Musical Meaning and Interpretation

Reviews / Votes

In this superb collection, a dream-team of musical hermeneuts explores what the editors call "the nearly infinite variety of ways in which music means." The authors tease out strands of meaning in music by Beethoven, Chabrier, Unsuk Chin, Coltrane, Stephen Foster, Mahler, and Chou Wen-chung. Along the way, they give vivid demonstration of the challenges and the pleasures of interpretive work in music, including the ways that music connects, and connects us, with the world around us. * Joseph Straus, Distinguished Professor of Music, CUNY Graduate Center * This volume demonstrates, amply and richly, that an investment in music's seemingly inexhaustible capacity for meaning need not occlude an acute awareness of its historicity and political entanglements, its agencies and affordances, or its object status in the world. The scope of imagination and quality of scholarship across this collection are outstanding, and compellingly urge a vital critical engagement with renewed practices of interpretation, most broadly conceived. * Sherry Lee, Associate Professor of Musicology, The University of Toronto * A truly exciting collection! Beyond its attention to expressive codes and critical traditions, Musical Meaning and Interpretation is a book that brims with an exuberant delight in music's multi-dimensional flux of meaning * the urgent particularity of sounding gestures, feelings, bodies, and histories. Eleven leading music historians and analysts deliver a superbly modulated symposium engaging jazz, chamber, symphonic, and folksong repertoires of Asia, Europe, and North America. These authors' perspectives are unusually eclectic; their reflections erudite yet accessible; and the disciplinary critique is unfailingly generous and constructive. What could be more inspiring?Philip Rupprecht, Professor of Music, Duke University *