This paper seeks to intervene in hegemonic discourses of composer deification by arguing that any philosophical model of musical production which marginalizes the role of the performer has committed a serious theoretical error. I do so by offering an ontological argument, then a semantic argument, before finally discussing consequences and loosely sketching a positive theory of musical production. Beginning my ontological argument from the principle of pragmatic constraint, I posit a view of music as teleologically oriented towards performance and argue on this account that any successful ontology of music must center the role of the performer, since music as such can not be actualized without performance. To elaborate this claim, I draw parallels to Marxian commodity theory, arguing that (i) the infusion of performers' living labor is required for music's actualization and that (ii) the study of music outside the material circumstances of its creation is akin to commodity fetishism. I then turn to semantic arguments, first establishing both that interpretive performance is interpretation in the hermeneutic sense and that this interpretation is always constructive. Then, I discuss three ways in which performers contribute semantic content to musical works. First, through definitive interpretation, musicians clarify and further define directives indicated by the score. Second, in the common practice of transgressive interpretation, musicians commonly contradict the score in order to exert their own artistic influence. Third, in affective interpretation, performers actualize the score's indeterminate semantic content, collapsing it into a single version for the sake of performance — here, I draw comparisons to both electron clouds and the quantum-mechanical concept of superposition in explicating my view of scores' latent meaning. On account of these ontological and semantic arguments, I conclude that performers are indisputably significant in the creation of music, and therefore should be considered collaborators with, rather than formally subordinate to, composers. Responding to the apparent radicality of this idea, I argue that, although we can never claim that a musician has performed a piece 'wrong' insofar as their performance accords with their intentions, a performer can still fail when they err in actualizing their own intended performance. I lastly pivot to the question of a positive philosophical theory of musical production. While I refrain from developing a full account, I discuss Florian Klinger's theory of aesthetic action and point to several aspects which I think future music philosophies ought to incorporate. I conclude by pointing toward future avenues for research in metaphysical, ethical, and interdisciplinary veins.
William Robertson (Sun,) studied this question.