Oh, you're no limo-waiter, Onhwy61. Thank you for you questions; they raise some very important issues. Admittedly, this is a very difficult area with a learning curve of trying to understand what each other is saying. I will try to do my best to answer your questions, in order:
1, 2 and part of 3:. The problem we first must clear up is that "musicality" is not some-thing out there. Language is prone towards abraction and sometimes we make these absractions into a thing (symptomatic of our objective cognitive faculties). For instance, I can not look out my front door and point to "democracy" because it not a thing, but a desription of an agreed upon thought between minds. Similarly, when discussing "musicality" we must be on guard to always remember that we are discribing a state of consciousness. Moreover, it describes a dynamic of movement of the mind, the listening mind, as it seeps deeper into the experience. In other words, my position is that "musicality" is characterized by such movement and that the nature of this dynamic is one that moves, upon first sitting down, from a cognitive identification to trans-cognitve receptibility; meaning that your mind's orientation to music changes as you listen from active identification using your thinking mind to a receptive space-of-mind that experiences the musical message, but which does so in a state absent cognition; when you look at Van Gogh's "Night Sky" you approach it searching with an active comparing mind - scanning brushstroke technique, composition, or perhaps, comparing to other abstract expressionist works, or other Van Gogh periods - then you slowly "take in" the work. This "taking in" is characterized by an opening which can be described by the dynamic of releasing the desire to cognicize perception. Each level, both cognitive and trans-cognitive, disclose symmetries of perception, and hence, knowledge, of the music. However, as the experience deepens, and becomes less cognitive-based in the mind, the perception of defining the experience as a thing out there decreases until the mind's propensity to objectify evaporates into an "event" of experience, ie subject/object dichotomies dissolve.
"Musical" components are ones that disclose truths of each level on the continuum moving from cognitive to trans-cognitive, and, importantly, catalyze that movement (the component does not cause the movement, but can facillitate it for the mind that can release an attachment to the power of objectified thinking). The important issue is that all levels disclose a truth indicative of their level (and, not incidentally, produce their own language terms, usually moving from analytic, object-focused visual based language, to emotive based, to, well, beyond language). In this sense, the levels are not exclusive, but inclusive (this is an integrative theory of aesthetics). What is objectified when first listening is valid, just as the experiential info disclosed at deeper levels is valid. The problem arises when those attached to cognitive processing (carrying that attachment into listening) say that theirs'is the only level, or that seeing a perception beyond their mode of perception is non-existent (and then they start with the accusations of irrationality, like scientists do when dealing with trtans-cognitive perception. See Desartes below). Components can be accurately musical ("accurate" an abstraction to describe desires towards greater detail, etc.) as the mind seeks for objective info to bound its experience, but also musical at deeper levels (and, which, we presently lack a language for because the gurus at the hi-Fi "journals" are attached to objectifying levels). People who see the mind as only having one mode of perception (active, cognitve)inherently relegate other experiences (tran-cognitive)(reason for this below).
First part of 3, 4: "Objective mind" is a simplified descriptive use for a a part of the functioning of thinking consciousness; the whole of thinking consciousness psychologists describe as "formal operational, hypo-deductive cognition" (using Piaget terms). I have not gotten into the temporal aspect because this is a big enough subject already (and, temporal comparison is also dualistically objectifying).
So, what is the objective mind, or what is the nature of its objectifying? We have evolved to see prey; look at a green tree and you can't see a green bird until it moves (it becomes an identified object as it moves in time). We look out at reality objectively based on evolutionarily-based structures in our collective minds. Our culture of predation of mind-against-mind in search of the accumulation of objects ("Capitalism", or Lockean mutually-reinforced rules of self interest)is both a symptom of this "genetic" and a reiforcement of it through the individual's minds acceptance of its assumptions that it learns from other minds. The objective mind, as we practice it, is highly reductionist and seeks to divide into either this or that, but genetics is not exclusionary of socialization, just as shallow active listening is not exclusionary of deep receptive listening.
Importantly, we possess this objective bias because we define our thinking mind as our only perception (Descartes' I think, therefore, I am). But this is false. Admittedly, it is a faculty that can bring many objects and increase your assumed viability, or allow you to objectify sound as you listen into a "statue garden" (as Valin is, symptomatically, apt to say), but it is not the only way to perceive reality. It is: I am, therefore, I think, sometimes. Think about it: when you looked at the sunset without thought, did you become non-existent? When you sank into the music and thought ceased, did you fail to exist? The silent receptive mind is the ground of cognition; it precedes it casually. The space around sound-objects is their ground of arisement; it precedes them. To deny the silent space of your mind or the space beneath sound is to deny your true deep nature, and also the deeper experience of music. Those deny deeper spaces of listening perception, or their value, deny a potential in themselves (accounting for their recoil).
Enough. Thank you for your patience.
