hegel, philosophy, and music 117Adorno says of the musicality present in poetic usage: ‘Musical is the
transformation of language into a sequencing whose elements connect
themselves differently from in the judgement’ (Adorno 1997 : 11 , 471 ).
Such transformation can take us somewhere that paraphrase involving
judgements cannot reach: ‘Works of art point, as it were, judgement-
lessly to their content without it becoming discursive. The spontaneous
reaction of the recipients is mimesis towards the immediacy of this ges-
ture’ (Adorno 1997 : 7 , 363 ). Adorno goes on to say that this moment
must be subjected to critique and to the concept, but it is clear that with-
out this prior spontaneous moment there is no art at all: ‘But art, mime-
sis which has been driven to consciousness of itself, is still bound to the
stimulus, to the immediacy of experience; otherwise it would be indistin-
guishable from science’ (ibid.: 385 ).^6 He comments in the ‘Fragment
on Music and Language’ that ‘interpreting language means: under-
standing language; interpreting music means: making music’ (Adorno
1997 : 16 , 253 ), suggesting another way in which making something
explicit cannot be construed solely in terms of claims. He also argues,
though, that in music ‘the sequence of sounds (‘Laute’) is related to
logic: there is right and wrong’ (ibid.: 251 ). This claim about the nor-
mative nature of music offers a further way of questioning the overly
cognitive nature of Brandom’s conception. Right and wrong in music
can just be a technical matter which takes place in terms of commit-
ments and entitlements. If you claim to be playing a particular piece to
an audience, there is much that one is objectively committed to, though
exactly what is essentially contested.^7 However, right and wrong can also
have to do with interpretative decisions about how something is to be
played, of a kind which are closely related to linguistic usage but which
may only be conveyed by gesture.
A pragmatist orientation like Brandom’s surely requires attention to
the musical dimension of language-use that is not captured in terms of
the propositional content on which Brandom focuses as the basis of all
other kinds of intelligibility. Connecting the wider pragmatic dimen-
sions of language to music, Lawrence Kramer suggests that while ‘locu-
tionary effects are confined to the sphere of language, illocutionary
force need not be’ (Kramer 1990 : 9 ). A more convincing pragmatist
approach to this issue than that of Brandom was already suggested by
6 ‘Mimesis’ in Adorno does not refer to imitation as a form of representation, but rather
to a sympathetic response towards an object, of the kind which can, for example, be part
of playing a piece of music. (See chapter 9 .)
7 Think of Nelson Goodman’s almost universally disputed claim that unless all the notes
of the score are realised, the piece has not been played.