The ontology of folk songs

Abstract

Folk songs can have various lives across continents for centuries without a score, known authorship, a canonical recording, or even a definitive version. This raises questions about what exactly constitutes a work of folk music. The aim of this thesis is to investigate what kind of entities folk songs are. The two main topics on the ontology of musical works are the basic nature of musical works (what kind of entities they are, how they are individuated, and what kind of a relation they have to their performances), and how the ontological status of works may vary across musical traditions. In §1 of this thesis, I introduce special features of folk songs. In §2, I introduce methodological debates on the ontology of musical works, then I propose the term anchoring to refer to the way a work's identity conditions are specified, and argue that the anchor of a folk song is its genealogy. In section §3, I introduce views about the basic nature of musical works, such as simple and complex Platonism, nominalism, and other views, and discuss the ontological diversity of works in different traditions. In §4, I rule out simple Platonism as a feasible ontological framework, because treating folk songs as eternal and immutable entities ignores their special features and how they are anchored. Finally, in §5 I introduce an alternative that is suitable, Roman Ingarden’s ontological framework for artworks.