Philosophy of the Performing Arts

146 performance as art
purpose of articulating an artistic content of her own – one not referable to
the performable work.
But this raises a more general worry about the idea of work-performances
as performance-works. As we saw in Chapter 4, for a performance to count
as the performance of a particular performable work W , the performer
must be guided by the prescriptions constitutive of W so that the perform-
ance aims to comply with those prescriptions. We saw that the prescriptions
themselves may need to be relativized to the context in which they were
generated if we are to know what they in fact prescribe. We have also agreed
that there is always further room for interpretation of those prescriptions on
the part of the performer. But, as has just been argued, for a performance
to count as a performance-work, it must aim to articulate an artistic con-
tent of its own. To what extent can a performer have both the aim required
if her performance is to be a work-performance and the aim required if
her performance is to be a performance-work? As we shall see in the next
chapter, this problem is particularly pressing when we ask about the status of
improvisations by jazz musicians on standards.
Another way to bring out this difficulty is to reflect on the kinds of prop-
erties of an improvised performance like Jarrett’s that Alperson cites in
arguing that such performances are artworks. We disagreed with Alperson’s
strategy of citing such properties for such a purpose, but it may be instruc-
tive to see how this strategy would fare when applied to work-performances.
There were, we may recall, three kinds of properties: first, the properties
of the performance viewed as a musical construction, analogous to the prop-
erties for which we admire performable works; second, the properties of
the performance qua action, such as virtuosity and sensitivity; and third,
the properties of the performance insofar as it involves the generation of a
musical structure in real time.
Consider the first kind of property. A performance of a performable
work seems to owe most of its properties as a musical construction to the
work performed. For, in order to count as a performance of the work, the
performer must intend to comply with the composer’s prescriptions, and
these prescriptions determine many of the structural compositional features
to which Alperson refers: “intelligible development, internal unity, coher-
ence, originality, ingenuity, etc., the artful employment of prevailing idioms,
and the emergence of an individual style.” Those such features that might
be credited to the performer – coherence (in interpretation), originality,
and individual style in particular – seem to be performative virtues rather
than qualities that contribute towards the articulation of a distinct artistic
statement by the performer. A performance of a performable work is also
unlikely to have the third kind of property, unless it does so in virtue of
the way in which the performer interprets the composer’s prescriptions.