ABSTRACT
This chapter begins with the premise that a knowledge and understanding of musical meaning is central to music education, and that it is through multiple musical creativities that meaning is made. Furthermore, it is the role of music education to enhance our capacity to make meaning through musical creativities.
To prioritise musical meaning means to understand it and to this end the chapter critically reviews theories of musical meaning and their manifestation in music education. By way of embracing the critical issues arising from this review, the work of musicologist Lawrence Kramer is explored as a contemporary take on the nature of musical meaning and the implications for music education. Of particular importance here is what Kramer calls open interpretation (hermeneutics), where all engagement with music can provide potential insight into its cultural, social, historical and political dimensions. The act of musical engagement is always an interpretative process and is a ‘performance’ where subject(s) and music meet to form meanings through a ‘fusion of horizons’. It will be argued that musical meaning, seen as open interpretation, has the potential to provide a theoretical underpinning for critical agency in music education through the discourse in music and the discourse about music.
