Organized by the AMS Music and Philosophy Study Group.
Musicologists and philosophers use the term “hermeneutics” differently. For the former, hermeneutics describes a way of approaching musical texts, sometimes used as a loose synonym for the close reading of notated scores. But for the latter, hermeneutics circumscribes the philosophy of interpretation, a substrain of the Continental tradition alongside existentialism, phenomenology, and Marxist critical theory (Critchley 2001). The gap between musical and philosophical hermeneutics finds its causes in the history of Western music theory (Bent 1994). However, the two hermeneutic practices often intersect at major points of inflection in musicology’s disciplinary evolution. For instance, Thomas Christensen (1993) has pointed up hermeneutics as a way to make sense of the old musicological rift between historicism and presentism—a rift later problematized by Philip Ewell’s (2020) critique of music theory’s “white racial frame.” Since the 1990s, proponents of New Musicology have been calling for an “open hermeneutics” to counter “closed” attitudes about what music is allowed to mean (Kramer 2020). Yet to decenter the position of the interpreter, some have advocated shifting our attention away from hermeneutics toward embodiment (Abbate 2004), while still others have sought “hermeneutic limits” for ethical research in the twenty-first century (Lee 2024). These interventions close the gap between musical and philosophical hermeneutics and treat the study of music as an interpretive practice.
This session meditates on the relationship between hermeneutics and music studies. Can the philosophy of interpretation help us think critically about how professional musicology and music theory have developed? Or suggest new directions as North American scholarship eyes an increasingly global horizon? What role does interpretation, along with its penchant for uncertainty, play in the production of musical knowledge? And how can the conventional association of hermeneutics with close reading be productively disentangled?