Interpreting Music [Hardcover]

Interpreting Musicis a comprehensive essay on understanding musical meaning and performing music meaningfullyinterpreting music in both senses of the term. Synthesizing and advancing two decades of highly influential work, Lawrence Kramer fundamentally rethinks the concepts of work, score, performance, performativity, interpretation, and meaningeven the very concept of musicwhile breaking down conventional wisdom and received ideas. Kramer argues that music, far from being closed to interpretation, is ideally open to it, and that musical interpretation is the paradigm of interpretation in general. The book illustrates the many dimensions of interpreting music through a series of case studies drawn from the classical repertoire, but its methods and principles carry over to other repertoires just as they carry beyond music by workingthroughmusic to wider philosophical and cultural questions.

Lawrence Krameris Professor of Music and English at Fordham University. He is the author of many books, includingMusical Meaning: Toward a Critical History; Opera and Modern Culture; andWhy Classical Music Still Matters, all from UC Press.

Clear, trenchant, delightfully opinionated, and thick with virtuosic word play. This book will not disappoint. Nicholas Cook, author ofThe Schenker Project: Culture, Race, and Music Theory in Fin-de-siecle Vienna

Eloquently formulated and laced with wit. A major contribution to critical musicology. Derek B. Scott, author ofSounds of the Metropolis: The 19th-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, modernisl£*