Lawrence Kramer

Interpreting Music is a comprehensive essay on understanding musical meaning and performing music meaningfully—"interpreting music" in both senses of the term. Synthesizing and advancing two decades of highly influential work, Lawrence Kramer fundamentally rethinks the concepts of work, score, performance, performativity, interpretation, and meaning—even the very concept of music—while breaking down conventional wisdom and received ideas. Kramer argues that music, far from being closed to...

Expression and truth are traditional opposites in Western thought: expression supposedly refers to states of mind, truth to states of affairs. <i>Expression and Truth</i> rejects this opposition and proposes fluid new models of expression, truth, and knowledge with broad application to the humanities. These models derive from five theses that connect expression to description, cognition, the presence and absence of speech, and the conjunction of address and reply. The theses are...

What, exactly, is knowledge of music? And what does it tell us about humanistic knowledge in general? <I>The Thought of Music</I> grapples directly with these fundamental questions&mdash;questions especially compelling at a time when humanistic knowledge is enmeshed in debates about its character and future. In this third volume in a trilogy on musical understanding that includes <I>Interpreting Music</I> and <I>Expression and Truth</I>, Lawrence Kramer...