A myth about music, made popular by modern and postmodern 20th-century critics, is that it consists merely of certain frequencies deployed in various rhythms by a range of sources. This positivist view of music holds that music alone, without the aid of words or visuals, cannot refer or point to some experience outside itself. This is averred with nearly self-evident smugness by, for example, Igor Stravinsky in his “Poetics of Music.” Taken literally, this means that a funeral march would do for a wedding celebration, while a sunny scherzo could serve to commemorate a tragedy. It is nonsense even on the face of it. Like all nonsense, though, it stems from a self-evident truth: Unlike words, music denotes nothing. That is what the modern critic means by “meaning,” the indication of specific physical or mental objects in the manner of verbal signifiers. Music does not fit that definition because its …