Ben Caplan and Carl Matheson have recently advocated musical perdurantism—the view that amounts to the conjunction of the following theses:

(1) Musical works are identical to mereological sums of their temporal parts (performances);
(2) Musical works persist by perduring, that is, “by having different temporal parts [performances] at every time at which they exist” (Caplan and Matheson 2006,
60).

In this talk I will argue that musical perdurantism faces a number of serious problems and, hence, cannot be accepted.