‘Making, Not Filling Time’

Improvisation and notation are frequently opposed in terms of transience versus permanence, an opposition that reflects broader Eurocentric ideas of orality and literacy. Confronting such binary distinctions, Schuiling describes the use of notation by three groups of improvising musicians, showing how notations mediate their understanding of time. This forms the basis of a critique of Alfred Schütz’s influential account of social interaction in musical performance. Schuiling argues that Schütz’s distinction of an ‘inner time’ of music and an ‘outer time’ mapped by the score remains tied to a work-centred musical ontology, and fails to attend to the making of time in the course of performance. Drawing on his fieldwork, Schuiling reconsiders the work of Maurice Halbwachs, the primary target of Schütz’s argument. Rather than understanding music as an object of inner contemplation, Halbwachs provides a view of music and temporality as a way of opening up to the world.

Music, Ontology and the Need for History: A Critical Discussion

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.

The Normativity of Musical Works

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.

Ontology

The chapter moves through a brief history of ontology and trends in contemporary analytic ontology before investigating common positions in musical ontology such as Platonism (Kivy, Dodd), compliance theory (Goodman, Elgin), continuant theory (Rohrbaugh, Magnus), and performance theory (Davies, Currie). After evaluating the strengths and weaknesses of each of these, it argues for a version of continuant theory as an account of musical ontology that makes sense of musical practices and intuitions while honouring naturalistic philosophical commitments. Moreover, I suggest that the inherently “shaky” nature of undecidable claims within ontology (musical or otherwise) means that ontological approaches should not take fact-stating as their sole objective. Rather, ontological statements may function both descriptively and prescriptively: as such, ontology possesses a key regulative purpose within our theoretical discourse.

Multiplicity, Audibility, and Musical Continuity

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.

THE EXISTENCE OF THE AUTHOR'S TEXT IN THE CONTEXT OF UNDERSTANDING PLATONIC EIDOS

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.

The Confession of Time in Augustine

The apparent contradiction between subjective and objective approaches to time in Augustine can be resolved if it is understood that he regarded cosmic time and the finite things it engenders as being of itself, in some sense, both psychic and self-recording. This interpretation holds whether or not Augustine affirms a world soul. It is justifiable in terms of the continued applicability of his earlier liberal-arts writings to his later texts and his blending of Plotinian vitalism, Porphyrian spiritualism, and his own ‘theurgism’ (especially in his commentary on the Psalms), which is parallel to that of Iamblichus. Augustine’s ‘musical ontology’, which is also a metaphysics of number, word, and seminal reason, leads him to develop a theory of time and memory that anticipates more the spiritual realism of Bergson than it does idealist and phenomenological philosophies. However, for Augustine, time as an image of eternity remains aporetic, and its aporia is ‘resolved’ only by the Incarnation and its sustaining as the liturgical and political community of the Church. Through Christological, and not just angelic, mediation, our memories and expectations truly reach to past and future realities, just as our intentions reach to really located things, but only because all of these are both inherently psychic/intellectual and sustained by the divine eternity.

Ontology of Time as a Deconstruction of Space. An essay on the Philosophy of Byzantine music

In this paper the author examines the ontology of Byzantine music in its self, its aesthetical ground, the philosophical and cultural principles of creation, its episteme, the epistemological field that produced its forms from the 12th till the 14th century, and why that musical ontology hasn’t change through the centuries. The paper discusses in partucular Ernst Bloch’s view that the only evolutionary expression of the Absolute spirit as far as music is concerned, is Western classical music. The author claims that the Western and the Byzantine music stand for two totally distinct and diverse ontologies of the musical being, something that Bloch seems to overlook; this, according to the author, is mostly due to the different systems of representation that have been used, and especially the representational ideas of the time-space relation. The author supports the view that while Western music is spatially-modeled, Byzantine music is time-modeled.