ABSTRACT
Music’s capacity to express moods and feelings that augment affective dimensions of our experiences draws an investigation into music’s power of expression across the threshold of deconstructive critiques. Hence, far from signaling a return to metaphysical pretensions, a hermeneutical inquiry into music’s expressive significance aims at uncovering music’s capacity to affect our understanding of ourselves and our world. Every meaningful encounter with a work occasions an experience that is properly aesthetic; moreover, this experience is one in which the work speaks. In this respect, the metaphorical character of the language of a work is decisive. To be sure, the idea that a musical work speaks a language can itself be interpreted metaphorically. The metaphor in this case effects the transfer of the properly linguistic nature of language into a nonlinguistic domain. However, the question immediately arises as to whether this metaphorical reference to the language of music exhausts the problem of music’s mode of communicability. In pursuing a hermeneutical inquiry into music’s power to speak, I cannot avoid Gadamer’s claim that language is the universal medium of our understanding of the world. At the same time, the sense of metaphoricity at work in language authorizes extending metaphor’s power to redescribe the real to encompass the musical work’s expression of its world. The expression of a world is therefore critical to the hermeneutics of music that I am undertaking to develop in this and the following chapter. To the extent that this hermeneutics concerns the experience that a work communicates, the question of the metaphorical character of a work’s power of expression is the starting point for a more sustained reflection on music’s mimetic relation to the world.
