94 performance and the classical paradigm
from the supervisory presence of the composer does not show that there
were no works before that time, but only that such works were necessarily
somewhat thinner in what they required of performers. According to Davies,
Goehr downplays historical continuities in her claim about the work- concept
because, given her paradigms, she sees this concept as emerging only when
certain notions admittedly found in earlier musical practice come to func-
tion together in a unified way – the notions of “composition, performance,
autonomy, repeatability, permanence and perfect compliance.” Davies, on the
other hand, maintains that performance practice prior to 1800 was indeed
regulated by the work-concept, as long as we do not conflate the latter with
its thick interpretation in nineteenth-century Romanticism.
Davies is surely right in thinking that Goehr cannot take the thick
Romantic construal of the work-concept as a given in arguing for the con-
structed nature of the notion of a musical work. But it isn’t clear that her
argument depends crucially upon such a construal. Like Kivy, Davies pays
little attention to Goehr’s claims about the distinctive function of musical
performance prior to 1800. It is the purported discontinuity in function
that supposedly explains why the work-concept comes to play a regulative
role only after that date. Because musical performance pre-1800 is subject
to the demands of an extra-musical event, there is no place, according to
Goehr, for repeatable works, even if there is a place for repeatable elements
that can be combined in individual performances. This allows her to account
for the importance accorded pre-1800 to the authorial role of composers,
as cited by Davies. Such importance may attach to the composition of those
elements that can enter into such performative wholes. If it be replied that
such elements are thin works, then it must be granted that they are not the
works we standardly identify in this period. It is the change in the function
of musical performance that, for Goehr, explains how the different elements
cited by Davies, such as repeatability and composition, come together only
after 1800 in a work-concept that regulates practice and individuates works
in the way we customarily do.
3 Jazz, Rock, and the Classical Paradigm
Jazz
Talk of improvisation leads us very naturally to the topic of jazz. One obvi-
ous feature of jazz performance is the value placed upon the improvisational
skills of the performers. Improvisation is clearly not sufficient for a perform-
ance to count as jazz, however, given its place in eighteenth-century classical
music. What is also crucial is the way in which performers relate what they