ABSTRACT
Robert Frances was in many ways prescient in bringing together semiotic and more directly perceptual-motor perspectives to questions of expression and meaning in music. Three books that appeared within three years of each other in the middle of the last century stand as representative and influential treatments of the topic: Leonard Meyer's Emotion and Meaning in Music, Robert La perception de la musique, and Deryck Cooke's The Language of Music. The culturally convened component of Cooke's theory focused on the association of particular musical materials with dramatic, narrative and verbal contexts that explicitly define the emotional message with which the music is associated. A rather different approach to music's meanings, strongly connected with language but moving much closer to directly perceptual experience, is the approach based on the conceptual metaphor theory of G. Lakoff and F. Johnson. Frances recognized the dynamic and evolving nature of musical materials, but made no systematic attempt to integrate this element into his account.
