Derrida’s Quasi-transcendental Interweaving of Invention and Interpretation

Résumé thinking, therefore, demonstrates that there is no logically coherent basis for the invention/ convention distinction that is all too often used to support the traditional belief that a musicologist’s sole task is merely the second-level analytical interpretation of musical compositions already so inventively brought into being by artists. This is an attitude that neatly excludes musicology from the domain of cultural production, which, it is often supposed, absolves the discipline of the responsibility for cultural critique at the coalface, as it were. In my view, then, the importance of Derrida’s pattern of thinking for critical musicology has to do with its power to address the dangers of ideological blindness that are the result of placing musicologists and/ or artists strictly on opposite sides of the invention-convention coin.