Philosophy of the Performing Arts

performance i: improvisation and rehearsal 161
that produces that construction in the very process of generating the sounds
that make up the performance. And with this difference in the values sought
and found in improvisational performance goes a difference in the kind of lis-
tening that is required. Improvisational performance calls for a listening that
attends to the manifest choices of the performer and screens out infelicities
that might otherwise be taken to be serious flaws. When a contemporary
performer gives a rendition of The Musical Offering , on the other hand, she is
simply interpreting a performed work, and the element of choice and risk
is no longer present in the performance in the way it was for Bach and for
his audience.^8
However, if we think about the possibility of appreciating an improvisa-
tional performance at which we are not present, what most naturally comes
to mind is not an example like The Musical Offering. Rather, we think we
can appreciate Jarrett’s Köln Concert , or John Coltrane’s performance of “My
Favorite Things” at the Newport Jazz Festival on July 7, 1963, through record-
ings of those events. The recording is of the very event of the performer(s)
improvising a sequence of sounds. Thus it might seem to provide a more
solid basis than a transcription for appreciating an improvisation subsequent
to its occurrence.
Matters are, as ever, more complex, however. Philosophers who have
addressed this issue usually begin by noting a challenge posed by the com-
poser and critic Roger Sessions to recorded music in general. Music, Sessions
claimed,
ceases to have interest for us ... the instant we become aware of the fact of
literal repetition, of mechanical reproduction, when we know and can antici-
pate exactly how a given phrase is going to be modeled, exactly how long a
given fermata is to be held, exactly what quality of accent or articulation, of
acceleration or retard, will occur at a given moment. When the music ceases
to be fresh for us in this sense, it ceases to be alive, and we can say in the most
real sense that it ceases to be music. (Sessions 1950, 70–71)^9
To defend musical recordings against the charge that they somehow destroy
crucial features of musical performance, we need first to clarify the aspects
of musical performance to which Sessions’ argument might apply.^10 Since
he stresses our ability to anticipate details of a recorded performance when
we listen more than once to a recording of it, some commentators have
taken the relevant aspects of a musical performance to be the structure of
the sound sequence performed or the particular inflections given to the
notes – color, timbre, dynamics, etc. These are indeed the qualities to which
Sessions refers in his text. In that case, we might consider empirical work on
the capacity of listeners to remember such details of a performance. Some