof, Beethoven was forced to call for the most abrupt changes in dynamic and expressive delivery from one and the same instrumentalist, as made into a special art by great virtuosos. This is the reason, for example, for that demand which became so quintessentially Beethovenian, namely a crescendo that does not culminate in a forte, but suddenly switches to piano: this one very common nuance is still so foreign to most of our orchestral players that careful conductors, wishing at least to ensure that the piano appears at the right moment, made it their musicians' duty to reverse the crescendo wisely, giving way to a cautious diminuendo. The true sense of this most difficult of nuances, to be sure, lies in the fact that, here, the same instruments are required to execute something that only becomes entirely clear when it is handed over to different instruments in alternation with one another. Our new composers, who have the richer modern orchestra and its now customary usage at their disposal, know this. These composers would have been able to achieve certain effects intended by Beethoven with greater clarity and without any eccentric demands of virtuosity from the orchestra, simply because a distribution among different instrumental complexes has now become easier.⁵⁰

It is not without reason that Wagner looks to more recent composers – i.e. himself – for examples, especially the principle of instrumental melodic division used with ever greater consistency since Lohengrin until its complete dominance in Tristan, which alone permits an absolute ‘clarification’ of the melody's structural aspects as conveyed through its expression, a clarification of the essential context uniting all successivities, that is to say an adequate translation into the colours and dynamics of the orchestral sound; and it is at once also the task of this translation that every older work confronts us with, and which caused Wagner to propagate, without any doubts, the practice of retouching; this then led by way of Mahler to Schönberg's arrangements, which pose the problem of reproduction directly from the perspective of developing compositional technique, as it were. When Wagner equates the postulate of clarity with that of the ‘drastic emergence of the melody’,⁵¹ this naturally does not simply refer to the melody in the upper voice, but rather to the ‘running thread’, the principal voice accompanied by harmony and counterpoint that leaps from voice to voice and from group to group, whose progress – throughout the entire period from Bach to Schönberg – constitutes the most fundamental aspect of the gestural-musical context, and which is ultimately the element to be ‘retraced’ by the conductor. At the same time, admittedly, it is also this aspect which – as an increase in the awareness of interpretation – inaugurates the work's destruction, in the sense that the contradiction between context and phenomenon is not external to it, but rather constitutes its life-force; and which, if that contradiction should no longer exist, i.e. if the older work should one day appear in a form that is sensually absolutely appropriate, will bestow upon it precisely thus a bare, dead, reified quality once again, reproducing at a higher level the reification of stubbornly realizing ‘what is written’. It would be a futile undertaking, however, if, out of fear of what progress might do to the work in the realization of the context through the phenomenon, one sought to prevent it; for precisely the work itself has its substance in such movement, and lacks any substratum that could serve to oppose its immanent movement. It is the innermost nature of true interpretation to contribute to the death of its object.

(The following sources must be inserted at the corresponding points in this section: Wagner's definition of the ideal of insight for interpretation as one of the context, i.e. the ‘melody’: ‘Here I was suddenly seized by the revelation of which things depend on the delivery, and I immediately understood the secret for finding a pleasing solution to this task. The orchestra had just learned to recognize the Beethovenian melody in every bar that had entirely escaped our well-behaved Leipzig musicians at that time; and this melody was sung by the orchestra’.⁵² Regarding the definition the context's representation as the construction ideal derived from Schönberg, cite Dorian: ‘The romantic interpreter who gets his result by mere temperament, by a display of fire, sadness, or agitation, is, as Rudolf Kolisch remarks, at a loss with Schönberg. The romantic method necessarily consists of a heightening of the surface luster, rather than what Schönberg demands – balance and symmetry of presentation, where true insight into the construction governs the outline as well as all the details of the interpretation.’)⁵³

5

The demand for a recognition of the work based on its inner change exposes itself in advance to the suspicion of relativism. If there is no such thing as the work-in-itself, the argument goes, then its recognition is, in the strictest sense, also not possible; rather, changes in perception are nothing but subjective projections and a stylistic demeanour entirely external to the work. Faced with this argument, one should fundamentally begin by recalling Hegel's critique of aesthetic relativism as a reliance on ‘taste’. Relativism is an illusion that arises as soon as something is handled according to foreign, transcendental criteria. This should not be misunderstood in the sense of the commonplace wisdom of the expert, who withdraws to the privilege of special knowledge in the face of any methodical reflection and claims dogmatically that, for those in the know, the truth is always self-evident. This is certainly not the case, and every insight gained through the material is empirically open to error. Technical knowledge per se offers no guarantee of the objectivity of what is recognized, not only for the reason that it is normally acquired from general disciplines whose laws are by no means identical to the specificity of the individual work, but also because the idea of technical consistency contains not so much the means of settling any aesthetic question unequivocally as an indication of how the horizon of any aesthetic problem can be explored; through its movement, however, this indication also nullifies any isolated judgement of right and wrong applied to a particular aspect of a work. Aesthetic consistency has its own internal dialectic, and not even the clearest case of a technical flaw is sufficient in itself to pass judgement on the work, but may in fact, on a larger scale or at a higher level of insight into the semantic structure of the overall construction, transpire as an element of truth and coherence. It is worthy of note that it was Schönberg, who developed the concept of total organization in music, who repeatedly defended the ‘mistake’, the deviation, the unretouchable stain. In truth, the best works of art are by no means the most perfect ones, but rather those whose imperfection bears the most profound witness to their fundamental contradictions. That is why those works, whose success takes its measure from the failure of the world, assume something helpless, frail and disorganized under the gaze of contemporary cultural administration. But woe to any work of art that should therefore content itself with its own imperfection. It makes all the difference, however, whether the claim to the absolute, necessary and yet wrong, which is made by every individual aesthetic judgement, dissolves in the movement of its own consistency and that of the matter itself, or whether the abstract hypothesis of subjective relativity forms the starting-point, prevents determinate judgement and movement within the idea itself, and ultimately leads to a sabotage of the aesthetic truth-content and the instatement of the consumer perspective, which pronounces that whatever pleases is allowed, failing even to recognize that precisely that subjective preference to whose shelter it retreats is a mere reflex of something hammered into it by a standardized machinery of production. The sublation of the individual aesthetic judgement in the progress of its object's own discipline and reflection is not synonymous with its invalidity, but leaves in its place, most definitely, that legitimacy which it takes from it as soon as it goes beyond those places, and at the same time aesthetic truth and objectivity stand precisely within the whole of that movement to which the isolated judgement falls prey. Just as the fifths in the variation theme of the Appassionata are of no benefit to the bungler who has not yet understood the rule forbidding parallel fifths, and who then makes the excuse that he likes his incorrect fifths so much; and just as the difference between his harmonies and Beethoven's is by no means subjective and one of degree, but rather points to a factual case of correct or incorrect, although, viewed abstractly, Beethoven wrote the same thing as the bungler, but now as something correct, the dynamics and incompleteness of musical interpretation can equally not alter the determinate distinction between something correctly or incorrectly interpreted, through which alone the works can unfold historically. Assuming that the most advanced insight into certain instrumental works by Schubert, for example, showed that his works, being essentially non-integrally organized in their structure, did not demand an integral, but rather a fragmentary interpretation, i.e. one that was fragile and torn in relation to the ideal of a unified progression; then such an insight would surely not validate the sort of interpretation which pays no attention to the structural whole and revels in the individual thematic moments, for example, taking care of everything else as filler. The requirement would rather be to render the very structure of the whole as a fragmentary one, the totality as something that is not total, and with every detail it would have to be decided exactly whether the contextual dissolution called for here identifies itself objectively from its own recognition, or rather remains contingent and rhapsodic. The criterion would be whether the cracks to be produced through interpretation themselves transpire as significant, as carriers of meaning, no matter how negative, or whether they remain fortuitous, mere filler in relation to the details brought to light. Even the destruction of the context through interpretation, which certainly can be called for, is subordinate to the primacy of the context. Aesthetic relativism is the mere complement of absolutism: only where the pre-critical idea of the work-in-itself forms the basis, and precisely this being-in-itself in history exposes itself as questionable, does its historical essence become distorted into a mere nuance in different epochs and subjects and turned over to relativity; whereas, as soon as change has been made the essential principle, this essential principle at once constitutes the principle of truth or falsity of both work and interpretation. Every act of musical work, every unfolding of music as art that goes beyond a merely culinary sonic experience, does not presuppose the dogmatic prescription, but certainly the categorial possibility of a distinction between right and wrong, both for the composer and for the performer. The apperception of musical sense, that is to say the fulfilment of the context, lies precisely in this distinction, and in this respect musical experience – which does not exhaust itself in physics, but carries, virtually, the entire categorial apparatus of music within itself – behaves in the same manner in relation to elementary facts such as right or wrong notes, as well as a judgement on the appropriate or inappropriate rendition of an entire complex piece. Every step in the subject's progressing experience of the matter leads deeper into it, and thus into the necessity of representation; indeed, the essence of the work manifests itself only through the step-by-step journey through such necessities. It is precisely the relativist hypothesis of the fortuity of interpretation that is rigid and reified. It presupposes a separation of the object that is-for-itself and the observing subject, which can view it in different ways as it pleases. This only applies, however, where the two are hopelessly estranged: only dead works, as completely objectified ones, would fall prey to relativity of observation, just as it is no coincidence that the wilfulness of so-called interpretative views manifests itself most crudely in drained, worn-out works infected by the rigor mortis of convention. True interpretation consists not in the perspectival observation of a work that is given once and for all; rather, the work itself incorporates the dialectic of its observation and thus grants it objectivity through change. Whoever then imagines that they have their own view of the work is estranged from it, and will consequently perceive only its plaster cast; whoever understands it spontaneously recognizes it. The disappearance of an observing subjectivity within the work and the subject's part in the constitution of the work's objectivity are one and the same. The only truth to relativism is that the access to the work's objectivity found by the performer is fortuitous. The organization of the whole as a semantic context means that it makes no difference which aspect, which dimension the work of interpretation takes as its starting-point. Assuming that the consistency of listening logic is given, every point leads to the centre and from there to all others. Whoever has studied a work with performers knows how important it is to say anything at all, simply to start somewhere, and how little it matters exactly where, indeed whether the point singled out is right or wrong, as, in Kolisch's words, ‘something is always wrong’, and therefore even the wrong criticism or a vague suggestion – in so far as they follow the discipline of the context at all – serves true interpretation.

(In the passage that speaks of relativity as a mere illusion that crumbles in the determinacy of exact work, insert the following sentence: if, for example, one were to confront the leader of a string quartet during his work with the relativity of his demands, espousing the possibility of contradictory ones, he would understand this objection less the more subjectively he was immersed in the work, but would thus also know less about its objectivity. The more narrow-mindedly he seemed to attack a mere technical casuistry, the more philosophical truth he would have on his side. – Where I write that the dialectical progress of interpretation also relativizes to a degree, i.e. that the isolated aesthetic judgement comes to an end, it should be expanded upon how this relativization differs concretely from aesthetic relativism. Motif: a conductor presents a work in nonsensical, mechanical symmetry with accents on the 1st and 3rd beats. The musical consciousness recognizes the contradiction between the manner of presentation and the context, i.e. the structure of the composition as one that differs from the schematic beat-divisions. This leads to the demand for a presentation of the sense, and that presentation may now for its part have come very gently into conflict with the fidelity to the text, or even with the organization of the whole, for example by one-sidedly holding together the expressive aspect at the expense of the constructive element for the sake of the sense, by emphasizing it through unity of tempo etc. In short, the process bears the traces of relativity, but in determinate negation: for all his mistakes, lack of clarity, imprecision and wilfulness, Furtwängler still represents the truth in comparison to the North German school of time-beating. The fact that he sometimes veers off into untruth does not make that latter any truer. The critical process to which that interpretational movement ultimately amounts is the objective unfolding of the dialectic locked within the work: musical interpretation is inseparable from critique. This manner of dialectical relativity does not mean an equality of views, but is rather the instrument of their abolition. True interpretation is a strictly predefined idea, but one that, for the sake of the antinomic essence of all musical works of art, cannot be realized itself. – In place of the music-lingual the idiomatic element.)

Structural keywords for chapters 2, 4 and 5 of the draft

2

Sign system, conceptuality

Letters

Absence of intention and pseudomorphosis towards verbal terms.

Recourse to the mimic aspect

My theory notes 20ff.

Historical crutches

Conclusions	Necessity of interpretation the zone of indeterminacy and the conceptual cf. Dorian
Interpretation does not aim for ‘intentions’	Paradox of the sign for the gestus
	Interpretation as the reinstatement of the gestus.
	Imitation. (Original manuscript)
	Change in the expression of writing as its measure.
	This change not direct, expression rather only retrievable through the concept, i.e. confrontation of writing with the ideal of the sound.

NB the context of music, its sense, is thus itself not intentional, but rather gestural

Music's expression is its indication of the gestus, which it ‘demonstrates’ for imitation.

NB the necessity of language's encroachment upon music in spite of its externality must become clear

4

1. The separation of music into text and interpretation is itself not fortuitous, but rather an expression of its dual character as mime and language. Being mimic, it cannot be purely read, and being lingual, it cannot be purely imitated. Reproduction therefore a form.
2. Reproduction necessary.
3. The zone of indeterminacy is structurally determined; no mere lack, yet no absolute, but rather questioning indeterminacy.
4. Interpretation as a reinstatement of the gestus through the intention.
5. It is not the task of interpretation to realize intentions, but rather to liquidate them through fulfilment.
6. This is possible from the two poles of
   1. α) the interpretation of the symbol through the neumic image of the whole, the mimic context.
   2. β) the imitation of the written score's appearance through fidelity against the symbol.
7. The original manuscript.

5

derive change from theory of writing.

historical character of interpretation.

categories and examples of change.

proof of the objectivity of change

laws of change as the unfolding of the immanent characters, the ‘life’ of the works.

Notes

1    Hugo Riemann, Handbuch der Musikgeschichte, vol. 1, part 1, 3rd edn, Leipzig, 1923, p. 8 [Adorno's note].

2    Ernest Neumann, The Life of Richard Wagner, New York, 1946, vol. 4, pp. 290f. [Adorno's note].

3    Richard Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften, 2nd edn, Leipzig, 1888, vol. 8, pp. 290f. [Adorno's note].

4    Ibid., pp. 290f. [Adorno's note].

5    Walter Benjamin, ‘Vorwort über die Aufgabe des Übersetzers zur deutschen Übertragung der Tableaux Parisiens von Charles Baudelaire’, Heidelberg, 1923, p. 7. [Adorno's note]; [English translation: ‘The Translator's Task’, in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, trans. Harry Zohn, New York: Schocken, 1969, pp. 69–82].

6    See Theodor A. Meyer, Das Stilgesetz der Poesie [The Stylistic Law of Poetry], Leipzig, 1901, pp. 55ff. [Adorno's note].

7    See Riemann, loc. cit., I, 1, p. 61, and Studien zur Geschichte der Notenschrift (1878) [Adorno's note].

8    Riemann, loc. cit., I, 1, p. 9 [Adorno's note].

9    TN: it was necessary here to make a compromise that conceals some subtle distinctions and relations in the original German. The first instance of ‘disposal’ in the sentence marked is the translation of Verfügung, the second that of Verfügen. The verb verfügen means ‘to have something at one's disposal’, with the adjective verfügbar for ‘available’. Verfügung is used to imply control of various sorts, also in legal terms (e.g. a court injunction), while the verbal noun Verfügen implies the act or state of disposal, of control. While ‘disposal’ is potentially misleading through its other, more common meaning, the alternatives seem even less satisfactory: ‘control’ is too unspecific, and is the obvious correlate of Kontrolle in any case, while ‘availability’ would convey only one sense of the word, and place an inappropriate emphasis on ideas relating to commodification and commercialization.

10    TN: see previous note.

11    See Arnold Schoenberg, ‘A New Twelve-Tone Notation’, in Style and Idea, pp. 354–62.

12    Riemann, op. cit., I, 1, p. 31 [Adorno's note].

13    Ibid., I, 2, p. 84 [Adorno's note].

14    Ibid. [Adorno's note].

15    Ibid., pp. 84f. [Adorno's note].

16    See ibid., p. 85 [Adorno's note].

17    Ibid., p. 89 [Adorno's note].

18    Ibid., p. 199 [Adorno's note].

19    Ibid., p. 95 [Adorno's note].

20    Ibid. [Adorno's note].

21    Ibid., p. 106 [Adorno's note].

22    TN: the original word Beseelung is not the common term for ‘inspiration’, but rather a literal correlate, according to its original meaning as the act of breathing life into something inanimate (in-spiring). Beseelung, from the noun Seele, meaning ‘soul’, offers a slight variation on this by connoting a bestowal of soul upon something lifeless, but simultaneously connects to ‘inspiration’ through the equivalence of ‘soul’ and ‘breath’ found in several languages (e.g. pneuma in Greek).

23    Ibid. [Riemann, op. cit.], p. 107 [Adorno's note].

24    Benjamin, op. cit., p. 11 [Adorno's note].

25    TN: see note 22, above.

26    Frederick Dorian, The History of Music in Performance, New York, 1942, p. 28 [Adorno's note].

27    See note 84, p. 247.

28    TN: see note 22, above.

29    TN: the original word nachgemacht establishes a direct connection to the preceding adjective gemacht (‘made’); this reminds us of the literal meaning of nachmachen, which is to ‘after-make’ or ‘after-do’ something, i.e. to duplicate or re-produce it after and in imitation of its original instantiation. This consequently has a slightly different implication, at least at the etymological level, to the synonym nachahmen; the verb ahmen, which no longer exists, connotes measure, giving this word a more calculated, theoretical shading, as opposed to the activity suggested by nachmachen. Although there are occasional exceptions to a pure equivalence of the two words, as in the case of material duplication, where only nachmachen would be used, there is in practice little difference between them, and I have hence generally translated both equally as ‘imitate’.

30    The passage already quoted in Versuch über Wagner from Alfred Lorenz's Das Geheimnis der Form bei Richard Wagner; see In Search of Wagner, p. 33.

31    ‘With regard to the logic and the genesis of the work, there are, grossly speaking, two types of composition. In the first, the whole is derived from the details, conceived as musical germs, and developed blindly under the compulsion of their inherent drive. The works of Schubert and Schumann belong to this type, and originally also those of Schoenberg, who said that when composing a song he allowed himself to be impelled by the initial words without taking the whole poem into consideration. In the second type, which is the inverse of the first, all the details are derived from the whole. The works of Beethoven belong to the second type. The greatness of a composer is essentially defined by the extent to which both types are integrated in his work – Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and Schoenberg are exemplary in this respect. If the composer clings undialectically to the first type of composing, as did Dvořák for instance, he produces a potpourri of “ideas” connected arbitrarily or schematically. The other extreme is represented by Handel, and leads to a sweeping though somewhat abstract conception of the whole, with sketchy, incomplete, and often superficial details’ (Adorno and Eisler, Composing for the Films, p. 94).

32    TN: the original use of Notenbild here poses a problem: whereas this is a general term for the written score and its appearance, and has been translated accordingly elsewhere, the particular emphasis placed here on its constitution, namely from Note(n) (‘written note[s]’) and Bild (‘image’), forced a more explicatory translation. It remains exceptional here.

33    Cf. ibid. [Dorian, The History of Music in Performance], pp. 224ff.; cf. Wagner, op. cit., p. … [Adorno's note]. The editor considers it necessary to replace the intended reference to Wagner with a reference to the Schumann text that Dorian quotes here: ‘Über einige mutmaßlich korrumpierte Stellen in Bachschen, Mozartschen und Beethovenschen Werken’ [Concerning Various Presumably Corrupted Passages in Works by Bach, Mozart and Beethoven], in Robert Schumann, Gesammelte Schriften über Musik und Musiker, Leipzig, n.d., vol. 3, pp. 66–72; the passage on the Pastoral Symphony is on pp. 70–2.

34    See note 26, p. 240.

35    See Ernst Kurth, Musikpsychologie, Berlin, 1931, pp. 1–3.

36    Ibid. [Dorian, op. cit.], p. 181 [Adorno's note].

37    ‘If you have completely mastered a major work in all its details, you sometimes experience moments in which your consciousness of time suddenly disappears and the entire work seems to be what one might call “spatial”, that is, with everything present simultaneously in the mind with precision’ (Alfred Lorenz, op. cit., p. 292; quoted in In Search of Wagner, p. 33).

38    Benjamin, op. cit., p. 10 [Adorno's note].

39    Dorian, op. cit., p. 69 [Adorno's note]. Dorian is referring to the article ‘Battre la mesure’ in Rousseau's Dictionnaire de musique.

40    Dorian, op. cit., p. 117 [Adorno's note].

41    TN: in English in the original.

42    Igor Stravinsky, Erinnerungen [Memoirs], Zurich and Berlin, 1937, pp. 98ff. [Adorno's note].

43    TN: in English in the original.

44    TN: in the original German, Adorno emphasizes the contradiction by using two words based on the same root: Tradition and tradierbar, the latter meaning ‘transmittable, capable of being passed down’.

45    Beethoven, Sonata for Violin and Piano [in G major, op. 96], Finale, after the general pause, 8 bars before letter L and 8 bars after L [Adorno's note].

46    Eduard Steuermann, quoted in Dorian, op. cit., p. 332 [Adorno's note]. Dorian quotes (without page reference) Steuermann's essay ‘The Piano Music of Schönberg’, in M. Armitage, Schönberg, New York, 1937.

47    Richard Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften und Dichtungen, Leipzig, 1888, vol. 9, pp. 251f. [Adorno's note].

48    Ibid., p. 232 [Adorno's note].

49    Ibid. [Adorno's note].

50    Ibid., pp. 232f. [Adorno's note].

51    Ibid., p. 234 [Adorno's note].

52    Op. cit. [Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften], vol. 8, p. 271 [Adorno's note].

53    Dorian, op. cit., p. 333 [Adorno's note].