Narrative Walks Through Music, University of Arts in Belgrade, Serbia, 5 October 2024 (online).
This paper argues that the history of Anglophone topic theory has presented theorists with a false dichotomy between semiotics and hermeneutics. Though the introduction to The Oxford Handbook recognized topic theory as “the foremost branch of music semiotics” (Mirka 2014), this was not always the case. Until semiotics took hold of research on “music and meaning” in the 1990s with the work of Kofi Agawu, Robert Hatten, Naomi Cumming, and Raymond Monelle, musical topics were treated as part of the rhetorical structure of Enlightenment repertoire (Allanbrook 1983; Sisman 1993). Despite attempts to interpret topics through the lens of intertextuality rather than semiotics (Klein 2005; Kramer 2011), theorists have increasingly used topics to “verify” supposed correlations between musical signifiers and extramusical meanings. As a result, semiotics has postured as a self-standing activity that grounds hermeneutics in the “responsible” reconstruction of historical listening competencies (Sánchez-Kisielewska 2023).
Semiotics is a variety—not the anchor—of hermeneutics: an insight that has been obscured by several crises over interpretation. The first crisis opposes interpretation as the historicist reconstruction of past meaning against the presentist actualization of meaning as an ongoing process (Christensen 1993). The second, related crisis opposes a “closed” practice of deciphering a text’s correct meaning against interpretation as a more “open,” participatory activity (Kramer 2020). Both crises take root in the early history of hermeneutics, with Friedrich Schleiermacher’s attempt to overcome the dialectic between the linguistic relations within a text and the author’s psychic process behind it. However, modern philosophical hermeneutics conceives interpretation as a precondition of understanding rather than a dialectic.
This paper points up a rift that has grown between musical and philosophical hermeneutics. For the former, semiotics enables the pursuit of verifiability by forging correlations between musical signifieds and extramusical signifiers. Yet philosophical hermeneutics reveals semiotics as but one possible strategy for topical interpretation.