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The Instrumentality of Music
Article in Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism · February 2008
DOI: 10.1111/j.1540-594X.2008.00286.x
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PHILIP ALPERSON
The Instrumentality of Music
Student: How do you count here, Maestro?
Casals: With my soul.
1
Imagine that you were fortunate enough to have
been in the sound room of the HMV recording
studio in London in the 1930s for the legendary
performances by Pablo Casals of Bach’s Suites
for Unaccompanied Cello. You look through the
soundproof glass and you see a man, transfixed,
concentrating on his music as he plays his musical
instrument. You see Pablo Casals with his cello.
What could be clearer than this? The picture of
a musician playing his or her musical instrument
seems to be at the foundation of what we mean
by the practice of music; and the idea of the musical instrument seems central to our understanding of the musical art. Of course we know that
music may also include other kinds of practices
such as dance, narration, verse, theatrical action,
surtitles, and subtitles. But it is the musician playing the musical instrument that is at the core of
practice. All other thoughts of music are parasitically or metaphorically based on this idea. If we
want to talk about the music of the birds, lovers
making beautiful music together, or the music of
the spheres, we do so with an implicit reference to
the kind of activity that Casals’s playing his cello
epitomizes.
It is hard to overestimate the importance of the
idea of the musical instrument in our appreciation
of music and our understanding of musical practice. We think of music as a performing art and,
typically, we think of the performer as performing
on a musical instrument. The notion of the musical instrument, as an object with sonic and musical
possibilities and limitations and with its own history of development, shapes our understanding of
the taxonomy and genres of music. We think, for
example, of string music, organ music, music for
winds, music for brass bands, and so on. The development of musical styles, particularly in the West,
is tied in important ways to the use of instruments.
To take a few examples and to speak in somewhat general terms, much medieval music consists
of plucked, bowed, wind, and percussion instruments; seventeenth-century baroque music shows
an increasing trend toward the use of stringed instruments; much music of late romanticism is characterized by huge instrumental resources, including large numbers of brass, reed, and percussion
sections; much twentieth- and twenty-first-century
music employs electronic instruments including
synthesizers and record turntables.
Musical instruments play a key role in our appreciation of many of the skills of music making.
When we think of a musician’s virtuosity or even of
her expressiveness or musicality, we think of these
things as specifically tied up with what she does
with the particular instrument she plays. Similarly,
we think of “instrumentation”—the branch of musical composition dealing with the use of instruments in a composition—as an art in itself. Indeed,
it might be said that musical experimentation with
timbre, coloration, and different constellations of
instrumental sound is one of the distinguishing features of modern music, certainly of music of the
romantic period. In some cases a change in the
traditional use of a single instrument can be striking, as in the case of Beethoven, who freed the
tympani from its usual role as a rhythmic accompaniment to the trumpet and instead employed it
thematically in the statement of a musical idea.
In other cases, instrumentation becomes a major
focus of attention for the whole orchestra, as in
the cases of Berlioz and Debussy, whose mastery
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 66:1 Winter 2008
c 2008 The American Society for Aesthetics
38
of instrumental orchestration and color made instrumentation a central object of aesthetic appreciation. The idea of instrumental music is so central to our way of thinking about music that when
people think of music in its purest form, they often tie the idea of absolute music (music without
extramusical connotations) to the idea of “instrumental music,” that is, music made exclusively with
instruments, excluding the human voice. Clearly,
the idea of musical instruments has great importance to our thinking about music, to ways in which
music is produced and performed, and to ways in
which we appreciate music.
In this paper, I would like to take a close philosophical look at the fundamental idea of music as
a practice involving instruments. I want, first, to
identify how we typically think about musical instruments, outlining the key features of the “commonsense” view of musical instruments. I then
want to complicate that picture in a way that I
hope is consistent with actual musical practice. I
argue that, from an ontological perspective, musical instruments are, from one point of view, necessarily embodied entities in a sense that I shall
defend. I also argue that the ontology of musical instruments must acknowledge an inescapably
immaterial aspect of musical instruments that is
usually overlooked by the commonsense view. I
argue that the commonsense view of musical instruments also overlooks the possibility that composers and audiences have their own range of musical instruments. I argue for a more robust philosophical view of musical instruments that takes
these matters into account. I conclude with a discussion of some key consequences of my view for
several important issues in the philosophy of music. I discuss what I take to be the appropriate
mode and object of attention in the appreciation
of musical performances and consider the kind of
musical ontology that this kind of attention suggests. I also discuss the idea of the instrumentality
of music itself, by which I mean both the idea of
“instrumental music” as well as the place of music
in relation to large questions of social and cultural
purposes that music might serve.
i. musical instruments
and the performer’s body
Let us stake out first what we may take to be the
commonsense view of musical instruments.
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
On the commonsense view, musical instruments
are devices that performers use to make music.
Typically, we think of instruments as discrete, selfsubsisting material objects, intentionally crafted
for the purpose of making music by performing
musicians. Stradivari made violins, violas, and cellos; luthiers make lutes and guitars; teams of craftspeople at the Steinway and Bösendorfer corporations make pianos; and so on. Musical instruments are the sorts of things one finds for sale in
music stores. Musicians take these objects and, by
holding them, hitting them, blowing through them,
plucking and scraping them, pressing on keys, and
so on, produce the sounds of music. This much
seems obvious.
But some qualifications do seem to be in order.
We have said that musical instruments are intentionally crafted for the purpose of making music.
Certainly many instruments are created with such
an intention. But do musical instruments need to
be crafted by individuals for the express purpose
of being used as a musical instrument? Some instruments that find themselves in musical practice are simply found in nature, as, for example,
the coconut and conch shells, grass reeds, stones,
and so on, that we hear in much folk music. Other
instruments are human artifacts but artifacts that
were not initially designed for use as musical instruments. Erik Satie’s ballet music, Parade, calls
for a typewriter, a steamboat whistle, a roulette
wheel, and a revolver. In such cases we would not
find an intention to make a musical instrument on
the part of an instrument maker.
Nevertheless, in such cases we can still locate a
human intention. “Natural” and “found” instruments are discovered and brought up into the artworld, so to speak, much in the way that found
objects such as driftwood and bicycle seats may
be taken up and deployed in the world of art. If
we want to insist that musical instruments require
instrument makers, what we would want to say is
that the “making” of such instruments involves the
intention to use the object as a musical instrument
and that this intention might be had by a composer
or a performer as well as by an instrument maker
in the traditional sense of that term. What counts
is that an object takes its place in the world of musical practice as something that can be used as a
musical instrument. So far so good.
We have also said that, on the commonsense view, musical instruments are discrete, selfsubsisting devices or material objects held or
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The Instrumentality of Music
manipulated by the performer to produce musical sounds. Again we may take Casals’s situation
as iconic. Casals’s cello is there for all to see in the
world of extension. He holds that instrument and
he plays it. The flautist blows across the blowhole
of the head joint of the flute which she holds. The
timpanist bangs on the drum in front of her. The
pianist pushes down on the keys and steps on the
pedals.
But, here again, some qualifications are in order. It is misleading to say simply that musical instruments are discrete, self-subsisting objects held
or manipulated by the performer. In some cases
it is hard to tell where the body ends and where
the instrument begins. Vocalists frequently speak
of their bodies, or parts of their bodies, as their
“instruments” (or their “pipes”—a play on pipes
and windpipes), and a substantial amount of instruction for singers consists in training techniques
and exercises for the control of the vocal chords,
the diaphragm, the chest, and the mouth; techniques to control breathing, manage the degree
of nasality, and alter vowel color; and methods to
develop different registers of the voice, including
the chest voice, the head voice, and falsetto. The
startlingly clear sounds produced by members of
Bulgarian women’s choirs, such as the Women’s
Choir of Sofia, involve the focused use of the neck
muscles in voice production, rather than the diaphragm, as in most professional singing in the
Western tradition.
Perhaps the most striking example of understanding the body itself as a vocal musical instrument comes in the non-Western traditions of
throat singing practiced by Inuit people of the Arctic regions of Canada, Greenland, Alaska, and
Siberia; Tibetan Buddhist monks; and the seminomadic tribes of Central Asia, especially in the
Russian republic of Tuva.
A Tuvan singer is able to achieve the remarkable feat of producing as many as four tones simultaneously, effectively singing synchronically with
himself. There are many styles of throat singing,
but the general practice is to generate a low fundamental tone (or drone) while simultaneously producing overtones—higher harmonic tones with
frequencies that are multiples of the fundamental frequency—with timbres that may resemble
the sound of a flute or a whistle. Normally, the
sound of a singing voice is a mixture of fundamentals and harmonics that we hear as a single tonal
sound where the fundamental tone identifies the
39
pitch and the harmonics contribute to the timbre
of the sound. To achieve the throat singing effect,
Tuvan throat singers master the difficult task of
constricting various parts of the vocal tract and
adjusting resonant cavities such as the mouth, sinuses, and lungs in order to tune and amplify particular harmonics so that they can be heard as discrete sounds, perceptually separable from the fundamental tone. The effect is striking.2
We find in the case of both the Tuvan throat
singer and the Western vocalist that the techniques
of controlling the body to produce musical sounds
require subtle attention and practice that go well
beyond the usual level of vocal sound production.
We can see in these vocal practices a strong analogy with the kind of effort and training that goes
into mastering a conventional musical instrument
to produce musical sounds. We are clearly warranted, then, in calling at least part of a vocalist’s
body her “instrument.”
Some performers use their bodies to create percussive effects. Bobby McFerrin, the jazz and pop
vocalist, is well known for percussing his own body,
in effect simulating the pulse that a rhythm section might otherwise provide. Tap dancers tap
with their feet. Flamenco dancers do the same
and clap their hands in often complicated, intense,
and virtuosic displays. These performers are doing more than simply making sounds in the course
of their performances. In creating these rhythms
with their bodies, they are contributing to the overall musicality of the piece by supplying rhythmic
and timbral interest as well as by accenting and
thereby bringing to attention particular melodic,
harmonic, textural, and phrasal features of the music.3
What is less often noticed is that we may extend
this insight about the embodied aspect of musical
instruments to conventionally understood musical
instruments, where the line between body and instrument also frequently blurs.
A guitarist playing in the fingerpicking style
may consider his fingernails part of the instrument,
even to the extent of fashioning his fingernails in
particular ways, painting them with Superglue, or
wearing semipermanent acrylic fingernails in order to produce particular sounds on the strings
and to facilitate playing. The tone and timbre of a
woodwind player’s sound is as much a function
of the way the player opens her throat as it is
of the physical instrument. That is why a saxophone player, for example, can pick up a range of
40
instruments with different sonic characters and,
to a great extent, still create the same identifiable, unique sound from instrument to instrument.
Similarly, having control over the lips, tongue, and
muscles of a brass or reed player’s jaw (the “embouchure”) is critically tied to the sound of the
instrument and even to the musical capabilities of
the instrument. When jazz trumpeter Chet Baker
was fourteen years old, a boy threw a stone at him,
damaging Baker’s upper left front tooth. The tooth
eventually fell out, forcing Baker to adapt his technique and play only in the middle range horn. It
was as if the change in his body cut the effective
range of his trumpet by two-thirds. Twenty-three
years later Baker had another unfortunate dental
event, which, according to legends, was the result
of either a severe beating or rotting teeth due to
heavy drug abuse. Baker was forced to wear dentures. As a result, Baker switched from trumpet
to the less physically demanding flugelhorn and
adapted his playing style further, playing less taxing solos with shorter phrases, narrower ranges,
lower dynamics, and so on.
Left-handed guitarists face their own special
challenges: if they simply turn the guitar upside
down so that their left hands pluck the strings and
their right hands make the chords on the fingerboard, they retain the strength and nimbleness of
their left hand for the picking but at the expense
of having to learn to play a guitar with a fingerboard having the treble strings on the top instead
of the bottom. Some guitarists learn to play that
way; others reverse the strings. The styles of lefthanded guitarists may vary as a result of this relationship between guitar and body.4
The relationship between the musician’s body
and the instrument is so intimate that performers go to extraordinary lengths to find and keep
the instrument that becomes one with them, an
instrument that provides, for example, the right
balance between ease and resistance to produce
the quality of tone, the tonal attack, the variability of intonation, the speed and range of vibrato,
and other aspects of musical production and expressiveness that best enable what it is that performer hopes to accomplish. We may speak of the
relationship of the “fit” between the performer’s
body and his instrument. Casals chose to play his
Goffriller cello even when offered the opportunity to obtain a Stradivarius, not only for the tone
and carrying power of the Goffriller, but also because he enjoyed managing the limitations of the
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
instrument. “I want to have to fight for my expression,” Casals said.5 All serious musical performers are sensitive to finding the musical instrument
that most closely matches their own personal and
bodily approaches to musical production. Woodwind players are notoriously fussy about the setup
of mouthpiece and reeds that suits the physical
dispositions they bring to their playing. Pianists
are fussy about the action of the keys: Vladimir
Horowitz brought his enormous nine-foot Steinway D piano from home on tour when he gave
recitals. Discovering an instrument that opens up
new musical possibilities is one of the great joys in
the life of a musical performer.
The point of all of these observations is that,
when thinking of the ontology of musical instruments, we need to keep in mind the continuity,
often the seamless continuity, between the physical instrument and the player’s bodily connection
with the instrument. Many musicians put the matter clearly when they speak of their instruments
as extensions of their bodies. The truth is that it
is difficult to say where the instrument ends and
the rest of the body begins. In this sense, musical
instruments are embodied entities.
ii. the immateriality of musical instruments
There is a more profound ontological problem
with the notion of instruments conceived simply as
material objects. This problem has been brought
to light by relatively recent developments in electronic and digital music making. Many performers nowadays play instruments whose sounds are
in large part shaped by encoded information that
reflects past or changing historical styles and traditions. A few examples will suffice.
In the 1960s the Farfisa organ company transformed the accordion by adding to the traditional
reed and bellows mechanism electronic key contacts, an internal microphone, a tone generator,
an amplifier system, and other electronic modifications. The result was an instrument that could
not only produce amplified accordion sounds but
could also simulate the familiar sounds of organs,
pianos, and wind and percussion instruments. The
theremin, the Moog synthesizer, the fuzz and wahwah pedals, the circuitry of electric guitar pickups,
and the entire development of digitized musical
instruments in the last fifty or so years, including computer-generated music and MIDI (Musical
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The Instrumentality of Music
Instrument Digital Interface) devices, with their
accompanying software programs, have had an important role to play in invoking and recasting musical sounds of the past as well as providing additional resources for musical composition and performance.6
It is important to realize again that what we
are talking about now are not material objects
construed as mere hunks of physical stuff. In the
cases mentioned above, we are speaking of objects whose creation and whose musical capabilities are infused with information and conceptual
structures that reflect the history and styles of musical sounds. That is to say, the material objects
we think of as musical instruments are culturally
freighted right from the beginning.
We did not really need the advent of electronic or digitized musical instruments to bring
this lesson home. Musical instruments have always
been created and used within the fabric of musical
history.
In some cases, technical developments for existing instruments have driven compositional practice. When, in the sixteenth century, flutes began
to be made in two or more pieces instead of a
single piece, the instrument’s intonation was dramatically improved, and when keys were added
and the cylindrical bore was changed to a conical
bore, the sound and playability of the instrument
were enhanced. These changes attracted the attention of composers such as Michel Blavet and
Johann Joachim Quantz, who then wrote concerti
and sonatas featuring the flute. As the use of these
musical instruments increased in the orchestral
repertoire, particular instruments frequently came
to be associated with various kinds of extramusical meaning. Flutes and oboes were often associated with pastoral scenes, trumpets with the hunt,
trumpets and drums with the battlefield, and so
forth. So the character, so to speak, of musical
instruments—their typical uses, the way they have
come to be played and thought of in the history
of music—is often rooted in the technical development of the physical instrument and its corresponding musical possibilities.7
Conversely, the history and traditions of musical composition may prompt the invention of new
musical instruments. When in the early 1960s Stan
Kenton was experimenting with increasing orchestral complexity in his big band jazz group, he decided that the band needed a brass sound with a
range somewhere between a low trumpet and a
41
high trombone and with an ability to cut through
the already formidable brass section for which his
band was famous. The result was the invention of
the mellophonium, an instrument that combined
the wraparound tubing of the French horn with
the front-facing, flared bell of the mellophone and
a large-diameter tubing (“bore”) and that, playing
in the alto register, bridged the space between the
saxophones and the trumpet/trombone brass section. The mellophonium had the tonal beauty of
the French horn but, with its front-facing bell and
large bore, it could cut through and soar over the
massed sound of Kenton’s band. The instrument’s
characteristics, the range of composition for which
it was especially appropriate, and, indeed, its very
existence, were the result of a felt compositional
need within a genre.8
Another way in which musical instruments
carry with them the history of their musical traditions is in their invention and use as provocative or
subversive gestures. Bob Dylan was roundly and
famously booed when he first used an electric guitar at the 1965 Newport Folk Festival, insulting
those in the audience who thought that folk music could not abide the electronically amplified instruments of the hated world of rock and roll. Or,
consider the case of Harry Partch. Partch composed for instruments of his own design that were
in counterreaction to the tradition of the twelvetone chromatic scale that is the basis of the diatonic
system upon which so much of Western music is
based. In its place Partch proposed a 43-note scale
based on a system of “just intonation,” a scale
most Western ears would hear as microtonal, if
not out of tune. He invented a number of musical instruments capable of operating in the system, including a 64-tubed bamboo marimba (the
“boo”), a 43-tone pedal-pumped reed organ (the
“chromelodeon”), a 13-glass gong assembly made
from cloud chambers bowls that had been used
to trace subatomic particles, a 72-stringed kithara
(lyre), a “harmonic canon” (a 44-stringed zither),
and an instrument he called “the spoils of war,”
composed of tuned artillery shell casings. Here we
have an example of the invention and use of musical instruments tied to the history of Western
music but with the specific intent of undermining
the harmonic system on which it is based.9
In fact, we may go further down the road of
insurgency. Neil Feather eschews terms such as
‘composer’ or “performer,’ preferring the term
‘sound mechanic.’ Feather dispenses with the
42
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
norm of scalar music altogether. He has invented
and has performed on such instruments as the
“nondo,” a large sheet of steel strung with music
wire hit with a mallet and whose pitch is infinitely
variable, and the “melocycle,” a contraption that
looks something like an exercise bicycle designed
by Rube Goldberg whose strings pass by electronic
pickups, causing the kind of Doppler effect we recognize in the falling pitch of the siren of an emergency vehicle as it speeds away.10 Perhaps at the
upper limit of musical insurgency we have some
of the music of John Cage, in which the musical
instrument, depending on your point of view, is either the entire world of ambient noise or is done
away with entirely.
As we can see, if we are to have a rich understanding of musical instruments, we cannot regard
them simply as material objects. The moment they
are musical instruments, they are musically, culturally, and conceptually situated objects. The advent
of computers and musical software simply reminds
us of this fact in a particularly vivid way.
iii. the instruments of composers
and audiences
To this point we have been concerned with the nature of instruments played by performers, and we
have seen that, contrary to the commonsense view
of the matter, performers’ instruments are not to
be thought of simply as discrete, self-subsisting
material objects external to the human body but
rather, in an important sense, as embodied entities.
We have also seen that there is an inescapably immaterial aspect to the performers’ instruments.
The modern use of computers and software
draws attention to another important ontological
feature of musical instruments that goes unnoticed
by the commonsense view. Consider for a moment
the case of traditional composed music—the familiar situation in which a composer provides a
score that is then read and performed by performing musicians for an audience. This is such a common state of affairs that we may call it the standard
presentation situation of music.
In the standard presentation situation we can
identify five poles of musical production and reception: the composer, the score, the work (presumably stipulated in large part by the score), the
performer, and the audience. Now there has been
much philosophical discussion about the ontological status of the work, its relationship to the score
and the composer, and other questions related to
this scheme.11 We can set these debates aside for
present purposes long enough to note that, as we
observed earlier, musical instruments on the commonsense view are typically associated with the
performer. It is the performer who plays the musical instrument. In the standard presentation situation the performer uses the musical instrument
to perform the composer’s work and in so doing
makes it available to the audience (see Figure 1).
But composers have their musical instruments,
too. We said earlier that orchestration—the stipulation of which instruments are used in a work and
how they are used—is an important part of the skill
set of the composer. It is less common, however,
to think of the instruments that composers use.
Again, it is interesting to start with the contemporary scene and work backwards. Consider the
many musical software programs available now,
such as Finale, Sibelius, and Band in a Box, that
enable users to compose, record, and produce music. Let me say a few things about Band in a Box,
concentrating on the compositional features of the
program. The program allows users to compose
music, with control over the usual musical variables: melody, harmony, rhythm, and tempo. The
Work
Composer
Score
Performer
Musical Instrument
Figure 1. The standard presentation situation.
Audience
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The Instrumentality of Music
program also enables the user to control for musical style; it comes loaded with a range of individual
preset styles. There is also a “style-maker” function that allows users to create and modify styles,
controlling for instrumentation, melody, harmony,
rhythm, tempo, dynamics, and expressive markings within a style. The program can produce conventional scores as well as audio files of what has
been composed.12
There are many reasons why one might chafe
at the idea that a software program could be regarded as a legitimate tool in the compositional
process. The program does not require that the
user have a deep level of music-theoretical training, for example, and it might be objected that true
musical composition requires of the composer a
sophisticated theoretical grounding in music. Alternatively, it might be objected that, with its battery of supplied styles, the program imposes constraints on the artistic freedom of the composer
to create. But these are matters of degree. Some
composers have more theoretical knowledge than
others and, as far as freedom of composition is concerned, composers have always composed against
the backdrop of a historical tradition that favors
certain genres, styles, and practices. No composer
composes ex nihilo.
It is also important to understand the range of
compositional options open even to the novice
user. There is a considerable array of rhythmic
choices, for example. Perhaps you would like to
select or adapt a drum style for a popular tune.
Are you interested in composing a jazz rhythmic
pattern to be played by the drummer with brushes
instead of sticks? You have thirty-two basic options from which to choose, each of which can be
altered for tempo and genre. You have the opportunity to control time signature, tempo, key signature, volume dynamics, and melodic, harmonic,
and rhythmic variables, including accents, phrasing marks, bar lines, and expressive directions. You
can print out complete musical scores or just lead
sheets with chord progressions to study for future
changes.
Historically, many composers have composed
at the piano, trying out various permutations of
musical phrases, sections, and so on. Band in a
Box has a computerized reharmonization option
that allows users to take a given melody and reharmonize it, that is, generate alternate supporting
harmonic accompaniments for the melodic line selected, from among hundreds of genre choices. In
one demonstration in the package, the program
43
takes a melody from the first movement of Bach’s
Brandenburg Concerto in F. The program analyzes the keys and scales implied by the melody.
The user can impose any new key (G-flat, for example) on individual bars, composites of bars, or
whole movements. The user can transpose entire
compositions in a range of genres and styles, with
a variable range of major and minor modalities.
There is even an option to determine how wild
the variations should be. So, for example, a moderately low wildness setting combined with one
of the bossa nova styles would result in a bossa
nova reharmonization of the first movement of
the Concerto with a relatively tame harmonic substructure with hip-but-not-too-far-out turnaround
chords. If you do not like the harmonies generated
by the program, you can open up the options for
each harmonic change and find dozens of other
options, sorted alphabetically by root names of
the chords or even by the program’s determination of what it calls “best to worst” choices. The
program allows you to generate styles from earnumbing Muzak-like background music to musically advanced avant-garde harmonic stylings.
Suppose you wish to compose a piece of music
within a genre or style but you have not yet settled
on a melodic subject. The program allows you to
choose the genre or style category and then have
the program generate melody options. You can,
if you like, help the program out by choosing a
specific number of bars, total duration of the composition, and so on. Or, suppose you have a candidate melody but you want to play around with
it. The program can generate improvisations and
variations on previously composed melodies. The
improvisations can be generated in any of dozens
of styles, levels of complexity, and percentages of
deviation from the original melody. You can specify whether the improvisations should start or end
on the same notes as in the original melody and
what percentage of passing tones is acceptable.
In short, the Band in a Box program invokes
many of the same compositional habits, strategies, and techniques that Mozart or Beethoven
might have used while experimenting at the piano keyboard, starting, say, with a relatively simple melody or harmonic pattern, substituting a
more exotic harmony, trying another, experimenting with the instrumentation, working from the
history of past compositional practice, and imagining new possibilities. And if you do not have
quite the auditory imagination for which Mozart
and Beethoven were famous—that is, if you
44
cannot hear complex music in your mind’s ear—all
you have to do is save what you have composed
to audio files and play them through your loudspeakers.13
Now imagine a relatively sophisticated composer who has enough mastery of the computer
program so that her levels of musical productivity
when using the program are on a par with what
she was accustomed to doing at the piano keyboard instead of the computer keyboard. Imagine a modified Turing Test in which her work with
Band in a Box is indistinguishable from her work
at the piano.14 Here again, developments in digital
computer design remind us in a vivid way of the
fact that composers throughout history have relied
upon enabling instruments in their compositional
activity.
Moreover, as with the case of musical instruments of performers, composers’ musical instruments may be understood as having physical,
ideational, and historical components. The physical keyboard of the piano displays in a visual,
spatial, and particularly graphic way the array of
sounds as heard and, in a certain sense, many important elements of Western music, from the use
of the diatonic scalar system, to justified music intonation, to the so-called horizontal temporal features of melody and rhythm, and to the so-called
vertical features of simultaneous sounds in consonance and harmony and the relationships of parts
or lines in a piece.15 The computer program does
much the same thing. The program’s design logic
and programming, combined with elements from
the history of actual human musical production
that the designers of the program have built in, is
closely analogous to the piano keyboard. Both are
compositional musical instruments.
When we think about what we have been calling
the standard presentation situation, we also realize
that audience members have their range of instruments. Anything that can be utilized to bring the
music to a listener can be regarded as a musical instrument. Radios, iPods, computers, high-fidelity
stereo systems, in-store broadcast equipment, audio and video discs, and podcasts are all devices
by means of which listeners may hear music. The
ontology and technology of musical re-production
is much discussed by philosophers. It is an interesting question what it is that is being reproduced,
whether a performance or a work or something
else. The role of producers, studio engineers, and
audio technicians and the techniques of recording processes are also of great importance. It has
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
been argued by some that certain genres of music,
such as rock, are primarily created in the studio, so
that to speak of the recording as a re-production is
somewhat misleading. The work is created in the
studio.16
Recital halls also fall into the category of instruments that bring music to listeners. Of course there
is the musically relevant matter of room acoustics. Every musician who has played in a concert
hall knows that the acoustics of halls affect not
only the sound but also the manner in which musicians play in order to accommodate the peculiarities of the acoustics of the room. The Philadelphia Orchestra is renowned for the deep silken
warmth of its string section. Lore has it that an
important factor in the development of the signature “Philadelphia sound” was the relatively dry
acoustics of the Academy of Music where the orchestra played for its first hundred years. It is said
that the acoustics of the hall required the string
players to compensate by exerting greater force
on the strings in order for their sound to project
in the hall. Conductors Leopold Stokowski and
Eugene Ormandy and generations of players developed this distinctive texture, which they were
able to create wherever they played, even in their
new home, the Kimmel Center, which has a very
bright acoustical profile.
Perhaps it is not even going too far to say that
some concert halls can be “played” in the manner
of musical instruments. Performance spaces may
not only be designed for music, or for particular
kinds of music, but they also may be tunable. In
fact most contemporary recital halls are adjustable
so that baffles, doors, risers, curtains, and other
physical paraphernalia can be moved to enhance
particular musical qualities for individual concerts
or even for individual pieces of music within a concert. The acoustics of performance spaces also frequently involve electronic amplification that can
modulate acoustic and musical variables.
Concert halls also affect the presentation of music by allowing for a public space in which music can be performed. The advent of public music
halls in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries
not only provided physical space but also helped
to establish a culture of listening in which music
was presented in a way not unlike art objects are
presented in a museum. This listening situation
brought with it certain expectations and habits,
not only about the ideal of listening to music for its
own sake, but also concerning the place of music
in society as a cultural emblem.17 The advent of
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The Instrumentality of Music
45
Work
Composer
Performer
Audience
Musical Instrument
Musical Instrument
Score
Musical Instrument
Figure 2. The standard presentation situation, version 2.
the personal iPod also fosters certain sorts of listening habits within a social space, not the least of
which is a kind of privatized musical experience
that, I think can be argued, has its own advantages, disadvantages, and peculiarities, especially
pertaining to the sociality of listening. One could
argue that, while the iPod offers attractive opportunities in terms of the ready availability of music
and the fidelity of musical sound, it is a technological and cultural development that encourages
a kind of alienation in which listeners become foreign to others in the world around them.18
Finally, I mention in passing one especially interesting musical instrument that we might think
of as a listener’s musical instrument, the Yamaha
Disklavier. The Disklavier is a regular piano, with
strings, sounding board, and the usual key and
hammer mechanism, but it has been outfitted with
an electromechanical system that can play the piano. In one sense, this is not such a new invention. Since the mid-nineteenth century we have
had player pianos that have been able to read piano rolls and play the piano without a human pianist being present. What makes the Disklavier
so interesting is its ability, by means of a software
system that plays the piano, to present “live” performances, as it were, of previous performances
by encoding in great detail performance variables
from a recording of a performance. The software
program infers from the recording at what force
the key was struck, how far down the sustain pedal
was pushed, how individual notes were weighted
in chords, and so on. So, for example, at a display in Toronto, a Disklavier was tuned to approximate the voicing of Glenn Gould’s piano. The
software was employed to encode Gould’s performance from Gould’s famous 1955 recordings of
Bach’s “Goldberg” Variations. The playerless piano then re-performed Gould’s performance. And
it doesn’t end there. A reperformance of Gould’s
original recorded performance has been recorded
onto a new CD so that it can now be re-reproduced
in your home. Gould, who was notoriously shy
about performing in public and who was famous
for his use of studio technology to edit his own
recordings, would have loved it.19
In view of what we have said to this point, it now
appears that our picture of the standard presentation situation has gotten a little more complicated
(see Figure 2). Indeed, if we hew closely to the position that anything that can be utilized to bring
the music to a listener can be regarded as a musical instrument, we may, in the case where we have
an ensemble with a conductor, think of the baton
and the orchestra as the conductor’s instruments.
So the picture gets even busier (see Figure 3).
Work
Composer
Musical Instrument
Score
Performer
Conductor
Audience
Musical Instrument
Musical Instrument
Musical Instrument
Figure 3. The standard presentation situation, version 3.
46
At this juncture, one might wonder whether this
account of musical instruments, which considerably extends the range of what might be thought
to be a musical instrument, is overly generous. In
so proliferating the number of things that might
be considered a musical instrument, have we not
multiplied entities beyond necessity? Have we arrived at the conclusion that anything could be—
or everything is—a musical instrument? Surely, it
might be thought, these would not be helpful suggestions.
Occamites need not reach for their razors.
While I have given wider latitude to the realm of
musical instruments than we find in the commonsense view, the concept of a musical instrument is
nevertheless constrained by the cultural embeddedness of musical instruments. Musical instruments are not mere artifacts. They are instruments
whose classes and subclasses are underwritten by
the actual practices of music whose intentions
and histories shape and sustain the categories.
From an ontological point of view, the concepts,
classes, and subclasses of musical instruments may
be thought of as norm kinds—classes that define
correct and incorrect examples and in which the
criteria for correctness are relativized to and established by the musical cultures in which they
arise.20 If musical practice continues to foster the
use of brass instruments including the trumpet, the
trombone, and the tuba, these categories and entities will continue to have application within the
practice.
iv. the musicality of instruments
and the instrumentality of music
Let us take a moment to gather together what I
have been saying to this point.
I have been arguing that the commonsense concept of the musical instrument is foundational to
our everyday understanding of the practice of music. In what I have called the standard presentation
situation of music, musical instruments are generally associated with performers. The idea of a
performer playing a musical instrument is iconic,
capturing the idea that music is a performing art,
and music is thought to be a performing art in
virtue of the ability of performing musicians to
play musical instruments to produce music. Furthermore, on the commonsense view, musical instruments are thought to be essentially discrete
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
and self-subsistent material objects, held or manipulated by performers, made expressly for that
purpose by instrument makers.
I have also argued that the commonsense understanding of musical instruments of performers
is naı̈ve in certain respects.
I have argued that the idea of construing
musical instruments as essentially discrete, selfsubsistent material objects held or manipulated by
performers needs to be qualified, for several reasons. Musical instruments are not objects divorced
from performers’ bodies, but rather they are intimately tied to performers’ bodies, so much so that,
in some cases, it is difficult to know where the body
ends and where the instrument begins. This means
that in some cases musical instruments must be understood in part as parts or as dispositions of the
body. Because of this intimate relation between
instrument and body, in the actual practice of music a hard and fast distinction between an external
material object and the body of the performer is
harder to maintain than the commonsense view
would lead people to think. The performer’s musical instrument is better understood as an amalgam
of material object, the performer’s body, and bodily dispositions as habituated by the developments
of various musically related skills.
Moreover, though the commonsense view has
it right that, typically, some intentionality is involved in the causal chain that brings musical instruments into being and into use, that intentionality may come not only from an instrument maker
but from a performer, a conductor or bandleader,
an acoustician, a studio technician, and ultimately,
even from an audience. I have argued that musical
instruments can only be understood with respect
to their intentional, ideational, and historical components, for example, as heuristic devices whose
conceptual apparatuses play a role in the creation
of music. I have argued that we can speak not only
of the instruments of performers but also of the instruments of composers, conductors, listeners, and
audiences.
In arguing for this enlarged conception of musical instruments, I have emphasized that we
must understand musical instruments as culturally
freighted objects, that is, as objects that arise in the
context of the history of musical practice. Just as
the invention and development of musical instruments may come as the result of needs and forces
in the history of music, so also can changes in the
technical development of instruments affect the
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The Instrumentality of Music
course of music history, musical composition, musical performance, and musical reception.
In qualifying the commonsense understanding
of musical instruments in these ways, I have sought
to show that, ontologically, musical instruments
need to be understood as musically, conceptually,
and culturally situated. Or, to put the matter more
formulaically, I wish to argue that musical instruments must be understood as instrumentalities in
the context of human affairs.
Let me now step back from the matter of musical instruments to make a few brief suggestions
about the significance of this conception of musical instruments for several issues in the philosophy
of music more generally.
It seems to me, first of all, that there are important lessons to be learned about the nature of musical performance and that a deeper conception of
what we mean by a musical instrument will help us
better understand the achievement of musicians
as performers and of music as a performing art.
In the case of the standard presentation situation,
where we think of the performer as in some sense
enabling the actualization of the composer’s work,
it is clear that the achievement of the performer
goes well beyond simply using a material instrument to render the performed work in a public
way. Of course it is true that in the standard presentation situation one does perform a work. A
central feature of musical performances in the
standard presentation situation is precisely the
performance of composers’ works, making them
audible in real time for audiences. In this context,
musical performers work not only to get the notes
right but also to present a compelling rendition of
a work and to match the performer’s natural expressiveness with the expressive possibilities offered by the work. These are the sorts of issues
that have been dealt with in the philosophical literature on interpretation and authenticity in music,
especially with respect to questions about the appropriateness and faithfulness of a performance
to the composer’s intentions, or to the score, or
to a musical genre, style, or historical period, or to
some combination of these, “covers” of previously
recorded music, and more.21
I want to suggest, however, that our understanding of the performance of musical works would
be enhanced by a greater attention to the role
that instruments play in the presentation of musical works. To appreciate the performer’s performance, I would argue, is to appreciate a particu-
47
lar kind of human achievement. As we have seen,
what the performer does is perform a work with
an instrument that is at once both recalcitrant—
insofar as it must be “mastered” so that the instrument can be utilized in the service of the production of musical works—and intimate—insofar
as musical instruments are inevitably connected
with the bodies and bodily actions of the performer. I want to suggest that the performance
of musical works is a kind of musical practice in
which the object of aesthetic appreciation is legitimately regarded as the work-in-performance.
That is, there is a kind of double consciousness of
the performance as a performance of the work as
a musical entity and of the performer’s achievement in performing the work, an experience that
may be characterized as having a certain kind of
“twofoldness.” If, for example, we are listening attentively to a performance by Alfred Brendel of
Mozart’s Sonata in F major K. 333–494 in which
Brendel conveys a shimmering, graceful, singing
quality in the Andante movement, we are, I believe, aware both of Brendel’s performance of that
movement of the work and of Brendel’s extraordinary ability to produce fluid, melodic, voicelike
music from what is, after all, a percussion instrument. To put the matter formulaically, we might
speak of a double consciousness of the performance of the work and the performance in the
work.22
Now it might be objected that, even if we grant
that this twofold kind of appreciation I describe
of performed music is possible, this account runs
afoul of the view that the primary goal of musical
performances in the standard presentation situation is precisely the performance of composers’
works, making them audible for audiences. My
view, however, is that philosophies of art must
in the end be driven by the beliefs and practices
of people within the world of the art in question.
Here I am in accord with philosophers such as Roman Ingarden, Joseph Margolis, Jerrold Levinson,
Amie L. Thomasson, and Stephen Davies, who,
in various ways, have stressed the importance of
understanding art in the context of their relevant
intentional activities and histories.23
It is my contention that the multifaceted approach to the performance of musical works I have
described is in fact in close accordance with the
way that most people listen to the performance
of musical works. It is clearly the case in works
of art whose performance is widely understood to
48
require an extraordinary level of achievement, as,
for example, in the case of the bel canto tenor aria
“Ah! mes amis” from Donizetti’s opera, La Fille
du Regiment, which requires of the singer of the
work great agility, not to mention the ability to
hit nine high Cs. Some people come to Donizetti’s
opera for the sole purpose of seeing and hearing
this showpiece—often called the Mount Everest
for tenors—performed. But I believe there is typically some consciousness of this sort of duality in
the appreciation of the performance of most musical works.
This is not to say that every listener is equally
capable of appreciating all the nuances of this kind
of double consciousness. With respect to the actual
demands placed upon musical performances, it is
possible that performing musicians are themselves
most likely to have the fullest appreciation of what
has been accomplished, since they are most familiar with the demands of the project from the inside,
so to speak. In fact, it is likely that there is a natural segregation of listeners in this regard. French
horn players are in a better position to understand
the level of achievement of French horn playing
than nonmusicians or even than musicians who
do not play the French horn. Indeed, very good
French horn players are likely to be in a better
position to understand the level of achievement
of very good French horn players than mediocre
French horn players. But that is simply a feature
of the appraisal of all human achievement. The
same would be true for the appreciation of works
in the centuries-old forms of classical Cambodian
and South Indian dance—sophisticated dance traditions requiring of their performers the mastery
of literally thousands of movements, gestures, and
positions and extraordinarily demanding control
over the entire body, including the face. We appreciate what we can, within the limits of our horizons.
Greater attention to the role of musical instruments in the performance of music also gives us
a deeper insight into performances in the musical
performance outside of the standard presentation
situation. In certain cases of musical improvisation
there is no prior existing work created by a composer. In other cases, performers improvise on a
previously composed work, but attention is traditionally directed less toward faithfulness to the
work and more toward the evident spontaneity of
the musical activity.24 In these cases, our appreciation of what has been accomplished is often tied
to the specificities of the demands of the instru-
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
ment. The jazz pianist Bill Evans, for example, is
widely admired for extending the range and complexity of harmonic texture that the piano keyboard makes possible. Maynard Ferguson was well
known for his physically demanding command of
the stratospheric range of the trumpet. Scott LaFaro, playing the upright bass more like a guitar
than a traditional time-keeping bass accompaniment, showed that it was possible for the bass to
play exceedingly lyrical and rhythmically complex
passages. Clark Burroughs, the lead singer of the
Hi-Lo’s who could hit a G above high C, and Yma
Sumac, the Peruvian soprano with a four-and-ahalf-octave range from B below C to A above high
C, are to the voice what Maynard Ferguson was
to the trumpet. In each of these cases, I believe,
listeners appreciate the human achievement with
specific regard to accomplishment in the context
of the demands of the particular instrument involved.
I would, finally, also like to suggest that the conception of musical instruments I have been advancing has implications for our understanding of
music itself as a particular human practice, or perhaps more accurately, as a set of musical practices.
Again, because of space limitations, I can only
sketch out the sort of thing I have in mind here.
I have stressed throughout that the philosophical analysis of musical instruments must, in the
end, be contextual, taking into account the entire
range of human activity involved in the production and appreciation of music, rather than focusing only on the narrower concern with the work
itself. It is in this spirit that my analysis of musical
instruments moved from thinking about musical
instruments as material objects seen as mere intermediaries between the performer and the performed work to an analysis of the ontology of musical instruments that takes into account a range
of properties of instruments that pose challenges
and demands that must be faced by performers
and that offer musical possibilities for composers,
performers, and listeners. I have argued that the
ontological characteristics of musical instruments
and the particular kind of human achievement that
the use of these instruments represents are central
to the appreciation of both works-in-performance
as well as to musical performances that do not
involve the presentation of previously composed
works. I have also argued that in understanding
these things, we need to take into account the historical and cultural forces that hold sway in the
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The Instrumentality of Music
world of music. In this way we can see that the
use of musical instruments may go so far as to call
cultural trends into question, as I believe Dylan
did in his performance at Newport in 1965.
If there are such things as natural kinds—classes
that denote naturally occurring materials or things
such as chemical elements—music, as a human
practice or as a set of practices, is not that sort
of kind. That is not to say that music is not natural
to human beings: some aspects of musical practice,
if not universal, seem to be extremely widespread
among societies worldwide. Nor is it to say that
music is divorced from the natural world. Far from
it: as I have indicated above, music is very deeply
affected by its rootedness in the material world,
especially in the case of the use and meaning of
musical instruments.
What I wish to stress rather is that music is a set
of culturally and historically situated practices of
human beings. Perhaps the most we can say about
the overall coherence of this set is that they form
something like a set of Wittgensteinian “family resemblances,” a range of activities that answers to
a myriad of human possibilities and interests. And
I believe that a deeper understanding of the nature and importance of musical instruments has
something important to tell us about this range of
practices so conceived.
In 1991 Peter Kivy posed an intriguing question
in an article entitled “Is Music an Art?”25 What
Kivy had in mind in that article was pure instrumental (or “absolute”) music. Kivy argues that instrumental music is not an art in the sense of what
we think of as the fine arts. The notion of the fine
arts, as developed in the eighteenth century, rested
on the notion of an essentially representational
practice. Vocal music—specifically the “declamatory” music of composers such as Palestrina—
made the inclusion of music in the category of the
modern system of the fine arts plausible, but instrumental music never rested comfortably under
the rubric of representation. On Kivy’s view, pure
instrumental music is closer to the idea of a decorative art, an art that presents to us pure sonic design
that we may value for its own sake. On Kivy’s view,
absolute music is “a quasi-syntactical structure of
sound understandable solely in musical terms and
having no semantic or representational content,
no meaning, making reference to nothing beyond
itself.”26
Like all of Kivy’s writing, the scholarship is erudite and the argument is provocative. I applaud
49
Kivy’s effort to shine a light on a central value
of instrumental music—the appreciation for the
formal and expressive qualities of the music itself, an aspect of music that captures the imaginations of musicians and listeners alike. As Casals
once said when rehearsing the second movement
of Mozart’s Symphony No. 39 in E-flat Major, “We
must follow the line of the music; we must find the
design.”27
But as admirable as it is to take the purely musical aspect seriously, I cannot completely agree, as I
have argued elsewhere, with Kivy’s assessment of
absolute music. I believe, first of all, that there is, in
fact, a well-established understanding of the fine
arts, with a lineage going back to Plato, according
to which the fine arts are linked to the notion of
the arts of beauty and according to which absolute music, even construed as a “decorative” art,
can be accommodated. But more fundamentally, I
believe that even with respect to so-called absolute
music, the decorative aspects of music are inseparable from the expressive dimension of music, a
view that I believe Kivy’s version of “enhanced formalism” can accommodate. There is, on my view, a
continuum of instrumental music that ranges from
an art of pure decoration with a relative paucity of
expression to instrumental music that approaches
the limit of full-blown expressive imitation. If we
admit that much, perhaps what we would want to
say is that there is not an art of instrumental music,
or even a fine art of instrumental music, but rather
various arts of instrumental music.28
I also believe that, with respect to instrumental
music, the expressive aesthetic value of music only
begins to tell us about the range of significance that
music has for human beings. We must distinguish,
first, between the aesthetic value of music that focuses on a relatively narrow range of experience
relating to sensual and structural properties—
however profound that experience might be—and
the artistic values of music, by which I mean the
larger cultural and social significance of music that
has been attributed to music from the time of the
ancient Greeks, whether in terms of the connection between music and ethos, mathematics, cosmology, religious, or social and political thought
and action.29
Or, if I may put the matter differently, if we are
to come to a fuller understanding of the significance of music, we must do this with an understanding of a second sense of the instrumentality
of music, one that is related to the instrumentality
50
of music we have been discussing in this article
to this point. We must come to understand the
instrumental value of music. The way forward, it
seems to me, is to keep in mind two important
strategies. The first is to take as our initial data
the complexity of musical practices, examining the
many functions that music does serve in the lives
of people and in the various communities in which
music is practiced. That is to say, the understanding of music must be contextualist and historical.
The second strategy is to adopt a point of view
we can call value pluralism, that is, to accept the
premise that the value of music may reside in aesthetic values, generously construed, as well as in
nonaesthetic values. In this, I think philosophers
of music have much to learn from ethnomusicologists, anthropologists, and sociologists of music.30
This is an approach that will have much to say
about matters concerning musical form, emotion
in music, musical representation, the creation of
music, and the various modes of using, appreciating, and valuing music—as well as about the nature
and role of musical instruments.
In this way I think we will be on the road to
developing a robust understanding of the full instrumentality of music.31
PHILIP ALPERSON
Department of Philosophy
Temple University
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19122
internet: alperson@temple.edu
1. David Blum, Casals and the Art of Interpretation
(University of California Press, 1977), p. vi.
2. For examples, listen to Musique Traditionnelles
d’Asie Centrale: Chants Harmoniques Touvas, Silex
Y225222, especially selections 5 (“Kargyraa”) and 20
(“Uzlyau”). In the Inuit tradition, two women stand facing
each other, generating an astonishing range of rhythmic vocal sounds that include lullabies and representations of the
wind, water, dogs, seagulls, and other natural sounds. Listen
to Katutjatut Throat Singing, Inukshuk Records, IPCD-0798.
For an example of Tuvan fusion listen to Yat-Kha’s CD, ReCover, on which the Yat-Kha Tuvan punk band performs
eerie covers of such rock classics as Iron Butterfly’s “InA-Gadda-Da-Vida” and Santana’s version of “Black Magic
Woman” (World Village, 468061).
3. For examples, see the film clips of the great Flamenco
dancer Yva Yerbabuena on www.youtube.com. Listen also
to the contributions of clapping and tapping on Paco de
Lucia’s CD Siroco (Verve, 830913-2), and, on the jazz fusion compilation FlamencoJazz (Nuba, KAR 101), listen to
Chano Domı́nguez’s versions of Thelonious Monk’s tunes,
“Well You Needn’t” and “Bemsha Swing.”
4. See John Engel, Uncommon Sounds: The Left
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
Handed Guitar Players That Changed Music. (Brussels,
Belgium: Left Field Ventures sprl, 2006).
5. Blum, Casals and the Art of Interpretation, p. 133.
6. We might also mention in this regard the relatively recent phenomenon of nonsynchronous digital distance recording sessions in which performers at one physical location can create a virtual studio session, playing
with other musicians at other physical locations in online
recording sessions by trading, performing on, and altering
MP3 files. See, for example, www.sessionplayer.com and
www.esession.com.
7. Why are there virtually no jazz harpists or jazz bagpipists? Probably because the idiomatic harmonies, rhythms,
and dynamic variations of jazz are so hard to achieve on
these instruments. Readers are invited to listen to the music of jazz harpist Park Stickney and jazz bagpipist Rufus
Harley, respectively, to determine whether these players are
exceptions to the rule. Similarly, slide trombones are very
cumbersome instruments that make rapid movement from
note to note very difficult. Frank Rosolino was one of the
very few slide trombonists who could match the dexterity of
key-based instruments such as saxophones and clarinets or
valve-based instruments such as trumpets and flugelhorns.
If you want to keep up with the horns, you’re better off with
a valve-trombone.
8. For an example of the Stan Kenton Mellophonium
Orchestra, see Kenton’s version of Leonard Bernstein’s West
Side Story, arranged by Johnny Richards, especially the
exquisite ballads, “Maria,” “Tonight,” and “Somewhere,”
Stan Kenton’s West Side Story, Capital Jazz, CDP 7243 B
2991427.
9. For examples of Partch’s music listen to The Harry
Partch Collection, Volumes 1–4, New World Records, 80621
1–4.
10. See www.neilfeather.org.
11. See, for example, Stephen Davies, Themes in the
Philosophy of Music (Oxford University Press, 2003), Part
One, pp. 11–77.
12. I thank Jay Alperson for drawing this program to
my attention.
13. The possibility that programs such as Finale,
Sibelius, and Band in a Box can make up for a lack of musical imagination and skills is a matter of growing concern to
schools of music. Gary Hagberg informs me that some music
schools now require applicants to sign a statement affirming
that they have not used these programs in preparing tapes
submitted as part of the application packet.
14. “Modified” because in the original test we have a
machine versus a human being. Here we have a human being
versus the same human being with the aid of a machine.
15. That is one reason why keyboard facility is so important for musical understanding. Woodwind, brass, and, to
a lesser extent, string players, do not enjoy this advantage.
16. See, for example, Theodore Gracyk, Rhythm and
Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock (Duke University Press, 1996)
and Andrew Kania, “Making Tracks: The Ontology of Rock
Music,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 64
(2006): 402–414.
17. See Lydia Goehr, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
18. Compare Marx: “Activity and mind, both in their
content and in their mode of existence, are social: social activity and social mind. The human essence of nature first
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The Instrumentality of Music
exists only for social man. . . . Only through the objectively
unfolded richness of man’s essential being is the richness
of subjective human sensibility (a musical ear, an eye for
beauty of form—in short, senses capable of human gratification, senses affirming themselves as essential powers of
man) either cultivated or brought into being.” Karl Marx,
Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, trans. Martin Milligan (New York: International Publishers, 1964), pp.
137–141.
19. See Edward Rothstein, “Is It Live . . . or Yamaha?
Channeling Glenn Gould,” New York Times, March 12, 2007.
20. On the concept of norm kinds, see Nicholas Wolterstorff, Works and Worlds of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1980).
21. See, for example, Stephen Davies, “Authenticity in
Musical Performance,” The British Journal of Aesthetics 27
(1987): 39–50; Stan Godlovitch, “Authentic Performance,”
The Monist 71 (1988): 258–273; Jerrold Levinson, “Authentic
Performance and Performance Means,” in Levinson, Music,
Art, & Metaphysics: Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics (Cornell University Press, 1990), pp. 393–408; and Peter Kivy,
Authenticities: Philosophical Reflections on Musical Performance (Cornell University Press, 1995).
22. The notion that an experience can have a “twofold”
dimension has been explored in other contexts. Richard
Wollheim famously discussed the idea of twofoldness in
connection with the perception of pictorial representation,
a notion that has been discussed by many others in the
field of aesthetics. See the symposium, “Wollheim on Pictorial Representation,” comprising Richard Wollheim, “On
Pictorial Representation,” Jerrold Levinson, “Wollheim on
Pictorial Representation,” and Susan L. Feagin, “Presentation and Representation,” The Journal of Aesthetics and
Art Criticism 56 (1998): 217–240. See also Kendall Walton, “Depiction, Perception, and Imagination: Responses
to Richard Wollheim,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism 60 (2002): 27–35 and Bence Nanay, “Is Twofoldness Necessary for Representational Seeing?” The British
Journal of Aesthetics 45 (2005): 248–257. In speaking of
“double-consciousness” I also mean to refer to W. E. B.
DuBois’s famous discussion of “double-consciousness” in
his trenchant analysis of the dimensions of racism, in particular his treatment of the question, “How does it feel to
be a problem?” DuBois writes, “It is a peculiar sensation,
this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at
one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s
soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his twoness,—an American, a
Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings;
two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength
alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” W. E. B. DuBois,
“Of Our Spiritual Strivings,” in The Souls of Black Folk: Essays and Sketches (New York: Bantam Classics, 1989 [1903]),
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pp. 2–3. I do not wish to press the reference to DuBois (or,
for that matter, to Hegel’s discussion of the “unhappy consciousness” in the Phenomenology of Spirit, which likely influenced DuBois) further than to call to mind the notion
that there are kinds of experience that can be characterized
as being singular but with two aspects. A detailed analysis
of the phenomenal character of the twoness of the experience of performed music is beyond the scope of the present
article.
23. See Roman Ingarden, The Ontology of the Work of
Art, trans. Raymond Meyer with Jon. T. Goldthwait (Ohio
University Press, 1989); Joseph Margolis, What, After All,
Is a Work of Art? (Penn State University Press, 1999);
Jerrold Levinson, Music, Art & Metaphysics, cited above;
Amie L. Thomasson, “The Ontology of Art,” in The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics, ed. Peter Kivy (Oxford: Blackwell,
2004), pp. 78–92 and “The Ontology of Art and Knowledge
in Aesthetics,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
63 (2005): 221–229; and Stephen Davies, The Philosophy of
Art (Malden, Ma: Blackwell, 2006).
24. See Philip Alperson, “On Musical Improvisation,”
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 43 (1984): 17–
29. For other analyses of musical performance see also Stan
Godlovich, Musical Performance: A Philosophical Study
(London: Routledge, 1998) and David Davies, Art as Performance (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2004).
25. Peter Kivy, “Is Music an Art?” The Journal of Philosophy 88 (1991): 544–554.
26. Peter Kivy, Music Alone: Philosophical Reflections
on the Purely Musical Experience (Cornell University Press,
1990), p. 202.
27. Blum, Casals and the Art of Interpretation, p. 15.
28. Philip Alperson, “The Arts of Music,” The Journal
of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 50 (1992): 217–230.
29. See Philip Alperson, “Instrumental Music and Instrumental Value,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 27 (1992):
2–10.
30. See Philip Alperson, “Value Monism, Value Pluralism, and Music Education: Sparshott as Fox,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 31 (1997): 19–30.
31. I would like to thank the faculty and students and
the participants at a seminar on aesthetics sponsored by the
Faculties of Logic and Philosophy of Science and Theory of
Literature at the Universidad Autonoma de Madrid, where
an earlier version of this essay was read. I am especially indebted to Lilian Bermejo, Noël Carroll, Jesús Vega Encabo,
Paloma Atencia Linares, Margaret Moore, Paula Olmos,
Mario Santos, and David Teira Serrano for their thoughtful questions and valuable suggestions at those meetings. I
would also like to thank Susan Feagin, Mary Hawkesworth,
and an anonymous referee for JAAC for excellent suggestions that helped me to sharpen the argument of this essay
at a number of points.