The Philosophy of Music
triumphal terrains. The symphony is sonority that is only just taking shape; its form is impatience, destruction, escalation, a constant sighting as yet without lingering, absolute vision; its counterpoint does not set
linea contra lineam,
butcomplexum contra complexum,
and in this remembered "historical" horizontalism first provides the simultaneity, the totality, the shape borne upwards.
For this purpose, then, the voices had at first to become lighter, also pause often, in order to acquire and retain momentum. Since then, how ever, the sound has filled out again, become more songful and filigrane. A difficult new simultaneity: the organically interwoven string playing and the violent symphonic fire with its lethargies, climaxes and the spirit of the future. What Schubert nevertheless initiated, Bruckner and Wag ner's polyphony have taken further, and Beethoven's now and then thin, unsonorous symphonic writing, dedicated only to the functioning of the whole, melismatically only punctuated, has become identifiable as pre cisely its least essential and most easily dispensable element. Afterward everything could again become right hand in piano music, or an individ ual, richly blossoming solo passage within orchestral ensemble playing. It has turned out, to a certain extent, that there is an evidence, a chamber musical subtlety, a contrapuntal minimum still underlying the fugue that represents only
one
of its potential formsY This subtlety is always just a means, always just a cipherless, meaningless, reflexive formula, just as the entire theory of harmony was, but its different, specific superstructures are objectively determining forms, depending on the rhythm. If one nonetheless makes the fugal application unconditional, if one suppresses everything else that the sonata has brought in terms of succession, of the meaningful competition between the harmonic and the contrapuntal, es pecially of counterpoint within the dramatic harmony, then the fugue's counterpoint will also become reflexive: as something applicable to every thing and thus to nothing, not even to itself, as a kind of ingenuity pat terned on a single one of its concretions and hence become drab, which has lost precisely its transcending, differential valence in the properly as sembledsystem
of counterpoints. If therefore the mobile and yet regular, .tran�parent participation of the voices has returned, if above all Bruckner allows varied melismatic play, and all remaining signs indicate that mu- \
sic is moving toward an ever higher degree of filigrane, carving, and in
ner power, this does not immediately suggest a copyist's return to the .
brocade, as though Mozart had backslid from Bach's Baroque into a light Rococo and Beethoven into the stark Empire style, as if, finally, Bruck ner's and Wagner's polyphonic symphonic style had broken off the old architectonic counterpoint in favor of a minor handicraft all around their
illegitimate dramatizing. Even the other demand, that the
ultimate music
should correlate to the fugue's melismatic-contrapuntal balance as an ac tualization, in the same way that reality correlates to the corrective, sig nifies no disregard for the dynamic sonata, no "Onward to the fugue!" Rather: the historical Beethoven is closer to the "real" Bach than the his torical Bach is; the gradual convergence to the old music of space is an
acte accessoire,
a fundamental Beethovenian accomplishment, a purelysubstantial act of grace crowning the perfected system, and so the
total
dramatic counterpoint
remains as the place of preparation laid before theultimate music, before the ontology of music as such.
Then again, here too the ear hears more than the concept can explain.
Or to put it differently, one senses everything and kAows exactly where one is, but the light that burns in one's heart goes out when it is brought into the intellect. For that reason, then, in order to correctly understand
what is contrapuntally intended, a new self must be set
above
the counterpoints as mere indicative form, the self experienced during listening, the individuality of the great composers themselves who apply the differ ent types of counterpoint, as the properly expressive-descriptive seal, in
deed, even as the incipiently undistanced ideogram. It is not possible here
to explain something purely intellectually and then immediately to corre
late it beyond. The game has to follow rules, certainly, but what the needy human being seeks within it, beyond it, does not. Thus for example it is laid that Beethoven connects the complementary themes with greater dis cernment than Mozart. This obviously does not suffice to explain the heard, the most colorful activity: it is not only better when Beethoven errs rhan when a theorist is right, but also this aspect, wherein Beethoven is
IIrrict and wise, ultimately cannot be reflected as strictness and wisdom in
terms of counterpoint as form, nor of the second, kaleidoscopic counter point of succession. To the same extent, what is formally given-which hefe also means, always, what is given according to the form-should no
I�ss fail when the point is to deduce not only the "where from," which
'coliid if necessary still be "explained" by means of the contrary friction
And purification of the themes, but the "where to," the storm in which
The Philosophy of Music
nameless struggle, the deeper Why and What of the rewards of victory and all the remaining spiritual forces of this game, so meager and so aim less in terms of the formal cipher. Certainly everything is well ordered, then; there is just as much "mathematics" in here as there is order, and certainly to that extent the types of counterpoint-like the relational, structural and morphological systems of the banquet, the festival, the dance; like strategy, functional theory and systematization generally-can be developed within a taxonomy: the essence of music is thereby as little if not less depleted than logic and categorial theory can give an account of metaphysics. For what one infers from the scaffolding, that is just the provincial stage where Garrick played Hamlet, or, to be exact: Bach and Beethoven, the
great subjects themselves, appear above the form they utilize,
the indicative cipher, the merely lower objective determination; appear as the calling, creating, expressive-descriptive seal, indeed precisely-since here the needle sinks as when near the pole-as incipiently undistanced ideograms, as indicators of the musical metaphysics of inwardness. So lit tle does the mere compositional layout encompass what the deeply moved listener immediately knows and comprehends: music's hall of the mirrors and its guests, this theater of magic and illusion; and without the new, au togenous, metaphysical commitment of a subject who will carry on the essence of Bach or Beethoven, even the more profound forms of counter point remain mere, higher orders of mechanization, which can in no way continuously guide us across to the fugue or the sonata
in their ideal state.
It is Bach and Beethoven alone, then, who exist ultimately as transcend ing counterpoint: Bach and Beethoven alone, and something within our receptivity which can answer Bach and Beethoven as the generative and underivative force, as the living force by virtue of which all this happens, as the sole essential tenet of discontinuous music theory, as the great en counter of a particular subjectivity compelling one into its sphere, and as the individual named Bach or Beethoven that is
prima facie-in
terms of the philosophy of history-so general and canonical that, like Plotinus' angels, it can stand as the operative category of this sole possible tran scending counterpoint.There are four great ways of having counterpoint, then, and all of them
prima facie
possess an objective relationship to ethical facts. Now of course it was precisely music to which we assigned a markedly eccentric role in history. But then music is historically nonconformal for just the.tory of our kernel; because, in other words, the history of modern music, as "belated" music as such, is too large for modernity's space, and corre spondingly, as was already evident from our presentation of rhythm, this art form's marked historical eccentricity is grounded in the totality of its categorial recapitulation of the philosophy of history and the ethics of in wardness. There are in other words four great hierarchies of having coun terpoint, and these possess a constitutive correlation to the metaphysical ethical spheres of the self, albeit one to be complemented by listening, creating, and not simply demonstrable directly, without a leap. Accord ingly Mozart is Greek, offers the small, secular self, gentle, is Attic coun terpoint, pagan joy, the soul conscious of itself, the soul of feeling, the stage of the self that takes the form of play. Bach is medieval, offers the small spiritual self, powerfully built, sac rally complete, a ruby glass of music, architectonic counterpoint, filled with love and hope, with the re membering or actual self-soul, with Adam's atoned soul, in other words the self in the shape of faith. Beethoven, Wagner in cohtrast have broken out; they summon, lead into the