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Perspektiver på musikalsk mening

Abstract

Body and Mind in Perfect Union: Perspectives on Musical Meaning
This article was presented as the Tobias Norlind Lecture 2005 at the conference “Musicology Today”, organized by the Swedish Society for Music Research at Växjö University in June 2005. The article starts with a brief overview over the changing status of questions of musical meaning within music philosophy, musicology, and music psychology, focusing especially upon developments during the past 25 years. Thereafter, the notion of musical meaning is problematized from several different philosophical perspectives. The cognitive semantic view of meaning as a fundamentally embodied phenomenon which transcends language, is presented as an alternative to the focus within analytical philosophy upon meaning as an intra-linguistic phenomenon, a view which has dominated within Anglo-American music philosophy, thereby radically limiting the scope of scholarly investigations of musical meaning. Towards the end of the article the author presents her own body-based approach to musical meaning, which draws strongly upon cognitive metaphor theory, as well as the ongoing Musical Gestures Project at the University of Oslo, in which she is a participant.