Download What a Musical Work Is

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Class 10: Music
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Class 10: Music
Jerrold Levinson: “What a Musical Work Is”
Thesis:
A piece of music is a sort of structural type, and as such is
both non-physical and publicly available. A musical work
is a sound structure + performance means:
(MW) S/PM structure-as-indicated-by-X-at-t
Background:
• Levinson is in part reacting to theories of art like Croce and
Collingwood’s—that what distinguishes a work of art from
other things is its being essentially mental—and to
type/token theories of art.
• Levinson’s theory falls out of his Historical Definition of
Art and his theory of Hypothetical Intentionalism.
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Class 10: Music
What Is a Musical Work?
• Some philosophers (e.g. Croce and Collingwood) have
maintained that musical and literary works are purely
mental.
- As private intuitive experiences in the minds of their
creators, such works would be essentially unshareable.
- But experiences can neither be played, nor read, nor
heard.
• Some philosophers (e.g. Margolis) contend that works of
art (including music) are abstract objects (e.g. types).
- Under this sort of theory, a musical work is some sort of
structural type (most likely a sound structure), and as
such is both non-physical but publicly available.
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Class 10: Music
Two Objectives
(1)To show that the proposal that musical works are not mere
sound structures is deeply unsatisfactory.
(2)To suggest a structural type that does satisfy the
requirements for an adequate view of, and can be
identified with, a musical work.
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Class 10: Music
Musical Works Could Not Be Created By Their Composers
• If musical works were mere sound structures, then musical
works could not be created by their composers.
- Sound structures are types of a pure sort, which can exist
at all times – they are essentially mathematical objects.
- The sound structure of Beethoven’s Quintet, Opus 16
could have existed ten years before Beethoven was born.
- But if that sound structure could have been instantiated
then, it must have existed then.
- “Sound structures per se are not created by being scored –
they exist before any compositional activity.” (79)
- So if composers do create their works (and we presume
they do), then musical works are not sound structures.
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Class 10: Music
Musical Works Could Not Be Created… (cont’d)
• The idea that composers merely discover or select entities,
rather than create them, flies in the face of our deeplyembedded intuitions.
- “If we conceive of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony as
existing sempiternally, before Beethoven’s compositional
act, a small part of the glory that surrounds Beethoven’s
composition of the piece seems to be removed.” (79)
- If musical works are not identical with scores,
performances, or thoughts, what is the composer
creating?
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Class 10: Music
Creativity Requirement
(Cre) Musical works must be such that they do not
exist prior to the composer’s compositional
activity, but are brought into existence by that
activity.
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Class 10: Music
Identical Sound Structures Do Not Mean Identical Works
(1) “If musical works were just sound structures, then, if two
distinct composers determine the same sound structure,
they necessarily compose the same musical work.” (80)
(2) “But distinct composers determining the same sound
structure in fact inevitably produce different musical
works.” (80)
(3) “Therefore, musical works cannot be sound structures
simpliciter.” (80)
- Consider “Pierre Menard”
• Certain attributes of musical works are dependent on more
than the sound structures they contain.
• Works are composed in a musico-historical context.
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Class 10: Music
Identical Sound Structures Do Not Mean… (cont’d)
• The musico-historical context of a composer P at a time t
includes:
(a) The whole of the cultural, social, and political
history prior to t.
(b) The whole of musical development up to t.
(c) Musical styles prevalent at t.
(d) Dominant musical influences at t.
(e) Musical activities of P’s contemporaries at t.
(f) P’s apparent style at t.
(g) P’s musical repertoire at t.
(h) P’s oeuvre at t.
(i) Musical influences operating on P at t.
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Class 10: Music
Identical Sound Structures Do Not Mean… (cont’d)
• All these factors serve to differentiate works identical in
their sound structures.
(1) A work identical in sound structure to Schoenberg’s
Pierrot Lunaire (1912), but composed by Strauss in
1897, would be more bizarre, upsetting, anguished, and
eerie, given its context.
(2) Mendelssohn’s Midsummer’s Night Dream Overture
(1826) is considered highly original. Another work,
with the same sound structure, composed in 1900,
would be highly unoriginal.
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Class 10: Music
Identical Sound Structures Do Not Mean… (cont’d)
(3) Brahm’s Piano Sonata Opus 2 (1852) is strongly Lisztinfluenced, but had Beethoven written it (before Liszt
was born), it could hardly be Liszt-influenced.
(4) A work of Stamitz containing a “Mannheim rocket” (a
loud ascending scale figure for unison strings) is
exciting. An identical work composed today would be
funny.
(5) Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra (1943) satirizes
Shostakovitch’s Seventh Symphony (1941). If Bartok
had written it in 1939, it couldn’t have satirized the
Seventh Symphony.
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Class 10: Music
Identical Sound Structures Do Not Mean… (cont’d)
Objection: These aesthetic and artistic differences between
works are really just facts about their composers, and aren’t
attributes of works at all.
Rebuttal (1): These are the qualities of art: “Artistic and
aesthetic attributions made of musical works are as direct
and undisguised as attributions typically made of
composers.” (81)
Rebuttal (2): It is implausible to reduce aesthetic qualities to
a composer. “W is scintillating” isn’t the same as saying “W’s
composer is scintillating.”
Rebuttal (3): While a composer might be considered original,
he is original because his work is original, not vice versa.
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Class 10: Music
Finite Individuation Requirement
(Ind) Musical works must be such that composers
composing in different music-historical
contexts who determine identical sound
structures compose distinct musical works.
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Class 10: Music
Musical Works Involve Specific Means of Performance
• “If musical works were simply sound structures, then they
would not essentially involve any particular means of
performance.” (82)
- But the instrumentation of particular works is an integral
part of those works.
(1) Composers specify a means of production, through
which a pure sound pattern is indirectly indicated:
“When Beethoven writes a middle C for the oboe, he
has done more than require an oboe-like sound at a
certain pitch – he has called for such a sound as
emanating from that quaint reed we call an “oboe.””
(82)
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Class 10: Music
Musical Works Involve Specific Means of Performance (cont’d)
(2) “There is nothing in scores themselves that suggests
that instrumental specifications are to be regarded as
optional – any more than specifications of pitch,
rhythm, or dynamics.” (82) If a given score is
performed using instruments other than those specified,
we don’t consider it a performance of that work.
(3) “The determinateness of a work’s aesthetic qualities is
in peril if performing means are viewed as inessential
so long as exact sound structure is preserved.” (83) If
we wish to preserve these aesthetic attributes, we must
recognize performing means as essential components of
musical works.
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Class 10: Music
Musical Works Involve Specific Means of Performance (cont’d)
e.g. “[I]f we understand the very sounds of the
Hammerklavier Sonata to originate from a fullrange synthesizer, as opposed to a mere 88-key
piano of metal, wood, and felt, it no longer seems
so sublime, so craggy, so awesome.” (83)
(4) Music is about the instruments. “Imagine a piece
written for violin to be played in such a way that certain
passages sound more like a flute than they do a violin.
Such a piece would surely be accounted unusual, and to
some degree, original as well. Understood as a piece
for violin and occasional flute, however, it might have
nothing unusual or original about it at all.” (84)
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Class 10: Music
Inclusion of Performance Means
(Per) Musical works must be such that specific
means of performance or sound production
are integral to them.
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Class 10: Music
Defining a Musical Work
• “I propose that a musical work be taken to involve not only
a pure sound structure but also a performing means.” (84)
- This satisfies the (Per) requirement.
- But we must also include the (Cre) and (Ind)
requirements.
(MW) S/PM structure-as-indicated-by-X-at-t
- An S/PM structure-as-indicated-by-X-at-t (unlike a mere
sound structure) does not pre-exist the activity of
composition, so it is created, and (Cre) is satisfied.
- Musico-historical context is a function of a fixed time and
person, so the (Ind) requirement is satisfied.
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Class 10: Music
Defining a Musical Work (cont’d)
Initiated Types: (Indicated Structures) are instantiated into
existence by an intentional human act of some kind – by the
work.
Implicit Types: (Pure Structures) are purely abstract, like
chess moves and strings of words, and as such predate any
instantiation.
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Class 10: Music
Defining a Musical Work (cont’d)
• “The Ford Thunderbird is not simply a pure structure of
metal, glass, and plastic. The pure structure that is
embodied in the Thunderbird has existed at least since the
invention of plastic (1870); there could certainly have been
instances of it in 1900. But the Ford Thunderbird was
created in 1957; so there could not have been instances of
the Thunderbird in 1900. The Ford Thunderbird is an
initiated type.” (85)
• Musical works, as well as poems, novels, and plays, operate
the same way: each is a temporally-bound structure.
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Class 10: Music
Defining a Musical Work (cont’d)
• Could we combine the (Ind) and (Cre) requirements?
(MW') S/PM structure-as-indicated-inmusico-historical-context-C
• “[T]wo composers composing simultaneously but
independently in the same musico-historical context who
determine the same S/PM structure create distinct MW
types, but the same MW' type.” (86)
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Class 10: Music
(MW)
S/PM structure-as-indicated
-by-X-at-t
(MW')
S/PM structure-as-indicated-inmusico-historical-context-C
• “It must be admitted to be somewhat counterintuitive for a theory to make the
composer of a work essential to that work.” (86)
• Should we want to argue that a composer who creates a work in the same musicohistorical context as another composer has not created a work that is his own?
• Two works composed in the same musico-historical context by different
composers may develop different aesthetic properties after t. On MW', this would
mean the works are the same at t, and become different afterwards.
• If a musician performs a musical work, it would be intuitive that he had performed
one work or the other, and not both (particularly if he isn’t familiar with one of
them).
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Class 10: Music
Conclusion
• Each of the following must be distinguished:
(a) Instances of the work, W.
(b) Instances of the sound structure of W.
(c) Instances of S/PM structure of W.
(d) Performances of W.
• An instance of W is a sound event conforming to the S/PM
structure of W, and exhibiting the required connection to
the indicative activity where A creates W.
• Instances are a subclass of the set of performances of a
work: all instances of W are instances of W’s sound
structure, and W’s S/PM structure, but not vice versa.
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Class 10: Music
Conclusion
• Performances are attempts to exemplify W’s S/PM
structure.
- Performances may be more or less successful.
- Performances do not always fully instantiate (incorrect
performances).
• “One hears an S/PM structure-as-indicated-by-X-at-t
whenever one hears an instance of that S/PM structure
produced by performers who, roughly speaking, are guided
by X’s indication of the S/PM structure in question.” (88)
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Class 10: Music
Consequences
(1) Composers would retain the status of creator in the
strictest sense.
(2) Musical composition would be revealed as necessarily
personalized.
(3) Musical composition could not fail to be seen as a
historically rooted activity whose products must be
understood with reference to their points of origin.
(4) It would be recognized that the pure sound structure of a
musical work, while graspable in isolation, does not
exhaust the work structurally, and thus that the
underlying means of performance must be taken into
account as well if the work is to be correctly assessed.
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Class 10: Music
Questions & Problems
(1) Are strings of notes more like strings of numbers or
strings of words? What is the difference?
(2) Is Levinson correct that a string of notes is never
created? Are strings of words never created, either?
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Class 10: Music
Roger Scruton: “Understanding Music”
Thesis:
Music is an intentional object, characterized by melody,
rhythm, and harmony in spatial orientation and movement.
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Class 10: Music
The Content of Musical Works
• Music is an abstract (i.e. non-representational) art form: it
has no means of referring to and presenting an object
independent of itself.
• Many people want to ascribe content to works of music,
and to describe this content in emotional or otherwise
mental terms.
- Music is sad.
- Music is angry.
- Music is joyous.
• Critics and philosophers have hoped to find this content by
focusing on expression rather than ‘description’ or
‘representation’.
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Class 10: Music
The Content of Musical Works (cont’d)
• But notions like ‘expression’ seem to be unclear: their use
seems to imply that the meaning of music is to be found in
a state of mind conveyed by it.
- But how is this possible, if music cannot describe things?
• Discussion of expression has become dominant in musical
aesthetics.
- However, this discussion has failed to clarify matters. To
explain the content or meaning in the language of music
requires understanding the language of music.
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Class 10: Music
‘Intentional’ Understanding
• The letter “H” is an intentional object.
• What makes us see the letter “H” as a letter, and not merely
as three lines, is something outside its material make-up. It
requires a background of theory, and its perception requires
a sort of action on the part of the seer.
• The same is true of symbols, language, and representation,
generally.
- “My dog hears the sound ‘walk’ – which for him
constitutes a signal, a trigger to excitement. But he does
not hear the word ‘walk’, since he is deaf to its character
as language.” (79)
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Class 10: Music
‘Intentional’ Understanding (cont’d)
• I may hear words I don’t understand, but insofar as I hear
them as words, I hear them as filled with semantic and
grammatical implications.
• Similarly, when I hear a tone, I hear a sound imbued with
musical implications.
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Class 10: Music
Musical Space
Tone
• A tone has both ‘vertical’ and ‘horizontal’ elements:
- The vertical is the harmonic.
- The horizontal is the melodic and rhythmic.
• Harmony: A combination of melodic lines being played
simultaneously.
• Melody: A succession of (and change of) musical events
over time, perceived as a single unit.
• Rhythm: A pattern (or patterns) of duration in music.
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Class 10: Music
Musical Space (cont’d)
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Class 10: Music
Musical Space
• A proper description of musical expression depends upon
an account of the distinction between sound and tone.
- Sound per se has duration, but not melody.
- Sound per se has repetition, but not rhythm.
- Sound per se has pitch, but not harmony.
• “Tones, unlike sounds, seem to contain movement. This
movement is exemplified in melodies, and can be traced
through a ‘musical space’, which we describe in terms of
‘high’ and ‘low’. It seems fairly clear that this description is
metaphorical.” (80)
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Class 10: Music
Musical Space (cont’d)
• Although metaphorical, our spatial language for music is
intuitive:
- Some sounds seem to fall from a great height.
- Some sounds seem to rise up.
• Some philosophers have even tried to argue that our spatial
language for music is literal, say, because the ‘height’ and
‘depth’ denote the positions of the human larynx as it
vocalizes the range of sounds.
• Further examination shows, however, that this is not the
case.
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Class 10: Music
Musical Space (cont’d)
• The color spectrum is a gradation, and exhibits
continuity.
• So is the arithmetrical continuum.
- One can always speak of greater or lesser
distance between points on a continuum.
- But neither the color spectrum nor the
arithmetrical continuum is a dimension – they do
not constitute frames within which one might
identify a given object.
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Class 10: Music
Musical Space (cont’d)
• “A dimension stands in a specific relation to the things that
it contains. For example, an object is located in space; it
occupies a certain position which might have been ocupied
by something else; it is also oriented in space Now the
place occupied by blue in the spectrum is not a ‘space’ that
might have been occupied by red, say.” (81)
Orientation
• Orientation is a topological feature of space, where an
object and its mirror image are incongruous: one cannot be
fitted into the same space as another.
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Class 10: Music
Musical Space (cont’d)
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Class 10: Music
Musical Space (cont’d)
• The ‘auditory spectrum’ might seem to be a dimension:
- Provided we can consider a chord an ‘object in auditory
space’, objects in the auditory spectrum possess
orientation.
• “[W]e hear a chord as a single musical object, but that is
the result of our musical understanding. It is not a feature of
the ‘spatial’ distribution of sounds. Hence, in order to
construe musical ‘space’ as analogous to physical space, we
have to construe it, not materially, but intentionally.” (83)
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Class 10: Music
Musical Space (cont’d)
• “It is a phenomenal fact about auditory space that it
possesses the topological feature of orientation; but it is not
a fact about sound, construed independently of the musical
experiences of which it is the (material) object.” (83)
Disanalogies With Physical Space
• Tones don’t seem to have parts: this deprives them of
orientation.
• The basic individuals in physical space obey the law that no
two individuals can occupy the same space at the same
time.
- If a violin and a flute play in unison, is the result one
individual or two?
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Class 10: Music
Musical Movement
• We regularly describe music as moving vertically and
horizonally.
• “We have no way to individuate tones expect in terms of
their uninterrupted continuity at a single pitch.” (84)
- No tone can move from one pitch to another, without
becoming another tone.
- So no individual in auditory space actually moves.
• “Hearing movement in auditory space is very different from
seeing or hearing movement in physical space. It does not
involve an act of re-identification: it does not require the
perception of the same thing at different places.” (84)
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Class 10: Music
Musical Movement (cont’d)
• Though we hear “movement” in music, this is a fact about
our experience, not about some actual movement in
auditory space.
• We might be tempted to toss aside the notion of musical
movement, but if we do so, we are left with mere sound:
the distinction between sound and music having dissolved.
- “If we take away the metaphors of movement, of space,
of chords as objects, of melodies as advancing and
retreating, as moving up and down – if we take those
metaphors away, nothing of music remains, but only
sound.” (85)
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Class 10: Music
Musical Movement (cont’d)
• “Music belongs uniquely to the intentional sphere, and not
to the material realm. Any analysis of music must be an
exercise in intentional rather than scientific understanding.”
(86)
• Terms used to describe music refer to material sounds. “But
they refer to them under a description which no material
sound can satisfy. Sounds do not move as music moves …
Nor are they organized in a spatial way … nor do they rise
and fall.” (86)
• Unlike perceiving “secondary qualities” like color, which is
a sensory capacity, depending only on the power of sensory
discrimination, perceiving music requires more.
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Class 10: Music
Musical Movement (cont’d)
• Musical qualities are closer to what are called “tertiary
qualities” like aspects, which depend upon our non-sensory
capacities to observe them.
• Pareidolia: the psychological tendency to perceive
recognizable forms, particularly human faces, in random
objects:
- The Man in the Moon
- The Virgin Mary in my grilled cheese
- Faces in car grills
- Satanic messages in records played backwards
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Class 10: Music
Musical Movement (cont’d)
• “The perception of an aspect is not, then, the acquisition of
a peculiar false belief. For this reason, it remains partly, or
perhaps wholly, within the control of the subject. He cannot
choose what to believe, but he may often choose what to
‘see’.” (87)
- Tilghman: “Seeing-As”
• Perceiving an aspect is an active kind of perception – it
involves the engagement of attention, an interest in surface.
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Class 10: Music
Rhythm
• Perceiving rhythm is more than a perception of regularity in
sound: it is a perception of a temporal ordering.
• “Our musical education leads us to hear rhythm in the click
of a train along the tracks. Indeed, we hear rhythm in all
kinds of sounds, and sometimes, by an act of will, make the
most obnoxious repetitions bearable (and in due course
unbearable) by hearing them in syncopated forms.” (89)
• Animals can hear temporal sequence, but can they hear a
bar line, an off-beat, and so on?
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Class 10: Music
Rhythm (cont’d)
• “In hearing rhythm we hear the music as active; it seems to
be doing something (namely, dancing) which no sounds can
do. When we hear a rhythm we hear sounds joining to and
diverging from each other, exerting over one another
peculiar ‘fields of force’, determining each other in a
manner familiar from our knowledge of human
movement.” (90)
• This movement, however, is more ours than the music’s – it
is subject to imaginative activities of comparison and
contrast.
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Class 10: Music
Harmony
• Harmony is differentiated from the perception of
simultaneous toes. In the first case, the tones are heard as
one thing (a “chord”) – in the second, as several.
• In the first case, no tone ‘emerges’ as the principal bearer of
musical significance, where in the second, the great
difference between the bass note and the treble note is
evident, and we perceive two musical entities acting at
once.
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Class 10: Music
Harmony (cont’d)
• In counterpoint, separate musical movements are heard as
harmonizing, but at no point does a chord occur.
• In music, sonically-identical notes will be described in
different ways, depending on their context: “In effect, we
are forced to determine the criteria of identity of chords
differently from the criteria for the identity of the sounds
that compose them.” (93)
• Notes played later in a movement will determine harmony
earlier in the movement: “[O]nly in the totality of a musical
phrase do sounds determine harmony.” (94)
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Class 10: Music
Harmony (cont’d)
• We describe harmonies in metaphorical terms: “spaced”,
“open”, “filled”, “hollow”, of “coming together” or
“moving apart”.
• “Just as melody involves the metaphorical transference of
ideas of ‘movement’, ‘space’, ‘height’ and ‘depth’, so does
harmony involve the metaphorical transference of ideas of
‘tension’, ‘relaxation’, ‘conflict’ and ‘resolution’.” (94)
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Class 10: Music
Explaining the Metaphor of Musical Experience
• We might theorize that in describing music in spatial and
temporal terms, we are projecting: “Since the movement is
not literally in the music, it must, we are inclined to think,
have been put there by the listener.” (94)
• We transfer not only qualities of movement, but emotional
qualities, too. Music is passionate, or solemn, or playful:
“We project into the music the inner life that is ours, and
that is how we hear it there. […] The emotion that is heard
belongs purely to the intentional and not to the material
realm.” (95)
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Class 10: Music
Explaining the Metaphor of Musical Experience (cont’d)
• “It has often been said that, in order to understand the
gesture, state of mind, or feeling of another, some kind of
‘empathy’ or ‘Einfühlung’ is required, whereby I
imaginatively project myself into his position and see the
world through his eyes.” (95)
• I know what your fear is like through Einfühlung – I
respond to your face and gestures, and thereby I can come
to understand your mental state: I imagine what it is like to
feel as you do.
• This same effect can occur when we watch movies, where
actors aren’t actually feeling anything.
- Consider Carroll on taking our cues from Horror characters.
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Class 10: Music
Explaining the Metaphor of Musical Experience (cont’d)
• “In certain circumstances of, observing a gesture of
expression, we have the experience of Einfühlung, of
knowing what it is like, whereby the gesture becomes, in
imagination, our own. […] It is as thought we have been
granted a first-person perspective on the world that we
know is not ours.” (98)
• We hear musical gestures as we might see a person
gesturing to an audience: “Just as we see spirit, life and
activity in gestures, so do we hear movement, life and
activity in music. And sometimes we enter into that
movement as we do into the movement of an imaginary
being.” (99) Briefly, that perspective becomes ours.
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Class 10: Music
Conclusion
• “Understanding music involves the active creation of an
intentional world, in which inert sounds are transfigured
into movements, harmonies, rhythms – metaphorical
gestures in a metaphorical space. And into these
metaphorical gestures a metaphorical soul is breathed by
the sympathetic listener. At a certain point, he has the
experience of a first-person perspective on gestures that are
no one’s.” (100).
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Class 10: Music
Questions & Problems
(1) Would we be able to recognize music in an alien
environment?
(2) Does music actually have rhythm, melody, and
harmony, or do we just imagine that it does?
(3) Does music gesture, or does the musician gesture with
the music?
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Class 10: Music
Pablo Picasso, Three Musicians
(1921)