In late September, I was invited to participate in a remarkable interdisciplinary conference at Örebro University in Sweden. The conference, Contemporary Perspectives on Music Performance and Creation (CPMPC 2026), took place over the course of two days, September 24–25, and brought together musicians (jazz, classical, and avant-garde), composers, improvisers (music and theater), artistic researchers, musicologists, and philosophers to explore current issues, questions, and practices in contemporary musical creation and performance.
I have attended many academic conferences over the years, but this one was exceptional, which I attribute to its genuinely interdisciplinary character. I would even describe the experience as transformative—not only for my work in philosophical hermeneutics but also for my own music-making and other creative endeavors. The conference was intentionally small, with no concurrent sessions, thus allowing participants to get to know one another over lunch, coffee, dinner, and to experience incredible musical performances that took place in the evenings. Together with the vibrant interdisciplinary dialogue, the atmosphere was one of generosity, openness, hospitality, inclusion, and creativity. Such an atmosphere invited conversations across disciplinary boundaries and created a space in which we could participate in the “happening” of music—whether through actually playing music or through engaged listening. None of what I say here is intended to diminish theoretical reflections on music, as those were certainly present and contributed to the unfolding of understanding; however, the element of experiencing the music enacted and performed both in the concerts and in the presentations—e.g., hearing a short excerpt played on the piano and then continuing the talk, as it were, brought the conceptual points “home” in a concrete and embodied way.
My presentation, “Hermeneutical Movement: Play, Leeway, and a Coda on Free Jazz,” was part of a panel titled “Embodied Play and Musical Understanding: Gadamerian Hermeneutics in Theory and Practice.” My fellow presenters were Lena Johnson (theorist and an extraordinary professional pianist) and Ulrik Volgsten (musicologist whose research engages Gadamer’s work). Their co-authored paper, “Rehearsing Beethoven: A Meditation on Musical Understanding,” explored musical interpretation through Gadamer’s concept of play, fusion of horizons, dialogue, while also proposing a fruitful development of Gadamer’s thought through an engagement with Daniel Stern’s concepts of vitality affect and affect attunement. Their research drew upon detailed reflections from Lena’s twelve rehearsal sessions of Beethoven’s Sonata for Piano and Violin in C minor, Op. 30 No. 2, which examined how musical understanding emerges and develops through the ongoing interaction between performers and the musical work.
Our panel discussion also included contributions from Mattias Solli, a philosopher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), whose research engages Gadamer, musical understanding, and improvisation. Mattias has published on Gadamer and music, including the relationship between musical affordances and interpretive experience. I especially enjoyed getting to know him and discussing our shared philosophical interests. (Not to mention, my gratitude for his “directional” assistance, which kept me from getting lost in Örebro—my gratitude on this point extends to Lena and Ulrik as well!)
One insight from our panel that I have lingered with is precisely this dialogical movement between philosophical hermeneutical concepts and the concrete practices of musicians. That is, the concrete enactment of music both confirmed hermeneutical claims and served as a needed provocation, raising important questions about the hermeneutical significance of affects and embodiment in the experience of making music and listening to it as an engaged participant.
What struck me throughout the conference was how naturally Gadamer’s hermeneutical aesthetics resonated with the musicians’ descriptions of their creative practices. For Gadamer, an artwork is not a static object possessing a fixed meaning that an interpreter subsequently uncovers once and for all. Rather, art’s being is dynamic, ever unfolding new meanings in its various enactments. For many of the musicians at the conference, this was not a “new revelation.” Rather, it was simply part of what they do in the activity of creating and performing music! (As a former jazz guitarist—my undergraduate degree is in Jazz Studies and Performance—and as of the last few months I have started playing the piano, this was not news to me either; however, when the topic is discussed in a room full of philosophers, they quickly get tied in knots about questions of identity, whether there is a-historical “essence” behind the piece, etc. This is not to suggest that these are unimportant or insignificant questions, but it is to emphasize the need for precisely this kind of interdisciplinary engagement.)
Whether discussing jazz improvisation, contemporary composition, avant-garde performance, or theatrical improvisation, participants repeatedly returned to themes of attentive listening, responsiveness, freedom of experimentation, uncertainty, and risk. Music-making, performance, and musical understanding were disclosed as a dynamic process of negotiating possibilities with the music itself, other musicians, and engaged audience members.
This was particularly evident in discussions of improvisation. To improvise is more than spontaneous creation. It requires an attuned openness to what is happening in the present—a capacity to listen “understandingly” and respond to the movement of the music, a willingness to take risks and to “recover” on the spot when things don’t go as planned.
A musical gesture or move that doesn’t unfold as anticipated need not bring the performance to a halt. Instead, it can become the occasion for a new musical opening. Rather than dwelling on the past “mistake,” one learns to respond creatively (and compassionately), allowing the music to unfold in unexpected ways.
Here Gadamer’s notion of play becomes especially relevant. Play involves movement, responsiveness, and a certain freedom (Spielraum) within constraints. Its movement is neither entirely determined in advance nor simply arbitrary. Indeed, one of the central insights of Gadamer’s analysis is that the players do not have complete mastery over the play. Rather, they themselves respond, are drawn into, and carried along by play’s movement. In the context of music, play is dialogical, a back and forth, call and response between various dialogue partners. The score, a particularly difficult musical phrase, or a performer’s body language becomes something like the offerings of a dialogue partner—something to which one must listen attentively and respond to rather than control.
Another important theme that was a connecting thread in the various presentations was the embodied character of musical performance and music-making and how to relate that to musical understanding and pedagogy. In this vein, several presentations explored the role of metaphor in musical performance and pedagogy. For example, Peter Knudsen discussed findings from a research project entitled, Expanding Horizons: Improvisational Explorations of 20th-Century Classical Music. His work considers how musical compositions by Debussy, Ravel, Hindemith, Takemitsu and others could be reconfigured and reimagined through improvisational practice. Further aspects of his project included developing different score formats ranging from rather fixed to quite open scores with indeterminate notation. Knudson also explored how musicians think about their improvisational activity by way of metaphors—for example, the “room” (his example) as an aesthetic space that both constrains and enables creativity.
Ann Elkjär Gustafsson shared her experience of using metaphors in teaching young flute students how to acquire greater bodily attunement with their instrument. As she explained, playing the flute well requires learning to control bodily activities and processes that are largely invisible—breath support, vibrato, articulation. Their invisibility makes them challenging to teach. In order to meet this challenge, flute instructors often employ metaphors to communicate more concretely various technical, artistic, and abstract concepts. Both presentations highlighted how metaphors can become pedagogical tools that enable musicians to negotiate the relationship between bodily technique, musical expression, and creative freedom.
What became clear is that these embodied and metaphorical dimensions of musical practice (whether creating or performing) are not external or ornamental additions to music’s coming forth or enactment; rather, they are integral to both the interpretative process and to achieving an understanding of the piece. Here again, Gadamer’s hermeneutics offers fertile ground for interdisciplinary engagement. His expansive understanding of linguisticality (Sprachlichkeit), his account of play as reciprocal movement that “exceeds” the players, the need for risk in hermeneutical understanding, and his emphasis on the dynamic, performative, and communal ontology of the work enable us to think about musical understanding as something that happens between participants—through bodily gestures, melodic, harmonic and rhythmic attunement and responsiveness.
The conference also reminded me of what Gadamerian hermeneutical philosophy underscores again and again—the rigid distinction between theory and practice is an abstraction and academic disciplinary boundaries that reinforce that abstraction contribute toward the irrelevance or even death of the humanities. Musicians making music engage in interpretive activity and the concretization that happens in this activity is intimately interconnected with understanding the piece; conversely, hermeneutical engagement with a musical work involves a participatory—even improvisational—dialogical interaction with the work in which one follows its contours, rhythms, and movements with an openness to be taken by surprise, perhaps even unsettled as one’s interpretative conjectures and previous understandings are provoked and expanded.
As I wrap up my reflections, I want to reiterate and call attention to the collegiality and generosity of the organizers and participants involved with bringing this conference to fruition. In our conversations over lunch, coffee, or in breaks after presentations, they demonstrated a genuine communal and dialogical way of engagement, going out of their way to make everyone feel included. Throughout the course of the symposium, I was struck by the openness with which participants shared their artistic and life experiences (and how they see the two as intimately related) and their genuine interest in hermeneutical philosophy. Our conversations moved easily across disciplinary boundaries, and whatever differences in perspective or approach that arose became occasions for further exploration rather than attempts to exert some kind of “disciplinary” superiority.
Although it was a relatively short time in the company of such exceptionally creative and intellectually engaging people, my experience is one that I will take with me and from which I will draw in the years to come. I returned from Örebro with an abundance of creative ideas, some of which I am already incorporating into my philosophical research, my own music-making (you can listen to recent short composition below), and other creative projects. Perhaps more importantly, I returned with a renewed sense of the profound connections between philosophical inquiry and artistic practice.
My participation at this conference confirmed what has been “hovering” around my work on hermeneutics for some time but was disclosed poignantly by engaging with this diverse group of scholars: Gadamer’s hermeneutical aesthetics is exceptionally well suited for interdisciplinary dialogue with musicians, composers, improvisers, and other performing artists. In other words, hermeneutical philosophical inquiry and artistic practice can (and should!) mutually illuminate and transform one another—and such reciprocal shaping is crucial for hermeneutics not to stagnate or lose its vitality. The conversations begun in Örebro, I hope, will continue to bear fruit—and will perhaps give rise to future hermeneutical and musical collaborations.
[Coda: I started playing piano this summer, about a little over a month before attending the conference, and in response to a season of significant loss. Having given up jazz guitar due to lack of time and what could perhaps be called “burnout” or negative baggage from music school and my own insecurities, it is quite–after a more or less decade hiatus–nice to return to music-making. Now I find myself playing the piano every day, creating short compositions, improvising in ways that I was never able to on my guitar, and actually looking forward to playing–waking up thinking about melodic lines and new harmonic and expressive possibilities. I’m taking what I learned from the conference and approaching the piano entirely differently than I did jazz guitar. I’m not practicing scales, modes, and patterns in all twelve keys for hours upon end as I did in music school, nor trying to acquire “perfect technique” or aim for a “flawless performance.” Instead, my approach is much more exploratory, emphasizing non-regular movement and expressive dynamics, and strives to be compassionate (rather than unproductively self-critical). I have no idea how to “properly” use the pedal and would most likely be charged with over-using it by a professional. But I like the way it sounds and the overtones and dissonances that it creates, so, at least for now, I’m going to keep “over-using” it. None of this is to suggest that I have thrown my knowledge of jazz harmonies and music theory to the wayside–that’s not the case at all. I certainly draw on all that I learned in my formal music training, but I’m letting my ear, my emotions, my body, and metaphors and narrative arcs play a much stronger role in the creative process.]
