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

orchestra brings the score to life exactly as instructed by the score, and the (passive)
audience unpacks the delivered music to get the composer’s message.
We thus hear people say that music can only have meaning if it is seen to be a
type of language, with elements akin to words, phrases and sentences, and with
elements that refer beyond themselves to extramusical things, events, or ideas.
(Johnson, 2007, p. 207)
In other words, the classical view of musical meaning is very similar to the view of
meaning espoused by classical cognitive science: music is a symbolic, intentional
medium.
The view of music as a symbolic medium that conveys intended meaning has
generated a long history of resistance. The autonomist school of aesthetics (see
Hanslick, 1957) argued against the symbolic theories of musical meaning, as well
as against theories that music communicated emotion. Hanslick’s (1957) position
was that music was a medium whose elements were pure and nonrepresentational.
Hanslick famously argued that “the essence of music is sound and motion” (p. 48).
Modern positions that treat musical meaning in an embodied fashion are related to
Hanslick’s (Johnson, 2007; Leman, 2008).
Embodied alternatives to musical meaning become attractive because the conduit
metaphor breaks down in modern music. If control is taken away from the
score and the conductor, if the musicians become active contributors to the composition
(Benson, 2003), if the audience is actively involved in completing the composition
as well, and if music is actually a “cool medium,” then what is the intended
message of the piece?
Modern embodied theories of music answer this question by taking a position
that follows naturally from Hanslick’s (1957) musical aesthetics. They propose that
the sound and motion of music literally have bodily effects that are meaningful. For
instance, Johnson (2007) noted that,
to hear music is just to be moved and to feel in the precise way that is defined by
the patterns of musical motion. Those feelings are meaningful in the same way that
any pattern of emotional flow is meaningful to us at a pre-reflective level of awareness.
(Johnson, 2007, p. 239)
Similarly, Leman (2008, p. 17) suggested that “moving sonic forms do something
with our bodies, and therefore have a signification through body action rather than
through thinking.” Some implications of this position are considered in the next
section.
Minimalist composers themselves adopt a McLuhanesque view of the meaning
of their compositions: the music doesn’t deliver a message, but is itself the
message. After being schooled in the techniques of serialism, which deliberately
300 Chapter 6