Interpretation, performance, and Musical Understanding

This project explores musical understanding through Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics. Rather than treating perceptual listening, formal analysis, and participatory practice as competing aesthetic or pedagogical approaches, we investigate how these moments interact within a hermeneutic process of interpretation. Our material comprises twelve documented rehearsals of Beethoven’s Violin Sonata Op. 30 No. 2. We are particularly examining how verbal dialogue gradually gives way to non-verbal communication between the performers. The project seeks to illuminate musical understanding as a co-constituted event and to extend Gadamer’s notion of play through dialogue with Daniel Stern’s concept of affect attunement, thus contributing to a broader debate on musical interpretation and practice.