rhythm and romanticism 81Underlying these issues is the question of what it is to hear something
as music. The blackbird that used to sing a minor key jazz riff outside
our house was not making music, but the sounds it made could be
heard as music. At this level an inferential approach to what the sound
could be heard as – it was specifically pitched, rather than consisting
of arbitrary frequencies, melodic, rather than unconnected pitches,
syncopated, etc. – is sufficient to justify the judgement that it was musi-
cal. The appeal of the blackbird’s phrase arose because it established a
continuity between natural and cultural realms, of the kind I am refer-
ring to as belonging to metaphysics 2. Biological explanations of such
phenomena account for the melodic inventiveness and the capacity
for imitation of blackbirds in terms of evolutionary advantage. How-
ever, they do not exhaust the meaning of these phenomena because
they cannot account for how a world of significances can be built up
by linking natural phenomena to human practices and experiences.
This linkage is not simply a subjective projection onto a meaningless
objective substrate, because the world in which the phenomenon
occurred is, as we shall see, itself already in some sense musically
constituted.^1 The kind of meaning involved in metaphysics 2 relates to
the fact that we can re-contextualise an element of the world in order
to generate new significance. This ability depends upon being able to
establish an identity between a phenomenon that is felt to be meaning-
ful and its transformed manifestation. Interpretation of this ability is
vital to the issue of music and philosophy.
The origin of something is, of course, not an explanation of
what that thing has become. However, it is worth considering the
relationships between music, language, and philosophy in terms of
the non-conceptual origins of the capacity for identification which
makes both conceptual thinking and music possible. Concepts can
initially be described in terms of Rorty’s – reductive – idea of them
as the ‘regular use of a mark or noise’. Such use has to be appropri-
ate to the purpose in question, which again suggests a link between
conceptual and other kinds of articulation. Even at this minimal
level the issue arises of how such regularity of use moves from the
instinctual to the reflective level that Rorty characterises in terms of the
use of metalanguage. How does the awareness of regularity based on
1 It may also be that the bird is doing more than just protecting its territory and is singing
for the pleasure of singing: the two are not mutually exclusive.