| Contents |
Introduction -- The type/token theory introduced -- Motivating the type/token theory: repeatability -- Nominalist approaches to the ontology of music -- Musical anti-realism -- The type/token theory elaborated -- Types I: abstract, unstructured, unchanging -- Types introduced and nominalism repelled -- Types as abstracta -- Types as unstructured entities -- Types as fixed and unchanging -- Types II: platonism -- Introduction: eternal existence and timelessness -- Types and properties -- The eternal existence of properties reconsidered -- Types and patterns -- Defending the type/token theory I -- Unstructuredness and analogical predication -- Musical works as fixed and unchanging -- Abstractness and audibility (again) -- Works and interpretations -- Conclusion and resumé -- Defending the type/token theory II: musical platonism -- Platonism it is: replies to Anderson and Levinson -- The existence conditions of works of music -- Composition as creative discovery -- The nature of the compositional process: replies to objections -- Composition and aesthetic appraisal: a reply to Levinson -- Composition and aesthetic appraisal: understanding, interpretation, and correctness -- Musical works as continuants: a theory rejected -- A theory introduced -- Explicating and motivating the continuant view -- The continuant view and repeatability -- Further objections to the continuant view -- Musical works as compositional actions: a critique -- Currie's action-type hypothesis -- Davies's performance theory -- Sonicism I: against instrumentalism -- Sonicism introduced -- Sonicism motivated: moderate empiricism -- Instrumentation : timbral sonicism introduced -- Scores -- Instrumentation, artistic properties, and aesthetic content -- Levinson's rejoinder -- Sonicism II: against contextualism -- Introduction: formulating contextualism -- Contextualist ontological proposals -- Levinson's doppelgänger thought-experiments -- Artistic, representational, and object-directed expressive properties -- Aesthetic and non-object-directed expressive properties -- Conclusion: the place of context. |
| Abstract |
This book argues for what the author terms the simple view of the ontological nature of works of pure, instrumental music. This account is the conjunction of two theses: the type/token theory and sonicism. The type/token theory addresses the question of which ontological category musical works fall under, and its answer is that such works are types whose tokens are sound-sequence-events. Sonicism, meanwhile, addresses the question of how works of music are individuated, and it tells us that works of music are identical just in case they sound exactly alike. |
| Bibliography note | Includes bibliographical references (pages 277-282) and index. |
| LCCN | 2006036280 |
| ISBN | 9780199284375 (alk. paper) |
| ISBN | 0199284377 (alk. paper) |
