Musical Meaning and Interpretation

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.

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.

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.

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

Michael J. Puri is a professor of music history and theory at the University of Virginia. His research focuses on French and German music of the long nineteenth century, and combines music analysis, intellectual history, and critical theory. He is the author of Ravel the Decadent: Memory, Sublimation, and Desire (OUP 2011), and has received the Einstein Award from the American Musicological Society and the Delta Delta Delta Fellowship from the National Humanities Center. Jason Geary is Dean and Professor at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. He has published widely on the music and culture of nineteenth-century Germany, in particular the composers Mendelssohn, Wagner, Mahler, and Richard Strauss, and Hellenism as it relates to music. Author of The Politics of Appropriation: German Romantic Music and the Ancient Greek Legacy (OUP 2014), Geary is a Fulbright grant recipient and a past member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton. Seth Monahan teaches analysis and musicianship at the Yale School of Music and was formerly the chair of Music Theory at the Eastman School of Music. In addition to his research on form and meaning in the music of Gustav Mahler, he studies the ways in which conventions of music-analytical rhetoric relate to aspects of musical cognition and experience. He is the author of Mahler's Symphonic Sonatas (OUP 2015) and is a two-time recipient of the Society for Music Theory's Emerging Scholar Award.