16.1 The Origin and Meaning of Interpretation

The very etymology of the word “interpretation” (from the Latin, interpretātiō, meaning explanation) is connected with the need for everything we do to be clear and comprehensible to ourselves. To understand means to understand “something as something,” which is already the projection of an appropriate action.

Our perception turns the undefinedness of the work into a form for us, since that is our perception. However, in terms of its objective structure, the work does not change in the slightest as a result. It continues to exist embodied as a semblance of freedom, and thus as a possibility of an undefined set of interpretations. But so long as it exists like this, it exists not for us. We only make it our own through interpreting it […].Footnote 1

Consequently, before something becomes interpretable—explicable—it first has to be understood. “Whoever interprets is trying in their own way to explain what another has also shaped in their own way”Footnote 2 (Antanas Maceina is quoting Romano Guardini). The composer, by giving a sign-form to the work, obliges the future interpreter to give to that form their own—sound-intonational—form. Only then is the idea actualised and the work becomes functional. But for the actualisation of the work to be realised as the actualisation of a possibility, it is not enough just for its sign-form to be transformed into sound.

It is a question of fixing one’s gaze on the object through all the diversions with which the interpreter constantly assails himself along the way. Whoever wants to understand a text, is always carrying out a projection. From the moment a first meaning becomes apparent in the text he projects a meaning of the whole (as well as the sequence of musical events—the narration—J. R.). On the other hand, it is only because one reads the text from the outset with certain expectations of a definite meaning that an initial meaning becomes apparent. It is in working out this sort of projection—which of course is constantly being revised in the light of what emerges with deeper penetration into the meaning (the search for means of expression—J. R.) that the understanding of what is there consists.Footnote 3

Meanwhile, a passive and, from a creative perspective, purely instrumental process can be called a performance, but by no means an interpretation, which demands a more ambitious, intentional relationship with the work being interpreted.

So that we can understand better the importance of the interpretive action for the expression of the work’s meaning, it is worth reviewing briefly the origin of this phenomenon. Concepts such as “hermeneutics,” “exegesis” and “interpretation” are synonymous. These are all connected with the explanation of texts, primarily religious texts. Since the interpretation of music is directly related to the goal of the meaningful rendering of musical texts, one should start with an explanation of the concept of hermeneutics, to understand how it is relevant and applicable to the substance of musical performance—interpretation. Incidentally, the concept of hermeneutics was first applied to music by Hermann Kretzschmar, the German musicologist and conductor, at the beginning of the twentieth century. The Greek word hermeneutike—hermeneuo means “I explain, I teach,” analogously to the Latin word interpretatio. Thus, hermeneutics is the branch of philosophy which studies foundational written texts, explaining them from an internal perspective (from the perspective of the text itself). The search for the inner meaning of a text is therefore both a hermeneutic and a philosophical activity (an activity pertaining to the search for meaning), which in no way contradicts the goal of interpreting the texts of musical works. Based on etymology, three strands of hermeneutical meaning are normally distinguished: expressing (utterance), speaking; explaining, interpreting; and translating. The two latter functions can be expressed by the same verb, since translating is conveying through familiar speech the sounds of a language which seem foreign; it means, in a certain sense, to interpret, that is, to explain what you have understood. Is not the sphere of expression of a musician (performer, player) a peculiar translation of signs (figures) into a sound-acoustic form?

Wilhelm Dilthey, who is accorded the title of a hermeneutic thinker, highlighted in his writings the concepts of “lived experience” and “understanding.” “Lived experience (Erlebnis) seems to have become a key term. In it, however, resonances of [Dilthey’s] earlier ideas about the facts of consciousness are still to be heard. As always, these facts are taken to be the ‘ultimate data’ and ‘foundation’ of the ‘coherence of mental life,’ combining our perceptions and values. […] Understanding in the human sciences consists in a return from outwardness to the inwardness—more precisely, the self-awareness—that makes itself known in the expression. […] From now on, the triad of life (or experience, Erlebnis), understanding, and expression functions as the foundation for the human sciences […]. [Understanding is] a ‘process whereby we discern something inward by means of signs outwardly given to the senses.’ […] Explication and interpretation need to be conceived as the artful understanding of the enduring expressions of life.”Footnote 4 A lot of the rules of hermeneutics were drawn directly from rhetoric, and were later (in the Baroque era) applied to music. Teachers of rhetoric aligned the art of explanation with the much richer example of the rhetorical corpus. The Greeks understood the word “utter” as meaning “interpret.” Every utterance (hermeneia) is the communication of thoughts in the soul (thus of the inner essence) in external speech. What then is different in the case of musical “utterance”—sound expression? Hermeneutical (interpretive) action manifests itself necessarily as the process of mediation of meaning, which returns from the exterior to the inner essence of meaning.

The dialectic of surface and depth, signs and the signified emphasises the primacy of meaning (as a cause) over its sign expression—as a consequence in the act of conversion into sound. Hermeneia means not only utterance but also language in general (language has to be uttered, turned into speech), translation, explanation, as well as the style or manner of performance. “A style comes alive from the same things as play—from rhythm, harmony, regular change and repetition, stress and cadence.”Footnote 5 The hermeneutical or interpretive function always means to convey, by making understandable, something that has already been thought. Style is always individual, since it is the result of a person’s powers of perception. Later, in early Latin writings and patristics, hermeneia was rendered as interpretatio. This is very neatly defined by Boethius (480–525 CE): interpretatio est vox articulata per seipsam significans (“interpretation is an articulated voice meaningful by itself”).Footnote 6 Articulation, in a broad sense, is also an act of understanding that dictates its means of expression. Here the role of moderation and taste as determined by learning is important. Taste determines the relationship of the elements which make up a phenomenon or thing. Any conscious human act is inseparable from interpretation, which is an act based on understanding.

16.2 Interpretation as Action

For understanding to emerge, an effort is required—first, to understand general things, and then to apply their ideas for the explanation of specific things. “The action and its consequence must be joined in perception. This relationship is what gives meaning; to grasp it is the objective of all intelligence. The scope and content of the relations measure the significant content of an experience.”Footnote 7 The principle of the hermeneutic circle is applicable, where separateness is perceived through generality (where the role of the detail is determined by the requirements of the whole), and where general principles which explain the problem of expression are used to understanding the problems of musical expression. This is referred to in all the chapters of this book.

Emphasising action as a personal, that is, as a conscious act, Karol Wojtyła says: “The accompanying presence of consciousness is decisive in making man aware of his acting rather than in making his acting conscious. Again, it is its presence that makes him act as a person and experience his acting as an action, the role of the aspect of consciousness being manifested most appropriately in the latter.”Footnote 8 A person is accompanied by an action, and an action is always related to a person. This cohesion must be present in comprehension or interpretation. “To fulfil means to make one full, or else—to make it complete. Therefore, fulfilment seems to be the most appropriate equivalent of the term ‘actus.’”Footnote 9 To actualise a musical work, to make it complete, with a life of its own, calls for interpretation. “The doing or making is artistic when the perceived result is of such a nature that its qualities as perceived have controlled the question of production.”Footnote 10

In the Western philosophical tradition the equivalent of our “action” is actus humanus, […] not only derived from the verb agere—which […] means to act or to do […]. It is the concretisation of the dynamism appropriate for the human (person), because it is carried out in a manner appropriate for the free will. […] The peculiar aspect of the term actus is its close link with a corresponding potentia. This points to the potential substratum of actualisation; it explains why actus humanus considers human as the subject who acts; less directly, it accounts for their potentiality as the source of acting.Footnote 11

The act of interpretation is the transformation of a musical work from its situation of potential into real being—by giving it an appropriate sound form.

One speaks habitually of the word of being as if it were a substantive, even though it is a verb par excellence. […] With Heidegger, “verbality” was awakened in the word of being, what is event in it, the “happening” of being. It is as if things and all that is “set a style of being”, “made a profession of being”.Footnote 12

To understand means to understand “something as something,” which is already the projection of an act. The act of interpretation is precisely the putting of the musical work into being—the realisation of its essence.

16.3 The Specific Character of Musical Interpretation

The concept of interpretation was first applied to music in 1868, with the publication of the book Les virtuoses by Léon Escudier. Interpretation is a child of the Romantic era and directly related to the development of the art of music in the nineteenth century. With the advent of the cult of the virtuoso, the revelation of a work’s meaning passed into the background. It has thus become very important to address this problem, and to actualise interpretation as a mode of performance based on the expression of meaning. The question confronting the performer who wants to become an interpreter is, how should they shape their activity? What should be the focus of their attention and energy?

Martin Heidegger, in his essay “The Origin of the Work of Art,” when discussing the essence of a work of art, states: “What something is, as it is, we call its essence.”Footnote 13 Without, therefore, answering the question “what,” and without understanding “what” the work is speaking “about,” we cannot know how to express “it”; we cannot find adequate means of expressing the “what.” “Think about what, but think more about how. Since the ‘how’ of the representation reveals how one understands the matter.”Footnote 14

Famous performers have rarely shared their approach towards interpretation, for various reasons, and one of them is possibly lack of confidence in the force of explaining their thoughts in writing. However, one of the most famous pianists of the twentieth century, Alfred Cortot, offered some intelligent reflections, which are worth acknowledging:

As it becomes more exalted in character, musical language doubtless becomes more esoteric, but for the initiated it retains all its emotive clarity of definition. None the less, it is only with the aid of an infinitely subtle intellectual mechanism that the interpreter can—and should—illuminate the meaning of a composition through the symbolic speech of sounds.Footnote 15

Or, on the subject of technique: “The only way, at once rapid and certain, of perfecting instrumental technique is to bring it into close subjection to our concern for poetic interpretation.”Footnote 16 Poetics should be understood here as a category which combines an understanding of aesthetic norms and artistic skill (artistic technique). Sadly, skill often lives alongside aesthetic norms. “Ontological poetics does not stop with the text, because the text does not close, but ‘leads’ to what is beyond it.”Footnote 17 From the time of Aristotle, poetics has been understood as the perception of the material of the construct created, and the organisation of the structures of such material (from the Greek poíēsis, meaning creation, creative work). Cortot wrote about the need to develop among musicians “the gift that constitutes the interpreter’s talent—exteriorisation, without which music is a dead letter.”Footnote 18 After all, expression is also exteriorisation, the revelation of the inner (from the Latin exterior, meaning external, the passing from inner, or mental, to external activity). Cortot explains exteriorisation as the ability of the performer to “listen to self from the side,” to feel and evaluate, in the interpretive act, the musical images that are being created. Interpretation is the content of the musical performer’s activity; in order for this activity not to remain only mechanically functional-instrumental, it must be based on certain attitudes and the abilities to use them. The object of interpretation is the text of the author (composer), submitted to the interpreter’s will. To understand, so that you can communicate,

[…] is not merely to repeat the speech event in a similar event (in our case, transforming the signs of the text into sound—J. R.), it is to generate a new event beginning from the text in which the initial event has been objectified. In other words, we have to guess the meaning of the text because the author’s intention is beyond our reach.Footnote 19

“One doesn’t need to know the artist’s private intentions. The work tells all.”Footnote 20 Every graphic element of the text of the notes can, due to its own semiotic nature, be deciphered, as the signifier of a field of corresponding meanings. In searching for the sense of the meanings, the performer-interpreter makes a particular choice, that is, they semanticise (give meaning to) the sign structures in a certain way. By virtue of their powers, they give the graphic text artistry, by revealing it through sound intonation. The quality of artistry varies greatly. An inferior result may be due to the inferiority of the performer’s artistic potential. After all, value presupposes an allusion to values. Thus, only a value-oriented personality is creative, and the product of its activity aesthetically valuable. The view is frequently expressed that it is enough for the performer only to know how to play their instrument or have a voice. Such performers are described by Asaf’ev as “merely reproducing the notation.”

16.4 Is a Single True Interpretation Possible?

The emergence of interpretation as an independent branch of musical activity should be linked to the beginning of the Romantic era. It was particularly then that composers sought to record their intentions as precisely as possible in the text of the notes, and demanded from performers fidelity to their conceptions. However, this new demand, when set against the freedom previously at the performer’s disposal, sharpened the confrontation between the composer and the performer, who aspired to be an interpreter. The earlier freedom in performance (particularly in the Baroque era) allowed one to create a cadenza in an instrumental concerto, improvise embellishments and even to change somewhat the texts of the works. These confrontational tendencies led to the emergence of two orientations in the art of performance: the Post-Romantic—with greater emotion, and a dominant subjective element in handling the text—and the academic—with restrained rigour, following a close, if not slavish, attachment to the musical text. The latter tendency unfortunately persists, since it does not require the greater intellectual effort of seeing through the signs as to what they signify. We encounter here a problem of interpretation (as understanding and explanation—expression), not only an issue of performance. “An interpreter is a decipherer and communicator of meanings. […] No musicology, no music criticism, can tell us as much as the action of meaning which is performance.”Footnote 21

Approaches towards the (in)sufficiency of notation vary according to the period, and the individual characteristics of the composers. The negative approach of Igor Stravinsky or Maurice Ravel to interpretation is often mentioned. With them in mind, or perhaps without really understanding the full meaning of their attitudes, the importance of interpretation as an art is called into question. Yet, all the same, in order for a work to emerge in sound in consequence of the composer’s creative activity, the composer cannot dispense with the creative efforts and abilities of the performer as the actor in the musical process. “The representative alone is the true artist. Our creations as poets and composers are in reality volition, not power; representation only is power—art.”Footnote 22 The creativity of the performer, their personality, are even stimulated by the conditionality of precise marking of the textual intentions, which is the interpreter’s space of freedom. “What characterized the concept of text is that it presents itself only in connection with interpretation and from the point of view of interpretation, as the authentic given that is to be understood. […] The return to the supposed given [provides] a better orientation for understanding.”Footnote 23 Acknowledging the existence of an objectively significant, that is, a standard interpretation would fundamentally question the factor of creativity. One would be left only with copying, the imitation of a so-called single correct interpretation, and this would constitute a disregard for freedom that constitutes any creative act.

A musical work is often perceived as a text of notes—a set of signs, which indicates something beyond itself; a particular entity called a musical work. But this is more just a definition of the text. After all, the work and its text are not identical things. The work lies “concealed” under the text; that is why it needs opening up—through understanding and expression. If you play only “what is written,” the opening up does not happen. Deeper musical experience shows that the signs are based on a convention which is passed down from one generation to another—as to how these signs are perceived, the characteristics of the sounds which they represent and how and to what extent they are subordinate to musical intonation as the main driver of the interpretive process. Orientation in this domain of signs is determined by one’s artistic taste, and criteria of beauty and meaning—the whole value-based edifice which one creates for oneself and follows.

The standpoint of “precise” performance is related to the idea of a musical work being the bearer of a precise meaning. In that case, the task of the performer is only to communicate this “truth” impartially. This anti-interpretive position has been adopted and supported by information theory: a work is a message, and a real message is the communication of a particular fact, which cannot have multiple meanings. Hence, both the communication and understanding of the work must be objective, that is, with a single meaning.

“From breadth to depth” is a very simple model of the development of understanding. Thus, I understand something about the same thing and I understand “differently” something about the thing that is “the same” all the time.Footnote 24

The text being interpreted is always the same, but it is always revealing itself in a different way depending on my changing experience. That is why there is such a broad spectrum of interpretation of the same works.

The author’s interpretation was considered the ideal, disregarding the fact that the mission of the composer is complete when the text emerges. If the composer themselves perform their own work, they become just one of a number of interpreters of the work, since they too are guided in this process only by the work’s text and will find it difficult to reproduce those feelings and thoughts which led to the work’s emergence.

Interpretation of a work should focus purely on its objective qualities; we should strictly disregard all external or extrinsic factors (biographical, historical, etc.) concerning the author of the work. The (alleged) mistake of supposing that the meaning and value of a work can be determined by such factors is called the “intentional fallacy”. […] A work, once released to the world, became a public object to which no one, including the author, had privileged access.Footnote 25

A contrary orientation is not consistent with the specifics of an aesthetic message, which presupposes a multiplicity of meanings. There is no single correct performance. There are many ways of performing if these are interpretations, since each person, depending on their creative potential and education, presents even the same work differently each time. This is also what Arvydas Šliogeris is referring to in the quotation above.

Recognising the creative freedom of interpretation raises the issue of the limits of that freedom. How far can this go without harming the identity of the work?

16.5 Identity (Invariance)

Before using this concept (from the Latin identicus, meaning identical, the same), let us explain it. A musical work, being unique, and identical to itself as an opus fixed by the notes, does not change as it exists on paper or in other media. However, from the perspective of interpretation, identity is polysemic. For the purpose of interpretation, distinctness of understanding and communication of the same object are both natural and necessary, while the object being interpreted remains unchanged in its givenness (one “understands” something “differently” which is all the time “the same”). Meanwhile, adherence to invariance and objectivity of interpretation leads to routine, dogmatism and the fetishisation of instrumentism.

What is it in fact that doesn’t change when a work is interpreted? The main elements of the work are preserved: the melody, the harmony, the rhythmic design. Though, in the process of intonation, both the melody and the rhythm acquire new features.Footnote 26 “Nothing exists from whose nature an effect does not follow.”Footnote 27

In philosophical literature, the invariant is understood as the structure of an object (from the Latin invariantis, meaning unchanging). Any object is a system, that is, a complex of particular elements in an appropriate relationship with each other. The category of invariant is also related to the category of quality. The invariant here reveals itself as the preservation of the system’s quality, the maintenance of the essential relations in that system. The maintenance of the structure’s “balance” is also the limit of the freedom permissible to the performer. For example, an incorrect tempo which does not correspond to the spirit of the work can cause qualitative changes of dynamics and articulation, affect the intonation and phrasing, and lead to the collapse of the invariant. Thus, the variation of the object (the work) in the process of interpretation, although it acquires different features each time, must preserve features and qualities which do not jeopardise the idea of the work. The process of interpretation, though variable, must not prejudice the invariance or identity of the work. A compromise has to be found between the “what” and the “how.”

16.6 The Relationship Between the Whole and the Detail in the Process of Interpretation

What is the work to the performer? First of all, it is its text, the object which provides the starting point for the act of interpretation. It is the document on which the performer has to rely. Here a cardinal difference emerges in the roles in the musical process of these two actors—the composer and the performer-interpreter. The performer, in contrast to the composer, has to go from outside to within, while the composer has done the opposite: they have passed from their internal concept to the outside—to the fixing in signs of that concept or idea. The interpreter must make contact with the text of the work, as fixed by the signs of the notes and the dynamic and articulatory indications. These are the rudiments which stimulate and condition the interpreter’s activity. The text of the work appears to the performer-interpreter as a structural unit, which requires an understanding of the intonational—logical—connections of its structures. Here we encounter an energetic process. The linear—spatial—arrangement of the material being intoned is only the means; meanwhile the goal is to use this material to find the cause which gave rise to it (that is, the idea) and, having understood this, to express it by appropriate means of expression. When analysing the work, one cannot lose the relationship with the whole. The structure is the arrangement and connection between the work’s elements, that is, a particular correlation of the larger and smaller elements constituting the whole. “The task of structural analysis […] consists in performing a segmentation (the horizontal aspect) and then establishing various levels of integration of parts in the whole (the hierarchical aspect).”Footnote 28 However carefully the details are worked out, the main task and goal should be the process of combining a structured whole, that is, its elements, and their appropriate harmonisation.

The hermeneutical rule that we must understand the whole from the individual and the individual from the whole stems from ancient rhetoric and was carried over by modern hermeneutics from the art of speaking to the art of understanding. There is in both cases a circular relationship (the principle of the so-called “hermeneutic circle” applies—J. R.). The anticipation of meaning (the image formed in advance—J. R.), in which the whole is projected, is brought to explicit comprehension (from the Latin explicitus, meaning explained, examined—J. R.) in that the parts, determined by the whole, determine this whole as well. […] Harmonizing all the particulars with the whole is at each stage the criterion of correct understanding. Its absence means the failure to understand.Footnote 29

The whole is not the sum of the details or parts, however highly refined; they have to emerge from the whole and be dependent on it, and on it having been understood. One should bear in mind that, from an interpretive standpoint, the form is a particular totality of intonations, which dictates its expressions from within on the basis of its perception.

Beauty lies in the proportions of its constituent parts: “To be beautiful, a living creature, and every whole made up of parts, must not only present a certain order in its arrangement of parts, but also be of a certain definite magnitude. Beauty is a matter of size and order”.Footnote 30

The form, when creatively perceived, rises above the details, and this is characteristic not only of artistic creation. Any making always presupposes, first of all, the image—the form of what is being made, and only after this, is there a search for the material—the ways and means to realise the visual or sonic idea. If one understands the text as the potential of the future act (interpretation), the process of entelechy (in Aristotelian philosophy, the purposive realisation of the potential inherent in matter) applies, when the sonic (intonational) potential (possibility) of the work is turned into reality through the act of interpretation. In this act, the double realisation of the potential (both the understood meaning of the work and the creative powers of the interpreter) is expressed. “The power of an effect is defined by the power of the cause insofar as its essence is explicated or defined through the essence of its cause.”Footnote 31