Theories of Contextualist..continue....

Among contextualists, however, a simple referential view is the exception rather than the rule. Any theorist who examines musical perception is making a study of a complex human activity. He is dealing with the psychology of music, in which certain elements—e.g., music, listener, mode of apprehension, cultural context—are indispensable and in which characteristic processes recur. Specialists will emphasize one element or another: formalists the music itself, sociologists the listener and his milieu, psychologists the how of perception. Though psychology could survey the whole field, in practice psychologists, according to their persuasions, investigate the perception of measurable acoustic phenomena, the physical-mental effects of musical sound, or—more rarely—the functional role of music in human experience; and pragmatists and analysts alike may leave something out of account. But it remains for the comprehensive theorist, probably one who, like Langer, is equipped to discern relationships among many departments of thought, to construct a valid hierarchical structure of musical meaning in all its ramifications.

Deryck Cooke,a British musicologist and the author of The Language of Music (1959), who may be classified as a referential expressionist, has offered a sophisticated argument for the notion of music as language. Concepts, however, may not be rendered by this language, only feelings. Cooke reaffirms the possibility, long disputed by many theorists, that such feelings may be recognized, identified, and even classified. But he confines his investigation to the last few hundred years of the Western tradition.