ABSTRACT
Some writers make a specific point of incongruities between musical norms, or between an explicit musical element and an implicit musical norm. There are two possible ways to interpret musical incongruities. One is to resolve them into new congruences by modifying their correlations so that they accommodate each other. The second way is to acknowledge the structures of incongruities as semantically significant in themselves and interpret them as irony. Attempts to create sets of criteria that will help to establish the presence of an ironic message have been made mainly in literature. The most serious attempt to formulate theoretical grounds for musical irony was made by Robert Hatten. Ronald Woodley brings the traditional approach to romantic irony in music to its self-evident extreme by actually claiming that every form of musical ambiguity could be perceived as musical irony.
