A cognitive concept of musical meaning

Abstract

Almost two centuries after the publication of Hanslick's On the Musically Beautiful: A Contribution to the Revision of Music Aesthetics and the consolidation of the formalist current, its principles are still at the core of understanding musical meaning as an emerging property of musical form. The consolidated creative paradigm of a composer "picking up" music from his imagination and then decoding it into a musical notation to produce a music sheet that will stand for the music itself to be read by a performer that will, in turn, restitute the musical work to its sonic nature still is roughly the norm in the Western world. This paradigm, however, poses several challenges to musical meaning in other musical practices, especially those that mainly employ improvisation. Starting from a different concept of writing, dislodging the musical work from its usual "place" on the music sheet, and going through the notion of experience as the primary human process of knowledge formation, this article proposes a concept of musical meaning as “embodied” in musical experience, determined and conditioned by devices explained by theoretical frameworks from the enactivist cognitive sciences.