hegel, philosophy, and music 115Music itself cannot be construed as making claims in the sense Bran-
dom intends, but it just as clearly can be interpreted, because it possesses
meaning, albeit in a manner which cannot be fully explained by discur-
sive claims. Such meaning can be illuminated by discursive, metaphor-
ical, and gestural responses, but these responses cannot replace the
experience of the music itself, both from the point of view of the per-
former and of the listener. This is precisely where explanations can
reach a limit in the sense to which Cavell and Wittgenstein advert.
Wittgenstein puts ‘explanation’ in inverted commas because what he
means is the establishing of different contexts in which we may grasp
something of how the music might be understood, without making
any literal claims. This understanding is apparent in music’s capacity
even to take on forms which have a structure that can be understood
as related to a claim – ‘that is as if an inference were being made’. A
simple example of this is the juxtaposition of two phrases that relate as
‘question and answer’, of the kind one encounters in many forms of
music. Similarly, the passage from the Rasumovsky Quartet cited above
might be heard as a kind of parenthesis which may change our very
sense of what a parenthesis can be. Brandom can object here that one
must first understand inference and parenthesis in terms of material
inference, before they can apply to music. However, this is a two-way
process: one must – as Brandom insists – first understand such forms
of intelligibility as part of the world, but this understanding can resist
the translation from knowing how to knowing that. The experience
of expecting something as a consequence of something else, which is
part of what it is to be in a world at all, involves a pattern of inference
which need not become theoretically explicit and which is also a consti-
tutive part of the experience and practice of music. Musical innovation
often relies on contradicting the expected consequences from previous
events in a piece, and this can then set up another kind of inferential
pattern which influences subsequent music.
It might be objected that the whole point of Brandom’s project of
‘making it explicit’ is to convert the pre-theoretical immediate into
the theoretically mediated, but the question is whether this may not
exclude something quite fundamental. The grounding of the sort of
understanding Wittgenstein discusses would not be of the same kind as
an explanation, and seems to relate rather to what Kant suggested by
the notion of the aesthetic idea, which ‘gives much to think about, but
without any determinate thought, i.e.conceptbeing able to be adequate
to it, which consequently no language can completely attain and make