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Distinct performances of the same song can mean very different things. Yet the meaning of the song may be fixed. My immediate purpose is to show how the interplay of semantics and pragmatics generates different meanings in different performances. Context dependent aspects of a song's meaning should not be confused with context dependent aspects of a performance's meaning. My more general purpose is to advance our understanding of musical meaning. Musical performances are rich in meaning because semantic information, contingently associated with a musical structure, generates myriad possibilities for generating pragmatic contextual supplementation of the work during its performances. My central proposal is an application of core ideas in philosophy of language. Audiences interpret art and music, and audience interpretation involves decisions about which properties belong to the works being interpreted and which belong only to a particular performance of that work. Consider the following case. Suppose someone utters a sentence and thereby makes a claim, but the referring expression of the sentence is a name or description that does not refer to the speaker's intended referent. Is the resulting sentence true or false? In a well known article, Saul Kripke discusses cases such as “Her husband is kind to her,” said of a man who is not married to the woman in question.1 On Kripke's analysis, a narrow focus on the semantic content of the sentence tells us that the spoken sentence is true only if the woman (that is, the woman referred to by the gendered pronoun) is married and the man in question is kind to her. But this focus on literal meaning may divert reference away from the intended male referent. If the woman is married, the truth of the sentence depends on her husband's behavior. If the actual husband is cruel to her, then the assertion is false. Or suppose the woman is not married. Following our semantic conventions, the sentence is false, for it is false if she is not married. Yet, married or single, the intended male referent is the man actually observed being kind to the woman in question. So long as the person to whom the speaker addresses the sentence understands the speaker's intended reference, the speech act will successfully refer to that person and it will succeed even when the intended audience for the sentence recognizes the failure of semantic reference. Thus, a successful understanding of a speaker often requires us to set aside a strict adherence to the semantic reference of the referring expression, and the speaker's utterance can be true even if its proper semantic reference should render it false.
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