Ashplant
Reading, Smashing, and Playing Ulysses
Kramer, Lawrence. Interpreting Music. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.
Related topics:
Creation and Making
Music
The Unspoken
Link to citation page: http://grinnellcollege.worldcat.org/title/interpreting-music/oclc/606760506&referer=brief_results
Kramer discusses both understanding musical meaning and how to perform music meaningfully. Most importantly, he focuses in part on the intersection of music and language. Kramer's book is essentially a long essay divided into chapters, examining aspects of music interpretation that include hermeneutics, language, meaning and metaphor, among others. Kramer discusses the intersection of music and words--how, for example, can a piece of music be described as "heartbreaking?" The process is one by which the music enables listeners to enjoy music in a certain way, including "the ways of accurate and detailed formal-technical description" (23). Kramer goes on to argue that music "relays understanding by finding a place in a language game, or more exactly in a loose but large network of language games" (25). What he means by language games, though, are "modes of performance," and not just "occasions of utterance" (26). Kramer goes on to discuss the sometimes irrepressible feelings that music can evoke in us, which Kramer claims is what happens when music becomes a part of people's lives. Metaphor, he argues, is "cognitive mapping," a "turning [of] principle medium in which meaning proliferates, and proliferates specifically by the transfer of semantic energies from one sphere of interest to another" (84). It would seem that metaphor is then the term used for one area (language) using the energies of another (music). He concludes by saying that metaphor is "a mutual transfer of values, concepts, and associations between the conjoined terms" (91). Later, Kramer attempts to articulate the difference between language and music, saying that language slows down the process of metaphor, while music accelerates or embodies it. Ultimately, the book aims to provide a resource that explains both understanding and performing musical scores. Although the book discusses some areas of neuroscience and how those relate to music and language, the main focus of the text is performance and understanding.
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