A word is always continuous with the other words which accompany it, and takes different aspects according to the cadence and movement of the sentence in which it is set: just as each note of a melody vaguely reflects the whole musical phrase.

[…]

Memory and perception become states of the same nature, and between them no other difference than a difference of intensity can be found. But the truth is that our present should not be defined as that which is more intense: it is that which acts on us and which makes us act, it is sensory and it is motor; — our present is, above all, the state of our body.

Henri Bergson, Matter and memory

In my experience—and I would guess not only mine—music and meaning meet most intimately in the body and in time. The phrase “music means” acquires particular force when considered from the perspective of temporality and embodiment. Indeed, it seems to me that every experience of meaning is necessarily temporal and bodily—spatiotemporal. It is as though meaning curved the space of relations and altered the course of what follows. Space, in this analogy, would be the configuration of relations; time, the dimension of change; mass, the capacity to exert an influence; and weight, the manner in which that influence makes itself felt.

If time can be understood—and I believe it should be—not as an absolute, immutable ordering of events, but as a dynamic, generative dimension of existence itself, grounded in conflict and tension, then music, more than almost anything else, is an enactment of this mechanism: one of its purest manifestations. Music is not so much a sequence of events occurring in objectively flowing time as a flow of tension between what is remembered and what is anticipated. Music is sometimes treated as a phenomenon independent of sound, but I reject that separation. I prefer not to abstract music from its sounding—actual or imagined—as I can see few advantages in broadening the field in this way. Music, then, is, in my view and in the briefest possible terms, the sound of time.

Similarly, I believe that music should not be abstracted from the body—from its intimate connections with the body’s shape and scale, its relationship with and dependence upon its environment, or its vital functions. Music “means” through its correspondences—or rhymes—with pulse and breath, with the proportions between the individual and the world: with light, temperature, the density of matter, and the speed of motion; in short, with the realities in which the body exists. The concept of gesture is especially useful here. I understand gesture as an act through which the body actively participates in the world. It need not be directed towards an unequivocal purpose; there are also gestures that constitute ends in themselves. A given environment both constrains and enables the body’s gestures, creating a form of resistance to movement; possible gestures are realised within these limits. Another useful concept is affordance: a possibility for action that emerges in the relation between the properties of an environment and the capacities of a particular body when it encounters an object—a thing, a place, and so forth. The affordance of a ladder, for example, is the possibility, perceived on seeing it, of climbing its rungs to a certain height through a particular sequence of movements and with the use of a particular degree of strength. This is not an absolute property of the object: it will be perceived differently by people of different ages and physical abilities. An affordance is realised within a particular relationship. Music works in a similar way, although less explicitly and not necessarily instrumentally. Through its parameters, the limits of the subject’s embodied reality and the movements available to them—in the broadest sense—become perceptible. Each subject’s relationship with a particular music is individual; the meaning they experience is not universal, although there are points of contact and overlapping fields of experience, memory, and expectation.

In short, music is the sound of time as felt by a particular body in its relationship with the world. Its unfolding reorganises the field of possible movements; under its influence, the weight of gestures, feelings, memories, and expectations shifts.

Some of the maps I have looked into

Gaston Bachelard, Intuition of the Instant

Henri Bergson, Matter and memory

Peter Cheyne, Andy Hamilton, Max Paddison (red.), The Philosophy of Rhythm. Aesthetics, Music, Poetics

Brian Ferneyhough, The Tactility of Time (Darmstadt Lecture 1988)

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Music and Time. A Philosophical Postscript (1988)

Gérard Grisey, Tempus ex machina. A Composer’s Reflections on Musical Time

Mariusz Kozak, Enacting Musical Time. The Bodily Experience of New Music

Salvatore Sciarrino, Le figure della musica. Da Beethoven a oggi

Jason Yust, Organized Time. Rhythm, Tonality, and Form