Realism about musical works is often tied to some type of Platonism. Nominalism, which posits that musical works exist and that they are concrete objects, goes with ontological realism much less often than Platonism: there is a long tradition which holds human-created objects (artifacts) to be mind-dependent. Musical Platonism leads to the well-known paradox of the impossibility of creating abstract objects, and so it has been suggested that only some form of nominalism becoming dominant in the ontology of art could (...) cause a great change in the field and open up new possibilities. This paper aims to develop a new metaontological view starting from the widely accepted claim that musical works are created. It contends that musical works must be concrete and created objects of some sort, but, nevertheless, they are mind-independent, and we should take the revisionary methodological stance. Although musical works are artifacts, what people think about them does not determine what musical works are. Musical works are similar to natural objects in the following sense: semantic externalism applies to the term ‘musical work’ because, firstly, they possess a shared nature, and, secondly, we can be mistaken about what they are. (shrink)

We analyse the role of a theatrical script and its relation to the literary work and the theatrical performance. We put forward an Argument from Modality, which demonstrates structural and functional differences between literary works and theatrical scripts. Next, we answer some potential challenges to our argument. We demonstrate that the failure to realize the far-reaching consequences of a clear distinction between the literary work and the theatrical script is a source of confusion in the debate on the relata of (...) the relation of interpretation. In particular, we show that the relation of interpretation does not hold directly between the literary work and the theatrical performance. It is mediated by the script. The script interprets the literary work by filling in its places of indeterminacy and adjusting it for stage purposes. Moreover, the script, which is a set of instructions, is executed rather than interpreted in a theatrical performance. (shrink)