Referentialists and nonreferentialists continuation..........

continuation..........
If there is intrinsic, or embodied, meaning, one may well ask what meaning is embodied and how it is to be apprehended. An extreme formalist would say that the acoustic pattern itself and nothing more is the sense of music; Hanslick, indeed, said this, though he did not hold consistently to the view. But most nonreferentialists regard music as, in one way or another, emotionally meaningful or expressive. Referentialists, too, find expressive content in music, though this emotional content may be extramusical (even if not explicit) in origin, according to the American theorists John Hospers in Meaning and Truth in the Arts (1946) and Donald Ferguson in Music as Metaphor (1960). Meyer has made the observation that while most referentialists are expressionists, not all expressionists are referentialists. He makes the useful distinction between absolute expressionists and referential expressionists and identifies his own position as “formalist–absolute expressionist.” In acknowledging that music can and does express referential (designative) meanings as well as nonreferential ones, Meyer exhibits an eclectic and certainly permissive view. But he has been criticized for failing to make clear the modus operandi of this referential meaning in music.