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While the ontology of musical works is a venerable theme in the philosophy of music, works of classical music have been the primary focus of study. This essay displaces that focus by considering the ontology of musical works in relation to jazz ‘standards’. Responding primarily to realist conceptions of musical works for performance, the essay outlines an emergent, non-essentialist, network-based ontology of jazz standards. By focusing on two key operations—replication and nomination—a philosophical and musicological argument is presented where ‘work-determinative’ properties are shown to be sufficient but not necessary. Under this concept, works are corrigible and subject to mediation. Not only do subsequent performances change the nature of the work, the very act of ‘replication’ (or musical reproduction) requires social mediation. After presenting the argument, a series of broad contrasts are drawn between the network-based concept of musical works and the realist view.

‘Sound studies’ and ‘auditory culture’ are terms often used synonymously to designate a broad, heterogeneous, interdisciplinary field of inquiry. Yet a potential disjunction between these terms remains. Some scholars within sound studies, by turning to the ontology of sound and to the material–affective processes that lie ‘beneath representation and signification’, reject auditory cultural studies. In this essay, I consider the ‘ontological turn’ in sound studies in the work of three authors (Steve Goodman, Christoph Cox, and Greg Hainge) and offer a few arguments against it. First, I describe the Deleuzian metaphysical framework shared by all three authors, before addressing their particular arguments. Then, I consider Goodman’s vibrational ontology. While Goodman claims to overcome dualism, I argue that his theory is more rigidly dualist – and poorer at explaining the relation of cognition to affect – than the cultural and representational accounts he rejects. Next, Cox and Hainge’s aesthetic th...

This essay introduces the reader to Jean-Luc Nancy's writing on listening, by focusing on his use of two French verbs that both mean ‘to listen’, namely entendre and ecouter. By playing close attention to way that Nancy differentiates these verbs, and the historical context in which they have played a role, one discovers an entryway into Nancy's challenging thinking about sound, sense, and subjectivity. Ecouter and entendre are discussed in relation to the phenomenological theories of listening of Pierre Schaeffer. Schaeffer emphasizes entendre, which is etymologically related to word intentionality, as the privileged mode of listening to the sound object, an intentional object, whose sense is grounded on the closed reference back to the listening subject. Nancy critiques this mode of listening—and the implicit subject posited—by emphasizing ecouter, which holds open the threshold between sense and signification. Listening reveals sound as a structure of resonance—an infinite sending and resending. Nancy'...

Just over a decade ago, when I was a doctoral student in music at the University of California, Berkeley, I participated in a graduate seminar on Ludwig Wittgenstein and cultural criticism led by t...

This paper employs a Wittgensteinian framework to describe the experience of listening to the music of Mathias Spahlinger. First, a ‘skeptical puzzle’ is introduced, based on a reading of Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations. The puzzle problematizes the security of ascriptions of meaning to material practices. Then, Spahlinger's ephemere is used as a test case: it is described from a first-person perspective, compared with an account of the work given by Claus-Steffen Mahnkopf, and given as an example of an audible presentation of the ‘skeptical puzzle’. Such a presentation is marked by a phenomenon that Wittgenstein described as ‘the dawning of an aspect’. By focusing on the role of aspect perception and the problems of ascription in Spahlinger's music, it is possible to argue against Mahnkopf's criticism of Spahlinger's work, as well as understand an underlying affinity between extreme forms of repetition and perpetual transition within Spahlinger's compositional habitus.