What is a musical work? In Hearing Double: Jazz, Ontology, Auditory Culture, Brian Kane offers a fresh answer to this well-worn question. In contrast to the Goehrian notion that the work concept emerged as a regulative ideal during the late eighteenth century – and ‘work’, on this view, refers to canonical pieces of music that exist as ideal types and as material scores that circulate on international markets – Kane argues that jazz standards are best understood as networks. A jazz standard is a receptacle of accumulated aural and oral traditions, of musicians’ lived memories of past performances, and of many recordings. To use an epitomic example, whereas Beethoven agonized over every detail of Symphony No. 5 until every note was in its perfect place, performances of jazz standards such as ‘Body and Soul’, ‘I've Got Rhythm’, and countless others are never identical to their scores. While the commodities of written music and recordings are crucial for musicians who study and perform this music, jazz performances are not quite commodities. The performance of a standard cannot be held to the ideals secured by copyright law, Kane explains, since musicians of successive generations alter or omit aspects of copyrighted scores at will, reharmonizing, simplifying melodies or writing new, more complex ones (i.e., counterfacts), taking riffs from original compositions and recontextualizing them, and so on. Nothing is final – including ontology.

‘[O]ntology is historical’, ‘ontology is social’: Kane thus opens his endeavour to develop ‘a non-essentialist, network-based ontology of standards’ (10). The title of his book, Hearing Double, refers to listening to any version of a standard (live or recorded) in relation to accumulated history. When the trained auditor listens to a new artist play ‘Body and Soul’, for instance, they hear the fresh version against the backdrop of so many historical recordings. The auditor therefore listens to how the performer hears this accumulated history – as Peter Szendy reminds us, listening to an arrangement of any established work of music is a way of listening to someone else's listening.Footnote ¹ Every version of a jazz standard is a node in the network that produced it and also a kind of second-order reflection on that network. ‘Hearing double’, in a nutshell, ‘is the perceptual and imaginative act of hearing how one piece of music is made out of another piece of music’ (233).

Hearing Double is composed of two parts: ‘Ontology’ and ‘Auditory Culture’. Part I, comprising four chapters, outlines Kane's ‘non-essentialist, network-based ontology of standards’ (10) while Part II, containing two final chapters, delves into the history of radio, the music publishing business, historical avant-gardes, and the birth of ‘the new sound’ in mid-century studios to argue, in Kane's words, that between about 1930 and 1960, ‘there existed a co-constitutive relation between musical practices and musical ontology, where practices shaped ontology, and ontology in turn guided practices’ (155).

The book opens with a figure that many readers would probably least expect to find in any book about jazz: Allen Forte. Kane probes Forte's seldom-studied The American Popular Ballad of the Golden Era (1995) to point up, on one hand, the hoariness of Forte's implicit conviction that jazz can be ennobled only when studied through the same tools that the analyst applies to the classical canon; and on the other hand, Kane brings a surprising notion of Forte's to light. In a rare passage in which the old Schenkerian discusses jazz improvisation, Forte implies that jazz musicians are already analysts because they study and internalize harmonic structures so as to alter them (22). In this sense, popular musicians are already formalists. Kane pivots to his own central query: if jazz musicians constantly play with and against the underlying harmonic structure of any tune, substituting new chord changes, playing ‘out’, making new arrangements for various ensembles, and so on, then ‘the more one looks into the history of a standard, the harder it is to identify “the original”’ (24).

To interrogate the status of ‘the original’, Kane takes recourse to Stephen Davies's distinction between ‘thick’ and ‘thin’ musical works – that is, between works that are scored with ample ‘thick’ detail (e.g., a symphony) and ‘thin’ or minimal detail (e.g., jazz lead sheets that include only a melody and chord changes). Kane demonstrates that the ‘thin’ version of any jazz standard emerges through time. When Miles Davis performed ‘So What’ over the course of about six years, for instance (1959–65), he and his band increased the tempo, the bassists (first Paul Chambers and then Ron Carter) simplified the iconic bass riff in order to play it quickly, Davis and Wayne Shorter stopped playing the original written pitches when stating the simple, two-note repetitive horn melody, instead choosing pitches at will, and finally, during a performance at the Plugged Nickel, Davis played the melody out of sync with the rest of the band, creating antiphony (35–9). If the written bassline, the notes of the melody, and even the melody's rhythm are changeable, then what is ‘the original work’? Davies would insist that the ‘thinnest’ structure of any piece of music, its most essential elements, were always already there in the work from the beginning. Kane responds trenchantly by invoking the Freudian term Nachträglichkeit (retroaction or ‘afterwardsness’) to describe the traditional ontologist's sleight of hand when he (i.e., Davies) imagines that essential features, which only emerge post hoc, were there all along.

The full consequences of the question, ‘what is the original work?’, come to light in chapter four (‘The Ontology of Musical Networks’), the central theoretical chapter of the book, as Kane parries with other philosophical forebears. He quickly does away with Nelson Goodman's contentious notion (put forward in the 1968 Languages of Art) that a musical work is identical with its score, hence if a performer misses a single note, then their performance is no longer a performance of that work but of something else. Such rigid ‘nominalism’, as Kane dubs it, offers nothing for our understanding of jazz. Perhaps the most outlandish existing theory of musical ontology, though, which Kane credits to the ‘realists’ Peter Kivy and Nicholas Wolterstorff, contends that musical works are eternal, immutable sound structures (i.e., ‘norm-kinds’). When taken (too) seriously, this position demands that we think of a composer as a discoverer who, like a scientist uncovering an eternal verity, inscribes an already existing ideal formal structure during the act of composition. Following the logic of this ‘realist’ position, if Symphony No. 5 is an abstract sound structure, then it must have existed (in the clouds, perhaps) back in the Neolithic period and will continue to exist once humankind has ceased. Kane leans more towards another ‘realist’, Jerrold Levinson, who held that musical works are not mind-independent. We humans make music, after all, and the historical contingencies of cultures and technologies (there can be no piano sonatas without pianos) are what afford abstract, formal musical structures to emerge only at specific moments in history. In Levinson's terms, musical works are ‘initiated types’, that is, contingent abstractions.

Against the grain of established philosophies that position ‘the work’ as a Platonic form that exists before a work's instantiation in performance – even if this instantiation is contingent, the work is still an abstract totality – Kane the seasoned guitarist draws from the intuitive know-how of jazz practitioners: the ‘work’, an idea that lives in our memory, changes with successive performances. Only through time and study do we realize what a tune's essential features or structures are, and even then, we might hear a new performance that makes us reconsider anew what any old standard ‘is’.

The reader may find revealing Kane's graphic representations of the networks of specific standards such as ‘In the Mood’ (58) and ‘Body and Soul’ (77). His mastery of the body of recorded versions of each of these tunes is impressive, and I took much delight at his invitation that the reader frequently halt reading to listen – ‘Put on the music, the prose can wait’ (13). Listening to various versions of ‘In the Mood’ with Kane gives credence to his view that the ‘essential’ aspects of any standard emerge through time as one musician borrows a riff from another, recontextualizing old material. Kane dubs this process ‘replication’, which is one of two primary strategies by which jazz musicians navigate the network of any standard. The other strategy, ‘nomination’, means what one would expect: naming a tune. In Kane's words, ‘a moment of baptism initiates an historical process of transmission … A name is both an assertion and a solicitation’ (104). Nomination opens up history; it locates a tune in a network and solicits us to hear double.

In Part II, Kane narrates the rise of an emergent ontology of jazz standards in twentieth-century US history. During and after the Great Depression, as record sales dropped and the new medium of radio threatened to undercut the record market, institutions such as the Federal Radio Commission pushed radio stations to limit broadcasting recordings and instead feature live performances. Today, it is well known that popular musicians such as Rihanna or Beyoncé buy demos from various ‘hitmaker’ studios around the country. Kane describes perhaps the earliest song factory scene: as publishing houses recognized the power of radio to reach millions of listeners at once, their executives began sending new piano-and-voice scores directly to radio stations that employed union bands, sometimes bribing stations for airplay, and also hired arrangers to create stock orchestrations (‘orks’) that could be sent directly to dance orchestras or big bands.

These historical details point up the importance of arrangers for the budding US culture industry, and hence for the budding ontology of the jazz standard. Kane's insights into this early hitmaker scene come by way of a 1941 report written by an Adorno acolyte, Duncan MacDougald Jr, whose ‘Popular Music Industry’ either echoes or anticipates Adorno's own infamous gripe that popular radio music dumbs down our ability to listen. Kane takes recourse to composer and arranger Johnny Mandel's affirmation that the art of radio music lies in the immense variety and originality of arrangements. MacDougald, too, recognized the importance and originality of arrangements, so in a gratifying turn, Kane reads an Adornian against Adorno.

With Kane's concise synopses of analytic philosophers who have written about the status of musical works, his Latourian approach (which he credits Georgina Born) to the aural networks embodied in the archive of jazz recordings, and his patient analyses of musical detail amid the broad technological and cultural histories of popular music, Hearing Double may appeal to readers interested in jazz and popular musicians, the histories of recording and radio, and analytic philosophies of music, and especially to professors and graduate students in music studies, music theory, and related interdisciplinary fields such as sound studies. It is worth pointing out, though, that Kane's analysis of any standard's network depends on bodies of recordings, and while jazz performances are not copyrighted, recordings are. While every performance might differ, nevertheless Bird with Strings, Kind of Blue, and A Love Supreme are no less hallowed – no less ‘ontologically’ fixed and ideal – than the score of Symphony No. 5, and any jazz practitioner (Kane included) would treat these albums with the same (or greater) reverence. Further, one wonders about the place of sound in the emergent jazz ontologies. When I listened with Kane to Monk and Coleman Hawkins's versions of ‘Body and Soul’ during the final chapter, for instance, I noticed that my worshipful awe at each of these masters is owed as much to their distinct sounds as to Monk's anarchistic use of tritone substitutions or Hawk's melodic innovations (details that Kane analyses). Monk's characteristically percussive and abrasive tone is perfectly balanced by his mastery of dynamics just as Hawk's wide vibrato and sharp ‘bite’ are countered by moments of breathy lusciousness. It is curious that an ‘ontological’ examination attends primarily to pitches and chords. Kane has something in common with Forte after all.

Of course, writing about a specific musician's tone is about as difficult as re-living a live performance in prose. Kane's analyses are concrete and revealing, largely because he sticks with scores and records. In pointing out Kane's adherence to copyrighted, commodified, and incorrigible historical media in his effort to outline an ontology that transcends copyright, commodity circulation, and seemingly any fixity whatsoever, my intention is not to do away with his conclusions. Rather, I wonder if Kane's analyses can be pushed to exceed the scope of Hearing Double. Instead of offering a new, expanded sense of the ontology of musical works as Kane does, I wonder if the scholarly study of jazz may interrogate the presuppositions of the very notion of musical ontology. Such an interrogation would move with and bolster a deconstruction of the whole project of ontology in general.

It is well known that jazz is a historically Black art form, but it is less often pointed out that ontology is a white science.Footnote ² Emmanuel Lévinas once termed ontology, the logos (science, knowledge, discourse) on the nature of being, a ‘philosophy of power’ or an ‘egology’. Derrida, meanwhile, noted that logos connotes ‘gathering’, the subsumption of diversity into totality that is essential to the spiritual fabric of ‘Western metaphysics’, which he dubbed ‘white mythology’.Footnote ³ Kane is not unique in raising ontological questions about jazz. Fred Moten's In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, which can be read as an avant-garde assault on the ‘work concept’ and its attendant cultural politics, is a glaring omission in Kane's book. Hearing Double falls short of its opening avowals, ‘ontology is historical’ and ‘ontology is social’ (10), in so far as the sociohistorical terrain of the concept of ‘ontology’ is addressed only superficially. But Kane's study will remain an invaluable touchstone for anyone interested, as I am, in exploring the consequences, not only of examining jazz through the lens of ontology, but also in asking: what happens to ontology if we play it like jazz?