Law making music

ABSTRACT This essay proceeds in three parts. The first part introduces a Māori waiata (a ceremonial song, with movements) that occurred in the debating chamber of the New Zealand parliament in 2017 on the Third Reading of Te Awa Tupua (Whanganui River Claims Settlement) Bill. The resulting statute confers legal personality on the Whanganui River. The second part advances a way of approaching musical appreciation as a mental activity which, by joining sound to musical meaning not only makes musical sense of sound, but can also, in so doing, be said to participate in the process of making music. Crucial to the move from making sense of music to making music, is the notion that music is inherently a metaphorical way of thinking about sound; one in which the music metaphor operates by making sound humanly meaningful. The third part – proceeding from the idea that music operates as metaphor and, like all metaphor, produces meaning by translating abstractions into concrete conceptions – posits music as a bridge (a joint or articulation) between eras, cultures and social strata that might otherwise struggle to find meaningful points of connection and communication. The hope is that we might come to understand law making music in the sense both of ‘law making’ music and law ‘making music’.