MTS - Musical meaning and
interpretation
Jonathan.Hicks@music.ox.ac.uk
HT10 week 1
„works of music have discursive
meanings . . . these meanings
are definite enough to support
critical interpretations‟
Lawrence Kramer, “Tropes and Windows…”, 1.
„Interpretation is the revenge of
the intellect upon art‟
Susan Sontag, “Against Interpretation”
How we got into meaning and
interpretation
Why we should get out of this
way of thinking
TMI
„[Stravinsky and Kerman] eliminate the reflective and associate
"music". . . with some kind of primary, inarticulate, implicitly
incommunicable activity‟
Richard Taruskin, “A Myth of the 20th Century…”, 6.
Music as cultural practice
„Meaning is an irrepressibly volatile and abundant thing;
you really can't have just some of it.‟
Lawrence Kramer, “Tropes and Windows…”, 2.
Hermeneutics
text and context
verstehen
subjectivity
Hermeneutic windows?
„MEANING, whether in music, image, or text, is a product of action
rather than structure. It is more like a gesture than like a body. The
criterion for viability or credibility in interpretation (it's better not to
speak of validity, much less of truth) is response in kind. Meaning is not
produced via a linear derivation from a core of certainty, whether
semiotic or hermeneutic. Nor is it produced via a one-to-one matching of
less certain interpretive claims with more certain evidential ones.
Meaning comes from negotiation over certain nodal points that mobilise
the energies of both text (image, dramatic action, musical unfolding) and
context. I once called these points hermeneutic windows - partly to
counter the idea of music as purely self-sufficient and self-reflective, a
windowless monad - and the term seems to have had some currency‟
Lawrence Kramer, “Musicology and meaning”, 9.
Chopin, Prelude in A Minor,
Op. 28, no. 2.
Semiotics
poietic process esthesic process
“producer” trace receiver
Jean-Jacques Nattiez,
Music and Discourse, 17.
Sociology
„too often, music is thought of as a stimulus
capable of working independently of its
circumstances of production, distribution and
consumption‟
Tia DeNora, Music in Everyday Life, x.
Soundtracks of our lives
Changing Tracks, Jo Whiley
BBC Radio 1
Music--Drastic or Gnostic?
Interpretation of art is part of a flight from experience
Privileging of discursive meanings in academia
Focus on meaning entails an obsession with
ciphers/translation
Intervention
„we have an obligation to overthrow any means of defending
and justifying art which becomes particularly obtuse or
onerous or insensitive to contemporary needs and practice‟
„What the overemphasis on the idea of content [meaning]
entails is the perennial, never consummated project of
interpretation. And, conversely, it is the habit of approaching
works of art in order to interpret them that sustains the fancy
that there really is such a thing as the content of a work of art.‟
Susan Sontag, “Against interpretation”
What meaning cannot grasp
„opera is one of those art forms and objects of reference for
aesthetic experience which one would not do justice to by
experiencing it and analysing it exclusively within the
dimension of meaning-production or meaning-identification –
that is, through interpretation based on a style of philosophical
reflection that we call hermeneutics.‟
„An entirely different way of seeing opens up the minute we
write the word “re-presentation” with a hyphen and think about
its possible etymological meaning, namely as a making-present
again.‟
Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, “Production of presence…”, 343; 45.
„I'm an opera buff, and can be reduced to a puddle by
beautiful singing…It is moments like those when opera, in
addition to the aesthetic joys and emotional satisfactions, can
seem like a spectator sport or a circus high-wire act. They‟re
times when opera audiences cheer or jeer.‟
“Pavarotti‟s high C”, http://mindblog.dericbownds.net
Meaning meaning everywhere
TMI
Text and context
Hermeneutics
Semiotics
Sociology
Against Interpretation
Meaning versus presence