ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses more closely on the precise normative, epistemological and ontological issues that are at stake in theorizing the twin concepts of ‘mediation’ and the ‘music itself’. It is perhaps not surprising that the purported ideological unmasking of the ‘music itself’ has been accompanied by a correlative critique of its methodological distillate, formal analytical practice. The chapter explores on dialectically conceived notion of the ‘music itself’ is a necessary counterweight to an untenable, or trivial, emphasis on the ‘contexts of reception’. It examines on different concepts of mediation, rather than on the extent to which a particular model of mediation and its associated ontology might serve to determine, at a normative level, the mode of interpretation to be adopted. The chapter appears to imply an ontology of music dependent upon the notion of some originary authentic condition that is itself subsequently distorted by the imposition of an alienating conceptual scheme.
