Abstract

There is a strong intuition that we can listen to works of music, yet musical ontologies on which works of music are abstract objects, perhaps most notably, type theories of music, seem to imply that this is impossible. This problem has received relatively little attention in the literature. I here explore and develop a solution suggested by Julian Dodd and argue that it has at least two problematic consequences, namely (i) that some works of music cannot be listened to unless one has already studied the relevant score or through a similar process learned roughly what the work requires of its performances and (ii) that it is possible for two people to listen to different musical works while listening to the same performance.