Music and Embodied Cognition: Listening, Moving, Feeling, and Thinking. By Arnie Cox

Abstract

The disciplines of music theory and musicology have long given highest status to the score as the site of meaning, an approach that has seen performance as a form of mediation between composer and listener. But innovative research over the last few decades—in embodiment,1 cognition,2 agency,3 performance and recordings studies,4 and performance-centered approaches to structure formation5—has encouraged music scholars to take their own embodiments, as well as specific performances or recordings, more seriously in music analysis and criticism. Arnie Cox’s work, aimed primarily at listeners, contributes to this change in approach. His new book builds on his earlier established “mimetic hypothesis,”6 and draws on George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory.7 It is an exploration of how we feel, experience, and conceptualize music. Cox draws attention to musical concepts that are entrenched in our discourses, but that are, objectively speaking, inaudible: pitch height, musical motion, musical tension, striving melodies, leaps, and so forth. Such properties of musical meaning, while often attributed to “the music,” are shown to emerge through listeners’ embodied participations or co-performances. Drawing on linguistics, cognitive science, psychology, and philosophy, Cox’s multifaceted theory takes into account different types of music, different peoples’ experiences, and different musical contexts.