Afterword: On Certainty

Abstract

Abstract This begins as a coda to Chapter 9 but draws on many themes from the book. In music as elsewhere, modernity has involved the abstraction of models of the world that are then treated as if they were the world. Musical notations are highly reductive—as cues for complex, real-time action they have to be—and cannot embody everything that matters in music. Ignoring or eliminating what is not rationalised gives rise to the false certainties that, among other things, underpin the oppressive culture of classical performance today. But music also shows how the irrational can be mobilised within the rationalised systems that structure everyday life. Approached from the relational perspective put forward in this book, music can suggest ways in which the reified structures of modernity can be humanised. Music cannot bring about a better world, but it does provide some hints as to what it might look like.