Making sense of music

Musical signification has been implicitly discussed for a long time in work on music. Only recently has it been established as an explicit discipline, focusing mainly on sense-making as a major constituent of signification and meaning. A number of questions are still pending. How does one deal with the tensions between an object-centered approach to music and a subjective, cognitive, and hermeneutic approach to musical sense-making? Is there a distinction in content and methodology? How can the objective and the subjective, the art-work and the receiver, the immanent meaning and the attributed
meaning be brought together? Making Sense of Music is an attempt to answer these questions through the insights of several diverging fields. Revolving around the central concept of musical sense-making, this volume includes 31 contributions of scholars from 18 countries, which encompass semiotic musical analysis and phenomenological, hermeneutic, and/or cognitive approaches.