Aims and context

This book advances five closely interconnected but wide-ranging theses. 1: Elgar was a modernist composer. 2: His music carries meanings that can be discovered by analysis. 3: Schenkerian voice-leading analysis is a useful preliminary to the hermeneutics – the study of meaning – of all kinds of tonal music, but its foundations and presuppositions need to be examined and reworked in this case. 4: The philosophy of Martin Heidegger can at the same time aid in three tasks: the useful reformulation of Schenker's phenomenology, the understanding of music's ontology, and the hermeneutics of musical works. 5: A work of music, being an intentional object with a supratemporal form, is a mimesis of humankind's lived temporality, and lights up for us the structures of our own existence.

All of these theses are controversial to a greater or lesser extent. Few Elgarians or academic musicologists would instinctively accept thesis 1. Of those who sense something of the modernist in him, he has been compared, not entirely to his favour, with contemporaries: after noting that his conservatism need not rule out a kind of progressiveness, Arnold Whittall adds, echoing Adorno's view of Debussy, that ‘the fractures and ambiguities characteristic of modernity are … less likely to be found in Elgar than they are in other tonal symphonists of the time, such as Sibelius, or, in particular, Mahler’. And on the surface – the place where fractures are generally seen – he is entirely right.