Philosophy of the Performing Arts

92 performance and the classical paradigm
This explains both the enormous number of different “works” that we
ascribe to composers such as Vivaldi and Scarlatti and the overlap in musical
material between these “works.” Furthermore, because of the need to adapt
a performance to the needs of the particular extra-musical function that it
served, there was little occasion for rehearsal prior to performance. Only
the most general prescriptions were provided for the performers, neces-
sitating much embellishment on their part. Indeed, it was often not known
in advance which instrumentation and musicians would be available for a
performance. Performers therefore had to adapt to meet the contingencies
that presented themselves. A further consideration helped to entrench this
state of affairs. Until the end of the eighteenth century, no notation existed
that would permit a full enough specification of a composer’s prescrip-
tions to allow a performance in accordance with these prescriptions to take
place in the absence of the composer himself. Where scores were published
corresponding to eighteenth-century performances, they were identified
with the particular performance occasion rather than with an independent
performable work, or they were treated as exercises for musicians to enable
them to better develop their performative skills.
Goehr draws the following conclusions from these features of eighteenth-
century musical performance practice:
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 com-
positional activity. (Goehr 2007, 185–186)
To say that the concept of the performable work had no “regulative force”
in eighteenth-century musical practice is to say that it did not regulate
what musicians did or, presumably, how what they did was viewed by those
attending the events where music was performed. If this is correct, then
locating eighteenth-century musical performances within the classical para-
digm cannot be expected to help us understand why they had the features
that they did. Given our assumption that subsuming performances under
the paradigm is justified just in case it does have some kind of explanatory
payoff, Goehr’s analysis suggests that, even in Western classical music, the
scope of the classical paradigm is more limited than we might have thought.
While nothing prevents us from treating the eighteenth-century scores that
are available to us as the basis for multiple performances, it seems wrong
to think of the original performances from which these scores are derived
as themselves performances of performable works in the sense required by