Hermeneutics and Music Criticism

<p><em>Hermeneutics and Music Criticism</em> forges new perspectives on aesthetics, politics and contemporary interpretive strategies. By advancing new insights into the roles judgment and imagination play both in our experiences of music and its critical interpretation, this book reevaluates our current understandings of music’s transformative power. The engagement with critical musicologists and philosophers, including Adorno, Gadamer, and Ricoeur, provides a nuanced analysis of the crucial issues affecting the theory and practice of music criticism. By challenging musical hermeneutics’ deployment as a means of deciphering social values and meanings, <em>Hermeneutics and Music Criticism</em> offers an answer to the long-standing question of how music’s expression of moods and feelings affects us and our relation to the world. </p> <p>Preface Acknowledgements 1. Aesthetics, Hermeneutics, Criticism 2. Social <em>Werktreue </em>and the Subjectivization of Aesthetics 3. From <em>Musikē</em> to Metaphysics 4. Formalist Aesthetics and Musical Hermeneutics 5. Deconstructing the Disciplinary Divide 6. The Question of Metaphor 7. Mimesis and the Hermeneutics of Music 8. Political Critique and the Politics of Music Criticism 9. Toward a Hermeneutics of Music Criticism Notes </p>