Page 15 - Weiss, Jernej, ur./ed. 2025. Glasbena interpretacija: med umetniškim in znanstvenim┊Music Interpretation: Between the Artistic and the Scientific. Koper/Ljubljana: Založba Univerze na Primorskem in Festival Ljubljana. Studia musicologica Labacensia, 8

Weiss, Jernej, ur. 2025. Glasbena interpretacija: med umetniškim in znanstvenim | Music Interpretation: Between the Artistic and the Scientific.
Koper/Ljubljana: Založba Univerze na Primorskem in Festival Ljubljana. https://doi.org/10.26493/978-961-293-425-5.15-21
© 2025 Jernej Weiss

Musical Interpretation:
Between the Artistic and the Scientific

Jernej Weiss
University of Ljubljana | University of Maribor

The monograph Musical Interpretation: Between the Artistic and the Scien-
tific focuses on the diversity and specifics of individual interpretative prac-
tices in connection with some recent artistic/performance-related and re-
search-based findings in the field of musical interpretation.
We know from the extraordinarily diverse history of performance
practice that up until the nineteenth century most music performed was
contemporary music, with the result that there were no significant diver-
gences between musical scores as written and the sound and performance
contexts. Such divergences began to emerge in the nineteenth century with
the emergence of the so-called standard repertoire, when the oeuvres of
certain composers who were universally acclaimed even in their own day,
above all Beethoven und andere Götter, to borrow part of the title of a recent
1
monograph by our esteemed colleague Helmut Loos, became a permanent
fixture in musical life. As sound and performance conventions changed, di-
vergences from the performance and sound contexts of the period in which
these works were composed necessarily began to occur, while awareness of
the resulting differences inevitably led to questions about how to interpret
these works.
Discussions about musical interpretation are particularly relevant
when previously forgotten music is revived. Increasingly in-depth research
1 Helmut Loos, E-Musik – Kunstreligion der Moderne. Beethoven und andere Götter
(Kassel: Bärenreiter-Verlag, 2017).

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