Abstract
The craft of textual exegesis shares much in common with the interpretation of music. Both projects require a set of skills of attunement that must be cultivated over many years: careful listening, perceptiveness to subtlety and the sublime, and the open-heartedness to be moved and transformed by the object of one’s interpretive attention. This art also requires a willingness to revisit the same compositions many times over, always plumbing the well in the search for deeper resonances or layers of meaning. Exegesis of texts as well as that of music requires attention to the silence, whether to the white spaces