•  27
    Musical Exdurantism
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 80 (4): 477-493. 2022.
    Recently, Caterina Moruzzi has appealed to Ted Sider’s case for continuant exdurantism and the availability of a “parallel move” in musical ontology to promote a specific version of musical work exdurantism. In this article, I argue that her version of musical exdurantism undermines the prospects for making the parallel move, but I go on to sketch two alternatives that do not. In Section I, I outline apparent persistence-parallels between ordinary material objects and musical works. In Section I…Read more
  •  27
    Is Moruzzi's Musical Stage Theory Advantaged?
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 78 (3): 357-362. 2020.
    In a recent article, Caterina Moruzzi (2018) develops and defends her musical stage theory. This discussion response supposes that Moruzzi's development and def.
  •  40
    The aim of this thesis is to increase our ontological understanding of musical works in two ways. We’ll increase our understanding of their categorial nature and we’ll increase our understanding of what the identity of each musical work consists in. In chapter 1, I introduce the basic question of the thesis: what are musical works? This question is broken down into four separate questions which guide the structure and argument of the thesis. One question asks if musical works exist, the other as…Read more
  •  66
    Against Kania’s Fictionalism about Musical Works
    British Journal of Aesthetics 55 (2): 209-224. 2015.
    Andrew Kania has attempted to argue for nihilistic fictionalism about musical works. This view combines an error theory about musical work discourse with the proposal that musical work discourse has a non-alethic value which warrants continued participation in it. In this paper, I argue that Kania fails to establish either component of nihilistic fictionalism. First, I elaborate and reject Kania’s attempt to establish fictionalism on the basis of a methodological proposal he calls ‘descriptivism…Read more
  •  62
    Property Theory of Musical Works
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 76 (1): 57-69. 2018.
    The property theory of musical works says that each musical work is a property that is instantiated by its occurrences, that is, the work's performances and playings. The property theory provides ontological explanations very similar to those given by its popular cousin, the type/token theory of musical works, but it is both simpler and stronger. However, type/token theorists often dismiss the property theory. In this essay, I formulate a version of the property theory that identifies each type …Read more
  •  66
    Types, Tokens, and Talk about Musical Works
    Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 75 (3): 249-263. 2017.
    It has recently been suggested that the type/token theorist concerning musical works cannot come up with an adequate semantic theory of those sentences in which we purport to talk about such works. Specifically, it has been claimed that, since types are abstract entities, a type/token theorist can only account for the truth of sentences such as “The 1812 Overture is very loud” and “Bach's Two Part Invention in C has an F-sharp in its fourth measure” by adopting an untenable semantic claim: namel…Read more