The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"Despite anticipations in Nietzsche, the idea of an open concept—often also referred to as an open-textured concept—was first explicitly used by Friedrich Waismann in his essay on the verifiability of empirical statements. Waismann's account is reminiscent of Wittgenstein's remarks on unbounded concepts and family resemblances, and is well, if not exhaustively, understood in the light of these. Concepts of democracy, justice, and art, as well as of music and musical work, are examples to keep in mind as we proceed with the more general discussion."105 105 Cf. Nietzsche: ‘As for the other element in punishment, the fluid element, its “meaning” in a very late condition of culture . . . the concept “punishment” possesses in fact not one meaning but a whole synthesis of “meanings”: the previous history of punishment in general, the history of its employment for the most various purposes, finally crystallizes into a kind of unity that is hard to disentangle, hard to analyze and, as must be emphasized especially, total indefinable. (Today it is impossible to say for certain why people are really punished: all concepts in which an entire process is semiotically concentrated elude definition; only that which has no history is definable.)’ (Basic Writings of Nietzsche, tr. and ed. W. Kaufmann (New York, 1968), ‘On the Genealogy of Morals’, Second Essay, § 13, 515–16.) Waismann, ‘Verifiability’, Aristotelian Society Proceedings, supp. vol. 19 (1945), 119–50; Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, tr. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford, 1958), §§ 67 ff. Since the 1940s, the idea of an open concept has been employed widely in aesthetics, ethics, and the philosophies of science and law. See M. Weitz, ‘The Role of Theory in Aesthetics’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 15 (1956), 27–35; M. Mandelbaum, ‘Family Resemblances and Generalizations Concerning the Arts’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 2 (1965), 219–28; W. B. Gallie, Philosophy and the Historical Understanding (London, 1964), ch. 8; T. J. Diffey, ‘Essentialism and the Definition of "Art" ”, British Journal of Aesthetics, 13 (1973), 103–20; H. L. A. Hart, ‘The Ascription of Responsibility and Rights’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 49 (1948–9), 179–94. |
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The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music (1992, Clarendon Press, Oxford) is a book by Lydia Goehr.
Blurb:
"What is the difference between a performance of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony and the symphony itself? What does it mean for musicians to be faithful to the works they perform? To answer such questions, Lydia Goehr combines philosophical and historical methods of enquiry. Finding Anglo-American philosophy inadequate for the task, she shows that a historical perspective is indispensable to a full understanding of musical ontology. Goehr examines the concepts and assumptions behind the practice of classical music in the nineteenth century and demonstrates how different they were from those of previous centuries. She rejects the finding that the concept of a musical work emerged in the sixteenth century, placing its emergence instead around 1800. She describes how the concept of a work then came to define the norms, expectations, and behaviour that we now associate with classical music. Out of the historical thesis Goehr draws philosophical conclusions about the normative functions of concepts and ideals. She also addresses current debates amongst conductors, early-music performers, and avant-gardists."
See also
When we reflect on such a sentence as 'The meaning of a statement is the method of its verification', we should, first of all, be quite clear as to what we mean by the term 'method of verification'. From a logical point of view we are not interested in the various activities that are involved in verifying a statement. What, then, is it we have in mind when we talk of such things? Take an example. Suppose there is a metal ball in front of me, and I have the task of finding out whether the ball is charged with electricity. To do that I connect the ball with an electroscope and watch whether the gold leaves diverge. The statement 'The gold leaves of the instrument diverge' (s) describes the verification of the statement 'The ball is charged' (p). Now what exactly am I doing when I describe the verification of the statement p? I establish a connection between two statements by declaring that the one (s) is to follow from the other (p). In other words, I lay down a rule of inference which allows me to pass from the statement 'The ball is charged with electricity' to another that describes an observable situation. By doing this I connect the statement with another one, I make it part of a system of operations, I incorporate it into language, in short, I determine the way it is to be used. In this sense giving the verification of a statement is an important part of giving its use, or to put it differently, explaining its verification is a contribution, to its grammar.
