118 music, philosophy, and modernity
Schleiermacher in 1809 – 10 : ‘language as a totality of tones is a musical
system. The musical element also has an effect in every utterance, and
as this effectiveness has a different basis from that of the significant, they
can come into conflict with each other’ (Schleiermacher 1998 : 238 ).
The tension between these dimensions, the possibility that they can
mutually reinforce – or mutually weaken – each other, points to ques-
tions for philosophical approaches to language which are still too rarely
regarded as philosophically significant. Kramer puts the consequence
of this very aptly: ‘music, as a cultural activity, must be acknowledged to
help produce the discourses and representations of which it is also the
product’ (Kramer 1990 : 17 ). Despite his adherence to the primacy of
‘norm-laden practices’ over ‘matters of fact’ (Brandom 2002 : 326 ), this
two-way relationship seems hard to accommodate in Brandom’s terms,
and will be equally difficult to make sense of in some of the terms of
Hegel’s account of music.
That interpretation is not limited to texts, even in a pretty wide sense
of the word ‘text’, is apparent at a variety of levels. A listener may inter-
pret music by, for example, hearing it as evocative of something, or they
may understand it as establishing ways of being in the world which give
a coherence to their world that it otherwise lacks. This may link some
piece or performance to other music, rather than to propositionally
statable ideas about the world. Maynard Solomon suggests that listen-
ers may feel what is in fact a kind of inferential ‘impulse to invent pro-
grammes and literary prototypes for musical compositions – somehow
to diminish the anxiety, terror, and loneliness that may be aroused by
the musical evocation of an unrecognizable time and place’ (Solomon
2003 : 15 ). It is the way in which Beethoven ‘turns from validating the
expected to inventing places where no one has ever gone before’ (ibid.)
that indicates a dimension missing from Brandom’s Hegelian rational-
ism. The question is how philosophy should deal with something that we
understand but which both cannot be cashed out into the ways in which
we try to bring it into the discursive fold and can move the boundaries of
that fold. Locating music as part of a world of facts as true claims would
precisely fail to capture the specific kind of understanding it sometimes
demands.
Such issues concerning the scope of interpretation constitute an
important example of the kind of ‘entanglement’ of music and philos-
ophy outlined in chapter 1. Let us summarise some of the core issues
before considering some of Hegel’s texts on music. When Brandom
talks of linguistic utterances in terms of interpretable noises, he uses the