Philosophy of the Performing Arts

challenges to the classical paradigm in music 93
the classical paradigm, or to think of these scores as themselves representing
eighteenth-century performable works.
This conclusion might be disputed, however. Kivy, discussing Goehr’s
work, describes as “intolerable” the thought that Western art music was
not a performed art until the nineteenth century (Kivy 1995, 262–263).
He argues that, even if we grant that there was not, in eighteenth-century
musical practice, anything meeting our strict conception of the performable
musical work, we can nonetheless preserve a performance/work distinction
that applies to such practice. For the eighteenth-century musical community
placed a high value on improvisation of a sort “that required for its enjoy-
ment the concept of a pre-planned, preformed, and enduring kind of music
as the standard against which it could be measured” (Kivy 1995, 263). The
value ascribed to improvisation, Kivy maintains, requires as a foil the idea
of performance from a notation, or from memory of a notated, previously
existing, work.
We cannot fully assess the force of this response until we look more
closely – in Chapter 8 – at improvisation in general, as a feature of musical
practice, and at its bearing upon the applicability of the classical paradigm to
that practice. However, it isn’t clear, given Goehr’s account of eighteenth-
century musical practice, that the foil against which improvisation would
have to be measured must be the performance of a previously existing per-
formable work. For, as we saw, she claims that performance practice drew
very freely not on pre-existing works but on pre-existing elements that
could be enlisted in adapting a performance to the needs of a given extra-
musical event. Improvisation, then, could be valued as a way of developing
or embellishing upon such elements, or as a way in which such elements are
synthesized into a single performance, without the need for the pre-existing
repeatable works that the classical paradigm demands.
In a more extended critical response to Goehr, Stephen Davies argues that
her conclusions rest upon two assumptions (S. Davies 2001, 86–92). First,
in surveying the musical tradition, she focuses on striking dis continuities
between musical performances before and after 1800. Second, the discon-
tinuities upon which she focuses depend upon her selection of the works of
Beethoven as paradigmatic of the work-concept. These works are, in Davies’s
terminology, relatively thick, and their scores are taken to be strictly bind-
ing on performers. Given this choice of paradigm, it is not surprising that
Goehr is impressed by discontinuities in performance practice. But, Davies
maintains, she fails to pay proper respect to important continuities between
nineteenth-century musical practice and that of earlier periods. There is, he
claims, ample evidence of an interest in the authorial role of composers
going back to at least the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Also, the absence
of a notation prior to 1800 capable of freeing the performance of a work