Abstract
Text – context: An ideological power game or a dialectical dissonance?The reversal of the conventional relationship between musical foreground and political background and the concomitant formation of a new relationship, that is political foreground – musical background, was the result of the (mainly legitimate) claims of new musicology. The concept of context may be accessed from a variety of theoretical positions, but this article focuses on the role of ideology within a contextual approach. It takes literary theory and current ideological claims as starting-point to view the strained relationship between text and context in a historical perspective. An ideological approach foregrounds the function of the text, rather than its interpretability. More specifically this article is an investigation into the possibilities, boundaries and limitations of interpretation. As opposed to either an approach in which the work of art is regarded as an autonomous aesthetic object, or a contextual approach in which matters outside the text constitute the primary concern, I argue for a more nuanced view in which text and context function as equal partners in a kind of dialogue. Finally I adopt the relationship between consonance and dissonance as metaphor to represent the problematic relationship between text and context.
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