scholarly journals Multiplicity, Audibility, and Musical Continuity

Dialogue ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 59 (1) ◽  
pp. 101-121
Author(s):  
PETER ALWARD

ABSTRACTMusical works are both multiple — they have a plurality of instances — and audible — they can be heard by listening to their instances. Two prominent approaches to musical ontology designed to explain these features of musical works are the type-token model and the continuant-stage model. Julian Dodd has argued that the type-token model has an advantage over the continuant-stage model because it can offer a direct explanation of the audibility of musical works in terms of their ontological category. In this paper, I defend the continuant-stage model against Dodd's argument by invoking a work-unifying continuity relation.

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 31-62
Author(s):  
Lisa Giombini

Abstract Although an ontological approach to musical works has dominated analytic aesthetics for almost fifty years, criticisms have recently started to spread in the philosophical literature. Contestants blame mainstream musical ontology for lacking historical awareness, questioning the cogency of metaphysical proposals that are substantially essentialist with regard to our musical concepts. My aim in this paper is to address this accusation by engaging the historicist critics in a sustained debate. I argue that even if the arguments based on history and sociology turn out to be accurate, this may not be enough of a reason to abandon the ontological project altogether. Ontology and history do not necessarily clash. Moreover, historical-sociological examinations do not fulfil our philosophical interest in music. I conclude by making a plea to “historical ontology,” a perspective that does not reject ontology but closely connects it to the dialectic between historical research and aesthetic interest.


Author(s):  
Pavel G. Shinkevich ◽  

This article is devoted to the study of musical text in the context of the Plato ontology. Our task is to show the process of cognitive comprehension of a musical text as an ontological and hermeneutic reflection. It is fundamentally important for the author to become acquainted with two basic philoso-phical positions, showing fundamentally opposite views on the musical ontology as a whole. To reveal the existence of a musical text at the ontological and hermeneutic levels, we need to develop the neces-sary tools to “subtract” the authentic meanings that underlie the creation of the creator of the text. In the context of the problem under study, we will get acquainted with the various ontological positions of philosophers such as Peter Kivy, Jerome Levinson and other thinkers. Observing, for example, the invisible controversy of Kiwi and Levinson, we can track two radically opposite approaches to the study of musical text. Developing the position of classical Platonism that musical compositions are discovered rather than created, Peter Kivy shows us musical works as discovered eternal types. The opposite position is that of Jerome Levinson, showing a musical composition as a soluble idea, which lies in the potentiality of the author. This approach criticizes the idea of combining musical creations with Platonic universals (Kivy), arguing, on the contrary, about the author’s onto-logical principle. Choosing one of the approaches to understanding the authentic intent of the author’s text, we need to establish the primary and secondary levels of reflection. Given the direct relationship between the author and the interpreter of the text, it is important for us to identify the ontological conditions for the emergence of the text as the primary level of reflective immersion. The level of hermeneutic exist-ence, which implies the conditions and variability of the musical variant of the text, we will attribute to second-order reflection. Thus, in the context of the Plato ontology, it is important for us to identify the uniqueness of the historical text and show the self-existence of its existence. In this regard, the author comes to the con-clusion that the moment of birth of the text is in intuitive experience as an eternal idea that does not depend on anything and does not go anywhere. This level is the most basic, since the fact of fixing the idea of the text in direct graphics is secondary, and having recognized the graphics, the transcriptor creates the interpretation-thing of the idea, just trying to establish similarity as the principle of com-munication. An attempt to establish this connection in the form of a musical interpretation is multivari-ate and coincides with the original idea only partially. As a result, at the hermeneutic level, scoring of musical notations enlivens the musical being of the text, but at the same time alienates us from under-standing its original idea.


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 1-135
Author(s):  
Alessandro Arbo

Abstract The cases of copyright infringement that occasionally crop up in the world of music raise many interesting questions: what do we mean when we talk about the identity of a musical work and what does such an identity involve? What in fact are the properties that make it something worth protecting and preserving? These issues are not only of legal relevance, they are central to a philosophical discipline that has seen considerable advances over the last few decades: musical ontology. Taking into account its main theoretical models, this essay argues that an understanding of the ontological status of musical works should acknowledge the irreducible ambivalence of music as an “art of the trace” and as a “performative art.” It advocates a theory of the musical work as a “social object” and, more specifically, as a sound artefact that functions aesthetically and which is based on a trace informed by a normative value. Such a normativity is further explored in relation to three primary ways of conceiving and fixing the trace: orality, notation and phonography.


2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-53
Author(s):  
Vitor Guerreiro

This paper is about the dilemma raised against musical ontology by Roger Scruton, in his The Aesthetics of Music: either musical ontology is about certain mind-independent ?things? (sound structures) and so music is left out of the picture, or it is about an ?intentional object? and so its puzzles are susceptible of an arbitrary answer. I argue the dilemma is merely apparent and deny that musical works can be identified with sound structures, whether or not conceived as abstract entities. The general idea is this: both Platonism and nominalism about musical works are a kind of fetishism: musical works are not ?things?, in Danto?s sense of ?mere real things?; they rather involve complex relationships between objects, events, and different kinds of functional properties. For this, I draw on Levinson and Howell?s notion of indication, combined with Searle?s approach to institutional reality... with a little twist of my own.


2010 ◽  
Vol 31 (2) ◽  
pp. 95-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudia Quaiser-Pohl ◽  
Anna M. Rohe ◽  
Tobias Amberger

The solution strategies of preschool children solving mental-rotation tasks were analyzed in two studies. In the first study n = 111 preschool children had to demonstrate their solution strategy in the Picture Rotation Test (PRT) items by thinking aloud; seven different strategies were identified. In the second study these strategies were confirmed by latent class analysis (LCA) with the PRT data of n = 565 preschool children. In addition, a close relationship was found between the solution strategy and children’s age. Results point to a stage model for the development of mental-rotation ability as measured by the PRT, going from inappropriate strategies like guessing or comparing details, to semiappropriate approaches like choosing the stimulus with the smallest angle discrepancy, to a holistic or analytic strategy. A latent transition analysis (LTA) revealed that the ability to mentally rotate objects can be influenced by training in the preschool age.


1997 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saul Sternberg ◽  
Teresa Pantzer
Keyword(s):  

Author(s):  
John F. Feldhusen ◽  
Russel E. Ames ◽  
Kathryn W. Linden
Keyword(s):  

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