I read a version of this text at the conference "Making Musical Works in Early Modern Europe" (London, June 2019). My goal was to provoke rather than simply present an argument: I wanted to express frustration both at the general urge among philosophers to define things (the impulse on which ontological enquires are based), and at the urge among some historical musicologists to take those definitions too seriously. The opening of the essay is focused on some other presentations in the conference; in the second half I move on to discuss broader problems.
According to the official programme for this conference, the title of my offering is 'The Challenges of Ontology'. It’s a nice title, and in some ways it encapsulates what I’m going to say; however, it isn’t the title I submitted to the organizers of the conference. My actual title is: 'Who needs an ontology of the musical work?'
It isn’t difficult to see why this title was deemed unacceptable. As a rhetorical question, it is provocative — perhaps even glib in its implied dismissal of an entire musical-philosophical enterprise. However, my intention in posing such a question was not to undercut the value of that enterprise. Today’s discussions have been very stimulating, and many of the topics addressed, both here and in the wider literature, carry important ramifications: musical, historical, and, more broadly, cultural.
Yet, at the same time, my enthusiasm is tempered by a concern that we may be thinking about ‘musical works’ in the wrong way. For one thing, we seem to be conceiving of work-hood as something that a piece of music either does or does not have. For instance, earlier today [a participant] took issue with Lydia Goehr’s apparent contention that Bach ‘did not’ create musical works. (As it happens Goehr's argument is more nuanced than the version presented to us earlier today.) The participant claimed that in fact Bach and his contemporaries (not to mention forebears!) did, in fact, create musical works. There’s a kind of binary absolutism behind his thinking: Bach either ‘did’ or ‘did not’ create musical works. [Another participant], too — though she offered a wonderfully nuanced acknowledgment that musical ontology arises at different points in different repertoires — seemed to imply that for each of those repertoires there is a point at which ontology comes into play.
So, again, there’s this notion that musical works either ‘do’ exist in the cultural currency of a given time and place, or ‘do not’. More crucially, there is a notion that musical works either ‘are’ the kinds of entities for which an ontological account can be given, or ‘are not’.
The problem with speaking about musical works in absolute terms is that the difference between a ‘piece of music’ and ‘a musical work’ is not, in fact, absolute. In other words, it is not intrinsic to the music: not to be found in the notes themselves, but rather in the way those notes are understood within broader cultural contexts. (If you doubt this, imagine being given a page of a score, with no information about the composer, date, or any other contextual information, and having to say whether the page came from a piece of music or a musical work. You would be at a loss. And indeed your first recourse would probably be to try to figure out when and where it was written, so as to pin down its extramusical dimensions.) What this means is that when we ask ‘whether Bach composed musical works’, we’re actually asking a complex bundle of questions that have no clear answer, and which rely on our answers to a vast array of sub-questions.
Now, already, the implications of the rhetorical question in my title should be coming into focus. By asking who needs an ontology of the musical work, I am pointing towards precisely the fact that who is asking the question will, to a large extent, determine the criteria they adopt, and thus the definition that ultimately emerges. In the case of Bach, it’s worth noting that the three questions we might pose — did Bach think he was writing musical works, did his contemporaries think so, and do we think so — will all receive different answers. It may well be that Bach’s contemporaries did not think he was composing musical works, yet it seems evident that the musical culture we currently inhabit, in the 21st century, does think so. (Bach, of all composers, has over the past few centuries become such a talisman of musical genius and monumentality! For many of us, the notion that Bach didn’t compose works would seem a provocation — far more so than the rhetorical question in my title!)
One of the disagreements at play here is related to history: over time, changing notions of creativity, genius, craftsmanship — as well as repetition, aesthetic individuation, and so forth — have contributed to changing notions of the musical work. Fine. In some sense, that’s why we’re talking about the issue in the first place: because some influential thinkers have argued that things were sufficiently different ‘back then’ so as to render problematic our modern viewpoints.
I’ll return to this question of historicity in a few minutes. But first, I want to point out that the chronological divide is by no means the only one that bears upon ontological disputes. The 'who' in ‘who needs an ontology of the musical work’ might refer to any number of different people. To name a handful of examples who have a direct interest in questions surrounding the work-concept: composers, listeners (concertgoers and Spotify-streamers alike), concert organizers, philosophers of music, critics, and record company executives. All of these people bring widely divergent preoccupations and problems to their thinking about musical works, and will therefore understand the nature of those works very differently. And indeed, I didn’t even mention ‘performers’ in that list — but here, too, within a single group, coexist students, amateurs, professionals of various kinds, and teachers. We should expect to find striking variation between the ways professional performers think about musical works, and the way (say) Suzuki violin students do. Indeed, we go even further, and speculate that perhaps professional performers conceive differently of musical works when they are in the practice room vs. when they are on stage.
The reason for this is simple: each of these people will be asking ontological questions for different reasons, and thus addressing different problems. (The problems of the record company are not those of the Suzuki student, just as the problems of an orchestral violinist are not those of a concerto soloist improvising a cadenza.) And it is those problems, in all their messy practicality, that impose constraints upon the kinds of answers each of person can and will accept. The boundary between a mere ‘piece of music’ and a ‘musical work’ is, as I’ve already said, not to be found in a given collection of notes, but in the mind and mindset of the person encountering those notes.
Now, from the perspective of some analytic philosophers, this may sound dangerously relativistic — yet in practice, we’ve treated musical ontology this way for decades. To take just one example (outdated enough to be fair game, crazy enough for the error to be obvious), Nelson Goodman’s criterion of ‘complete compliance’ (in which a performance of Beethoven’s 5th with a single wrong note is actually a performance of a different work) is often ridiculed precisely because, despite its analytic rigour, it so spectacularly fails to account for either the interests of listeners or the realities of performance. It is dismissed on the grounds that nobody with actual stakes in the matter could possibly take it seriously. So, the notion that an account of the musical work should be beholden to practicalities is not new. Yet it is both striking and puzzling to me that so many discussions proceed by first attempting to pin down the necessary and sufficient conditions for workhood, and then attempting to show that they did or did not obtain at various arbitrary historical moments.
The problem with this approach, as should now be clear, is not only that it starts by chasing a chimera. Even the second question — whether musical works existed in a given time and place — is based on a misconception. This is because everything I’ve just said about the divergent interests of modern musickers today also applies to musickers of the past. Claims that Bach ‘did’ write musical works, or that musical works ‘came into existence in 1800’ are simply not meaningful, since musical works both did and did not exist before 1800.
It is certain that, to many of Bach’s contemporaries, it made no sense to think about music as anything beyond ‘mere pieces’ — but, then again, we could say the same for some of Liszt’s contemporaries, and indeed for some people today.
Conversely, it is plausible that, in the minds of other historical figures, musical works did indeed exist long before 1800. I find it difficult to imagine that music of substantial quality can ever be composed without a robust (even if tacit) notion of the musical work. My reason for thinking this is that the best composers often depart radically from mainstream contemporary standards, and it is hard to imagine that they could do so without having a sense that they were doing something fundamentally different — dare I say ‘better’, and perhaps even ‘more important’, more ‘monumental’ — than their colleagues. This is as true of Monteverdi and Buxtehude as it is of Bach and Mozart, and any other pre-1800 figure who wrote great music. These composers were not doing the bare minimum, generating workaday minuets out of simple 8-bar phrases, or crafting cantatas from prefabricated schemata: although they did use schemata and 8-bar phrases, they also pursued more idiosyncratic aesthetic goals — and they often did so with an explicit sense that the fruits of their labours would hold lasting aesthetic value. Indeed, something along these lines must have occurred to them: otherwise, there would be no reason to eschew contemporary stylistic clichés, and every reason to rely on them. (This is because, as Leonard Meyer has shown at length, each compositional decision that departs from mainstream norms slows productivity considerably.) Yet even without dwelling upon such matters, I think it’s fair to assume that all people in art-making cultures have a work-concept of some sort: a notion that some objects are uniquely worthy of attention in a way that other, even superficially similar, objects are not.
What does all of this add up to? In some sense, I have returned to the point at which I began. I stated at the outset that the question of ‘whether Bach composed musical works’ is actually a proxy for a number of other questions, foremost among them: whether Bach thought he composed musical works. (A question which, as is now clear, I would answer in the affirmative.) However — and this is where I’ll live up to the name of the panel and become properly metahistorical — there is still an unsolved problem lurking in the background: namely, should we care about ‘what Bach thought he was doing’? Actually, let me put that more generously: I find it likely that Bach thought he was composing musical works; others find it likely that he did not. The question is: do his thoughts have any bearing on the reality of whether he did, in fact, compose musical works?
I suspect that the prevailing bias in this room is that yes, Bach’s thoughts matter. Yet there are reasons for skepticism. Like us, Bach was human — and, like us, Bach could be wrong about the nature of his own actions and motivations. His interests in alchemy, his religious convictions, his knowledge of planetary orbits (all six of them!), his apparent political sentiments — these seem quaintly outmoded by modern standards. When we investigate his beliefs on these matters, we do so for historical interest rather than to settle active debates about the nature of scientific investigation or political morality. His thoughts are, in other words, ‘mere’ (and I use the term advisedly) — ‘mere’ historical curiosities. Why should his thoughts — whatever they were — about the nature of musical works, be any different?
In one sense, his intuitions on the matter could not possibly be sound, because his understanding of the import of his style was necessarily incomplete. He could not have grasped the extent of his inheritance from previous composers, nor the place of each individual work within his oeuvre, nor the nature of his stylistic overlap with contemporaries, much less the cultural-evolutionary trends that his works would inspire in the centuries that followed. It is only with considerable temporal remove that these questions can be answered in any detail — and if for that reason alone, we should be reluctant to accept an account of musical ontology that rests on historical perspectives.
Thus, to return to that glib, rhetorical question of my original title — who needs an ontology of the musical work — perhaps the only reasonable answer is that, if anyone does, we do. Whether composers of the past thought of their compositions as ‘works’, or as pieces of music, or as formulas for successful one-off performances (or indeed in other terms entirely!) doesn’t change the fact that we, asking these questions in the 21st century, need not mechanically privilege historical perspectives when formulating answers.
***
According to the official programme for this conference, the title of my offering is 'The Challenges of Ontology'. It’s a nice title, and in some ways it encapsulates what I’m going to say; however, it isn’t the title I submitted to the organizers of the conference. My actual title is: 'Who needs an ontology of the musical work?'
It isn’t difficult to see why this title was deemed unacceptable. As a rhetorical question, it is provocative — perhaps even glib in its implied dismissal of an entire musical-philosophical enterprise. However, my intention in posing such a question was not to undercut the value of that enterprise. Today’s discussions have been very stimulating, and many of the topics addressed, both here and in the wider literature, carry important ramifications: musical, historical, and, more broadly, cultural.
Yet, at the same time, my enthusiasm is tempered by a concern that we may be thinking about ‘musical works’ in the wrong way. For one thing, we seem to be conceiving of work-hood as something that a piece of music either does or does not have. For instance, earlier today [a participant] took issue with Lydia Goehr’s apparent contention that Bach ‘did not’ create musical works. (As it happens Goehr's argument is more nuanced than the version presented to us earlier today.) The participant claimed that in fact Bach and his contemporaries (not to mention forebears!) did, in fact, create musical works. There’s a kind of binary absolutism behind his thinking: Bach either ‘did’ or ‘did not’ create musical works. [Another participant], too — though she offered a wonderfully nuanced acknowledgment that musical ontology arises at different points in different repertoires — seemed to imply that for each of those repertoires there is a point at which ontology comes into play.
So, again, there’s this notion that musical works either ‘do’ exist in the cultural currency of a given time and place, or ‘do not’. More crucially, there is a notion that musical works either ‘are’ the kinds of entities for which an ontological account can be given, or ‘are not’.
The problem with speaking about musical works in absolute terms is that the difference between a ‘piece of music’ and ‘a musical work’ is not, in fact, absolute. In other words, it is not intrinsic to the music: not to be found in the notes themselves, but rather in the way those notes are understood within broader cultural contexts. (If you doubt this, imagine being given a page of a score, with no information about the composer, date, or any other contextual information, and having to say whether the page came from a piece of music or a musical work. You would be at a loss. And indeed your first recourse would probably be to try to figure out when and where it was written, so as to pin down its extramusical dimensions.) What this means is that when we ask ‘whether Bach composed musical works’, we’re actually asking a complex bundle of questions that have no clear answer, and which rely on our answers to a vast array of sub-questions.
Now, already, the implications of the rhetorical question in my title should be coming into focus. By asking who needs an ontology of the musical work, I am pointing towards precisely the fact that who is asking the question will, to a large extent, determine the criteria they adopt, and thus the definition that ultimately emerges. In the case of Bach, it’s worth noting that the three questions we might pose — did Bach think he was writing musical works, did his contemporaries think so, and do we think so — will all receive different answers. It may well be that Bach’s contemporaries did not think he was composing musical works, yet it seems evident that the musical culture we currently inhabit, in the 21st century, does think so. (Bach, of all composers, has over the past few centuries become such a talisman of musical genius and monumentality! For many of us, the notion that Bach didn’t compose works would seem a provocation — far more so than the rhetorical question in my title!)
One of the disagreements at play here is related to history: over time, changing notions of creativity, genius, craftsmanship — as well as repetition, aesthetic individuation, and so forth — have contributed to changing notions of the musical work. Fine. In some sense, that’s why we’re talking about the issue in the first place: because some influential thinkers have argued that things were sufficiently different ‘back then’ so as to render problematic our modern viewpoints.
I’ll return to this question of historicity in a few minutes. But first, I want to point out that the chronological divide is by no means the only one that bears upon ontological disputes. The 'who' in ‘who needs an ontology of the musical work’ might refer to any number of different people. To name a handful of examples who have a direct interest in questions surrounding the work-concept: composers, listeners (concertgoers and Spotify-streamers alike), concert organizers, philosophers of music, critics, and record company executives. All of these people bring widely divergent preoccupations and problems to their thinking about musical works, and will therefore understand the nature of those works very differently. And indeed, I didn’t even mention ‘performers’ in that list — but here, too, within a single group, coexist students, amateurs, professionals of various kinds, and teachers. We should expect to find striking variation between the ways professional performers think about musical works, and the way (say) Suzuki violin students do. Indeed, we go even further, and speculate that perhaps professional performers conceive differently of musical works when they are in the practice room vs. when they are on stage.
The reason for this is simple: each of these people will be asking ontological questions for different reasons, and thus addressing different problems. (The problems of the record company are not those of the Suzuki student, just as the problems of an orchestral violinist are not those of a concerto soloist improvising a cadenza.) And it is those problems, in all their messy practicality, that impose constraints upon the kinds of answers each of person can and will accept. The boundary between a mere ‘piece of music’ and a ‘musical work’ is, as I’ve already said, not to be found in a given collection of notes, but in the mind and mindset of the person encountering those notes.
Now, from the perspective of some analytic philosophers, this may sound dangerously relativistic — yet in practice, we’ve treated musical ontology this way for decades. To take just one example (outdated enough to be fair game, crazy enough for the error to be obvious), Nelson Goodman’s criterion of ‘complete compliance’ (in which a performance of Beethoven’s 5th with a single wrong note is actually a performance of a different work) is often ridiculed precisely because, despite its analytic rigour, it so spectacularly fails to account for either the interests of listeners or the realities of performance. It is dismissed on the grounds that nobody with actual stakes in the matter could possibly take it seriously. So, the notion that an account of the musical work should be beholden to practicalities is not new. Yet it is both striking and puzzling to me that so many discussions proceed by first attempting to pin down the necessary and sufficient conditions for workhood, and then attempting to show that they did or did not obtain at various arbitrary historical moments.
The problem with this approach, as should now be clear, is not only that it starts by chasing a chimera. Even the second question — whether musical works existed in a given time and place — is based on a misconception. This is because everything I’ve just said about the divergent interests of modern musickers today also applies to musickers of the past. Claims that Bach ‘did’ write musical works, or that musical works ‘came into existence in 1800’ are simply not meaningful, since musical works both did and did not exist before 1800.
It is certain that, to many of Bach’s contemporaries, it made no sense to think about music as anything beyond ‘mere pieces’ — but, then again, we could say the same for some of Liszt’s contemporaries, and indeed for some people today.
Conversely, it is plausible that, in the minds of other historical figures, musical works did indeed exist long before 1800. I find it difficult to imagine that music of substantial quality can ever be composed without a robust (even if tacit) notion of the musical work. My reason for thinking this is that the best composers often depart radically from mainstream contemporary standards, and it is hard to imagine that they could do so without having a sense that they were doing something fundamentally different — dare I say ‘better’, and perhaps even ‘more important’, more ‘monumental’ — than their colleagues. This is as true of Monteverdi and Buxtehude as it is of Bach and Mozart, and any other pre-1800 figure who wrote great music. These composers were not doing the bare minimum, generating workaday minuets out of simple 8-bar phrases, or crafting cantatas from prefabricated schemata: although they did use schemata and 8-bar phrases, they also pursued more idiosyncratic aesthetic goals — and they often did so with an explicit sense that the fruits of their labours would hold lasting aesthetic value. Indeed, something along these lines must have occurred to them: otherwise, there would be no reason to eschew contemporary stylistic clichés, and every reason to rely on them. (This is because, as Leonard Meyer has shown at length, each compositional decision that departs from mainstream norms slows productivity considerably.) Yet even without dwelling upon such matters, I think it’s fair to assume that all people in art-making cultures have a work-concept of some sort: a notion that some objects are uniquely worthy of attention in a way that other, even superficially similar, objects are not.
What does all of this add up to? In some sense, I have returned to the point at which I began. I stated at the outset that the question of ‘whether Bach composed musical works’ is actually a proxy for a number of other questions, foremost among them: whether Bach thought he composed musical works. (A question which, as is now clear, I would answer in the affirmative.) However — and this is where I’ll live up to the name of the panel and become properly metahistorical — there is still an unsolved problem lurking in the background: namely, should we care about ‘what Bach thought he was doing’? Actually, let me put that more generously: I find it likely that Bach thought he was composing musical works; others find it likely that he did not. The question is: do his thoughts have any bearing on the reality of whether he did, in fact, compose musical works?
I suspect that the prevailing bias in this room is that yes, Bach’s thoughts matter. Yet there are reasons for skepticism. Like us, Bach was human — and, like us, Bach could be wrong about the nature of his own actions and motivations. His interests in alchemy, his religious convictions, his knowledge of planetary orbits (all six of them!), his apparent political sentiments — these seem quaintly outmoded by modern standards. When we investigate his beliefs on these matters, we do so for historical interest rather than to settle active debates about the nature of scientific investigation or political morality. His thoughts are, in other words, ‘mere’ (and I use the term advisedly) — ‘mere’ historical curiosities. Why should his thoughts — whatever they were — about the nature of musical works, be any different?
In one sense, his intuitions on the matter could not possibly be sound, because his understanding of the import of his style was necessarily incomplete. He could not have grasped the extent of his inheritance from previous composers, nor the place of each individual work within his oeuvre, nor the nature of his stylistic overlap with contemporaries, much less the cultural-evolutionary trends that his works would inspire in the centuries that followed. It is only with considerable temporal remove that these questions can be answered in any detail — and if for that reason alone, we should be reluctant to accept an account of musical ontology that rests on historical perspectives.
Thus, to return to that glib, rhetorical question of my original title — who needs an ontology of the musical work — perhaps the only reasonable answer is that, if anyone does, we do. Whether composers of the past thought of their compositions as ‘works’, or as pieces of music, or as formulas for successful one-off performances (or indeed in other terms entirely!) doesn’t change the fact that we, asking these questions in the 21st century, need not mechanically privilege historical perspectives when formulating answers.
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