Musical Ontology, Musical Reasons

Abstract

The results of such enquiry have the following shape: a set of properties, Σ, is posited as normative with respect to a given type, so that - here I am following Julian Dodd's way of putting the matter - 'for something to be a properly formed token' of that type, 'it must possess each member' of the relevant set of properties; '[t]o be any sort of token' of that type, even if only a 'malformed' one, 'a sound-event must possess enough of Σ's members'.5 Philosophical disagreement is, then, disagreement about what is to be included in S. Some philosophers have included only temporally ordered patterns of relations between pitched sound (a position sometimes termed 'sonicism')6; others have also included the timbrai properties of those pitched sounds ('timbrai sonicism')7; others have added the means by which such timbrai properties are produced ('instrumentalism'); while still others have added considerations concerning musico-historical context and the relations holding between that context and a given sound-event ('contextualism').8 And there are further possibilities, too. More ambitiously, although at the risk of being thought to beg the question, I have argued that no version of noncontextualism can be true. Because noncontextualism can assign no role to aesthetic reasons in the production of any sound-event, it cannot, I have suggested, distinguish between soundevents that are instances of music and sound-events that are not.