Musical Types and Musical Flexibility

Abstract

A central motivation for the type-token model of music works is its ability to explain musical multiplicity—the fact that musical works are capable of having multiple performances through which they can be experienced and which cannot be individually identified with the works themselves. The type-token model explains multiplicity by identifying musical works with structural types and taking performances to be tokens of those types. In this paper, I argue that musical works are flexible in ways which permit performances which are tokens of distinct structural types to be performances of the same musical work. And I argue that various attempts to reconcile the type-token model with musical flexibility are ultimately unsuccessful.