On the Ontology of Music

It is generally accepted that one of the recognizable traits of a philosopher is the ability to think outside of social convention. Perhaps this propensity for abstract thought is best displayed in the debate among Nominalists and Realists in terms of musical expression. The central question in this debate is whether music is created or discovered by the author of a piece.

The general acceptance in society is that musical works are created by their authors. When Bach wrote his cello suite No. 5 in C minor most believed he was composing the work, hence why we tend to view musical artists as inspired geniuses. Among some philosophers there exists an opposing view: that musical works are discovered rather than created. Such a belief is referred to as Realism while those who believe that music is created are referred to as Nominalists. For the Nominalist then, no musical work exists beyond musical scores and performances. For the Realist, there is something beyond scores and performances in music that exists separately from tokens of the work. Here the word token is being used to describe any performance of a given work in the way that a token is any particular specimen of a particular class. Tokens of a musical are of a particular type; in the same way that there may be found many red things but there exists also redness in itself. So for music, there may be many different tokens of a given type. An example would be the different performances (or tokens) of the type “Tiny Dancer” by Elton John and the Foo Fighters.

Plato believed that objects experienced in the world were not in fact real; he believed they were copies of the perfect forms which existed, in a way, separately from our reality. In this way for Plato a chair is an inferior copy of the perfect form of a chair. This may be thought of along the same lines as what many hardcore Realists believe in terms of music; that a musical work pre-exists its composer and that it would continue to exist in some fashion even if all recordings and scores of the work were destroyed and forgotten.

To better understand this concept perhaps we need to discuss what makes a musical work. Are performances the same as the work or are they instances of the work? What makes a performance a performance of a work? Does one have to adhere perfectly to the score? Such hard-line interpretations seem to reflect a misunderstanding of the nature of musical scores; they are not clear cut instructions for playing a song but rather should be thought of in a similar fashion to a road map. A road map cannot give one a detailed explanation of their trip, only a guideline of how to arrive at one’s destination. Many Nominalists believe that there are only performances of a score, and that the score links performances of a work. This strict interpretation seems counter-intuitive however, for this would mean that a single error in performing the score would not be a performance of that work. As already mentioned this is not the manner in which musicians use a score.

For Realists, universals really do exist. They believe that any performance of a work is simply a token of a given type, and that type may be thought of in a fashion similar to Plato’s perfect forms. In this sense for Realists, a composer does not write a song; rather they discover the pre-existing type and bring it into our existence.

The ideas of the Realists do seem bizarre upon first glance. When thought of in greater detail however, one quickly realizes how difficult this debate becomes. Questions regarding the individuation of music arise, what makes the poem or song the thing that it is? Then there is the issue of numerical identity in music, when do we have one thing and when do we have more than one thing? Finally, one would assume that in order to better approach the ontology of music one would first have to tackle the nature of art works; what sort of thing is an artwork? Is a song a material object or something else?

It is interesting to note that among current philosophical circles it is the Realists who are winning the debate, although personally I do have reservations about the view. At any rate the discussion is far from being resolved and will likely continue for some time into the future.