Full Description
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.
Contents
Acknowledgments
List of Figures
About the Companion Website
Contributors
Introduction: Toward New Horizons: Music, Shared Understanding, and the Search for Meaning
Michael J. Puri, Jason Geary, and Seth Monahan
METHODOLOGIES
1: "Rituals of Circularity": On the Intellectual Underpinnings of Rotational Form
Michael J. Puri
2: The Devil's on Your Side: On The Shady Business of Hermeneutics
Phil Ford
3: Pleasure, Knowledge, and Social Commitment Revisited
Steven Rings
CASE STUDIES IN RECEPTION
4: Chabrier and the Pittoresque
Alexandra Kieffer
5: Beethoven's Late Quartets as Absolute Music in Modern Society
Sanna Pederson
6: A Century of Singing Along to Stephen Foster
Esther M. Morgan-Ellis
HERMENEUTICS IN ACTION
7: Mining for Meaning with Late Beethoven: Cultural Units, Dialogic Form, and the Hermeneutic Project (with Glosses on Opp. 101, 110, and 111)
Vasili Byros
8: The NaÏve and the Sentimental as Cultural Memory in Mahler's First Symphony
Jason Geary
9: Ritual and Variation in Unsuk Chin's %Su: Concerto for Sheng and Orchestra (2009)
Yayoi Uno Everett
10: Inter-Asia Imaginings: Chou Wen-chung's Eternal Pine
Nancy Yunhwa Rao
11: "The Sweet Fragrance of Life": Mortality and Rebirth in Mahler's "Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde"
Seth Monahan
Selected Bibliography
Index
