Whether instrumental music — music without words, without programmatic title, without explicit reference to objects outside itself — can be said to 'mean' anything is a question that has divided aestheticians for at least two centuries. The two extreme positions are easily stated and have had distinguished defenders. The 'absolute' position holds that music, in the strict sense, refers to nothing beyond its own internal relations, and that the apparent expressivity of a passage is a fact about how the passage is heard rather than about what the passage is about. The 'referential' position holds that music expresses, with greater or less specificity, emotional or psychological content that lies outside the score and can, with patience, be approximately named.
Each position has, in its strongest form, embarrassments the other does not face. The strict absolute position has to explain why competent listeners across cultures so often agree, in broad terms, on the emotional character of a given passage, and why the agreement extends to features (calm, agitation, longing) that the absolute position's own terms cannot easily accommodate. The strict referential position has to explain why, when listeners attempt to name the content of a passage with any specificity, the namings diverge sharply — and why, in the very cases where music seems most clearly to be saying something, the something resists being said in any other medium. Each position protects its core by exiling its embarrassment.
A more careful intermediate position, of the kind that survives extended attention, holds that music neither refers in the way words do nor is purely self-contained. Its relation to the extra-musical is, on this view, neither denotation nor decoration but a kind of structural resemblance — between the patterns of tension and resolution in a passage and the patterns of feeling those passages are heard as expressing. The resemblance is precise enough to support broad agreement and loose enough to resist specific paraphrase. To call the resemblance 'meaning' risks the suggestion that music says particular things; to deny it any name risks the impression that music does no work outside itself.
What survives, then, is a question with a clearer structure than the original alternatives suggested. Music is neither the empty formalist game nor the encoded emotional letter; it occupies an intermediate space whose features have proved harder to specify than the extreme positions, whose simplicity attracted philosophers in the first place, would have suggested. The fact that the intermediate space has resisted clean specification is not, on the present evidence, a reason to retreat to either extreme. It is rather a reason to take the difficulty of specification as itself part of what is interesting about music as a form.
The primary purpose of the passage is to: