A Framework for Musical Meaning

Compared to other forms of art, speaking of “meaning” seems to be most elusive in music, since the kind of “meaning” involved basically is neither semantic nor depicting. One might conclude that it makes no sense to speak of musical meaning at all, but this conclusion has seemed too rash to many thinkers. Consequently, the problem has been approached in quite varied ways. The present paper proposes a framework in order to throw light upon the relations between those various approaches to understand the meaning of music. This frame is triangular, its three points being (1) musical structure and analysis, (2) the embodied experience of listening, (3) the hermeneutic approach to interpret music in terms of its relation to the world. I provide short descriptions of the relations of interdependence by which these aspects influence each other, as well as suggestions how to place several recent theories of musical meaning in the proposed framework.