Musical Performance

A Philosophical Study

Stan Godlovitch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• ISBN:
  9781134654390
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Most music we hear comes to us via a recording medium on which sound has been stored. Such remoteness of music heard from music made has become so commonplace it is rarely considered.
Musical Performance: A Philosophical Study considers the implications of this separation for live musical performance and music-making. Rather than examining the composition or perception of music as most philosophical accounts of music do, Stan Godlovitch takes up the problem of how the tradition of active music playing and performing has been challenged by technology and what problems this poses for philosophical aesthetics. Where does does the value of musical performance lie? Is human performance of music a mere transfer medium? Is the performance of music more expressive than recorded music? Musical Performance poses questions such as these to develop a fascinating account of music today. musicians - but via some recording medium on which sound has been stored.

Part I
CENTRAL ASPECTS OF PERFORMANCE

1
A MODEL OF MUSICAL PERFORMANCE

Introduction

What is the nature of musical performance? Intuitively, performances are occasions of musical sound—musical events—intentionally brought about by musicians for listeners. More abstractly, they are conceived formally as instances or tokens of certain universals or kinds; namely, musical works. In this chapter, I outline a model of performance which reflects and yet complements various intuitive considerations. I also aim to build sympathy for a performance-centred conception of music, the overall plan being to epitomize a tradition of music-making.

Why focus thus on performance? Music, after all, has many facets. The activities of composers, musicians, and listeners, and, by association, the works, performances, and experienced sounds of music, offer different perspectives from which to view music. Still, music is characteristically classified as a performing art. Since music typically lives in and for its public sounds which derive from performance, there is reason enough to regard the musical enterprise generally from the performance standpoint. More strongly, if music is essentially a performing art, the performance perspective is clearly privileged.

Four primary constituents of the musical sphere are typically drawn together in performance: sound, agents, works,¹ and listeners. Plausibly, any standard performance consists of sounds made by some musician instancing some musical work for some listener. These four factors will clearly figure in any model of performance.

Ordinary language embodies a concept of performance more relaxed than the model to be proposed. While respectful of the intuitive view, the emerging picture brings to the foreground certain otherwise understated intentional and contextual factors affecting performers and listeners. The resulting model is thus more determinate than some intuitions about performance; for example, in requiring the presence of attentive audiences and properly informed musicians. Further, the model outlines a cluster of success conditions for performance, the realization of which constitutes an idealized paradigm of music-making. Rather than assembling a stereotype which faithfully mirrors what would ordinarily count as an acceptable performance, the model depicts the fully successful or exemplary performance. That successful performance serves as an analytical benchmark derives in part from the sense of achievement internal to descriptions like: ‘Williams performed the Giuliani Concerto Opus 30 in Jasper, Alberta on January 2nd’. Such expressions imply not merely something undertaken, but something fully completed or accomplished. Note, the notion ‘fully successful’ does not here connote the highest levels of individual accomplishment captured in expressions like ‘exceptional’ or ‘definitive’ performance which mark a given occasion as superior to most others. The success conditions outlined in my account are meant to heighten conceptual undercurrents which are often implicit in standing conventions and discourse. From this idealization emerges a model of the model performance, cleaner at the edges than real life, against which one can assess one’s typical expectations.

I focus on solo performance not only for its relative simplicity but because of its ultimacy. Analyses of ensemble performance derive directly from or contrast with it. Solo performance, broadly conceived, covers cases where one performer’s musical decisions and actions predominate. With fully collaborative ensembles like string quartets, one may conceivably postulate a supra-individual performer, the quartet, to facilitate attributions of global sound quality as well as global praise since each quartet player is equally responsible for the joint venture.

Again, for simplicity, I emphasize instrumental music-making throughout. Instrumental music counts for much of music-making, and the separateness of musical agents and their instruments brings into high relief aspects of physical challenge and control which will figure strongly in the account. Further, the presence of language and meaning in song would needlessly complicate the picture presented of what music-makers must accomplish at a very primary level of agency. Even if song were historically prior to instrumental music, the latter is constitutionally prior, so to speak, by being semantically leaner. Even if instrumental music were not analytically more primitive than song, song verges, at least in comparison, towards the mixed media, blending melody and poetry or melody and narrative. That said, the voice can be and is used purely to make musical sound. When so used, my account applies fully to voice.

Preliminary groundclearing

Performance falls within a family of music-making activities. While general terms like ‘work’, ‘piece’, and ‘number’, standardly attach to whole items of music, another group of terms typically describes general music-making activity; for example, ‘play’, ‘perform’, and ‘execute’ (and, relatedly, ‘performance’, and ‘execution’). These last verbs differ in various ways. We can draw a distinction in level between playing and performing.

‘Playing’ refers to more general and generic activity than the more specialized and formal ‘performing’. Though every case of performing involves playing, one may succeed in playing without having succeeded in performing. ‘Performing’ invokes occasion and ritual; ‘playing’ leaves such contextual imputations open. Sight-reading for amusement, say, is also playing but not performing in most cases. ‘Playing’ neutrally captures occasions of creating musical sound. ‘Performing’ applies more restrictedly as a species of playing.

Performing is not the sole species under the genus ‘playing’. Besides sight-reading, one may rehearse, practise, jam, noodle, and so on. These too are more determinate than playing, and distinct from performing. Terms like ‘concert’, ‘recital’, and ‘show’ typically relate to relatively prominent performance occasions. ‘Rehearsal’, ‘practice session’ and ‘jam session’ denote less formal episodes. Performances tend to be special ritualized occasions, considerably more constrained than rehearsals, practice, or recreational playing. For present purposes, I will take the familiar recital as a standard performance setting.

‘Perform’ and ‘performance’ have both singular and general uses. Singular uses include ‘Paganini performed the Tarantella just once’, and ‘The performance tonight of Brandenburg III starts at 8pm sharp’. The general use occurs in ‘Performance of Finlandia strengthened the people’s resolve to resist the enemy’, and ‘Among other instruments, O’Dette performs on cittern’. ‘Performance’ occasionally means ‘recital’, ‘show’, or ‘concert’; for example, ‘The matinee performance has been cancelled’: while ‘perform’ relates analogously to a general manner of playing; for example, ‘He performed with bravura last night’. In what follows, ‘performance’ is not used synonymously with ‘recital’ or ‘concert’. Instead, individual performances in the sense intended attach to individual works rather than designated venues.

Constituents of performance

As mentioned, performances draw together sounds, agents, works, and listeners. Each of these occupies a role within performance, and collectively they comprise the large, complex, integrated events which performances are. I shall examine these critical constituents and indicate how they are woven together in successful performance.

Sound sequences

Every performance necessarily has sound as a constituent, but no sequence of sounds, considered purely as sound, constitutes a performance. Still, claims like: ‘I heard a performance of Britten’s Nocturnal last night’, suggest that performance can be viewed exhaustively as an object of hearing. Suppose ‘performance’ in the claim refers just to a temporally-bounded ordered set of sounds which fall under a physical-acoustical description involving a transmission medium, sound waves, and wave qualities like frequency and amplitude. Although the sequence presumably was deliberately caused by some human, this forms no explicit part of the reference. But, can the description of a performance fail to coincide with any description of any musical activity?

Surely acoustic properties alone are insufficient to enable one to identify, let alone adequately constitute, any performance, even if such ingredients are elementally required. If there were a ‘music of the spheres’—perfect oscillations of cosmic crystals—the very detachment of the sound from any obvious agent would disqualify it as a performance. It would be space noise, however melodious. More dully, one cannot differentiate through sound alone the music players create and the non-musical tappings of their shoes while playing it, both of which co-exist and result from the movements of their body. To identify performances one must supplement sound sequences by reference to works and performers at least.

Attributing self-sufficiency to sound sequences rests on the odd notion that performances can be identified and characterized independently of players and works. What inspires such a belief?

Recordings might influence such views because of the temptation to say that they capture performances proper rather than mere performance sound. This, however, involves an uncritical assimilation of dissimilar paradigms. Many creative activities—for instance, painting, cooking, sculpting, writing, lute-making—yield independent and independently identifiable results. These activities result in moveable, saleable, collectable things which live independent lives and often outlive their creators. Recordings share these features and may influence conceptions of performance on analogy with the detachability and autonomy of paintings.

Recordings of performances, however, are not performances. Recordings are just traces or records of performances, and no more performances in their own right than photos are the objects photographed. The temptation to neglect this likely stems from the stunning excellence of the resemblance, and its often capturing everything that certain parties are concerned with in the original, while dispensing with the seeming side-effects of live music-making. Common idioms are misleading. Having heard a recording or taped broadcast of the C# Minor Prelude, one typically remarks: ‘I heard a performance of the C# Minor Prelude last night’. But if the performer is dead, to say: ‘I heard Rachmaninoff perform his C# Minor Prelude last night’ is awkward, surely, because literally false.

Performances are essentially events. That alone should make clear their difference from discrete, independent physical objects. Performance sound ceases with the cessation of its generative source, the activity of music-making, and hence is causally dependent upon that source. Even if some sound outlasts the activity (through echo, say), the entire performance cannot outlive all the activity. Most performance sounds overlap with the sound-making. Cause and effect here travel together. Such is not true of detachable, transportable things like paintings.

One may be tempted to reify musical sound if one supposes that auditory experience captures all that is musically significant. One may close one’s eyes at a concert the better to absorb the music. So some listeners believe. But this says less about sound exhausting the musical significance in a performance than it does about the psychological means through which sound may be appreciated and savoured by certain music consumers.

If musical sound alone is not sufficient for performance, perhaps sound is not necessary either. John Cage wrote 4’33? to make this very point. Lasting four minutes and thirty-three seconds, 4’33? involves pure silence and yet calls for everything else normally featured in performance—performers, instruments, audiences, venues. Each of the three sections of 4’33? is marked ‘TACET’. 4’33? is meant for any instrument, and was premiered by David Tudor in Woodstock, New York, 29 August 1952. Tudor, at the piano, indicated the duration of each section by opening and closing the keyboard cover.

Does Cage merit serious regard? Cage purportedly used 4’33? to stress the equal importance of sound and silence in music. Most pieces contain elements of both; but some, like perpetual motion pieces, contain just sound. Why deny musical status to a work consisting of pure silence? If this is the main point of 4’33? it seems a silly analogue to a sight gag. Imagine a culinary cousin, a gourmet’s delight called Holes which consists of an empty folded napkin served with fresh coffee. The message: to stress the equal importance of air and solids in doughnuts. Some doughnuts, the ones with holes, contain elements of both, while others, jelly doughnuts, contain just solids. Why deny culinary status to doughnuts emphasizing pure air? Ignoring general worries about the nature of art, it is questionable whether 4’33? is even a musical work.² If it is not, then performing it cannot be a musical performance. That should caution us against taking it centrally into account.

Most pertinently, 4’33? only works in contrast against a prior paradigm involving sound. Pieces like 4’33? could never be musically typical.

Musical agency

Four aspects of agency are pertinent to performance: causation, intention, skill, and intended audiences. Below, I elaborate upon the claim that musical performances are activities brought about by human agents with certain abilities and with certain intentions about their activities and beneficiaries.

Causation: making music happen

As events, performances have causes, but performances, clearly, are not mere occurrences, but actions undertaken by agents. As such, performance points both to its origin and purpose. The cause of musical performance is standardly some human being.

That said, we talk comfortably about the performance of machines. Taken genetically, human and machine performances share certain features. Consideration of machine performance involves attention to specifications, statistics, and ratings. The specifications and statistics describe what the machine can do under given conditions relative to an assigned task, while the ratings tell us how well it operates relative to other machines. ‘Isaac performed the Chaconne’, describes at least what Isaac did. He caused the Chaconne to be sounded. Isaac’s performance rating: ‘He did it well, given the pressure’.

Similarities fade once individuality enters. ‘Isaac gave a startlingly original performance of the Chaconne’, departs from shop talk. Machines are often of value only if they are reliably replicable, and instances of a particular line are designed to be uniformly reliable and interchangeable in their job. Though I may admire the performance of my particular vacuum cleaner, I do not expect more than uniform reliability and, discounting sentimental attachments, am happy to replace it with another which performs as well. From human performance we customarily expect distinctiveness which, as a norm, is not built into machine performance. Much musical performance thrives on the virtues of unique variety and the unexpected by design which are characteristics of creative, that is, anthropoid, agency.

Musical performance is typically a humanly caused sound sequence. Since humans usually make such sound with certain instruments (including voice), one may expand this with ‘using some specified musical instrument’.

Do player pianos give performances? To eliminate such prospects, one may appeal to the lack of intention in such devices.³ Although intention figures in any paradigm of performance, one may rule out the player piano on other grounds. Player pianos are merely playback devices and so more like record, CD, and tape players than they are like paradigm performers. The roll or magnetic insert functions like a tape or CD. The only difference is the output mechanism. Whether or not the roll played back was punched out by an actual human performance is incidental. The pianola does not interpret its roll. The changes in any sequences of playings can be explained by appeal to determinable environmental changes; for example, the roll is worn in parts, there was a slight power surge, a hammer stuck, etc. What counts is who or what created the roll in the first place. Sound-making devices which actually perform must meet certain elemental causal conditions which player pianos lack; that is, they must programme their own renditions.

Intention: the performer’s plan

Performances are deliberate, intentionally caused sound sequences. They are never involuntary like sneezes, nor accidental or inadvertent. A person, unaware of a certain piece, who plays something sounding just like it by casually running a bow across a cello could only generously be said to have performed that piece. Such a person could not claim the credit that is normally due to one who has given a performance. The intention to perform and beliefs about the immediate context are integral to performance.

What do performers intend in causing sound? Roughly, one intends to cause a certain sound sequence with certain qualities at a certain time. (Works and means also figure, though reference to them here needlessly complicates matters.) Generally, one intends to play well, to meet and even exceed certain standards of proficiency. Time and circumstance may frustrate one’s desires. Delays in opening occur as do mistakes in execution. Sometimes fortune smiles when things go as, or even better than, one had wished. Players surprise themselves occasionally with spontaneous expressiveness.

Questions about certain performance details reflect upon intention and prior planning; for example, ‘Did you really want such a big diminuendo in measure 15’, ‘to slow down that much in bar 22?’, ‘to employ such a brittle sound in the repeat?’. Highly deliberate, self-monitoring players may answer these confidently. Others may not. Some may hold false beliefs about their performance until tapes or reviews set the record straight. One’s performing intentions may be more or less rich depending upon one’s preparatory deliberations. Performance may be pre-planned down to microscopic details, or run more thinly on rough-hewn notions of overall effect. Whatever the degree of pre-planning, performers must have some notion about the desired outcome, some relatively determinate conception of their intended sound.

One cannot have a plan so thin it regulates virtually nothing; for example, the intention to play some sounds or other. This is to renounce all plans, rather like answering ‘Breathe, eat, and sleep’ in response to ‘What do you plan to do with your life?’. In such cases, it cannot matter what sound one causes. In performing it always matters. What of very thin plans; for example, just to cause this sound sequence? Though possibly appropriate in practice as one gears up to conquer technical obstacles, such thinness is at best preparatory only. In itself, it promises nothing of musical interest. Should musical interest arise, it does so arbitrarily and incidentally. Of course, we must exclude cases of apparent thinness, where the player’s past experience and knowledge operate tacitly in the background. There is a minimal thinness of plan below which performance proper either fails completely or fails to get going at the outset.

To perform is to intentionally generate and to regulate the generation of some sound sequence. Such regulatory intentions shape the sound by making certain effects happen. They also comprise a normative template which informs the player how well the performance is going and how it went. Without such templates, no performance ranking is possible. Individuals commonly rank their own performances, not necessarily by audience response, but by conformity to their own ideals. Though one may achieve this conformity by luck, one cannot consistently so achieve it.

That performers must adopt a plan of action against which the relative success of a certain caused sound sequence is assessed suggests that performance has both intrinsic as well as instrumental value. By...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Central Aspects of Performance
• Part II Challenges to the Model
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index