Musical Meaning and Interpretation: Perspectives, Reflections, Critique

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.

Michael J. Puri is a professor of music history and theory at the University of Virginia. His research focuses on French and German music of the long nineteenth century, and combines music analysis, intellectual history, and critical theory. He is the author of Ravel the Decadent: Memory, Sublimation, and Desire (OUP 2011), and has received the Einstein Award from the American Musicological Society and the Delta Delta Delta Fellowship from the National Humanities Center.

Jason Geary is Dean and Professor at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. He has published widely on the music and culture of nineteenth-century Germany, in particular the composers Mendelssohn, Wagner, Mahler, and Richard Strauss, and Hellenism as it relates to music. Author of The Politics of Appropriation: German Romantic Music and the Ancient Greek Legacy (OUP 2014), Geary is a Fulbright grant recipient and a past member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.

Seth Monahan teaches analysis and musicianship at the Yale School of Music and was formerly the chair of Music Theory at the Eastman School of Music. In addition to his research on form and meaning in the music of Gustav Mahler, he studies the ways in which conventions of music-analytical rhetoric relate to aspects of musical cognition and experience. He is the author of Mahler’s Symphonic Sonatas (OUP 2015) and is a two-time recipient of the Society for Music Theory’s Emerging Scholar Award.