Many spheres of music : hermeneutic interpretation of musical signification

Abstract

Considerable interest has been shown in the field of music aesthetics in recent years, not only by aestheticians but also by writers from diverse fields such as musicology, psychology and linguistics. What we have witnessed in these discussions have been not only painstaking analyses of music in terms of its aesthetic value, but also explorations of music in relation to a varied range of research areas from examining the relations between music and mind using psychological methods, through evaluating music in terms of our post-modem notion of art, to exploring the relations between language and music in terms of their semantic and semiotic characteristics. Such accounts typically seek to show that music is more than mere sound, and, in particular, several accounts focus on its expressiveness and its possibility of conveying a certain significance