Joan Grimalt – Orchestra conductor (Vienna University), linguist (Barcelona University), and PhD in musicology (UAB) with a thesis on Gustav Mahler supervised by the late Raymond Monelle. After a decade devoted exclusively to interpretation and conducting, primarily opera in Central Europe, Joan returned to Catalonia where he combines practical musicianship with teaching and research at the Escola Superior de Música de Catalunya. Notably, he was involved with the Vienna Volksoper from 1995 to 1997. As a pianist, his focus has been on German art song. Joan’s primary research area is Musical Hermeneutics, particularly focusing on the intersections with language and literature such as rhetoric, prosody, and dramaturgy. In recent years, he has also participated in research projects on performance studies, where his experiences as a performer and teacher converge in a hermeneutical, performer-oriented analysis. Grimalt is a member of the international research group on Musical Signification led by Eero Tarasti. He has presented and published much of his research at the group’s regular international conferences. In his book Mapping Musical Signification (Springer, 2020), Joan compiled his colleagues’ and his own research on musical interpretation into a systematic textbook. A follow-up volume, Analysing Musical Signification. A Hermeneutic, Rhetorical Approach to Western Art Music, which focuses on a theory of musical discourse and dramaturgy, is scheduled for publication in 2025.
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Małgorzata Grajter: I would like to begin with a short introductory note about musical hermeneutics in Poland: as an interdisciplinary approach on the intersection between musicology and philosophy, it does have some tradition in our country, particularly thanks to the late Professor Maria Piotrowska (The John Paul II Catholic University of Lublin). Based on the „classic” German school of hermeneutics – Schleiermacher, Dilthey or Gadamer – she formulated a theoretical background of hermeneutics to be applied in musicological studies.
These theoretical reflections found some resonance in the works of other scholars here, including Professor Mieczysław Tomaszewski and the Kraków School of Music Theory, which you are befriended with. But oftentimes, I have the impression that whenever musical hermeneutics is brought to the table in our academic musicology, it is burdened with a stigma of something so vague and unspecific that it does not deserve to be called a legitimate research methodology. Your forthcoming book Analysing Musical Signification. A Hermeneutic, Rhetorical Approach to Western Art Music (Springer, due in November 2025) will hopefully challenge this view on hermeneutics as a term meaning „everything and nothing at the same time”. Why do you think it is worth giving hermeneutics a try?
Joan Grimalt: Thank you for that very relevant question! I think taking a hermeneutic approach is helpful not just for music studies, but even for science more broadly, because it can loosen the grip of approaches like positivism – which, despite being rather old, still sometimes get in the way of thinking about music. Still, my main aim here isn’t really to change music theory itself, but rather to be useful to young performers seeking well-founded criteria for their musical decisions. In other words, when we speak of Music Hermeneutics, we are really just addressing interpretation using a philosophical, Greek term. And in the end, hermeneutic analysis is normally the kind of thinking and listening a performer undertakes, whether consciously or not, and regardless of whether they call it “hermeneutic”.
Following Gadamer, the way one arrives at truth in art and the humanities is a specific one, hence the title of his central work, Truth and Method. In art and humanities, we are not constraint to prove things, but invited to share our thoughts and feelings and maybe persuade or move others. Gadamer warned us against taking up methodological tools that are not meant to deal with artistic, linguistic, or philosophical knowledge. I am very proud of the friendly connections I have with the Tomaszewski/Malecka school in Kraków, and with other Polish scholars who find their own ways to dig into the semantic and expressive side of music.
M.G.: Quite obviously, your book didn’t come from nowhere; it combines your experience as a musicologist, musician and teacher. Which of these sources inspired you the most, and in which ways do you think the book is offering something new to the readers?
J.G.: Both my recent books, Mapping and Analysing MS, are an attempt to bring some order to a kind of knowledge that is pretty hard to pin down, namely the experience one gathers as a performer. During my student years in Vienna, I had two extraordinary role models who inspired me deeply: Claudio Abbado and Nikolaus Harnoncourt. I spent my whole youth playing piano and conducting, and now, as I’m nearing retirement, it feels like the right moment to look back and reflect on it all. That reflection really took shape over the last 20 years, especially through the study and personal acquaintance with Constantin Floros and his pioneering work in musical semantics. It was also shaped by my involvement with the International Congresses on Musical Signification, which Eero Tarasti has been organising for over thirty years. These meetings bring together people from all over the world who are committed to putting these kinds of experiences into words in a rigorous academic way. It was at these meetings that I met my PhD supervisor Raymond Monelle, as well as inspiring figures like Robert Hatten and Grabócz Márta. Semiotics and topic analysis were key tools and became my starting points from which I gradually crafted my own hermeneutic toolbox and theory.
M.G.: The first intuitive attempt of understanding hermeneutics equates it with interpretation – a term which appears frequently in your writings, and I am sure it will also appear a lot in your new book. It brings to my mind Maria Piotrowska’s statement, underlining that not all interpretation of music is allowed to be called hermeneutics. The author suggests that an interpretation cannot be simply called hermeneutics without having fulfilled a set of rules, honoured by tradition. Are there any criteria that make a hermeneutic interpretation valid?
J.G.: Yes, this is Gadamer, and Jean Grondin, and their respect for tradition, but there are also other voices proposing more innovative approaches, which help those who wish to leave these circles and traditions and search for new paths.
As a matter of principle, each of us has the ability to bring a creative, unique, and valid interpretation to any work we perform. And indeed, as performers, it’s part of our job to stay open and listen to what others have contributed, both in the past and in our immediate environment. In practice, common sense keeps us from saying anything completely off the wall, so in day-to-day school life, there is not much danger of hearing nonsense. What really happens is that there’s a lot to learn from one another, as long as we keep listening – doesn’t matter if it’s a student or a colleague.
A second thing to consider is that language is often called humanity’s greatest cultural achievement. So, being able to put words to the artistic experience is arguably the central task of hermeneutics, at least according to Gadamer and his legacy.
M.G.: Back in my student days, I remember being often warned against „going the wrong methodological path” or committing „methodological errors”. Is there such thing in hermeneutics as a wrong or false interpretation? What can save us from „erring in the wrong direction” in musical hermeneutics?
J.G.: Thanks for bringing up methodology again. I really think there’s a lot to explore here, and the next few decades should be very productive. Like I said earlier, Gadamer warns against strict methodologies – because they can make us rush ahead of the artworks we’re trying to understand. Still, we do need some criteria to point us in the right direction. For hermeneutic analysis, I’ve come up with a pretty straightforward five-step tool that can be adapted to any kind of music. You start by spotting references to movement, like dances or marches, then check for vocal references, rhetorical devices, and finally, you look at the dramaturgical aspect, where you think of the piece as a sequence unfolding over time.
On top of that, philosophical hermeneutics teaches us to appreciate traditional methods like dialogue as a never-ending source of knowledge. It’s all about the creative power of building convincing, illuminating analogies, being willing to self-critique, and moving back and forth between the whole and its parts – that process we call the hermeneutic circle. And above all, the best insights come from a close personal familiarity with the repertoire.
MG: Do you think musical hermeneutics is universal, i.e., for everyone? Or is a certain level of expertise in music and humanities a sine qua non?
J.G.: Whenever I hear talk about levels in our privileged life as scholars, I am reminded of something my piano teacher in Vienna, Prof. Seidlhofer, used to say. When asked about predicting our futures as professional pianists, she used the image of a personal circle – the circle of people you reach with your performances or your words. Those people in your circle are the ones who really matter to you, the ones you have the privilege of having a creative dialogue with.
On the other hand, creativity in performance can go in two very different directions. Some performers put themselves first, continuing and shaping the composer’s creative process to serve their own purposes. Others put the “Other” first – they want to serve the work, the composer, and the audience. That’s why they try to learn everything they can about the history and style of the piece and base their interpretations on that knowledge. In the hermeneutic tradition, the “Other” is often capitalized as a sign of respect and focus. This isn’t just a Christian tradition; pagan humanities have done the same thing.
M.G.: Let us now return to the subtitle of your book – A Hermeneutic, Rhetorical Approach to Western Art Music. Could you tell us more about your second key term – ‘Rhetorical’? Where does it come from, and how does it complement musical hermeneutics in your approach?
J.G.: Thanks for the great question – rhetorics is really central to my book. In my theoretical frame, instrumental Western music can be understood as the representation of an improvised discourse. This model, grounded in historical context and familiarity with the repertoire, helps when listening to and performing classical and romantic chamber music, as well as symphonic repertoire. It goes way beyond the usual “figures” to include many rhetorical devices and gestures that often don’t even have a name, but show up repeatedly in common-practice music. Listening to music as a spontaneous kind of discourse, one can interpret any interferences into expected patterns as subjective interventions, that is, a represented subject altering a preestablished musical material that would have been suitable for a function, typically in a temple, in a military setting, in the theatre, or in the dance hall. When those steady 4+4 patterns get broken, it can be seen as a sign of this symbol of Western modernity, the Subject, making a strong entrance into pre-modern patterns.
M.G.: In your last book for Springer, Mapping Musical Signification (2020) you were dealing a lot with topic theory, which is generally thought to be designed mostly for the 18th and early 19th-century repertoire. However, as we could observe at the last Congress on Topics and Hispanic Music in Madrid, this field is continuing to expand, and is subject to countless variations, or geographic excursions. Does topic theory play an important role in your vision of musical hermeneutics?
J.G.: Rather than ‘topic theory’, some researchers, including myself, prefer the term ‘topical analysis’ because, in a typically hermeneutic way, topoi resist being pinned down in a neat theoretical system. Still, it’s a fantastic tool for analysis. I’ve noticed that more and more music scholars are including topical references in their writings, even if they don’t always use the name. And I agree – the boundaries have expanded far beyond just the 18th-century music highlighted by Leonard Ratner and Wye Allanbrook. In Mapping, I grouped musical topoi by semantic fields (the temple, the military, the hunt, and so on). In Analysing, I suggest thinking about musical references in two complementary ways. First, there is an abstract, static aspect, where sets of topoi can be seen as styles, topical fields, and isotopies. Second, there’s a dynamic side, where topoi show up in meaningful sequences, as dramatemes, or as dramaturgical archetypes.
M.G.: You seem to propose ‘musical discourse’ and ‘musical dramaturgy’ as alternative metaphors to the recently well-established ‘musical narrative’. It makes me remember the words of Bernard Sève, who claimed that music cannot be a ‘storyteller’ itself because there is no time difference between music and the events which are being ‘told’. In such case, what do we do with all the musical genres traditionally labelled as ‘narrative’? Take Chopin’s Ballades, for example: are they ‘narrative’, or ‘discursive’?
J.G.: I would say they are dramaturgical, they represent something like a drama. Yes, I also find the idea of ‘narrative’ in instrumental music a bit tricky. After all, narrative seems to require words, doesn’t it. Whereas music has been associated with representation for centuries. And when you look at topoi, most of them have gone through the theatrical stage before ending up in sonatas and symphonies. So for me, and for a few respected colleagues, thinking of musical discourse as dramaturgy, as a staging of musical references, just feels more fitting.
As for the instrumental Ballade, I actually talk about it quite a bit in my new book. One of the topical styles I focus on is the “Ballad style”, which sets up a preluding ‘bard’ strumming a ‘lyre’, often in a melancholic tone, introducing passages that depict a legendary, remote past. These scenes from the ‘past’ are usually represented in a different key and metre, whether in a pathetic, lyrical-pastoral, or stormy tone. And typically, you’ll hear that ‘bard’ coming back in the middle of these scenes, interjecting emphatically or making subjective comments in his original key and metre. This pattern has roots in early 19th-century opera, and, interestingly, you find it later on in instrumental works of the second half of the 19th-century, even when Ballade isn’t in the title. So this “Ballad style“ could be an instance where temporal shifts are conveyed or represented through stylistic shifts, involving tempo, metre, and character.
M.G.: My one final question would concern your target reader: who do you think would benefit the most from reading Analysing Musical Signification? Is it designed exclusively as an academic handbook for musicians, or can it be used outside this context, too?
J.G.: My main audience is definitely my students, young performers who often want practical criteria for performative analysis, so they can make decisions about articulation, tempo, or character in the pieces they play or conduct. But since I bring in a lot of references to cultural history, that I often use as a grounding of my interpretations, I think anyone with a bit of technical background in music could enjoy most of the book.
M.G.: Thank you very much for your time answering my questions. Moltes gràcies!
J.G.: Let me thank you so much for this thoughtful interview – it’s given us a chance to dive deep into some of the main issues in my new book.
