Musical versus Philosophical Hermeneutics: Semiotics, Topic Theory, and the Politics of Musical Meaning

The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy defines hermeneutics broadly as the “study of interpretation.” Though the first modern writers on hermeneutics were Protestant theologians concerned with interpreting scripture after the Reformation, philosophers have since expanded the field of inquiry to encompass theories of literature, history, law, language, and knowledge. Yet when music scholars speak of hermeneutics, they have something much narrower in mind. In the 1990s, semiotics dominated theories of musical meaning, and it relegated hermeneutics to a strictly complementary role: to going “beyond the purely structural,” augmenting musical analysis with extramusical speculation. This was not always the case. At the outset of the nineteenth century, the interpretation of music was tightly linked with contemporary philosophies of interpretation. But as the Romantic idea of absolute music evolved, it widened the apparent gap between the musical and the extramusical, singling “music itself” out for special treatment.

Topic theory began in the 1980s as a vocabulary for describing how eighteenth-century art music borrows and combines styles from earlier periods. For this reason, scholars during the New Musicology period of the 90s saw topic theory as an olive branch between musicology and music theory: two fields warring over the musical-extramusical divide. Since then, topic theory has evolved into “the foremost branch of musical semiotics,” praised for linking musical signifiers to extramusical meaning in an “intersubjectively verifiable” way. A centuries-old dichotomy continues to fashion music into an objective ground for truth, controlling the way we interpret music and keeping its meanings under wraps. To meet the challenges of a new, global era of post-truth, this antiquated model of musical hermeneutics needs to keep pace with developments in the philosophy of interpretation.