Musical Performance: A Philosophical Study by Stan Godlovitch

Author:Stan Godlovitch [Godlovitch, Stan]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, pdf
Publisher: Taylor and Francis
Published: 2002-01-30T16:00:00+00:00

The fixity of the work

However fixed the notated work, its details cannot interfere excessively with variability in the instance. Otherwise performing works would be akin to minting coins. On the other hand, musicality scarcely requires that one use only the immediate resources of one’s imagination. Just how compromised is the discretion available to the score-player? This is basically to ask: How is variety under fixity possible? which, in turn, prompts the question: What is the nature of a work’s fixity? Whatever the answers, notated works must allow highly varied instances to meet the expectations in performance.11 Notated works which tolerated a single type of instance would not be works-for-performance as we know them, but would instead satisfy certain composers who have turned to electronic instantiation precisely to avoid the variety typical of instantiation by so-called ‘interpreters’.

The work-performance relation can be conceived as a one-many relationship between types and their tokens. Performances are spatiotemporally delimited events; works are abstract entities. Though made by human beings, works seem not quite of this world. They share theoretical space with patterns, structures, designs, theories, schemas, and other abstracta. Some regard works as autonomous fixed entities, particularly after the death of the composer. What sort of fixity is this? Though scores can be edited and revised, the underlying object of these operations may be thought to survive. One may always revisit the work, the contents of which are definitively determined by its author operating in a precise context of creation.12 Thus conceived, works cannot be destroyed the way spatiotemporal particulars can. Left alone, a painting is fixed as a work, but mutilation can change paintings utterly. No abstract design lurks behind the piece of coloured cloth ready to bear the standard should its ‘en-canvassed’ instance fall in battle.13

The fixity of musical works embraces both precise security of details and immunity from change. However conceived, the fixity of the work must typically be consistent with the opportunities for novelty expected in performance. This makes the work’s fixity quite unlike the definiteness of general abstracta such as formal logical structures or unlike the unalterability of the past, say.14 As will be argued, a more fruitful comparison is with stories, parables, legends, and jokes. That a tale is fixed in structure, plot, or theme, and yet admits instantiations which add local colour is familiar enough. Such works effectively are frameworks. This mode of variety under fixity will later be considered as a fruitful model for musical invention.

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