Music Criticism in Vienna records a culture in which musical criticism had achieved the status of a minor art form. The period covered - October 1896 to December 1897 - was an eventful time in Vienna. Bruckner died, then Brahms; Mahler arrived; premieres of works by Czech composers coincided with increasing tension in the Empire between Czechs and Germans; Puccini's La Boheme reached Vienna on its sensational progress around the world; and the great programme music debate continued. (...) These events and issues were recorded and debated by some two dozen critics ranging from Eduard Hanslick, widely credited with (and blamed for) raising music criticism to an art, to Heinrich Schenker. The focus of Sandra McColl's monograph is unashamedly on the critics themselves, and her reconstruction of the climate of debate about whatever music or musicians came to their notice. She illuminates the intellectual climate in which the music was created, performed and received, and provides a foundation for the study of musical criticism in the post-Hanslick generation. (shrink)

More than a century after Guido Adler's appointment to the first chair in musicology at the University of Vienna, Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History provides a first look at the discipline in this earliest period, and at the ideological dilemmas and methodological anxieties that characterized it upon its institutionalization. Author Kevin Karnes contends that some of the most vital questions surrounding musicology's disciplinary identities today-the relationship between musicology and criticism, the role of the subject in analysis (...) and the narration of history, and the responsibilities of the scholar to the listening public-originate in these conflicted and largely forgotten beginnings. Karnes lays bare the nature of music study in the late nineteenth century through insightful readings of long-overlooked contributions by three of musicology's foremost pioneers-Adler, Eduard Hanslick, and Heinrich Schenker. Shaped as much by the skeptical pronouncements of the likes of Nietzsche and Wagner as it was by progressivist ideologies of scientific positivism, the new discipline comprised an array of oft-contested and intensely personal visions of music study, its value, and its future. Karnes introduces readers to a Hanslick who rejected the call of positivist scholarship and dedicated himself to penning an avowedly subjective history of Viennese musical life. He argues that Schenker's analytical experiments had roots in a Wagner-inspired search for a critical alternative to Adler's style-obsessed scholarship. And he illuminates Adler's determined response to Nietzsche's warnings about the vitality of artistic and cultural life in an increasingly scientific age. Through sophisticated and meticulous presentation, Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History demonstrates that the new discipline of musicology was inextricably tied in with the cultural discourse of its time. (shrink)

Aesthetics, hermeneutics, criticism -- Social Werktreue and the subjectivization of aesthetics -- From musike to metaphysics -- Formalist aesthetics and musical hermeneutics -- Deconstructing the disciplinary divide -- The question of metaphor -- Mimesis and the hermeneutics of music -- Political critique and the politics of music criticism -- Toward a hermeneutics of music criticism.

Music's status as an art form was distrusted in the context of German idealist philosophy which exerted an unparalleled influence on the entire nineteenth century. Hegel insisted that the content of a work of art should be grasped in concepts in order to establish its spiritual substantiality (Geistigkeit), and that no object, word or image could accurately represent the content and meaning of a musical work. In the mid-nineteenth century, Friedrich Theodor Vischer and other Hegelian aestheticians kept insisting on (...) art's conceptual clarity, but they adapted the aesthetic system on which this requirement had been based. Their adaptations turned out to be decisive for the development of music criticism, to such an extent that music critics used them to point out musical content and to confirm music's autonomy as an art form. This book unravels the network of music critics and philosophers, including not only Hegel but also Franz Liszt, Franz Brendel, and Eduard Hanslick, whose works shaped public opinions of music."--Publisher's description. (shrink)

Friendly Remainders draws on Adorno's concept of the negative dialectic, examining its importance in Adorno's thought and its critical application to musical forms. Moving beyond a positivist view where musical object and appreciation operate as a synthesis, the negative dialectic method focuses on divergence and dissonance in musical forms and in society. Contradictions and divergent details and concepts become "remainders," friendly because of the fresh perspective they offer on musical forms. Dineen examines these contradictory remainders in (...) subjects such as the fascist element in Wagner's character, the torpor of Schoenberg's twelve-tone method, the self-contradiction implicit in Beethoven's Late Style, Frank Zappa's attempt to define himself as a "serious" composer, the reactionary stasis in Marilyn Manson's DVD "Guns, God and Government World Tour," and the death motive in John Coltrane. Friendly Remainders takes seriously the project of making Adorno accessible, asking the same questions of classical and popular music - taking the measure of Mahler as much as Manson - for the value of the critical insights they provoke. (shrink)

Music is an activity that needs to be acted out and “doing” music is a very embodied experience. That’s why the metaphor of motion is pervasive in Western class.

By “criticism” I understand here the discussion of works of art in any and all ways that might be considered relevant to their understanding and appreciation. By “interpretation” I understand the discussion of works of art purporting to explicate their meaning. By “analysis” I understand the discussion of works of art that concentrates solely on their phenomeno-logical, syntactic and formal properties.

This paper provides a reading of the opera criticism of Bernard Williams in the light of his philosophical writings. Beginning with the observations that his philosophical writing lacks engagement with musical and aesthetic issues, and his operatic writing appears to present no particular philosophy of the subject, I try to draw together certain themes by mapping Williams's operatic concerns onto his philosophical project more generally. I argue that the 'excessive' nature of the artform—the idea that opera tends to (...) exceed its musico-dramatic functions—was of particular interest to Williams, partly because it resonated with his dislike of easy theoretical solutions to thorny practical issues. More specifically, Mozart's Cosi fan tutte is related, via the way the way its emotional register exceeds its dramatic context, to the issues examined by Williams in his work on moral luck. Similarly, I discuss the way Williams's essay on Debussy's Pelléas et Mélisande seems to hint at an account of the emotions which is otherwise missing from Williams's oeuvre. (shrink)

The absence of a clear distinction between notions of the individual and the social or general must, in fact, raise particularly strong reservations about any critical method as preoccupied as French structuralism is with comparisons between art and natural language. To be sure, this preoccupation has led to the isolation of many suggestive likenesses and differences between music and language. Among the likenesses, for example, is the assertion that both language and music constitute semiotic media within which the same techniques (...) for verifying competence and correctness of usage can be applied. Lévi-Strauss is insistent that musical as well as linguistic usage must be subject to verification through reference to some sort of "double articulation," or what will more generally be called here "dual structure," that is, through some method whereby, in effect, speakers and listeners can test each other's competence by altering the relationship between a more general and a more particularized level of a system and observing each other's responses.1 Nattiez essentially rejects this method of verifying competence, but he proposes two others which have analogues in the linguistic theory, respectively, of Zellig Harris and of Noam Chomsky ; interestingly these methods, which appear to be more "modern" than Lévi-Strauss', rely far more heavily on faith in fundamentally unexplainable judgments by single individuals, especially by individual "experts." · 1. Lévi-Strauss' somewhat obscure account of double articulation in Raw and Cooked differs from standard accounts such as André Martinet's and John Lyons' in Noam Chomsky , pp. 19-20. Lévi-Strauss appears to include both phonemes and morphemes in the code level, whereas it is more usual to oppose to the phonemic or sound level a level of meaning which is both semantic and morphemic. Rose Rosengard Subotnik is an assistant professor of music at the University of Chicago. She has written on Adorno's criticism of nineteenth-century music and is currently studying the relation between nineteenth-century German music and philosophy. She has contributed "Tonality, Autonomy, and Competence in Post-Classical Music" to Critical Inquiry. (shrink)

Musical thought in the Chinese tradition is frequently discussed in terms of the Confucian discourse on “ritual and music (lǐyuè 禮樂),” but how this Confucian discourse has been viewed by its critics has seldom been addressed. This paper aims to explore musical thought in the Zhuangzi as a serious critique of Confucian musical discourse. Zhuangzian thinkers doubt whether Confucian ritual music can avoid restricting music within a specific musical tradition, impeding the freedom to enjoy music, and (...) distorting the nature of music. Unlike Confucian discourse, which emphasizes music’s external effects, Zhuangzian musical thought ultimately leads us to focus on the essential questions: how to cultivate one’s own sensibility toward musical harmony, how to open one’s mind to comprehend different musical sources, and how to eventually reach musical Dao. (shrink)

This paper is composed of two related parts. The first raises questions regarding the characterisation of the phenomenology of music listening required by Davies’s theory of musical expressiveness, appearance emotionalism. I will identify two possible readings of the theory, a thick and a thin one, and claim that the former represents the basic characterisation of what it is to hear expressive music according to appearance emotionalism. The thick characterisation is to be preferred, I will claim, both on the grounds (...) of textual evidence and of overall consistency and explanatory power. The second part of the paper discusses a criticism of appearance emotionalism I advanced in a recently published paper, along with its consequences for aesthetic education. In the remainder of the paper, I address Davies’s twofold reply to my objection. I will contend that both replies fail to address at least some of the problems I raised. The first reply fails because of Davies’s own view of emotions, while the seconds fails if one accepts the thick characterisation of appearance emotionalism I offer in the first half of the paper. (shrink)

This article examines the role of the aesthetic in the criticism of Edward Said through a reading of two lesser-explored texts, Musical Elaborations and On Late Style. It explores how, by drawing upon ideas from Gramsci and Adorno, Said advocates a convergence of social and aesthetic approaches to musical analysis and criticism. Although critical of some of the tensions arising from Said's varying perspectives on music and society, the article suggests that we can nonetheless detect a (...) distinctive ideology of the aesthetic in Said's writings on music. It argues that Said's ideas on the temporal or narrative structure of certain musical works or performances function, within his wider thinking, as an aesthetic paradigm for undermining fixed identity and linear or totalizing narratives. Thus Said's reflections on music do not simply retreat from social and political concerns, but rather elaborate a utopian thinking regarding the interface between criticism and the aesthetic. (shrink)

Musical values -- Back to Beethoven -- A state of crisis? -- An imaginary object -- A matter of representation -- Music and the academy -- Music and gender.

In the Western classical tradition music criticism represents one of the most complex and influential forms of performance assessment and evaluation. However, in the age of peer opinion sharing and quick communication channels it is not clear what place music critics’ judgments still hold in the classical music market. This article presents expert music critics’ view on their role, function, and influence. It is based on semi-structured interviews with 14 native English- and German-speaking critics who had an average of (...) 32 years professional activity in classical music review. We present the first visual model to summarize music critics’ descriptions of their role and responsibilities, writing processes, and their influences. The model distinguishes six roles : consumer adviser, teacher, judge, writer, stakeholder, and artist advocate. It identifies core principles governing critical writing for music as well as challenges that arise from balancing the above six responsibilities whilst remaining true to an implicit code of conduct. Finally, it highlights the factors that inform critics’ writing in terms of the topics they discuss and the discursive tools they employ. We show that music critics self-identify as highly skilled mediators between artists, producers and consumers, and justify their roles as judge and teacher based on a wealth of experience as against the influx of pervasive amateur reviews. Our research approach also offers occupation-based insights into professional music review standards, including the challenges of maintaining objectivity and resisting commercial pressures. This article offers a new viewpoint on music critics’ judgments and recommendations that helps to explain their expectations and reflections. (shrink)

A musical phrase, or, for that matter, a musical unit of any size or shape, becomes an image whenever we imagine it to be invested with a content whose origins lie outside music. Such a content, according to the theory developed here, constitutes the image's conventional significance; it accounts for whatever strikes us about the image as having a common and familiar ring. That being so, the origins in question must be coincident with the fundamental ideas--the archetypes--that have (...) been traditionally represented as underlying and unifying Western culture. As the theoretical constructs they are, arehctypes are never encountered directly. It is in the form of their local variants that we make contact with the archetypes, and it is at this local level that the present book sets its sights: style, the typical or shared element in the musical imagery of a time and place, is studies as a function of Zeitgeist, the complex of beliefs, values, and ideals of a community. The approach is both thematic and historical, in keeping with a key objective of archetypal criticism. Far from repudiating the popular notion that music expresses the human emotions, this study attempts to recast emotion theory by examining musical images for kinds of behavior from which we may infer not only emotion (pathos, effectus) but also personality (ethos). Ethical and affective distinctions are very sharply drawn, in an effort to clarify and widen the vocabulary of musical commentary, as well as to provide cultural and historical backing for contents long considered the cliches of musical expression. (shrink)

"Originally published in the United States in hardcover in 2012 and in paperback in 2013 by McSweeneys, San Francisco.".

The ontology of musical works often sets the boundaries within which evaluation of musical works and performances takes place. Questions of ontology are therefore often taken to be prior to and apart from the evaluative questions considered by either performers as they present works to audiences or an audience’s critical reflection on a performance. In this paper I argue that, while the ontology of musical works may well set the boundaries of legitimate evaluation, ontological questions should not (...) be considered as prior to or apart from critical evaluation. Rather, ontological claims are a type of critical evaluation made within musical practices. I argue that philosophers of music might learn from the debate in political philosophy about the difficulty of setting the limits of public reason in a way that remains open to a plurality of legitimate evaluative perspectives. Just as pre-political or metaphysical identification of the boundaries of public reason fail to accommodate the fact of pluralism in contemporary democratic politics, so too does a metaphysical identification of the boundaries of legitimate evaluation of musical works and performances fail to accommodate the fact of pluralism in contemporary musical practices. I apply John Rawls’s formulation of political liberalism, arguing that musical ontology should be critical, not metaphysical. (shrink)

In this elegant book he develops a powerful statement of what music analysis and criticism in relation to historical understanding can be.

Originally published in 1987, this book forms a conceptual account of the relationship between music and poetry in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth ...

Musical formalism, which strictly limits the type of thing any description of the music can tell us, is ill-equipped to account for contemporary performance practice. If performative interpretations are in a position to tell us something about musical works—that is if performance is a kind of description, as Peter Kivy argues—then we have to loosen the restrictions on notions of musical relevance to make sense of performance. I argue that musical formalism, which strictly limits the type (...) of thing any description of the music can tell us, is inconsistent with Kivy's quite compelling account of performance. This shows the difficulty that actual performances pose to overly rigid conceptions of music. Daniel Barenboim unannounced performance of Wagner in Israel in 2001 shows that the problem of the boundaries of musical relevance is no mere philosophical puzzle. It is a pressing problem in the musical public sphere. (shrink)

Melopoetics, the study of the multifarious relations between music and literature, has emerged in recent years as an increasingly popular field of interdisciplinary inquiry. In this volume, noted musicologists and literary critics explore diverse topics of shared concern such as literary theory as a model for musical criticism, genre theories in literature and music, the criticism and analysis of texted music, and the role of aesthetic, historical, and cultural understanding in concepts of text/music convergence. These fourteen essays (...) - united here not by a common ideology but by common subject matter - demonstrate how musical and literary scholarship can combine forces effectively on the common ground of contemporary critical theory and interpretive practice. The concluding essay by interdisciplinary historian Hayden White locates this ambitious enterprise of contemplating 'music and text' in the larger context of intellectual history. (shrink)

This book describes various Western musical ecologies of the cosmos developed from the ancient world to the present, ecologies that seek to define the creation and preservation of the universe through musical principles. The author explores centuries of musical treatises, hymns, and Western fiction.

In this eloquent book, Daniel Barenboim draws on his profound and uniquely influential engagement with music to argue for its central importance in our everyday lives.

Why are some popular musical forms and performers universally reviled by critics and ignored by scholars-despite enjoying large-scale popularity? How has the notion of what makes "good" or "bad" music changed over the years-and what does this tell us about the writers who have assigned these tags to different musical genres? Many composers that are today part of the classical "canon" were greeted initially by bad reviews. Similarly, jazz, country, and pop musics were all once rejected as "bad" (...) by the academy that now has courses on these and many other types of music. This book addresses why this is so through a series of essays on different musical forms and performers. It looks at alternate ways of judging musical performance beyond the critical/academic nexus, and suggests new paths to follow in understanding what makes some music "popular" even if it is judged to be "bad." For anyone who has ever secretly enjoyed ABBA, Kenny G, or disco, Bad Music will be a guilty pleasure! (shrink)

With a characteristically broad and provocative treatment, Dahlhaus examines a single music-aesthetical idea from various historical and philosophical viewpoints. "Essential reading for anyone interested in the larger intellectual framework in which Romantic music found its place, a framework that to a remarkable degree has continued to shape our image of music."--Robert P. Morgan, Yale University Carl Dahlhaus (1928-1989) is the author of a highly influential body of works on the foundations of music history and aesthetics.

Addresses the ways that writers, musicians, philosophers, politicians, critics, and scholars speak of music from varying standpoints and in varying ways.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Criticism, Imagination, and the Subjectivization of AestheticsRoger W. H. SavageThe growing discontent with reductivist practices signals a new current in contemporary criticism's understanding of music, literature and art. George Levine's unease with critics who are unable or unwilling to account for their continuing preoccupation with literary texts they expose as "imperialist, sexist, homophobic and racist" illumines the contradiction fueling the reduction of aesthetics to ideology.1 Cultural studies (...) that deploy literature as evidence of the aesthetics' socio-historical substance mask literature's capacity to break open new perspectives on reality by assuming that literary works are politically complicit with the aesthetics' strategic "mystification of the status quo" (A&I, p. 3). Criticism's indifference to its philosophical presuppositions exacerbates the paradox of denouncing a body of works that constitute criticism's aesthetic and intellectual heritage. According to Mario Valdés, literary studies' coming of age mandates that criticism take account of a tradition nurtured by a succession of philosophers including Hans-Georg Gadamer and Paul Ricoeur.2 For Valdés, the post-structuralist realization that literary texts are indeterminate and inexhaustible prohibits replacing the work of art with critical commentaries on it; criticism's collective and determining role belongs to a shared community of commentary whose history and thought is a record of the changing interpretations and understandings of literary texts' meanings. [End Page 164]Valdés's claim extends to the field of contemporary music criticism, where the fashion of denouncing aesthetics as socially pernicious turns against traditional musicology's institutional authority. By demystifying absolute music (instrumental music devoid of programmatic associations), a self-proclaimed critical musicology revolts against traditional musicology's perceived political and ideological agenda. Critical musicology militates against the aesthetic conceit that absolute music transcends its social construction. Yet, by overlooking the philosophical presuppositions that set music's autonomy against practical affairs, new musicology accedes to the schema it recoils against.The tradition nurtured by Gadamer's philosophical hermeneutics and Ricoeur's hermeneutic phenomenology represents a critical current whose significance has been overshadowed by postmodernist investments in decoding music's social and political content. Gadamer's critique of the subjectivization of aesthetics and Ricoeur's meditations on the imagination's capacity for invention offer an alternativeto contemporary music criticism's reaction against the principle of music's aesthetic autonomy. Gadamer and Ricoeur question art's formal separation from reality, which belongs to the history of Kant's radical subjectivization of aesthetics. Gadamer's critique of art's aesthetic differentiation prepares the ground for revealing how socially informed analyses conform to the schema Kant initiates by divorcing judgments of taste from their surrounding cultural ethos. Gadamer argues that, by discrediting theoretical knowledge that does not rely on the methodology of the natural sciences, the transcendental function Kant ascribes to aesthetic judgment lays the foundation for differentiating between art's aesthetic constitution and a concept of truth that accommodates the standard of the natural sciences. Through reducing the "sensus communis to a subjective principle," Kant legitimates his critique of aesthetic judgments by denying taste any importanceas a mode of knowledge.3Ricoeur's hermeneutical reflections on imagination complement Gadamer's critique of a differentiating consciousness that abstracts art works from their cultural worlds. For Ricoeur, imagination is productive when the fictions that works create affect our understanding of ourselves and our world by re-describing reality. Aesthetics' alignment with ideology encounters a limit in the power works evince by unfolding different ways of seeing or hearing reality. Ricoeur's reflections on imagination stand in stark contrast to the idea that individual works represent a form of cultural capital in the struggle for social position [End Page 165] and power. Contemporary critical practices' failure to account for the philosophical separation of judgments of taste from knowledge of reality precipitates the impasse criticism encounters when it identifies aesthetics with ideology at the expense of a work's capacity to affect reality in productive ways. The dispersal and potential disappearance of music's aesthetic character into the recesses of cultural and political analysis keeps step with the conceptual narrowing imposed by a restrictive sociological critique. Demystifying music's ideological representations of gender, race and identity purges romantic... (shrink)

The present paper aims to investigate the role played by figurative language, in particular metaphor and simile, in expressing negative opinions in reviews of popular music albums. In order to explore this phenomenon at the intersection of cognitive linguistics, discourse analysis, and pragmatics, it makes use of language data gathered from selected critical reviews of music albums from a reputed English-speaking music website Pitchfork.com. More specifically, the paper analyses selected instances of negatively-laden metaphors and similes so as to demonstrate how (...) they are used to portray key objects of criticism such as music album as a whole, artists and their careers, music genre and its production, songs in the album, and their lyrics. Moreover, it analyses figurative imagery used to express negative opinions about these objects of criticism by pointing out the prominent role of personification and objectification. (shrink)

What is music, what is its value, and what does it mean? In this stimulating volume, Roger Scruton offers a comprehensive account of the nature and significance of music from the perspective of modern philosophy. The study begins with the metaphysics of sound. Scruton distinguishes sound from tone; analyzes rhythm, melody, and harmony; and explores the various dimensions of musical organization and musical meaning. Taking on various fashionable theories in the philosophy and theory of music, he presents a (...) compelling case for the moral significance of music, its place in our culture, and the need for taste and discrimination in performing and listening to it. Laying down principles for musical analysis and criticism, this bold work concludes with a theory of culture--and a devastating demolition of modern popular music. "A provocative new study."--The Guardian. (shrink)

This volume, reproducing a special issue of The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism on &"The Philosophy of Music&" (Winter 1994) with a revised introduction and two new articles, is distinguished by its breadth of content, diversity of approaches, and clarity of argument, which should make it useful for classroom teaching. The topics covered include musical representation, the expression of feeling in music, the metaphysics of operatic speech and song, musical understanding, musical composition, feminist music theory, (...) music and politics, music and racial identity, music in non-Western cultures, and the ontological implications of recording technology for rock music. The approaches used are philosophical, historical, social and political, feminist, and ethnomusicological. The book includes discussions of a great many styles and historical periods of music, from ancient Greek music and music theory to instrumental and operatic music in the Western classical tradition, Persian music, music of the Blackfoot Indians, rock and the blues, and the avant-garde compositions and performances of John Cage. The contributors, all eminent scholars in the field, are Philip Alperson, No&ël Carroll, Stephen Davies, Claire Detels, John Andrew Fisher, Lydia Goehr, Peter Kivy, Jerrold Levinson, James Manns, Bruno Nettl, Jenefer Robinson, Joel Rudinow, G&öran S&örbom, Francis Sparshott, and Kendall Walton. (shrink)

What are musical works? Are they discovered or created? Can recordings substitute faithfully for live performances? This book considers these and other intriguing questions. It first outlines the nature of musical works, their relation to performances, and their notational specification; it then considers authenticity in performance, musical traditions, and recordings. Comprehensive and original, the volume discusses many kinds of music, applying its conclusions to issues as diverse as the authentic performance movement, the cultural integrity of ethnic music, (...) and the implications of the dominance of recorded over live music. (shrink)

Excerpt from Le Gout Musical en France Tous ceux qui apprecient et aiment l'oeuvre d'un artiste appartiennent a sa famille intellectuelle en qua lite de parents pauvres. Ils sont, en quelque sorte, des reductions plus ou moins passives de la personnalite de l'auteur. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the (...) work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.". (shrink)

Fixing the meaning of complex signs -- Pre-classical sentiment -- Contradictory sentiments -- The C minor style -- Beethoven's expansion -- Romantic intensity -- Obsessions.

Guy Rohrbaugh and Allan Hazlett have provided two arguments against the thesis that musical works are types. In short, they assume that, according to our modal talk and intuitions, musical works are modally flexible entities; since types are modally inflexible entities, musical works are not types. I argue that Rohrbaugh’s and Hazlett’s arguments fail and that the type/token theorist can preserve the truth of our modal claims and intuitions even if types are modally inflexible entities. First, I (...) consider two alternatives for the type/token theorist proposed in recent literature about the topic: the created types’ solution and the created abstract objects’ solution. I argue that none of them is attractive for the type/token theorist because they do not preserve the theoretical advantages of type/token theories to explain musical works’ repeatable nature. Then, I focus on the arguments’ common premise that musical works are modally flexible entities. A deeper analysis of musical practice will show that this premise is not true: our modal claims do not imply that musical works could have had different intrinsic but, instead, extrinsic properties. Finally, I show how the nested types theory may offer a satisfactory explanation of this fact and how it captures the truth of our modal talk about musical works. (shrink)