Horizons of Fusion: Arabic Maqām, Improvisation and Gadamerian Hermeneutics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This chapter represents an attempt to interpret a fundamental structure in Arabic music, maqām , in terms of Gadamer’s notion of the fusion of horizons. Often translated into English as “mode,” maqām goes beyond pitch set or scale. It is a musical reality, beautiful and fascinating, not well served by traditional theoretical tools, which deserves more attention. I argue, on the one hand, that Gadamerian hermeneutics can illuminate how maqām works, while showing, on the other, how maqām might contribute to a better understanding of Gadamer’s thought. In the context of my overall argument, I deal with Gadamer’s key notions of play, imagination, indeterminacy, the centrality of the question and the notion of ethos. I show how Gadamerian hermeneutics applied to maqām can constribute to certain discussions in the philosophy of music. I suggest that maqām presents a challenge to Gadamer’s understandings of language and the musical work. Ultimately, it is appropriate to conceive of maqām as itself a horizon in which fusion of perspectives can take place.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".