Music, aesthetics of

2. The ontology of music

The central question of the ontology of music, in musical domains where the notion of a work – a repeatable and non-occasion-bound musical entity – has purchase, is that of what manner of thing a musical work precisely is.

It is clear that the standard musical work of the Western tradition is not any physical object or event whatsoever. In particular, it is not identical with any performance of it. It is equally not to be identified with any score of it, whether original manuscript or mass-produced copy, for such things are evidently seen and not heard. Furthermore, a musical work generally predates any of its performances, and can survive the destruction of all of its scores. Yet scores and performances remain of great importance: musical works in this tradition are largely defined by the former and experienced through the latter.

If a work of music is not a physical entity, what is it? There are four views on this question with some currency, three of which hold that a musical work is some variety of abstract entity. The first is that a musical work is a set or class of performances. The second is that it is a universal or pure type, such as a sound structure or pattern. The third is that it is a mental rather than an abstract entity, something existing properly in the minds of composers as well as perhaps of their interpreters and audiences. And the fourth is that a musical work is a qualified or contextualized type, akin to other products of culture in being creatable and bound to specific persons, times and places of origin. Finally, it is also possible to take an eliminativist view of musical works, denying that there really are any such things, and recognizing only scores, performances, intentions and associated practices.

Eliminativism aside, of the four views indicated above there are arguably conclusive objections to all but the last. Focusing on the second view, the idea that a musical work is simply a sound structure (or tonal-instrumental structure) confronts grave problems. One is that such a thing does not admit of being created; the total musical structure ultimately settled on by the composer, the upshot of various acts of choosing and arranging tones and instrumentations, already exists as an abstract object within the musical system in which composition takes place, and so cannot be brought into being by the composer. But a more important problem is that, conceived as simply a sound structure, a musical work cannot support the complex of aesthetic and artistic predications justifiably made of it. Two musical works, composed within the same musical system, may be identical in musical structure and yet differ in the aesthetic or artistic features that are ascribed to them, for example, brashness, wittiness or originality. This is due to the different contexts in which they were composed, and the different contexts of correct performance, audition, and understanding that this entrains. Only a view such as the fourth noted above, that individuates musical works more finely – for example, as composer-initiated types whose identity is bound up with person, time and place – can be adequate to musical works as they figure in our experience and description of them. The act of composing a standard musical work is thus one of the composer indicating, in a specific musico-historical context, a musical structure, so creating the work which is precisely the structure-as-indicated-by-the-composer-in-that-context (see Art works, ontology of §§2–3).