While studies in music history inevitably revolve around musical works, the concept of the ‘musical work’ itself remains as elusive as it is pervasive. The term suggests a range of assumptions about the composer’s agency and aesthetic goals, and about the dissemination or influence of the composition. Philosophers and music scholars have argued that around 1800 the musical work had been conceptualised in its most elaborate, discrete form, crystallising as a specific set of regulative practices in musical production and reception, against which modern and postmodern composers would have to battle. What constitutes the musical work so defined, and why it held sway during the nineteenth century, has become a subject of lively debate.

The musical work, however, existed as both artefact and concept for many centuries before 1800. This was the starting point for Reinhard Strohm’s seminal re-evaluation of the historiography and ontology of the work-concept in his article ‘Looking Back at Ourselves: The Problem with the Musical Work- Concept’. Strohm argued against the commonly held view that around 1800 the paradigm of the work-concept had changed dramatically. Examining twentieth-century theorising about the musical work, Strohm showed how it resulted from the methodologies and biases peculiar to the authors and their era. Most importantly, he collapsed the argument for a watershed in Western art music marked by the emergence of a regulative work-concept. He drew attention to discussions about the musical work reaching back to the fifteenth century and insisted that the conceptualisation of the musical work as such was part of a long-standing discourse that continually revisited basic themes: the unparalleled skill of creative artists, the impulse to memorialise their output, and the tension between artistic expression and social function. On this last point Strohm challenged reigning opinion by emphasising that an otherwise autonomous musical work could be integrated with social and cultural practices.

The essays in this volume build on Strohm’s argument by demonstrating how social and cultural practices generate different conceptualisations of the musical work at different times and in different places. As such, this collection shifts the debate about the work-concept from the ontological plane onto the historical.