ABSTRACT
This Cagean view of music connects to a use of “music” with some currency, in which the word serves as in effect a predicate of experience. The rule of usage is roughly this. If there is a musical experience going on-characterized in some phenomenological fashion or other-then there is music; if not, then the situation is devoid of music. The auditor, through having the right kind of experience, determines whether music is present or is occurring; the source of the sounds experienced in the appropriate way, their raison d’être-or even whether they actually exist-is regarded as irrelevant. It should be clear that from my perspective this is a degenerate notion of music, which obscures more than it illuminates, and denies to music several features that I have argued are central to it, namely, sentient origin, artistic intent, and public character. Furthermore, it is a hopelessly relativistic notion, making the status of anything as music (even Mozart piano concertos) relative to each individual listener and occasion. The concepts of a distinctive musical experience, or of the hearing of something as music, are useful ones, to be sure, but there is little to be gained by collapsing them into the cultural and objective category of music itself.
