Are musical works sound structures?

Abstract

This paper is about the dilemma raised against musical ontology by Roger Scruton, in his The Aesthetics of Music: either musical ontology is about certain mind-independent ?things? (sound structures) and so music is left out of the picture, or it is about an ?intentional object? and so its puzzles are susceptible of an arbitrary answer. I argue the dilemma is merely apparent and deny that musical works can be identified with sound structures, whether or not conceived as abstract entities. The general idea is this: both Platonism and nominalism about musical works are a kind of fetishism: musical works are not ?things?, in Danto?s sense of ?mere real things?; they rather involve complex relationships between objects, events, and different kinds of functional properties. For this, I draw on Levinson and Howell?s notion of indication, combined with Searle?s approach to institutional reality... with a little twist of my own.