1000227-Paulo de Assis-1 PDF
1000227-Paulo de Assis-1 PDF
1000227-Paulo de Assis-1 PDF
Virtual Works
Actual Things
Essays in Music Ontology
serIes
Virtual Works—Actual Things:
Essays in Music Ontology
VIRTUAL WORKS—
ACTUAL THINGS:
ESSAYS IN MUSIC
ONTOLOGY
Edited by Paulo de Assis
9 Introduction
Paulo de Assis
171 Appendix
The International Orpheus Academy for Music and Theory 2016:
Concerts and Installations
183 Index
5
Acknowledgments
This volume would have been impossible without the active and generous
collaboration of all its authors—Andreas Dorschel, David Davies, Gunnar
Hindrichs, John Rink, and Lydia Goehr—whom I warmly thank for their time,
engagement, and enthusiasm. Further, I thank Kathy Kiloh and Jake McNulty
for their willingness to be part of this project even without having attended
the Orpheus Academy 2016. At the Orpheus Institute, I am particularly grate-
ful to Heloisa Amaral and Lucia D’Errico, two advanced doctoral students who
enormously helped me in designing, preparing, and running the Orpheus
Academy 2016. Their professionalism and affability in communicating with
the faculty members during the Academy contributed greatly to the success-
ful unfolding of the discourse. My thanks also go to Juan Parra Cancino for
his creative collaboration in the musical performances and his technical assis-
tance throughout the Academy. Last but not least, I am grateful to the Orpheus
Institute’s front-desk collaborators Heike Vermeire and Kathleen Snyers, who
highly efficiently communicated with the faculty before, during, and after the
Academy on any practical and logistical matter. Regarding this book, I am
grateful to the Orpheus Institute’s series editor, William Brooks, who enthusi-
astically embraced this publication from my very first proposal, and to Edward
Crooks, who copy-edited the complete volume with the highest professional-
ism and intelligence. Finally, great thanks go to Peter Dejans, the director of
the Orpheus Institute, who consistently facilitated and created all necessary
conditions for the realisation of our Academies, as well as for the publications
issuing from them.
Paulo de Assis
7
Introduction
Paulo de Assis
Orpheus Institute
Rasch
On the morning of 4 April 2016, at the outset of the Orpheus Academy for
Music and Theory 2016, together with other musicians of the ME21 Collective,1
I performed a new iteration of Rasch, an artistic research project around Robert
Schumann’s piano fantasy Kreisleriana (1838, 1850).2 Under the title Rasch14:
Loving Barthes(3), the complete musical score of Schumann’s piece was played on
a modern grand piano. Additionally, the performance included pre-recorded
sounds and live electronics, as well as video projections of texts, images, and
film fragments. The performance had no perceptible beginning: when the
doors opened, a sonic installation based upon a recorded reading of Roland
Barthes’s 1979 essay “Loving Schumann” was diffused over four loudspeak-
ers. Another essay by Barthes—“Rasch,” from 1975—functioned as a constant,
recurrent conceptual layer throughout the complete performance, fragments
of which were projected onto the walls or heard through the loudspeakers. At
some points, the pianist, while scrupulously playing all the notes prescribed in
the score, played them in extreme slow motion. At other times he sustained a
chord, or even stopped playing for more than a minute. Other pieces of music
were played live or through the loudspeakers at specific moments of the per-
formance: Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte (especially number 6, “Nimm sie hin
denn, diese Lieder,” at the end of Kreisleriana no. 2), Ignaz Moscheles’s Etude car-
actéristique pour piano, op. 95, no. 1 (immediately before Kreisleriana no. 5), Bach’s
Gigue from the second French Suite, BWV 813 (as a lead-in to Kreisleriana no.
1 The ME21 Collective is composed of artistic researchers involved in or collaborating with the research
project MusicExperiment21, a five-year programme on practice-based research in music. The project
brings together diverse artistic, performative, historical, methodological, epistemological, and philo-
sophical approaches, creating experimental performance practices and new modes of thinking about
music and its performance. The project crucially moves from interpretation towards experimentation, a
term that is not used in relation to measurable phenomena, but rather to an attitude, to a willingness
to constantly reshape thoughts and practices, to operate new redistributions of music materials, and to
afford unexpected reconfigurations of music. The project is funded by the European Research Council
and is hosted at the Orpheus Institute. The ME21 Collective is its performative extension. It is made of
musicians, performers, composers, dancers, actors, and philosophers, and it has no stable formation.
Its modes of communication include conventional formats such as concerts, performances, and instal-
lations, but also lectures, publications, and web expositions. It has performed in Argentina, Austria,
Belgium, Brazil, Germany, Ireland, Portugal, and the United Kingdom.
2 Rasch is a series of mutational performances, lectures, and essays grounded upon two fundamental
materials: Robert Schumann’s Kreisleriana, op. 16 (1838, 1850), and Roland Barthes’s essays on the music
of Schumann, written in 1970, 1975, and 1979 (see Barthes 1985a, 1985b, 1985c), particularly “Rasch,” a
text exclusively dedicated to Schumann’s Kreisleriana. To these materials other components are added
for each particular version: visual elements, other texts, or further aural elements. An overview of the
complete instantiations of the Rasch series is available at Research Catalogue, https://www.researchcat-
alogue.net/view/64319/64320. A full-length video recording of Rasch111: Loving Barthes[1], can be watched
online at https://www.researchcatalogue.net/view/99320/99321.
DOI https://doi.org/10.11116/9789461662521.ch00
Paulo de Assis
8), and very short fragments of the Goldberg Variations, BWV 988 (during the
pre-performance sound installation), and also recordings of pianists like Yves
Nat and Vladimir Horowitz playing Schumann’s Kreisleriana. Instead of the cus-
tomary thirty or so minutes of a rendering of Kreisleriana, this performance had
a duration of around fifty-five minutes.
Clearly, this was not a performance “of ” Kreisleriana, though all its pitches,
rhythms, dynamics, and formal “proportions” have been played and “faithfully”
respected. It was also not a performance “about” Kreisleriana, as it had no ped-
agogical intention of revealing to the audience anything it didn’t know before
(even if that happened as a side effect). And it was also not a performance “after”
Kreisleriana, for the simple reason that the full score was played in an intended
mainstream, modern mode of musical interpretation. Significantly, all mater
ials external to Schumann’s score, all the various layers that were brought into
dialogue with it, were not chosen incidentally or “associatively,” but rather fol-
lowing a precise and rigorous research process. Every single component of the
performance had a close relation to Schumann’s piece, be it prior to the com-
position as a fertile humus that had an impact on the compositional process, or
a posteriori, as reflective exercises directly inspired by the piece. As examples of
such materials, one can mention the following: Roland Barthes’s essay “Rasch,”
which is exclusively dedicated to Kreisleriana (see Barthes 1985b); his text “Loving
Schumann,” which not only is devoted to the German composer but also was
published as the introduction to Marcel Beaufils’s monograph on Schumann’s
piano music (see Barthes 1985a; Beaufils 1979); Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte,
which is literally quoted in Schumann’s Fantasie, op. 17 (composed immediately
before Kreisleriana), in a passage with close melodic resemblance to the end of
Kreisleriana no. 2; Moscheles’s piano study Zorn [Anger] that served as direct
inspiration for Kreisleriana no. 5 (see Rostagno 2007, 98–102); and Bach’s Gigue
from the second French Suite, whose rhythmical pattern is exactly the same as
the rhythm of the main theme of Kreisleriana no. 8.
Kreisleriana, a famous piece of the mainstream pianistic repertoire, is regarded
as well known; thus, normally, there would be many “fully qualified”3 perfor-
mances and recordings of it. However, we now know, at least since Antonio
Rostagno’s (2007) exhaustive account of the compositional and editorial his-
tory of this piece, that this is not the case. Not only are there two versions of
the score (the first from 1838, the second from 1850), but also four different
editions were printed in the nineteenth century, two prepared by Schumann,
the other two by Clara Schumann (see Rostagno 2007, 205–8). In the twentieth
century, attempts were made to offer the reader a combination of all these dis-
parate bits of information. The result was that, with the exception of Charles
Rosen, every single pianist plays the version of 1850, but does not really play
everything as it was notated by Schumann—some possible alternative passages
from the 1838 version “infiltrate” these renderings, so that most performances
3 On the notion of “fully qualified” performances, see David Davies in this volume, p. 47, where he states
that “something is fully qualified to play the experiential role in the appreciation of a given artwork X at a
time t just in case at t it possesses all those experienceable properties that are necessary, according to the
practices of the art form in question, to fully play this role.”
10
Introduction
we hear today are of a musical object that was not exactly designed in that man-
ner by the composer. So much for “fully qualified” illusions.4
But, beyond the specific problem of “the score,” the question that the per
formance made by the ME21 Collective raises is of a different nature: what kind
of relation is there between all these things—that were part of the performance
and that have an umbilical relation with the piece—and Schumann’s work?
What are these things in relation to this piece? In an orthodox ontological
account, they have nothing to do with Kreisleriana.5 Still, they obviously do
concern it. Ontological questions were not part of the original research plan
of MusicExperiment21, and we did not turn to them from a philosophical will
to clarify the nature of our objects of daily work. Nor did we aim at developing
a new aesthetic model for the reception of past musical works. More simply,
but—I suspect—with deeper consequences, we found ourselves in a situation
where our own practices could not be aesthetically assessed on the basis of
existing ontological accounts, and where our ways of working with the mater
ials started suggesting new and alternative views of what a musical work is,
which component parts it might have, and how its material constitutive parts
allow for the individual and collective construction of an “image of work.”
Crucially, our mode of operating clearly considers the performative moment
not as a place for representation of already known sound structures, but of a
critical problematisation of the musical objects under consideration. With the
project Rasch, a major breakthrough happened: it seemed to us that musical
works could be considered from a completely new perspective, moving beyond
currently available music ontologies, which are based on a representational mode
of thinking about musical works.6 Is there a possibility to think about those
4 I am referring here to those ontological accounts that determine a work’s “qualification” solely on the
basis of a score or a plurality of scores, per se. This view must be differentiated from other accounts
(such as the one mentioned in the preceding footnote) that are less essentialist, including the modal-
ities through which a given musical community frames and receives performance practices. I thank
David Davies for calling my attention to this important differentiation.
5 David Davies has pointed out that this statement depends on which particular ontological account I am
referring to. As Davies wrote (pers. comm.): “For a contextualist like Levinson or myself, at least some
of the things included in the performance do enter into the work. To cite the most obvious example, the
Beethoven passage quoted by Schumann in the earlier piece [Fantasie, op. 17] would, for the contextual-
ist, be partly constitutive of the earlier piece, in the sense that the passage features in Schumann’s work
as a quotation, and a failure to grasp this is a flaw in a listener’s grasp of that piece. Whether this also
extends to Kreisleriana will depend, for the contextualist, on how [he or] she takes this to itself relate to
the earlier piece.” In any case, Davies agrees with me in that “even for such a contextualist, most of the
things incorporated into the performance of Rasch would not enter into the appreciation of Kreisleriana
as a work.” As an example of relative openness to the inclusion of heterogeneous components into a
work, Davies mentions Jerrold Levinson, who “thinks that the ways in which future composers or per-
formers take up elements in a given piece do enter into a full engagement with the latter.” I thank David
for this precise and crucial remark.
6 With “representation,” I am referring to the performance “of ” something, or, more precisely, to the
performance of something “as” something, which implies the existence of something “original,” prior
to the performance, something that is then rendered perceptible through some sort of “representation”
in the moment of the performance. In this sense, the performance functions as a “representation” of
something exterior to it. Thus, I am not referring to the old aesthetic question of music’s “resistance to
representation,” related to the absence of the signified in musical pitches, rhythms, or formal structures.
In any case, music theory and music philosophy have a long tradition of thinking about musical entities
in representational terms. As Christopher Hasty (2010, 4) has put it, “[even] if music seems to defy rep-
resentation and has occasionally challenged the claims of representation, music theory has embraced
representation as a way of fixing the musical object.”
11
Paulo de Assis
entities that we usually call “musical works” in another way? Is there another
way of conceiving musical renderings of past musical objects? Is it possible to
move beyond the classical paradigm of music performance and reception? How
could all those materials that are not supposed to be played in a performance,
but which obviously relate to a given “musical work,” be considered as being
part of that work? What kind of “image of work” would that imply? It seemed to
me that there are multiple ways of thinking about, and of conceiving, musical
works. And every specific image of work has implications for its renderings
in concerts, recordings, performances, or installations. All of a sudden, in
the middle of the MusicExperiment21 project, and to my own surprise, I saw
myself obliged to address ontological questions, as new views on ontological
issues seemed to be necessary. And this was the reason to organise the Orpheus
Academy 2016 on this topic, to which we invited some of the leading experts in
the field.
12
Introduction
13
Paulo de Assis
7 Most of the comments were made via email, in a rather informal mode of communication that also
included comments within the written files. These comments have been integrated into the main text,
and the author of the comment only appears (as a footnote) in those cases where a clearly different
voice made or suggested some sort of clarification that positively influenced the essay.
8 The only exception is Gunnar Hindrichs, who due to several other commitments could not take part in
this exchange of thoughts and comments.
9 A special case is Lydia Goehr’s essay, which is followed by three formal “responses” that were written
independently of the Orpheus Academy 2016. Earlier versions of Goehr’s paper had been presented at
the University of Toronto (2015), and at the Philosophy Department at the New School for Social Re-
search, New York (see Chapter Six, footnote 2). On that occasion, Goehr received two written responses
to her presentation, which, given their interest, and in line with our idea of a collective discourse, are
published here for the first time. My own comment to her essay can be seen as a third response, making
also the bridge to the concrete artistic presentations that took place during the Orpheus Academy 2016,
which are briefly described in the concluding Appendix.
10 I wish to deeply thank David for his generous analysis of our statements, and for including us in his
elaborated map of ontologies. I think he is correct from the point of view of currently available music
ontologies, though I will argue that MusicExperiment21 operates outside such ontologies, suggesting a
new image of work that is, at the same time, “more ideal” than Platonism’s views (including an “excess”
of virtual singularities), and more empirical than nominalistic accounts (being grounded on actual,
individual singularities). I will briefly explain these notions further on, and in greater detail in my
forthcoming book Logic of Experimentation: Rethinking Music Performance in and through Artistic Research (De
Assis 2018).
14
Introduction
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Paulo de Assis
11 One should note that, whereas Goehr aimed at a social ontology, rooted in history and historicity,
Davies is trying to better define an abstract ontology, in the tradition of transcendent music ontologies.
16
Introduction
References
Barthes, Roland. 1985a. “Loving Schumann.” in Langue, discours, société: Pour Émile
In Barthes 1985d, 293–98. First published Benveniste, edited by Julia Kristeva, Jean-
1979 as “Aimer Schumann,” preface to Claude Milner, and Nicolas Ruwet (Paris:
Beaufils 1979, 9–16. Éditions du Seuil).
———. 1985b. “Rasch.” In Barthes 1985d, ———. 1985c. “Musica Practica.” In Barthes
299–312. First published 1975 as “Rasch,” 1985d, 261–66. First published 1970 as
17
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18
Virtual Works—
Actual Things
Paulo de Assis
Orpheus Institute
During the International Orpheus Academy for Music and Theory 2016, I pre-
sented a first attempt towards a completely renewed perspective on musical
entities, one that could move beyond existing music ontologies, relating more
to current performance practices and to the vast amount of available music
sources and documents. Since the Academy, and partly as a result of it,1 my ideas
developed into a music ontological thought strongly inspired by the differen-
tial ontology of Gilles Deleuze. A detailed account of my “new image of work”
will be a major part of my forthcoming monograph Logic of Experimentation (De
Assis 2018), but I wish to present its fundamental traits in this chapter, not least
because they explain the title of this book, and of the Orpheus Academy 2016.
I will proceed in three steps: First (section 1), I will point out some of the prob-
lems with currently available music ontologies, as they have been discussed
in recent years (mostly) by analytic philosophers. Next (section 2), I will pre
sent some basic components of a Deleuzian ontology as it has been extracted
from his writings by post-Deleuzian philosophers (prominently by Manuel
DeLanda, and first and foremost based upon Deleuze’s seminal book Difference
and Repetition). Finally (section 3), I will present a novel way of thinking about
musical entities, suggesting a “new image of work,” and, consequently, an
alternative music ontology. I would like to emphasise that I do not claim to
offer a complete, finished, and transparent ontological account. It is more of
an attempt (a Versuch) that will be followed by other essays addressing specific
topics in greater detail.
1 I wish to express my gratitude to Lydia Goehr, David Davies, and Lucia D’Errico for their extensive and
precise comments on draft versions of this chapter.
19
DOI https://doi.org/10.11116/9789461662521.ch01
Paulo de Assis
2 Guy Rohrbaugh’s ontological arguments have been of personal interest to me, especially his notions of
“continuants” and “historical individuals” (that he vaguely retrieves from biology and from processes
of speciation), which makes his position—among all other currently available accounts—the one that
comes closest to my own practice and perspective (even if still with substantial differences). Further-
more, I also share with him his declared scepticism about music ontologies, a scepticism related to the
widespread use of a philosophical terminology that has lost the connection to the modes of existence of
musical works and practices of our day.
3 For a precise and concise description of Platonism, nominalism, fictionalism, perdurantism, endurant-
ism, and eliminativism, see the chapter by David Davies in this volume (pp. 45–64). Another excellent
overview of ongoing positions and discussions, including viewpoints from several authors, is the volume
Art and Abstract Objects, edited by Christy Mag Uidhir (2012), particularly Andrew Kania’s essay “Plato-
nism vs. Nominalism in Contemporary Musical Ontology” (2012). A further recent edited volume on
music ontology is Alessandro Arbo and Marcello Ruta’s Ontologie Musicale: Perspectives et débats (2014).
4 As David Davies mentioned to me (pers. comm.), analytic philosophers acknowledge the existence
of some practical forms of knowledge (“knowledge [of ] how [to do things]”), “and many [analytic
philosophers] would recognize that some knowledge is irreducibly embodied.” For a detailed account
of the complex field of analytic philosophy in relation to music, see David Davies’s forthcoming essay
“Analytic Philosophy of Music,” which will be part of the Oxford Handbook on Western Music and Philosophy.
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Virtual Works—Actual Things
phers, such as Ross P. Cameron, Ben Caplan, Carl Matheson, David Davies,
Julian Dodd, Andrew Kania, Chris Tillman, and Guy Rohrbaugh (among oth-
ers), have contributed major essays on art and musical ontology, renewing
an analytic discourse initiated in the 1960s and continued up until the 1980s
by music thinkers such as Nelson Goodman, Richard Wollheim, Nicholas
Wolterstorff, Jerrold Levinson, Stanley Cavell, Peter Kivy, and Stephen Davies
(among others). The problem with this analytic tradition is that, despite their
differences, the very structure of its arguments, so fundamentally concerned
with the conditions of identity, is incompatible with the objects it pretends to
define and explain (see Butt 2002, 62). Analytic philosophers define the iden-
tity of things by the necessary conditions that enable such things to belong to a
general category, that is to say, they must have an “essence.”5 It was this kind of
analytical landscape that Lydia Goehr, back in 1992, managed to call into ques-
tion. Her critical perspective addresses not so much whether musical “works”
exist as the particular moment in history when a specific way of conceiving
musical works became “the” regulative force for musical practices. Goehr
first and foremost disclosed the regulative function of the work-concept,
showing its profound historicity. As a consequence, and in a second (though
critical) moment, the work-concept itself appears as dependent on a historical
point of view. As John Butt (2002, 62–63) expressed it, “In Goehr’s account, no
analytic theory adequately accounts for the historical boundary of the music
that it concerns.[6] . . . According to Goehr [the work-concept] is an ‘open
concept,’ allowing for the subtraction or addition of defining characteristics
provided that its continuity is assured and that it is consistently recognisable
over its period of operation.” Goehr was simply trying to get hold of the innu-
merable musical practices that were obviously incompatible with analytic con-
structions deprived of any sense of historical situatedness and ideally placed
in a world without time and imperfections. As Goehr ([1992] 2007, 86) put it,
“The lurking danger remains that the [analytic] theories will probably become
forever divorced from the phenomena and practices they purportedly seek to
explain. . . . The problem with the search for identity conditions resides in the
incompatibility between the theoretical demands of identity conditions and
the phenomena to be accounted for.” Moreover, the theoretical abstraction of
analytic philosophies is not only divorced from musical practice, it is also com-
pletely removed from philological studies, from research on sketches, music
editorial practices, changes in execution and interpretation paradigms—in a
nutshell, from the complexities of history, and from the concrete, processual,
5 In this respect, David Davies (pers. comm.) reminded me that that both Goodman’s and Wollheim’s
writings “explicitly reject the project of defining art, any of the arts, and limit themselves to the more
modest task of providing necessary conditions” for the existence of an artwork.
6 Here too, David Davies makes a call for a more nuanced formulation, taking into account recent devel-
opments in analytic philosophy. As Davies wrote (pers. comm.): “I think this is the important criticism
of much of the analytic work on music (e.g., Kivy), although it is not true of all the writers you cite [in
this chapter]. Levinson, for example, restricts his account of ‘what a musical work is’ to musical works of
a certain period, and recent work by analytic philosophers has been much more sensitive to differences
between musical practices. But it is also true that when Lydia Goehr wrote her book [late 1980s], analyt-
ic philosophy of music was, for the most part, guilty of the things she charged.”
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and immanent fabrication of all those documents that enable us to think about
“musical works” in the first place.
A second problem with contemporary ontologies concerns the problem of
representation. Despite their profound differences and quarrels, the three main
existing umbrella theories—Platonism, nominalism, fictionalism—share a
common trait: they are all sustained by a representational model of thought
and by representational musical practices. There is always the performance or
the apprehension of something “as” something, or the performance “of ” some-
thing. Whatever one perceives in any specific here-and-now (a performance, a
recording, a description), it is a “representation” of something else.7 Platonists
insist on the primacy of an original idea and of perfectly encapsulated sound
structures (Wollheim’s types) that can be represented through performances
(Wollheim’s tokens, which can be qualified or fully-qualified). Nominalists focus
on the material entities internal to musical practice, rejecting abstracta but
keeping the central assumption of performance as based upon the repeatabil-
ity and variablity of an immanently generated but clearly well-articulated work,
which crucially pre-exists the performance and to which the performance is
compared, thus reintroducing a transcendental entity into the picture. For
fictionalists there are no works altogether, but through their construction of
works “as if they existed” they commit—in practical terms—to the same model
of performance as presenting (or representing) a pre-given musical entity (even
if phantasmatic). They all agree that there “are” musical works (the exception
being the eliminativists), and they all look for “what kind of things they are.”
However, despite their considerable differences, these three main currents
of music ontology further share a common set of fundamental questions that
relate to the conditions of identity of musical works: What exactly is a musical
work? Are musical works abstract ideas or concrete things? How can a musical
work be identified as this musical work? How can an instantiation of a work be
considered as adequate, legitimate, or, to use the language of ontologists, “fully
qualified”? In addition to the conditions of identity, these questions also relate to
the criteria of judgement of any given appearance of a musical work, thus doubly
pertaining to a representational mode of thinking, a mode that is actually of
Aristotelian imprint rather than Platonic.
In this double sense, the vast majority of current music ontologies could
be seen as actually relying on the Aristotelian world of representation. But
this world is umbilically related to Plato’s theory of ideas. The very notion of
representation implies something prior to it that has the capacity for “being
represented.” As Gilles Deleuze argued in a long section of Difference and
Repetition (1994, 262–304), the Aristotelian world of representation is enabled,
first and foremost by Plato’s theory of ideas, and crucially by its intrinsic moral
motivation.
7 Broadly agreeing with me (“this is true of mainstream analytic ontology of music”), David Davies stress-
es that there are some exceptions, among which he counts Kania’s paper “All Play and No Work” (2011)
(which rejects the assumption among many analytic writers that most jazz performances also fall under
the classical paradigm) and Stephen Davies’s account of jazz performances (2001).
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Virtual Works—Actual Things
While discussing and critically challenging Plato’s notions of copy and simu-
lacrum, Deleuze observes—in the conclusion to Difference and Repetition—that
from a Platonist perspective the copy can always be systematically distin-
guished from the simulacrum by subordinating its own difference to a fourfold
principle: of the Same, the Similar, the Analogous, and the Opposed (ibid.).
According to Deleuze, these strict verifiable correspondences do not per se
imply a system based upon representation: “with Plato these instances are not
yet distributed as they will be in the deployed world of representation (from
Aristotle onwards)” (ibid.). It is in the transition from the Platonic world to the
world of representation that “a slippage occurs” (ibid.). As Miguel de Beistegui
(analysing and paraphrasing Deleuze’s reversal of Platonism) makes clear:
Thus, it was actually after Plato that “the sameness of the Platonic Idea . . .
gives way to the identity of the concept, oriented towards the form of identity in
the object, and grounded in a self-identical thinking subject” (ibid., 61). A “thinking
subject” that “brings to the concept its subjective concomitants: memory, rec-
ognition and self-consciousness” (Deleuze 1994, 266). In this new representa-
tional model, both objects and subjects are taken as being perfectly defined,
transparent, and uncorrupted. This is what allows analytical investigations (of
the objects, but also of their coded, i.e., linguistic articulations), on the one
side, and for phenomenological considerations (of and by the subjects), on the
other. The main operation for knowing the world becomes recognition, and dif-
ference in thought disappears because, as Beistegui (2012, 61) observes, “the
image of thought as recognition . . . requires the concordance and collabora-
tion of all faculties (perception, memory, reason, imagination, judgment, etc.)
in the presentation of the same object, or the object in the form of self-identity.
Far from breaking with the doxa, and becoming paradoxical, the dominant image
of thought inherited from Platonism solidifies into an orthodoxy, all the more
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8 In this respect, Gunnar Hindrichs writes that “Every ontology manifests a conceptual scheme that
articulates the great chain of being” (see Hindrichs, in this book, pp. 67, my emphasis).
9 Against DeLanda, David Davies (pers. comm.) claims that he is describing something closer to logicism,
a view of mathematics to which “very few analytic philosophers [would] subscribe.”
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Virtual Works—Actual Things
10 In my view, this is the point where Rohrbaugh could have found a way out of the analytic tradition,
making a critique of what he just so precisely described. Unfortunately, he continues alluding to the
Aristotelian way of thinking about species as “scattered individuals” whose constitutive parts are
individual creatures (his constituants, which have been strongly criticised by music Platonists). Within
the ontological account that I propose further down, Rohrbaugh’s continuants can find a new mode of
existence, independent of transcendent systems and from hierarchical categorisations.
11 P. D. Magnus (2012, 108) even writes that Julian Dodd pronounced an “accusation” against Rohrbaugh’s
idea that “historical individuals are familiar parts of the world.”
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If one is looking for some kind of ally in the search for a novel, nonhierarchical,
and fully immanent ontology, Gilles Deleuze seems to be one of the best placed
philosophers to help us. As is well known, the overturning of Platonism (in the
wake of Nietzsche’s famous claim) and the overcoming of “representation”
were two of Gilles Deleuze’s life-long projects, and they are at the very core of
his primary thesis for his Doctorat d’État, his famous book from 1968, Différence
et répétition (see Deleuze 1994). Deleuze himself did not “officially” write texts
specifically devoted to ontological issues, but, as Constantin V. Boundas (2005b,
191) has written, “For Deleuze, philosophy is ontology,” and one could even
claim that his books (also those co-authored with Félix Guattari) make signifi
cant contributions, not to “one” ontology but to several, multiple ontologies.
Crucially, Deleuze’s philosophy is one of difference, a difference that remains
unsubordinated to “identity” and to “being,” rejecting hierarchical categories,
and insisting on the profound reality (and realism) of his concepts of the virtual,
the intensive, and the actual, which manifest themselves in various assemblages
of energies, forces, and tendencies, making the world in which humans and
non-humans live.
Among other philosophies of difference (such as Derrida’s), one must stress
the point that while rejecting laws and axioms, Deleuze “offers us principles
and methods . . . whereas Derrida offers us an ethos and style of writing about
difference explicitly resistant to the emergence of principles or methods”
(Williams 2013, 27). For someone operating in the creative field of artistic
research, which is by definition a “constructivist” field of activity (as it gener-
ates objects or events of artistic nature), a permanent resistance to principles
and methods would be counterproductive, if not simply sterile. That’s why phil-
osophers like Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, or Félix Guattari are so relevant
to artistic research: they offer a possibility for thought and practice outside laws
and axiomatic principles, but they also enable the positive fabrication of materi-
alities issuing from intensive processes. “Deleuze’s ontology,” as Constantin V.
Boundas (2005b, 191) makes clear, “is a rigorous attempt to think of process and
metamorphosis—becoming—not as a transition or transformation from one
substance to another or a movement from one point to another, but rather as
an attempt to think of the real as a process” (my emphasis). If the real is thought
of as a process, its processuality simultaneously is fed by and generates a con-
tinuous flux of forces and intensities, which reveal themselves only in the very
moment of their transductive actualisation. These forces and intensities do
generate forms and matter, but it would be a mistake to think of them exclu-
sively in terms of things and their qualities. Extension and extended magnitudes
are only the result of the intensive genesis of the extended. “Becoming” is not
“becoming-Being,” but a much more complex and elaborated process of per-
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Virtual Works—Actual Things
Actual/virtual
The terminological doublet virtual–actual is central to the ontology of Gilles
Deleuze, being present in his books and essays since his first published texts
on Henri Bergson in 1956. Actual and virtual describe the fundamental domains
of Deleuze’s differential ontology. According to Anne Sauvagnargues (2003,
22, my translation), “the actual designates the present and material state of
things, while the virtual refers to everything that is not currently/presently
here (including incorporeal, past, or ideal events).” It is the exchange and
communication between the actual and the virtual that enable a dynamics of
becoming as different/ciation and creation. Primary differences of energy and
energetic potentials generate “differentiation” (virtual structure) and “dif-
ferenciation” (the genesis of actuality). Such dynamics always happen in the
form of an event—an event being the individuation of differentiation, and the
actualisation of differenciation. One cannot overstress that for Deleuze, both
the virtual and the actual are real. As Deleuze (1994, 208–9) himself has put it:
“The virtual is opposed not to the real but to the actual. The virtual is fully real.
. . . Indeed, the virtual must be defined as strictly a part of the real object—as
though the object had one part of itself in the virtual into which it plunged as
though into an objective dimension. . . . The reality of the virtual consists of
the differential elements and relations along with the singular points which
correspond to them.”
Importantly, Deleuze’s virtual is by no means to be understood in terms of
“virtual reality,” but, on the contrary, as something absolutely real, that is even
“actually” perceived as tension or inconsistencies in/of the actual, as a dia-
grammatic reservoir of effectively potential actualisations (some of which will
affect the world, some of which not), but that exist in a topological space of
possibilities.14 Moreover, the distinction between the virtual and the actual is
12 For a thorough discussion of the relations between the couple virtual–real and the notion of becoming,
see Boundas (2007, 489–91).
13 Other concepts, such as the couple molar–molecular, the dark precursor, the quasi-cause, transduction, or the
event are not addressed here for the sake of space, though they are also central to Deleuze’s ontological
construction.
14 It is in this sense that Deleuze, directly inspired by Bergson, could talk of a past that has never been
present (the virtual as immemorial past), and of a future that will never be present (the virtual as a never-
attainable messianic future). This link between the couple virtual–real and past–future temporalities
prevents any reification of the past (as in Plato’s recollection), or of the future (as in some teleological
ideologies) as it presupposes non-determining and non-deterministic tendencies.
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Intensity
Both the virtual and the actual appear, then, as the result of concrete energetic
processes, involving the passage, the relay, or the transformation of one type of
energy into another, crucially establishing a connection between two or more
series with different energetic potentials. The virtual does not exist a priori to
the intensive processes that generate it; it does not pre-deterministically define
the processes of its actualisation (which would imply a kind of neo-Platonism).
At the same time, the actual is not an “image” (a “copy”) of a pre-existing model,
but it emerges progressively as the result of concrete intensive processes of
onto- and morphogenesis. Before the definition of any ontological category,
there are several constantly ongoing ontological processes, which are summa-
rised—in Deleuze’s terminology—under the notion of the intensive. Intensive
processes generate singularities in the two sides of the real: individual singu-
larities in the actual–real, and universal singularities in the virtual–real. Thus,
Deleuze’s notion of intensity, the pre-individual relationship between two or
more fields with different potentials, gains centrality within his ontological
scheme. Intensities are not ontological entities or categories (as the virtual and
the actual can be considered to be), they are real events “whose mode of exist-
ence is to actualise themselves in states of affairs” (Boundas 2005a, 131).
A thorough discussion of the complex relations between the virtual, the actual,
and the intensive would lie outside the scope of this chapter, especially as there
have been several attempts to clarify this topic, each leading to significantly
different understandings.15 Be that as it might be, what seems clear from all
these different understandings of Deleuze’s ontology, is that “intensity holds
15 In fact, there is no consensus about the precise placement of these three notions within Deleuze’s on-
tological system. Dale Clisby’s recent essay “Intensity in Context: Thermodynamics and Transcendental
Philosophy” (2017, especially 250–55) offers a short, yet precise, overview of the three main currently
available positions: (1) those who align the intensive with the virtual, which is the (critical) position of
Peter Hallward (2006) and Alain Badiou (2000); (2) those who think the intensive as a third ontological
domain, as has been convincingly proposed by Manuel DeLanda (2002) and John Protevi (2013), who
excavated the precise scientific influences in the writings of Deleuze; and (3) those who consider the in-
tensive as being part of the actual, or as “the being of the actual” as Jon Roffe (2012, as quoted in Clisby
2017, 253) has suggested.
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Virtual Works—Actual Things
the true key for Deleuze’s metaphysical system,” as Clisby (2017, 251) pointedly
summarises. Critically, Deleuze’s ontology is an ontology of forces and of actu-
alisations, not an ontology of actualised phenomena. As its object, it takes not
the completed form (be it ideal or nominal) but formation itself. In the words
of James Williams (2013, 42), “Deleuze’s view is that no object is fully accounted
for through its actual properties since the changes that it has undergone and
will undergo, and the differences implied in those changes, must be consid-
ered to be part of the object.” In this sense, as long as we insist on the existence
of well-defined things, Deleuze’s position will not be grasped, and his case to
overturn Plato and Aristotle will not prevail. With Williams (ibid., 69), one can
say that “to be is not to be a well-defined thing with recognisable limits [but]
on the contrary, it is to be a pure movement or variation in relation to well-
defined things.” The process of actualisation does not occur in a vacuum:
“at every moment there exists a field of intensity implicated in the explicated
objects of experience” (Clisby 2017, 254).
Within a dynamic system, any process of individuation starts from inten-
sity, leading to the emergence of singularities, whether actual singularities
or virtual ones. In the fifth chapter of Difference and Repetition, Deleuze (1994,
247) clearly states that individuation precedes and gives rise to actualisation:
“Individuation does not presuppose any differenciation; it gives rise to it.”
Thus, “every differenciation presupposes a prior intense field of individuation”
(ibid.). Critically, this “prior intense field of individuation” is a problematic field.
There is no transparent nor straightforward correspondence between the prior
field of individuation, the field of individuation itself, and the individuated sin-
gularity it affords. In all phases and at all moments of the individuating pro-
cess there are multiple and incommensurable forces playing a complex game
of intensive tendencies and unfoldings. Any intensive process is a metastable
flux of energetic discharges, potentials, and tendencies. And whereas this dif-
ferentiation establishes a problematisation, the concrete actualisations of that
virtual field express differenciations as the constitution of solutions (by local
integrations), leading to the formation of actual things. Such things are formed
by different sets of specific individual singularities that are actualised in the
here-and-now, in the present. The process of differenciation happens through
transduction, changing one type of energy into another, critically leading to the
formation of new and unexpected individuations, which contain emergent
properties that were not predetermined in advance. These actualisations result
in individual singularities, which can be things, objects, or documents, all with
two parts: an extensive part (quantitatively measurable and divisible) and an
intensive part (qualitatively active and non-divisible). The actual things in the
world are thus not only the result of an intensive genesis, as they remain proces-
sual, even within their physical constraints. They are never (or only very rarely)
petrified in a final state of zero energy. Intensive processes never stop and never
come to an end.
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Singularities
From the working together of the notions of virtual-actual, intensity, and trans-
duction (or modulation as Anne Sauvagnargues prefers to call it16), one starts
grasping the virtual diagrams and the actual things that populate Deleuze’s mater-
ialist world—a world that radically departs from, and that is totally different
from, the Aristotelian system of categories.17 With the couple virtual–actual
and with intensity, we have the ontological “domains” of Deleuze’s system. I
will now turn to those entities that Deleuze acknowledges as existing in the
world.18 For Deleuze, the actual world is populated only by individual singulari-
ties that often appear as populations of individual singularities, which exist in
different spatio-temporal scales and in different modes of interaction among
individual components. The actual world is the world of actual things, and all
these things have the same ontological status—thus, no hierarchies, but a
flat ontology to start with. As DeLanda (2010, 83) makes clear: “In [Deleuze’s]
approach all actual entities are considered to be individual singularities, that is,
all belong to the lowest level of Aristotle’s ontological hierarchy, while the roles
of the two upper levels are performed by universal singularities.”
Every individual singularity emerges as the outcome of a historical process, it
is the concrete result of intensive processes that occur in the world. Every sin-
gularity is produced or fabricated in a specific point in time and space. So, for
example, atoms of hydrogen are fabricated inside stars; there is no “hydrogen
in general,” but a concrete population of materially existing hydrogen atoms
(DeLanda 2010, 85). Likewise, there is no canis familiaris in general, but rather a
population of single dogs, each of which is an individual singularity, unique and
unrepeatable (as a simple DNA test can prove). As every individual singularity
is unique, special, and remarkable, what deserves attention are not the “spe-
cies” but the moment of “speciation,” that particular moment when something
changes state or phase, when a mutation occurs, when a cosmic phenomenon
happens. Bigger populations of singular individuals define “larger individuals,”
and what matters are those moments when a new species appears, and when
it disappears. Species are historical entities that depend on the concrete evo-
lution, transformation, and mutations of all the individual singularities that
define them—one individual at a time, one by one. The focus on such onto-
genetical processes, on intensive individuations, enables Deleuze to populate
reality exclusively with immanent entities, eliminating any transcendent ones,
such as the essences of Aristotle’s two upper categories, genus and species. For
16 See Sauvagnargues (2016, especially chapter 4, “The Concept of Modulation in Deleuze, and the Impor-
tance of Simondon to the Deleuzian Aesthetic,” 61–84).
17 Deleuze’s extremely dense critique of Aristotle—which essentially focuses on his concept of “differ-
ence,” and which aims at showing that Aristotle’s definition of difference is problematic and misses
a deeper understanding of the term—is to be found in paragraphs three to five of the second section
of the first chapter (“Difference in Itself ”) of Difference and Repetition (Deleuze 1994, 38–44). On this
difficult passage, see also Williams (2013, 64–68), Somers-Hall (2013, 23–30), and Hughes (2009, 40–42).
18 As this is a notoriously difficult task, I support my inquiry with reference to authors who have already
dealt with this topic in great depth. In addition to Constantin V. Boundas, I am deeply indebted to
Manuel DeLanda’s several accounts of a Deleuzian ontology, to Anne Sauvagnargues on its implica-
tions for art, and to Arkady Plotnitsky for his invaluable clarifications in relation to mathematics (see
Boundas 2005b, 2005c, 2007; DeLanda 2002, 2006, 2010, 2012; Sauvagnargues 2003, 2005, 2013, 2016;
Plotnitsky 2006, 2009).
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Virtual Works—Actual Things
Aristotle the world is already divided by general and specific categories that are
eternal, unchangeable, and not subject to corruption and decay. For Deleuze,
on the other hand, the world of discrete things emerges constantly, as solutions
to problems that are defined by conditions that do not determine a result, nor
impose consistency. Finally, as DeLanda writes, “as these ontological problems
undergo a process of actualization they become progressively differentiated
into a multiplicity of actual solutions. This differentiation proceeds in a fully
historical way, and may only reveal a portion of the possibility space at a time”
(2012, 236, my emphasis). Thus, the Aristotelian categories of the general and
the particular (in musical Platonism: the types and the tokens) can be replaced
in a Deleuzian ontology by two radically immanent entities: the universal singu-
lar and the individual singular.
Topological unfoldings
Influenced by theories coming from mathematics and embryology, Deleuze
thinks of the actualisations that lead to the individuation of singularities as
happening through a sequence of “topological unfoldings.” In very simple
mathematical terms, a topological entity is one that can be folded into another
form without losing its identity. As philosopher and mathematician Arkady
Plotnitsky (2006, 191) defined it, “Geometry has to do with measurements,
while topology disregards measurement, and deals only with the structure of
space qua space and with the essential shapes and figures.” Differently than
in Euclidian geometry, in topological geometry a circle, for example, can be
stretched into an ellipse or into a quasi-square without losing its topological
identity. A sphere can be compressed into a cylinder, a cone, or a pear-like
shape, its topological identity remaining untouched. In an essay on mathe-
matician Bernhard Riemann (who, together with his teacher Gauss, was one
of the inventors of topology), Plotnitsky (2009, 201) is very precise about this
identity: “Insofar as one deforms a given figure continuously (that is, insofar
as one does not separate points previously connected and, conversely, does
not connect points previously separated) the resulting figure is considered the
same.” However, spheres are topologically different from tori, and they can-
not be converted into each other without disjoining their connected points.
If one extends these mathematical notions to biology, genetics, and embryol-
ogy, one can think of the unfolding of an embryo as a matter of topological
transformations, or of a vertebrate animal as the result of topological changes
and developments. French naturalist Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire thought (at the
beginning of the nineteenth century, i.e., before Darwin) that species could be
conceived without genera, as transformation (transmutation was his word) from
one into the other. This leads to the perspective that the world can be con-
ceived first and foremost as a continuum of intensity that becomes segmented
into species only as certain tendencies are manifested and certain capacities
exercised (see DeLanda 2010, 91). These remarks are extremely relevant as we
attempt to eliminate transcendent entities from the world. Every single animal
or embryo is the result of concrete, immanent, intensive processes, and is abso-
lutely not an “instantiation” of an idea, of a “genus,” or of a “species.” We need
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to think of an animal as a topological animal (ibid., 96), which can be folded and
stretched into the multitude of different animal species that exist on Earth. Of
course, this is only physically possible at the level of the embryos, which are
flexible enough to endure these transformations. Moreover, every topological
or “virtual” animal must have the capacity of being divergently actualised (leading
to concrete divergent individual singularities), and each actualisation must be
inheritable with a slight degree of unpredictability. We come close to describing
DNA structures, and it is indeed “the structure of the space of possible body
plans that replaces the genus ‘Animal’” (ibid., 97). The relevant causal agents
(chromosomes, genes, genes marking axes of longitude and latitude, cellular
populations, etc.) do not operate and act as “formal causes,” but as “efficient
causes.” As DeLanda highlights, “Aristotelian species like ‘Horse’ and ‘Human’
should be replaced by historically constituted species that have the same onto-
logical status as the organisms that compose them, that is, that are individual
singularities; and the genus ‘Animal’ should be replaced by a space of possibilities in
which the different body plans are universal singularities, capable of being diver-
gently actualized into a large number of sub-phyla and classes” (DeLanda 2010,
102, my emphasis).
On a higher scale, biological populations of individuals (what we use to call
“species” in common language) are “as singular, as unique, and as historically
contingent as individual organisms: species are born when their gene pool is
closed to external flows of genetic materials through reproductive isolation, and
they die through extinction” (ibid., 93–94). As today is widely accepted, no spe-
cies is sempiternal, they are all historically contingent and ephemeral. Even
stars are ephemeral: they exist for a limited amount of time, even if this is
beyond our human capacity of imagining. Everything is ephemeral, everything
is contingent, everything is part of a continuous relay of intensive energies from
one actualisation to the next, without being predetermined and without being
predictable. The diversity of entities that populate the world are bounded in
extension, but they are generated by invisible and temporal processes set in
motion by immanent differences of intensity—not by any transcendental “sub-
stance” or “essence,” which are no more than unreal reified generalities.
Multiplicities
In addition to the singularities and topological intensive transductive pro-
cesses, the concept of “multiplicity” is absolutely crucial for a Deleuzian ontol-
ogy. It is one of the most recurrent concepts in the works of Deleuze—alone or
in collaboration with Félix Guattari—and it finds its roots not in philosophy
or linguistics, but in mathematics, particularly in the subfields of differential
geometry, group theory, and dynamical systems theory.19 Deleuze mentioned
it early on, in his 1966 book Bergsonism, where the subtitle of the second chap-
ter is precisely “Théorie des multiplicités”20 (Deleuze 1991, 37–49). Although
19 This has been exhaustively disclosed and explained by DeLanda (2002, 2010). A very different perspec-
tive, critical of DeLanda’s assumptions and interpretation, has been offered by Mary Beth Mader (2017).
20 A subtitle that, unfortunately, is not rendered in the 1991 English translation of the book.
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21 I insist on the crucial aspect that these universal singularities are by no means to be confused with Pla-
tonic ideas. They are real and effective parts of a dynamic system, and they can be actualised instantly
at any given time of the system’s lifespan. They are not the result of predeterminations, nor are they
pointing towards necessary or unidirectional solutions.
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22 Deleuze’s use of the term “Idea” would also require some further explanations, which unfortunately I
cannot undertake here. In short, I simply stress the fact that Deleuze’s “Idea” is mobile and changeable,
thus very different from the reified Ideas of traditional idealisms and from the Kantian concepts of the
understanding, which Deleuze discusses in chapter 4 of Difference and Repetition, in relation to Salomon
Maïmon’s reading of Kant (see Deleuze 1994, 168–76).
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Virtual Works—Actual Things
ities, and that accounts in a purely immanent way for the regularities (but also
for the inconsistencies) in the processes and in the individuations. The virtual
diagram cannot exist without the actual and virtual singularities that build it.
Nothing would happen in the world without the continuous relay of intensities
from the virtual to the actual, and vice versa.
This leads to an ontology that is processual, immanentist, and based upon
difference (different/ciation), a difference that is conceived not negatively, as
lack of resemblance, but productively, as that which drives dynamic processes.
Epistemologically, it defines a problematic epistemology (or an epistemology of
problems and problematisations), one that gets rid of the general laws of axio-
matic epistemologies without denying the objectivity of physical knowledge,
which is now investigated by immanent distributions of the singular. The notion
of truth is also devalued, as the dynamic processes are not predetermined, nor
are they predictable. Ethically, the world emerges as profoundly transformed: a
closed, finished and authoritative world pervaded by transcendental ideas and
categories gives place to an open world of immanent events and singularities,
“full of divergent processes yielding novel and unexpected entities, the kind
of world that would not sit still long enough for us to take a snapshot of it and
present it as the final truth” (DeLanda 2002, 6).
At this point, the choice of our title for the Orpheus Academy 2016 is clear.
What traditionally, or at least for the last two hundred years, have been called
“musical works” are specific “zones,” or partial elements of something that can
be more aptly described and thought about in terms of musical “multiplici-
ties,” which are fabricated by intensive processes that generate virtual structures
and actual things. Music Platonists focus only on the structures, the reality of
which they deny and which they conceive as purely abstract, fixed, immobile,
and eternal. For their part, nominalists rely only on extensive individual singu-
larities, historically contingent, but also fixed and totally defined, to which they
deny a virtual (intensive) component. For a Deleuzian-inspired music ontol-
ogy, musical multiplicities must be grounded in the actual, even as some of the
forces that the actual summons might remain virtual. Both—abstract struc-
tures and petrified strata—have to be overcome. Structures are mobile and
fluid, while strata are constantly being dismantled and reshaped. As Michael
Gallope stated, in his attempt to define “a Deleuzian musical work,”
Deleuze offers a glimpse of something different: music for him is certainly based in a
materiality of sound, but is not reducible to any social or perceptual situation. It has
a strange kind of autonomy, one that is oriented towards the absolute, but not as a
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vehicle for the actual work’s content. Incredibly, he tries to think a musical work that
is once more ideal and more empirical than the common perspectives. A Deleuzian
musical work would be more ideal than a Platonist view since the logic of sensation
has no “fallen” or exterior moment like performance external to itself. And it would
be more empirical than a historicist perspective since it takes no recourse to the
regulative norms of any historical moment. (Gallope 2008, 117–18)
Michael Gallope’s essay “Is There a Deleuzian Musical Work?” (2008) is, to my
knowledge, the only serious attempt so far to think about music ontology from
a Deleuzian perspective. However, he places his inquiry within currently avail
able ontologies, using Peter Kivy and Lydia Goehr as two examples of the polar-
isation of the debate between Platonism and historicising views. My take is
different: I think it is indispensable to think outside existing music ontologies,
to come up with a new image of work (which replaces the word “work” itself),
and to appropriate for music ontology the basic features of Deleuze’s ontol-
ogy—and not so much what Deleuze said or wrote about music. So, I don’t
think there is “a Deleuzian musical work,” which is Gallope’s central concern.
There cannot be a Deleuzian musical “Work” (with a capital W). There can only
be a Deleuzian musical work, which is a multiplicity made of virtual topological
singularities, actual individual singularities (containing a virtual component in
themselves), and intensive transductive processes (generating the virtual and
the actual).
Under this new image of “work,” every musical multiplicity has two halves:
a virtual image and an actual image, resonating with Deleuze’s statement that
“every object is double without it being the case that the two halves resemble
one another, one being a virtual image and the other an actual image” (1994, 209,
my emphasis).
If we consider these two images in relation to musical works, one can think
of the virtual image as the one relating to the structure, to the diagram of a
musical work, with all its topological singularities. It remains ideal without
being abstract (because those singularities are real; that is, they “exist”), and is
dependent on the quantity and quality of the concrete mapping of its univer-
sal singularities made by every single person. Thus, there are as many virtual
images of a musical work as persons “thinking” of it. Every single person has
his or her own and unique “diagram” of any given musical work. This diagram is
always individual, and can only be “thought” if one starts from the topological
singularities that enable us to think about it in the first place. It is by no means
something prior to our mapping of the singularities; it is not an abstract or
transcendental entity. On the contrary, it is the most extreme immanently gen-
erated construction, being dependent on an innumerable amount of concrete
singularities working together in a specific assemblage of forces, intensities,
and tendencies (remember that every singularity is the result of intensive
energetic processes of individuation, thus, not “sempiternal” Platonic fic-
tions). In order to emerge, this “structural” image requires a “transcendental
empiricism,” an enormous (“transcendental”) amount of events, of individual
and topological singularities, of intensive processes, of forces and tendencies
empirically experienced by every single agent (performer, listener, reader, etc.).
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Virtual Works—Actual Things
23 I addressed this topic in detail in “Beyond Urtext: A Dynamic Conception of Musical Editing” (De Assis
2009, 7–18).
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38
Virtual Works—Actual Things
Strata
In very concrete terms, we have to be clear about which things we consider to be
a legitimate part of the actual components of our musical multiplicities. In this
sense, and as a useful tool for music practitioners creating innovative modes
of performance, I have been proposing a terminology based upon strata and
processes of stratification, which is vaguely inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s
use of these terms in A Thousand Plateaus (1987, 39–74, 637–39).24 Appropriating
their terminology, and remaining aware of the unavoidable anisomorphism
between philosophy and art, one can divide all those music materials that
physically exist in the real world into diverse types of strata. Substrata are mater
ials that already existed in the world before the first traits of instantiation of a
new piece were produced; among them one finds other musical pieces, instru-
ments, instrumental and compositional manuals, spoken and unspoken rules,
codes of behaviour and practice, lists of personnel, payment sheets, and so on.
Parastrata refer to documents produced while composing or preparing a per-
formance, produced in view of the generation of a new piece, directly leading
to the emergence of a new musical multiplicity; they include sketches, drafts,
first editions, letters, and writings or annotations by composers and perform-
ers. From that particular moment in time, when a piece has been first defined,
many other future materials become thinkable and possible: new and renewed
editions, all sorts of catalogues (of the sketches, of the variants, of the ren-
derings), technical analysis of the piece or parts of it, reflexive texts about it,
theoretical contextualisations, recordings, and so on—these are epistrata, they
appear from the first materials that defined the piece and evolve from them
in ever growing circles. Next, there are metastrata, new materials generated at
every future historical time, by practitioners aiming at presenting or, better,
at exposing specific sets of materials from a given multiplicity in a new way;
such strata include performances, recordings, transcriptions, expositions, or
any other mode of critically reflecting on the available sources. Furthermore,
there are also interstrata, particular singularities that function in more than one
register, being sometimes part of one strata, sometimes of another one. Finally,
materials that have apparently nothing to do with a given piece, but that might
under certain circumstances create relations to it are called allostrata (one sim-
ple example is a concert situation where, for example, a piece by Schumann
enters into an unexpected relation with a piece by Ligeti). Significantly, all
these different strata are not ontologically predefined, that is, their belonging
24 Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 522n14) acknowledge their appropriation of these concepts from Italian
paleoanthropologist Pia Laviosa Zambotti, more specifically from her book Les origines et la diffusion
de la civilisation (1949), where she develops a whole theory on nomadic cultures and their progressive
diffusion over the Earth’s ecumene. Especially in chapter four, she addresses the topic of strata, sub-
strata, and parastrata, illuminating the processes by which a nomadic culture interfered with, and was
influenced by, the sedentary cultures it met. A set of substrata, which were part of the structures of a
sedentary population or of its milieu, starts being challenged, while new configurations (parastrata) be-
gin to emerge. The concrete planetary movements and migrations of human populations described by
Zambotti proved to be wrong by the late 1950s, but her descriptions of the kind of interactions between
humans, and between humans and their milieu, still have validity and are worth reading.
39
Paulo de Assis
40
Virtual Works—Actual Things
41
Paulo de Assis
work, it claims the pure unknown as the most productive field for artistic prac-
tices. Rather than accepting a reproductive tradition, it argues for an experi-
mental, creative, and vitalist attitude.
References
Arbo, Alessandro, and Marcello Ruta, eds. Research. Leuven: Leuven University Press.
2014. Ontologie Musicale: Perspectives et DeLanda, Manuel. 2002. Intensive Science and
débats. Paris: Hermann. Virtual Philosophy. London: Continuum.
Badiou, Alain. 2000. Deleuze: The Clamor ———. 2006. A New Philosophy of Society:
of Being. Translated by Louise Burchill. Assemblage Theory and Social Complexity.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota London: Bloomsbury.
Press. First published 1997 as Deleuze: La ———. 2010. Deleuze: History and Science.
clameur de l’Etre (Paris: Hachette). New York: Atropos Press.
Beistegui, Miguel de. 2012. “The Deleuzian ———. 2012. “Deleuze, Mathematics, and
Reversal of Platonism.” In The Cambridge Realist Ontology.” In The Cambridge
Companion to Deleuze, edited by Daniel Companion to Deleuze, edited by Daniel W.
W. Smith and Henry Somers-Hall, 55–81. Smith and Henry Somers-Hall, 220–38.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Boundas, Constantin V. 2005a. “Intensity.” Deleuze, Gilles. 1991. Bergsonism. Translated
In The Deleuze Dictionary, edited by by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara
Adrian Parr, 131–32. New York: Columbia Habberjam. New York: Zone Books. First
University Press. published 1966 as Le Bergsonisme (Paris:
———. 2005b. “Ontology.” In The Deleuze Presses universitaires de France).
Dictionary, edited by Adrian Parr, 191–92. ———. 1994. Difference and Repetition.
New York: Columbia University Press. Translated by Paul Patton. New York:
———. 2005c. “Les stratégies différentielles Columbia University Press. First
dans la pensée deleuzienne.” Translated published 1968 as Différence et répétition
by Alain Beaulieu. In Gilles Deleuze: (Paris: Presses universitaires de France).
Heritage philosophique, edited by ———. 1998. Essays Critical and Clinical.
Alain Beaulieu, 15–43. Paris: Presses Translated by Daniel W. Smith and
Universitaires de France. Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis:
———. 2007. “Different/ciations: University of Minnesota Press. First
The Case of Gilles Deleuze.” In The published 1993 as Critique et Clinique
Edinburgh Companion to Twentieth-Century (Paris: Minuit).
Philosophies, edited by Constantin Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. 1987.
V. Boundas, 489–503. Edinburgh: A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Edinburgh University Press. Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian
Butt, John. 2002. Playing with History. Massumi. Minneapolis: University of
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Minnesota Press. First published 1980 as
Clisby, Dale. 2017. “Intensity in Context: Mille plateaux (Paris: Minuit).
Thermodynamics and Transcendental Dodd, Julian. 2007. Works of Music: An Essay
Philosophy.” Deleuze Studies 11 (2): 240–58. in Ontology. Oxford: Oxford University
Davies, Stephen. 2001. Musical Works and Press.
Performances: A Philosophical Exploration. Gallope, Michael. 2008. “Is There a
Oxford: Clarendon Press. Deleuzian Musical Work?” Perspectives of
De Assis, Paulo. 2009. “Beyond Urtext: a New Music 46 (2): 93–129.
dynamic conception of musical editing.” Goehr, Lydia. [1992] 2007. The Imaginary
In Dynamics of Constraints: Essays on Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in
Notation, Editing, and Performance, edited the Philosophy of Music. Rev. ed. Oxford:
by Paulo de Assis, 7–18. Leuven: Leuven Oxford University Press.
University Press. Hallward, Peter. 2006. Out of this World:
———. 2018. Logic of Experimentation: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation.
Rethinking Performance through Artistic London: Verso.
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Virtual Works—Actual Things
43
Locating the Performable
Musical Work in Practice:
A Non-Platonist Interpretation
of the “Classical Paradigm”
David Davies
McGill University
1
In The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, Lydia Goehr makes the following
claim: “The idea of a work of music existing as a fixed creation independently
of its many possible performances had no regulative force in a practice that
demanded adaptable and functional music, and which allowed an open inter-
change of musical material. Musicians did not see works as much as they saw
individual performances themselves to be the direct outcome of their compo-
sitional activity” (Goehr [1992] 2007, 185–86). To say that the “work-concept”—
the concept of the multiply performable work—had no “regulative force” in
eighteenth-century musical practice is to say that it did not regulate what
musicians did nor, presumably, how what they did was received by those attend-
ing the events where music was performed. Goehr takes this to show that in
general Western musical performances before the late eighteenth century
are not rightly taken to be of performable works conforming to the “work-
concept,” and she thereby appeals to artistic practice in arguing for ontological
conclusions.
I have argued elsewhere (Davies 2017) that musical ontology is indeed reflec-
tively accountable to musical practice. Practice must ground our ontological
inquiries into the nature of artworks of various kinds because the ontologist’s
primary task is to make sense of the practices into which such artworks enter,
and terms like “musical work” as employed by the ontologist play an essentially
explanatory role in this endeavour. More generally, the philosopher’s task, in
addressing a human practice, is to provide a framework that both facilitates
the achievement of the aims of that practice and furthers its comprehension by
both practitioners and receivers.1
1 It is because the task facing the musical ontologist is reflective, and not merely descriptive, that the
“explanatory” role I ascribe to the notion of “musical work” accords with this more general character-
isation of the philosopher’s task in addressing a human practice. The musical ontologist’s task is to
furnish us with a conception of the “musical work” that explains, and thereby makes sense of, those
45
DOI https://doi.org/10.11116/9789461662521.ch02
David Davies
features of our musical practice that should be preserved in a codification of that practice that respects
its presumed aims. Thus the adequacy of an “explanatory” conception of the musical work requires that
it both facilitates the achievement of the aims of musical practice and furthers its comprehension. I am
grateful to Andreas Dorschel for pointing out the need to clarify this point.
2 As we shall see below, “multiply performable” works in the performing arts are merely one species
of the broader genus “multiple artworks”—they are multiple artworks whose multiple instances are
performances.
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Locating the Performable Musical Work in Practice
3 For a much fuller presentation and defence of the following account of multiple artworks and of the
different senses in which they can be said to have instances, see Davies (2010). The terminology used in
the present context is slightly different from that used in the 2010 article—for the current terminology
see Davies (2015).
4 Paulo de Assis has pointed out that this definition of being “fully qualified” to play the experiential
role should be doubly relativised to a time. The first relativisation, in the formulation I give, concerns
the properties that an instance possesses at the time it is experienced. Since these properties can change,
at least in the case of instances that are material objects rather than events (for example, works of
sculpture), a given object may be “fully qualified” at one time but, after suffering material change, not
“fully qualified” at another time. But we also need to allow for changes in the practices of the art form
in question. An object or event having given properties p may be “fully qualified” to play the experien-
tial role according to the practices in art form F at time T, but not be fully qualified to play that role
according to the practices in F at time T*. To take an example suggested by Paulo (pers. comm.), “a Bach
performance by Pablo Casals, by Sigiswald Kuijken, or by Mischa Maisky, all of which were considered
‘fully qualified’ when they appeared, [were] not necessarily [so considered] afterwards (I think Casals,
for example, would not count as fully qualified in the performance landscape of the 1990s, nor Kuijken
in the 1890s).” To bring this out, the definition of being “fully qualified” needs to be modified to read as
follows: Something is fully qualified to play the experiential role in the appreciation of a given artwork X
at time t just in case it possesses at t all those experienceable properties that are necessary, according to
the practices of the art form in question at a given historical time “T,” to fully play this role. Once we make
explicit this second dimension of temporal relativisation, we must ask whether the practices in place
in F at a particular time T—for example, the time of the work’s composition—have a privileged status
in determining, atemporally, those entities that count as “fully qualified” (or, as I term this, “strict”)
instances of the work, or whether a work’s “strict” instances are only specifiable relative to, and may
change according to, the performance practices of the artistic community evaluating or appreciating
the work. Since I do not address these epistemological issues in the present paper, I shall let the simpler
formulation stand in the body of the paper. I thank Paulo for his perceptive observation, however, which
would bear crucially were we to raise such epistemological questions.
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David Davies
48
Locating the Performable Musical Work in Practice
For one subscribing to such a view of performable musical works, the sali-
ent ontological questions about musical artworks relate not to their abstract
nature—as, in some sense, prescriptions for performances—but to the kinds
of properties entering into those prescriptions, and thus to the manner in
which performable works are individuated. Different answers to this question
include pure sonicism, timbral sonicism, and instrumentalism. The distinc-
tive claim of the sonicist is that “whether a sound-event counts as a properly
formed token of [a performable work] W is determined purely by its acoustic
qualitative appearance” (Dodd 2007, 201)—that is to say, purely by the way the
performance sounds. Pure sonicists hold that the kinds of features prescribed for
correct performance of a musical work are restricted to structural or “organisa-
tional” properties—pitch, rhythm, harmony, and melody (see, e.g., Kivy 1983).
Timbral sonicists, on the other hand, maintain that the timbre of the notes pro-
duced, which will vary according to the instruments used in generating those
notes, is an essential part of what the composer prescribes for well-formed per-
formances of the work (see, e.g., Dodd 2007). While the timbral sonicist makes
the timbral qualities of a sound sequence partly constitutive of the perform-
able work, she or he doesn’t require that, in well-formed performances, this
sound sequence is actually produced on the instruments with which we naturally
associate those timbral qualities. Instrumentalists, on the other hand, insist that
a correct performance of a performable work not only must have the prescribed
timbral qualities, but also must be performed on the prescribed instruments
(see, e.g., Levinson 1980). Another central question is whether performable
works are essentially contextualised entities. The contrasting views here are
that works are pure sound structures or sound sequences (see, e.g., Kivy [1983]
and Dodd [2007]), and that they are sound structures or sound sequences as
indicated in a particular musico-historical context (see Levinson 1980).
2
If, as I have argued (Davies 2017), we hold ontology of art reflectively account-
able to artistic practice, what are the salient features of practice that must be
accommodated by an ontology of musical works if the latter are taken to be
performable works conforming to the classical paradigm? Repeatability seems
to be essential, since this is just another way of saying that we have a work that
admits of multiple p-instances and that therefore in some manner exists inde-
pendently of its particular performances. Repeatability is built into the “work-
concept” understood in terms of the classical paradigm and our question is
how we should think ontologically about those cases, if any, where this work-
concept is regulative.
In the analytic literature, we find a number of other things proposed as
essential to our musical practice and thus, given our methodological directive,
as features for which an ontology of music must account. But there is consid-
erable disagreement about some of these properties, and they need to be bal-
anced against one another in our attempts to make ontology of music rationally
accountable to musical practice. Audibility, for example, is one property that
49
David Davies
has been taken to carry ontological weight (see Dodd 2007). But the supposed
audibility of musical works seems to be explicable on any ontological account
as long as something appropriately related to the work is audible (see Davies
2009). Another often-cited property of works satisfying the classical paradigm
is creatability (see Levinson 1980), but there are debates over whether perform-
able musical works must be created by their composers or whether creativity
in discovery is enough (Dodd 2007). Again it isn’t clear that there is a non-
question-begging datum that an adequate ontology must explain. The same
applies to the claimed modal and temporal flexibility of the musical work
(Rohrbaugh 2003 makes such a claim; for criticism, see Davies 2012a, 271–73).
However, there is one other feature that seems essential to musical
works in any musical practice that conforms to the classical paradigm, although
it has attracted much less attention than those properties just cited. This is
what I term the “variability” of at least some multiple artworks, including musi-
cal works. The “problem of variability” for an ontological theory of such works
is to explain the range of acceptable variation in artistically relevant properties
amongst the strict p-instances of such multiple works. Where, as in the case of
literary works, initiation is by means of an exemplar, there is no room for vari-
ation in artistically relevant qualities among a work’s strict instances. This is
because strict instances are required to emulate the exemplar in all artistically
relevant respects—thus allowing no room for variation in such respects. But
the problem of variability seems to be particularly acute for “type” theories of
multiple artworks that are generated by means of a production-artefact, such
as photographs, films, and works of cast sculpture (see Davies 2012b). It also
presents a problem for theories of musical works taken to fall under the classi-
cal paradigm. We seem to have in our practice a perhaps imprecise distinction
between performances and non-performances of a musical work, and between
correct and incorrect performances, and, in musical practices describable in
terms of the classical paradigm, we seem committed to variations in the artis-
tically relevant properties of both performances and correct performances.
3
Of the various proposed ontological accounts of works in musical contexts
where the “work-concept” has regulative force, which ones can at least accom-
modate the two features—repeatability and variability—that seem intrinsic to
the very idea of a performable work?5 There are broadly speaking three kinds of
answer to the question, What kind of thing would a musical work that fits the
classical paradigm be, ontologically speaking?
(1) According to musical “Platonism” in its various forms, the musical
work is an abstract entity of some kind that stands outside our musical
practice and informs and guides that practice in certain ways.
5 Note here that this is not incompatible with the claim, in Davies (2017), that it is the whole of our
practice to which the ontology of art is accountable. Our question here is not which ontological theory
we should accept upon reflection, but which ontological theories have the resources to accommodate a
practice that conforms to the classical paradigm.
50
Locating the Performable Musical Work in Practice
51
David Davies
4
Suppose that, for these or other reasons, we reject the Platonist option in
an ontological account of musical practice describable in terms of the clas-
sical paradigm, and agree that the only entities to which we can appeal in
such an account are entities that are nominalistically acceptable—concrete
particulars or constructions out of such particulars. As those members of
MusicExperiment21 proposing the “multiplicities” conception of the musical
52
Locating the Performable Musical Work in Practice
work have pointed out, these entities—the multiple materialities entering into
our musical practice broadly conceived—are both considerable and diverse. In
presenting the case for thinking of musical works in terms of multiplicities,
they identify these elements in the following passage:
I shall spend the rest of this paper exploring the options open to one who
endorses a materialist picture and wishes to in some way accommodate those
aspects of our practice that naturally lend themselves to description in terms
of the classical paradigm. An obvious question will be how different alterna-
tives can provide us with a reflectively acceptable framework for thinking about
a practice apparently characterised by repeatability and variability. Theorists
considering the nominalist options confronting the ontologist of multiple art-
works describable in terms of the classical paradigm have identified the follow-
ing more general alternatives (see, e.g., Tillman 2011; Kania 2012):
(1) “Materialist” theories that commit themselves to the real existence of
such multiple works construed as in some sense “constructions” out
of the material elements entering into our practices. Two examples of
such theories are musical perdurantism (Caplan and Matheson 2006)
and musical endurantism (Rohrbaugh 2003), which take musical
works to be either constituted by or ontologically dependent upon
such material elements.
(2) Eliminativist theories (e.g., Cameron 2008), according to which
“there are only concrete objects, such as performances and the cre-
ative actions of composers, and none of these can be identified with
musical works; therefore there are no musical works” (Kania 2012,
208).
(3) “Fictionalism,” as proposed by Andrew Kania (2012), as a kind of
“eliminativism light.”
Kania assumes that both materialist and eliminativist accounts entail that there
are no musical works of the kind assumed in our ordinary musical practices,
since he takes those practices to commit us to Platonism. (This, I think, will be
so only if we are so committed by our commitment to repeatability and variabil-
ity, but that is the very question at issue). So construed, the issue is whether it is
better to identify musical works with concreta or to deny that there are musical
works. Kania (2012, 210) takes the argument for eliminativism over materialism
53
David Davies
to be that “it would do less violence to musical practice to deny the existence
of musical works altogether than to identify them with the concreta the mater
ialist believes them to be.” He also maintains that “the dispute between the
materialist and the eliminativist is doubly pragmatic” (ibid.): (1) it is pragmatic
in the sense that the materialist and eliminativist agree about what kinds of
things exist, but not about whether to call one kind of thing a musical work;
and (2) it is also pragmatic in the sense that something like the “methodo-
logical directive” identified at the beginning of this paper appears to be implicit
common ground. The question the nominalist faces when choosing between
materialism and eliminativism is whether it would be better to give up talk of
musical works altogether or to transform it into talk of, say, fusions of perform-
ances. And the measure of what is better here is closeness to, or coherence
with, existing musical practices.
Kania claims that we should prefer fictionalism over either materialism or
eliminativism on these pragmatic grounds. The fictionalist about musical
works claims that, while there are actually no such things, we have shared ways
of representing such things in our musical practice. These shared representa-
tions play a valuable part in that practice, and this justifies continuing to talk as
if there were such works even if the world contains no such things. The kinds
of properties we have been assuming that musical works must have—Kania
cites creatability and repeatability, in particular—play an important part in
sustaining different elements in our musical practice. But, Kania maintains,
it isn’t clear that anything can actually have both these features; so, in order
to preserve the various useful parts of musical discourse centred on the work-
concept, we should make-believe that there are such things. Kania argues that
this practice, with its incorporation of the work-concept, is worth preserving.
But the crucial fictionalist claim here is that “it would make no difference if
there were no musical works, strictly speaking, as long as we all continued to
behave as if there were” (Kania 2008, 440).
While musical fictionalism, like fictionalism more generally, is not without
its defenders, it does raise more general metaphysical questions that I don’t
want to get into in any detail here. To simply gesture at the issues, we might
ask why the regulative role of the work-concept in our practice doesn’t itself
justify being a realist about performable musical works. Kania seems to think
that, if our concern is to preserve both creatability and repeatability as aspects
of our practice, we cannot be realists about musical works because nothing
could have both of these properties. But, as suggested above, I don’t think cre-
atability is crucial to the work-concept, so this can’t be a conclusive reason for
fictionalism about musical works. But any fictionalist move not supported in
this way seems to assume practice-transcendent standards as to what “really”
exists, and this is itself a contested meta-ontological position, especially if we
consider recent work by authors such as Searle (1995) and Thomasson (2007)
on social ontology.
54
Locating the Performable Musical Work in Practice
This proposal suggests not that there is no material basis for the work-concept
—it allows that we can indeed see the work as conceived by the classical
paradigm as one possible construct out of the material multiplicities making
up our historically evolving musical practice—but rather that we should now
pursue other potentialities that those multiplicities would allow for musical
performance. The issue between the first and second cited passages concern-
ing MusicExperiment21 is that the latter passage seems to allow, whereas the
former passage seems to deny, that at least some materialistically grounded
musical practices are correctly described in terms of the classical paradigm
even if other (new and innovative) practices would not be rightly so described.
These two ways of thinking on the part of nominalistically and materialistically
inclined ontologists of music may be usefully mapped onto some recent work
in the ontology of theatre. Prefiguring the sentiments of MusicExperiment21,
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David Davies
James Hamilton (2007, 31) affirms6 that “the texts used in theatrical perform
ances [are] just so many ingredients, sources of works and other ideas for theat-
rical performances, alongside other ingredients that are available from a variety
of other sources. Works of dramatic literature, in particular, are not regarded as
especially or intrinsically fitting ingredients for performances. As ingredients
they are but one kind among many possible sources of words for a theatrical
performance.” But Hamilton is not merely affirming a possibility for theatri-
cal performance. He maintains, in line with MusicExperiment21 (2015), that “a
[theatrical] performance is . . . never a performance of some other work nor is it
ever a performance of a text or of anything initiated in a text; so no faithfulness
standard—of any kind—is required for determining what work a performance
is of. . . . Theatrical performances are artworks in their own right” (Hamilton
2007, 32). His descriptions of theatrical practice stress the elements of deliber-
ation, extemporisation, experimentation, and discovery that enter into the pre-
paratory process, the choices open to the director and performers, and the fact
that the text is always used by the performers to realise the general performative
goals of the company—it is always a means to an independent performance,
rather than something that, in itself, imposes any constraints on performance.
As Hamilton (2007, 203) characterises this general feature of theatrical pro-
ductions, “a company arrive at the first rehearsal and are given a script. There is
no logically predetermined way for them to use the script. There is not even a
requirement, of logic or of art, that they actually do use it. This is a situation in
which a number of things can be decided.” This supports the further claim that
where we have the appearance of a theatrical performance falling under the
classical paradigm, the performers are merely exercising one among a number
of possible options as to how to use the script as an ingredient in a production.
The classical paradigm, Hamilton maintains, has no applicability to theatre
understood as a performing art.
Hamilton’s rejection of the classical paradigm in theatre relies on the idea
of theatrical productions as processes of “ensemble revision,” and one prob-
lem with this claim, historically, is that it fits uneasily with periods of theat-
rical practice where ensemble revision has played a minimal role, if any—see
for example Tiffany Stern’s work on the nature of Shakespearean and seven-
teenth-century British theatre (Stern 2000; for a discussion of the significance
6 It might be thought that Hamilton’s use of the term “text” in this passage runs counter to Nicholas
Cook’s influential contention (2001) that, in thinking about musical performance, we should “shift
from seeing performance as the reproduction of texts to seeing it as a cultural practice prompted by
scripts.” To think of the score as a text, for Cook, is to think of it as embodying the composer’s original
vision, something to which performance is accountable; whereas to think of the score as a script is
to think of it as “choreographing a series of real-time, social interactions between players.” Cook’s
distinction has influenced much contemporary work in musical performance studies, but Hamilton’s
use of the term “text” here in no way conflicts with Cook’s account, nor indeed with Hamilton’s own
talk, in a passage quoted below, of the place of a “script” in the ensemble revision of theatrical works.
Cook’s distinction between texts and scripts is a distinction between two ways of thinking about scores.
In the case of theatre, on the other hand, the thing in need of reconceptualisation is itself a text—a
play script—rather than a score. Hamilton’s claim is that we should view this text as a script in Cook’s
sense—it is one among many things that can enter as ingredients into the social interactions that result
in a performance. I am grateful to Andreas Dorschel for alerting me to the need to clarify this point.
56
Locating the Performable Musical Work in Practice
of Stern’s work for Hamilton’s claims about theatre, see Davies 2011, 164–71).
But even where we do have productions that involve “ensemble revision,” it
isn’t clear why this establishes that the ingredients model accounts for all such
productions better than the classical paradigm. Take a company attempting
to present a “faithful” rendition of Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler, for example. While
performances of this production indeed reflect decisions and modifications
made in rehearsal, those decisions and modifications seem to be governed by
the company’s overarching aim of being true to Ibsen’s play in the sense of con-
forming as far as possible to Ibsen’s prescriptions in the play script. Hamilton
claims that, even if the company belongs to a tradition that always uses a text in
this way, their treating it as the script of a performable work is still an unforced
choice on their part, as the ingredients model requires. He supports this claim
by appealing to an ideal companion company belonging to the same tradition
who would see alternative ways of engaging with the text. So, where companies
seek to faithfully realise an independent work, we have “performances that
adopt constraints that are not binding in the tradition, but are taken as though
they were” (Hamilton 2007, 210).
But this is rather mystifying. For suppose that we have a tradition where both
performers and audience assume that the right, or the only, way to engage with
the text of a dramatic work is to seek to mount a production that is faithful
to the text of that work. In what sense does the observation that “objectively”
there are other options open to both performers and audience show that per-
formances intended by the performers and understood by the audience to be
of a work are not really of the work at all? By analogy, it is objectively possible
for musicians performing in a string quartet to treat the score as merely one
“ingredient” in a group improvisation. But this surely does not demonstrate
that their actual performance, which is intended by the performers and under-
stood by the audience to conform to the classical paradigm, is not really of a
musical work at all. This suggests that the right lesson to draw from Hamilton’s
account is not that we should deny the applicability of the classical paradigm to
theatrical performance, but that we should insist on its contingency and stress
the range of possibilities that a text presents to a performing company and the
exciting prospects for those who take advantage of this range of possibilities.
This then fits with a broader literature that points to the limitations of the
classical paradigm as a model for performances in the performing arts, given
the diversity of legitimate aims of performance, and the possibilities available
for performers who are not bound by the classical paradigm or, if bound, are
bound in a much looser way than has traditionally been assumed. To mention
only a couple of issues here:
(1) Those late twentieth-century theatrical productions that provide a
primary motivation for Hamilton’s “ingredients” model of theatre are
only an extreme example of a more general problem that we face in
identifying what is required for a performance to be a performance of
a particular play. Theatrical practice allows considerable freedom in
modifying the elements in the play script for a theatrical work while
still performing that work, as is evident in Peter Brook’s “existential-
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David Davies
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Locating the Performable Musical Work in Practice
5
I started this paper by asking how we should think ontologically about a
musical practice in which the “work-concept” does play a regulative role. It was
suggested that two features that any such practice must have are repeatability
and variability, and that it is difficult for a Platonist to accommodate the latter
feature. If, in line with the reflections in the previous section, we think that
there are at least some actual or possible forms of musical practice rightly char-
acterised in terms of the classical paradigm, then we can return to our original
question, now voiced in a nominalist/materialist key. Assuming that there are
various ways in which a practice can be structured around the multiplicity of ele-
ments that enter into it, what is distinctive about the manner of structuration
associated with the work-concept? In the final part of this paper, I want to con-
sider two possible answers to this question.
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David Davies
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Locating the Performable Musical Work in Practice
7 I sketch here the account that I spell out in much greater detail in Davies (2012).
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Locating the Performable Musical Work in Practice
References
Brandom, Robert. 1994. Making It Explicit: Davies, Stephen. 2001. Musical Works and
Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Performances: A Philosophical Exploration.
Commitment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Oxford: Clarendon Press.
University Press. Dodd, Julian. 2007. Works of Music: An Essay
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Journal of Aesthetics 48 (3): 295–313. Goehr, Lydia. (1992) 2007. The Imaginary
Caplan, Ben, and Carl Matheson. 2006. Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in
“Defending Musical Perdurantism.” the Philosophy of Music. Rev. ed. Oxford:
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intellectually rewarding exchange. Above all, I would like to thank Paulo for his tireless work in bringing
us together in the first place, and in editing the resulting volume.
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Reality. New York: Free Press.
64
Towards a General Theory
of Musical Works and
Musical Listening
Gunnar Hindrichs
University of Basel
I. Preliminaries
1. In the following I will offer an argument for musical works as autonomous
sound complexes. Such autonomous sound complexes are understood to con-
stitute the being of music. I will also offer a corresponding account of musical
listening. It presents musical listening as the disclosure of musical works. From
these two connected models, I will finally infer an idea of music history that
defends the central role of the avant-garde.
2. Let me note in advance some points of contention. Among these might be:
the privileging of musical works over musical practices; the elevation of a spe-
cific cultural-historical type of music to its constitutive exemplar; the neglect
of social, cultural, or historical conditions in favour of musical autonomy; the
disregarding of liturgical, communal, or political functions of music; and the
ignorance towards phenomena that overcome formal closeness, such as instal-
lations, chance compositions, conceptual art, aesthetic situations, and the like.
I hope that they, and other points of contention, will fall to the wayside over
the course of the argument. My aim is neither to commit music to the work-
concept that ruled the European tradition between, say, 1700 and 1950, nor to
sterilise music by extinguishing its seemingly extra-musical aspects. Rather, I
propose a concept of the musical work that is assumed to grasp the full being
of music, which then helps us adequately understand those phenomena that
seem to dissolve the work paradigm. I do hold, however, that such a concept of
the musical work is central to the understanding of musical being in general.
3. The mode of presentation will be dogmatic. That is, I will discuss neither
contrary nor connatural positions, but devote my argument to constructive
work; exceptions prove the rule. I also will not give multiple examples, but stay
mainly within the conceptual tracks of the argument. The latter is a deficit, for
the meaning of any philosophy of music consists of its explicative function on
concrete musical entities and experiences. However, I hope that this deficit is
balanced by the fact that some crucial concepts stem from compositional and
musicological reflection. In these concepts, musical experience has been pre-
cipitated, thus being present within the argument in an indirect manner. In any
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DOI https://doi.org/10.11116/9789461662521.ch03
Gunnar Hindrichs
case, the dogmatic outlook does not imply that I disrespect obverse theories or
that I have not learned from them, nor does it imply that I fancy the following
ideas were all invented by myself. It is simply a matter of concision. The restric-
tion to constructive and conceptual work allows the argument to be expressed
in the most straightforward manner.1
5. The majority of people who share this disillusion concludes that musical
ontology has been shipwrecked in general. If it is to be continued at all, ontol-
ogy may survive in the form of an “as if ” ontology. This is to say that, by using the
concept of musical works, one does not commit oneself to their existence but
articulates a regulative idea for certain musical practices: one acts “as if ” works
of music existed. Veritable ontological claims, in contrast, have to be aban-
doned. But this conclusion regarding the general collapse of musical ontology
is overhasty. The failure of the common approach evidently does not imply that
there cannot be an ontology that does not run after definitions and that does
not ignore the demands of aesthetics. This possibility is crucial because the
question of musical being remains somehow to be answered, for, after all, our
musical experience is the experience of something that is. The task, then, is
1 The argument draws on material that was presented on different occasions. Section II includes un-
published thoughts delivered at Brown and Harvard Universities. Section III compresses, and slightly
reformulates, the much more detailed account of basic concepts as offered by my book Die Autonomie des
Klangs (2014). The two sections were presented at the Orpheus Institute, as was the main body of section
IV. Section IV also makes use of an argument discussed at the inaugural meeting of the Basler Forum für
Musikästhetik in 2015, and of some parts of the keynote address that I delivered to the annual meeting
of the Gesellschaft für Musiktheorie in Berlin the same year. The address was published as Hindrichs
(2016a) and the Basel paper was published as Hindrichs (2016b). I am indebted to the audiences of all
these presentations. I am also indebted to Elaine Fitz Gibbon for polishing my English.
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Towards a General Theory of Musical Works and Musical Listening
6. The argument for an aesthetic ontology goes thus. Its first premise asserts
that ontology is not fundamental. This premise stands in contradiction to the
venerable idea of ontology as first philosophy. Stretching from Aristotle to
contemporary accounts, this idea argues that ontology comes first because it
investigates being as such, in contrast to all approaches that investigate specific
kinds of being and thus build on a general account of what there is. However,
ontology cannot maintain the first place in the order of philosophical inquiry.
Every ontology manifests a conceptual scheme that articulates the great chain
of being. Without such a scheme, or a framework of basic ontological concepts
(categories), being remains an inarticulate sphere of which nothing could be
said. This conceptual scheme, in turn, requires an analysis. And its analysis
cannot be an ontological analysis, since any ontology presupposes a conceptual
scheme. Thus, ontology is not the fundamental inquiry, but depends on a prior
investigation into its conceptual scheme. Ontology is dethroned.
7. That the conceptual scheme articulates the great chain of being means that
it articulates the elementary ways of how the things are. The concepts of the
scheme, or categories, operate on these elementary ways of being. Now, a gen-
eral formula for “how the things are” is to say that “the things are thus and
thus.” Accordingly, the basic ontological concepts operate on the things being
thus and thus. However, that the things are thus and thus is not only the univer-
sal structure of being, but also the universal structure of judgements. It is their
generic logical form. It follows that the great chain of being substantiates the
generic logical form of judgements. In other words, the content of judgements,
“that things are thus and thus,” and the facts of reality, “that things are thus and
thus,” have the same form. This puts us in a position of assuming that the basic
ontological concepts can be founded in the reflection on the logical form of
judgements. Judgement theory may provide us with proper access to the con-
ceptual scheme of ontology.
8. The premise that ontology is not fundamental thus drives us to take notice
of the proper order of judgement. And here I believe the Kantian view to be
right: that there are three distinct types of judgement, which are irreducible
to one another. These types are theoretical judgements, practical judgements,
and aesthetic judgements. For reasons evident enough, let us focus immedi-
ately on the third type. Aesthetic judgements differ from theoretical judge-
ments and practical judgements in peculiar ways. On the one hand, unlike
theoretical judgements, aesthetic judgements are not made true by facts, for
judgemental content made true by a fact consists of the description of the fact,
and the description of a fact and its aesthetic apprehension are two distinct
things. On the other hand, unlike practical judgements, aesthetic judgements
do not entail any interest in the realisation of their contents, for the aesthetic
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Gunnar Hindrichs
9. In the horizon of this Kantian idea, an important conclusion for the proper
ontological approach has to be drawn. If judgement theory gives access to the
framework of basic ontological concepts, and if a cardinal tenet of judgement
theory consists of the differentiation of judgement into theoretical, practical,
and aesthetic judgements, then ontology too has to be differentiated. This is
to say that there are different, irreducible kinds of ontology: one under the
prescription of theoretical judgement, one under the prescription of prac-
tical judgement, and one under the prescription of aesthetic judgement.
Correspondingly, we have reason to speak of a specifically aesthetic being,
whose articulation depends on the third type of judgement and which is ruled
by neither one of the two other ontologies. Such ontology is tuned in a genu-
inely aesthetic key.
10. The most salient characteristic of aesthetic ontology is the autonomy of its
entities. This becomes clear when one considers the opposite of autonomy.
The opposite of autonomy, heteronomy, applies where entities are not ruled by
themselves, but are submitted to laws imposed on them. Here, the entity and
the law are two sides that have to be brought together, and the entities become
cases of the law. As such cases, they have to be identifiable, and re-identifiable,
as particular instances of a law that is, in principle, general. Accordingly, the
judgement type on which the framework of heteronomy depends must be a
judgement type that identifies its objects. But identification is not an issue of
the aesthetic judgement. Questions like, Does the reference fail?, How is one
guaranteed to get the object right?, What discriminating knowledge must the
judging subject have?, and so on, are nonsensical from the aesthetic point of
view, for aesthetic judgements are not made true by facts. If the truth-makers
of aesthetic judgements were facts, they would indeed have to identify their
objects, for the correct or incorrect discrimination of their objects would con-
tribute to their truth. Since this is not the case, the issue of identification is not
significant. It follows that the entities of aesthetic ontology are not to be con-
sidered as identifiable, and re-identifiable, objects. And from this, it follows
further that they cannot be cases of imposed laws. Thus, aesthetic entities are
not subject to any kind of heteronomy. The structures of aesthetic being are
structures of autonomy.
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Towards a General Theory of Musical Works and Musical Listening
recognition. Examples of the different uses are, on the one hand, me seeing
someone in the mirror and identifying him as myself by thinking “I am stand-
ing there and there,” and, on the other hand, me thinking “I feel pain,” regard-
ing which the question of whether it is really me who feels pain is nonsensical.
These examples suggest that, using the “I” objectively, I spot myself in a range
of objects, whereas no identification is pursued when I use it subjectively. In an
analogous manner, we can distinguish between the object use and the aesthetic
use of the singular term in a judgement. Its object use identifies a particular
object with which the judgement is concerned; its aesthetic use, however, does
not recognise an object in contrast to other things, for identification is not at
issue in the case of judgements that are not made true by facts. Here the singu-
lar term refers to something that is simply present. To acknowledge this feature
marks the most important difference to the other versions of musical ontology
onstage. All of them are meant to offer matrices of identification, be they ver-
sions of Platonism, nominalism, or other isms; however, a truly aesthetic ontol-
ogy does not need such a matrix.
13. These autonomous entities are designated by the notion of the musical
work. There is no musical being that is not a work; that is, there is no musical
being that is not constituted as an autonomous entity. To be significant, this
general notion needs to be articulated in a series of explicata. Such explicata are
the basic ontological concepts that build the framework in which the aesthetic
being of music can be understood. It follows that the basic concepts of musical
ontology must be constructed under the auspices of autonomy.
14. The first concept is the concept of musical sound. Whatever else music may
be, it is something audible. Sound is therefore its most elementary characteris-
tic. However, not every sound is musical sound. According to the requirements
of aesthetic ontology, the difference between musical and non-musical sound
is to be explained in terms of autonomy and heteronomy. Thus, we can say that
musical sound is sound giving itself its own laws, while non-musical sound is
sound being subject to foreign laws, for example, to the laws of physics or the
laws of social praxis. In this sense, the most elementary characteristic of the
musical work is the autonomy of sound.
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Gunnar Hindrichs
15. The autonomy of sound has to be read in the strict sense. The fact that sound
gives itself its own laws means, first, that the rule system of musical sound is not
imposed upon by anything external to it and, second, that this rule system has
to be validated by the musical entity itself. To say the latter is to say that there
is no musical apriority. Musical apriority would consist in pre-established rule
systems that would determine whether sounds might count as musical sounds.
Many epochs of music history suggest the existence of such musical apriority,
and one is seduced by this into assuming that musical sound stands under its
condition. However, twentieth-century currents as distinct as musique con-
crète, electronic music, musique formelle, and chance music have all proven that
the decision of whether sounds may count as musical sounds is a basic problem
for composition. The second condition of the autonomy of sound is a conclu-
sion from this: the musicality of sound is not decided by some musical apri-
ority, but by the self-legislation of sound. Self-legislation means that the laws
of sound hold in virtue of the sound complex alone. They are instituted by the
inner consistency of the sound constituted by them. Rule systems that appear to
be preset, such as tonality, counterpoint, and the like, are in fact to be recon-
structed by each musical work in terms of their own rule systems.
16. There are different types of musical sound. Such types cannot be deduced,
but have to be induced by musicological, compositional, or practical reflec-
tions. Their most important requirement is that they are common enough to
precede all specific functions that musical sounds fulfil. Sound types articulate
generic possibilities of musical sound. As such articulations, they remain on
the merely structural level. In contrast, the individuality of a musical sound is
articulated by the concept of timbre. Timbre must not be misunderstood as
one sound parameter alongside others. Rather, timbre is the “general physiog-
nomy” (Chion 2011, 237) of an individual sound of music. However, since we
often do speak of the same musical sound appearing in different timbres, for
example, in the case of a figure played at different pitches or performed by dif-
ferent instruments, one has to restate the assessment of timbre with the pro-
viso that musical sound possesses a core towards which its physiognomy grav-
itates. This core can be the same in different individual sounds and belongs,
accordingly, to an intermediate level between the generality of types and the
individuality of timbre. Different physiognomies constitute different individu-
alities of sound without excluding a common kernel that allows their equation.
17. Individual sounds, sound kernels, and sound types are identifiable and
re-identifiable. This is grounded in the concept of rules. Because a rule requires
the discrimination of particulars as its cases, it implies the identifiability, and
re-identifiability, of items. Accordingly, sound rules identify sounds as their
instances. This seems to contradict the statement that the question of identifi-
cation is nonsensical concerning musical being. But although the question of
identification indeed does not apply to the musical work itself, it does apply to
the sounds whose complex the work is. And this means that individual sounds,
sound kernels, and sound types are not the object of aesthetic judgement as
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Towards a General Theory of Musical Works and Musical Listening
long as they are taken for themselves. The aesthetic judgement refers only to
the complex, or the totality, of sounds, while all identifiable sounds remain
under its radar. The complex of autonomous sound differentiates into them.
19. Having introduced musical sound as standing under self-given rules, the
adjacent basic concepts have to be explicata of the different kinds of these rules.
The first of these kinds consists of rules that govern the temporal relations of
sounds. Accordingly, the second basic concept is the concept of musical time.
20. Traditionally, the temporal character of music was seen as evidence against
the conception of musical works. Music, it was said, could not form a work
because its fugaciousness contradicted the endurance that works of art must
have. Leonardo thus subordinated music to painting, which remains in being,
whereas music dies immediately after its creation (Leonardo 1651, 1.25). The
argument relies on the assumption that the temporal structure of music sub-
jects music to time, and therefore to its fugaciousness. However, if the con-
cept of musical time articulates autonomous sound, music cannot be subject to
time, but gives the time rules by itself to itself. It does not stand in time, but has
time within it. Autonomous sound is sound possessing time.
21. If musical time is not the time to which music is subject, but the time that
music has, musical time is, in the first instance, not a time span. Time spans
are units of the temporal order. But musical time is not an element of the
temporal order, but its own autonomous order. Thus, it is not a time span.
Correspondingly, musical time cannot be compared to other units of time.
Since a unit that can be compared to other units is called an extensive magni-
tude, musical time is not an extensive magnitude. Now, the opposite of exten-
sive magnitudes are intensive magnitudes. They are characterised by the con-
tinuity of degrees. It follows that musical time is such an intensive magnitude.
It is the continuity of degrees, or a flowing magnitude, that then differentiates
into distinct units. Accordingly, the rules of musical time are the rules of dif-
ferentiation of this flowing continuity: they are rules of differentiation of the
intensive magnitude into extensive magnitudes. Therefore, it is of foremost
importance to bind the temporal units of music to the continuity of musical
time. The comparable units of metre, for example, have to be understood nei-
ther as divisions nor as additions of time, but as products of the evolution of
time, as Moritz Hauptmann (1853, 238) put it and Christopher Hasty (1997)
worked out. Products of the evolution of time are differentiations of its conti-
nuity. Its extensive magnitudes result from its intensive magnitude.
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Gunnar Hindrichs
intensive magnitude of musical time and the extensive magnitude of the time
span in which a musical work is performed or heard. How can these incommen-
surable magnitudes correspond? Their correspondence can be formulated in
terms of claims and compliance. The intensive magnitude of musical time calls
for an adequate extensive magnitude of extra-musical time, and the extra-
musical time span satisfies this claim if the performance is felicitous. Note that
this allows for a variety of compliances, for musical time does not define the
measurement of the extra-musical time for which it calls, as its intensive mag-
nitude cannot represent an extensive magnitude. Compliance remains a mat-
ter of judgement. And note further that this feature explains the repeatability
of musical time in extra-musical time. The musical time of a work is repeated
again and again in extra-musical time, for the claim that it presents remains the
same while its compliances change.
23. After all, musical time can be understood as an intensive magnitude that
differentiates into intra-musical extensive magnitudes and that calls for the
compliance of extra-musical time spans.
24. Time rules cannot be the only kind of rules. The concept of musical sound
has established musical sounds as identifiable, and re-identifiable, items.
Time rules, however, do not institute the framework that is needed in order to
identify, and re-identify, musical sounds. Let us assume that, contrary to fact,
time rules were the only rules of autonomous sound. If we wanted to state the
numerical difference of qualitatively identical sounds under this condition, the
only way to do so would be to distinguish by the instants of time at which they
sound. Accordingly, sounds at different instants would need to be different
sounds. But then, sounds would not be re-identifiable at different instants of
time. It follows that identifiable, and re-identifiable, sounds require a frame-
work that entails more than just the rules of time.
26. Musical space is often either confused with the space in which music
appears or taken as a metaphor. But like musical time, musical space is not the
space in which music is, but the space that music has in itself; and it is more
than a metaphor because it is the constitutive condition for identifiable sounds
whose complex the musical work is. Nonetheless, musical space is a rather mar-
ginal concept in musical aesthetics. The old distinction between temporal
and spatial arts seems to have suppressed the spatial characteristics of music.
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Towards a General Theory of Musical Works and Musical Listening
27. Musical space has three dimensions: breadth, height, and depth. The first
dimension determines the horizontal order of musical sound. It is the simul-
taneous representation of temporal succession, “sounds being side by side,”
and its factors correspond to the respective factors of musical time. The sec-
ond dimension, height, determines the vertical order, “sounds being one upon
another.” It is operated by the distinction between high and low and differen-
tiated by intervals, scales, their repeatability in other positions, and the like.
The diastematic and chordal structure of music is constituted in its height, as
well as the pitch determination of clusters and sound clouds. The third dimen-
sion, depth, introduces “sounds being behind one another.” Its fundamental
operator is the construction of nearness and remoteness in different respects,
extending from factors of background and foreground over the topology of
tonal regions, to musical gestures like wie aus weiter Ferne.
28. In addition to the three dimensions, at least two other spatial functions rule
autonomous sound. These functions are the diagonal and the density of musical
space. The diagonal correlates horizontal and vertical functions. It is important
especially for counterpoint, which constructs musical structures that embody
internal relations between vertical and horizontal positions. Density, in turn,
determines musical sound concerning whether it is open-worked or compact.
Questions of complexity or minimalism are variations of density. All these spa-
tial functions generate the order of distance between sounds. Globally, they
govern the constriction or the extent of musical structures; locally, they operate
on their internal patterns.
30. The concepts of musical time and musical space articulate the structural
order of musical sound. However, in addition to their structural order, the
spatio-temporal sounds of music must also be convincing. Their power to
convince is because musical sounds are not arbitrary, but consequent. That
is, they have to have some kind of logical force. The spatio-temporal sounds’
power to convince is grounded in their musical logic.
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Gunnar Hindrichs
31. Musical logic must not be cast in terms of analytical necessity, but has to be
understood in respect to the uses of argument. The musical order of sounds
works like an argument that is meant to convince someone of a certain con-
sequence in a particular context: it is a topical argument of a certain scope.
The spatio-temporal sounds’ power to convince depends on this scope. To
assert that a sequence of sounds is an argument of a certain scope is to assert
that a sound sequence in, say, a Chopin nocturne is convincing under differ-
ent presuppositions than it would be in a motet by Josquin. To be sure, sound
sequences also contain elements independent of scope. Rules of counterpoint,
for example, contribute to the persuasiveness of a fugue by Bach as well as of a
symphony by Bruckner, although their musical logic is otherwise quite differ-
ent. Nonetheless, even the elements independent of scope acquire their spe-
cific function within an argument of a certain scope. Thus, musical arguments
are topical, or dialectical, arguments and not analytical ones.
32. That musical sound sequences are arguments meant to convince someone
introduces a further condition. Convincing someone makes sense only if the
consequence of which one shall be convinced is not already obvious. There
must be some opposition to it. With regard to music, this means that doubt
about and resistance against sound sequences are the precondition of musical
arguments. If music runs like clockwork, it has no power to convince. It must
“unsettle the aesthetic apparatus” in order to become convincing (Lachenmann
1996, my translation). On the basis of such a disturbance, the topical arguments
of music can do their work. They convince those who are resistant to sound
sequences of their consequence. Accordingly, the functional order of music
institutes persuasiveness on the basis of disturbance.
33. The upheaval of the aesthetic apparatus is not restricted to the currents
of twentieth-century music that explicitly have formulated it. It holds for all
autonomous sound complexes, that is, for all musical entities in the realm of
aesthetic being. Ordinary oppositions like rhapsodic versus logic, drastic ver-
sus gnostic, music at hand versus music in presentation, and so on, miss the
point insofar as they rest on a mistaken view of musical logic. To repeat: musical
logic is constructed in the form of topical arguments that convince someone
of certain sound sequences under certain premises. This holds both for ad libi-
tum and obliggato styles of music. And since topical arguments presuppose
the resistance of an opponent, musical arguments presuppose the resistance
of the listener to their sounds. This can be seen even in the case of the most
easy-going forms of music. Tonal music, for example, rests on the exposure of
its tonality in the form of the cadence. The cadence, in turn, consists of two falls
of the fifth (I–IV, V–I). The first fall suggests that the tonic is the dominant of
the subdominant, although it is posited as the tonic; the second fall dissolves
this contradiction and reconfirms the right of the tonic. The cadence is thus
grounded in a harmonic malfunction: the elements of the first chord repre-
sent a different tonal function (the dominant) than the function that they are
supposed to represent (the tonic). It follows that the argument in favour of a
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Towards a General Theory of Musical Works and Musical Listening
certain tonality, which the cadence presents, presupposes the resistance and
disturbance of the aesthetic apparatus, whose understanding of the first tonal
function is shaken. Where such elementary upheaval is missing, the musical
argument of the cadence becomes nonsensical. Thus, being successful, musical
arguments sublate the resistance of the aesthetic apparatus into a fuller under-
standing of the music.
35. The best model I can find is that of the fourfold meaning of Scripture. In this
model, what is written in a Scriptural text can be interpreted in four ways: the
literal sense, or “what is said”; the allegorical sense, or “what you shall believe”;
the tropological sense, or “how you shall live”; and the anagogical sense, or
“what you can hope for.” Applying this model to music, the different layers of
musical meaning can be distinguished in the following ways: the literal sense of
musical sounds is the meaning of sound solely in regard to sound, “what is said
in terms of sound alone,” and we have seen that this meaning consists of the
argumentative function that a sound possesses in a sequence of sounds. On the
basis of this literal sense of music, the three other senses point to something
other than sound alone. The allegorical sense is what musical sounds make
you believe from the particular premises that they imply. To give an example:
under certain implicit premises of eighteenth-century German Protestant
music, a sound structure is to be understood as passus duriusculus and thus as
the enactment of pain. The tropological sense, in turn, is what musical sounds
mean when their auditors apply them to themselves and the comprehension
of their own lives. To again give an example: the meaning of rhythm could be
understood as the exposition of the movement of the animate world. Finally,
the anagogic sense is the utopian meaning of musical sounds: they present an
order of freedom not realised in the existing world. Each of these higher senses
is constituted as autonomously as the elementary literal sense. They are con-
strued under implicit premises for beliefs, with conditions for the application
to oneself, or as structures of anticipation that are all part of the rule system
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Gunnar Hindrichs
of musical sounds and understandable in terms of it. Thus, their contents are
functions of musical sound, in opposition to musical sound as a function of
such contents.
36. With the concept of musical meaning, the articulation of musical being
seems to be completed. The spatio-temporal structure of autonomous sound
and its fourfold meaning are spelled out. But the last step is still missing. As
seen, the logical force of musical sound is of a certain scope, instituted by each
of its autonomous complexes. Its power to convince depends on this scope.
Therefore, it calls for the persuasiveness of the scope itself. The persuasiveness
of the scope, in turn, cannot be decided by the arguments working within it.
That is, musical meaning, resting on the argumentative functions of sounds,
stands under the constraint that the scope of the autonomous sound complex
itself proves to be valid. And this proof cannot be a matter of musical meaning,
but has to be articulated on a superordinate level.
37. In order to be valid, the scope of the autonomous sound complex has to be
related to a normative instance. If it satisfies the demands of this instance, its
validity is realised. The instance cannot be external to the musical work, for
this would run counter to the autonomy of sound. Accordingly, the required
relation of the autonomous sound complex must be an internal relation. This
means that the complex has to manifest an aspect that is different from the
aspect of which the articulations hitherto given are comprised, and to which
the latter aspect can be related. Let us call this latter aspect the aspect of form.
In our context, musical form shall be defined as the answer to the question
“what is it?” asked about a musical entity. The framework of this answer has
been explained: the form of a musical entity is a certain autonomous spatio-
temporal structure of fourfold meaning. But the question “what is it?” is not
the only question to be asked of a musical entity. An equally important ques-
tion asks “whereof is it?” The answer to this question is given by the music-
al material. Musical material is everything of which a musical work is made.
It comprises not only inventories of tones and systems of their relations, but
also rules of performance and social conditions of music. What matters is that
these materials have been transformed into the form of autonomous sound.
Seemingly given determinants from nature and society are thus subordinated
to the self-legislation of sound. Indeed, these materials are present only within
the autonomy of sound, for they have been processed by the rule system of the
musical work before they become an issue. Thus, the musical material is an
internal aspect of autonomous sound complexes, although external matters
have precipitated into it.
38. The musical material is the normative instance to which the rule systems of
autonomous sound are related in order to be valid. This is because the musical
material is itself not formless, but was preformed over the course of history.
Being historically preformed, the musical material implements a specific range
of possibilities of what can be made of them. In Adorno’s words, the musical
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Towards a General Theory of Musical Works and Musical Listening
material has a certain tendency (Adorno [1949] 1975, 38–42). To it, the music-
al form has to respond if it wants to realise the possibilities offered by the
material. One must not misconceive this tendency. It is clear that it cannot
be straight linearity, and it is also clear that it cannot be used as a tribunal to
condemn, or to praise, abstract methods of composition. Rather, it has to be
understood as a historically instituted, and historically changing, field of com-
positional possibilities to which the rule systems of autonomous musical sound
have to react. As such a field of possibilities that excludes other possibilities,
the musical material has normative power.
39. The internal relation of aesthetic validation has now become manifest. It
consists of the consistency of material and form of an autonomous sound com-
plex. Therefore, the final concept of musical ontology has to be a concept that
articulates the internal consistency-relation of works. In recourse to some con-
siderations of Schoenberg (1975), I call this final concept the “musical idea.”
The musical idea is the method used to generate cohesion through the homeo-
stasis of material and form. It institutes rule systems of spatio-temporal sound
sequences with meaning in response to the demands of material possibilities.
40. Because musical meaning is an element of form, while the musical idea is
the method that relates form and material in a consistent manner, the musical
idea is meaningless. It is the meaningless centre of musical meaning. As such, it
transcends everything that can be interpreted in music. But it is not ingrained
into music and its interpretations from above. Rather, it is the explicatum of the
fact that musical form has to respond to material requirements. That is, the
musical idea manifests a transcendence of meaning that is rooted in the mater-
iality of music. As such, it proves the aesthetic ontology of musical works to be
materialistic and transcendent at once.
42. The characterisation of musical listening shall begin with its intentional-
ity. To say that musical listening is intentional is to say that it is the hearing of
something as something. The formula “of something as something” entails two
conditions: musical listening is, first, directed towards something and, second,
perceives that towards which it is directed under a certain aspect. Wittgenstein
explains the latter condition, perceiving something under a certain aspect, by
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Gunnar Hindrichs
44. Before becoming more explicit about that which makes an interpretation
a musical interpretation, let us refine the general idea a little bit more. The
interpretations according to which something is heard as something cannot be
general concepts under which audible phenomena are subsumed or classified.
Subsumption and classification are analytical operations. But the interpreta-
tive guidance of the flow of perception is a synthetic function. It synthesises
perceptual information into perceptual items of certain aspects, making an
indeterminate “this” into a recognisable “this-such.” Using terminology intro-
duced by Kant, we can call the “this-such” a figurative synthesis of perceptions,
and we can call the function that carries it out the productive imagination of
this-suches (Critique of Pure Reason B150–52, Kant 1998 256–57).2 This synthetic
function is productive because it generates the recognisable items of percep-
2 Here and in the following, I draw on the interpretations provided by Wilfrid Sellars (1968, 4–8), and
Peter F. Strawson ([1971] 1974).
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Towards a General Theory of Musical Works and Musical Listening
45. Yet another point: the results of productive imagination, the figurative syn-
theses of “this-suches,” are closely connected with judgements. For example,
the perceptual contents “this-sound trope” and “this-triad” can be easily stated
in the propositional forms “this is a sound trope” and “this is a triad.” In these
propositional forms, they become the content of judgements. From the easy
transformability of non-propositional content into propositional form, it fol-
lows that a perception according to an interpretation is not a mere “this.” As a
“this-such,” it is conceptually rich, closely connected to the predicative use of
concepts and implying a framework of them. Notwithstanding, the this-such
nexus is distinct from judgement insofar as it is in the perception itself, having
been put there by productive imagination according to an interpretation. To
hear something according to an interpretation, it is not necessary that one be
able to transform one’s “this-suches” into propositional forms. Thus, the per-
ception is not reducible to the concepts and the conceptual framework that it
implies. The figurative syntheses of productive imagination are transformable
into propositional forms, but independent of their actual transformation.
46. Under these premises, the distinction between musical and non-musical
listening can be restated more precisely. The differences in their interpreta-
tions are differences of figurative syntheses by productive imagination. Musical
listening is imaginative in its own way. And we can state the direction in which
this way leads. The distinctive imaginative form of musical listening must con-
cern the conceptual factors that are implied in the respective interpretation
according to which we hear.
47. By this, one could feel prompted to say that the required conceptual dif-
ference becomes explicit in the different conceptual frameworks implied in
productive imagination. When we hear a “this-triad,” the conceptual richness
of this perception leads to another framework, namely that of tonal harmony or
at least of chord systems, than does the conceptual richness of a “this-signal.”
But it seems that the difference between musical imagination and non-musical
imagination must be more than just the implication of different conceptual
schemes. Musical and non-musical imaginations not only involve different sets
of concepts, they also appear to involve concepts in different ways.
48. One way to state this difference in conceptual involvement is to say that
the productive imagination in musical listening does not assert the concepts it
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Gunnar Hindrichs
implies. This statement could be concluded from Roger Scruton’s position that
aesthetic experience employs unasserted thought (1974, 87–98).3 Unasserted
thought goes beyond what is believed truly or falsely. To be sure, not everything
that we believe is asserted; but everything that we believe when we believe truly
or falsely is asserted. Scruton’s position that aesthetic experience employs
unasserted thought fits nicely with the pre-propositional side of productive
imagination. But it misses the transformability of “this-suches” into propo-
sitional form. When we hear a “this-triad,” we are allowed to move on to the
proposition “this is a triad.” And here we clearly make an assertion. Thus, the
concept of a chord is implicitly asserted when we hear a “this-chord,” and the
concepts that are at work in figurative syntheses are not at work as unasserted
concepts but as tacitly asserted concepts. We thus have to look for another pos-
sibility in order to state the different ways in which concepts are involved in
musical imagination.
49. I suggest that this possibility can be found in the fundamental characteris-
tic of aesthetic judgements. This characteristic, and not the contrast between
asserted and unasserted thought, marks the difference between musical and
non-musical listening. As argued in the first section, the fundamental char-
acteristic of aesthetic judgements consists of the condition that these judge-
ments are not made true by facts. In the context of musical listening, this con-
dition becomes important because the transformation of “this-suches” into
propositional form occurs under the prescription of aesthetic apprehension.
Musical listening is a form of aesthetic experience. Hence, its propositional
form must be a function of the aesthetic judgement, and the perceptual con-
tent that can be transformed into a propositional form has to be explicable in
regard to the aesthetic judgement. Now, if musical listening tacitly asserts the
concepts that are implied in its figurative syntheses, and if it amounts, in the
end, to aesthetic judgements, then the assertion of those concepts is not made
true by facts. Here the distinctive factor of musical listening becomes evident.
Musical listening synthesises something according to an interpretation whose
propositional form is never made true by a fact. Nonetheless, musical listening
asserts its interpretations, that is, it claims to be true. Both conditions amount
to the circumstance that musical listening is full of tacit claims encapsulated
in its conceptual richness, and that it nonetheless can never be nailed down by
facts. Musical listening is marked as imaginative freedom, being the issue of an
ongoing critique.
3 Scruton continues his claim in his The Aesthetics of Music (1997, 88–90).
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Towards a General Theory of Musical Works and Musical Listening
51. Since musical listening intends to disclose musical being, the concepts that
are involved in its productive imagination are the very concepts that articulate
the being of music. Correspondingly, the scheme of ontological concepts is
also the tacit conceptual scheme of musical listening, articulating the concep-
tual richness involved in our hearing of sounds as music. The basic concepts
are not only explicata of musical being, they are also explicata of the figurative
syntheses of musical imagination.
52. With their help, we can distinguish different layers of figurative synthe-
ses. The first layer refers to musical time and musical space. Musical time and
musical space are interpretative frameworks in which audible phenomena can
be heard. According to them, these phenomena are heard as products of the
evolution of musical time and as sounds at a certain place in musical space.
They are synthesised as “this-torrent,” “this-crotchet,” “this-foreground,” or
“this-high-pitch,” and the conceptual richness that is involved in these figura-
tive syntheses according to an interpretation is evident. Musical analysis, in its
broadest sense, devotes its work to bringing this richness into propositional
form. However, by such transformation, it provides new means for new inter-
pretations according to which one can hear sounds as music, so that a recip-
rocal influence between productive imagination and analytical explication is
applicable. Explicit conceptual work precipitates into musical listening in the
form of an implicit cultural memory. Such cultural memory contributes to the
tacit assertion of concepts that are involved when we hear sounds according to
an imaginative interpretation.
53. This also concerns the second layer of figurative syntheses, the layer of
musical meaning. Here, we have the iteration of the formula “something as
something.” In the first layer, audible phenomena are heard as spatio-tempo-
ral structures. In the second layer, these spatio-temporal structures are heard
as convincing spatio-temporal structures, and this means that they are heard
as argumentative functions of a musical logic. The interpretation according
to which an audible phenomenon becomes a sound within musical time and
musical space is now the issue of a further interpretation, which is concerned
with its meaning.
54. One might object that this iteration of interpretations is gratuitous. All
kinds of music at hand, for example, seem to be the issue of interpretations
of sounds that do not care about argumentative functions of a musical logic.
That very well may be. But if sounds are supposed to be heard in an aesthetic
key, the question of their aesthetic validity arises. And these sounds have to be
heard as convincing sounds. In other words, they have to be heard as sequences
that endorse certain consequences. This is their argumentative function. If you
restrict the conceptual richness that is involved in the interpretation of sounds
as music to the frameworks of musical time and musical space, you deprive
these interpretations of their aesthetic significance. That is, you disconnect
them from the aesthetic judgement. Correspondingly, such rudimentary inter-
81
Gunnar Hindrichs
56. But hearing sounds according to an interpretation does not stop at the
level of their functional sense. We hear spatio-temporal sound structures of a
certain musical logic as birds, as grief, as the movement of life, as something
that no ear has heard before, and so on. The figurative syntheses produced by
such interpretations entail a conceptual richness of a different texture than the
richness involved in the figurations of argumentative functions. In their case,
the guidedness of the perceptual flow acquires forms that make the listener
hear some extra-musical content in sounds. Taking advantage of a distinction
drawn by Richard Wollheim (1980, 140–50) in a different context with different
intentions and different implications, we can say that, according to these inter-
pretations, you hear sounds as something that prompts you to hear something
in them.
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Towards a General Theory of Musical Works and Musical Listening
58. Corresponding to the three higher senses, the guidedness of the perceptual
flow that is accomplished on this layer of figurative syntheses manifests three
different modes. In its first mode, the guidedness stands under implicit prem-
ises that make you hear some extra-musical content in them. The sounds pro-
duced by it embody affections or enact nature or expose ideals: being guided
under the premises of, say, the doctrine of figures, you hear the chromatically
descending fourth as passus duriusculus, and, accordingly, hear pain in it. In its
second mode, the guidedness works in regard to what music means to us and
our lives. Here, the sounds are heard as inviting us to apply their features to
ourselves and thus to hear extra-musical content in them: being guided by the
application of, say, the sonata form to your bourgeois life, you hear the history
of a subject or its Bildung, moving through contradictory experiences and reflec-
tions to a solution, in the piece of music. And in its third mode, the guidedness
operates in view of something that is lacking. The sounds are heard as substan-
tiating a state that is nowhere else realised and thus to be heard in them: being
guided by the anticipation of, say, true freedom, you hear such freedom in the
constellation of musical sounds.
59. On the level of the three higher senses, the conceptual richness of produc-
tive imagination seems to violate the autonomy of sound. Sounds are heard as
something according to an interpretation that employs extra-musical content.
Thus, they appear to be subject to heteronomous conditions. But this would
be true only if the extra-musical contents were not integrated into the scope of
the aesthetic judgement. Since the figurative syntheses of musical listening are
implicitly asserted propositions that stand under the prescription of the aes-
thetic judgement, the conceptual richness of these syntheses also involves this
prescription. That is, the extra-musical contents are deprived of interests and
from being made true by facts when they precipitate in the figurative syntheses
of musical sound, for these are the two marks of the aesthetic judgement. By
this, extra-musical contents, which as such are laden with interests and identi-
fications of facts, become functions of autonomous sounds. Thus, the fact that
something extra-musical is heard in the music does not impose extra-musical
rules onto the laws of music. On the contrary, the extra-musical meanings of
sounds are the results of the rule system of music that incorporates the rules of
extra-musical content under the prescription of the aesthetic judgement.
60. The integration into the scope of the aesthetic judgement applies also to a
further issue. The interpretations according to which we hear audible phenom-
ena as musical sounds involve certain values. To stay with one of the examples
above, whether you hear the chromatically descending fourth as passus duriuscu-
lus or as embodiment of expressive subjectivity depends on the value relations
83
Gunnar Hindrichs
of the respective frames of reference. Let us say that the piece in question is
Bach’s Invention for Three Voices in F minor. To hear it under the premises of
the theory of figures, you have to emphasise the traditional context in which
Bach’s music stands, and you have to estimate highly the German Protestant
music of the eighteenth century. To hear it in the other way, you have to stress
the path-breaking quality of Bach’s compositions, which relates them to forth-
coming ideas, and you have to place the expression of the subject over the rhet-
orical craftsmanship that produces music for church services. Here, different
evaluations are at work. These evaluations, which concern intra-musical ques-
tions, are entangled with extra-musical evaluations. Considering Bach’s music
in the context of the older tradition refers to the value of a pre-modern ordo
divinus; in contrast, considering it with regard to the forthcoming ideas refers
to the value of the modern subject and its individual expression. Musical val-
ues and extra-musical values go hand in hand and shape the interpretations
according to which something is heard as music.
61. The values that are implied in musical listening make clear that the inter-
pretations of audible phenomena are by no means purely descriptive. They are
also normative. Intra- and extra-musical values are involved in the guidedness
of the perceptual flow, and the figurative syntheses of musical listening are full
of evaluative impact. In other words, the “this” that becomes a “this-such” is
normatively laden because the “such” manifests the guidedness of perceptions
according to interpretations including value relations. This should be no sur-
prise. Perceptual guidedness requires points of orientation that establish the
direction into which the flow of perceptions runs. Such points of orientation
cannot be randomly selected. They have to be of some value in order to be
directive, and they have to be of higher value than other potential points of
orientation. And this means that the points of orientation embody value rela-
tions. They determine the content of the figurative syntheses. Because musical
listening is interpretative listening, it is descriptive and normative at once.
62. The fact that musical listening is packed with value relations seems to
introduce the predicament that Nicolai Hartmann aptly called “the tyranny of
values” (1926, 574–76; 1932, 2:421–26).4 The tyranny of values consists of the
tendency of each value to posit itself as the tyrant of interpretative contexts.
It is connected with the devaluation of other values, with the corresponding
struggle of values, and with the submission of our understanding to a decision
for certain values. This proves that values are positions in a system of values.
The devaluation of values downgrades them within the system, the struggle of
values is a struggle for position, and the submission of our understanding to
value decisions makes it into something that must occupy a position registered
in the system. All this is well known from the history of musical listening. The
tyranny of values pops up again and again.
4 Hartmann considers the tyranny of values in the context of practical reason. His solution, however,
which suggests a “value synthesis,” is as dissatisfactory as his material value ethics in general.
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Towards a General Theory of Musical Works and Musical Listening
63. But as in the case of musical meaning, the values involved in musical lis-
tening are integrated into the scope of the aesthetic judgement. That is, their
genuine articulation—value judgements—are subordinated to another kind of
judgement. Often, aesthetic judgements are considered to be a special case of
value judgements. Indeed, beauty itself is frequently defined as aesthetic value.
Nothing could be more wrong. Values are connected with interests, as are their
articulations, value judgements. Aesthetic judgements are not. Thus, the aes-
thetic judgement is of a different kind than the value judgement. If the latter
has to be in the scope of the former, the interests that are connected with it
have to lose their power. And this means that the values themselves cannot be
the tyrants of our understanding any longer. On the contrary, aesthetic judge-
ment deprives of their decisive force the values that are involved in musical lis-
tening. To be sure, hearing audible phenomena as musical sounds still involves
value relations, but these value relations are not the determinative factors in
the end.
64. This leads us to the highest point at which musical listening is attached. The
formula “something as something” has been iterated several times. The layers
of musical listening extend from hearing something as spatio-temporal sound
structures, to hearing spatio-temporal sound structures as argumentative func-
tions, to hearing argumentative functions as something that makes you hear
something in them. All these layers are pervaded with tacit value relations. But
the aesthetic nature of musical listening is not yet explained: to subordinate all
these layers under the aesthetic judgement requires hearing them as autono-
mous sound complexes.
65. At first glance, it seems that this requirement is a further iteration of the
formula “something as something.” What else could the phrase “hearing some-
thing as an autonomous sound complex” mean? But we have to be careful here.
As seen, the formula “something as something” can be explained in terms of
“hearing something according to an interpretation.” And this cannot hold for
autonomous sound complexes for the following reason: to hear something as
an autonomous sound complex is to hear the sound as self-legislating sound.
As we saw in the previous section, the self-legislation of sound is grounded in
the internal relation of musical form and musical material. Correspondingly, in
order to hear something as an autonomous sound complex, one must appre-
hend this internal relation. The internal relation of form and material, in turn,
has proven to be the meaningless centre of musical meaning. Thus, it cannot
be interpreted. It follows that hearing it is not an issue of interpretation. The
phrase “hearing something as an autonomous sound complex” is corrupted.
It does not allow for a reformulation in terms of “hearing something accord-
ing to an interpretation” and is, accordingly, mistakenly expressed. Instead of
saying “musical listening hears something as an autonomous sound complex”
we should merely say “musical listening hears an autonomous sound complex.”
The musical work is simply present in musical listening. Hearing something as
musical sound depends upon this.
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Gunnar Hindrichs
67. But the nonsensical core at which musical listening is attached has, as we
saw, a structure. It consists of the response of the form to the tendency of the
material. This tendency is directed to the actualisation of hitherto unactual-
ised possibilities that the material offers. The movement that is concerned with
such actualisations is the avant-garde. Thus, the infinite reshaping of interpre-
tations for the sake of the nonsensical core of music is connected to the musical
avant-garde. It receives from the avant-garde the works that open our ears, and
it is committed to the avant-garde. Musical listening in the sphere of the aes-
thetic judgement is partisan.
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87
The Work of the Performer
John Rink
University of Cambridge
This essay considers the work of the performer in relation to the musical work.1
More is at stake than the play on words implied here. By claiming that perform-
ers’ engagement with the “musical work” as conventionally understood entails
a different sort of “work” in the sense of both process and outcome, I argue
that what performers do influences music’s very content, how it takes shape,
and how those who hear it perceive and understand it. The essay first describes
the act of performing and what I have termed “the problem of performance”
(Rink 2001b). The next section then revisits key literature on musical narrativity
and puts it to use in addressing the performer/work relationship at the heart of
the enquiry.2 Finally, a case study based on my experience in playing a piece by
Rachmaninoff demonstrates that relationship in action.
Premises
“Music-making,” writes Jonathan Dunsby (2001, 346), “is a virtually universal
human activity”; motivated at the most fundamental level by “private biological
necessity,” it takes the form of “public property” at its most elevated extreme.
For all its universality, however, musical performance is notoriously resistant to
explication, notwithstanding an avalanche of research in recent years and grow-
ing recognition of its centrality to musical thought and musicological enquiry.
Gaining a clear and comprehensive understanding of musical performance is
thwarted by its evanescence and ontology, ambiguity surrounding what it sig-
nifies and how it conveys meaning, and the performer’s variable identity in
the act of performance. In surveying these problems, I lay the groundwork for
reconsideration of aspects of performative process from the perspectives of
both performers and listeners.
Performances do not exist so much as happen,3 and live performances in par-
ticular are temporal, ephemeral acts—in Nicholas Cook’s words, a “snatching
of eternity . . . from the jaws of evanescence” (2001, §19). Furthermore, a single
performance is rarely if ever adequate or definitive: as Janet Schmalfeldt (1985,
28) has observed, “there are always ‘different, better’ performances . . . to be
1 I am grateful to Daniel Leech-Wilkinson, Andreas Dorschel, and Paulo de Assis for their insightful
comments on a draft of this essay.
2 See Leech-Wilkinson (2015) for further discussion of what I call the “performer/work relationship.” For
example, referring to multiple recordings of Chopin’s Berceuse, op. 57, Leech-Wilkinson comments:
“There is much less work being done by the score and much more by the performer than is implied by
the way we habitually talk about scores” (345). While the composer provided “a starting point” in the
form of the finished score, “most of the musical work is done later” (344).
3 See Godlovitch (1998) for discussion.
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The Work of the Performer
7 For a critique of the notion of “communication” in performance, see King and Gritten (2017).
8 The “talk-and-play events” described below represent one way of meeting such a need. Note that in
smaller-scale concert venues many professional musicians now give verbal introductions to the pieces
they will be performing; these “ice-breakers” establish a rapport with listeners and help avoid the
barriers that persist in more formal concert settings.
9 Katharine Ellis (1997, 357) cites one review from 1837 which “makes clear how a quasi-sexual possession
of the audience was an integral and necessary part of the performance,” in which “issues of control”
were at stake.
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John Rink
involving sound, time, and human experience: the score tended to be seen as
“the music,” and vice versa. In proposing new means of studying music as per-
formance, Cook encouraged a “dissolving of any stable distinction” between
performances and works by regarding scores not as texts but as “scripts,” a term
implying “a reorientation of the relationship between notation and perform-
ance” (§16). Such a reorientation, he argued, would allow the prevailing con-
ception of “a single work located ‘vertically’ in relation to its performances” to
be transcended in favour of “an unlimited number of ontologically equivalent
instantiations, all existing on the same ‘horizontal’ plane” (§17).
According to this model, engagement with “the work” therefore yields innu-
merable new conceptions and constructions thereof, rather than a singular
version that musicians are expected to reproduce in performance. The creative
agency of the performer is obviously critical in that respect, and this has been
increasingly recognised in recent decades. For example, the role of gesture
and physicality in performance has now been widely investigated, along with
other factors defining the “total performance event.” An extensive literature
has grown up around practice and rehearsal, and along with it an increasing
attention to the technical, artistic, and practical concerns of performers with
regard to both research into practice (see Frayling 1993, 5), which considers
what Jane Davidson (2015, 93) calls “the practice-focused behaviour of oth-
ers,” and practice as research (characterised by Frayling [1993, 5] as practice
“through” research), which investigates emergent, practitioner-led activity
through a cycle of research planning, acting, observing, and reflecting. The
five-year CHARM initiative10 promoted the musicological study of recordings
by drawing on a “wide range of approaches ranging from computational ana-
lysis to business history” in four projects that now have many counterparts; and
CHARM’s successor, CMPCP,11 explored key research questions focusing on
the creative practice of performance rather than the outcomes thereof.
Questions nevertheless remain about how the “relationship between nota-
tion and performance” is played out, and further attention is also needed to
the process by which performers devise the “ontologically equivalent instanti-
ations” referred to above. These are the focal points of the next two sections,
which address—if only provisionally—the work of performers in interacting
with and shaping the musical work.
10 AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music; www.charm.rhul.ac.uk.
11 AHRC Research Centre for Musical Performance as Creative Practice; www.cmpcp.ac.uk. CMPCP
addressed three main research questions: In what ways are performers creative? How does their creative
activity vary across different cultures, idioms, and conditions? How do musical performances take shape
over time, through the exercise of individual and collective creativity?
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The Work of the Performer
so long. For reasons that will become clear, further re-evaluation is warranted
here, especially in respect of the literature on musical narrativity from the 1980s
and 1990s.12 In retrospect, it seems astonishing that so little attention was paid
to performance in that literature, given that music’s narrative properties—
however constituted—can be actualised only through performance. Moreover,
any claims about a musical structure’s ostensibly immanent narrativity must
account for the fact that works signify in unique ways on each performance
occasion, and furthermore that “musical structure” is a fundamentally syn-
chronic notion valorised by analysis but at odds with the diachronic process of
music-in-sound. I am not suggesting that the leading authors on musical nar-
rativity altogether ignored its time-dependency, but some of their conclusions
seem remote from, and inimical to, musical reality and to what I am calling
the work of performers. This is problematic in itself and frustrating in respect
of the potential of the narrative concept to shed light on what performers do;
on how they regard, engage with, and co-create the musical work; and on how
listeners make sense of what they are hearing. To redress these lacunae, I survey
and critique the principal literature here, teasing out definitions that eventu-
ally are reconceived and newly employed.
In an article applying Proppian theory and terminology to music (especially
the notion of “plot archetype”), Anthony Newcomb (1987) defined a narrative
as a continuous “series of functional events in a prescribed order” (165), and
he asserted that “the very heart of musical meaning . . . lies in modes of con-
tinuation,” which in turn “lie at the very heart of narrativity, whether verbal or
musical” (167). Elsewhere, Newcomb (1994) described musical narratives as “a
comprehensible series of intentional acts” (84) potentially comprising “two
distinct elements”: “those aspects or characteristics within the music itself that
suggest or stimulate a narrative interpretation,” and the “criteria and strat-
egies by which the listener identifies, locates and interprets narrative aspects
in music” (85). According to Newcomb, such aspects “are themselves purely musi-
cal” (86) and require no literal “story,” although any narrative activity on the
listener’s part “is stimulated by a heightened sense of contingency within the series
of events itself ” (87).
Notwithstanding this emphasis on immanent and “purely musical” proper-
ties, Newcomb cites Jerome Bruner’s (1991, 5) distinction between the “narra-
tive mode of thought” and “forms of narrative discourse,” each of which “enables
and gives form to the other.” For Bruner, narrative is “a form not only of repre-
senting but of constituting reality” (5), operating “as an instrument of mind” in
the construction thereof (6). Its characteristics include:
12 In the ensuing survey I concentrate on the anglophone literature from the period in question mainly
because it was so influential in the context of New Musicology, as a result of which its failure to address
issues related to performance can be seen as especially problematic. It goes without saying that a vast
literature on musical narrativity now exists and that a systematic trawl of that literature would be re-
quired to explore all the issues adumbrated here. By way of example, see Grabócz (2009); Baroni (2007);
Seaton (2005); Tarasti (2004); Nattiez (1990a); Adam (1984); Ricœur (1983–85); Tiffeneau (1980).
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John Rink
1. diachronicity (6)13
2. a “part–whole textual interdependence” whereby “parts and wholes
in a narrative rely on each other for their viability” (8)
3. a distinction between a narrative’s “plot” and its mode of delivery (12)
4. a normative background and its subversion through “breach[es] of
conventional expectation” (15)
Similar points inform Eero Tarasti’s Theory of Musical Semiotics (1994), which
claims that “some music is narrative even though it has no explicit connec-
tion with a verbal, gestural, or pictorial language that can provide a ‘plot’”
(23). Tarasti defines three types of narrativity. The first involves “latent trait[s]”
that emerge only “when a musical work is interpreted, played, or performed
in a given way,” and which cannot be analysed “merely at the ‘neutral’ level
of musical structure” (23). In contrast, the second is “based on an immanent
process of signification” (30) and manifests itself “at a purely structural level”
(23). And the third should be seen as a “general category of the human mind,
a competency that involves putting temporal events into a certain order, [i.e.]
a syntagmatic continuum” with “beginning, development, and end,” whose
logic reflects a given tension that is manifested in an “arch progression” (24).
Tarasti’s book mostly concerns the second type and the semantic content of the
“musical utterance” (énoncé musical), but he broaches the first—the act of utter-
ance (énonciation musicale)—in an analysis of Fauré’s “Après un rêve,” studying
eight “pertinent parameters” in twenty-eight select recordings, among them
tempo, vibrato, and breathing (205–8). This rare attention to the performance
act is undermined, however, by Tarasti’s commitment to an ostensible “basic
truth” concerning musical interpretation, namely, that “performance can only
be analyzed in relation to the musical enunciate itself ” (193).14 Such a “truth” is
problematic for reasons shown later.
Other references to performance in narrative terms can be found in roughly
contemporaneous writings by Janet Schmalfeldt (1985), Fred Maus (1988), and
William Rothstein (1995), who claimed that the performer’s aim is “to discover,
or create, a musical narrative,” synthesised “from all he or she knows and feels
about the work; listeners, in turn, will construct their own narratives, guided by
the performer. One performer’s narrative may differ radically from another’s
for the same work, and not all will accord equally with the composer’s inten-
tions. . . . But a narrative there must be, even if it . . . cannot be translated into
words” (1995, 237).15
I too have written about musical narrative, defining it as “a time-dependent
unfolding of successive musical events, palpably linked to produce a coherent
13 According to Bruner (1991, 6), a “narrative is an account of events occurring over time”; it is both
“irreducibly durative” and based on a “‘mental model’ whose defining property is its unique pattern of
events over time.”
14 Tarasti translates énoncé musical both as “musical utterance” and as “musical enunciate,” while énonciation
is variably translated as “uttering,” “utterance,” “musical performance,” and so on.
15 See also Schachter (1988, 253) on Chopin’s four Ballades and Fantasy op. 49: “Among the musical values
of all these works is their narrative quality; but the narration is a musical one, carried out by tonal struc-
ture, texture, form, and motivic design.”
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The Work of the Performer
16 My view about embodiment “in sound alone” has since evolved, as I show later.
17 Note Shaffer’s (1995, 18) complementary claim that the performer is a “privileged listener.” For further
discussion of the semiotic tripartition see Nattiez (1990b), among others.
18 As we will see, I mean “program” in the sense of a “series of coded instructions and definitions,” as
“something conceived of as encoding and determining a process, esp. genetically” (OED 2018, 9b), not
as in “programme music” (ibid., 5: “A sequence of scenes or events intended to be conveyed by a piece
of music, or serving as the inspiration or basis for a composition”). Moreover, as will also become clear,
the focus here is on the solo performer, although relevance to other performance contexts should by no
means be ruled out.
19 I concentrate here on the listener, though there are of course many different sorts of perceiver, includ-
ing critic, analyst, and so forth.
20 See Donington (1963) on the role of familiarity and unfamiliarity in the performance of “early music” as
well as more generally.
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John Rink
narrative narrativised
“program” response (?)
Figure 4.1
Perceiving performance
The available space allows only brief observations on musical narrativity as
perceived by listeners, and what it is listeners hear. A significant component
of the latter will be what Peter Johnson (1999, 63) terms “the physical prop-
erties of musical sound itself ”; in his view, “performance is constituted by the
listener from physical sound as signifier, constituting the fabric of the music.”
The implications of sound are greater than one might assume: as Clarke
(2002a, 190) claims, “The sounds of a performance have the potential to con-
vey a wealth of information to a listener, ranging from physical characteristics
related to the [performance] space . . . and the nature of the instrument, to
less palpable properties such as the performance ideology of the performer.”21
Moreover, “information about the body of the performer and its relationship
with the instrument” is also specified (ibid., 191; see also Doğantan-Dack 2008;
Rink 2017). That is why Godlovitch (1998, 43) describes “the sound sequence
in performance” as “not just a physical commodity but a phenomenal one.”
But, as observed previously, the listener’s construction of meaning stems from
a good deal more than just the sound of the music: citing Kershaw’s (1992, 22)
pronouncement that “no item in the environment of performance can be dis-
counted as irrelevant to its impact,” Cook (2001, §28) encourages an ethno-
graphically inspired understanding of “the performance of a particular piece in
the context of the total performance event,” as noted above. This more broadly
constructed meaning explains the presence of “music” and “act” in the centre
of figure 4.1, along with my resistance to claims of unmediated immanence and
my misgivings about Tarasti’s “basic truth,” given that the factors influencing
the meaning of performance as constructed by listeners (whether narrative
meaning or not) may well reside outside the score and the musical enunciate
as he understands it.
Furthermore, any theory of narrativised response must avoid further naive
assumptions about how listeners listen and their inclination or ability to hear
structurally ramified, comprehensive narratives within performed music.
Referring to Levinson (1997), Clarke (2002a, 192) claims that “listeners do not
construct elaborate and large-scale hierarchical structures, but are primar-
21 Or rather, the performance ideology of the performer as inferred by individual listeners. In private corres-
pondence, Daniel Leech-Wilkinson commented that listeners draw on their own ideologies to attribute
intentions and motivations to the performer.
96
Conceiving performance
A psychological perspective is by no means sufficient, however. The next step in
this more broadly conceived enquiry into musical narrative and specifically the
“narrative programming” that I referred to earlier is therefore to consider what
I call the score–sound continuum, the primary relevance of which to solo perform-
ance must again be emphasised. Shown in figure 4.2, this continuum implies
that the score only hints at “the music,” which necessarily will be imagined
and internalised by the performer either at first sight or, more usually, over
an extended timescale involving rehearsal and actual performance, in a dura-
tive and recursive process. The performance “program” is never entirely fixed,
although (as we will see) it may remain largely stable over time and, in some
respects, possibly across different performers’ conceptions.
Figure 4.2.
The means by which music takes shape from the score22 involves what pianist
Alfred Brendel (1976c, 25) terms a “translation” of the composer’s intentions
“into one’s own understanding . . . with the help of one’s own engaged emo-
tions, one’s own senses, one’s own intellect, one’s own refined ears.” In his
22 The score has been variously described as a recipe, rough outline, template, blueprint, roadmap, and (as
noted earlier) script. See, for example, Clarke (2002b); Cook (2001); Howat (1995).
97
view, a key priority of practice is “the task of clarifying, purifying, fortifying and
restoring musical continuity” (1976a, 124)—the accent on continuity chiming
both with Godlovitch’s (1988, 34) reference to the “spatiotemporal continu-
ity” on which the cohesion of a performance depends, and with Newcomb’s
“modes of continuation.”
That continuity partly explains why I refer to the performer’s program as
being “narrative” in nature. A second reason relates to the deliberate construc-
tion by some performers of more traditionally conceived “narratives, tableaux
and programmes for the works they play,” as noted by Rothstein (1995, 238).
Such literal prompts are of only passing interest in one sense, but the com-
ments of two performers along these lines do offer more general insight into
performance conception and into the musical narrative under discussion here.
Brendel’s essay “Form and Psychology in Beethoven’s Piano Sonatas” intrigu-
ingly claims that in one movement, “the psychological process establishes the
form . . . but the form itself is also cast in such a way that one can deduce from
it the psychological process” ([1971] 1976, 50).23 Though never defined, the pro-
cess in question takes on more specific meaning in Brendel’s “narrativised,”
diachronic description of the music, which presumably conveys verbally the
basis of his performances thereof. Similarly, one of the first priorities of con-
cert pianist Murray Perahia in learning a piece is to discern a “unifying” image
or framework “so that the whole thing is either telling some kind of story, even
if the story is only with tones, or [so that] those tones can somehow metaphor-
ically transform themselves into some kind of story that one can make sense
of, so that the whole piece can be seen as one, so that one isn’t only working
on details, . . . so [that] one has the whole picture before one begins” (quoted
in Rink 2001a, 12, reproduced with additional original text).24 Close study then
follows, contextualised within the broad framework, as in one movement of a
sonata by Chopin where Perahia found the essence of the music’s meaning—at
least as conveyed in his performance—within an inner voice, which professed
an overriding “sadness” and “disappointment of not being able to go higher”
to its implicit goal (quoted in ibid., 12). For Perahia, “it is important to try to
sketch what’s happening—the drama of the tones—into a kind of metaphor-
ical drama, so that it speaks to you on as many levels as possible, not just the
musical level” (quoted in ibid., 15).
These comments reveal one aspect of what I am referring to as the perform-
er’s “narrative program”—a “drama of the tones,” which might be consciously
played out in the performer’s mind to the point that it “becomes” the music
and possibly even subsumes the identity of the performer (see Rink 2017). But
coupled with this assignment of function to individual musical elements and
their shaping in an overarching “plot” (however defined) is the structuring of
the mental model behind the musical continuity so essential to performance
and to any narrative conception. To understand this requires reference to
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The Work of the Performer
99
John Rink
control over the flow of events. It also helps explain why, or how, performances
and thus “the music itself ” vary from occasion to occasion, thanks in part to
each performance’s unique actualisation of an underlying conceptual frame-
work (which itself can be highly dynamic). That is true of any narrative act, as is
the existence of some sort of hierarchical structure in the first place. Discussing
solo piano performance from memory, Eric Clarke (1988, 3) writes: “Though
something of an idealization, we can imagine a performer who, at the start of
a performance, has a complete knowledge of the generative structure of the
piece, from the very highest level, where the whole piece is represented as a
unity, down to the lowest level, . . . where each . . . note is represented.”25 Clarke
illustrates this hypothetical structure as a conventional tree diagram, only part
of which is likely to be “active at any time” (ibid., 4). Although the essentially
static nature of Clarke’s diagram and especially the fixed point at the top fail
to capture the essential process of performance (even at the most remote con-
ceptual level, which in principle should encapsulate the performed music’s
shape, its “arch of tension,” as heuristically represented in my intensity curve,
discussed earlier), his depiction alludes to important and intriguing parallels
between the actualisation of a performance conception and the “improvisa-
tory” composing-out described by Heinrich Schenker, whose theory repre-
sents music—in Tarasti’s words (1994, 24)—as “a totality created by a structure
wherein all events relate to a basic model and the tension it provides,” which
“corresponds well to the syntagmatic demand of narrativity.”26
That demand is also met through the agency of performance expression,
notably performers’ apparent use of what Palmer (1997, 125) calls “a syntax or
formal set of rules to generate expression,” by means of which “systematic pat-
terns of expression result from transformations of the performer’s internal rep-
resentation of musical structure.”27 For example, Clarke (2002b, 61) writes that
“the stability (or otherwise) of . . . higher-level tempo shape can . . . be directly
attributed to the stability of the performer’s representation of the music,” par-
ticularly with regard to phrase structure. Bruno Repp (1992) discovered signifi-
cant agreement between the timing profiles of twenty-eight performers’ ren-
ditions of a given piece, all of which, according to Clarke (2002b, 65), “were
organised around the phrase structure,” with an “increasing diversity between
the performers [occurring] at more superficial levels of expression.” The fact
that “subsequent studies by Repp with even larger samples (over 100 perfor-
mances of the same music) have confirmed these conclusions” (ibid.) suggests
the existence of generally perceived paradigms (or “archetypes”) derived from
phrase structures that are individualised on each performance occasion.28 This
25 The proposition that “each note is represented” does not imply a conscious focus on each and every
one by the performer as the music is played or sung. On the contrary, the consciousness of the perform-
er necessarily operates at a higher level, in part to reduce a cognitive load that otherwise would be too
great to allow operational fluency.
26 The time-dependency of a performance’s “fundamental structure” is implicit in my intensity curve and
also in the “theory of performance” espoused by Rachmaninoff, which I discuss later.
27 See for example the rule systems devised by Johan Sundberg and Neil Todd (cited in Clarke 2002b).
28 For discussion, see Buck, MacRitchie, and Bailey (2013); compare however Rink (2013) and Cook (2013,
esp. chap. 6).
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The Work of the Performer
lends some credence to claims that music’s meaning derives from structure,
even if that is by no means the full story. (For further discussion, see Rink 2013,
2015.)
The final matter for consideration here concerns the physical aspect of per-
formance, specifically motor programming. Palmer (1989) defines this as “the
memory representation for the organization (prior to execution) of a sequence
of commands to the performing muscles” (332) operating at hierarchical “lev-
els of conscious and unconscious control,” respectively comprising “conscious
intentions influenced by cognitive and emotional” factors and, at lower rep-
resentational levels, “automated procedures” (345). Jeff Pressing (1988, 131)
observes that motor programs take shape through the combination of “specific
single movements . . . into sequences, and ultimately into various subroutines
that make up goal-directed action[s]. [These] are then organized and initi-
ated by an executive,” which various authors have explained in terms of motor
schemata, frames, scripts, and action plans (see, e.g., Shaffer 1981). Expert per-
formers have access to a vast repertoire of “finely timed and tuneable” motor
programs (Pressing 1988, 139) learnt over many years, which are “susceptible to
tuning (adjustment) on the basis of feedback” (133) in the heat of performance.
The hierarchical nature of such programs, the existence of archetypes (even if
personal ones), and their flexible and spontaneous realisation in performance
all resonate with the definitions of “narrative” advanced earlier. Furthermore,
the individual “gestures” that make up these programs—gesture in the literal
sense of physical motion and in terms of the sonorous shapes that result—
potentially have a functional role as bearers of semantic content, as “units of
code” within the unfolding narrative (for discussion see Robb 2015). The need
to recognise physical movement as an integral part of any performance con-
ception and enactment is one more reason why we must look beyond the score
to understand both musical meaning in general and musical narrativity more
specifically. In my view, we cannot properly define music’s narrative character
or indeed understand music in general and its effect on us unless the actions of
the performer are fully taken into account.
Work in progress
Some years ago (Rink 2001b), I suggested that the combination of words and
music in what I have since called “talk-and-play” events offers a highly effective
means of surmounting the obstacles to communication that I identified earlier
in this essay. In my experience, greater insight tends to be generated through
that combination than by means of either performance or verbal commentary
alone. Although more traditional modes of presentation will continue to have
their place, the pursuit of alternative formats like those I am describing could
significantly enhance the prevailing understanding of musical performance,
however recondite the latter remains.29 Unfortunately, because the medium of
29 Hence the programme of “talk-and-play” events initiated in 2009 by the AHRC Research Centre for
Musical Performance as Creative Practice.
101
Figure 4.3.
Figure 4.3. Rachmaninoff, Prelude op. 23, no. 10: first edition (Moscow: Gutheil [1904]).
John Rink
30 Without wishing to seem immodest, I should observe that alongside my work as a musicologist I regu-
larly perform professionally, having received the Premier Prix and the Concert Recital Diploma in piano
from the Guildhall School of Music & Drama in 1981.
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The Work of the Performer
come to a head in the fascinating build-up from bar 19 to the climax around
bars 29–31, where the pianist’s hands continually interlock and awkwardly but
tellingly compete within the same space and for the same notes. The pedalling
must be highly refined elsewhere as well so that contrapuntal textures are not
obscured or evocative dissonances resolved too quickly.
I gradually came to imagine, hear, and embody this deceptively complex music
in a form different from the published score. I now regret that I did not follow
my habitual advice to students (whether performers or not) to log their evolving
impressions in a diary as they get to know a piece; nevertheless, it is possible to
reconstruct the process by which I grew more familiar with this music. Early on I
was aware of a fundamental thematic idea: the falling iambic figure announced
in the bass at the beginning. This continually crops up in various intervallic
guises and at different registral levels, demonstrating Rachmaninoff ’s tech-
nique of building his preludes “from tiny melodic or rhythmic fragments”
(Norris 2001, 715). I also revelled from the start in the ingenious counterpoint,
the rhythmic play during the approach to the climax, the rich timbres made
palpable by all the black notes, and the lushness of attack invited throughout,
especially in the chordal figurations. But only later did everything coalesce into
a sense of the music’s “shape”—a property difficult to define but essential to, or
at least characteristic of, coherent performance, as I have argued over the years.31
Rachmaninoff seems to have held a similar view. Professing what Norris ([1976]
2001, 78) calls a “theory of performance centred on the idea that every piece
has a culminating ‘point,’” Rachmaninoff himself declared: “This culmination,
depending on the actual piece, may be at the end or in the middle, it may be
loud or soft; but the performer must know how to approach it with absolute cal-
culation, absolute precision, because if it slips by, then the whole construction
crumbles, the piece becomes disjointed and scrappy and does not convey to the
listener what must be conveyed” (quoted in ibid.).32
This extraordinary manifesto leads one to question where the “culminating
point” might be in the musical “narrative” of this prelude, and how to approach
and then move beyond it. Such were the complexities of the score that I had
to engage in analysis away from the piano, rather than rely on my ear alone, in
order to develop a feel for the music’s shape and thus meet the challenge set by
Rachmaninoff—as well as to memorise the music, for only when it was learnt by
heart could I really begin to hear it. The analysis involved teasing out the mani-
fold contrapuntal implications by constructing a new score (discussed below)
which explicitly showed the various textures. I also devised a profile of contra-
puntal texture (see figure 4.4) to trace the progression from two active parts or
strands at the opening through three in bars 11–18, one in bars 19–34, four then
three then four in bars 35–56, and back to two in the coda (bars 56–62), with
a brief contraction to one just before the end. This diagram reveals an innate
textural rhythm, a process of expansion and contraction that is embedded in
the music while also impinging on, indeed shaping, the music as performed. It
is the basis of the performance’s physiognomy as well as its breathing.
31 See, for example, Rink (1990, 2002a); see too the essays in Leech-Wilkinson and Prior (2017).
32 This passage is also discussed by Cook (1999, 2013) and Dunsby (2002).
105
John Rink
Figure 4.4.
33 I noticed the connection with the introduction at a late stage in learning the piece, such is the richness
of the writing here.
106
Figure 4.4. Rachmaninoff, Prelude op. 23, no. 10: contrapuntal texture in profile.
Figure 4.5.
Figure 4.5. Rachmaninoff, Prelude op. 23, no. 10: reworked score, based on first edition
(see figure 4.3).
John Rink
more deliberately on getting the notes out, not only accurately but with suffi-
cient dynamic and timbral finesse to effect the “right” linear connections—and
within an overall piano. It is possible to hear the rich textural intricacy by playing
the passage without pedal, which masks the gaps between individual attacks.
Referring again to the reworked score, note the physical properties of bars
11–18, which constitute the first three-voice passage. For instance, in bars 13
and 17 the two hands share an accompaniment which needs to sound seamless
(hence my additional articulation markings), while in bars 12 and 16 the upper
note of the arpeggiated bass is impossible to play with the left hand except on a
fairly unresonant piano, as the pedal has to catch the anticipatory lower note so
“early,” though played with the right hand the upper note might lack linear con-
nection within the melody. Hence the question mark above the G♭ in bar 16—a
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The Work of the Performer
34 According to Martyn (1990, 489), Rachmaninoff recorded op. 23 no. 10 in New York Studio No. 2 on 18
March 1940. The recording was originally issued by Victor (V 2124) and HMV (DA 1772) and is currently
available on Magic Talent CD 48074 (duration 3'16"), as well as on YouTube.
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John Rink
work of the performer must surely be not to reproduce the music, but rather to
create it as if from scratch. Yet that is precisely what I would be doing were I to
perform it again now.
References
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Presses Universitaires de France. Anne Douglas. 2009. The Artistic Turn:
Baroni, Raphaël. 2007. La tension narrative: A Manifesto. Collected Writings of the
Suspense, curiosité et surprise. Paris: Seuil. Orpheus Institute. Leuven: Leuven
Brendel, Alfred. (1971) 1976. “Form and University Press.
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Music as Play
A Dialogue
Andreas Dorschel
University of the Arts Graz
In the beginning was the sound. What a sound is like depends on its source and
on the space it has to fill.
In these verses from The Prelude, book III, William Wordsworth described his
undergraduate residence of the 1780s at St John’s College, Cambridge. Sounds,
notes, voices: his room became a musical chamber—of sorts, certainly. By 1947
it was no longer an obscure nook; it was enlarged, and, thanks to Wordsworth’s
autobiographical poem, had become famous. On an early spring day of that
year, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who had been elected professor of philosophy in
1939, met in that same room with his acquaintances Elisabeth Lutyens, a mod-
ernist composer, Myra Hess, an acclaimed pianist, and Rae Woodland, a young
singer.2 In the middle of the room stood a Blüthner grand piano from the 1880s.
Myra Hess had just finished playing the C-major prelude from book I of Bach’s
Well-Tempered Piano.
115
DOI https://doi.org/10.11116/9789461662521.ch05
Andreas Dorschel
&c ‰ œ œ œ ‰ œ œ œ œ ‰ œ œ œ œ ‰ œ œ œ œ ‰ bœ œ œ œ ‰ œ œ œ œ
œ
œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ
? c œ™ œ
≈ j ≈ j
™ ≈ j
™ ≈ j
™ ≈ j ≈ j
˙ ˙œ œ ˙œ œ ˙œ œ œ™ œ œ™ œ
˙ ˙
U
& ‰ ‰ œœœœœœœœœœ œœ w
œœœœœ œ œ w
w
œœ
Ϫ
? ≈ œ™j œ œ œ
˙ œ œœœœ
≈ j
w
œ ˙
˙ ˙ ˙ ˙ w
u
Figure 5.1.
116
Figure 5.1. Johann Sebastian Bach, Das Wohltemperierte Klavier I, Praeludium no. 1 in C
major, BWV 846, bars 30–35.
Music as Play
117
Andreas Dorschel
118
Music as Play
RW: It would not, since he would have taken so much for granted—to the
extent of not even thinking of it.
MH: If the question is over not just what a game is, but rather what is an
appropriate game and for whom, then matters, it seems to me, are set-
tled within a way of life. Life happens against some backdrop to which
we constantly refer. Other ways of life can be imagined in which, for
example, boys were trained to kill enemies and to see that as a sort of
adventure game.
EL: They cannot just be imagined. They were real a few years ago—that
sort of adventure game in the infamous Hitler Youth. Hence I was
worried about “game” being an open concept that any practice could
appropriate.
LW: Concepts are not there to teach us morals. They are in place for the good
and the wicked alike. Or rather, the good and the wicked put them in
their place.
RW: I am glad we are the good ones.
MH: Good, that is, at playing music.
RW: I do not play it.
MH: Why not?
RW: For one thing, because some of it just isn’t play.
EL: Professor Wittgenstein will find a beastly “essence” in what you say
there. Nothing is just what it is. The meaning of something is its use.
RW: There is use and there is abuse. Yesterday I sang in Beethoven’s Missa
solemnis at King’s. I did not understand all of it—but that much I under-
stood: It would not have come about without the ambition to be more
than mere play. Beethoven’s setting of the Mass is itself a religious pro-
fession. It makes the actual church rite superfluous. (Hums Dona nobis
pacem from the Missa solemnis, op. 123.)
Ϫ Ϫ
p
# Ϫ
Ϫ
œ œ j
Soprano & # 68 J œ™ œ œ œ ‰ ∑
do - - - na no - bis pa - cem
Figure 5.2.
119
Figure 5.2. Ludwig van Beethoven, Missa solemnis, op. 123, V. Agnus Dei, bars 123–26,
Soprano.
Andreas Dorschel
MH: We often say that music is play or that music is played—this may already
imply a difference. What do we mean by it? Do we mean by it one thing
or many?
EL: Where Wittgenstein is concerned, always many.
LW: And is that such a bad thing? “I will teach you differences.”
RW: King Lear, Act 1, Scene 4.4 Kent speaks these words. At the end of the
play, when Lear is grieving over Cordelia, Kent tries to explain how he
had followed him faithfully all the time. Lear does not listen.5
LW: See in him what happens to those who ignore teachers of differences.
RW: After the king dies, Albany offers the rule of the kingdom to Kent. Kent
refuses, hinting that he is going to follow Lear into death.6 See what
happens to teachers of differences.
LW: Depending on the audience. You are not like Lear, are you? There is
something musically wrong with him, after all.
EL: “O you kind gods / Cure this great breach in his abused nature; / The
untuned and hurrying senses O wind up / Of this child-changed
father!”7 Cordelia’s words.
RW: Being in tune with the teacher, I trust I have learnt some differences.
We sometimes say that people play because we deem their performance
entertaining or find it structured towards winning and losing or based
on competition or requiring skill or springing from luck.
LW: Praise your memory! But do not think the list is complete. None of the
features you recorded will be present in all games, and they will be pres-
ent in a host of things that are not games.
RW: I will recollect that, too.
MH: And still, with such variety at hand, you say you do not play music, Rae?
RW: Have you never noticed that we call those who perform on musical
instruments players, but that this is never said about singers?
MH: Why is that, I wonder.
RW: We say that somebody plays with something, say, a child with building
blocks. An instrument seems to fit this schema, but not a voice: for the
singer is her voice.
MH: You know that I am rather fond of jazz. I found my way into it through
that Californian family, the Brubecks, whom I got to know in London.
Last night I went to that odd Scottish jazz club on Bishopsgate, Boisdale.
An American singer performed there, Ella Fitzgerald, of stupendous
diction, phrasing, and intonation, as well as a tenor saxophone player
with large, but light, warm and silky tone, a rhapsodist on his instru-
ment, Paul Gonsalves. I call him a player, not her; that’s the way we talk.
Yet my musical instincts went against it, and still go now. In their musical
dialogue, Fitzgerald played around with its elements, whether pitch or
rhythm, just as much as Gonsalves did. She also played with her voice.
And, finally, I would even say, bewildered: she played her voice.
120
Music as Play
RW: Which of the features from Ludwig’s list makes you think so?
MH: Skill perhaps. It was so remarkable on both Fitzgerald’s and Gonsalves’s
parts.
RW: Remember, we listened together last week on the BBC to Kathleen
Ferrier singing the Alto Rhapsody by Brahms. Outstanding skill on her
part, wouldn’t you say?
MH: I would. Some of that skill was very different from Fitzgerald’s, though
not all of it.
RW: But you would never say that Ferrier played the Alto Rhapsody, would
you?
MH: I wouldn’t, indeed.
RW: I know what you mean by playing with one’s voice and even playing
one’s voice. But the voice is in its own precisely when it is not being
played with. That’s why Ferrier is so moving. That’s also why I do not
even aspire to playing my voice.
EL: Sour grapes? And, by the way, I never try to be moving in music. For mov-
ing, we have public transport now.
RW: Sour grapes?
MH: Stalemate. I suggest we have the last three bottles of Weingut Dönnhoff
Roxheimer Höllenpfad Riesling Kabinett 1921 at St John’s—from grapes
that were not sour. 82° Oechsle. (She opens the first bottle and pours the oth-
ers, then herself, a glass.)
LW: You are doing your best to turn the interrogation into a proper
symposium.
EL: As long as you are rather silent, that is not very difficult. Even the wine
would hardly have been needed, much as I welcome it.
LW: Silence is Cordelia’s virtue, though it isn’t until a long way into the play
that one discovers that.
EL: What is virtue in Cordelia could be fatigue in you. And, anyway, it would
not be much healthier than Kent’s teaching of differences.
MH: Good health, then. (They all clink their glasses and drink.)
RW: Do you believe, Myra, it is healthy to turn something into what it is
not—a voice into an instrument?
MH: Transfiguration may be a sign of strength. Fitzgerald can do a lot of
things with her voice that Gonsalves can do with his instrument, whereas
unskilled voices master very few things that saxophones, played compe-
tently, achieve. Even some differently though highly skilled voices may
not at all match the peculiar achievements of saxophones.
RW: Instruments do not use words. For consistency, you should give up on
words if you wish to turn your voice into an instrument.
MH: Fitzgerald did, much of the time. It is called scat singing, I have been
told. She articulates syllables and combinations of syllables like (sings)
“di yu di dee dee doohdun di di oohnbee” that do not constitute words.
LW: That reminds me of one of the streaks criss-crossing within the game
network. Those syllables lack reference and meaning. Sometimes games
seem to make up a world of their own. When playing chess, in moving
121
Andreas Dorschel
122
Music as Play
also want us to fail. For that gives them something to gossip about.
Concert life—it’s not unlike those sports games that people watch.
What matters is presence: the performance of the actual moment. For
both of us, audience suspense will set up one and the same game. And
rarely a fair one at that.
RW: I know what you mean. But that’s just the social setting for our art. Now
it is placed in that ambience; it could be placed elsewhere. The setting
does not touch the art itself.
EL: Dream on.
RW: “I was the Dreamer, they the Dream.”8
MH: Wordsworth forever. Send him down to the kitchen where they prepare
his cornflakes. There is another matter that definitely touches the art
itself. It has to do with the history of European music. Instrumental
and vocal music, at least since the seventeenth century, have each
instilled features of their own in the other. On the one hand, it has been
demanded of instrumentalists that they “sing” on their instruments—
even we pianists whose instruments, based on hammers, do not seem to
be made for that purpose in the first place.
RW: Poor percussionists that you are . . .
MH: Well—the demand to sing on the instrument can seem to be a restric-
tion, rather than an expansion; a restriction, though, that has led to
delightful results.
EL: Yes, and the piano is better at it than the harpsichord. Let us have more
of your Bach. And Scarlatti. And Mozart. And Chopin.
RW: To move your heart, at last?
EL: To make it stand still, for moments.
RW: That issue is not that pressing right now. I urge you to tell me of the
other hand, Myra, as it concerns me.
MH: On the other hand, singers have been asked to develop their organ so
that it is capable of all the figures instrumentalists can muster—clearly
an expansion rather than a restriction. It produced, among other ravish-
ing results, the florid aria di bravura.
RW: I am glad we singers do not have to imitate pianos.
MH: Positively. You would never have reached that standard. Either wind
instruments or string instruments set the yardstick of virtuosic play with
the voice.
RW: As a soprano, here I feel at home. Rossini has the mezzo-soprano revel
in coloratura, too. But poor Kathleen and the other altos—it’s a world
closed to them. When wind instruments, string instruments, and voice
are directly set against each other, in the aria concertata, we attend a game
that corresponds to another one of Ludwig’s streaks: competition.
EL: Don’t we have enough of that outside art? That’s hard enough to bear.
RW: It will be all the more welcome in art. We want a safe show of competi-
tion sometimes, to be viewed from the outside. The performing artist
123
Andreas Dorschel
will then be inside it, of course. When Kathleen and I studied with Roy
Henderson at the Royal Academy of Music a short time ago, I had the
chance to sing Mozart’s “Martern aller Arten”—with full orchestra.
MH: What a feast!
RW: That aria is really a C-major concerto, or sinfonia concertante, for
soprano and four solo instruments—flute, oboe, violin, cello. While
they attempt to outdo each other in bravura, the game keeps the audi-
ence in enchanted disbelief as far as “torments of all kinds” (sings)
j œ™ œ œ™ œ #œ œ
Soprano & c œ™ œ J œ œ J Ó ∑
Mar - tern al - ler Ar - ten, al - ler Ar - ten
Figure 5.3.
124
Figure 5.3. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Die Entführung aus dem Serail, KV 384, Act II, No.
11: Aria “Martern aller Arten” (Konstanze), bars 61–63.
Music as Play
125
Andreas Dorschel
126
Music as Play
MH: A composition like Strauss’s Delirien was made for actual dancing; but
at the same time composers wrote waltzes for imaginary dancing rather
than actual—playing a different sort of game.
LW: It makes me feel much better.
MH: Chopin was a master of double play in that, for the naive listener, he
went along with the approved game while, at closer attention, casting
suspicion upon it.
EL: Through genre, the rules of a game are laid out; but secretly subverting
them is yet another game.
MH: Even the briefest and most popular of his waltzes, the “Minute,” hints at
such double play. (She sits down at the Blüthner and plays it.)
EL: Wondrous, as always when you play.
MH: Just genius loci.
EL: Your false modesty! You played through the London air raids, so obvi-
ously you do not need favourable circumstances. But what did you mean
earlier by “a different sort of game”? And what is the common one from
which it has to be distinguished?
MH: The common one first. Oddly, the common one turns already against
the common, the everyday. But that turn against is itself very common.
Games can offer an escape from ordinary life. In playing them we recede
from one kind of reality only to enter another kind. The nineteenth-
century ballroom waltz was such a game. It replaced the straight-on
movements of the rational, goal-directed individual with circling that,
ideally, has to offer a little delirium. Precisely that rapture required the
most regular and foreseeable structure. Unlike riders on today’s roller-
coaster, who are offered a little delirium as a ready-made technology for
consumption, dancers have to produce the waltz each time by them-
selves and for themselves. Their circling—in six steps around the body
axis—must be coordinated.
EL: I see. Regressions have forever thrived on simplicity, not on complication.
RW: Instead, Myra is getting ever more complicated. Is this going to turn into
an extended college lesson? I hanker after our quick conversation.
EL: Let Myra lecture and consummate that peculiar university feel while you
are all ears.
RW: Or the particular feel of the dreary flat obdurate Cambridgeshire fens
in November? Grey sky and black land, boringly repeating themselves,
separated as if by a ruler.
EL: What a figure of speech. Don’t talk: look and listen. It takes a while to
discover the Fens’ bleak beauty. You should manage, though, Queen of
the Night! If you wish to keep up your distaste, though, I recommend
Vaughan Williams’s In the Fen Country, composed in 1904, ten years after
his graduation from Trinity. His first great exercise in orchestral tedium.
MH: Thanks, Elisabeth. In Cambridge, landscape and academic spirit are
one.
RW: I won’t deny that.
127
Andreas Dorschel
MH: Subtle works of art keep some distance from the escapist frenzy rather
than altogether giving in to it: in Chopin’s D♭-major waltz, marking that
distance, in the gentlest way, itself takes the form of play. (She picks up the
score from the Blüthner.) Starting a perpetuum mobile, the composer intro-
duces a rotation model, alluding to the circling motion of the waltz. The
chain of quavers plays around the tone A♭. Listeners may relate the fig-
uration to a waltz metre for the first two bars, but not for those that
follow. The rotation model consists of four quavers, counteracting the
¼
³ metre. But it acts not just against the waltz metre, but also against the
expected dance periodicity of 4 + 4 bars. Bars 3–4 and 5–6 are identical
in the right hand. Chopin’s handling of the rotation model produces
a structure of 2 + 4 + 2. When the left hand comes in regularly in bar 5,
the uncommon grouping appears to be covered up for the moment; but
a tension in the right hand remains—the accompaniment has started
either too late or too early. If the quaver figuration isn’t really dancing,
although it alludes to the circular motion of the waltz, perhaps it is bet-
ter understood as an attempt to rush off. (She plays the beginning of the piece
once more.)
Molto vivace
b
& b bbb 43 >œ nœ œ œ œ nœ œ œ œ œ œ nœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ nœ œ œ œ nœ œ œ œ œ œ
leggiero œœ œœ
? bb b 3 ∑ œ œ
b b4 ∑ ∑ ∑ œ
° *
6
œ œ b œ œ™ œ œ œ œ œ mœ nœ
b œ
& b bbb œ œ nœ œ œ œ nœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ
œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ
? bb b œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ
bb œ œ
° * ° * ° * ° * ° *
Figure 5.4.
EL: What a lecturer has been lost in you! Alas, Cambridge! You are brilliant.
Chopin’s oblique art of dancing. I thought I heard an oblique kind of
singing, too, when you played the entire piece.
MH: In bar 63, Chopin starts a cantilena. But it is left as a fragment, hanging
in the air on its highest note. A trill of the right hand on A♭, the central
tone of the perpetuum mobile, interrupts, followed by the return of the
latter. (She plays, with a hint of parody, from bar 64 to the end.)
128
Figure 5.4. Frédéric Chopin, Waltz in D♭ major, op. 64, no. 1, bars 1–10.
Music as Play
˙™
(Molto vivace)
Ÿ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
˙ œ œ œ
64
b ˙ œ œ nœ
& b bbb 43 œ ∫œ ˙™ ˙™ ˙™
n œœ œœ bn œœ œœ b œœ œœ Œ̇ œ
œ
? bb b 43 œ œ œ Œ Œ ∑ ∑ ∑ ∑
bb œ
° * ° *
72 <Ÿ>~~~~~~~~~
b b
& b b b ˙™ nœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ nœ œ œ œ nœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ nœ œ œ œ nœ œ œ œ œ œ
cresc.
f
œœ œœ
? bb b ∑ œ œ
bb ∑ ∑ ∑ ∑
œ
° *
œ bœ œ™ œ œ œ œ œ mœ nœ œ
78
bbbb œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ
& b nœ nœ œ œ œ
œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ œœ
? bb b œ œ œ œ
œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ
bb œ
° * ° * ° * ° * ° *
Figure 5.5.
129
Figure 5.5. Frédéric Chopin, Waltz in D♭ major, op. 64, no. 1, bars 64–82.
Andreas Dorschel
œœ. ˙˙
Sehr lebhaft (M.M. h. = 76)
œ œ œ nœ ˙ œ. œ. ™™
b
& b 43 œœ œœ œ œœ œ œ œ nœœ bœœ nœœ. ˙˙ bbœœœœ œœœ œ œ œ œœ œ œ œ œ nœœ bœœ œ ˙
œœ œœ œ œ œ œ . . . œ œ œ
.
> >
˙™ ˙™ œ ™™
> >
œ ˙™
f
˙™
? bb 43 œ œ
˙™
bœ œ œ bœ œ
œ. ˙ ™ ˙™ b œ. œ. . œ˙ œ.
œ œ ˙™ b œ. œ. œ.
œ˙
Figure 5.6.
& b ™™
9
b ∑
MH: As long as we talk music, you will have to suffer it. Name me even one
∑
Cambridge composer. ∑ ∑ ∑
RW: Sir Charles Villiers Stanford of Trinity College was the most famous one.
? bb ™™
MH: I am afraid Ludwig will not count any talent below towering genius.
∑ ∑ ∑ ∑ ∑
Towering genius and Josef Labor. He grants an exception for him, but
not for Stanford and Vaughan Williams.
LW: Perhaps the true Cambridge composers hide, dressed up as something
14
else, too—philosophers, say.
b
&b ∑ ∑ ∑ ∑ ∑
EL: We’ll not suspect you.
LW: In that case I shall quit my professorship this year. I had hoped our
assembly would turn out to be more uplifting.
? bb ∑ ∑ ∑ ∑
EL: It might still turn out that way once we three drop our masks.
∑
RW: Masquerade is just a special brand of a wider phenomenon. As I can tell
from my classical education, the Latin illudere literally means “to play in.”
Aren’t we all playing and being played with? Vexing and being vexed?
MH (opening the last bottle of wine and refilling the glasses): Stay sober! An illu-
sion is play only as long it is recognised as an illusion—children’s threats
at Halloween, the masquerade in the ballroom, Lear’s death onstage.
When deception is not seen through as an illusion, it becomes ordinary
fraud. Fraud is beyond play for the deceived person, otherwise it would
not work as fraud.
EL: Could it not be conducted as play by the deceiver?
MH: It might. For, eerily, there does not seem to be any human activity that
could not be conducted, by some weird individual, as play. Or, perhaps,
the individual does not even have to be weird. Cats usually aren’t; but
what the cat relishes as play is deadly reality for the mouse. Warfare may
be seen as a tactical and strategic game by those in control, but not by
those being bombed.
EL: Reciprocity, in such matters, is not a given. Is that what you are saying?
MH: It is. The military strategist plays with his soldiers and with the civilians
of the other side, but they do not play with him. Love is a game for Don
Giovanni, but not for Donna Elvira. I could imagine a poet playing vir-
tuosically with certain elements of the Gospel, but devout Christians
would not be willing to join in the game. More than that, they might
deny that there was a game to be played.
130
Figure 5.6. Robert Schumann, Faschingsschwank aus Wien, op. 26, bars 1–8.
Music as Play
EL: To be play, then, is not a feature of things, but an attitude towards them?
And that attitude could sometimes be shared by others and sometimes
not be shared by them, couldn’t it?
MH: Players may announce the attitude they expect from those who watch
them. It is the frame, the stage, the screen, the situation, the context
that allows the pretence to be seen through when and if “the girl plays
a fairy” or “Vivien Leigh plays Cordelia.” Taking her utterances with
the attitude that “this is play” on the part of the audience saves Leigh
from being carted off to the psychiatric ward. And though Leigh must
be able to distinguish herself from Cordelia—that’s why she is not sent
to Bedlam—she must be Cordelia for her audience during the perform-
ance of Lear.
LW: Note the different way in which we are talking here. Confronted with
such play, we do not say that someone plays with someone or with
something. In a characteristic turn, we use the simple accusative object
instead of the prepositional phrase: someone plays someone or, indeed,
something.
RW: Something?
LW: Yes, something. What such play references is not restricted to what is
ordinarily considered a “person.” Children sometimes take on the
roles of water, fire, or wind. Such is the case in ring-a-ring o’ roses—it
includes the pretended metamorphosis of a human being into a plant.
The slowest child, when it comes to falling down, turns into the station-
ary “rosie,” the rose bush around whom the other children dance.
EL: No hell there?
MH: No hell. Your memory played a trick on you.
EL: Or it wasn’t my memory.
LW: Your mask seems to be inside rather than outside.
EL: That will make it difficult to drop it.
RW: A few rounds of ring-a-ring o’ roses could at least help you to sunnier
recollections. It is just so much nicer to be a blossoming rose bush than
to go to hell.
EL (molto rubato con morbidezza): What if I don’t like it nice?
RW (agitato): Then go to hell.
MH: Goodness gracious me. So hostile?
RW (hums Dona nobis pacem from Beethoven’s Missa solemnis, op. 123.)
Ϫ Ϫ
p
# Ϫ
Ϫ
œ œ j
Soprano & # 68 J œ™ œ œ œ ‰ ∑
do - - - na no - bis pa - cem
Figure 5.7.
131
Figure 5.7. Ludwig van Beethoven, Missa solemnis op. 123, V. Agnus Dei, bars 123–26,
Soprano.
Andreas Dorschel
EL: As long as it is just imitating one thing instead of another, the differ-
ence—hell versus rose—may not be that important.
RW: Wagner blurred it. In Parsifal, Kundry is called “Höllenrose”—the rose
of hell.
LW: I’ll teach you a difference. Another one. Not all imitation is considered
play-acting. If a girl draws a dog, she must keep a distance from the ani-
mal, and it is because of this quality of “staying outside” that we do not
call drawing “acting.” But the girl may as well imitate a dog by making
herself similar to it, creeping into the dog’s body and mind; that sort of
getting or being “inside” someone or something is imitative play.
MH: Last Friday, Beecham conducted Strauss’s Alpensinfonie at the Royal
Albert Hall. Some found it sublime, others banal. Whatever it is, it is
not a great instance of imitative play. The illustrator stays outside. On
studying Debussy’s Préludes recently, by way of contrast, I was amazed to
see that the composer placed the individual titles not above, but below
the pieces. He took so much care not to limit the imaginative freedom
of play.
RW: But, inevitably, players will know the titles beforehand.
MH: That’s true. Yet the gesture is characteristic and points towards play. A
title above the piece takes the external object as given and invites com-
parison with it—a procedure as remote from play as it gets. (She sits down
one last time at the piano and plays Debussy, Préludes, book 1, no. 6: “Des pas sur
la neige.”)
˙™
plus lent très lent
nœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ nœ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ U
w
˙™
w
œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ œ w
& b 44 Œ ∑
- - - -
pp pp
œ œ ˙˙˙ ™™ ? œ œ.
morendo - - - ppp
. U
4 n
& b 4 Œ̇
œ #œ œ œ œœ œ #œ œ œ
. . Œ̇ . . Œ̇ . . Œ̇ . . œ œ
. œ.
œ. w
. w
Figure 5.8.
(Having finished, she pauses for a moment.) “Footsteps in the snow.” Music
™™ It
5
does not walk. It can perhaps depict walking; Richard Strauss did that,
&b ∑ ∑ enough. Debussy’s music,
and well ∑ ∑ the walker.
however, gets inside
embodies the steps. Just as Vivien Leigh plays Cordelia, being her, so
within™™ play,
Debussy’s music plays steps on the snow, being them.
?b ∑ LW: You are∑ right. Acting, or impersonation,
∑ ∑
is another streak
and also within the play of music. If we wish to make sense of the claim
that music, or some music, is play, looking out for such streaks may be
the least violent way. We cannot find a particular trait that renders all
132
& b ™™
9
∑ ∑ ∑ ∑ ∑
? b ™™
Figure 5.8. Claude Debussy, Préludes, book 1, no. 6: “Des pas sur la neige,” bars 32-36.
∑ ∑ ∑ ∑ ∑
Music as Play
References
Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. (1798) 1997. “Frost Wittgenstein, Ludwig. (1953) 2009.
at Midnight.” In Samuel Taylor Coleridge: Philosophische Untersuchungen / Philosophical
Selected Poetry, edited by H. J. Jackson, Investigations. Edited by P. M. S. Hacker
87–88. Oxford: Oxford University Press. and Joachim Schulte. Translated by G.
Poem written 1798. E. M. Anscombe, P. M. S. Hacker, and
Shakespeare, William. (1608) 2005. King Lear. Joachim Schulte. Rev. 4th ed. Oxford:
In The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Wiley-Blackwell. First ed. published 1953
Works, edited by John Jowett, William (Oxford: Blackwell).
Montgomery, Gary Taylor, and Stanley Wordsworth, William. (1850) 2000. The
Wells, 2nd ed., 909–41. Oxford: Oxford Prelude. In William Wordsworth: The Major
University Press. Text based on the quarto Works, edited by Stephen Gill, 375–590.
edition first published 1608 (London: Oxford: Oxford University Press. Poem
Nathaniel Butter). first published 1850 (London: Moxon).
10 I am immensely grateful to John Rink (St John’s College, Cambridge) for detailed comments on a
previous version of this dialogue; I have not been able to do justice entirely to his considerate critique.
I would also like to thank Paulo de Assis and Edward Crooks (Orpheus Institute, Ghent) for helpful
suggestions.
133
What Anyway Is a
“Music Discomposed”?
Reading Cavell through the Dark
Glasses of Adorno
Lydia Goehr
Columbia University
135
DOI https://doi.org/10.11116/9789461662521.ch06
Lydia Goehr
136
What Anyway Is a “Music Discomposed”?
137
Lydia Goehr
acting with sincerity: they seemed to mean what they said, even purposefully
to be trying to communicate with their publics. Still, the sincerity was decep-
tive given the more basic claim that what they were producing was somehow
already false.
Here, Cavell implicitly appealed to a modernist false consciousness, a situ-
ation in which the public could be accepting-yet-discontent with the contem-
porary state of art, and hence intrigued by all the claims of artists, yet suspi-
cious that the whole enterprise was a hoax. Once more, for Cavell, the fraudu-
lence attached to contemporary music or art was not exhausted by a deliberate
deception on the part of artists—or con artists—aiming to mislead the public
or trick them into accepting something that either categorically was not art or
honorifically should not have been accepted as art. He was not merely contin-
uing the general suspicion that Plato had set into action: that artists were on a
par with deliberately deceiving sophists. Instead, he was describing a new or
contemporary form of not-knowing—not one deceptively paraded around by
individual impostors as knowledge, but a not-knowing saturating the entire
atmosphere of the times, the detection of which required a special sort of
social-psychopathological analysis. Put like this, he joined those in the same
period who were trying to capture something like a total or mass deception, a
full-scale crisis of humanity, though one whose symptoms could then be read
back through the long history of modernity as a whole.
138
What Anyway Is a “Music Discomposed”?
posted on the walls, while, at the other extreme, all the deafening cries of crisis,
scepticism, hocus-pokery, and doubt.
Of late, I have had several opportunities to consider the atmosphere of
the sixties that motivated so many thinkers to capture in their philosophical
thought an urgency that they associated with the then contemporary arts.
They premised the urgency on their observations that current theories were
at odds with the practice, the reception with the production, and that the pub-
lic’s expectations, experiences, and judgements were radically at odds with
the works being produced. Even if the contemporary art was “intoxicating,” as
for example Arthur Danto liked to use this term, it was often described as too
“difficult” to understand, or “incomprehensible,” to use the dogged German
words associated with Adorno. The incomprehension was attributed to a fail-
ure either of experience or of philosophical terms, terms that were either too
analytic or dreary or too harmonious and outdated to accommodate what was
actually being produced as art. The question then was how to make sense of
art’s offerings in ways that would both philosophically and phenomenologi-
cally satisfy those who felt most disenchanted and dispossessed. It was, clearly,
a far more anxious than celebratory project.
In pursuing this anxiety, I have found that the term “atmosphere” was
often used to capture not clear and transparent worlds or forms of life made
explicit or articulated conditions, but worlds rendered opaque by dense and
deep grounds and backgrounds of bad faith, erroneous habituation, natural-
ised intuitions, and false prejudices and expectations. Used this way, the term
echoed an earlier use with a most striking effect when George Santayana, first,
and then John Dewey wrote of an atmosphere and human environment that was
being denaturalised or debased, or of a Weltanschauung borrowed from across
the Atlantic that had already reached a breaking point at the apocalyptic start of
the twentieth century. Terms like “atmosphere,” “environment,” or “worldview”
were given a special presence in writings of philosophers who sought some sort
of exit out of a labyrinth covered over by a very German grey fog.
Cavell wrote of how aestheticians were now incapable of producing criti-
cism, given a perceived inability even to recognise the proper objects of the
discourse. “It is not clear,” people now think, “what is and is not essentially con-
nected to the concept of music” (Cavell ([1967] 1976b, 204). And also, “I believe
it is true to say that modernist art—roughly, the art of one’s own generation”
has become—precisely because it has not yet properly become—“a problem
for the philosophy contemporary with it (in England and America anyway)”
(ibid., 183). After this, he asked whether this would be true of any generation
or particularly of his own. He wanted to have the answer go both ways. The
problems so acute for his generation would allow him to view the entire dis-
cipline of aesthetics going back, as he put it, two hundred years. And with this
extended gaze, he would try to come to understand modernist art, then mod-
ernism, then art as a whole. If aesthetics was done right, a path would be forged
if not to recomposing the world, then to rewarding the philosophical subject,
or Cavell as the writer, with a transcendent or radical new insight into a world
discomposed.
139
Lydia Goehr
3. R
eading Cavell through the dark glasses of
Adorno
When Cavell described a music discomposed, he rendered the condition
extreme. Like many around him and long before him, he pulled on the once
classical but now antiquated terms of rhythm, poetry, harmony, and compos-
ition as leitmotivic metaphors to restore philosophical sense to a world that
seemed to have lost all proportion. A world that did not make sense was experi-
enced as bereft of its musicality, leaving only unwitting impostors to conduct
a discomposed public through the dissonant rhythms of the day. If Cavell did
not clarify the term “fraudulence,” then just as deliberately he did not clarify
the term “discomposed”: again, in this second case, he did not even use the
term beyond the title. Yet, let us consider now all that the term “discomposed”
might mean.
One is very likely to read a music discomposed first off as pointing to musical
works that have been or become decomposed, if they were not somehow uncom-
posed to begin with. Consider Adorno’s description of some modernist works
that, with their refusal to be fully-formed, or to be totally- or through-com-
posed, were produced as fragmented or broken. Or think of the many pro-
nouncements of the likes of John Cage, James Joyce, or Samuel Beckett who,
in their endgames of chance and improvisation, refused to compose in a way
that would allow the dominant work-concept to remain comfortably in place.
Or consider another sense, when the term “discomposition” is attached not
to works but to an experience or a response. “It is in the tranquillity of decom-
position,” wrote Beckett in 1951 in Malloy, “that I remember the long confused
emotion which was my life. . . . To decompose is to live too, I know, I know, don’t
torment me” (Beckett [1955] 2009, 22). To this sort of feeling, Cavell ([1964]
1976, 115) then responded in his own study of Beckett: “Beckett’s perception
is of a ‘meaningless universe’ and language in his plays ‘serves to express the
breakdown, the disintegration of language’—by, one gathers, itself undergo-
ing disintegration. Such descriptions are usual in the discussions of Beckett I
am aware of, but are they anything more than impositions from an impression
of fashionable philosophy?” Cavell’s remark is odd, even disingenuous, given
what one would think could have been a shared feeling. But here one has to
read his remark as trying, with Nietzsche, to separate the feeling of breakdown
from what follows as a consequence for the philosophy if, as Cavell fears, the
philosophy will lead persons now to live down in the depths only of a “nay-
saying” nihilism. Nihilism was not and could not be the right answer for Cavell
as it was not the right stopping place for Nietzsche.
Given this sort of discourse, many have blamed the fashions of art and the
fashions of philosophy, but the critique has gone deeper when theorists have
looked to the changes brought about by social forces—by what Marx had
described, say, in his Capital: Critique of Political Economy, when a certain sort of
bartering decomposed a community from the inside out, or when technologi-
cal developments allowed fashions, in Freudian terms, to become also fetishes
and fixations.
140
What Anyway Is a “Music Discomposed”?
3 “Bedeutet bei der oberen Musik das atomistische Hören fortschreitende Dekomposition, so gibt es bei
der unteren schon nichts mehr zum Dekomponieren.”
4 “Auch darin stimmen Hörer und Produkte zusammen: die Struktur, der sie nicht folgen können, wird
ihnen gar nicht erst angeboten.”
141
Lydia Goehr
5 “dem subjektiven Zerfall der Zeit ihre objektiv-geometrische Aufteilung entgegengestellt, ohne daß
zwischen der Zeitdimension und dem musikalischen Inhalt ein konstitutiver Zusammenhang bestünde.
In der Verräumlichung der Musik ist Zeit, durch ihre Stillstellung, ebenso zerfällt, wie sie im expressiven
Stil sich in lyrische Momente dekomponiert.”
142
What Anyway Is a “Music Discomposed”?
bourgeois individualism, which with its beginnings in antiquity had worked its
way through the Renaissance to end up in ideologies of super-personalities, at
which point the ego splintered as it fell prey to a mass fraudulence or deception
of a fascistic and overcapitalised proportion. Beyond the kitchen staff, Adorno
sought a resistance in the very few individuals who refused to play along. Such
resistance would stand for a social moment in a “moral superego” that was not
content merely to be or become “understandable to others” (ibid., 63–64).
Finally, in his Negative Dialectic, in his discussion directed toward breaking the
spell of false totality, Adorno wrote: “The straighter a society’s course for the
totality that is reproduced in the spellbound subjects, the deeper its tendency
to dissociation. This threatens the life of the species as much as it disavows
the spell cast over the whole, the false identity of subject and object” (Adorno
[1966] 1973, 337, as translated in Adorno [1973] 2007, 346).6
6 “Je mehr die Gesellschaft der Totalität zusteuert, die im Bann der Subjekte sich reproduziert, desto
tiefer denn auch ihre Tendenz zur Dissoziation. Diese bedroht sowohl das Leben der Gattung, wie sie
den Bann des Ganzen, die falsche Identität von Subjekt und Objekt, dementiert.”
143
Lydia Goehr
144
What Anyway Is a “Music Discomposed”?
Crabb (1818, 265) earlier described three terms that he regarded as nearly syn-
onymous: consonant, accordant, and consistent. He began with consonant,
noting how, from the Latin consonans, the participles of con and sono bring
sounds together in “unison or harmony.” accordant signifies an accordance of
meaning—hence, an agreement, whereas consistent, made from con and sisto
is, as is the term itself, a placing or putting together. We speak of consonance,
he wrote, “in matters of representation,” of accordance in “matters of opin-
ion or sentiment,” and consistence “in matters of conduct.” Drawing his exam-
ples from the Old and New Testaments, and so also his temper and tone, he
added that the “consistency of a man’s practice with his profession is the only
criterion of his sincerity.” Although each of the three terms has its opposite—
consonant to dissonant, accordant to discordant, and consistent to inconsist-
ent—together they are unequal in value. “Consonance is not so positive a thing
as either accordance or consistency, which respect real events, circumstances,
and actions.” For whereas “consonance mostly serves to prove the truth of any
thing, . . . dissonance does not prove its falsehood until it amounts to direct dis-
cordance or inconsistency.” Thus, “there is a dissonance in the accounts given
by the four Evangelists of our Saviour, which serves to prove the absence of all
collusion and imposture, since there is neither discordance nor inconsistency
in what they have related or omitted.” But instead of telling us to what collusion
or imposture might lead, Crabb concluded with three quotations regarding
the consonance, accordance, and consistency toward which we rather should
strive.
Crabb (1818, 265) drew the first and second quotations from British sermon-
ist and professor of rhetoric Hugh Blair. The first read: “Our faith in the discov-
eries of the Gospel will receive confirmation from discerning their consonance
with the natural sentiments of the human heart.” This sentence appeared in
Blair’s sermon on the Last Judgment (Blair 1802, 462). To counter the idea that
persons prosper by injustice without conscience, Blair alerted his readers to
the truth that never has there been a nation on earth “among whom there did
not prevail a consciousness that, by inhumanity and fraud, they justly exposed
themselves to the hatred of those around them, and to the displeasure of any
145
Lydia Goehr
secret invisible power that ruled the world” (ibid., 463). Aware of their crime,
they seek out their punishment as a fact of human nature. “The difference of
good and evil in actions is [therefore] not founded on arbitrary opinions or
institutions, but in the nature of things, and the nature of man: it accords with
the universal sense of the human kind” (ibid.). Crabb (1818, 265–66) quoted
this sentence as exemplary for the idea of accordance. Then, for “consistency,”
he offered this much briefer prescription drawn from Joseph Addison “Keep
one consistent plan from end to end.” Addison’s sentence was a reduction of
lines drawn from Horace’s De Arte Poetica (11:126–27). The matter at hand was
how a poet or philosopher remains consistent from the beginning to the end of
a poem, an argument, or indeed any extended expression of a thought. Horace
had noted, however, the hermeneutic struggle where, if one does not begin in
the proper place or on the right note, one would not reach the end in a way
according with the beginning. To give greater consonance and consistency in
the development of character and plot, he instructed, one sometimes must
begin in medias res: hence, not at the beginning or at the end, but somewhere in
the middle.
Crabb’s explanation of synonyms reflected a discourse of common terms,
but terms that were constantly being challenged given the tendency toward
their misuse. This, too, is something that was taken up by another writer in the
same period: namely Ralph Waldo Emerson and particularly in his essay “Self-
Reliance” ([1841] 2015). This was an essay that would later come to influence
Cavell when, tending toward an autobiographical pitch for his philosophical
writing, he moved from the expressions and experiences of one’s own subject or
self to rethink the condition of a transcendent self, a philosophical self granted
some sort of universal insight or perspective through the foggy atmosphere.
Emerson sought a consistency in the inner sincerity with which a writer or an
artist expresses him- or herself, for such a “latent conviction,” he wrote, shall
be or produce a “universal sense” ([1841] 2015, 127). For always “the inmost
becomes the outmost,—and our first thought is rendered back to us by the
trumpets of the Last Judgment” (127). Emerson found this sincerity and con-
viction of voice in Moses, Plato, and Milton, who spoke not what others, but
what they themselves thought. The greater the genius of a person, the more
thoughts, both inspired and rejected, entered into the minds and works of
artists. Immediately distinguishing the true geniuses from the cowards and
impostors, he wrote that “it needs a divine man to exhibit anything divine. A
man is relieved and gay when he has put his heart into his work and done his
best; but what he has said or done otherwise shall give him no peace. It is a
deliverance which does not deliver. In the attempt his genius deserts him; no
muse befriends; no invention, no hope” (128).
Emerson addressed the necessary non-conformism of the true thinker, the
necessary solitude of place and thought that someone must find in a world that
conspires as a “joint-stock company” (Emerson [1841] 2015, 129–30) to take
away the freedom from persons in the name of compliance. “Self-reliance”
was the term for the aversion to a compliance or bartering that relies rather on
stock names and customs. Self-reliance is equal to a thoughtful integrity, of an
146
What Anyway Is a “Music Discomposed”?
With [a pedantic] consistency a great soul has simply nothing to do. He may as well
concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Out upon your guarded lips! Sew them
up with packthread, do. Else if you would be a man speak what you think to-day
in words as hard as cannon balls, and to-morrow speak what to-morrow thinks in
hard words again, though it contradict everything you said to-day. Ah, then, exclaim
the aged ladies, you shall be sure to be misunderstood. Misunderstood! It is a right
fool’s word. Is it so bad then to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood,
and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and
every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. To be great is to be misunderstood.
(133)
147
Lydia Goehr
In a world that has no space for such improvisation or chance, there is, Cavell
observed, no dissonance or antagonism, and where there is no dissonance,
there is no consonance worth having, because the consonance achieved is
really no achievement at all. Likewise, and I find this argument also through-
out Adorno’s work, there is no sense of improvisation where the intention is
missing or claimed no more to count in overly controlled procedures of mak-
ing music. The form sustained by intention and improvisation is missing.
Cavell spelt out one must of meaning as a must of composing where, from and
through tensions, imbalances, shocks, surprises, risks, and dangers, we are led
to a fulfilment, a calm, or a release, a sublimity of experience, almost a divin-
ity of vision. He articulated the terms of improvisation and chance as an ethi-
cal inventiveness and resourcefulness that displayed itself as virtuous over the
safer option, the latter being a cop-out from being human as when one merely
imitates in academic ways. Producing what is obvious in the face of things is not
to produce at all. It is merely or coldly to repeat what is already in evidence or
already the case. Of such an obvious or repetitive production, he added, we do
not use words of praise: we do not speak of the act of composing or its result
with aesthetic predicates of achievement or virtue, as having been, say, “master-
ful, elegant, subtle, profound. . . .” (Cavell [1967] 1976b, 199).
To take a chance, to improvise, or to experiment is to issue an invitation to
others to accompany one on one’s way. Cavell saw this invitation not as an
authoritative command or as resting on a deontological foundation. Still, the
invitation exacts an obligation in the only way exactitude should be. “The price
for freedom in this choice of commitment and accountability is,” he wrote,
“that of an exactitude in meeting those commitments and discharging those
accounts which no mere morality can impose” (200). So when one makes a
promise, for example, one asks for the trust of others that the risks one is pre-
pared to take are worth taking. To compose or to create is ethically to commit
oneself as one does in any action when one puts one’s values on display, when
one embodies or enacts one’s values. When commitments and choices work
out from beginning to end, we have assumed responsibility for them; we speak
of them as consistent or coherent. And when we do not, we speak of a loss of
coherence.
6. Ethical consequences
To flout the ethical demand was consequential. It was what led most to the
condition of being discomposed. Cavell described how listening to a work
one recomposes it, much as Dewey and Collingwood described listening and
learning as a re-enactment, and much as Adorno wrote of a dialektische Bewegung
wherein in the discomposing of the work one recomposes it in an act of lis-
tening or performing. Where and when there was a failure of re-enactment or
recomposition, there was a failure of communication or comprehension. To
explain the failure, Cavell described the loss of conventions or the stable back-
ground—a known background—against which we understand new moves in
a practice. If the ground is taken from us, we do know how to go on—we lose
148
What Anyway Is a “Music Discomposed”?
as a whole is now looked upon not as a firm inheritance from the past, but as
a continuing improvisation in the face of problems we no longer understand.
Nothing we now have to say, no personal utterance, has its meaning conveyed in the
conventions and formulas we now share. In a time of slogans, sponsored messages,
ideologies, psychological warfare, mass projects, where words have lost touch with
their sources or objects, and in a phonographic culture where music is for dreaming,
or for kissing, or for taking a shower, or for having your teeth drilled, our choices
seem to be those of silence, or nihilism (the denial of the value of shared meaning
altogether), or statements so personal as to form the possibility of communication
without the support of convention—perhaps to become the source of new
convention. (201–2)
As evidence for the new fashion and fetish for formulaic conventions, Cavell
looked at an avant-garde that had retreated into academia and into producing
journals for pre-chosen readers, where preaching for a new music in technical
and arcane language was preaching to the already converted. Composers for
composers; writers for writers—but all in the conspicuous absence of a public.
What were construed as problems of our time were turned into problems only
for those now already in the know. Only when there was an admission that com-
posers or artists had lost their way in their own procedures did Cavell sense an
honesty in the critical discourse. He did not buy the adage that time would tell
or that in a thousand years (and this is Schoenberg’s language) we would come
to whistle Schoenberg in the subways. Waiting for time to tell, Cavell wrote, is
to ignore “what the present tells” ([1967] 1976b 188).
7. A dis-discomposed music?
Cavell asked after the situation when art only seems to trigger disappointment
and dissatisfaction. Could and should we even trust that the triggers are real?
Could not the discomposure itself be a fake? How, he asked, with Wittgenstein,
do we ever know that those who express pleasures and pains are not faking it?
Do we ever know another person at all? We feel disoriented—unstringed—
when we discover something about another person in whom we have placed
our trust. Our alienation from ourselves, triggered by our distance from others,
allows us to experience the world—or our environment—as disharmonious.
But what of a world in which no one seems to feel at home—where, as in a
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Lydia Goehr
crisis of humanity, all feel unstrung? Cavell recalled what the composer Saint-
Saëns had said about the emperor of the avant-garde, as having no clothes, and
of how history had stripped him naked. But if waiting for time to pass could
not now perform the revelation or reveal the truth behind the fancy clothes of
imposture, what, if anything, could?
One possible answer was philosophy—thinking the truth through to the end.
Describing what the present tells, Cavell ([1967] 1976b) moved to a telling of all
times: that, in the end, “the dangers of fraudulence, and of trust, are essential
to the very experience of art” (188–89). “If anything . . . should count as a thesis,”
he wrote, “that is my thesis” (189). He constantly reconfirmed this generalising
move: “Contemporary music is only the clearest case of something common to
modernism as a whole, and modernism only makes explicit and bare what has
always been true of art” (189). Or “It is not merely a modern problem; it is, one
could say, the problem of modernism, the attempt in every work to do what has
never been done, because what is known is known to be insufficient, or worse”
(195–96).
But still, though he had his philosophical thesis in hand, he did not count it
as the cure. For the last time, the title offered the clue that had become now
also the cure. One way out at least for music seemed to be to detach itself from
the state of having become discomposed. Cavell wrote of modern taste being
defeated not by new commandments of taste or by re-disciplining taste, but by
allowing music or art to de-discipline taste—and hence our entire response
structure. We were reading the entire situation in the wrong way. Turning to
music and art, he seemed to fall back on what in music and art could not be
defeated: namely, its power to resist its social discipline. Hence, if a music dis-
composed was the problem for the modern subject and the modern world,
then perhaps a music that was dis-discomposed would be the cure. The cure
was presented as revolutionary and radical. It had to be so presented in the
extreme condition of the sixties against those who held on to so anxious a com-
portment in the world.
But from another perspective, the utopian cure was as old as the hills, and
walking in those hills, the decomposed philosophical subject of modernism
suddenly felt very safe: as calmed as the winds. Sitting in the world, the phil-
osophical subject could now listen to tonal and atonal music anew, as an art
expressive of a condition of scepticism overriding the dominant impression
that the world now was lost as once it had not been. A music composed had
always been also a music threatened by discomposure. [Or as my critics showed
me, I was mistaken to write of a music dis-discomposed, for, all the time, I had
really meant to refocus the target onto the philosophical self as the discom-
posed subject who looks toward the very idea of composition as a riddle or
enigma of modernism, the enigmatic relation of subject to object where the
dark glasses do not throw forth a clean and clear light.]
150
What Anyway Is a “Music Discomposed”?
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152
Three Responses to
Lydia Goehr’s Essay
“What Anyway Is a
‘Music Discomposed’?”
In what follows, three responses to Lydia Goehr’s essay are presented to the
reader. The first two—by Kathy Kiloh and Jake McNulty—were delivered at the
fourth annual meeting of the Association for Adorno Studies, which was hosted
by the Philosophy Department of the New School for Social Research in New
York on 9 and 10 October 2015. Both comments are to be seen as an impor-
tant complement to Goehr’s text. The third response—actually an extended
comment—written by myself is a direct result of the editing process of Goehr’s
essay. Fascinated by the topic, I read Cavell’s original essay and all subsequent
discussions at the very beginning of 2017, coming to a rather critical view on
Cavell’s original essay from 1965. It was sent to Lydia Goehr, Katy Kiloh, and
Jake McNulty, who read it carefully. On the one hand, this extended comment
slightly departs from the main topic of this volume; on the other hand, it argues
for the making of music as the most compelling way to reply to Cavell, thus
establishing a bridge to the performances and installations presented during
the Orpheus Academy 2016, which are described in the appendix with hyper-
links to their video recordings.
Paulo de Assis
153
DOI https://doi.org/10.11116/9789461662521.ch07
Response 1
What Is a Music
Dis-discomposed?
Kathy Kiloh
OCAD University, Toronto
Lydia Goehr’s paper ends by characterising Cavell’s “cure” for a music discom-
posed as a strategic move that would be particularly at home in eighteenth-
century aesthetic philosophy. She suggests that Cavell’s solution to the problem
of a music discomposed (and by extension a subject discomposed) would be a
music dis-discomposed. Although I feel fairly confident in my understanding
of what it might mean to be discomposed (both music and subject), I remain
unsure about what a music dis-discomposed would possibly be. I’m going to
attempt to explain what I think that phrase might mean, with the assumption
that my inability to hear what Goehr means, and the misconceptions that
might result from this partial deafness, will be corrected or mitigated in the
conversation that this paper and my response to it will open.
So there are three concerns that I want to clarify: (1) what would it mean for
(music, the subject) to be dis-discomposed, (2) what is it about Cavell’s “cure”
that reeks so openly of a conservative philosophical modernism, and (3) what
happens when we bring all this back into conversation with Adorno? I will have
to bring several key words into this conversation in order for me to try to hear
what Goehr means, although I know that by applying these terms to what she
has already said, I may misrepresent her meaning. Nonetheless, by deploying
the terms autonomy and heteronomy and, alongside these terms, narcissism
and love, transcendence and universality, I hope to make explicit the links and
distinctions, connections and disconnections between Cavell and Adorno that
Goehr has so eloquently indicated in her paper.
The atmosphere of fraudulence that Cavell attributes to the aesthetic pro-
duction contemporary to the time of the composition of this essay (and, as
Goehr suggests this atmosphere extends beyond the realm of aesthetic pro-
duction to shape the human condition itself), is nicely articulated by her turn
to the eighteenth-century writings of George Crabb. Crabb suggests that the
meaning of the word consonance implies a proof of truth, whereas this is not
true of its opposite: dissonance. Dissonance cannot act as a proof of falsehood
unless it leads to complete inconsistency. The dissonance of atonal music
therefore, because it remains an effect of a consistent aesthetic programme,
cannot be cited as a symptom of art’s falsehood. But neither can this work be
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Kathy Kiloh
proven to be “true” in any sense. We the public, and the artists as well, are left
then with the feeling that all might not be right with the new music, and yet, we
can’t prove it to be wrong. There is no real way to judge this work. And because
of the dissonance that exists between the subject of modern philosophy and
the subject experienced through modern literature and modern life, there is
no way to produce and communicate meaning within this situation; we wade
in a sea of fraudulence. In turning to Crabb’s dictionary of synonyms, Goehr
also highlights the anxiety that emerges alongside the eighteenth-century dis-
course of aesthetics—this anxiety is the need for clarity in language—it is the
desire to ensure that the speaking (or writing) subject can mean what he or
she says, and that, in doing so, will be able to make him- or herself understood
to the public at large. This anxiety should be understood as a reaction to the
growing subjectivisation of the world that Luc Ferry (1993, 7) has identified
as the hallmark of modernity. Communication of universal values and feeling
becomes increasingly problematic in a world that rejects tradition as the enemy
of individual freedom.
According to Crabb’s definition, to compose—that is, to impose an order
upon that which has no “natural” order of its own—requires a subject endowed
with the capacity to commit itself to seeing a piece through from the beginning
to its end, and to thereby create and attempt to communicate meaning. As an
antidote to the atmosphere of fraudulence, Cavell seems to argue for a heroic
subject capable of taming chance and cultivating it into experimentation and
improvisation. As Goehr points out, this is an ethical commitment, in that it
requires the composer to expose his or her values for all to see, and potentially,
for those values to be misinterpreted by others. When this meaning is created,
and achieves the desired effect, then, Cavell argues, what results for the art-
ist and the viewer/listener/reader is a sublime, divinely transcendent point of
view. But for Adorno, the transcendence of the work of art can’t provide us with
this sweeping view of history and the present as a totality: “Artworks . . . pro-
duce their own transcendence, rather than being its arena, and thereby they
once again become separated from transcendence” (1997, 111). The transcend-
ence produced by art is what provokes the shudder (ibid.): that which shakes
us out of our identification with this subject conceived of as autonomous and
masterful by reminding us of our very constitution as subjects, and of the suf-
fering of the nonidentical left behind in this identification.
In Cavell’s essay, much is made of the new music’s conformity to technical
prescription—in fact, Cavell also refers to the way this prescription has come
to dominate literary production, specifically in the case of the nouveau roman.
The author of the work no longer “composes” work—he or she merely follows
a philosophically pre-determined programme. The work becomes a mere illus-
tration of the overly technical directive published in academic periodicals—it
is secondary, an afterthought that has no real bearing on the aesthetic theory
itself. This perspective certainly shares something in common with Adorno,
who writes in Aesthetic Theory: “the fatal aging of the modern: a result of the
tensionlessness of the totally technical artwork” (1997, 452).
156
What Is a Music Dis-discomposed?
What Cavell describes is, in fact, a situation in which subjective autonomy has
capitulated to the heteronomous constitution of the work of art in an attempt
to guarantee universal aesthetic agreement, but in guaranteeing this agree-
ment, the work communicates no subjective content. In response to this situ-
ation, Cavell proposes that what is needed are strong individuals (Goehr uses
Emerson’s term, “self-reliant,” but we could also throw in Kant’s term “mature”
here)—in any case—strong individuals who are capable of saying what they
mean, even if this means that they may not be understood. This requires sub-
jects who are capable of turning away from the adoration and respect of others
in order to isolate themselves with their own genius. But, as Adorno points out
in “Opinion, Delusion, Society,” in an atmosphere of fraudulence, when there
are no clear truths to cling to, individuals cling all the more tightly to what they
perceive to be their personal opinions, justified by “experience” (Adorno 1998).
This is because in a world in which (quoting from Negative Dialectics) “none . . .
are capable of love” (Adorno [1973] 1997, 363), opinion is always (here from
Opinion Delusion Society) “invested with affect” (Adorno 1998, 107)—a tendency
that Adorno believes to be based on a collective narcissism, defined as “the fact
that human beings to this day are obliged to withhold a measure of their ability
to love from, for instance, other loved ones, and instead to love themselves in a
repressed, unacknowledged, and therefore, insidious manner” (ibid.). It is dif-
ficult, then, to determine whether what we experience as genius is, in fact, an
original act of creative autonomy in which meaning is produced, or a delusion
that arises from and returns us to the “collective narcissism” that “compen-
sates” (ibid., 118) us for our lack of individuality.
I think it is precisely Cavell’s reliance upon this heroic subject and his invest-
ment in the sublimely transcendent—even omnipotent—perspective afforded
by the work of art that makes his cure for a music discomposed “as old as the
hills” (see, Goehr above, p. 146 ) and so (falsely) comforting to the modernist
philosophical subject, made anxious by its own discomposition. And I think
also that there would be no need to paint Adorno as a postmodern thinker in
order for us to recognise that the modernist philosophical subject should feel
anything but safe within the pages of his books and essays. As Goehr points
out, Adorno, somewhat like Cavell, appeals to the few individuals still capable
of performing the role of “moral superego”: whose aim is decidedly not to be
understood by others at the expense of his own attempt to produce and express
meaning. But from my perspective, the composing (or dis-discomposing) sub-
ject that Cavell calls for and the exemplary subject that Adorno appeals to look
quite different. Adorno understood that when a work of art or a subject makes
a claim to autonomy, we need look upon this claim with suspicion, with “dark
glasses” perhaps. To assert one’s autonomy is useless if this exercise of so-called
autonomy leaves the system it rails against intact. And while this most certainly
does not appear to be Cavell’s intention, his reliance upon antiquated aesthetic
forms and concepts ultimately reinforces the system as a whole.
On Cavell’s account, the atmosphere of fraudulence can’t be blamed on a
lack of philosophical aesthetics; rather, philosophy dominates aesthetic pro-
duction—and, what’s worse, it’s the wrong kind of philosophy. Cavell seems
157
Kathy Kiloh
158
Response 2
159
Jake McNulty
As Cavell stresses, this account implies a novel view of the relation of these
modern works to past ones. In particular, it implies that the possibility of fraud-
ulence has always been present. If that possibility is inherent to human action,
artistic or not, then it follows that it will have been present in all past musical
works, since all were products of agency. At least in this one respect, modern-
ism’s break with the past is less radical than either its detractors or its defend-
ers might have us believe.
The truths about our condition encapsulated in modern musical works are
disconcerting; we therefore have a tendency to repress their true significance,
a tendency Cavell finds in certain (then) contemporary critics and compos-
ers. One of the great themes of Cavell’s work of this period is that many of the
more extreme ideas in both traditional philosophy and contemporary criticism
(those in the periodical Die Reihe, for instance) represent misbegotten attempts
to evade these truths about our condition. This is a facet of one of Cavell’s cen-
tral preoccupations in Must We Mean What We Say?: philosophy’s flight from the
human.
It is against this backdrop, I suggest, that we should understand the mean-
ing of the phrase “music discomposed.” If music “composed” is music that is
a product of intention, then music “discomposed” is modern music and crit-
icism that mistakenly strives to eliminate intention from theory and practice.
Although Cage is clearly implicated in attempts to create music of this kind,
his interpreter Krenek is the main culprit here. For Krenek, “chance” displaces
human responsibility completely and therefore divests music of its status as
a product of the human will (Cavell explicitly labels Krenek a “nihilist” and
includes Stockhausen in this camp, too). Put crudely, Krenek, Stockhausen,
and, to a lesser extent Cage, are fleeing the human.
If this answer to Goehr’s question (“What anyway is a music discomposed?”)
seems plausible, then I think that Goehr’s argument should be qualified in a
certain respect. Goehr’s essay often equates “music discomposed” with mod-
ern music and, more specifically, its radical break with convention; moreover,
the essay seems to include Cavell in the chorus of authors who lament the
breakdown of convention, bemoan the disorientation modernism creates, and
so on. In my view, however, Cavell’s reaction to modern music is not conven-
tionally conservative but more nuanced and complex. What Cavell bemoans is
not the break with convention itself but rather the wrongheaded attempts of
certain critics, composers and philosophers (e.g., Krenek and Cage) to under-
stand this break as having rendered human intention obsolete.
There is textual evidence that this is what Cavell meant by his title. Admittedly,
he does not explicitly say so, but he comes very close. For Cavell, critics and
composers like Cage and Krenek, with their appeals to “chance,” threaten
music with “discomposition” in the following way: “When a contemporary the-
orist [Stockhausen, Cage, Krenek, et al.] appeals to chance, he obviously is not
appealing to its associations with taking and seizing chances, with risks and
opportunities. The point of the appeal is not to call attention to the act of com-
position, but to deny that act; to deny that what he offers is composed” ([1967]
1976b, 202).
160
Krenek, Cage, and Stockhausen in Cavell’s “Music Discomposed”
161
Jake McNulty
where convention has (more or less) completely broken down. With Bach,
Cavell says, improvisation is still possible: his music, although not ordinar-
ily improvised, can at least be imagined to have been improvised or to be the
product of the composer’s improvisational experimentation. With Beethoven,
however, improvisation is no longer possible: not because there is, in fact, less
improvisation in his works but because we can no longer hear his pieces as if
they were improvised. Here, Cavell draws a distinction between what is a prod-
uct of “improvisation” (for him, an honorific) and what is merely a product of
“chance” in Cage and Krenek’s sense (for him, a symptom of decline, as we saw
earlier). Cavell does so in an effort to express his conviction that what appears
improvised in modern music—Stockhausen’s Klavierstück XI, for instance—is,
in fact, not improvised at all but rather a mimicry of true spontaneity.
162
Response 3
Stanley Cavell’s
“Music Discomposed” at 52
Paulo de Assis
Orpheus Institute
1
When I received Lydia Goehr’s note of acceptance to my invitation for the
Orpheus Academy 2016—on musical ontology—I was surprised by her choice
of topic: a paper providing a new interpretation of Stanley Cavell’s 1965 essay
“Music Discomposed.” The reference to Adorno in the subtitle, and my know-
ledge of Lydia Goehr’s erudition and sophisticated argumentation, made me
believe that there would be a “secret path” from Cavell’s apparent discussion
of the state of musical composition in the 1960s to the subject matter I had
imagined she would broach, namely a revisitation of musical ontological ques-
tions twenty-five years after the publication of her book The Imaginary Museum
of Musical Works (1992). If Cavell, according to Goehr, operated a “strategic dis-
placement of the subject matter” in his essay, so she would do the same with
the topic of the Orpheus Academy 2016. And indeed, after hearing her pres-
entation, and after reading her essay, I was able to discern that secret link, one
that is not obvious but crucial. Goehr introduces it at the end of her second
paragraph: the origin of Cavell’s “strategic displacement of the subject mat-
ter” (the real matter being the “repressed . . . modernist philosophical sub-
ject” and not really the “state of contemporary musical composition”; see,
Goehr above, p. 132) is Cavell’s uneasy relationship to, or “disconcert” with,
“the over- and under-composed offerings of his day.” Music that according to
Cavell is “over-composed” (Krenek and Stockhausen with their “total organi-
sation” being his examples) or “under-composed” (Cage and the Stockhausen
of Klavierstück XI) obviously challenges the dominant notion of the regulative
work-concept, raising questions of what a musical work is and what it is not. If
under-composed, a piece cannot claim to have a fully prescriptive, normative
instance of reference, therefore having literally as many different renderings as
performances. If over-composed (be it by extreme rationalised compositional
algorithms and/or by electroacoustic, mechanical renderings), it loses any pos-
sible variability from performance to performance, becoming something fixed,
frozen, dead. Thus, under- and over-composed music seems to exist outside
the classical paradigm of the work-concept, which among other qualifiers
requires a strong reference (“the work”) and a pluralistic variability of render-
163
Paulo de Assis
164
Stanley Cavell’s “Music Discomposed” at 52
ness, sincerity, honesty, profundity, and other “virtues” that are explicitly pre-
sented by him as “necessary to act coherently and successfully at all” (ibid., 198).
2
The gregarious, conservative, and reactionary perspective of Cavell’s text can-
not be overlooked, and I am not totally convinced that “Music Discomposed”
deserves the respectful attention we are giving to it. The essay was written in
1965 for the Oberlin Colloquium in Philosophy, and published in 1967 in the
proceedings of that conference (Capitan and Merrill 1967). Already in that vol-
ume, two comments by no less than Joseph Margolis and Monroe C. Beardsley
pointed out some significant problems in Cavell’s argumentation. Margolis
(1967) focuses on Cavell’s central notion of fraudulence and his hyper-judge-
mental considerations of what is art and what is non-art, while Beardsley (1967)
struggles with Cavell’s peregrine idea that one should treat works of art like
people, and disagrees with his stated thesis that “the dangers of fraudulence,
and of trust, are essential to the experience of art” (Cavell [1967] 1969b, 188–
89). Cavell’s response to Margolis and Beardsley appeared in that same volume,
just after their comments under the title “Rejoinders” (Cavell 1967), and was
later reprinted as “A Matter of Meaning it” (Cavell [1967] 1969a, 213–37) in Must
We Mean What We Say? More recently, in 2010, Brian Kane and Stephen Decatur
Smith edited a special issue of the Journal of Music Theory under the suggestive
title “Cavell’s ‘Music Discomposed’ at 40” (which was in fact at 45), with con-
tributions by Amy Bauer, Brian Kane, Dmitri Tymoczko, Eric Drott, Franklin
Cox, Lawrence Kramer, Michael Gallope, Richard Beaudoin, and Stephen
Decatur Smith. I will not enter into the details of that excellent volume, nor
of any of those brilliant contributions, as they are easily available to the reader
and do not deserve to be summarised out of their respective contexts of argu-
mentation. In terms of a precise critique of Cavell’s essay, I find particularly
relevant the contributions by Franklin Cox, Amy Bauer, and Michael Gallope,
which sharply articulate some significant shortcomings and factual mistakes
in Cavell’s argumentation. Thus, in what follows, I shall simply present three
further critical points that were not mentioned in the debate (or at least not
sharply enough): (a) Cavell’s reliance on a quotation by a secondary figure, (b)
the now visible historical defeat of his position, and (c) the underlying (uncon-
scious?) presence of Schopenhauer in Cavell’s notion of improvisation and
musical “discovery.”
3
In “Music Discomposed” Cavell alludes to Kant’s aesthetics, Nietzsche’s The
Birth of Tragedy, and Tolstoy’s What Is Art? and makes references en passant to
Thomas Kuhn, Paul Oskar Kristeller, and René Wellek; however, the only
extended quotation (211 words long!), the one that constitutes the core “proof ”
of his anti-modernist argument, is by Ernst Krenek (see Cavell [1967] 1969b,
195). Throughout the essay, Krenek is considered as an exemplary representa-
165
Paulo de Assis
4
Nevertheless, the crucial point is not so much that Cavell’s essay was already
outdated when he wrote it but that his thesis and his perspective were defeated
by history. As Franklin Cox (2010, 38) put it: “History appears to have proven
Cavell wrong.” Today, fifty-two years after the composition of Cavell’s essay,
Cage’s and Stockhausen’s works have already become classics of the twenti-
eth century, their musics being played somewhere almost everyday, and with
great success. It seems as if the “nihilists” managed to “act coherently and
successfully.” This story also applies to other artists Cavell explicitly referred
166
Stanley Cavell’s “Music Discomposed” at 52
5
Cavell never provides a definition of “music discomposed,” but he offers a
romantic view of “composed music” (Cavell [1967] 1969b, 198, 200). This is
music that results from inspired improvisations: “One can hear, in the music
in question [“composed music”], how the composition is related to, or could
grow in familiar ways, from a process of improvisation; as though the parts
meted out by the composer were re-enactments, or dramatizations of successes
his improvisations had discovered . . . containing essentially only such discov-
eries” (Cavell [1967] 1969b, 200–201, my emphasis). Cavell thus places himself
on the side of those who pretend that sound structures are “discovered” and
not “invented.” “Composed music” would be, paradoxically, one that sounds
as if it were improvised (200), a music where improvisation and chance play
a crucial role (198). In a certain sense “composed music” would be music that
sounds as if not composed, as if coming from unknown areas of creativity, from
some sort of secret origin of art. Inventiveness, the “artificial” generation and
manipulation (by humans or by an algorithm) of sounds and structures, would
sound as if composed and is therefore disdained by Cavell as “discomposed
167
Paulo de Assis
168
Stanley Cavell’s “Music Discomposed” at 52
6
Furthermore, were time and space to allow—which they don’t—I would have
liked to include in this comment three more topics, which I simply list here as
very problematic, and as a possible guide for future work:
(a) Cavell’s repugnance for precompositional work, drafts, and schema, a
“problem” he associates with modernity, ignoring not only Beethoven’s
sketches, but also Old-Flemish imitational processes, Bach’s canons,
and so on.
(b) His apparent belief in an uncorrupted “I.” Cavell ([1967] 1969b, 198)
sustains that “a work of art . . . celebrates the fact that men can intend
their lives at all . . . , and that their actions are coherent and effective
at all in the scene of indifferent nature and determined society,” as if
Freud, Nietzsche, and Marx had not existed and had not written the
books they did.
(c) His essentialist, controlling, and disciplining credo that art must
have “a definite set of features” that one could describe “in technical
handbooks,” whereby “fraudulence could be detected and exposed.”
The question for me is not What counts as art? but Who decides what
counts as art? or Who decides what is “false”?
7
As a final remark, I think it is fair to say that Lydia Goehr’s choice of topic was
obviously pertinent. The responses to her paper, including this one, prove that
Stanley Cavell’s essay “Music Discomposed” still provokes reactions and is,
therefore, somehow still “alive.” Philosophically and compositionally, it seems
to me completely dated and outdated, but it poses questions with which we—
composers and performers of new music—are still confronted today. Those
questions, even if anachronistic and reactionary, as I believe they are, must
nevertheless be answered. Goehr’s attempt to move from Cavell’s “discompo-
sure” into a “radical new form of composure” is certainly one of them, to which
every respondent to her paper is adding newer and different ones. Let’s only
hope that one day such questions will vanish, as it will be clear to everybody the
positive, energetic, and luminous power of creativity, the constructive force of
desire production—and no longer a discourse on dark forms of negative dia-
lectics, on intricate interpretations and reinterpretations of obscure academic
terminologies, on unproductive reiterations of past subject matters and prob-
lems. Instead of revolving the past, we should be making the future.
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Dialectics. Translated by E. B. Ashton. ———. 1991–92. “In Memory of
New York: Continuum. This translation Eichendorff.” In Notes to Literature,
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Book first published 1958–74 as Noten first published 1969 (New York: Scribner).
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———. 1997. Aesthetic Theory. Translated ‘A Matter of Meaning It’ after Forty Years.”
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———. 1998. “Opinion, Delusion, Society.” (Paris: Grasset & Fasquelle).
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Suhrkamp, 1963) and Stichworte: Kritische Books. First delivered as lectures in Rio
Modelle 2 (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, de Janeiro in 1973.
1969). Goehr, Lydia. 1992. The Imaginary Museum of
Bauer, Amy. 2010. “Philosophy Recomposed: Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of
Stanley Cavell and the Critique of New Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Music.” In Kane and Smith 2010, 75–90. Kane, Brian, and Stephen Decatur Smith,
Beardsley, Monroe C. 1967. “Comments.” In eds. 2010. “Cavell’s ‘Music Discomposed’
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1965 Oberlin Colloquium in Philosophy. of Serial Techniques.” In “Problems of
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Cavell, Stanley. 1967. “Rejoinders.” In Musical Quarterly 46 (2): 228–29.
Capitan and Merril 1967, 110–32. Margolis, Joseph. 1967. “Comments.” In
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(New York: Scribner). Nono, Luigi. (1959) 1975. “Geschichte und
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170
Appendix
The International
Orpheus Academy for
Music and Theory 2016:
Concerts and Installations
In addition to the guest faculty lectures, discussions, and dialogues out of which
the six chapters of this book evolved, the International Orpheus Academy for
Music and Theory 2016 included several performances, music interventions,
and installations. These were intended not as subsidiary or decorative moments
within a substantial theoretical debate, but as an integral part of the discourse,
contributing concrete sonic and visual materials to the topic. Considering
the performative moment not as a place for representation (of already known
sound structures), but of problematisation of the musical objects under consid-
eration, the three concerts explored unknown and unpredictable encounters
between music, texts, and imagery. Prepared by the ME21 Collective, con-
cretely by Paulo de Assis, Lucia D’Errico, and Juan Parra C., these performances
were further explorations of experimental performance practices of Western
notated art music, problematising major works not only by Robert Schumann,
Ludwig van Beethoven, John Cage, and Bruno Maderna, but also by Athanasius
Kircher, Nicola Vicentino, and Sigismondo d’India. Furthermore, there were
four installations that displayed diverse sets of material objects related to the
works played in the concerts. These included a table with copies of materi-
als that led to the composition of Luigi Nono’s .....sofferte onde serene..., a video
installation documenting a previous performance by the ME21 Collective of
music by Friedrich Nietzsche, a video documentary on “Hyperion’s Explosive
Compression,” a piece by Juan Parra C. after Bruno Maderna’s Hyperion, and a
diagram representing Einar Torfi Einarsson’s re-notation of Kreisleriana no. 1
in diagrammatic form.
171
DOI https://doi.org/10.11116/9789461662521.ch08
Appendix
All these concerts and installations have been devised and realised with a
strong focus on their immediate physical materiality, and it is very difficult to
describe and to communicate them a posteriori, especially in written format.
Thus, in what follows, the reader can find hyperlinks to video recordings that
simply function as documentation of the concerts and performances, as well
as the introductory texts to them, as they were printed during the Orpheus
Academy 2016.
1. Musical performances
I. Opening Session—4 April 2016, 10:00–10:30 | Orpheus Institute, Auditorium
Video recording available at: https://www.researchcatalogue.net/profile/
show-work?work=350826.
172
The International Orpheus Academy for Music and Theory 2016
173
Appendix
120, to several musical encounters, letting other times and styles interfere with
Beethoven, making unconnected connections happen. In the time frame of
the original piece, diverse techniques of elimination, suppression, substitu-
tion, and replacement are used. Alongside interventions from other times and
styles, including from composers such as Bach, Mozart, and Cramer, to which
Beethoven openly related, new pieces are regularly composed for every particu-
lar instantiation of the project.
More specifically, Diabelli Machines5 is the first outcome of a collaboration
between the MusicExperiment21 Collective and Ensemble Interface, a collabo-
ration that was preceded by a two-week long residency by Ensemble Interface at
the Orpheus Institute. In addition to recently composed pieces by Paolo Galli,
David Gorton, Tiziano Manca, Juan Parra C., and Bart Vanhecke (which were
composed as part of the previous collaboration between MusicExperiment21
and the Antwerp based HERMESensemble), Lucia D’Errico composed a fully
new piece. All the “new” pieces are intended as variations on the variations,
including musical reflections or glosses on the original. The composers are all
researchers at the Orpheus Institute, affiliated either with its research centre
or with the docARTES doctoral programme. Juan Parra C. worked on live-
electronic comments on Variation 20. Lucia D’Errico prepared not a score
but a “sonic image” of Variation 8 that has to be re-enacted by the performers.
Tiziano Manca composed a musical reflection on the entirety of the Diabelli
Variations, placed after Variation 10. David Gorton wrote a set of three vari-
ations to replace Variations 12, 13, and 14. Bart Vanhecke prepared a dark
comment on Variation 20, and Paolo Galli wrote a problematisation of the third
part of the work, that is, of Variations 21 to 28. More than simple commissions,
these compositions are part of a collaborative endeavour that was built through
a series of team meetings involving the core team of MusicExperiment21, all the
musicians of Ensemble Interface, the six composers, and the choreographer
Kurt Dreyer—a regular collaborator with Ensemble Interface who embraced
this project with incredible energy, the highest professionalism, and conta-
gious communicative skills.
Part I
Shadows from the Empty Centre, after pieces by Athanasius Kircher, Nicola
Vicentino, and Sigismondo d’India
Lucia D’Errico: concept, guitars, and electronics
The current model of production in notated art music, based on the distinction
between composer and performer, is designed to make the function of the lat-
ter redundant: the sonic result is already envisioned by the projection of sound
on a visual medium—the score. Is it possible to retain a correspondence with
past musical works while departing from the—supposedly—faithful reproduc-
tion of a score? The research project Shadows from the Empty Centre experiments
174
The International Orpheus Academy for Music and Theory 2016
This case study deals with the notion of reinterpretation, understood as the
process of recovering not only a particular piece of music but also the circum-
stances of its composition and original performance in order to adapt it for a
performance with electronic instruments. Although today they are considered
and performed as individual compositions, Aria and Fontana Mix were first per-
formed together as a single work. This was the point of departure for me to (a)
review the compositional procedures behind the creation of Fontana Mix, (b)
apply them in the design of a musical instrument to be used in performance,
as a complement to Aria, and (c) propose a simultaneous performance of both
works following the score of Aria as a structural guideline.
175
Appendix
2. Installations
I. Con Luigi Nono: An Archaeology of Things (curated by Paulo de Assis)
Con Luigi Nono: An Archaeology of Things displayed copies of the crucial materials
that led to the composition of Luigi Nono’s .....sofferte onde serene..., as well as
further materials that were generated after the original piece was done. Such
things include sketches, working tapes, manuscripts, the final score, the final
tape, editions, recordings, books, and articles, the digitalisation of the tapes
and the new critical edition and its transcoding for orchestra. Inspired by
Michel Foucault’s concept of “archaeology,” this installation exposed the mate-
rial things that can make .....sofferte onde serene..., a part of a “discourse-object.”
176
The International Orpheus Academy for Music and Theory 2016
The larger goal of this research project is to look at the performance practice
of electroacoustic music as reflected by the mirror of traditional instrumental
interpretation, and by a specialised performer rather than by the composer.
Specifically, it aims to present a number of strategies to analyse, reconstruct,
reinterpret, and create electroacoustic music that is actively situated in a larger
historical context and either is informed by or is a rendering of pre-existing
repertoire. In doing so, the positive aspects of the notions of “core repertoire,”
so commonly used in traditional instrumental contexts, can be adapted and
utilised by electronic music practitioners, in all three aspects of their practice:
technical, compositional, and performative.
In Juan Parra C.’s collaboration with the Italian theatre company Muta
Imago, these notions of interpretation are activated by the needs, constraints,
and challenges of producing a new version of Bruno Maderna’s Hyperion, focus-
ing on the double dramaturgical and dramaturgical-musical roles of the solo
instruments, and the use of recordings of the orchestral parts as a sound object
that both contributes to the musical structure and provides a dramaturgical
character: an aural representation of a different temporal and spatial plane,
one that both sustains and collides with the “live” performers. In the process of
creating the electronic processing system, selecting the orchestral recordings,
and reconstructing the final timeline for the work, the dramaturgical needs, the
logistical constraints, and Parra’s own considerations when approaching inter-
pretation in live electronic music equally contributed to the decision-making.
177
Appendix
used to refer to one of his compositions, and, later on, to Wagner’s music in
general. This weight he increasingly associated with the idea of “swimming,” to
which he proactively opposed the notion of “dancing.”
In this performance, which took place on 28 November 2015 in the
Tanzquartier Wien, the ME21 Collective presented musical works by Nietzsche
in dialogue with fragments of his texts, exposing some of the tensions between
Nietzsche-the-composer and Nietzsche-the-philosopher.
178
Notes on Contributors
David Davies is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at McGill University. He
is the author of Art as Performance (Blackwell, 2004), Aesthetics and Literature
(Continuum, 2007), and Philosophy of the Performing Arts (Wiley-Blackwell,
2011), the editor of The Thin Red Line (Routledge, 2008), and a co-editor of
Blade Runner (Routledge, 2015). He has published widely on the ontology
and meta-ontology of art, on philosophical issues relating to music, film,
photography, performance, literature, and visual art, and on more general
issues in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, and philosophy of language.
Andreas Dorschel has been Professor of Aesthetics and Head of the Institute
for Aesthetics of Music at the University of Arts Graz (Austria) since 2002.
Before that appointment, he taught at universities in Britain, Germany,
and Switzerland, where in 2002 the University of Berne awarded him the
Habilitation. In 2006, he was a visiting professor at Stanford University.
Dorschel was elected to the Board of the Austrian Research Fund (FWF) in
2008, in 2011 and, again, in 2014. He co-edited Bodily Expression in Electronic
Music (New York: Routledge, 2012; 2nd ed., 2013). Among his six author-
ed monographs are Verwandlung: Mythologische Ansichten, technologische
Absichten (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2009) (Neue Studien zur
Philosophie 22) and Ideengeschichte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht,
2010). Articles by Andreas Dorschel have appeared in publications includ-
ing the Cambridge Quarterly, The Oxford Handbook of the New Cultural History
of Music, and Philosophy (Cambridge University Press).
179
Notes on Contributors
Giovanni Moment: Essays on the Legacy of an Opera (2006). She has written
many articles on the works of Theodor W. Adorno, Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
and Arthur Danto. Lydia Goehr offers courses in the history of aesthetic
theory, the contemporary philosophy of the arts, critical theory, and the
philosophy of history. Her research interests are in German aesthetic the-
ory and in particular in the relationship between philosophy, politics, his-
tory, and music.
180
Notes on Contributors
of four Series Editors of The Complete Chopin—A New Critical Edition, and he
directs Chopin’s First Editions Online (funded by the Arts and Humanities
Research Council) and Online Chopin Variorum Edition (funded by the
Mellon Foundation). He holds three visiting professorships and serves on
the advisory boards of numerous research projects, scholarly journals, and
institutes.
181
Index
183
Index
184
Index
ontology, 1, 3, 11–22, 24–36, 38, 40, 42–43, 45–46, Schumann, Robert, 9–11, 13, 15, 17–18, 39–40, 129–30,
48–55, 59–61, 63–64, 66–69, 75, 77, 81, 89, 92, 163 171–72
differential ontology, 19, 27 scripture, 75
music ontologies, 11, 14–17, 19–20, 22, 24–25, 36, Scruton, Roger, 80, 87
37 Searle, John R., 54, 64
Orpheus Research Centre, 12, 174 Sellars, Wilfrid, 78, 87
Shaffer, L. Henry, 95, 101, 114
P Shakespeare, William, 120, 133
Palmer, Caroline, 99–101, 113 Simondon, Gilbert, 30
Parra C., Juan, 13, 171–77 simulacra/simulacrum, 23–25, 90
Perahia, Murray, 98 singularities, 14, 27–41
perdurantism, 20, 53 Sloboda, John, 95, 114
performance, 9–13, 15–17, 19, 22, 24, 34, 36, 38–41, Socrates, 147
46–47, 49, 51–52, 55–58, 62, 72, 76, 79, 89–101, sonicism, 49, 51
104–5, 111, 120, 122–25, 131, 133, 142, 153, 163, 164, Sorace, Claudia, 176
171–78 sound, 10–11, 13, 22, 35, 49, 52, 65–66, 69–77, 79,
Plato, 22–24, 27, 29, 138, 146 81–83, 85–86, 90, 92–93, 95–97, 110–11, 115, 125,
Platonism, 14, 18, 20, 22–26, 28, 31, 36, 41–43, 143, 145, 167–68, 171, 174–75, 177
50–51, 53, 62–63, 69 space, 13, 27, 30–34, 37, 72–73, 81, 96, 105, 115, 148,
play, 10, 13, 15–16, 45, 47–48, 52, 54, 56–59, 62, 89, 91, 169, 176
98, 101, 104–6, 110–11, 115–33, 143, 166–67 species, 23–25, 30–33, 46, 143, 145
Plotnitsky, Arkady, 30–31, 43 Stanford, Charles Villiers, 130
Pollock, Jackson, 167 Stella, Frank, 167
Pop Art, 167 Stern, Daniel N., 97, 114
Pressing, Jeff, 101, 113 Stern, Tiffany, 56–57, 64
problematisation, 11, 13, 29, 35, 37, 171, 174 Stockhausen, Karlheinz, 160–64, 166–68
Protestant music, 75, 84 strata, 35, 39, 40–41, 172
Proust, Marcel, 142 allostrata, 39
Pythagoras, 147 epistrata, 39–40, 173
metastrata, 39–40, 173
R parastrata, 39, 173
Rachmaninoff, Serge, 89, 100, 102–11 substrata, 39, 172
Rancière, Jacques, 164 stratification, 39
repeatability, 13, 22, 48, 50, 53–54, 58–60, 63, 72–73 Strauss, Joseph, 126–27
Repp, Bruno, 100, 114 Strauss, Richard, 132
representation, 11, 13, 22–24, 26, 58, 73, 99–101, 145, Stravinsky, Igor, 168
165, 171, 177 Strawson, Peter F., 72, 78, 87
research, 9–12, 17, 21, 26, 37, 40–41, 55, 89, 92, 97, 169, structure, 11, 13, 21–22, 25, 27, 31–36, 38–39, 41, 49,
173–74, 177 67–68, 71, 73, 75–76, 81–82, 85–86, 93–94, 96–101,
Riemann, Bernhard, 31, 33, 43 127–28, 136, 141, 150, 161–62, 164, 166–68, 171, 177
Rihm, Wolfgang, 167 substance, 26, 32, 34, 138
Rink, John, 12, 13, 15–17, 89–114, 133
Robb, Hamish J., 101, 114 T
Robbe-Grillet, Alain, 167 Tarasti, Eero, 93–94, 96, 100, 114
Rohrbaugh, Guy, 19–21, 25, 38, 43, 50, 53, 59, 60–61, Taruskin, Richard, 40, 43
64 things, 10–11, 13, 16, 20–27, 29–33, 35, 37–41, 46–50,
Rosen, Charles, 10 53–54, 56, 58–60, 62, 66–69, 75, 77–78–85, 95,
Rossini, Gioachino, 123 98–100, 105–6, 116–21, 125–26, 131–33, 136–38,
Rostagno, Antonio, 10, 18 141–42, 144–46, 148, 150, 168, 172, 176
Rothstein, William, 94, 98, 111, 114 Thomasson, Amie L., 54, 64
Roussel, Raymond, 167 thought, 12, 13, 15–17, 19, 22–23, 25–26, 31, 35–36, 38,
Ruta, Marcello, 20, 42 56, 68, 80, 89, 90, 92–93, 99, 117, 128, 133, 135–36,
138–39, 145–47, 149, 164, 168, 177
S Tillman, Chris, 21, 53, 64
Saint-Hilaire, Geoffroy, 31 timbre, 49, 70, 86
Saint-Saëns, Camille, 150, 168 time, 10, 13–14, 17, 21, 24–25, 28, 30–33, 37–41, 47,
Santayana, George, 139 55–56, 59–60, 71–73, 81–82, 90, 92–94, 97, 100,
Sauvagnargues, Anne, 27, 30, 43 111, 124, 141, 149–50, 169, 174, 176
Scarlatti, Domenico, 123 tokens, 22, 24, 31, 48–49, 61–62
Schatz, Jonathan, 176 Tolstoy, Leo, 165
Schenker, Heinrich, 100 tonality, 70, 74–75, 143, 161
Schmalfeldt, Janet, 89, 94, 114 topology, 27, 31–34, 36–38, 73
Schoenberg, Arnold, 77, 87, 149, 161, 166 Toscano, Alberto, 28, 43
Schopenhauer, Arthur, 165, 168 transduction, 27, 29–30, 34, 37
Schumann, Clara, 10
185
Index
truth, 35, 68, 94, 96, 145, 147, 150, 155, 157, 160, 168 125–27, 130–33, 143, 147, 149, 158
Tymoczko, Dmitri, 165 Wollheim, Richard, 21–22, 48, 61–62, 64, 82, 87
types, 17, 20, 22, 24–25, 28–29, 31, 37, 39, 48, 50–52, Wolterstorff, Nicholas, 21, 48, 61, 64
61–63, 65, 67–68, 70–71, 78, 94–95, 99 Woodland, Rae, 15, 115–16, 118–27, 129–33
Wordsworth, William, 115–17, 123, 126, 133
V work, 11–17, 19, 21–25, 34–38, 40–42, 45–66, 69–74,
Vanhecke, Bart, 173–74 76, 80–81, 84–86, 89, 92–95, 97–98, 104, 111, 125,
variability, 13, 50–53, 59–60, 62–63, 163 128, 135, 139–44, 146–48, 150, 156–67, 169, 171,
Vaughan Williams, Ralph, 127, 130 174–78
Vervoort, Valérie, 176 multiple artworks, 46–48, 50, 53, 59, 61
Vicentino, Nicola, 13, 171, 174 musical work, 11–12, 15, 17, 21–22, 34–37, 45–47,
Virgil, 135, 145 49–52, 54, 57, 60, 65–66, 69–70, 72–73, 76, 85,
virtual, 13–14, 26–30, 32–37, 40–41, 55, 106, 176 89, 92–94, 104, 111, 140–41, 144, 159–61, 163–64,
174–75, 177–78
W new image of work, 13–14, 19, 25, 35, 36, 41
Wagner, Richard, 132, 178 work-concept, 14–16, 21, 40, 45–46, 49–50, 54, 59, 63,
Wellek, René, 165 92, 140, 144, 163–64
Welles, Orson, 62
Citizen Kane, 62 Y
Williams, James, 26, 29–30, 34–35 Young, Eugene B., 33, 43
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 15, 68, 77–78, 87, 115–22, Young, James O., 16, 18
186
Editor © 2018 by Leuven University Press /
Paulo de Assis Universitaire Pers Leuven /
Presses Universitaires de Louvain.
Authors
Minderbroedersstraat 4
David Davies
B–3000 Leuven (Belgium)
Paulo de Assis
Andreas Dorschel
ISBN 978 94 6270 140 3
Lydia Goehr
e-ISBN 978 94 6166 252 1
Gunnar Hindrichs
Kathy Kiloh
D/2018/1869/23
Jake McNulty
NUR: 663
John Rink
Production manager The research leading to these results
Heike Vermeire has received funding from the
European Union Seventh Framework
Managing editor Programme ([FP7/2007-2013]
Edward Crooks [FP7/2007-2011]) under grant agreement
Series editor n° 313419.
William Brooks
Lay-out
Studio Luc Derycke
Cover design
Lucia D’Errico
Cover image
Lucia D’Errico,
“Sodium Chloride Crystals,”
after an image by NASA
Typesetting This work is licensed under a Creative
Friedemann bvba Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-
NoDerivatives 4.0 International License
(CC-BY-NC-ND). For more information,
please visit creativecommons.org.
DOI https://doi.org/10.11116/9789461662521
188
The Orpheus Institute Series encompasses monographs by fellows and associ-
ates of the Orpheus Institute, compilations of lectures and texts from seminars
and study days, and edited volumes on topics arising from work at the institute.
Research can be presented in digital media as well as printed texts. As a whole,
the series is meant to enhance and advance discourse in the field of artistic
research in music and to generate future work in this emerging and vital area
of study.
Orpheus Institute
Korte Meer 12
B – 9000 Ghent
Belgium
+32 (0)9 330 40 81
www.orpheusinstituut.be
The Orpheus Institute has been providing postgraduate education for musi-
cians since 1996 and introduced the first doctoral programme for music prac-
titioners in Flanders (2004). Acting as an umbrella institution for Flanders, it
is co-governed by the music and dramatic arts departments of all four Flemish
colleges, which are strongly involved in its operation.
Throughout the Institute’s various activities (seminars, conferences, work-
shops, and associated events) there is a clear focus on the development of a new
research discipline in the arts, one that addresses questions and topics that are
at the heart of musical practice, building on the unique expertise and perspec-
tives of musicians and maintaining a constant dialogue with more established
research disciplines.
Within this context, the Orpheus Institute launched an international
Research Centre in 2007 that acts as a stable constituent within an ever-grow-
ing field of enquiry. The Orpheus Research Centre is a place where musical art-
ists can fruitfully conduct individual and collaborative research on issues that
are of concern to all involved in artistic practice. Its core mission is the develop-
ment of a discipline-specific discourse in the field of artistic research in music.
Beyond musical works: a new approach to music ontology
and performance
What are musical works? how are they constructed in our minds?
Which material things allow us to speak about them in the first place?
Does a specific way of conceiving musical works limit their performative
potentials? What alternative, more productive images of musical work
can be devised?
Virtual Works—Actual Things addresses contemporary music
ontological discourses, challenging dominant musicological accounts,
questioning their authoritative foundation, and moving towards dynamic
perspectives devised by music practitioners and artist researchers.
Specific attention is given to the relationship between the virtual
multiplicities that enable the construction of an image of a musical work,
and the actual, concrete materials that make such a construction possible.
With contributions by prominent scholars, this book is a wide-ranging and
fascinating collection of essays, which will be of great interest for artistic
research, contemporary musicology, music philosophy, performance
studies, and music pedagogy alike.
ISBN 9789462701403