Hermeneutics and Music Criticism Roger W. H. Savage Hermeneutics is the art of interpretation. Hermeneutics and Music Criticism forges new perspectives on aesthetics, politics and contemporary interpretive strategies. By advancing new insights into the roles judgment and imagination play both in our experiences of music and its critical interpretation, this book reevaluates our current understandings of music’s transformative power. Savage's examination of music's affective significance provides a unique account of music's capacity to explore new dimensions of experience. His critique of the politics of criticism concludes with a plea for "judgments of argumentation" that acknowledge music's productive value. The engagement with critical musicologists and philosophers, including Adorno, Gadamer, and Ricoeur, provides a nuanced analysis of the crucial issues affecting the theory and practice of music criticism. By challenging musical hermeneutics’ deployment as a means of deciphering social values and meanings, Hermeneutics and Music Criticism offers an answer to the long-standing question of how music’s expression of moods and feelings affects us and our relation to the world. Roger W. H. Savage teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles. He has published articles on aesthetics, music, and philosophy in Telos, Philosophy and Literature, The European Legacy, The British Journal of Aesthetics, ex tempore , and Selected Reports in Ethnomusicology