Rule and Improvisation. An Ontology of Music

Abstract

This dissertation argues (1) that musical improvisation is any performer’s real-time handling of that excess of musical properties not encoded by any set of instructions, nor foreseeable by the performer herself, that we find in any performance; (2) that, hence, every musical performance is improvisatory in a lesser or greater degree; (3) that every performance stems from a (not necessarily textual) set of instructions, as long as no musical occurrence takes place ex nihilo or in an alleged normative void; (4) that there can be no musical work detached or independent from a performance, by virtue of what I’ve called the minimum sensorial requirement; and (5) that a form of Carnapian deflationism is the best ontological strategy to address mind-dependent, cultural entities such as musical works. As a consequence of the above, (6) a musical work should be considered an unrepeatable, improvisatory and hybrid entity, a physical/normative object (understood in a deflationary, non-realist fashion), the aggregation of a set of instructions (a particular abstract artefact) and a performance (a concrete object).