The Work of Music and the Problem of Its Identity by Roman Ingarden (review)

and other essential categories” of mental patients, many of whom had “acute psychotic disorders” (p. 2). Hence, it appears, Kern’s concept of the Zeitgeist was constructed, at least partially, from aberrant worlds. This, it seems, explains much: the objective world surely gets filtered out after passing through pathological perception. Kern is on more certain ground when discussing the impact of technology, because of its ubiquitous nature in society. In particular, the period covered saw a mass of new or improved inventions whichclearly transformed Western society: the electric light, phonograph, telephone, camera, bicycle, automobile, and so forth. Thus Kern is probably correct when he writes that a cause of the “failure of diplomacy” in July 1914 “was that diplomats could not cope with the volume and speed of electronic communication ” (pp. 275-6). If Kern had included in his manuscript only such connections, the final book would certainly have been a slim volume-but one which would be much less problematic. REFERENCE I. Linda DalryrnpleHenderson,“On Artists, Scientistsand Historians,” Leonard0 19, No. 2, 153-158 (1986). THE WORK OF MUSIC AND THE PROBLEM OF ITS IDENTITY by Roman Ingarden. Jean G. Harrell, ed. Adam Czerniawski, trans. University of California Press, Berkeley, CA, 1986. 181 pp. ISBN: 0-520-05529-2. Reviewed by Allan Shields, 4890 Old Hwy., Mariposa, CA 95338, U.S.A. Despite the infinite pains Roman Ingarden took to reveal the details of his problem and its solution, in the end he looked on this work as an adumbration of an eventual theory of the meaning and identity of the work of music. Indeed, as the translator and Max Rieser, in his extensive summary essay about Ingarden’s life work, both make clear, this volume is at once a propaedeutic and adjunct to the author’s larger task: a unified philosophy of art. Ingarden himself often refers the reader to his other fundamental works, especially TheLiterary Workand Does the World Exist? A reader would be well advised to begin the study of this newly translated effort by first reading these more basic works of Ingarden, if only to comprehend his singular vocabulary of concepts. Ingarden’s method is that of epistemological phenomenology. Negatively, he opposes the epistemological idealism of Husserl, neopositivism, psychologizing of philosophy, materialism, naive realism, empiricism in various formsand Marxism. His procedure is to begin with commonsense convictions about musical works and to submit a succession of them to critical examination and analysis, marshalling arguments and counterexamples seriatim. In the comparatively brief compass of eight chapters, he erects more and more sophisticated hypotheses about the musical work and, again, eliminates them one by one. During the process, we are given numerous insights into the very heart of the musical process (he was himself a pianist and a sophisticated audient), into the details of a musical score and its interpretation, into the problems of interpretation and performance , into esoteric musicological and critical questions about the unity of a musical composition and especially the question of the existence (status) of a work of music. In the end (p. 156) Ingarden concludes that the problem of the idenrity of a work of music is a pseudoproblem and, because it is pseudo, distracts us completely from dealing with the tractable problem of identifying the work of music for what it is: a purely intentional, intersubjective object that is non-mental, non-physical, having no ‘objective’status in reality. It is ever a potentiality, a potency that is pregnant within the schematic score, within the era of interpretation, the skills of performers, as well as the skills of perception of the audients, whose roles in the ontic state of music have not before been sufficiently understood. Real objects exist autonomously, independently. Musical works ‘exist’ heteronomously, dependently. Trying to make musical works independent of audients and performances, or as scores or gramophone data, only obscures the more rewarding but lesstangible character of them. Once we understand that within limiting parameters of the score every performance is proper (p. 150), the socalled problem of a work’s identity evaporates and philosophy will have completed its difficult work. A work of music is not a single object. It is not the score, not one...