music, language, and origins 77precisely in terms of their rhetorical impact and as involving the ‘char-
acteristic’ (ibid.: 99 ).^9 The relationship between music and philosoph-
ical reflection can here be seen as going both ways, such that music
already articulates what conceptual thought as yet fails to articulate,
and vice versa. This is not, though, as Dahlhaus tends to imply, just an
issue of praxis preceding theory in the one case, and the converse in
the other.
The issue goes deeper because the thought and the music of the
early-modern period relate in more complex ways. If the intelligibility
of language and of music are inextricably related to each other, proposi-
tionally articulated accounts of music may themselves, as some Roman-
tic texts do, involve ‘musical’ elements. Furthermore, music need not
be understood just in terms of what is described by theories of music,
because it can itself help to constitute new kinds of thinking. The emer-
gence of the notion of a ‘musical idea’ from Kant’s notion of the ‘aes-
thetic idea’ in Romantic thought (see Neubauer 1986 ) indicates how
the notion of thought as inherently propositional and representational
fails to come to terms with some of the kinds of intelligibility involved in
the practices of music. What does an improvising musician do, for exam-
ple, but have ideas which can be heard and felt as right or wrong, good
or bad, etc., which can be normatively evaluated in the way that much
verbal language is? There is no reason to see these ideas as somehow
actually verbal, even though there may be verbal elements in the ways
they come about and though they may be subsequently characterised
in verbal terms.
Lest this all seem rather too eccentric for many philosophers, what
is at issue are really just the ways in which non-representational concep-
tions of language, which do not assume that there are radical breaks
between differing forms of articulation and understanding, can reveal
the interplay between differing symbolic and expressive resources in
ways that representational accounts cannot. Obviously ‘music’ as an
art-form depends, as Herder argues, on the reflective capacity which
needs language to be able to single out certain practices as belong-
ing together as ‘music’. At the same time, it is not so easy, as Herder
also suggests, to give an account of what separates that which eventu-
ally becomes language and that which eventually becomes music if one
sees all forms of human expression and articulation as in some way
9 The ‘characteristic’ has to do with the expression of individuality in the form of unortho-
dox works, rather than ‘typical’ works.