What Music Is
No TL;DR found
Abstract
In the closing pages of my book Music as Cognition I called upon a distinction between long-standing and honorable practices that are colloquially referred to as arts-such as cuisine, vintnery, tea-blending, and perfumery-and the true or formal arts, notably music, art, and dance.1 The distinction, I wrote, rests in the fact that tea-blending and perfumery have everything to do with sensation and perception, or the receipt through the senses of matters presented to them, while the formal arts have more to do with cognition, that is, with thinking and with ideas. But music, I believe, is alone among the formal arts in having spawned so vast a tradition of psychological research into its nature that locates its genesis in the sensory and perceptual processes, instead of locating it in the cognitive ones. My view that this represents a miscategorization of music with tea-blending was the motivation for writing Music as Cognition, of which the article you have before you is a brief summary. The path through which the thesis of music as cognition takes us includes at least the following disparate matters: an attempt to describe musical-cognitive processes without recourse to terms such as meter, harmony, and melody; some discourse on the nature of scales and chords and how they came to be; and the argument that of primary importance is investigating the route of the development of musical cognition in the child.