Writing musicological studies always entails writing about the history of musicology itself. Our Festschrift aims in the first place to develop knowledge on a wide range of musical topics and to stimulate scientific discourse. It is also meant as a contribution to the tradition of honouring prominent academics by means of a celebratory publication – a long-established practice in German-speaking countries, and one which has become widespread internationally. Thus, it is our intention to dedicate the present volume to a scholar, lecturer and intellectual whose lifetime’s work has had a major impact on the consolidation of modern musicology at the Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas, Universidade Nova de Lisboa: Mário Vieira de Carvalho. A Festschrift usually reflects the dedicatee’s scholarly fields and research interests. Our Essays on Music, Meaning and Society encompass some core issues in areas of research close to Mário Vieira de Carvalho’s own. His work has consistently explored the relations between musical phenomena and their social environment. For Mário Vieira de Carvalho music and society cannot be viewed as separate realms: they belong together and interact in multiple ways. It follows from this that musicology must devise ever more refined approaches to the interrelation of social and musical processes and practices. The chapter Social Existence Determines Human Consciousness: Interdependencies between Music, Society, and Technology addresses precisely those questions. The implications of Mário Vieira de Carvalho’s work for music analysis, criticism and aesthetics are manifold. Differentiations in musical reception or musical behaviour respond to differentiations in musical structure, which in turn reflect the musical intentions of the composer – a view developed by Mário Vieira de Carvalho since the time of his encounter with Christian Kaden as a former doctoral supervisor, and brought to fruition in his well-known studies on the music of Fernando Lopes-Graça, among other composers. Interrelations between composition, performance and reception are outlined in our chapters Analysing Music and Musicians: Text – Performance – Context and The Meaning of Meaning: Music, Discourse, and Silence.