Ontmusic5. When are two musical examples of the same song?

Some philosophers believe that what determines song identity is if two sonic event performances have used the same musical score. Of course, this requires that the song's notes have been written down.

Opposing this basic approach is Lawrence M. Zbikowski who argues in his book, Conceptualizing Music: Cognitive Structure, Theory, and Analysis, that the score is not the fundamental determiner of song identity. Rather, there is a much looser set of determiners consisting of applications of both global and local conceptual models.

“One common strategy is to represent key structural elements of a local conceptual model through artifacts such as scores or recordings. Although the score illustrations used for “I Got Rhythm” carry the aura of authority, they actually follow from the conceptual models for the song: a score is an artifactual manifestation of the elements of the conceptual model deemed most relevant to the musical practice of which the model is a part, created as a means of stabilizing the model. The score for the original version of “I Got Rhythm” (ex. 5.1) can thus be seen as a reflection of the conceptual model for pop songs.”

Furthermore, Lawrence M. Zbikowskil concludes that, “Thus, both in its production and interpretation, musical notation reflects (rather than generates) the local and global conceptual models that constitute musical practice.”

And Zbikowski has creatively applied conceptual models that previously were used to account for performer's musical practices to instead use them “to explain how individuals determine whether a particular performance is of a specific tune and how typical that performance is. The difference that distinguishes my models from those of Brailoiu, Arom, Cowdery, and Porter is that the sort of constructs they propose are used not for categorizing musical performances, as I attempt to do, but for producing them.”

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