What kind of thing is a symphony? Not the score, since a score may be destroyed while the work survives, and a work may exist for years before anyone writes it down. Not any performance, since performances differ and none is the work; a listener who dislikes a particular reading is not thereby disliking the symphony. Not the sum of performances either, since the work was complete before the first of them and will not be altered by the last. The obvious candidates all fail, which is why the question has occupied philosophers for a century without visible progress. A common resolution proposes that the work is a structure — a pattern of pitches and durations that performances instantiate more or less accurately. This has the merit of explaining how a work can be badly played, which theories identifying the work with its performances cannot manage. It has the demerit of making the work a mathematical object that was as available in 1600 as in 1800, and therefore not composed but discovered. Most who hold the view accept this consequence with more equanimity than composers do. The difficulty is sharper than an argument about vocabulary, because notation is not neutral. Western staff notation specifies pitch and duration with precision and leaves timbre, attack and the micro-inflection of tempo largely unspecified. It is not an accident that the structural account arose in the culture whose notation records exactly those features it treats as constitutive. Applied to a tradition in which the identity of a piece resides in ornamentation that no notation captures, the theory does not merely fail; it locates the work in the wrong place and then reports that the tradition has no works, which is a conclusion about the theory rather than the tradition. Nor is the difficulty confined to music outside the notated tradition. A jazz standard is a work by any ordinary usage, and its identity plainly does not lie in a determinate structure, since the notes are the first thing a performer changes. What persists is closer to a set of permissions: a harmonic frame and a body of understanding about what may be done within it and what would count as leaving. That such a thing is a work is not a marginal case to be accommodated once the central account is settled. It suggests that the central account has taken one historically specific practice of composition and mistaken it for the nature of the art. If a general account is wanted, it will have to be built from the practice outward rather than from the ontology inward. A work, on this approach, is whatever a tradition treats as the same thing across occasions of performance, and traditions differ in what they hold fixed. The proposal will disappoint anyone who wanted to know what musical works really are, since it makes the answer contingent on custom.
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