Gadamer’s Horizons as Interfaces for Knowing Musical Worlds

Abstract

According to Hans-Georg Gadamer, like any artwork, a musical performance has play in its essence: a non-teleological ‘to-and-fro movement’ that is independent of the musicians. Controversially, Gadamer claims that aesthetic understanding depends on recognizing the authority of the artwork over its observer. What is more unique to music than other forms of art, however, is that an independent, impersonal movement has been ascribed to it as an essential quality. Such musical movement, and particularly the musical personae that emerge from it, have usually been described in terms of metaphor, thus detaching the virtual agencies of music from any real-world processes. However, Gadamer argues, in line with his principle of non-differentiation, that in the realm of play the distinction between literal and metaphorical meaning becomes meaningless.

In this chapter, we pursue this idea across a number of case studies: the performance of instrumental western art music, the diffusion of musical ideas in musical improvisation, and the experience of playing along to video game music. Across these examples, in line with Gadamer’s insistence on the hermeneutic nature of aesthetic experience, we show that the experience of musical movement and agency is a means of interfacing with the social and technological practices from which music emerges. The interface shows important similarities to Gadamer’s concept of the horizon. The importance that Gadamer attaches to the authority of the artwork therefore appears to be more closely aligned with contemporary performance and media-based understandings of music than the work-centered approaches with which it is often associated.