Class 10: Music

1. Class 10: Music

2. 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.

3. 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.

4. Class 10: Music Two Objectives • To show that the proposal that musical works are not mere sound structures is deeply unsatisfactory. • To suggest a structural type that does satisfy the requirements for an adequate view of, and can be identified with, a musical work.

5. 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.

6. 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 deeply-embedded 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?

7. 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.

8. Class 10: Music Identical Sound Structures Do Not Mean Identical Works • “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) • “But distinct composers determining the same sound structure in fact inevitably produce different musical works.” (80) • “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.

9. Class 10: Music Identical Sound Structures Do Not Mean… (cont’d) • The musico-historical context of a composer P at a time t includes: • The whole of the cultural, social, and political history prior to t. • The whole of musical development up to t. • Musical styles prevalent at t. • Dominant musical influences at t. • Musical activities of P’s contemporaries at t. • P’s apparent style at t. • P’s musical repertoire at t. • P’s oeuvre at t. • Musical influences operating on P at t.

10. Class 10: Music Identical Sound Structures Do Not Mean… (cont’d) • All these factors serve to differentiate works identical in their sound structures. • 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. • 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.

11. Class 10: Music Identical Sound Structures Do Not Mean… (cont’d) • (3) Brahm’s Piano Sonata Opus 2 (1852) is strongly Liszt-influenced, but had Beethoven written it (before Liszt was born), it could hardly be Liszt-influenced. • 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. • 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.

12. 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.

13. 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.

14. 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. • 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)

15. Class 10: Music Musical Works Involve Specific Means of Performance (cont’d) • “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. • “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.

16. 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 full-range 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)

17. 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.

18. 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.

19. 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.

20. 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.

21. Class 10: Music Defining a Musical Work (cont’d) • Could we combine the (Ind) and (Cre) requirements? (MW') S/PM structure-as-indicated-in-musico-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)

22. Class 10: Music (MW') S/PM structure-as-indicated-in- musico-historical-context-C (MW) S/PM structure-as-indicated -by-X-at-t • “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 musico-historical 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).

23. Class 10: Music Conclusion • Each of the following must be distinguished: • Instances of the work, W. • Instances of the sound structure of W. • Instances of S/PM structure of W. • 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.

24. 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)

25. Class 10: Music Consequences • Composers would retain the status of creator in the strictest sense. • Musical composition would be revealed as necessarily personalized. • 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. • 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.

26. Class 10: Music Questions & Problems • Are strings of notes more like strings of numbers or strings of words? What is the difference? • Is Levinson correct that a string of notes is never created? Are strings of words never created, either?

27. Class 10: Music Roger Scruton: “Understanding Music” Thesis: Music is an intentional object, characterized by melody, rhythm, and harmony in spatial orientation and movement.

28. 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’.

29. 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.

30. 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)

31. 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.

32. 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.

33. Class 10: Music Musical Space (cont’d)

34. 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)

35. 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.

36. 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.

37. 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.

38. Class 10: Music Musical Space (cont’d)

39. 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)

40. 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?

41. 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)

42. 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)

43. 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.

44. 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

45. 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.

46. 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?

47. 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.

48. 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.

49. 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)

50. 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)