The first book-length consideration of questions relating to music and meaning.

"The outstanding originality of this book lies in the detail and perspicuity with which interrelations are traced between texts, it even seems that relations sometimes work backwards. Above all, this book does not offer a 'theory of intertextuality.' Rather, it is a many-sided survey of the topic, open-ended and truthful. It is fresh and inspirational."
—Raymond Monelle, Reader in Music at the University of Edinburgh and author of Linguistics and Semiotics in Music

Intertextuality in Western Art Music provides an interdisciplinary approach to the questions of music and meaning, using the approaches of Barthes, Foucault, Eco, Derrida, Lévi-Strauss, and others. Drawing on research in aesthetics, hermeneutics, semiotics, narrativity, analysis, and musicology, Klein argues that each musical text is part of a cultural network of texts that code the ways we make sense of music.