Meaning, Understanding, and Interpretive Authenticity

Abstract Interpretive authenticity now takes centre stage. A performance of a work is interpretively authentic to the extent that it evinces understanding of the work that is insightful, profound, far-reaching, and so on. This chapter starts by outlining some of interpretive authenticity’s key features, before discharging a substantial obligation that a commitment to it incurs: in short, an obligation to say what it is for pure instrumental music to have meaning (since the meaning of such a work is simply what is there to be understood in it). Responding to Kivy’s well-known scepticism on this score, musical meaning is introduced and characterized in detail, the central thesis being that understanding a musical work lies in appreciating its point: why it unfolds in the way it does. In the course of describing further features of musical meaning, a useful analogy is proposed between understanding a piece of music and understanding a person.