The question of how people change artworks is important for the metaphysics of art. It’s relatively easy for anyone to change a painting or sculpture, but who may change a literary or musical work is restricted and varies with context. Authors of novels and composers of symphonies often have a special power to change their artworks. Mary Shelley revised Frankenstein, and Tchaikovsky revised his Second Symphony. I cannot change these artworks. In other cases, such as those involving jazz standards and (...) folk songs, performers and ordinary folks have more power to change artworks. My preferred explanation of these facts is the created-abstract-simples view, according to which literary and musical works, unlike paintings and sculptures, are created abstract objects that have no parts. On this view, the way to change a literary or musical work is for an individual, empowered by social practices, to change rules about how a literary work should be published or a musical work should be performed. A. R. J. Fisher and Caterina Moruzzi object that the created-abstract-simples view doesn’t allow for literary and musical works to genuinely change, and Nemesio Garcia-Carríl Puy objects that the view doesn’t allow for these artworks to be repeatable. This paper clarifies the created-abstract-simples view and defends the view against these objections. -/- . (shrink)

Guy Rohrbaugh (2003) and Allan Hazlett (2012) have argued against the identification of musical works with sound-pattern types by arguing that musical works are.

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. (shrink)