Mind, Body, World- Foundations of Cognitive Science, 2013a

ehind the notes constitutes, after all, what the piece is saying, what the piece is
about. (Copland, 1939, p. 12)
John Cage (1961) believed that compositions had intended meanings:
It seemed to me that composers knew what they were doing, and that the experiments
that had been made had taken place prior to the finished works, just as
sketches are made before paintings and rehearsals precede performances. (John
Cage, 1961, p. 7)
Scholars, too, have debated the ability of music to convey meanings. One of the central
questions in the philosophy of music is whether music can represent. As late as
1790, the dominant philosophical view of music was that it was incapable of conveying
ideas, but by the time that E. T. A. Hoffman reviewed Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony
in 1810, this view was predominately rejected (Bonds, 2006), although the autonomist
school of musical aesthetics—which rejected musical representation—was
active in the late nineteenth century (Hanslick, 1957). Nowadays most philosophers
of music agree that music is representational, and they focus their attention on how
musical representations are possible (Kivy, 1991; Meyer, 1956; Robinson, 1994, 1997;
Sparshoot, 1994; Walton, 1994).
How might composers communicate intended meanings with their music?
One answer is by exploiting particular musical forms. Conventions such as sonataallegro
form provide a structure that generates expectations, expectations that are
often presumed to be shared by the audience. Copland (1939) used his book about
listening to music to educate audiences about musical forms so that they could
better understand his compositions as well as those of others: “In helping others
to hear music more intelligently, [the composer] is working toward the spread of
a musical culture, which in the end will affect the understanding of his own creations”
(p. vi).
The extent to which the audience’s expectations are toyed with, and ultimately
fulfilled, can manipulate its interpretation of a musical performance. Some scholars
have argued that these manipulations can be described completely in terms of the
structure of musical elements (Meyer, 1956). The formalist’s motto of classical cognitive
science (Haugeland, 1985) can plausibly be applied to classical music.
A third parallel between classical cognitive science, which likely follows directly
from the assumption that formal structures can represent content, is an emphasis
on Cartesian disembodiment. Let us now consider this characteristic in more detail.
Classical cognitive science attempts to explain cognitive phenomena by appealing
to a sense-think-act cycle (Pfeifer & Scheier, 1999). In this cycle, sensing mechanisms
provide information about the world, and acting mechanisms produce behaviours
that might change it. Thinking, considered as the manipulation of mental representations,
is the interface between sensing and acting (Wilson, 2004). However,
Classical Music and Cognitive Science 269