HOW IS EXTRA-MUSICAL MEANING POSSIBLE? MUSIC AS A PLACE AND SPACE FOR "WORK"

The article informs that it is a pervasive idea in Western culture that music is in some way capable of symbolizing emotions, images or ideas. Equally pervasive however, within the fields of philosophy, musicology, social psychology and linguistics, is the view that, in spite of increasing attention devoted to the topic, attempts to explain empirically music's communicative ability have met with relatively little success. To speak of expressionism as a unified theoretical "block" is, of course, misleading for there is certainly as much difference of opinion within the expressionist position as there is between it and the formalist view. Thus a sociology of musical meaning is also a sociology of styles or modes of work done by the listener and as such it should ask questions about how much work the music requires of the listener. For instance, does s/he find many contextualization cues, as occurs in highly ritualized situations (in which cases s/he need only re-affirm a conventional interpretation of the piece). Or, does s/he find so few contextualization cues that s/he must "on the spot" as it were, manage his/her own production by not constructing the interpretation but the cues of context as well?