ABSTRACT
In 2018, Bad Wolves changed The Cranberries’ hit single Zombie by updating one instance of ‘bombs’ in the lyrics to ‘drones’ and giving it a not-so-heavy metal instrumentation. Mozart’s Requiem was changed by his student Franz Xaver Sussmayr, who finished the piece after Mozart’s death, based on Mozart’s sketches for the piece. One natural answer to the revision puzzle is just that Bruckner is the author of his eighth symphony, whereas the author is decidedly not: only the original artist may change her work’s intrinsic properties. Relatedly, the default view in musical ontology has it that musical works are uncreated and eternally existing abstract objects such as types. According to this view, musical works cannot change: their intrinsic properties are fixed by the sound-structure that determines the type’s identity-conditions. Deviations from that type are either malformed instances or wholly new works.
