Goehr — The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works

Author: Lydia Goehr
Title: The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music
Year: 1992
Type: Academic book (Clarendon Press/Oxford; second edition 2007)

The book opens with a sentence built to start fights: “Bach did not intend to compose musical works.”¹ Goehr, a Columbia philosopher and a composer’s daughter (her father was Alexander Goehr of the Manchester School), is making a claim about concepts, and Bach’s music is safe: the work-concept, the idea that music consists of fixed and repeatable works owned by composers, crystallized only around 1800, and before it took hold a piece was largely constituted by its function: performances were judged on “whether an audience had been efficaciously affected in a manner appropriate to the occasion,” and only when notation became exact enough could “the fully compliant performance of a work” acquire its opposite, the extemporized one.² Once operative, the concept regulated everything — works became “treated as if they were givens and not ‘merely’ concepts that have artificially emerged and crystallized within practice.” And since a work is neither its score nor any performance of it (works are, in her phrase, “ontological mutants”), the only museum that can house the repertory’s permanent objects is an imaginary one. The title’s debt runs to André Malraux’s museum without walls, and she flags it herself.³

The argument built its own arena. A 1998 Liverpool symposium put the thesis on trial, and the resulting volume, The Musical Work: Reality or Invention?, stages the fight directly: Reinhard Strohm argued the work is a robust concept with Renaissance precedents and that gradual historical change makes any “at this point” claim “manifestly impossible”; Goehr’s counter is a logician’s — if gradualness bars all datings, the regress ends in the absurdity “that the work–concept existed from the first day of musical practice (whenever that was).”⁴ Harry White filed the Baroque rejoinder: Bach’s Wachet auf was more indentured to social function than the “Waldstein” sonata, “but this does not mean” it was “less emancipated in musical terms” — to suggest otherwise “is to mistake the social function of music for its meaning.”⁵ The 2007 second edition answered a decade and a half of this with a long new introduction (“I did not say Bach did not compose musical works, only that he had not intended to compose them”) and a concession that shows where the stakes actually sit: even if the dating were off by centuries, the claim would stand that the work-concept cannot be assumed “naturalistically or essentially to exist in all music practices.”⁶ Richard Taruskin wrote the new edition’s foreword.⁷

The standing is field-wide. Susan McClary’s blurb calls it “the most important book on music aesthetics to appear in the last several decades” — the New Musicology’s flagship scholar endorsing the philosophy volume — and the Times Higher Education Supplement ranked it among the most exciting books on music of its era.⁸ On this shelf it is the theory of everything the family’s practice looks like: the museum’s rulebook, dated and explained. It also names the deepest structural oddity this family brings to rhapsode: a music filed under composers rather than performers is a music organized by the work-concept, and this is the book that says where that filing came from.

Key contributions

• The work-concept thesis: music-as-works is a historical achievement of around 1800, a regulative concept mistaken for a fact of nature.
• The museum frame: the classical repertory as an imaginary museum of permanent objects, with fidelity as its house rule — the metaphor the whole canon debate now runs on.
• The Bach provocation and its precision: pre-1800 composers wrote music whose point was function and occasion; calling their output “works” projects the later concept backward.
• The debate architecture: Strohm, White, and the Liverpool symposium made the work-concept’s dating a standing field argument, with Goehr’s Sorites reply as the fixed point.

See also

• Oxford History of Western Music — the monument that performs the museum this book theorizes; Taruskin fronted the 2007 edition
• The Rest Is Noise — the century in which the museum’s doors were forced, at trade-book pace
• Classical music — the family whose composer-first filing this book explains

Footnotes

1. The opening sentence quoted verbatim (2007 ed., p. 8) per Gavin Steingo, “The Musical Work Reconsidered, In Hindsight,” Current Musicology 97 (2014); Goehr’s endowed chair (Fred and Fannie Mack Professor of Humanities, Department of Philosophy, Columbia) and her parentage per Lydia Goehr, Wikipedia; Alexander Goehr’s Manchester School standing per Alexander Goehr, Wikipedia (all accessed July 20, 2026). ↩

2. The function-and-occasion passage (2007 ed., p. 192) and the notation-and-compliance passage (p. 188) quoted verbatim per Steingo, Current Musicology 97 (accessed July 20, 2026). ↩

3. The regulative-concept passage (2007 ed., p. 104), “ontological mutants” (pp. 2–3), the imaginary-museum cash-out (p. 174), and the Malraux debt (p. 173, to “Museum without Walls” in The Voices of Silence) all per Steingo, Current Musicology 97 (accessed July 20, 2026). ↩

4. Michael Talbot, ed., The Musical Work: Reality or Invention? (Liverpool University Press, 2000), from the 1998 Liverpool symposium; Reinhard Strohm, “Looking Back at Ourselves: The Problem with the Musical Work-Concept” (pp. 128–52), with “manifestly impossible” (p. 135) and Goehr’s Sorites reply from her response essay in the same volume (p. 242), all quoted verbatim per Steingo, Current Musicology 97; the Strohm chapter’s argument per its Liverpool Scholarship Online abstract (both accessed July 20, 2026). ↩

5. Harry White in Acta Musicologica 69 (1997): 94–104, quoted verbatim (p. 100) per Steingo, Current Musicology 97 (accessed July 20, 2026). ↩

6. “I did not say Bach did not compose musical works…” (2007 ed., p. xlii) per John Ahern, “Bach did not intend to compose musical works,” Ad Fontes; the dating-stakes concession (2007 ed., p. xlviii) quoted verbatim per Steingo, Current Musicology 97 (both accessed July 20, 2026). ↩

7. The Taruskin foreword to the 2007 edition per Booktopia’s edition listing and the AbeBooks 2007-softcover listing (both accessed July 20, 2026). ↩

8. Both blurbs per Booktopia’s edition listing, which reproduces the publisher’s editorial reviews — McClary’s quoted verbatim; the Times Higher Education Supplement’s carried there as “One of the most exciting books on music to appear for a long time” (accessed July 20, 2026). ↩