Philosophy of Music: An Introduction

Abstract

Philosophy of Music: An Introduction. By ROBERTA. SHARPE. Acumen Press. 2004. pp. 196. £40.00 (hbk); £14.99 (pbk). DESPITE the similarity of its title to those of other recent books (among them Peter Kivy's Introduction to a Philosophy of Music and Aaron Ridley's Philosophy of Music: Theme and Variations), once into the text readers are not likely to confuse Sharpe's monograph with either of these two works. If we prize philosophers for their distinctiveness, as Sharpe argues that we prize the element of individuality in our friends and in our favourite composers, then this book is to be admired indeed. Sharpe rarely strays far from practical issues to do with listening to and performing music. After preliminary considerations about the nature of musical sound, Chapter 2 addresses the question of what it is that makes some musical works examples of art or fine art, and the more general issue of music's ontological status. Here, as elsewhere, Sharpe finds himself at odds with much mainstream philosophy of art. He argues that the question ‘What is it to be a work of art?’ has taken centre-stage because of the problem of ‘hard cases’ (e.g. Duchamp's Fountain and Cage's 4′33″) that seem to require little artistic skill and challenge traditional conceptions of art. Sharpe proposes a shift from analysing the concept of art to understanding it. Once we have understood what it is to have a more or less adequate concept of art, we should see that no final motivated decision can be made about various hard cases—there may be reasons both for granting and denying them status as art. While Sharpe believes that a theory of art should help settle current controversies about which works merit art status, such a theory should not ‘impose’ answers.

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