ABSTRACT
The resurgence of musical hermeneutics in recent scholarship provides an opportunity to reexamine critical practices that have been deployed to overthrow traditional conceptions of music. Turning to interpretive methods to decipher hidden social values, meanings, and political agendas has proven to be one of the most effective means of dismantling the onceprivileged idea that music operated within its own autonomous sphere. At the same time, the appeal to hermeneutics as a way to justify breaking with metaphysical and formalist conceits too often eclipses philosophical insights and arguments that run contrary to contemporary critical tactics and strategies. Most striking of all, the tradition of thinking out of which these insights and arguments arise is one that offers encouragement to critics who maintain that all understanding entails interpretive acts. The clash between strategies that exploit methods of interpretation to deconstruct music’s institutional preservation, and the philosophical and phenomenological investigations undertaken by thinkers such as Martin Heidegger, Hans-George Gadamer, and Paul Ricoeur therefore provides a welcome occasion for reconsidering the history of criticism’s relation to hermeneutics. At the same time, through reevaluating the history in which musical hermeneutics came to be opposed to formalist ideals, the philosophical undertaking for which this occasion calls leads to new insights into criticism’s limits and its task in relation to music’s power to affect ways in which the world is open to us.
