The question of the relation of the musical work to its historical context is raised in a variety of ways in this volume, but most explicitly and most radically by Charles Hamm, John Neubauer, and Peter Rabinowitz. … These three critics take their point of departure from the postmodernist notions of the openness of the work of art and of the function of the performer and/or audience in the production of the work's possible meaning. … In his consideration of the reception in black South Africa of Lionel Richie's “All Night Long (All Night),” Hamm first stresses the difficulty of imputing any specific meaning to the work itself. … Specific meanings are produced, Hamm says, “only at the moment of reception” and are “shaped by the cultural capital of the listener.” … The implications of Hamm's position could be unsettling to critics, I should think. According to Hamm, the critic's role would not consist of determining the real or true value of a given musical work, but rather – insofar as one were interested in meaning at all – in identifying the contexts in which it may have been heard and surveying the various meanings imputed to it by listeners in those contexts.