Social constructionism (or sometimes 'constructivism') is a broad-based epistemological
approach to understanding (largely) how talk and text work to construct our social lives. It is …

The essays in this journal issue all share an underlying concern with musical meaning. Most
of the essays examine the relation between, on the one hand, our thought and language …

Musical understanding has evolved dramatically in recent years, principally through a
heightened appreciation of musical meaning in its social, cultural, and philosophical …

In previous work, scholars of music have identified gesture as a core component of musical
meaning formation (Pratt 1931/1968; Truslit 1938; Coker 1972; Broeckx 1981; Hatten 1994; …

Music as a narrative drama is an intriguing idea, which has captured explicit music
theoretical attention since the nineteenth century. Investigations into narrative characters or …

Interactive improvisational musical spaces (which is to say, nearly all musical spaces)
involve affective relations among bodies: between the bodies of human performers, between …

This chapter asks what we can learn about expressive performance of western art music
from the ways in which performers talk about it. Music is notoriously hard to discuss: sound …

The question of musical meaning is one of the great practical and philosophical cruxes of
the Western tradition especially since the rise of autonomous instrumental music in the …

An interest in the use of recorded music (primarily popular music) as a sonic background or
foreground to all kinds of everyday activities—in short, what Anahid Kassabian has called …

Music is said to be the most autonomous and least representative of all the arts. However, it
reflects in many ways the realities around it and influences its social and cultural …