So modernity, by disenchanting the world, divides it. Modern music is therefore divided. One of the first signs of this division is the expulsion of music from language, as if tones and words were separate entities vying for power. This is why the history of modern music is staged dialectically as a struggle between instrumental and vocal forces grappling for totality. Music's progress and its desire for meaning are both generated by a split that is the mark of its modernity.

Hegel claimed that the Reformation witnessed some of the earliest stirrings of modern consciousness. Once again, modernity is born out of division; it broke out of a cataclysmic fracture that not only split Christianity but divided Europe into warring factions. Thus it is hardly surprising that modern progress should move schismatically for Hegel, pushing itself forward through a continual conflict of reformation and counter-reformation which the philosopher would conceptualise as the dialectic of history. What is modern about the Reformation for Hegel is that humanity finally discovers its individual freedom as a kind of ‘heretical principle’; humanity liberates itself from the past through an exercise of individual reason, embodied in the figure of Martin Luther nailing his theses on the door of the Wittenburg church. However, the freedom of modern subjectivity which Hegel speaks of is the very freedom that Max Weber describes as an incarceration; the rationality of the Protestant work ethic closes in on humanity like an ‘iron cage’.