Towards a Descriptive Ontology of Music

Abstract

In this short paper I argue that musical ontology does not rely primarily on the expert judgment of

members of the musical practice when it comes to intuitions about musical works. As a response

to this methodological misstep, I propose that musical ontology should change focus from the

common folk to the way primary actors of the musical practice—composers, musicians, critics—

think about, and believe of, musical works.

I start by offering a brief overview of the contemporary debate on the ontology of music.

Then I present my argument for a tighter pragmatic constraint on expert judgments about music.

Introduction

In this short paper I am arguing that musical ontology does not rely primarily on the expert

judgment of members of the musical practice when it comes to intuitions about musical works.

Even though a number of prominent musical ontologists have had formal musical training and a

robust understanding of musical practice, when try to elicit and compare intuitions their

considerations commonly appeal to a very loose notion of common sense that focuses more on the

ordinary or non-expert listener. As a response to what I argue is a methodological misstep, I

propose instead that musical ontology should change its focus from the common folk to the way

primary actors of the musical practice - composers, musicians, critics - think about, and believe of,

musical works. In the first section I offer a brief overview of the contemporary debate on the

ontology of music. In the second section I present my argument for a tighter pragmatic constraint

on expert judgments about music.

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 I. The Contemporary Debate on the Ontology of Music

The problematic character of musical works is a result of a peculiar quality of them: their

repeatability. Musical works have “the possibility of multiple occurrence built in to them” (Dodd,

2007, p. 10). To understand this better, let us think first about another kind of artworks, in this

case, paintings: consider The Card Game by Polish painter Balthus. There is only one Card Game,

it is held in exhibition at the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, in Madrid, Spain. That is the

original one. If someone makes a copy, no matter how technically perfect or indistinguishable from

the original, it would still be a copy. That is the reason why the notions of original, forgery, copy

and replica make sense when we talk about paintings. The relation between them is one of

resemblance, not of identity and not even fungibility: an original painting and its copy are not

interchangeable, to do so would amount to fraud. Moreover, we think of paintings as concrete

physical objects, and as such, they have both temporal and spatial locations; we can see them, we

can touch them, we can perceive them directly, so to speak. They are created, and they can be

destroyed. We think of them this way when, for example, the artist gives the ‘last stroke’ to the

work, we say the work is complete, it has been consummated into existence; we think of them as

being destroyed when someone sets them on fire and reduces them to ashes.

But it is not the same with musical works. Consider now the Suite for Harp by American

composer Bryce Dessner. Let us say that I have listened to it at its premiere performance and then,

some years later, I have listened it again at a harp recital. Was that premiere performance the

original Suite for Harp and the second, and thus any subsequent performance, a mere copy of it?

Which one is the original one? These questions do not really apply in this case for we tend to think

about musical works in a different manner. We conceive works of music as being naturally

repeatable: the Suite for Harp might have hundreds of different performances, at different places

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and at different times, executed by many different musicians too, yet we think that all of them

would be performances of the Suite for Harp. Even more, it seems that we think they all are the

Suite for Harp. This does not mean we cannot discriminate between performances of it, we do,

and it is a fundamental part of our musical practice. Still, it appears like we ‘experience’ the Suite

through its performances, regardless of how different they might be from each other.

These considerations (among others) give rise to a lot of interesting questions regarding

the nature of musical works. That is the reason we find their ontological character so perplexing

when compared to other kinds of artworks, particularly the works of plastic arts. And also, the

reason why the ontology of music has been, to a certain degree, a substantial topic in the

metaphysics of art. To finish this introduction, I offer a superficial overview of the ongoing

philosophical discussion around the ontology of musical works:

Following Bartel (2011), the contemporary debate on the ontology of music can be stated

around two separate questions more or less independent of each other:

1) ‘What kind of metaphysical entity is a musical work?’, an inquiry that constitutes what

Bartel calls the Fundamentalist Debate.

2) ‘What are the identity conditions of a particular musical work?’, the axis around which the

Identity Debate unfolds.

The first debate is concerned with the nature of musical works, i.e., what thing a musical work is.

It is worth noting that these debates, and musical ontology for that matter, do not aim at telling us

what music is, but what kind of thing music is. Their goal is not the definition of music, for that is

a completely different task (Thomasson, 2004, p. 78).

With that in mind, the question can thus be formulated as: what is the ontological category

of musical works? There have been several answers: the dominant view takes them to be abstract

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objects, more specifically, types with different characteristics, ranging from eternally existent types

(Kivy, 1987) to initiated types or indicated structures (Levinson, 1990, pp. 63-88). An alternative

account takes them to be sets, either sets of scores and performances or sets of possible

performances. But there are other fronts in the debate that think of them in various, less familiar

ways, from imaginary objects to fictional objects. Furthermore, there are those who argue that

musical works are concrete entities. Particular views on this side of the discussion propose that

works of music are events constituted by the act of composing (Davies, 2004), mereological sums

of performances, or perdurant individuals. Finally, there is a more radical view, called

eliminativism, that denies the existence of musical works (Matheson & Caplan, 2011, p. 39).

II. A New Pragmatic Constrain: Considering the Word of the Experts

I argue now that one important problem with the ontology of musical works is that musical

ontologists begin their inquiry, and build up their theories, based on assumptions and

presuppositions that might be somehow foreign to the most commonly shared conceptions about

works of music within the musical practice. That is, the views held by real and active members of

the musical community. To support this claim some important examples are called for: first,

Nelson Goodman’s Languages of Art (1968), one of the seminal works on the ontology of music,

proposes a revisionary account of the metaphysics of music that identifies a musical work with the

set of its score and performances, and that distinctively defies some core notions in the musical

practice, among them, the idea that authentic performances of a work can tolerate a certain level

of variation and even error—thus originating the so-called “wrong note paradox” (Predelli, 1999).

Andrew Kania (2008) suggests that from that point onwards the debate on the ontology of music

runs parallel to that of the classic problem of universals in metaphysics, with its very own version

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of the realist/anti-realist divide1. Precisely because of this framing of the discussion as mirroring

one of the fundamental debates in general metaphysics, a constant desideratum in a theory of

musical works has been taken to be their classification within some reputable, metaphysically

respectable category: e.g., platonic types, sets, intentional or imaginary objects and other more or

less idiosyncratic fauna abstracta, as well as four-dimensional worms and, of course, fictional

objects. The general idea being that the raw data stemming from the intuitions concerning our

musical practices needs to be fitted, regimented into a preconceived ontological template. Such

preoccupation with metaphysical correctness has been drawing away the attention paid to the

interpretation of the pre-theoretical data. Moreover, as a result of its (whether or not conscious)

drive to imitate the structure and formulation of a centuries old philosophical problem that deals

not with a small fraction of reality but basically with our entire worldview, musical ontology has

failed to listen to the voices that actually carry the authority on the matter: the experts in our

musical practice. I believe that because the problem of universal pertains both to the common man

and to the expert irrespectively—it could be argued that, on this subject, the judgment of the

layman is as accurate, relevant and informative as that of the astrophysicist, and even more

candid—ontologists of music have wrongly assumed that the same applies to the problem of

musical works. But why would this be so when what we are interested in defining and obtaining

information from are exactly our musical practices? Should not those engaged in them, and held

in them as authority figures, know better than the mundane concertgoer?

With this in mind, it is worth noting that I am not the first one to propose a more empirical

approach to the ontology of music or what it had been sometimes refer to as a “descriptive

1
On the realist front we find the theories of Kivy (1987), Dodd (2007), and Levinson (1990), while on the anti-
realist or nominalist side we have those of Goodman, as above mentioned, Predelli (1995) and Trivedi (2002), to
mention some relevant names in the literature.

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metaphysics of music”. Such a view has been defended by theorists like Kania (2009), Bartel

(2011) and, arguably, Dodd (2007). Such an approach is perhaps most explicitly outlined by David

Davies in his work Art as Performance, where it appears in the form of his Pragmatic Constraint:

Artworks must be entities that can bear the sorts of properties rightly ascribed to what are

termed “works” in our reflective critical and appreciative practice; that are individuated in

the way such “works” are or would be individuated, and that have the modal properties that

are reasonably ascribed to “works,” in that practice (2004, p. 18).

But although a project like this has been more or less endorsed by many ontologists of art, it seems

that such constraint is not really that tight. I believe that our failure to ground our ontological

theories on the actual musical practices is due to: First, a commitment to metaphysical

conservatism, in the sense that when envisioning a theory of musical works, ontologists tend to be

rather traditional in their attribution and description of metaphysical categories. They constantly

try to appeal to an already familiar and respected ontological category in order to characterise new

phenomena. The elegant principles of conservatism and parsimony constitute real theoretical

virtues in many other areas of inquiry, but we might need to loose them a bit if we want a tighter

pragmatic constraint.

Second, and very much linked to the first, the ontology of music relies heavily on notions

and conceptions drawn from the ontology of literature, more specifically, on a scheme similar to

that of the type/token distinction. Such distinction appears to be the default approach to the inquiry

on generic entities in general, but it might not be the appropriate point of departure for the purpose

of outlining an ontology of art that fully represents and clarifies the most commonly held intuitions

in the musical practice.

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 Third, ontologists of music suffer from a radical disconnection between them and the

people primarily engaged in the musical practice. Though academic ontology of music has worked

mostly on what is called “absolute music”, and has drawn their paradigms from the western

tradition of academic notated music, their appeal to common sense tends to dismiss the core

concepts of the musical practice in an attempt to generalise the theory from the point of view of

the ordinary listener. The problem here is that, in most cases, neither the ordinary listener nor the

most sophisticated composer is familiar with the concepts deployed by the musical ontologist. The

contemporary literature on the ontology of music (as can be noted in the examples of the previous

section2) makes a distinction between theoretical and pre-theoretical intuitions about music, but

many times it is not clear whether that distinction is made regarding musical theory or ontological

theory. The question can be put this way: do the pre-theoretical intuitions of the ordinary music

listener are pre-theoretical when it comes to notions of musicianship or to metaphysical notions?

One would assume the first one, but the second one is not so clear. I argue that the metaphysical

aspects of musical practice, at least as framed and characterised by the musical ontologist, are not

really familiar to the ordinary listener nor to the competent musician. Furthermore, it might be a

mistake to focus on the judgments of ordinary listeners without considering the judgments of

musical experts, for the latter do have a more robust, though perhaps not really systematised, set

of intuitions both about musicianship and about the metaphysics of musical works. Consider for

example, one core question in the ontology of music: are musical works modally fixed? Respected

accounts on the nature of musical objects take them to be so3. Nevertheless, if one is looking for

an answer to that question based on what composers actually think, one might find that such

consensus does not occur at the composer-level. The general view seems to indicate the opposite

2
See Bartel (2011) and Kania (2008).
3
See Dodd (2007), Levinson (1990) or Kivy (1987).

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answer, that musical works are modally flexible.4If primary agents in the musical practice have

their own views on the ontology of music, views that might affect of even determine the production

and execution of musical works, shouldn’t ontologists of music be concerned, in the first place,

with those views?

Facing these three obstacles is not hard to see why the so-called project of a “descriptive

metaphysics of music” fails to be truly descriptive. A stronger commitment to that project would

require us to avoid the three obstacles in order to provide a theory that reflects what the experts on

the subject, that is, composers, musicians, critics and musicologists, think about music.

One might object that such a change of focal point might turn out to be elitist: paying

attention to what the experts think instead of what the common folk think might end up just

widening the distinction between experts and non-experts. I could answer, firstly, that such a

distinction is and needs to be done in many other disciplines studied by philosophy. The

philosopher of physics must be concerned, mostly, with what the expert physicists say, not what

the common man thinks. It is hard to see why we shouldn’t take the same approach regarding

music. Secondly, it is worth noting that the focus on the experts is relevant not only because we

should be interested in the ways they think about music, but more importantly, because the way

they think about music constitutes the theoretical core of musical practice. What they think about

what they do affects directly what they do. This in turn answers another possible objection: that

such an approach would render the theory not a theory of musical works themselves but a theory

of the expert conceptual scheme of musical works. In other words, a theory about the concept of

works of music and not a theory about the actual works. That would not be the case here since the

4
See, for example, what Philip Glass expressed about his music on an interview on the occasion of the concert of
the Labéque sisters in Mexico City. MacMasters, M. (2018). Toda la música de Glass llama a la imaginación:
Hermanas Labéque. La Jornada. Retrieved from https://www.jornada.com.mx/2018/05/17/cultura/a03n1cul

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expert conceptual scheme of musical practice is directly linked to the musical practice itself: a

change in the way musicians think about music brings about a change in the way musicians make

music.

In conclusion, if one is ready to commit to a descriptive metaphysics of music, then one

should start by listening to what the experts have to say about the metaphysics of music, and that

requires our theories to be flexible enough as to accommodate those conceptions, not just forcedly

fit them in previously designed metaphysical categories. Regarding the role of the ordinary

listener, on the other hand, well, being the last link in the chain of musical practice, maybe that is

the place she should have in our ontological theory too.

References

Bartel, C. (2011). Music Without Metaphysics? British Journal of Aesthetics, 51(4), 383-398.

Caplan, B. & Matheson, C. Ontology in Gracyk, T. & Kania, A. (Ed.) (2011). The Routledge

Companion to Philosophy and Music. New York: Routledge.

Davies, D. (2004). Art as Performance. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Dodd, J. (2007). Works of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kania, A. (2008). The Methodology of Musical Ontology: Descriptivism and its Implications.

British Journal of Aesthetics, 48(4),426-444.

Kivy, P. (1987). Platonism in Music. Another Kind of Defence. American Philosophical

Quarterly, 24(3), 245-252.

Levinson, J. (1990). Music, Art and Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Predelli, S. (1999). Goodman and the Wrong Note Paradox. The British Journal of Aesthetics,

39(4), 364–375.

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Thomasson, A. L. (2005) “The Ontology of Art and Knowledge in Aesthetics”, Journal of

Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 63, 221-229.

Trivedi, S. (2002). Against Musical Works as Eternal Types. The British Journal of Aesthetics,

42(1), 73–82.

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