hegel, philosophy, and music 111Schn ̈adelbach says has to ‘show itself and be experienced’. This is not
immediacy in the strict sense, because, while perhaps having an immedi-
ate affective impact, what shows itself requires a whole series of contexts
and abilities for it to communicate what it does. Adorno says that
Hegel’s insight is certainly fruitful for music, that all immediacy is admit-
tedly mediated, dependent on its opposite, but that the concept of some-
thing immediate, as something which has become, has emerged, does
not just disappear in the mediation. However, this immediacy which is
relativised into a moment would not be the note, but the unique figure
which can be grasped distinctly as something to some degree plastic,
which is different from contrast and progress.
(Adorno 1997 : 16 , 520 )An example of such a ‘unique figure’ which cannot be just understood
in terms of its relations occurs when the slow movement of Beethoven’s
1 st Rasumovsky String Quartet is transformed by a suddenly inter-
polated new section in D-flat. Adorno interprets the passage as an ‘alle-
gory of hope’ (Adorno 1993 : 250 ) because it emerges at a point in a
deeply sad movement where there is no formal necessity for it to be
there at all and is one of the greatest moments in all of Beethoven.
The transformation depends on a unique kind of appropriateness or
rightness which is felt as part of a practice that cannot be fully grasped
by a command of linguistic meanings, or even of the tools of musicol-
ogy. Awareness of inferentially articulated contexts is still essential to
the possibility of the understanding in question here – even to hear
the change of mood and significance one must be able to contrast the
passage with what precedes it and what follows it – as is a command of
language, but Brandom’s and Hegel’s concentration on the conceptual
cannot do full justice to phenomena of this nature.
Both at the level of production and at the level of reception musical
understanding involves a kind of material inference which cannot be
articulated in terms of ‘an explanation of what it is to say something that
is powerful enough to explain what it itself is saying’. The translation of
‘knowing how’ into ‘knowing that’ which underpins Brandom’s enter-
prise reaches a limit here. In tonally based jazz improvisation the choice
of notes can be seen as involving inferences from the chords which allow
correctness of performance, but deliberate ‘playing outside’ the chords
can equally be successful. To carry out and understand this sort of play-
ing involves a version of material inference that relies on something
which may never fully be articulable in a theory of jazz harmony. If one