Brandon Polite

In _Things: In Touch with the Past_ (2019), Carolyn Korsmeyer builds on her earlier work in which she argues that our tactile interactions with objects connect us to the past, enriching our aesthetic experiences and imbuing artifacts with deeper meaning. Building on these insights, our paper addresses the puzzle of why some individuals prefer vinyl records despite the availability of music in sonically superior and cheaper digital formats. We argue that the physical act of handling records with care, being in touch with objects with unique histories, the traces of use and age that manifest in how they sound, and the extra effort involved in playing them contribute aesthetic dimensions to the experience of listening to music on vinyl that digital formats lack, which accounts for vinyl’s unique appeal.

Musicians, listeners, and record labels sort music into genres like jazz, punk, heavy metal, and so on. Metaphysically, what kind of thing is a genre? This paper explores the idea that music genres are historical individuals. The obvious way to develop this is to think of a music genre as being like a biological species. Although that approach has much to recommend it, we argue that it faces an insuperable difficulty: what we dub the problem of independent origins. We argue, instead, that a genre is a historical individual governed by an institution or social practice.

After nearly being killed off by CDs in the 1980s and 1990s, and despite the rise of streaming services like Spotify, vinyl records have had a major resurgence this century. Although nearly half of all records are purchased from online retailers and big-box stores, roughly half are bought at independent record shops, even though they are typically more expensive there. We believe one major reason for this is that record shops offer us aesthetic rewards that online retailers and megastores do not. In this paper, we will examine the aesthetic value of record shops. Skeptics may think that their value owes largely to the music they sell, the nostalgia they can induce, or the social status they can confer. While we agree that these values play some role in explaining contemporary interest in record shops, we argue that they are valuable for a number of other distinctively aesthetic reasons. First, record shops function as aesthetic institutions that are objects of appreciation in their own right. Second, record shops afford worthwhile participatory experiences of an aesthetic nature. Finally, the experiences that one has at record shops may ultimately enhance one’s appreciation of the music one listens to at home.

When Taylor Swift's record label was sold in 2019, the six studio albums she recorded for them came under the control of a person with whom she has had years of bad blood: Kanye West's former manager Scooter Braun. But rather than move on, Swift chose to take the unprecedented step of re-recording duplicate versions of those albums. With all of the profits made from selling, streaming, and licensing these “Taylor's Versions” going directly to Swift, she could deprive Braun of potentially hundreds of millions of dollars. The gambit has already paid off. The first two Taylor's Versions (of Fearless and Red) debuted at Number 1 on the Billboard charts and have sold over one million copies so far; and four more are still on the way. In this book, nine philosophers and one music producer explore the philosophical richness of Swift's project and the questions it raises: Are Swift's re-recordings new works of art or mere copies of the originals? Do the Taylor's Versions of the songs have the same meanings as the original versions, or do they now mean something different? Is her re-recording project genuinely artistic or merely commercial? Is Swift standing up for artists' rights or looking out for herself? Does the music industry exploit artists, and, if so, how should it be reformed? Together they show the philosophical dividends one of the most famous and acclaimed recording artists of her generation is capable of producing. For anyone interested in the complicated relationship between popular art and commerce this book is a must-read.

Anyone interested in the philosophy of music, especially popular music, should be familiar with Cristyn Magnus, P.D. Magnus, and Christy Mag Uidhir’s contemporary classic “Judging Covers” [Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 71(4) (2013), pp. 361–370)]. In the terrific A Philosophy of Cover Songs, an open-access book freely available to read online and download, P.D. Magnus strikes out on his own to expand on, revise, and refine the ideas he developed with his coauthors in that article. The book is philosophically rich, engaging, and loaded with illuminating examples. It is worthy of sustained scholarly attention, but also accessible enough for a general audience. It would be an excellent book to adopt in any undergraduate course (at any level) on aesthetics and the philosophy of art, or in any introductory philosophy course with units on those topics—and not only because students can read it for free.

In this paper, I explore the ways in which human bodies, payback, and comestibility become inescapably entangled in cultures in which honor is the prevailing virtue. Shakespeare was deeply sensitive to the social and psychological processes through which these concepts become entwined when honor is at stake—to the ways in which, as a means of corrective response, men who transgress a code of honor can be rightly reduced to their bodies, similar to how those who are not allowed to be full participants in an honor culture (most particularly women) always already are. I begin by examining Shakespeare’s earliest depictions of honor cultures in Titus Andronicus and The Rape of Lucrece, and then briefly discusses how the ideas they trade in are further developed and complicated later in his career, focusing specifically on Othello.

In ‘Listening to Music Together’, Nick Zangwill offers three arguments which aim to establish that listening to music can never be a joint activity. If any of these arguments were sound, then our experiences of music, qua object of aesthetic attention, would be essentially private. In this paper, I argue that Zangwill’s arguments are unsound and I develop an account of shared musical experience that defends three main conclusions. First, joint listening is not merely possible but a common feature of our socially situated experiences of music. Second, when listening with others our experience of the music and our sense of community with our fellow listeners often reciprocally enhance one another. Third, how deeply and intimately we share a musical experience with others depends upon such factors as our respective backgrounds, interests, and levels of expertise.

In this paper, I present the beginnings of a resemblance theory of representation. I start by surveying the contemporary philosophical debate surrounding musical representation and reveal that its main interlocutors share a conception of artistic representation as a mode of meaningful communication. I then show how conceiving of artistic representation in this way severely limits music’s possibilities as a medium for representation. Next, I propose an alternative conception of representation that, despite its widespread acceptance outside of the philosophy of art, has been largely denigrated within it: namely, that representation fundamentally depends on structural resemblance. Finally, I demonstrate how conceiving of artistic representation as grounded upon structural resemblances, rather than as a mode of meaningful communication, provides us with a more accurate picture of both (a) how music represents and (b) how we perceive and appreciate musical representations.

Many philosophers of music, especially within the analytic tradition, are essentialists with respect to musical experience. That is, they view their goal as that of isolating the essential set of features constitutive of the experience of music, qua music. Toward this end, they eliminate every element that would appear to be unnecessary for one to experience music as such. In doing so, they limit their analysis to the experience of a silent, motionless individual who listens with rapt attention to the sounds produced by either musicians a on stage, a stereo, or a portable device. This approach is illustrated in recent work by Nick Zangwill. Drawing on essentialist assumptions, Zangwill concludes that properly musical experience is effectively disembodied and radically private. While this seems plausible when we consider the essentialists’ paradigm case, Zangwill’s conclusion seems odd once we consider the wide variety of ways that people experience music. One’s body and social situation seem ineluctably enmeshed within the experience of, e.g., hot jazz played in a nightclub, where listeners bob their heads and dance to the music, cheer on the musicians, and socialize with their fellow concertgoers. The question this paper aims to answer is: should we consider this and similar experiences of music properly “musical”? I maintain that we should. Far from the world of pure music that Zangwill and others relegate properly musical experience, I conclude that our musical experiences are fully enmeshed within the somatic, affective, and interpersonal dimensions of human life.

This dissertation defends the place of representation in music. Music’s status as a representational art has been hotly debated since the War of the Romantics, which pitted the Weimar progressives (Liszt, Wagner, &co.) against the Leipzig conservatives (the Schumanns, Brahms, &co.) in an intellectual struggle for what each side took to be the very future of music as an art. I side with the progressives, and argue that music can be and often is a representational medium. Correspondence (or resemblance) theories of representation, such as the one I offer, have been much maligned in philosophy since the 1960s. Most theories assimilate representation under “meaning,” which has usually been thought to belong primarily to language. As a result, representational content has been taken to be purely conventional in the way that sentential meaning is. People want to know what music “means,” and these theories interpret this as “what does it refer to?” or “what propositions does it express?” I argue that propositional communication is only one (small) part of the issue. Once we overcome the bias of conceiving of musical works as essentially linguistic items, speech acts (performed) or sentence tokens (written), we can begin to take music on its own terms to discover how it represents—one way in which it “means.” The first step is to “naturalize” music’s representational content. Influenced by recent discussions in the philosophies of mind and science, I argue in Chapter 1 that composers represent extra-musical objects, events, and states of affairs through their works by exploiting antecedent relations (such as similarities in pitch, timbre, and structure) in order to secure reference to them. In Chapter 2, I survey and respond to the main challenges that those skeptical of music’s representational possibilities would raise against my theory of musical representation. In Chapter 3, I explore a number of ways through which music has been claimed to represent in order to show how my theory accounts for these diverse phenomena better than its conventionalist rivals, both in terms of the metaphysics and the epistemology. Chapter 4 extends this discussion by offering an account of how we perceive, understand, appreciate, and interpret sophisticated musical representations. I conclude by teasing out some of my theory’s implications and suggesting areas for further research