Where is the essence of a musical work?

Abstract

The essence of music engages the human ability to create symbolic meanings from any impression. In our search for this essence, we must first follow the communicative path of a musical performance. The double ontological status of music as both cognitive activity and observable object makes any transition from cognition to object a reduction from thick to thin entity, and any transition from notated/sounded work to interpretation/musical experience a thickening of the music’s properties. The process of elaborating upon the epistemological elements in this communicative chain positions the essence of the musical work as a discourse on relational dimensions that are culturally contextualized by the idea of a musical work.