Abstract
A central tenet of Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics is that we are interpreters. What is at issue in hermeneutics is our own being as interpreters. Despite this, Gadamer’s hermeneutics is commonly applied as a tool or means to understand the way in which we interpret particular things, be they texts, artworks, or conversations with our peers. This is especially clear in music studies where, for example, scholars often concern themselves with the ways in which performers interpret a score, and the relationship between the score and the performance. The fact that Gadamer’s hermeneutics attempts to approach the basic phenomenon of human existence, perhaps not surprisingly, rarely comes up in the music literature, to the detriment of both music and philosophical hermeneutics. Music offers important insights into Gadamer’s fundamental ontology that is worth exploring. Indeed, by approaching hermeneutics through music we gain insight into the movement, attunement, and presentation at issue in hermeneutic engagement. Working through key ideas from Gadamer’s philosophy such as the festival, conversation, and mimesis, the way in which the musical offers insight into the hermeneutical is illuminated. This chapter offers a renewed understanding of what it means to think with music, while making apparent elements of Gadamer’s hermeneutics that are sometimes obscured or overlooked.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
- 1.
Henri Bergson attempted to understand authentic temporality by distinguishing between divisible ‘time’ and the pure succession of ‘duration’ (2001). Heidegger (2010, 207), however, pointed out the way in which neither ‘time’ nor ‘duration’ overcomes the successive quality of time. For a discussion about this in a musical context see McAuliffe (2023, chap. 3).
- 2.
Gadamer himself discusses the idea of tempo markings in music in The Relevance of the Beautiful (1998, 43–44).
- 3.
- 4.
Risser takes this approach (2017).
- 5.
For a discussion on the relationship between performance and the ‘life’ of musical works see McAuliffe (2022); McAuliffe (forthcoming).
- 6.
For a discussion about how musical works can evoke a conceptual engagement with the sonority of the world, see (McAuliffe and Devenish 2023).
Bibliography
Aristotle. 1933. Metaphysics, Books I-IX. Loeb Classical Library. Translated by Hugh Tredennick. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Benjamin, Walter. 2007. Illuminations. Translated by Harry Zohn. Edited by Hannah Arendt. New York: Schocken Books.
Bergson, Henri. 2001. Time and Free Will: An Essay on the Immediate Data of Consciousness. Translated by F. L. Pogson. Mineola: Dover.
Bernasconi, Robert. 1995. ‘You Don’t Know What I’m Talking About’: Alterity and the Hermeneutic Ideal. In The Specter of Relativism: Truth, Dialogue, and Phronesis in Philosophical Hermeneutics, ed. Lawrence Kennedy Schmidt, 178–194. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
Dallmayr, Fred. 1996. Beyond Orientalism: Essays on Cross-Cultural Encounter. Albany: State University of New York Press.
Davey, Nicholas. 2013. Unfinished Worlds: Hermeneutics, Aesthetics and Gadamer. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
———. Gadamer’s Aesthetics. In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Article published June 13, 2007; last modified December 20, 2016. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/gadamer-aesthetics/.
Figal, Günter. 2002. The Doing of the Thing Itself: Gadamer’s Hermeneutic Ontology of Language. Translated by Robert J. Dostal. In The Cambridge Companion to Gadamer, edited by Robert J. Dostal, 102–125. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1977. The Universality of the Hermeneutical Problem. In Philosophical Hermeneutics. Translated and ed. David E. Linge, 3–17. Berkeley: University of California Press
———. 1998. The Relevance of the Beautiful and Other Essays. Translated by Nicholas Walker. Edited by Robert Bernasconi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press
———. 2007. From Word to Concept: The Task of Hermeneutics as Philosophy. In The Gadamer Reader” A Bouquet of the Later Writings, edited and translated by Richard E. Palmer, 108–122. Evanston: Northwestern University Press.
———. 2013. Truth and Method. Translated by Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall. London: Bloomsbury.
Grondin, Jean. 2001. Play, Festival, and Ritual in Gadamer: On the theme of the immemorial in his later works. In Language and Linguisticality in Gadamer’s Hermeneutics, edited and translated by Lawrence K. Schmidt, 43–50. Lanham: Lexington Books.
———. 2003. The Philosophy of Gadamer. Translated by Kathryn Plant. Chesham: Acumen.
Heidegger, Martin. 2010. Logic: The Question of Truth. Translated by Thomas Sheehan. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
———. Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter. New York: Harper Perennial, 2013.
Malpas, Jeff. 2012. Heidegger and the Thinking of Place: Explorations in the Topology of Being. Cambridge: The MIT Press.
———. 2015. Introduction: Hermeneutics and Philosophy. In The Routledge Companion to Hermeneutics, ed. Jeff Malpas and Hans-Helmuth Gander, 1–10. London: Routledge.
McAuliffe, Sam. 2022. Beyond the Performer: Gadamer, Pareyson, and the Hermeneutics of Improvised Musical Performance. Journal of Aesthetics and Phenomenology. https://doi.org/10.1080/20539320.2021.2083367.
———. 2023. Improvisation in Music and Philosophical Hermeneutics. London: Bloomsbury.
———. forthcoming. Situating the Musical Work in Improvised Telematic Performances. Contemporary Music Review.
McAuliffe, Sam, and Louise Devenish. 2023. Exploring Musical Worlds. Performance Philosophy.
Michelfelder, Diane P., and Richard E. Palmer. 1989. Dialogue and Deconstruction: The Gadamer-Derrida Encounter. New York: State University of New York Press.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. 2007. The Birth of Tragedy and Other Writings. Edited by Raymond Geuss and Ronald Speirs. Translated by Ronald Speirs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Plato. 1953. The Dialogues of Plato, 4 vols., 4th ed. Translated by Benjamin Jowett. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Risser, James. 1997. Hermeneutics and the Voice of the Other: Re-reading Gadamer’s Philosophical Hermeneutics. Albany: State University of New York Press.
———. 2017. Hermeneutic Considerations for Understanding Music. In International Yearbook for Hermeneutics, ed. Günter Figal and Bernhard Zimmermann, 61–75. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck.
Sallis, John. 2008. Transfigurements: On the True Sense of Art. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Savage, Roger H.W. 2010. Hermeneutics and Music Criticism. New York: Routledge.
Schmidt, Lawrence K. 2000. Respecting Others: The Hermeneutic Virtue. Continental Philosophy Review 33 (3): 359–379.
Schmidt, Dennis J. 2013. Keeping Pace with the Movement of Life: On Words and Music. Research in Phenomenology 43 (2): 193–203.
Sirowy, Beata. 2015. Hermeneutics, Aesthetics and the Arts. In The Routledge Companion to Hermeneutics, ed. Jeff Malpas and Hans-Helmuth Gander, 519–540. London: Routledge.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2024 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
McAuliffe, S. (2024). Approaching Hermeneutics Through Music. In: McAuliffe, S. (eds) Gadamer, Music, and Philosophical Hermeneutics. Contributions to Hermeneutics, vol 12. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41570-8_17
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41570-8_17
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-031-41569-2
Online ISBN: 978-3-031-41570-8
eBook Packages: Literature, Cultural and Media StudiesLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)