Silent Music

In this essay, I investigate musical silence. I first discuss how to integrate the concept of silence into a general theory or definition of music. I then consider the possibility of an entirely silent musical piece. I begin with John Cage’s 4′33″, since it is the most notorious candidate for a silent piece of music, even though it is not, in fact, silent. I conclude that it is not music either, but I argue that it is a piece of non-musical sound art, rather than simply a piece of theatre, as Stephen Davies has argued. I end with consideration of several other candidates for entirely silent pieces, concluding that two of these are in fact pieces of music consisting entirely of silence

The Methodology of Musical Ontology: Descriptivism and Its Implications

I investigate the widely held view that fundamental musical ontology should be descriptivist rather than revisionary, that is, that it should describe how we think about musical works, rather than how they are independently of our thought about them. I argue that if we take descriptivism seriously then, first, we should be sceptical of art-ontological arguments that appeal to independent metaphysical respectability; and, second, we should give ‘fictionalism’ about musical works—the theory that they do not exist—more serious consideration than it is usually accorded

Memento

The sleeper hit Memento (2000), directed by Christopher Nolan, is a brilliantly structured contemporary film noir, focused through the main character, Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce), who has a debilitating memory condition. Hit on the head during a home invasion – the incident – Leonard can remember his life as an insurance-claims investigator before the incident, but he cannot form new long-term memories. Thus, every fifteen minutes or so, he becomes a partial tabula rasa afresh. The audience comes to understand this condition through Leonard\u27s recounting the story of Sammy Jankis (Stephen Tobolowsky) in order to explain his own condition to others and to himself. (Sammy, who suffers from a similar condition, was the subject of one of Leonard\u27s pre-incident investigations.) One of the main narrative drives of the movie is Leonard\u27s quest to find John G – the mysterious second assailant in the incident, who supposedly raped and murdered Leonard\u27s wife – and to exact his revenge by killing him

New Waves in Musical Ontology

Since analytic aesthetics began, around 50 years ago, music has perhaps been the art most discussed by philosophers. The reasons for philosophers\u27 attraction to music as a subject are obscure, but one element is surely that music, as a non-linguistic, non-pictorial, multiple-instance, performance art, raises at least as many questions about expression, ontology, interpretation and value as any other art—questions that often seem more puzzling than those raised by other arts

Platonism vs. Nominalism in Contemporary Musical Ontology

Ontological theories of musical works fall into two broad classes, according to whether or not they take musical works to be abstract objects of some sort. I shall use the terms \u27Platonism\u27 and \u27nominalism\u27 to refer to these two kinds of theory. In this chapter I first outline contemporary Platonism about musical works—the theory that musical works are abstract objects. I then consider reasons to be suspicious of such a view, motivating a consideration of nominalist theories of musical works. I argue for two conclusions: first, that there are no compelling reasons to be a nominalist about musical works in particular, i.e. that nominalism about musical works rests on arguments for thoroughgoing nominalism; and, second, that if Platonism fails, fictionalism about musical works is to be preferred to other nominalist ontologies of musical works. If you think in terms of realism vs. anti-realism about musical works, then one way of putting this is to say that realism about musical works stands or falls with Platonism about musical works. That\u27s because, for methodological reasons I discuss below, a theory according to which musical works are concrete objects of some sort is not a realist theory of musical works, properly understood. This chapter is thus a contribution to the debate over the fundamental ontology of works of Western classical music, broadly construed, though its conclusions could be applied to other musical (or artistic or cultural) practices that are sufficiently similar, if such there be

Introduction

To say that Memento (2000) is thought-provoking would be, at best, an understatement. One of the main reasons for this neo-noir\u27s popular success is that audiences were hooked by the very puzzles that make the film a challenging one. These puzzles occur at various levels. There is the initial question of what exactly the structure of the film is and, once this is solved, the much more difficult task of extracting the story—what actually happens in the film, and the chronological order of the fictional events—from the fragmented plot. At the same time, however, the film quite explicitly raises philosophical questions such as what makes us who we are, both at any given moment in time and across time, with an emphasis on the role of memory

The Illusion of Realism in Film

Gregory Currie, arguing against recent psychoanalytic and semiotic film theory, has defended various realist theses about film. The strongest of these is that ‘weak illusionism’—the view that the motion of film images is an illusion—is false. That is, Currie believes film images really do move. In this paper I defend the common-sense position of weak illusionism, firstly by showing that Currie underestimates the power of some arguments for it, especially one based on the mechanics of projection, and secondly by showing that film images exhibit neither garden-variety motion, nor a special response-dependent kind

All Play and No Work: An Ontology of Jazz

If we consider different Western musical traditions, such as classical, rock, and jazz, we can find the same kinds of entities employed in all three traditions. For instance, there are recognizable, reinstantiable songs in all three traditions. There are also events we would happily call live performances of those songs, as well as recordings of them. Yet it is also true that these kinds of entities are treated differently in each of these traditions. For instance, those who produce and listen to rock recordings take, for the most part, a very different attitude toward what counts as acceptable use of recording technology (for example, note correction) than those who produce and listen to classical recordings. Are classical and rock recordings thereby different kinds of things? There is no absolute answer to this question. In some contexts, it is unproblematic to refer to recordings in general, ignoring the differences between these two types. In other contexts, however, it may be confusing or even misleading to ignore such differences. One such context might be where we are trying to understand with some precision the experiences of those who listen with understanding to, say, jazz recordings. If it turns out that we cannot satisfactorily describe the experiences of a knowledgeable jazz listener without making reference to the particular ways in which jazz recordings are made (and known to be made), then that will be a reason to favor a theory that includes such distinctions

Against the Ubiquity of Fictional Narrators

In this paper I argue against the theory – popular among theorists of narrative artworks – that we must posit a fictional narrative agent in every narrative artwork in order to explain our imaginative engagement with such works. I accept that every narrative must have a narrator, but I argue that in some central literary cases the narrator is not a fictional agent, but rather the actual author of the work. My criticisms focus on the strongest argument for the ubiquity of fictional narrators, Jerrold Levinson’s ontological-gap argument. Finally, I outline an alternative “minimal theory” of narrators, and some consequences thereof

Definition

Much of the time most of us can tell whether, and which of, the sounds we are currently hearing are music. This is so whether or not what we are listening to is a familiar piece, a piece we have not heard before, or even music from a culture or tradition with which we are unfamiliar. In cases where we are unsure, or initially mistaken in our judgment, we will often change our opinion based on further information. This near-universal agreement suggests that the concept of music is one shared by different people, and has boundaries which we are implicitly aware of and which we make use of in judging whether something is music or not. The project of defining the term music is the attempt to make explicit the boundaries of this concept