Andrew Kania

In this critical study of Julian Dodd’s Being True to Works of Music, I argue that the three-tier normative profile of the work-performance tradition in classical music that Dodd defends should be rejected in favour of a two-tier version. I also argue that the theory of work-performance defended in the book fits much more naturally with a contextualist ontology of musical works than with the Platonist ontology Dodd defends in Works of Music, despite his arguments to the contrary in the afterword of the new book. Finally, I argue that the reasons he gives for preferring a ‘tradition-based’ over a ‘historicized’ theory of the understanding of classical scores are not convincing.

Gregory Currie, arguing against recent psychoanalytic and semiotic film theory, has defended various realist theses about film. The strongest of these is that ‘weak illusionism’—the view that the motion of film images is an illusion—is false. That is, Currie believes film images really do move. In this paper I defend the common-sense position of weak illusionism, firstly by showing that Currie underestimates the power of some arguments for it, especially one based on the mechanics of projection, and secondly by showing that film images exhibit neither garden-variety motion, nor a special response-dependent kind.

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.

I investigate the widely held view that fundamental musical ontology should be descriptivist rather than revisionary, that is, that it should describe how we think about musical works, rather than how they are independently of our thought about them. I argue that if we take descriptivism seriously then, first, we should be sceptical of art-ontological arguments that appeal to independent metaphysical respectability; and, second, we should give ‘fictionalism’ about musical works—the theory that they do not exist—more serious consideration than it is usually accorded. CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    What's this?

I discuss Gregory Currie’s taxonomy of explanations of the fictional. On the one hand, there is an important kind of relation between internal and external explanations of some fictional truths that Currie leaves out, where both are salient and yet in a relation of harmony with each other. On the other hand, I do not see that he has established that there is a genuine relation of tension between some pairs of internal and external explanations, and thus I question the usefulness of the category of collapse. I also consider a further kind of explanation: the exterior explanation.

Aaron Ridley has recently attacked the study of musical ontology—an apparently fertile area in the philosophy of music. I argue here that Ridley's arguments are unsound. There are genuinely puzzling ontological questions about music, many of which are closely related to questions of musical value. While it is true that musical ontology must be descriptive of pre-existing musical practices and that some debates, such as that over the creatability of musical works, have little consequence for questions of musical value, none of this implies that these debates themselves are without value.

In this essay I first outline contemporary Platonism about musical works – the theory that musical works are abstract objects. I then consider reasons to be suspicious of such a view, motivating a consideration of nominalist theories of musical works. I argue for two conclusions: first, that there are no compelling reasons to be a nominalist about musical works in particular, i.e. that nominalism about musical works rests on arguments for thoroughgoing nominalism, and, second, that if Platonism fails, fictionalism about musical works is to be preferred to other nominalist ontologies of musical works.

In this essay, I investigate musical silence. I first discuss how to integrate the concept of silence into a general theory or definition of music. I then consider the possibility of an entirely silent musical piece. I begin with John Cage’s 4′33″, since it is the most notorious candidate for a silent piece of music, even though it is not, in fact, silent. I conclude that it is not music either, but I argue that it is a piece of non-musical sound art, rather than simply a piece of theatre, as Stephen Davies has argued. I end with consideration of several other candidates for entirely silent pieces, concluding that two of these are in fact pieces of music consisting entirely of silence.

I argue for an ontology of jazz according to which it is a tradition of musical performances but no works of art. I proceed by rejecting three alternative proposals: (i) that jazz is a work performance tradition, (ii) that jazz performances are works of art in themselves, and (iii) that jazz recordings are works of art. I also note that the concept of a work of art involved (1) is nonevaluative, so to deny jazz works of art is not to judge it inferior to artistic traditions with works, and (2) is univocal across other musical traditions, so to claim there are works of art in jazz would be to use a different sense of the term than we use when, say, discussing classical music.

Aaron Ridley has recently attacked the study of musical ontology—an apparently fertile area in the philosophy of music. I argue here that Ridley's arguments are unsound. There are genuinely puzzling ontological questions about music, many of which are closely related to questions of musical value. While it is true that musical ontology must be descriptive of pre-existing musical practices and that some debates, such as that over the creatability of musical works, have little consequence for questions of musical value, none of this implies that these debates themselves are without value.

Musicians of all sorts talk of getting “into a groove,” whether using those words or others; musical listeners also talk about the groove of a passage of music, a performance, or a recording. In his four-chapter essay, Groove, Tiger Roholt offers answers to questions that seem obvious candidates for philosophical inquiry yet that few philosophers have even touched on: what is a groove, exactly, and what is it to perceive or understand—to get— a groove? His answers are intriguing, not just because they are thoughtfully argued positions on an important yet neglected topic, but because, if correct, they challenge some central orthodoxies of philosophy of music, at least in the analytic tradition.Roholt’s main...

We compare William Henry Fox Talbot’s 1835 photographic negative 'Latticed Window (with the Camera Obscura) August 1835' with Richard Beaudoin’s 2009 solo piano work 'Étude d’un Prélude VII -- Latticed Window'. We claim that the score of Beaudoin’s work is a musical photograph of a performance of another musical work, and support the claim by describing their respective photographic and compositional processes, emphasizing the uniqueness of this score in being mechanically counterfactually dependent on its target (a recording of a Chopin prelude performed by Martha Argerich). We then compare Beaudoin’s score with other possible musical photographs, including musical recordings, sonic spectrographs, ordinary musical transcriptions, and typical musical scores. Finally, we consider an argument based on the transparency of photographs.

I argue that if we want to condemn sexual relationships between professors and students we must also condemn friendships between them. On the other hand, if we want to allow such friendships, we must condone (some) professor-student sexual relationships. My main reasons for this conclusion are, first, that the differences between close friendships and sexual relationships are more subtle than most people think — there is no clear boundary between the two — and, second, anything that would concern us about the latter should concern us about the former. I will argue, further, that though there may be reasons to avoid such relationships, there is nothing about the student-professor relationship in particular that should lead us to condemn all such relationships.

I argue that the work of art in rock music is a track constructed in the studio, that tracks usually manifest songs, which can be performed live, and that a cover version is a track (successfully) intended to manifest the same song as some other track. This ontology reflects the way informed audiences talk about rock. It recognizes not only the centrality of recorded tracks to the tradition, as discussed by Theodore Gracyk, but also the value accorded to live performance skills, emphasized by Stephen Davies.