108 music, philosophy, and modernity
them as standing to one another in relations of material incompati-
bility’ (Brandom 2002 : 179 ). As Hegel’s remark suggests, this idea is
easily applicable to music. In music the notes of a scale or chord are
‘materially incompatible’ with each other because each gains its iden-
tity by excluding the other notes in the scale or chord. The note is also
unified with these notes via the specific relations in which it stands to
them; in turn, the identity of the scale itself becomes determinate by its
not being other scales. This Spinozist structure permeates Hegel’s phi-
losophy at every level. Brandom shows how one can understand Hegel’s
account of immediacy and mediation as a way of responding to contem-
porary epistemological questions concerning the relationship between
the material and the form of cognition. However, in theAesthetics, Hegel
uses a version of this same account to establish a contentious evaluation
of the kind of ‘immediacy’ we considered in examining the question of
feeling and music. This evaluation has consequences which go beyond
the scope of what Brandom considers, and relates to questions for his
project that we shall consider in this section.
Brandom claims that ‘theonlyform the world we talk and think of can
take is that of a world of facts about particular objects and their proper-
ties and relations’ (Brandom 1994 : xxiii) which are expressed in claims.
He relegates any other sense of intentionality to the realm of animal
consciousness or to the merely psychological. This move seems to me
too restrictive with regard to the kinds of understanding involved in
music. An account of the way in which we conceptualise the material of
music would begin for Brandom’s Hegel with the non-inferential grasp-
ing of a note, taken as an example of a property, as ‘immediately contentful.
It just is the thing it is, brutely there...thethings presented in sensation
are taken as being what they are apart from any relations among them’
(ibid.: 204 ). The next stage occurs with the awareness that the property
of being a note ‘is determinate only insofar as it strongly differs from
other properties’ (ibid.). The note becomes more determinate, indeed
becomes a note at all, rather than a mere noise, by being related to
other things which are different from it. We could start, for example,
by saying that the auditory sensation in question is not a colour, then
that it is not an arbitrary environmental noise, then that it is not such
and such a note because it is lower, and so on. How, though, are these
relationships to be made intelligible, given the following problem?
At the level of mediation one can just endlessly detail the difference
between the frequency numbers of pitches without that making them
into what we understand as music. Brandom says that ‘the relations are