Musical Meaning and Interpretation

This collection of essays brings together leading musicologists and music theorists working across a range of genres--classical, jazz, and popular--to offer fresh approaches to questions of meaning in music. Rooted in humanistic values, Musical Meaning and Interpretation combines rich analytical insights with critical perspectives on musical hermeneutics, arguing collectively for the strength, necessity, and urgency of interpretive work in music.

Michael J. Puri is a professor of music history and theory at the University of Virginia. His research focuses on French and German music of the long nineteenth century, and combines music analysis, intellectual history, and critical theory. He is the author of Ravel the Decadent: Memory, Sublimation, and Desire (OUP 2011), and has received the Einstein Award from the American Musicological Society and the Delta Delta Delta Fellowship from the National Humanities Center.
Jason Geary is Dean and Professor at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University. He has published widely on the music and culture of nineteenth-century Germany, in particular the composers Mendelssohn, Wagner, Mahler, and Richard Strauss, and Hellenism as it relates to music. Author of The Politics of Appropriation: German Romantic Music and the Ancient Greek Legacy (OUP 2014), Geary is a Fulbright grant recipient and a past member of the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton.
Seth Monahan
teaches analysis and musicianship at the Yale School of Music and was formerly the chair of Music Theory at the Eastman School of Music. In addition to his research on form and meaning in the music of Gustav Mahler, he studies the ways in which conventions of music-analytical rhetoric relate to aspects of musical cognition and experience. He is the author of Mahler's Symphonic Sonatas (OUP 2015) and is a two-time recipient of the Society for Music Theory's Emerging Scholar Award.

- Acknowledgments
- List of Figures
- About the Companion Website
- Contributors
- Introduction: Toward New Horizons: Music, Shared Understanding, and the Search for Meaning
- Michael J. Puri, Jason Geary, and Seth Monahan
- METHODOLOGIES
- 1: "Rituals of Circularity": On the Intellectual Underpinnings of Rotational Form
- Michael J. Puri
- 2: The Devil's on Your Side: On The Shady Business of Hermeneutics
- Phil Ford
- 3: Pleasure, Knowledge, and Social Commitment Revisited
- Steven Rings
- CASE STUDIES IN RECEPTION
- 4: Chabrier and the Pittoresque
- Alexandra Kieffer
- 5: Beethoven's Late Quartets as Absolute Music in Modern Society
- Sanna Pederson
- 6: A Century of Singing Along to Stephen Foster
- Esther M. Morgan-Ellis
- HERMENEUTICS IN ACTION
- 7: Mining for Meaning with Late Beethoven: Cultural Units, Dialogic Form, and the Hermeneutic Project (with Glosses on Opp. 101, 110, and 111)
- Vasili Byros
- 8: The NaÏve and the Sentimental as Cultural Memory in Mahler's First Symphony
- Jason Geary
- 9: Ritual and Variation in Unsuk Chin's %Su: Concerto for Sheng and Orchestra (2009)
- Yayoi Uno Everett
- 10: Inter-Asia Imaginings: Chou Wen-chung's Eternal Pine
- Nancy Yunhwa Rao
- 11: "The Sweet Fragrance of Life": Mortality and Rebirth in Mahler's "Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde"
- Seth Monahan
- Selected Bibliography
- Index