The role of the listener in the construction of the meaning of a musical work

This study challenges approaches that reduce musical meaning to the composer's intention and the written score, and instead positions the listener as a constitutive agent in the construction of meaning. Within a hermeneutic and reception-aesthetic framework, it examines how musical meaning is historically and contextually reconfigured through the interaction of composer, performer, space and listener. Designed as a qualitative multiple case study, the research comparatively analyses Beethoven's 9th Symphony, Kemani Hamza Bey's Saba Mevlevî Peşrevi, the folk dance tune "Misket" and the Turkish pop song "Aşkın Olayım". Textual analysis, historical documentation, performance practices and discourses on listener reception are evaluated together. The findings indicate that these works undergo generic, functional and symbolic transformations across different contexts, and that the listener's horizon of expectations, pre-understandings and cultural position play a decisive role in this process. Thus, the listener is reconceptualised not as a passive receiver but as an active "co-author" of musical meaning.