challenges to the classical paradigm in music 101
in terms of the thin requirements of their sheet music. But, if all we add, in
characterizing such works, is the understanding that the live studio perform-
ance is to be augmented by the use of (unspecified) studio resources, this
leaves little room for the idea that we can compare two studio recordings
in terms of their being true to the work for studio performance, over and
above their being studio recordings that comply with the sheet music. Thus it
isn’t clear that the notion of a “work for studio performance,” understood
to be distinct from a work for live performance, meets the conditions we
have established for something to count as a performable work. If so, then
Gracyk and Kania make a powerful case for locating the rock work outside
of the classical paradigm, even though rock performances remain within the
paradigm insofar as we view them as performances of (thin) songs.
4 Non-Western Music and the Classical Paradigm
The musical genres considered thus far belong to the broadly Western musical
tradition. An obvious question, therefore, is whether the classical paradigm
can accommodate music produced and appreciated outside that tradition.
A couple of disanalogies might suggest that it cannot. First, as compara-
tive anthropologists and ethnomusicologists have stressed, music in other
cultures is generally closely tied to some non-artistic function – religious,
ritual, or social – rather than being designed for the kind of contempla-
tive appreciation central to Western music since at least the early nineteenth
century. We might ask then whether performances of such music qualify
as artistic. Second, most music-making in other cultures proceeds without
the use of musical notation. This raises the question whether, lacking such a
notation, there are sufficient resources to create and preserve performable
works of the sort required by the classical paradigm.
The first concern is easily answered if we define the kind of regard proper
to artistic manifolds in the way that we did in Chapter 1. We there distanced
“artistic regard” from the modernist idea that artistic manifolds call for a
kind of disinterested contemplation. Artistic regard, we maintained, is the
kind of regard that must be accorded to a manifold whose content has been
articulated in the way that artworks articulate their contents. The question,
then, is not whether music in another culture is intended for disinterested
contemplation, which it may well not be, given the ritual, religious, or social
function that it has in that culture. Rather, the question is whether the lis-
tener must attend to the music “artistically” in order to grasp the articulated
content that bears upon its capacity to serve that cultural function.^5
The second concern is addressed by Stephen Davies in his reflections
upon the music of the gamelan in Bali and Indonesia (2001, especially ch. 6;