Between Hermeneutics and Formalism: The Lento from Tippett’s Concerto for Orchestra. (Or: Music Analysis after Lawrence Kramer)

An account of the slow movement of Tippett's Concerto for Orchestra can be productively interwoven with a discussion about musical meaning. This provides a focus for the question of whether musical meaning should be regarded as primarily intrinsic or as located within what is linguistically predicable of music within cultural (or worldly) discourses. Methodologically, this is homologous with a distinction between formalist and hermeneutic approaches, corresponding loosely to disciplinary distinctions between music analysis and approaches of the so-called New Musicology. The work of Lawrence Kramer is paradigmatic of the latter, while writings by Derek Puffett, notably his analysis of Tippett's Second Quartet, illustrate the former. Complementary analyses of the Lento from Tippett's Concerto, drawing on the composer's second opera, King Priam, as an intertext, reveal the potential and limitations of hermeneutics and formalism. I suggest that we should not be misguided into an a priori privileging of one approach over the other, but instead attempt correctly to construe the relationship between them. Kramer considers analysis to be no more (or less) than the means to hermeneutics, and assumes the possibility of a relatively unproblematic translation from one mode of enquiry to the other. But the knowledge they produce is not coterminous, which leaves open the pursuit of the musically intrinsic, as well as the question of what approaches are suggested by the space between.