After reading the very enlightening article "Critics of Disenchantment" by Stephen Miles (available on jstor), defending some criticisms of "New Musicology" by Charles Rosen, I find myself faced with a certain chasm that I will need some reference or explanation to cross. It seems the furthest I can get to, insofar as the interpretation/reading of musical works themselves, is the following (for me, a very interesting idea):
"...the tension between the objective imperative towards comprehensibility vs. the subjective imperative toward expression. Adorno finds social meaning in the gaps and fissures that open up between these cognitive poles".
Such games, playing off what the listener expects to hear by presenting them with the unexpected, have long been played (though, in my ignorance, I assume they mainly came into usage with Mozart). I do not quite understand how one gets from this interplay to constructing "reasonable" readings of (instrumental) music which effectively seem to communicate something authentic about the music as it was intended as opposed to something that comes off as being merely correlated to the music in question, as opposed to coming chiefly from within it. Consequently I would be rather grateful if someone might oblige me by providing some (reasonably lucid) reference by which I might educate myself on this matter.
(I know that the meaningfulness of some of the above statements might easily be contested if interpreted, but I do not have the language to phrase them more correctly).
EDIT: I've just read the following article by Richard Dawkins (i'm pretty sure I've read it before, but)
Postmodernism disrobed
http://www.physics.nyu.edu/faculty/sokal/dawkins.htmlI think now I can maybe more fully understand in light my reaction to the stuff in that article the feelings that Alistair must have when confronted with similar interpretations of music!
