Abstract

Music operates not only as an expressive art form but also as a culturally embedded mode of knowing through which communities learn, transmit, and negotiate meaning. This paper examines musical interpretation as an embodied epistemic practice, arguing that knowledge in music is produced through participation, listening, memory, and repetition rather than through abstract representation alone. Methodologically, the study adopts a qualitative interpretive approach, drawing on conceptual analysis and illustrative examples from musical practice and intercultural contexts. Indian classical music is engaged as a key illustrative framework, where musical knowledge is transmitted through oral pedagogy, sustained embodied practice (riyaz), and culturally cultivated modes of listening rather than through notation alone. This allows the paper to foreground how musical understanding emerges from corporeal engagement and culturally learned interpretive practices. Framed within discussions of embodied transmission, the paper emphasizes that performing and listening function as epistemic acts that cultivate shared sensibilities, values, and identities within specific cultural contexts. Through bodily memory, habitual action, and improvisatory practice—particularly evident in the interpretation of rāga—musical traditions transmit knowledge across generations, positioning music as a living archive of cultural epistemologies. The paper further explores musical interpretation in intercultural contexts, including performances and receptions of Indian classical music across cultural boundaries. Rather than assuming universal meaning or seamless communication, the study highlights how such encounters involve negotiation, reinterpretation, and mutual adjustment. These processes enable music to function as a dialogic space in which identities are continuously shaped and reconfigured through embodied engagement. By foregrounding interpretation as an epistemological practice, this paper contributes to broader debates on music as knowledge.