•  1537
    The aesthetics of country music
    Philosophy Compass 16 (5). 2021.
    Country music has not gotten much attention in philosophy. I introduce two philosophical issues that country music raises. First, country music is simple. Some people might think that its simplicity makes country music worse; I argue that simplicity is aesthetically valuable. The second issue is country music’s ideal of authenticity; fans and performers think that country should be real or genuine in a particular way. But country music scholars have debunked the idea that country authenticity ge…Read more
  •  730
    There Are No Purely Aesthetic Obligations
    Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 102 (4): 592-612. 2021.
    Do aesthetic reasons have normative authority over us? Could there be anything like an aesthetic ‘ought’ or an aesthetic obligation? I argue that there are no aesthetic obligations. We have reasons to act certain ways regarding various aesthetic objects – most notably, reasons to attend to and appreciate those objects. But, I argue, these reasons never amount to duties. This is because aesthetic reasons are merely evaluative, not deontic. They can only entice us or invite us – they can never com…Read more
  •  253
    Appreciating Bad Art
    with Matt Johnson
    Journal of Value Inquiry 51 (2): 279-292. 2017.
    There are some artworks which we appreciate for their bad artistic qualities; these artworks are said to be “good because bad”. This is puzzling. How can art be good just because it is bad? In this essay, we attempt to demystify this phenomenon. We offer a two-part analysis: the artistic flaws in these works make them bizarre, and this bizarreness is aesthetically valuable. Our analysis has the consequence that some artistic flaws make for aesthetic virtues. Such works therefore present a counte…Read more
  •  194
    Spatial music
    European Journal of Philosophy 30 (1): 279-292. 2022.
    Everyone agrees that musical works are individuated by essential elements such as tone, harmony, and rhythm. Some argue that timbre or instrumentation can individuate musical works, too. I argue here that there can be a further element of musical works: spatial location. Some works of music are partly constituted by the location and motion of their sound sources. I begin by describing works of spatial music and arguing that they exist. I then consider the implications for the ontology of music. …Read more
  •  71
    Perfect Compliance in Musical History and Musical Ontology
    British Journal of Aesthetics 54 (1): 31-47. 2014.
    There’s a common assumption that Western classical music performance essentially involves an ideal of perfect compliance: to perform a musical work, the performer must intend to play all of the notes in the score of that work, without deviating. Many accounts of musical ontology focus on Western classical music; consequently, they take this assumption to be fundamental to their accounts. However, recent musicological research reveals that this ideal is a relatively recent phenomenon, and doesn’t…Read more
  •  68
    This thesis evaluates Lydia Goehr’s claim that the musical work-concept did not regulate musical practice before the watershed date of 1800. In the first chapter, I evaluate Goehr’s arguments for this claim from historical musicology. I appeal both to recent secondary research sources in musicology, and to philosophical analysis. The second and third chapters focus on philosophical aspects of Goehr’s watershed claim. In the second chapter, I focus on understanding Goehr’s claim that a regulative…Read more
  •  47
    Good-Bad Art
    The Philosophers' Magazine 86 44-50. 2019.
  •  29
    Natural Sounds and Musical Sounds: A Dual Distinction
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 74 (3): 291-302. 2016.
    In this article I consider the relationship between natural sounds and music. I evaluate two prominent accounts of this relationship. These accounts satisfy an important condition, the difference condition: musical sounds are different from natural sounds. However, they fail to meet an equally important condition, the interaction condition: musical sounds and natural sounds can interact in aesthetically important ways to create unified aesthetic objects. I then propose an alternative account of …Read more
  •  21
    The Sonic Art of Film and the Sonic Arts in Film
    In Noël Carroll, Laura T. Di Summa & Shawn Loht (eds.), The Palgrave Handbook of the Philosophy of Film and Motion Pictures, Springer. pp. 801-821. 2019.
    My goal in this chapter is threefold. First, I argue that film is, at least partly, an art of sound. Most films are not made merely to be seen; they are also made to be heard. This offers an alternative to traditional accounts of film, which take film to be an essentially visual artform, and it suggests new directions for research in philosophy of film. Second, I argue that there are several distinct arts of sound in film. Some of these arts, like film music, are “aesthetic” arts; others, like s…Read more
  •  14
    Unruly Tones: A Reply to Ravasio
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 75 (2): 191-194. 2017.