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This book is about musical hermeneutics. It provides a broad survey of “interpreting music” in the two complementary senses of the phrase: understanding musical works and performing musical scores. Hermeneutics is the art of interpretation. Embracing the Enlightenment model endows subjectivity with certain rights and dignities based precisely on its singularity, its irreplaceability, its finitude—even its opacity to itself. In the diversity of its results and its striving to maintain its own openness—no easy thing—open interpretation as a cultural practice continually reanimates this conception. And so does music, insofar as we link music to feeling, sensation, emotion, memory, and desire. Subjects make interpretations; interpretations make subjects. On what terms? To address this issue, we need to revisit two of the founding texts of hermeneutics, Friedrich Schleiermacher's “The Hermeneutics: Outline of the 1819 Lectures” and Hans-Georg Gadamer's Truth and Method (1960). The book also examines the objections to musical hermeneutics that are conveniently clumped together in a review by Richard Taruskin of several books about the concept of classical music.

Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's “Hunt” Quartet—the String Quartet in B-flat Major, K. 458—earns its nickname with its very first notes. Here are some things a listener might recognize: the strings unmistakably depict the calls of hunting horns; they summon the imaginary huntsmen to band together by joining one halloo to another through common tones; their triplet rhythms sound the confident canter of the hunters' mounts. But the mimicry is as transient as it is definite. Musical hermeneutics is an attempt to account for what the work of music might be heard to do in specific historical and cultural circumstances. This chapter explores how the work, especially the musical work, can be reconceived without being reified, fetishized, mystified, or set up as a surrogate form of fixed authority; discusses modes of language that are best suited to respond interpretively to the specifically musical character of the musical work; and considers the relationship between the musical work and its interpretations, primarily in the hermeneutic sense of semantic address and reply.

This chapter identifies three approaches to help in sorting out the different functions of recordings as memory objects, studying Jacques Attali and his analysis of “the repetitive economy” of mechanical reproduction and its tendency to stockpile. Next, it discusses Henri Bergson and the complicated dynamic between memory, past, and present moment, and describes the different forms of remembrance represented by recordings. The chapter also studies musical hermeneutics as a critical enterprise that has been changed by the kinds of repetition which are allowed by recordings.

This chapter demonstrates how there has been a lot of musicological effort given to the competing claims of the fixed, authoritative musical work and the creative act of performance, mostly to the detriment of the work. It oversimplifies the historical situation, which is full of complex instances in which the roles of the work and of performance meet and collaborate. Antagonism is only one variety of collaboration in this sense, and not the most frequent or most important variety. This confusion regarding the relationship between work and performance formed the basis of skepticism about the possibility of musical hermeneutics. The chapter aims to counter that skepticism and to outline a possible synthesis between musical hermeneutics and the study of music as collaboration.

What could it mean to deconstruct music in general and a classical score in particular? How is music pertinent to deconstruction at all? For deconstruction in its brief heyday was above all a matter of texts; Rose Subotnik reports that when she mentioned to Jacques Derrida that she was trying out deconstructive approaches to music, he assumed she was looking at writing on music, not music “itself” (whatever that might mean). Musical hermeneutics is not necessarily in the deconstruction business per se, but where music is concerned it deconstructs as it goes along, casually littering its path with discarded ideals. However, the catch-22 that goes with deconstruction also snags musical hermeneutics. Deconstruction is not a variety of skepticism but a highly refined form of pragmatism. This chapter explores whether there is anything in reason that prevents deconstruction from sustaining the difference between concept and rhetoric, by focusing on Ludwig van Beethoven's La Malinconia.

Musical meaning forfeits in advance any possible claim to represent musical knowledge. Music appears in this scenario as an intrinsically self-mystifying phenomenon. The more it incites subjectivity—that is, does just what it is supposed to do—the less responsive it becomes to description. The features we can describe, form and technique, cannot account adequately—if at all—for music's subjective effects. The chief traditional link of Western music to subjectivity is feeling. Parsing the statement “music expresses feelings” is a familiar task in musical aesthetics but perhaps a misguided one. The culture-based projection of subjectivity in music has a distinctive structure; it tends to mobilize a specific type of performativity. Musical hermeneutics proposes, not to decrypt a hidden message, and far less to fix the form of anyone's musical experience, but to leave a record of an event. Prejudgment delineates the sphere of common understanding; it pertains not to the things that need interpretation but to everything felt to need no such thing.

A reception history of Debussy’s music in the years after the 1902 premiere of Pelléas et Mélisande reveals the many interconnections between musical culture and early-twentieth-century intellectual culture in Paris, including recent developments in the human sciences, and can reorient the broader narrative of musical culture in this period away from comparisons to Symbolist poetry and Impressionist painting. This reception history likewise invites a reconsideration of musical experience in musicological scholarship and its relationship to hermeneutics, offering an alternative to the tendency in recent accounts of aesthetic experience to reify a problematic dualism between live, ephemeral “presence” and the inert historical artifact.