There are compelling reasons to believe that musical works are abstract. However, this hypothesis conflicts with the platitude that musical works are appreciated by means of audition: the things that enter our ear canals and make our eardrums vibrate must be concrete, so how can musical works be listened to if they are abstract? This question constitutes the audibility problem. In this paper, I assess Julian Dodd’s elaborate attempt to solve it, and contend that Dodd’s attempt is unsuccessful. Then I (...) discuss what I take to be the ideal response to the audibility problem, and show that it ultimately fails. I contend, consequently, that the project of construing musical works as audible is disheartening. Accordingly, in my last section, I will argue the audibility problem may be satisfactorily resolved without ascribing audibility to musical works. (shrink)

This paper aims to shed light on the question of whether musical appropriation is ethically unobjectionable. James Young (2021) has recently advanced a position on this topic, according to which, whereas the appropriation of a whole work is uncontroversially non-permissible, the appropriation of parts of a work is usually permissible. He grounds this view in ontological matters and in a criterion of fair use in terms of economic harm to the source work’s composer. I argue that, pace Young, we cannot (...) make general ethical claims about musical appropriation because their truth is sensitive to the musical genres that the involved works belong to. First, I clarify the scope of musical appropriation by means of considerations on musical practices and ontology. This will reveal that versions and covers are not genuine cases of musical appropriation. In a second step, I consider a specific kind of musical appropriation: using the first measures of a source work as the first measures of a secondary work. I show that, even if we assume Young’s ontological framework and his criterion on fair use, the instances of this kind of musical appropriation count as fair or unfair depending on the musical genres of the involved works due to their normative implications for the composition and appreciation of those works. (shrink)

I have recently defended two ideas (Puy 2022a). The first is that our modal claims about musical works do not imply that they are modally flexible entities, i.e.

_Winner of the Fabian Dorsch ESA Essay Prize._ Julian Dodd defends the view that, in musical work-performance practice, interpretive authenticity is a more fundamental value than score compliance authenticity. According to him, compliance with a work’s score can be sacrificed in cases where it conflicts with interpretative authenticity. Stephen Davies and Andrew Kania reject this view, arguing that, if a performer intentionally departs from a work’s score, she is not properly instantiating that work and hence not producing an authentic performance (...) of it. I argue that this objection fails. A detailed analysis of work-performance practice reveals, first, that the normative scope of interpretive authenticity encompasses the practice of composing musical versions and that, second, when performers sacrifice score compliance to maximize interpretive authenticity, they are performing the target work by means of performing a version of it. By means of the nested types theory, I then show how performances produced in this way can be properly formed instances, and hence authentic performances, of their target work. (shrink)

In his article “The Ontology of Musical Versions: Introducing the Hypothesis of Nested Types,” Nemesio Puy raises a hypothesis that continuity of the purpose is both a necessary and a sufficient condition for musical work’s identity. Puy’s hypothesis is relevant to two topics in cognitive psychology and experimental philosophy. The first topic is the prevalence of teleological reasoning about various objects and its influence on persistence and categorization judgments. The second one is the importance of an artist’s intention in the (...) categorization of artworks. We tested the teleological hypothesis across three studies. Vignettes in these three studies describe a musical work being changed in some of these aspects: purpose either changed or retained; score either changed or retained; change is made either by the same or a different composer. The results suggest that teleological considerations impact judgments on the persistence of musical works, but this impact appears to be relatively weak. The results also suggest that persistence judgments strongly depend on whether acoustical properties were changed, while whether the change was made by the original composer seems to be relatively unimportant. (shrink)

An impressive variety of theories of ontology of musical works has been offered in the last fifty years. Recently, the ontologists have been paying more attention to methodological issues, in particular, the problem of determining criteria of a good theory. Although different methodological approaches involve different views on the importance and exact role of intuitiveness of a theory, most philosophers writing on the ontology of music agree that intuitiveness and compliance with musical practice play an important part when judging theories. (...) A multitude of diverse claims exist regarding folk intuitions and matters of musical practice in the literature on the ontology of musical works. In this review paper, a systematized collection of about one hundred empirical claims extracted from the theoretical literature is presented. All of the empirical claims are categorized thematically. The paper also includes a short discussion on the role of appeals to common intuitions in methodological literature, as well as some suggestions for future research. (shrink)

In the ontology of music the Aristotelian theory of musical works is the view that musical works are immanent universals. The Aristotelian theory (hereafter Musical Aristotelianism) is an attractive and serviceable hypothesis. However, it is overlooked as a genuine competitor to the more well-known theories of Musical Platonism and nominalism. Worse still, there is no detailed account in the literature of the nature of the universals that the Aristotelian identifies musical works with. In this paper, I argue that the best (...) version of Musical Aristotelianism identifies musical works with structural universals. I first motivate the view by outlining its explanatory benefits. I then argue that Musical Aristotelianism is preferable to Musical Platonism and present a novel account of musical works as structural universals by developing D. M. Armstrong’s theory of structural universals. I discuss the consequences of Musical Aristotelianism with respect to on-going issues in debates about musical works and defend the view against an influential objection, concluding that Musical Aristotelianism is a genuine competitor in debates about the nature of musical works. (shrink)

Guy Rohrbaugh (2003) and Allan Hazlett (2012) have argued against the identification of musical works with sound-pattern types by arguing that musical works are.

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.

The relationship between 1. recipes, 2. ingredients and 3. dishes may be understood in analogy to the relationship between elements in the performing arts: for example, in music, 1. musical works, 2. ‘musical ingredients’ and 3. performances. The recipe’s inventor is a ‘composer’ and the cook is a ‘performer’. As I will argue, both in musical performances and in the preparation of dishes, the application of norms requires ‘creative’ adaptation to the concrete specific situation and the final product emerges from (...) practical interactions that involve transformations of their own normative bases. Hence, both in culinary practices and performing arts like music, the improvisational case is paramount for understanding how their normativity, as paradigmatic of the normativity of human practices in general, works. (shrink)