Listening Enlightened?

Listening enlightened?

This article was a bit more confusing than the last few, since there were a lot of different terms that were thrown around, such as intertextuality and subjectivity. First, the discussion of musical meaning came about; then came talk of interpretation of this meaning, both in terms of direct imitation and subjective thought. The link between context and text seems to me a little unclear, as the author never explains the text as the music. The reasoned, fictive, subjective accounts of the reception of Haydn at the end of the article are an interesting leap into the eighteenth century mindset, using the philosophy described in the first half of the reading. The question that is pressing on my mind concerns the “multiplicity” of interpretations, which is discussed often: If listening became so subjective, so open to many interpretations, how was the concept of listening constrained before the enlightenment? Was free interpretation allowed previously? There isn’t much in the text that describes the previous state of musical interpretation, and I think this would be important in postulating that there was a change in the perception of the music of Haydn and Mozart.