122 music, philosophy, and modernity
and expression, of the kind, for example, that Adorno characterises in
terms of ‘mimesis’.
The ubiquity of music in human culture has, then, to do with con-
tingencies which seem to resist reduction to the kind of assertion-based
model proposed by Brandom. David Cooper suggests of such models
that they ‘lose theirprima facieplausibility when attention is paid to
the meaning belonging to activities less commonly subjected to ratio-
nal appraisal than the making of assertions. (To ask about the mean-
ing of a painting would not, typically, involve asking about the artist’s
entitlement to express what he did.)’ (Cooper 2003 : 5 ). The same, as
Cooper implies, can be said of music. Brandom sees his project as mak-
ing explicit the implicit, as ‘turning something we can initially onlydo
into something we cansay: codifying some sort of knowinghowinto
the form of a knowingthat’ (Brandom 2000 : 8 ). Music does not fit
comfortably into this model. Brandom gives the example of a parrot
who can ‘produce an utterance perceptually indistinguishable from an
assertion of “The swatch is red”. Our nonetheless not taking it to have
asserted that sentence...isourtaking it that, unaware as it is of the
inferential involvements of the claim that it would be expressing...it
has not thereby succeeded in committing itself to anything’ (Brandom
2000 : 191 ). Something analogous applies to the blackbird that sang the
jazz phrase I mentioned in chapter 3 ;itisnot making music, but what
exactly is it that the blackbird has not committed itself to? What sort
of inferential involvements are there in the practice of music? Music
involves similar kinds of commitment to verbal assertion, but the rela-
tionship between the bird and a musician is different from that between
the bird and the maker of assertions. Because the bird can do more than
just imitate music that is already there, a musician such as Messiaen can
learn from the bird by appreciating a new way to phrase something
or by hearing a new rhythm, in a way which the language-user gener-
ally could not from the speaking parrot. We can consequently arrive at
new kinds of intelligibility which may enrich our existing practices and
which can create new, specifically musical commitments.
Cooper thinks that Brandom’s concern with the notion of appropri-
ateness is important, but appropriateness does not always depend on,
and cannot always be conveyed by assertions and their attendant com-
mitments. Music’s value can actually lie in its resistance to clear inter-
pretation in a world where the demand for explicit clarity may itself
become ideological. There are indefinitely many kinds of response to
the world, from painting to dance, and so on, which can be appropriate