ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the domain in which the musical work takes on the form it is actually intended to, as sound. The concept of interpretation is applied most often and analysis of the varied forms of music's existence this concept entails is most commonly encountered in this area. The concept of 'interpretation' is located in the conceptual field containing terms such as analysis, exegesis, reading and translation. The chapter considers the various possible goals of musical interpretation: trying to locate the work's essence by attempting to reconstruct its historical sound. It may be that the point of the new music of the twentieth century–in so far as it is aleatoric, open-form, intuitive, graphically notated, chance music, indeterminate, pointedly 'senseless' and 'chaotic'–is to free music from those traditional notions which encourage the search to locate its being. The ontology of art music is open-ended, and this open-endedness is unlimited with respect to its existence, reality and location.
