hegel, philosophy, and music 109individuated by their relata, and the relata by the relations they stand
in. But relations betweenwhat, exactly? The intelligibility of the rela-
tions themselves is threatened’ (ibid.: 187 ). If we assign a number to
every possible pitch in a total system we would have a system in which
the relata are all individuated. (This in fact leads to a – determinable –
infinity of notional different pitches.) However, we wanted to under-
stand what is encountered as a sound in the world as anotein music,
not as a number in an infinite, but determinate system. The note is
both an audible sensation and something which requires a system of
relations which extends beyond the determination of its frequency into
a series of human practices for it to be a musical note. For the note
to play a role in music, we therefore require further levels of contex-
tual understanding, which can include affective understanding, and
this is where things get more difficult. The difficulty is that the consti-
tution of intelligibility can go in both directions: if, as we saw in the
preceding chapters, the very understanding of real language-use relies
in some respects on structures of intelligibility associated with music, a
philosophical account like Brandom’s, which is founded on the mak-
ing and justifying of claims, may leave inadequate space for dimensions
of expression and communication that cannot be construed in those
terms. The issue here is not the fact that even musical understanding
cannot do without language use, but rather whether language use is
sufficient to articulate all that we understand via music. Wittgenstein
exemplifies the sort of alternative forms of articulation I mean when
he talks of gesture as a response to music (see chapter 8 ). These ques-
tions must clearly affect the perception of the scope and nature of the
philosophical enterprise.
Brandom argues that ‘We must reconceive the things we are talk-
ing about... in such a way that the immediacies that became first
available are construed assigns, expressing a reality articulated by the
relations that we first understood at the second stage’ (ibid.: 205 ). A
lot turns here on just how the notion of a sign is conceived: is a note
only a sign to the extent to which it is conceptualised in the manner
of ‘this noise is E, the third step in the key of C’? What, though, of the
way in which a note gains a significance in a unique musical context,
like the dissonant trumpet note in the dischord that precedes the coda
of the third movement of Bruckner’s Ninth? What reality does such a
‘note as sign’ express? It is not just the reality of its relations to the other
notes as shown in a musical analysis (whose terms may be contested and
undecidable anyway). The musical context in this example is not just