hegel, philosophy, and music 119Spinozist/Hegelian structure which is also the basis of Saussurean lin-
guistics. To move from the semiotic level of material incompatibility of
signs to the semantic level, though, one needs a pragmatic theory of the
kind Brandom proposes, such that signifiers can allow us to make utter-
ances about what we understand in the world that can be accepted or
rejected by others. It is not clear, however, that this approach to language
as inferentially articulated communicative action founded on claims
can capture the musical dimensions of language, or that it exhausts the
ways in which music itself can be meaningful. There are cases where one
can justifiably maintain, on the basis of discursively established norms,
that the tone or rhythm of a verbal piece of communicative action is
appropriate or inappropriate, but certain kinds of rightness or inap-
propriateness, of the kind that we can concentrate on in poetry, do
not reduce to such claims. They can only be experienced in the act of
hearing what ‘these words in these positions’ (Wittgenstein) do that no
other combination of words can. The notion of ‘these words in these
positions’ is inseparable from the idea that music relies on ‘these notes
in these positions’. In both cases a translation or paraphrase can illu-
minate but cannot replace the encounter with the particular piece of
articulation.
In inferentialist terms musical notes relate to a tonal system in a
manner analogous to the way signifiers relate to a linguistic system.
However, what we can say is happening in music at a conceptualisable
level – ‘this passage is in the relative minor’, etc. – does not explain the
ways in which the music may be understood at an affective level, or may
be played in a world-disclosing manner, even though the conceptual
description is obviously connected to such understanding. The crucial
fact is that it is the relationships between notes that count: transpos-
ing a piece does not, for example, change essential things about the
form of the piece. Adorno argues that in music ‘The task of interpre-
tation is of course not faithfulness to the textan sich, but the presen-
tation of “the work”, i.e. of the music for which the text stands in’
(Adorno 2001 : 89 ). The ‘music’ in this sense becomes a kind of reg-
ulative idea in terms of which ‘interpretation measures itself by the
level of its failure’ (ibid.: 120 ) (on this see chapter 9 ). Merleau-Ponty
claims that during the performance of a piece of music, ‘the sounds
are not just “signs” of the sonata, but it is there via them, it descends
into them’ (Merleau-Ponty 1945 : 213 ). The pragmatic use of linguistic
noises can, as Brandom argues, be interpreted in terms of mapping the
behaviour or action of another onto my behaviour or action, so that