The meaning of music

This paper defends a cognitivist account of the point of music as an art, according to which the point of music is to put us in a position of being right about the world. Such a view faces two objections: first that it requires all music to represent the world; secondly, that it makes the appreciation of music too dispassionate and disengaged. I consider what I take to be the two best arguments against the view that all music represents the world, and argue that they are uncompelling, before arguing that a representational view presents the best account of the meaning of music. And I argue that we can deal with the worry that a cognitivist view makes the appreciation of music too dispassionate by recognizing a particular kind of representation, one which involves a kind of impersonation, and in the case of music requires the listener to make herself part of the medium of representation.