Philosophy of Music
Philosophical questions about what music is, what a musical work is, and what makes it beautiful.
Definition
The branch of aesthetics concerned with the fundamental nature of music — what a musical work is, what makes it beautiful, and how works, scores, and performances relate.
Scope
Covers the philosophy of music as pursued chiefly in the analytic tradition: the ontology of the musical work (what kind of entity it is and how it relates to its performances and scores), the nature of musical beauty and value, and the conditions of authentic performance. Overlaps with but is more abstract than the study of musical expression and meaning, treated separately.
Core questions
- What kind of entity is a musical work?
- How does a work relate to its score and its performances?
- What makes a performance authentic or faithful to a work?
- What constitutes musical beauty?
- Did the concept of the autonomous musical work have a historical origin?
Key theories
- The work-concept as historically contingent
- Goehr argued that the idea of music as a body of fixed, autonomous 'works' to be faithfully performed is a regulative concept that crystallized around 1800, not a timeless truth, reframing musical ontology as historically and culturally situated.
History
Music aesthetics developed from eighteenth- and nineteenth-century debates over beauty and expression into a rigorous analytic subfield in the late twentieth century, when philosophers such as Goodman, Kivy, and Levinson sharpened questions about the ontology and identity of musical works.
Debates
- The ontology of the musical work
- Philosophers disagree over whether a musical work is an abstract type, a created entity, a kind of action, or merely a set of performances, and over the criteria that determine a work's identity across performances and editions.
Key figures
- Peter Kivy
- Lydia Goehr
- Nelson Goodman
- Jerrold Levinson
Related topics
Seminal works
- kivy2002
- goehr2007
- hanslick1986
Frequently asked questions
- What is the ontology of a musical work?
- It is the philosophical question of what kind of thing a piece of music is — for instance an abstract structure, a created type, or a class of performances — and what determines its identity.
- Is the idea of a musical 'work' universal?
- Goehr argues it is not. The concept of an autonomous, fixed work to be performed faithfully emerged in European music around 1800 and does not fit improvisatory or many non-Western traditions.