Philosophy

The practice of musical arrangement was commonplace until the 20th century, when the concept of authorship gained a more definite profile and a legal footing.
In this paper I consider the ontological and legal problems raised by Luigi Dallapiccola’s Sonatina Canonica, a work composed by arranging Niccolò Paganini’s 24 Caprices for Solo Violin, Op. 1 for solo piano. Despite its evident aesthetic value, the work has rarely attracted scholarly attention. The copyright issues that followed its publication are largely unknown: the SIAE - Italian copyright society - refused to recognise Dallapiccola’s claim to full royalties as the Sonatina Canonica was deemed an arrangement without creative attributes. I argue that the SIAE was wrong in its resolution. Dallapiccola’s work displays remarkable inventiveness in its dadaistic attempt to produce something new from given material. The composer transforms patterns from the Caprices into a contrapuntal dialogue between two or more voices. This renewal is the product of interpretative work whose originality should be acknowledged. I support my claim by comparing the structural connections between the two pieces and by analysing Dallapiccola’s compositional techniques.
I situate this case study within the broader context of the role played by arrangements and transcriptions in musical ontology. Can arrangements have an identity independent from originals? I argue that thought-provoking and inventive arrangements deserve to see their authorship praised, and that Dallapiccola’s work proves it.

This article defends Musical Stage Theory as a novel account of the ontology of musical works. Its main claim is that a musical work is a performance. The significance of this argument is twofold. First, it demonstrates the availability of an alternative, and ontologically tenable, view to well‐established positions in the current debate on musical metaphysics. Second, it shows how the revisionary approach of Musical Stage Theory actually provides a better account of the ontological status of musical works.

The last decades witnessed an exponential proliferation of AI music composition programs. The hard-coded algorithmic composition systems of the outset are progressively giving way to a more advanced use of neural networks and Deep Learning software, with a consequent
increase of the sophistication and quality of the music produced. The Mozart and Lady Gaga of the future are a set of silicon chips: Jukedeck, Flow Machines, Aiva and other programs are gaining more and more followers in many music platforms, raising a growing enthusiasm and
consent among their fans.
While the latest developments in the field of AI music are matter of excitement among both listeners and researchers, they also raise less practical and more philosophically oriented questions. In this paper I discuss the impact of AI on one of the key topics in the philosophy of
art: the nature of musical works. The question I will address is the following: “Can a computer create a musical work?”. In attempting to provide an answer, further questions about the creativity and intentionality exhibited by AI will emerge.
In the first section of the paper I identify a necessary requirement for musical works: being created by an act of intentional creativity. I then argue that the evaluation of something as creative or intentional is influenced by our subjective judgement. As a consequence, it seems impossible to objectively assess whether a computer can create a musical work. What we measure when we provide an answer to this question, in fact, are not the computer’s accomplishments but instead our subjective evaluation of them (Boden and Edmonds 2009).
In the second part of the paper I suggest an alternative definition of minimal creativity (CREATIVITYm) which focuses on the autonomy needed by a system to produce a creative output. I will claim that software like Jukedeck or Flowmachines, where the human presence is still essential for performing the task of composing music, do not create musical works. They at best can be considered an extension of the programmer’s or user’s mind (Clarks and Chalmers 1998). This point will lead to the related discussion about the boundaries of the self and the relative autonomy of humans and machines in respect to each other.
In the last part of the paper I will claim that the use of Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs) in software for music composition may grant AI a sufficient level of autonomy for deeming it able to create musical works (Yang 2017). In addressing the inherent difference of GANs from other kinds of software previously used in algorithmic composition, I will borrow some insights from the discussion on integrated information theory (Tononi 2008). Indeed, I will discuss the quantity of integrated information, or Φ (‘phi’), that a system for music generation which makes use of GANs has and what does this tell us about its levels of
creativity.

In this paper I defend a contextualist interpretation of authenticity in musical performance: we judge a performance as authentic not in respect to a stable set of requirements but according to contextually determined factors. This solution is the natural outcome of an independently supported ontological account of musical works: Musical Stage Theory. The aim of the paper is to give new momentum to the debate concerning the notion of authenticity and to challenge a monistic interpretation of authenticity: there is not one authenticity but many.

My aim is to discuss some counterexamples to the following principle:

(P) Necessarily, for every proposition p, for every cognitive agent S and for every cognitive agent S*, if S believes that p and S* believes that ¬p, then either S makes a normative error or S* makes a normative error.

If we assume the identity between S and S*, then (P) regulates what I'm going to call psychological contradiction; conversely, if we assume the non-identity between S and S*, then (P) regulates cases of disagreement. In trying to offer counterexamples, I will compare two different approaches: a three-valued approach and a relativist approach. I will argue that adopting the latter is preferable, since, contrary to the former, in offering counterexamples to (P) it does not commit us to hold the controversial metaphysical views that I will present in section 2. Furthermore, it allows us to propose genuine counterexamples not only in cases of syntactic disagreement, but also in cases of semantic and ontological disagreement.