Philosophy of the Performing Arts

100 performance and the classical paradigm
and stiffened by electronic interventions and editing” (S. Davies 2001, 35),
even though it is left open precisely how this should be done. Davies con-
cedes, however, that the case for viewing rock works as purely electronic
is strengthened if, as Gracyk and others have suggested, we take the rock
work to be the album – for example, Springsteen’s Born to Run – rather than
the individual track (S. Davies 2001, 34).
Andrew Kania (2006) has defended Gracyk’s general approach by
suggesting how it might accommodate the features of our practice to which
Davies appeals. Rock works, he maintains, are indeed thick recordings – he
terms these “rock tracks ” – that also manifest thin rock songs. Manifestation
is a relation that may, but need not, involve being an instance of what is
manifested. But, even if the recording is an instance of a song, in some sense,
it is not a performance of the song. In live performances, however, what is
performed is the song which the track manifests, rather than the recorded
track. While a live performance may in many ways seek to reproduce aspects
of the sound of the track, it also introduces other elements that are specific
to the context of live performance – for example, an extended introduction
and coda, or alternative lyrics – and may radically depart from the sound of
the track. The idea that live performances are performances of songs , then, is
preferable to Davies’s view of such performances as attempts at live replica-
tion of works for studio performance.
Kania argues that the value placed upon the instrumental skills manifested
in recordings does not pose a problem for this view, since the manner in
which the sounds in a track were produced may bear upon the aesthetic
properties we ascribe to the rock work. Nor is there a problem accounting
for our treatment of cover versions. While Davies wants to explain this in
terms of there being different (studio) performances of the same work for
studio performance, Kania talks instead of different tracks that are intended
to manifest the same song. He points, here, to an analogy with remakes in
cinema: “Just as we compare film remakes with their originals, yet do not
think of films as performances of the narrative they have in common, so
we compare cover versions without thinking of them as performances of
the songs they manifest” (Kania 2006, 409). In both cases, we treat the two
entities as works in their own right. While it is certainly possible to see the
entities as distinct performances of a shared work, such an approach is unin-
teresting given the thinness of what they share.
This final observation by Kania seems to be crucial when we try to decide
between the idea that rock works are purely electronic recordings and the
idea that they are works for studio performance. For, as we have seen, our
notion of a performable work is tied to the idea of interpretation in per-
formance, and to the idea of performances as more or less true to the work.
Davies resists the idea that works for studio performance are individuated