Abstract

In her book, Goehr defends two claims which surely generate controversy. She argues that for several reasons, no analytic method for defining musical works is viable, and no musical works existed before circa 1800. For Goehr, analysis fails in the attempt to capture the pure ontological character of musical works, to account for their mode of existence in terms of abstracta or relata, or to discover their alleged ahistorical identity conditions. The main reason most analyses fail, according to Goehr, is because the development of a coherent ontological theory is accomplished at the expense of accommodating our precritical intuitions. She argues that neither Nelson Goodman's extentionalist [[sic]] account nor Jerrold Levinson's intentionalist [[sic]] account successfully establish an equilibrium between theory and practice--between what can be logically and clearly stated about musical works and what is actually thought about them. The failure to establish such an equilibrium derives from the impossibility of analytic philosophers to offer clear grounds for resolving whether any given purported condition for the identity of a musical work marks something essential to the musical work's existence. For example, Levinson's desideratum that aesthetic qualities are essential properties of musical works is countered by Goodman's claim that aesthetic qualities merely refer to the evaluative qualities of musical works and not to the identity of musical works. Such a dispute, Goehr argues, is irresolvable.