Musical Meaning and Interpretation

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 Monahanteaches 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.

In this superb collection, a dream-team of musical hermeneuts explores what the editors call "the nearly infinite variety of ways in which music means." The authors tease out strands of meaning in music by Beethoven, Chabrier, Unsuk Chin, Coltrane, Stephen Foster, Mahler, and Chou Wen-chung. Along the way, they give vivid demonstration of the challenges and the pleasures of interpretive work in music, including the ways that music connects, and connects us, with the world around us.

• AcknowledgmentsList of FiguresAbout the Companion WebsiteContributors Introduction: Toward New Horizons: Music, Shared Understanding, and the Search for MeaningMichael J. Puri, Jason Geary, and Seth Monahan METHODOLOGIES1: "Rituals of Circularity": On the Intellectual Underpinnings of Rotational FormMichael J. Puri 2: The Devil's on Your Side: On The Shady Business of HermeneuticsPhil Ford 3: Pleasure, Knowledge, and Social Commitment RevisitedSteven Rings CASE STUDIES IN RECEPTION4: Chabrier and the PittoresqueAlexandra Kieffer 5: Beethoven's Late Quartets as Absolute Music in Modern SocietySanna Pederson 6: A Century of Singing Along to Stephen FosterEsther M. Morgan-Ellis HERMENEUTICS IN ACTION7: 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 SymphonyJason 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 PineNancy Yunhwa Rao 11: "The Sweet Fragrance of Life": Mortality and Rebirth in Mahler's "Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde"Seth Monahan Selected BibliographyIndex