In this text, I will use Hans-Georg Gadamer’s philosophical hermeneutics as the basis for a music-educational position in which the place of music in human life and in education will be delineated. Proper philosophical hermeneutics deals with the limits of human knowledge and the methods through which it is acquired and interpreted. In a music-philosophical context, hermeneutics defends the idea that musical being comes alive only in the act of musical engagement, characterised by complete devotion and playfulness. In such an engagement, the state of lived experience comes to the forefront—an experience that presupposes a unique and concrete temporality.

Time, however, is treated in multiple ways within philosophical hermeneutics. When it comes to the phenomenal temporality of musical experience, it is always here and now; in it, all subject–object relations fall away—the person and the musical share one and the same being. In music, this temporality is clearly perceptible, since music, as a temporal art, requires from everyone (performers, listeners) full devotion and inner activity in the present moment.

But philosophical hermeneutics also includes another, equally important mode of time: historicality. To accept the tradition and culture (in their concrete and unique context) of each epoch, each time; to recognise their interconnectedness; and to understand how music and human thought about music change in different periods—this constitutes the hermeneutic perspective on historicality.

Musical experience requires a sensus communis (common sense), through which one senses, internalises, and understands the musical. This sensus communis represents an inner disposition of the person, dependent on their social environment and concrete historicality. Such a sense presupposes an educated society in order to be realised, for society must serve as the soil in which the “common” of this sense can emerge. Building the education of society—forming this sense—is a task of utmost importance, assumed precisely by education.

Education, in turn, needs a clear model through which to guide itself—a truth, a criterion by which a person becomes educated, that is, develops and sharpens this sense; and all educational means, through the path of experience, must direct the person toward an educated experience. Gadamer’s hermeneutics invites us to assume that if, in a game or an experience, something is disclosed to us that cannot be disclosed otherwise, then the experience itself contains knowledge. Aesthetic experience, characterised above all by such playful engagement, must therefore also contain knowledge, an image, and a model.

Only music—as a bearer of aesthetic and moral value—can serve as the foundation for music education. The claim that music can provide a model, that one can be educated through it, can rest only on the foundations of a truly common sense. From this standpoint, play—as a mode of human relation to the world in which subject–object distinctions dissolve; play, which is the primary mode of being of the musical work and the very place where musicality lives—emerges as the essential means of education.

Education must make use of musicality and play, which reside within lived experience, for its own purposes—but in such a way that the inherent purposiveness of the play act is not destroyed, for play itself can never be a means, but only an end. Any criterion imposed from outside appears contentless from the standpoint of play and experience.

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