ABSTRACT
The musical aesthetic creation and its non-conceptual understanding are always greater than the sum of what can be articulated in language; cognitive understanding can never completely encompass all the complexity of aesthetic understanding. Music also aims to communicate more than the sensory, non-conceptual, indescribable, spontaneous aspects of aesthetic understanding can make available and which set off and motivate our subjective reaction. It is that cognitive understanding has a role to play. Aesthetic and cognitive understanding is two different modes of access to, and outcomes of, musical understanding. They complement each other through their difference, the sensory aspect connecting with the intellectual, with this fusion forming the basis of understanding in the round. Non-conceptual aesthetic listening and understanding and talking about what has been heard and understood aesthetically are not, however, to be viewed as two opposing worlds. Both non-conceptual and conceptual approaches to music have the element of cognition in common.
