ABSTRACT
Beethoven composed the Hammerklavier in 1817–1818 and no one else composed a sound-alike musical work–a musical work that sounds exactly like the Hammerklavier–a hundred years later. The dominant view is contextualism, according to which the answer is two, since it's necessary that the Hammerklavier is distinguished from other musical works, not just by how it sounds, but also by the historical context in which it was composed, where that context includes at least who it was composed by and when it was composed. When it comes to aesthetic properties, the issue between contextualists and sonicists thus comes down to musical empiricism. Contextualists start with the intuition that the Hammerklavier is exciting in ways that the 1918 Hammerklavier is not. This leads them to reject musical empiricism. By contrast, sonicists start with intuitions that support musical empiricism. Contextualism and instrumentalism are independent challenges to sonicism.
