Abstract

ABSTRACT This paper criticizes interpreters who appeal to structural homologies in making claims about the meaning of (classical instrumental) music. Such appeals are prevalent in Marxist and post-Marxist musical aesthetics, where structural correspondences between music and society are accorded great significance, and their prevalence can be traced to Adorno’s use of (what this paper calls) “semantically ambitious homologies,” which can be traced to Freud’s use of them. I lay out this genealogy and argue that homology-based musical semantics, as it has been customarily practiced, is a nonstarter.