ABSTRACT
A second view – which may or may not be held in conjunction with the first – is that music is essentially iconic: that it is an imitation or representation of, and thereby refers to, some aspect of the extramusical, ‘human’ world of emotions, character, and ideas. This is a referentialist view. (The thought here is that music derives its human relevance through signifying something in the human world.) Referentialism is not the same as expressionism, because saying that a piece of music makes us sad need not be taken to imply, or to be implied by, saying that the music is an imitation of, or is about, sadness. However, someone may be drawn to hold both referentialist and expressionist views if he or she thinks, say, that music imitative of sadness does in fact typically make listeners sad, or that what it is for something to be an imitation or representation of sadness is, at least in part, for it to evoke that emotion.
