110 music, philosophy, and modernity
immanent to Bruckner’s work and needs to include, for example, the
historical situation of a religious, late-Romantic composer in a secular-
ising age, as well as issues to do with listeners, their affective lives, musi-
cal expectations, and so on. Even though this kind of contextualisation
is precisely what an inferentialist approach relies on, not all of these
factors fit easily into Brandom’s model. The question is whether the
relationship between immediacy and mediation in music is just a mat-
ter of the conceptualisation of the notes. The basic move for Brandom
is from ‘mere immediacy’, to ‘mere mediation’, to ‘mediated immediacy’:
‘The underlying onlytheoretically(that isinferentially, i.e. by mediation)
accessiblerealityisexpressed bythe observationally (non-inferentially, i.e.
immediately) accessibleappearance, which serves as asignof it’ (ibid.:
206 ). The truth about the note and its place in music would, then,
be determined by how we articulate its significance in concepts and
thus, in Brandom’s account, in terms of discursive commitments and
entitlements to claims.
In order to avoid a ‘myth of the given’, the immediacy of a sensa-
tion must indeed be regarded as intelligible because of an underlying
relational structure of which it is a sign. In the case of music the struc-
ture might be, for example, the Western diatonic harmonic system.
Weencountered this issue in Herder’s mistaken concentration on the
single note. Music is, though, not simply a piece of an objectively char-
acterisable world, because it involves communicative intentions, of a
kind related to those present in language, by the very fact of its being
music rather than noise. Hegel is, of course, aware of this: music is a
manifestation ofGeist, but he regards it as inferior to discursive think-
ing. However, music as a practice is not reducible to the ways in which it
can be talked about, and what is not thus reducible isnotthe immediacy
with which the process characterised by Brandom begins. If music were
simply to consist in such immediacy, we could in the last analysis do
without the experience of the music and rely on a true description or
explanation of it, in the way that we see no need directly to re-investigate
the content of much of what we say about the world by repeating the
immediate experience of it. Orchestral conductors would, for example,
be justified in objecting to the overly verbal notion of how we can com-
municate about music implicit in Brandom’s account of immediacy and
mediation.
In the aesthetic experience of music mediation of Brandom’s kind
reaches a limit that involves a different kind of ‘immediacy’, an imme-
diacy suggested by the idea that metaphysics 2 has to do with what