Toward a Deconstruction of Structural Listening159debatable audibility of that concept, its relative inability to account for the particularities of a musical surface, and its reliance on archetypal musical structures as well as on nontemporal, visual schematics, is not a matter that can be analyzed here. Development, on the other hand, is widely considered by Western musicologists to be capable of projecting the impression of such self-determination. Schoenberg and Adorno quite openly define structural listening as developmental listening. But as virtually all scholars would concede, very little music, even Western art music, makes use of the technique of development (Schoenberg's perception of Bach's music as in some respects developmental [see note 37, this chapter] is not widely shared. Indeed, Bach's achievement is probably better characterized as the synthesis of a great diversity of generic concepts�concerto, trio sonata, dance, fugue, and so forthhan as structural selfdetermination.) In its pure state, moreover, the condition of self-determination, or even the projection of such a condition, would require the renunciation of premises, organizational principles, purposes, values, and meanings derived from outside of a musical structure. Almost no Western music outside of certain Classical and contemporary endeavors has come close to accepting such a condition of renunciation. Up until the end of the eighteenth century, for example, most music was shaped to serve an external social function; and in keeping with deep-rooted mimetic or rhetorical ideals, the dominating paradigm of music throughout this period was music with a text. Furthermore, Western music has been assumed in most periods to owe at least some of its significance to a larger cultural network of extra-musical ideas or stylistically related constructs. Structural listening looks on the ability of a unifying principle to establish the internal "necessity" of a strucure as tantamount to a guarantee of musical value. At the very least this assumption challenges the spirit of Godel's theorem. In practice, however, the principle on which structural listening relies more than any other to authenticate value is not one of self-evident rationality but rather one of its own choosing: individuality. Both Schoenberg and Adorno emphasize the responsibility of the conscious individual, whether composing or listening, to clarify actively the internal intelligibility of a structure, a process that, ideally, frees the meaning of that structure from social distortion and manipulation. Even in those instances when Schoenberg and Adorno concede the possibility of an instantaneous intuition of musical value, they attribute such intuition at bottom to a structural integrity in the music; and this integrity can be achieved only through an individualis-
