Interpretation, in music or the other arts, is a very individual thing. But a methodology, I believe, is the basis on which interpretive agreements and disagreements can be rationally discussed. This course aims to proceed in two phases, the first devoted to developing a vocabulary to enable the music lover to say more about a piece of music’s expressiveness than that it was “happy” or “sad” or “beautiful.” Terms such as “representation,” “convention,” Western culture,” and “expressive behavior” are key concepts in that development. Now, following the first phase of our study, I propose to amplify the expressive aspect of the course by examining the question of structural behavior — in other words, by considering how a piece of music operates in terms of its tonal and rhythmic organization. This second phase of our inquiry concerns what a performer has to do in order to communicate to the listener a (at the very least) competent execution. Here, the challenge is to depend on our “ears” — our mental/aural concentration — in order to follow a musical continuity. Above all else, we should remember that whatever we feel we’ve interpreted about a piece, it has already been filtered through, and thus inevitably influenced by, the interpretation of the performer.