While contemporary music aesthetics has revealed many aspects relating to music appreciation such as the properties of annoying and pleasant sounds, the familiarity effect and the U-curve correlating aesthetic value to complexity, the author is not aware of any systematic study which explores musical structure in relation to cognitive categorizing in form of isomorphisms.

This paper aims at investigating the structural organisation of music in relation to the structural organisation of thought. The claim is that certain cognitive categories such as viewing the world as consisting of symmetries or as a dialectical process can be observed within musical works which follow an isomorph music aesthetics. The paper attempts to look at some major historical developments of these isomorphisms between various cognitive music aesthetics and their respective cognitive categories.

While music aesthetics has, during recent times received attention within the area of experimental and analytical aesthetics as a from of understanding music appreciation, little attention has been paid to the intellectual or cognitive aspect of music aesthetics. Building on the observations as made by Blaukopf, who saw the attempts of the Baroque area to understand the world as composed of symmetries and overplayed symmetries reflected in the musical works of the same time period, here the attempt has been made to generalize this idea by referring to the concept of isomorphisms between musical structure (aesthetics) and cognitive categorizing. For instance, while the sonata form of the classical time period reflects a clear dialectical thinking (thesis, anti-thesis and synthesis), the same can be found within the areas of physics (force, counter force and movement) and the philosophy of history. Observing changes of cognitive categories in time such as a thinking in symmetries, a thinking in dialectics, a disintegration of thought, a thinking in formalisms to a thinking dominated by similarity classifications the same isomorph processes can be observed within the structure of music of the respective time periods.

The main implication of this paper is to add a new dimension to traditional concepts of the aesthetics of music, involving emotional and intellectual aspects, by examining how music can reflect or perhaps even form our thought processes on the level of cognitive categories.

Keywords: Isomorphism, cognition, categories, symmetries, dialectics, disintegration, formalism, similarity.

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