Anyone who takes music seriously has run into questions that turn out to be stranger than they first appear:

• What exactly is a piece of music, if it’s identical to no single performance and isn’t the score on the stand?

• Where is the line between music and mere sound—and why are we so sure a ticking clock isn’t music?

• How far can a performance depart from what the composer wrote before it stops being the same piece at all?

These are philosophical questions, and philosophers have argued about them for decades. But they aren’t abstract puzzles invented in a seminar room. They come straight out of the experience of listening: every time you compare two recordings of the same work, argue about an arrangement, or feel that a technically flawless performance somehow fell flat, you are already standing inside them.

Over three Tuesday evenings this September, philosopher Phil Mack takes up three of these questions—one per night. No background in philosophy is assumed; the only prerequisites are curiosity and a love of music. Each evening pairs sixty minutes of talk with thirty minutes of open discussion.

Tuesday, September 8, 7:00 - 8:30pm

Tuesday, September 15, 7:00 - 8:30pm

Tuesday, September 23, 7:00 - 8:30pm

Individual lectures: $20 / students $10

Series of all three: $50 / students $25

Phil Mack

Phil Mack is a philosopher based in Madison. He holds a PhD in philosophy from Marquette University and has taught for over a decade at UW–Madison, Marquette, and UW–Milwaukee, earning two teaching awards along the way. Though his academic research centers on ethics and the philosophy of race, he has had an abiding interest in aesthetics and the philosophy of art for the better part of twenty years—an interest rooted in a background in music performance and art history. He now builds public philosophy programming for general audiences across the Madison area, including courses in aesthetics and the philosophy of art at Depot Hill Creative in Stoughton and Arts + Literature Laboratory in Madison. He also works with the chamber ensemble Samtalä | Musicians in Dialogue, with whom he has given a lecture on what makes music profound, and is preparing a lecture-concert that pairs philosophical questions in music with live performance. He is drawn to the questions people already argue about, and to making the philosophical stakes of those questions vivid without watering them down.

DESCRIPTIONS

Lecture 1—What Kind of Thing Is a Piece of Music?The problem of what a musical work is

We talk about a symphony as though it were a thing in the world—we say we “heard” Beethoven’s Fifth, that the “same” piece was played in Vienna two centuries ago and in Madison last year. But what kind of thing is that piece, and where does it live? It isn’t the score: burn every copy and the music survives in memory. It isn’t any single performance: there are thousands, and we call them all performances of one thing. It isn’t the recording, which is a recording of something. So, what is that something?

This evening walks through three answers philosophers have defended, each stranger and harder to dismiss than it first sounds: that a musical work is an eternal object the composer discovers rather than invents; that there is no such object at all, only the performances themselves; and that the work is something a composer brings into being at a single moment, the way a recipe enters the world when someone first writes it down. Then the harder cases: Does a jazz standard work this way? Does a rock record? Does music even hold still long enough to be one kind of thing? A chamber music audience has lived with this puzzle for years without naming it. Tonight we name it.

Lecture 2—What Counts as Music?The problem of musical definition

 Everyone knows what music is—until they try to say what makes it music rather than speech, or noise, or birdsong. “Organized sound” is the textbook answer, but it’s hopeless: a car alarm is organized sound. Add a requirement—that music have melody, or rhythm, or pitch—and avant-garde composers have already written pieces that deliberately have none of these, and dared us to say they aren’t music. Require instead that music be made to move us, and you’ve just excluded scale practice, lullabies, and the background music in elevators and grocery stores.

This evening tests our confidence in real time. We’ll listen to a series of brief excerpts—a Mozart sonata, a drum circle, whale song, a wind chime, John Cage’s famous “silent” piece—and after each one ask the same question: is this music? The line gets harder to draw with every step. Along the way we’ll find that our fiercest judgments about what “isn’t really music” are often judgments about what isn’t good music in disguise—and that catching ourselves in that slip is where things get interesting. The evening closes on an unsettling possibility: that music may be the kind of thing no definition can ever quite pin down.

Lecture 3—When Is It Still the Same Piece?The problem of musical identity and authentic performance

One wrong note doesn’t turn Beethoven’s Fifth into a different piece. A thousand wrong notes might. No one can say exactly where the line falls—and that small puzzle opens onto one of the deepest questions about performance: what holds a musical work and its performances together at all?

A performance can stray from the work in three different ways, and this evening takes up each. It can stray in execution—the wrong notes—and we’ll see why no one has drawn a clean line between a flawed performance of a piece and a performance of some other piece entirely. It can stray in means: play Bach’s harpsichord music on a modern piano, every note in its place. You’ve changed the instrument without changing a single pitch—so have you changed the piece? And it can stray in interpretation when a performer defies the marked tempo because the music, as she hears it, asks for something else. That last kind turns the whole question around. The first two treat departing from the score as a problem to be managed; the third suggests that some departure isn’t just allowed but required—that being faithful to the music can mean being unfaithful to the page. Every performer in the room has stood in that tension. This evening gives it a name and a shape.

Image: 17th Century Andreas Cellarius Celestial Chart of Ptolemy’s Geocentric Model – Stunning Baroque Astronomical Diagram Depicting Ptolemaic Orbits Spheres and Constellations from the Iconic Harmonia Macrocosmica Celestial Atlas