1st Edition

Hermeneutics and Music Criticism

By Roger W. H. Savage Copyright 2010
    216 Pages
    by Routledge

    216 Pages
    by Routledge

    Hermeneutics and Music Criticism forges new perspectives on aesthetics, politics and contemporary interpretive strategies. By advancing new insights into the roles judgment and imagination play both in our experiences of music and its critical interpretation, this book reevaluates our current understandings of music’s transformative power. The engagement with critical musicologists and philosophers, including Adorno, Gadamer, and Ricoeur, provides a nuanced analysis of the crucial issues affecting the theory and practice of music criticism. By challenging musical hermeneutics’ deployment as a means of deciphering social values and meanings, Hermeneutics and Music Criticism offers an answer to the long-standing question of how music’s expression of moods and feelings affects us and our relation to the world.

    Preface Acknowledgements 1. Aesthetics, Hermeneutics, Criticism 2. Social Werktreue and the Subjectivization of Aesthetics 3. From Musikē to Metaphysics 4. Formalist Aesthetics and Musical Hermeneutics 5. Deconstructing the Disciplinary Divide 6. The Question of Metaphor 7. Mimesis and the Hermeneutics of Music 8. Political Critique and the Politics of Music Criticism 9. Toward a Hermeneutics of Music Criticism Notes

    Biography

    Roger W. H. Savage teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has published articles on aesthetics, music and philosophy in Telos, Philosophy and Literature, The European Legacy, The British Journal of Aesthetics, ex tempore and Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology.

     

    Savage (UCLA) here collects nine essays centering on the study of music and hermeneutics—the art of interpretation. Traditionally the study of hermeneutics has been limited to linguistic endeavors, but Savage brings the reader a host of contemporary interpretive strategies designed to simultaneously illuminate and break down accepted models of judgment with regard to the musical arts. Of particular interest are the essays on "the question of metaphor" and "mimesis and the hermeneutics of music," as both move toward application of literary theory to musical models. The final essay, "Toward a Hermeneutics of Music Criticism," concludes with an acknowledgement that the aesthetic value of a work and its aural interpretation provide the source for value and meaning. Savage has opened the door with this thought-provoking collection. Though the volume may engender many questions, it is an important resource for advanced scholars. Summing up: Highly recommended. Graduate students, researchers, professionals.

    --K.S. Todd, Oklahoma Baptist University