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This paper analyses the paradigms of interpretation and the evolution of
the creative processes in music and law. Whether it is matter of a score or a law, the
text is reborn through the work of the interpreter who, in dealing with the epistemological
problem of the understanding, has to harmonize the purity of the philological
reconstruction of the object with the need to actualize its sense. Moving from
the creative character of every interpretation—neither the musician can be reduced
to a mere executor of a concatenation of musical symbols on the staff as Stravinsky
wanted nor the judge may be conceived as a bouche de la loi according to Montesquieu’s
theory—this work, after having discussed Gadamer and Betti’s
hermeneutical approaches to music and law, focuses on the issue of the limits to the
interpreters’ freedom. The interpretation here proposed revolves around improvisation,
seen as a typical cultural practice of the aesthetic dimension of music.
Improvisation, which from baroque to jazz does not correspond to the realm of
absolute freedom, is used as a trait d’union in order to make a comparison with legal
experience. This is particularly true with the development of case law, which
becomes increasingly problematic especially in the light of ‘‘liquid modernity’’,
where the ‘‘polytheism of values’’ has been gaining strength. Seen from this perspective,
the comparison between the judge and the musician in their activity as
interpreters of a formalized system of signs highlights the controversial relationship
between form and creativity, the accuracy of the text and the requisites deriving
from the social context, certainty and justice.