The topicality of hermeneutics in music education

Abstract Musical learning, especially in higher education, should not be unidirectional, but based on a dialogue in which the piece of music is seen as a ‘companion’. In light of this, the article uses hermeneutics as a methodology to show, in the first step, that the understanding of music is always linked to the word as a substantial tool for understanding. If understanding music means interpreting it, then it is always a hermeneutic process that relies on or needs words to build a dialogue. Consequently, in the second step, the possibilities of dialogue are analysed using Hans-Georg Gadamer’s hermeneutics as a suitable tool for accessing and understanding music. This dialogue with the music itself opens a continuous process of question and answer which in turn generates new questions, so that in a third step, now using the concrete musical example of Mozart’s Minuet K.2, it is shown how this applied hermeneutics can be understood and how this dialogical relationship of the pupils with the music can be realized. Instead of unidirectional learning, dialogue with music enables the advancement of individual pupils’ knowledge that ultimately enriches people’s lives.