MUSC 6658 Henry Spencer

Dr. Kevin Moll 5/2/2016

Reading Response to Musical Hermeneutics

1. Hermeneutics evolved from the study and interpretation of religious texts, known as
exegesis. Being an authority on a religious text warranted a great deal of influence
within a community in the classical era because of the relevance of religious debate e.g.,
Council of Trent, Martin Luther. In association with aesthetics, how can the
hermeneutic method help us in our understanding of a work?

Hermeneutics originated as the search for valid interpretation and remains so for
aesthetics. The hermeneutics method seeks out the poetics employed by a creator which design a
work. Early hermeneutics of Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) begin the use of a
hermeneutic circle, which employs the knowledge of a creator’s entire corpus of work to better
understand the single work, wherein, the entire corpus of work is understood the analysis of a
single text. The same methodology may applied to a composers work. If we wish to understand
Beethoven’s late string quartets, we should have knowledge of how his compositional process
developed. Going further, Wilhelm Dilthey (1833–1911) would analyze the temporal location of
Beethoven. Providing details of that historical culture, in addition to contributing musical
influences only serves to further out historical understanding. Dilthey would also note that the
interpreter’s own thinking is itself of a certain historical epoch and may contribute to the
interpretation.

2. The chapter from Savage titled Formalist Aesthetics and Musical Hermeneutics outlines
the position of formalist aesthetics as it is played out be Eduard Hanslick (1825–1904)
—- the scientific analysis of tonal relationships within music and spawned from the
growing interest in programmatic music. Musical hermeneutics is outlines with
reference to the cited critic of Hanslick, Hermann Kretzschmarr (1848–1924). What
happens in the context of the chapter is a hermeneutical analysis of Hanslick’s
formalist aesthetics that returns the denied presence of the metaphysical. How does
Kretzschmarr address Hanslick’s formalist opinion?

The hermeneutic method may potentially be used to better understand the methods of any
philosopher. Kretzschmarr addresses the fact that Hanslick “could not free himself from the ether
of the Romantic standpoint on art” because “[he] echoed a romantic Pythagoreanism’s
transvaluation of the harmony of the spheres” (59). Essentially, Hanslick could not space the
presence of the metaphysical in his work “[he] vested his theory with an empirical significant
against the background of romantic metaphysics” (61). Kretzschmarr created an “aesthetics of
themes … identifying music’s structural features and procedures with a substantive expressive
meaning” in an attempt to place some meaning upon Hanslick’s forms (63). In so doing,
Kretzschamarr’s musical hermeneutics articulated the “correspondance between form and
content…[that served as] the epistemological function” of his theory (65).

3. Hermeneutics is the cross-disciplinary study of interpretation. Poetics is often described

as the creative process by which forms and meaning are put together to create work.
What relationship does hermeneutics have to the study of poetics?

4.