Interpreting Music - 9780520267060

Interpreting Music is a comprehensive essay on understanding musical meaning and performing music meaningfullyù"interpreting music" in both senses of the phrase. Synthesizing and advancing two decades of highly influential writing, Lawrence Kramer fundamentally rethinks the concepts of work, score, performance, performativity, interpretation, and meaningùeven the very concept of musicùwhile breaking down conventional wisdom and received ideas.

"Clear, trenchant, delightfully opinionated, and thick with virtuosic wordplay. This book will not disappoint." NICHOLAS COOK, author of The Schenker Project: Culture, Race, and Music Theory in Fin-de-SiFcle Vienna

"Eloquently formulated and laced with wit. A major contribution to critical musicology" DEREK B. SCOTT, author of Sounds of the Metropolis: The Nineteenth-Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris, and Vienna

"In this astonishing performance, Lawrence Kramer challenges us to rethink what it can mean to interpret music as listeners, as scholars, and as performers. Virtuosic, exhilarating, and provocative, this book confronts the conventional wisdom around such topics as hermeneutics, subjectivity, history, analysis, modernism, metaphor, and performance to shape our understanding of music into a virtual new order of things. Kramer's wide-ranging and humane outlook in Interpreting Music compels us to question what we thought we knew about music and meaning."-Michael Klein, author of Intertextuality in Western Art Music