Hermeneutics And Music Criticism

Hermeneutics and Music Criticism forges new perspectives on aesthetics, politics and contemporary interpretive strategies. By advancing new insights into the roles judgment and imagination play both in our experiences of music and its critical interpretation, this book reevaluates our current understandings of music’s transformative power. The engagement with critical musicologists and philosophers, including Adorno, Gadamer, and Ricoeur, provides a nuanced analysis of the crucial issues affecting the theory and practice of music criticism. By challenging musical hermeneutics’ deployment as a means of deciphering social values and meanings, Hermeneutics and Music Criticism offers an answer to the long-standing question of how music’s expression of moods and feelings affects us and our relation to the world.

Hermeneutics and Music Criticism forges new perspectives on aesthetics, politics and contemporary interpretive strategies. By advancing new insights into the roles judgment and imagination play both in our experiences of music and its critical interpretation, this book reevaluates our current understandings of music’s transformative power. The engagement with critical musicologists and philosophers, including Adorno, Gadamer, and Ricoeur, provides a nuanced analysis of the crucial issues affecting the theory and practice of music criticism. By challenging musical hermeneutics’ deployment as a means of deciphering social values and meanings, Hermeneutics and Music Criticism offers an answer to the long-standing question of how music’s expression of moods and feelings affects us and our relation to the world.

This volume explores Hans-Georg Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics within a musical context. It features contributions from philosophers, musicians, educators, and musicologists from a variety of backgrounds, and sheds light on both the hermeneutic nature of music and the musicality of hermeneutics. Contributors to this volume hermeneutically think with music to uncover its fundamentally hermeneutic character, and by thinking with Gadamer in a musical context, explore ways in which hermeneutics may be understood to possess an inherent musicality. Gadamer's thought is taken up in a variety of musical contexts including improvisation, musical performance, classical music, jazz, and music criticism. This first volume to explore Gadamer's hermeneutics in a musical context breaks new ground by challenging musical concepts and by pushing Gadamer's thought in new directions. It appeals to philosophers engaged with Gadamer's thought (and philosophical hermeneutics more broadly), as well as philosophers of music, musicologists, and musicians interested in critically engaging with the practice of performing and listening to music.

This study in artistic hermeneutics contains objections and critiques that have been generated by the contemporary cultural scenery of musical interpretation, especially related to the opera performances. Nevertheless, as the reader will surely notice, such critique can be very well applied to the entire spectre of contemporary culture, as the phenomena described here are ubiquitous. Ion Piso's 'alarm signal'-study is essential reading, particularly as it comes from somebody who has over half a century's experience of being an artist-interpreter in world opera. As such, Piso is well-placed to offer such a critique, and thus fulfil Goethe's challenging desideratum: You can only judge fairly what you, yourself, are able to accomplish; as the following quotations fully illustrate: "J. Piso was the new duke [...] He incarnates all the virtues that an interpreter must have for this role, and which are seldom met with in one person. These are the reasons why the duke of Mantova has become a role for which they are looking for specialized tenors. Piso is both young and lean, elegant and full of temperament, a very credible and conquering play boy [...] La donna e mobile has the qualities of Gigly, and his legato sounds always seductive. Furthermore, who else brings together these days, the finesse of the belcanto with such a prodigality of brilliants high-notes?" -- K. Honolka, Stuttgart, April 1964 "[Piso in Werther, was the highlight of the season as] he represents the true Romantic style - which is the mode in which this role should be interpreted, what more can be said... -- A. J. Potter, Opera, London, February 1968 "The Aria of the duke in Tableau IV was interpreted by the Romanian tenor J. Piso three times; this was the wish of the audience..." -- Tbilisi, April 18, 1960 "The virtuosity of Piso's technique produces a special pleasure to the listener, especially by the manner in which the most powerful forte comes to fade away in the most delicate piano. Through a rich variety of expressive tools, he was able to reveal the contents of the Lieds by interpreting them with an excellent diction technique." -- Potsdamer Blick, March 17, 1966 "Piso is the embodiment of the multilateral tenor, who has become today almost obsolete, due to the melodious charm of his voice, to his sensitivity, and to the homogeneity of his voice in all registers, even in the most 'exposed' passages. -- Die Union, Dresden, March 4, 1966

Twelve brilliant historians of theory probe the mind of the Romantic era in its thinking about music.

This magnificent survey of the most popular period in music history is an extended essay embracing music, aesthetics, social history, and politics, by one of the keenest minds writing on music in the world today. Dahlhaus organizes his book around "watershed" years--for example, 1830, the year of the July Revolution in France, and around which coalesce the "demise of the age of art" proclaimed by Heine, the musical consequences of the deaths of Beethoven and Schubert, the simultaneous and dramatic appearance of Chopin and Liszt, Berlioz and Meyerbeer, and Schumann and Mendelssohn. But he keeps us constantly on guard against generalization and clich . Cherished concepts like Romanticism, tradition, nationalism vs. universality, the musical culture of the bourgeoisie, are put to pointed reevaluation. Always demonstrating the interest in socio-historical influences that is the hallmark of his work, Dahlhaus reminds us of the contradictions, interrelationships, psychological nuances, and riches of musical character and musical life. Nineteenth-Century Music contains 90 illustrations, the collected captions of which come close to providing a summary of the work and the author's methods. Technical language is kept to a minimum, but while remaining accessible, Dahlhaus challenges, braces, and excites. This is a landmark study that no one seriously interested in music and nineteenth-century European culture will be able to ignore.

In The Critical Editing of Music (1996) James Grier called Georg Feder's Musikphilologie (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1987) "the most important contribution to date" on textual criticism in music and "the only one that considers the full range of critical issues in editing" (Grier, p. 14). Pendragon Press's edition of Feder's Music Philology now makes available in English translation this essential, intellectually engaging but concise discussion of the complex and multi-faceted tasks in traditional scholarly editing of music. --

Music scholarship's views of Franz Schubert's instrumental works continue to evolve. How might aesthetic values, historiographies, revisions to the composer's biography, and disciplinary commitments affect how we interpret his music? Schubert's Instrumental Music and Poetics of Interpretation explores the aesthetic positions and operations that underlie critical assessments of Schubert's instrumental works. In six chapters, each devoted to one or two of Schubert's pieces, René Rusch examines the conditions that have prompted scholarship to reevaluate the composer's music and legacy, considers how different conclusions about his music may be reflective of certain aesthetic values, investigates the role of narrative in both music analysis and constructions of history, and explores alternative forms of coherence through updated analyses of the composer's instrumental works. Rusch's observations and comparative analyses address four significant areas of scholarly focus in Schubert studies, including his approach to chromaticism, his unique musical forms, the relationship between his music and biography, and the influence of Beethoven. Drawing from a range of philosophical, hermeneutic, historical, biographical, theoretical, and analytical sources, Schubert's Instrumental Music and Poetics of Interpretation offers readers a unique and innovative foray into the poetics of contemporary analyses of Schubert's instrumental music and develops new ways to engage with his repertoire.