This is an overview of analytic philosophy of music. It is in five sections, as follows: 1. What Is Music? 2. Musical Ontology 3. Music and the Emotions 4. Understanding Music 5. Music and Value.

This article focuses primarily on improvisation in the arts as discussed in philosophical aesthetics, supplemented with accounts of improvisational practice by arts theorists and educators. It begins with an overview of the term improvisation, first as it is used in general and then as it is used to describe particular products and practices in the individual arts. From here, questions and challenges that improvisation raises for the traditional work-of-art concept, the type-token distinction, and the appreciation and evaluation of the arts (...) will be explored. This article concludes with the suggestion that further research and discussion on improvisation in the arts is needed, particularly in the areas of non-jazz improvisation. (shrink)

I argue that even if video games are interactive artworks, typical video games are not works for performance and players of video games do not perform these games in the sense in which a musician performs a musical composition (or actors a play, dancers a ballet, and so on). Even expert playings of video games for an audience fail to qualify as performances of those works. Some exemplary playings may qualify as independent “performance-works,” but this tells us nothing about the (...) ontology of video games or playings of them. The argument proceeds by clarifying the concepts of interactivity and work-performance, drawing particularly on recent work by Dominic Lopes, Berys Gaut, and David Davies. (shrink)

The paper offers a reconstruction of the logics of jazz improvisation that is drawing on Žižek’s Work on Hegel. A basic concept of Žižek’s reading of Hegel consists in the concept of Retroactivity as the temporality that is characteristic of what Hegel understands as the development of history. The logic of retroactivity cannot be understood in terms of a classical teleological account but rather draws upon the idea of incommensurable events: Each historical situation is presupposing its own preconditions in a (...) way that the contingent is transformed into necessity. The paper discusses the structure of the temporality of jazz in such a way that it can be informed by Žižek’s thoughts on the temporal logic of history. (shrink)