Revived with new intensity at the end of the twentieth century, questions of meaning and interpretation in music continue to generate widespread interest and give rise to new research directions and methods. This collection of essays brings together leading musicologists and music theorists working across a range of genres--classical, jazz, and popular--to offer fresh perspectives on a concern that bestrides every area of musical scholarship. While many accounts of musical meaning tend to limit and constrain, Musical Meaning and Interpretation contends that music's capacity to mean is virtually limitless and therefore resists clean and orderly taxonomies. Taken together, the essays attest to this nearly infinite variety of ways in which music may mean. Individually, they explore the intellectual underpinnings of rotational form, the mysterious agencies that populate our hermeneutic discourse, and the significance of pleasure in the interpretive act, among other topics, along with extended discussions of music by Beethoven, Chabrier, Unsuk Chin, Coltrane, Stephen Foster, Mahler, and Chou Wen-chung. Rooted in humanistic values, the essays combine rich analytical insights with critical perspectives on meaning and hermeneutics, arguing collectively for the strength, necessity, and urgency of interpretive work in music.
Industry Reviews
"In this superb collection, a dream-team of musical hermeneuts explores what the editors call "the nearly infinite variety of ways in which music means." The authors tease out strands of meaning in music by Beethoven, Chabrier, Unsuk Chin, Coltrane, Stephen Foster, Mahler, and Chou Wen-chung. Along the way, they give vivid demonstration of the challenges and the pleasures of interpretive work in music, including the ways that music connects, and connects us,
with the world around us." --Joseph Straus, Distinguished Professor of Music, CUNY Graduate Center
"This volume demonstrates, amply and richly, that an investment in music's seemingly inexhaustible capacity for meaning need not occlude an acute awareness of its historicity and political entanglements, its agencies and affordances, or its object status in the world. The scope of imagination and quality of scholarship across this collection are outstanding, and compellingly urge a vital critical engagement with renewed practices of interpretation, most broadly
conceived." --Sherry Lee, Associate Professor of Musicology, The University of Toronto
"A truly exciting collection! Beyond its attention to expressive codes and critical traditions, Musical Meaning and Interpretation is a book that brims with an exuberant delight in music's multi-dimensional flux of meaning--the urgent particularity of sounding gestures, feelings, bodies, and histories. Eleven leading music historians and analysts deliver a superbly modulated symposium engaging jazz, chamber, symphonic, and folksong repertoires of Asia,
Europe, and North America. These authors' perspectives are unusually eclectic; their reflections erudite yet accessible; and the disciplinary critique is unfailingly generous and constructive. What could be
more inspiring?" --Philip Rupprecht, Professor of Music, Duke University
