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This thesis evaluates Lydia Goehr’s claim that the musical work-concept did not regulate musical practice before the watershed date of 1800. In the first chapter, I evaluate Goehr’s arguments for this claim from historical musicology. I appeal both to recent secondary research sources in musicology, and to philosophical analysis. The second and third chapters focus on philosophical aspects of Goehr’s watershed claim. In the second chapter, I focus on understanding Goehr’s claim that a regulative shift occurred during the watershed date—that is, a change in the norms of musical practice. I argue that this shift is properly understood as a shift in unconscious, rather than conscious, concepts about musical practice. In the third chapter, I consider the ontological implications of Goehr’s view; Goehr adopts a view according to which musical works do not exist. I show that the argument for this view is unsound.

This thesis evaluates Lydia Goehr’s claim that the musical work-concept did not regulate musical practice before the watershed date of 1800. In the first chapter, I evaluate Goehr’s arguments for this claim from historical musicology. I appeal both to recent secondary research sources in musicology, and to philosophical analysis. The second and third chapters focus on philosophical aspects of Goehr’s watershed claim. In the second chapter, I focus on understanding Goehr’s claim that a regulative shift occurred during the watershed date—that is, a change in the norms of musical practice. I argue that this shift is properly understood as a shift in unconscious, rather than conscious, concepts about musical practice. In the third chapter, I consider the ontological implications of Goehr’s view; Goehr adopts a view according to which musical works do not exist. I show that the argument for this view is unsound.

This Field Study Report represents a preliminary inquiry or prolegomenon to a Philosophy of Music Education in Australia. My concern here is with the nature and function of music in Australian education, especially of young people. I am not concerned with the technical details of education and training in the musical art itself: my aim is rather to distinguish and account for public and professional attitudes towards music in Australian education, by identifying their philosophical sources and social determinants. The Introduction begins with a general historical background, including detailed references to the important developments of the past decade that have dramatically altered the role and raised public awareness of music in Australia. Chapter I, 'The Politics of Music in School and Society' argues that the philosophy of music education derives from two classical sources: Plato, the inspiration for music educators in totalitarian societies; and Aristotle, for education in the liberal democracies. A recent review (Sparshott 1980) indicates that these two philosophies are still key positions in the field. Chapter II, 'The Tradition of Music in Australian Education' shows how the philosophies of Plato and Aristotle, with Locke's utilitarianism, have influenced music education since colonial times, and how British pedagogical traditions have been modified by adaption to a new society and ethos. Chapter III, 'Music in Contemporary Australian Education' reviews recent empirical studies of the subject, showing, the persistence of traditional attitudes and basic problems. Chapter IV, 'The Right to Music: Aims and Methods' reports the empirical part of this Field Study - recorded interviews and discussions with adults and children involved in Australian music education and associated activities. These were the subject of a series of eight radio programs, first broadcast nationally by the Australian Broadcasting Commission, November 1979 to February 1980, subsequently rebroadcast twice, and now published on cassette (1981) Chapter V, 'The Right to Music : the Broadcast Series' consists of cassette recordings of the broadcast discussions, together with minimally edited transcriptions of the text. In my Conclusion, 'Philosophy of Music Education in Australia: the Three Traditions', I offer a preliminary analysis of contemporary Australian attitudes towards music in education as revealed by the broadcast discussion. I conclude that, while Australian music educators have been untrained philosophically, their attitudes (like those of society at large) towards music in education derive, in the main, from Plato, Aristotle and Locke.

Thesis (M.A.)--Memorial University of Newfoundland. / Typescript. Bibliography: leaves [88]-94. Also available online.

The Body of Music examines in what sense we can and must ascribe some sort of a body to music, which has traditionally been considered the most ideal and metaphysical of arts, and it seeks to analyze different aspects of corporeality in music. Its aim is to show that the body of music cannot be reduced to mere physical vibrations or simply to the condition sine qua non of musical experience. The body is always somehow active in music, it co-creates it, inspires it, it forms its significance or signifiance. Simultaneously it is itself transformed by music, it is played out in and through music. First, the body becomes apparent when we look at music as a process and activity rather than as a product. The body of a musician is that of a perpetual learner, it transforms itself, it is forced to think by itself and while "performing" music it has to breathe life into it, actualize it. Second, confronted with the process of learning and a musical instrument we come across the body of sound: something like the obstinacy of the material, irreducible to the intelligible strata of the musical sound. Sound is a complex phenomenon, whose material layer is itself productive of meaning. Third, there is the body of the listener, which is similar to that of the musician in that it too has to "perform", compose the music....

My project explores why it is so difficult to reconcile questions about the nature and meaning of music in philosophy with the case of Iranian classical music. This tradition is highly performative, musicians rarely use scores, and, importantly, that anyone who calls herself a musician but cannot extemporize is not really considered much of a musician in Iran at all. Yet curiously, despite the emphasis on extemporization in this tradition, there is, nonetheless, a resounding sonic familiarity among performances considered as falling in the classical genre, so much so that it seems odd to say that extemporization is the extemporization of something new. Moreover, there is very little concern with musical works, as understood in the western classical sense. My first chapter articulates the methodology I advocate. This methodology is adapted from Lydia Goehr’s The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (1992). Goehr offers a reading of the history western classical music that looks for the concepts around which its discourses center. I argue that the application of similar analysis to what scholars in other music traditions have to say about music will reveal something about the concepts around which their practices center. The emphasis is on reading the discourses of a practice for the concepts that dictate the thinking about it. This, I suggest, helps to make sense of what musicality means in the tradition in question. My central claim is that when Iranian classical music is read this way, one concept emerges as centrally significant. This concept is not of the work, but of embodied activity: a notion of doing in musical practice that relies heavily on the idea of musical dexterity in the performing moment, without this doing being oriented to the creation of something work-like. My second, third, and fourth chapters articulate and situate this reading against discussions about the ontological significance of performance in the philosophy of music. In my second chapter, I argue that the historical attention to mentally composed sound structures in Eduard Hanslick’s 1854 book, On the Musically Beautiful—a foundational text for the contemporary philosophy of music—leaves out the performing activity in musical practice. This, I suggest, is captured in the difference of approach to the musical nightingale: a metaphor that serves to illustrate musicality in the Iranian context but stands in Hanslick’s theory, for everything that music is not. In my third chapter, I offer a detailed reading of Iranian classical music to expose more fully the conceptual shape and force of the sort of embodied activity that the trope of the nightingale captures, when scholars of Iranian classical music analogize it—as they so often do—as the metaphorical aspiration of classical musicians, because it is considered the most musical being on earth in virtue of its dexterity. This, I contextualize using Polanyi’s notion of tacit knowledge (1966). In my fourth chapter, I explore the extent to which the reading I offer of Iranian classical music may be accommodated by contemporary discussions in the ontology of performance by turning to contemporary discussions that move away from addressing performances of works, but center on the significance of performative activity itself. This happens most commonly for the case of musical improvisation, after the question is introduced by Philip Alperson in “On Musical Improvisation” (1984). My claim here is that there is a crucial difference between the two cases. This difference is that embodied activity is not product-oriented in Iranian classical music practice, but rather, dexterity or technique oriented. In my final chapter, I explore how this insight can be extended more broadly into philosophical analysis, particularly in its comparative dimensions. I suggest there are implications not only for the ontology of performance, but notions of self-expression, creativity, and aesthetic attention, when they are considered in this culturally comparative light. In doing so, I hope to raise questions about the potential for doing non-reductive comparative ontology, and what can be gained, in a broad sense, from the effort of looking at artistic practice through a culturally different lens. / Philosophy

A interpretação musical, enquanto campo de pesquisa, trava ainda importantes embates em torno da epistemologia. A sua auto-compreensão alterna-se entre posturas subjetivas e normatividades estanques, deixando em estado latente os pressupostos históricos que validam as possibilidades interpretativas. Como a hermenêutica estuda as condições de validade da interpretação, propusemo-nos apresentar uma formulação da interpretação musical baseada nessa vertente filosófica tal qual é elaborada por Hans-Georg Gadamer. A consciência hermeneuticamente formada propõe uma sistematização que visa tanto à obra quanto ao intérprete, no potencial de crítica e superação dos limites normativos que a discussão de sua estrutura prévia de compreensão permite. Dois estudos de caso exemplificam o ganho interpretativo que a abordagem hermenêutica oferece: um manual técnico de Andrés Segovia e uma obra de Domenico Scarlatti, transcrita para violão por Sérgio Abreu / Performance, as research field, takes an argumentation about epistemology. Its self-comprehension changes from a subjectivity to fixed normativities, letting hidden the historic pre-supositions that makes valid the statements of validly. Since hermeneutics, in the proposition of Hans-Georg Gadamer, studies the conditions of validly of interpretation, we propose think musical interpretation based on this philosophical approach. The conscience hermeneutically formed makes systematic study of the interpreter as well as the work, in the potential critics and overwhelming of the normativity limits that the discussion about the previous structure of comprehension allows. Two cases give the examples of the interpretative gain of hermeneutic offers: a manual of technics by Andrés Segovia, and a Domenico Scarlatti\'s work transcribed for guitar by Sérgio Abreu.

A interpretação musical, enquanto campo de pesquisa, trava ainda importantes embates em torno da epistemologia. A sua auto-compreensão alterna-se entre posturas subjetivas e normatividades estanques, deixando em estado latente os pressupostos históricos que validam as possibilidades interpretativas. Como a hermenêutica estuda as condições de validade da interpretação, propusemo-nos apresentar uma formulação da interpretação musical baseada nessa vertente filosófica tal qual é elaborada por Hans-Georg Gadamer. A consciência hermeneuticamente formada propõe uma sistematização que visa tanto à obra quanto ao intérprete, no potencial de crítica e superação dos limites normativos que a discussão de sua estrutura prévia de compreensão permite. Dois estudos de caso exemplificam o ganho interpretativo que a abordagem hermenêutica oferece: um manual técnico de Andrés Segovia e uma obra de Domenico Scarlatti, transcrita para violão por Sérgio Abreu / Performance, as research field, takes an argumentation about epistemology. Its self-comprehension changes from a subjectivity to fixed normativities, letting hidden the historic pre-supositions that makes valid the statements of validly. Since hermeneutics, in the proposition of Hans-Georg Gadamer, studies the conditions of validly of interpretation, we propose think musical interpretation based on this philosophical approach. The conscience hermeneutically formed makes systematic study of the interpreter as well as the work, in the potential critics and overwhelming of the normativity limits that the discussion about the previous structure of comprehension allows. Two cases give the examples of the interpretative gain of hermeneutic offers: a manual of technics by Andrés Segovia, and a Domenico Scarlatti\'s work transcribed for guitar by Sérgio Abreu.