Philosophy of the Performing Arts

98 performance and the classical paradigm
playback. Such pieces, which he terms “purely electronic,” are constituted in a
studio using various kinds of technological resources. They exist in virtue of
being encoded in some way, and are to be played back by means of a mechan-
ical device capable of retrieving what is stored. As in the case of films whose
instances are screenings, the instances of such works are soundings generated
from accurately cloned copies of the master encoding, and not performances
of any kind. Davies cites, as examples, works of musique concrète by compos-
ers such as Pierre Schaeffer and the electronic music of Herbert Eimert.
Works for performance, on the other hand, require for their realization
that some role be played by a performer. In the familiar case of works for
live performance, we have a prescription, issued by the composer, as to what
must be done by musicians in order to perform the piece. In the case of a
work for studio performance, on the other hand, what is prescribed is that
the musicians’ skills be exercised in a studio where the sounds produced can
be “taped, superimposed, mixed, and modified, until a composite is pro-
duced” (S. Davies 2001, 31). Such works
require the electronic manipulation of the materials finding their way into the
performance. Normally they are not created in real time. Parts are laid down
one after the other, and accumulate by addition and juxtaposition. Usually the
result would be impossible to perform in real time ... The composite mix is
carefully constructed in a complex editing process. The performance is com-
pleted when the master tape is finalized. (S. Davies 2001, 34–35)
Davies claims that rock works are generally works for studio performance,
although he grants that some works – such as the Beatles’ “A Day in the
Life” – are better viewed as purely electronic. To view such works as purely
electronic is to treat all of the electronic manipulations of and additions to
the original recordings in the studio as constitutive of the work, rather than
as representing merely one way in which the work can be performed in the
studio through electronic manipulation of recordings.
Gracyk, on the other hand, equates rock works in general with purely
electronic works in Davies’s sense. While he points to the same phenomena
that Davies describes in the preceding passage, he argues that the focus of
critical and appreciative interest and attention in rock music is the distinc-
tive sound of the recording available to receivers in playback, rather than the
sound of a performance made available through the recording. He seeks to
counter not only the idea that recordings are recordings of performances in
the standard sense – live performances – but also the idea that live perform-
ances are performances of the rock work, now construed as the recording.
While performers frequently try to replicate distinctive aspects of the sound
of the recording, this, insofar as it is governed by an interest in mirroring