Philosophy of the Performing Arts

162 performance as art
critics of Sessions have appealed here to work by the philosopher of cogni-
tive science Diana Raffman. Raffman (1993, chs. 4 and 5) argues that the
mental schemata used by human memory to represent aspects of our expe-
rience are not fine-grained enough to preserve the distinctive inflections of
a musical performance. Gracyk, appealing to this work, suggests that this
in part explains why we are still engaged by familiar rock works even after
listening many times to their recordings (1996, 57ff., 236). The particular
tone of the guitar solo on the Kingsmen’s “Louie Louie,” for example, can
still deliver “the thrill of the unexpected” even when we feel we know every
musical detail of the recording.
Other commentators have been less impressed by this line of argument,
however.^11 For one thing, it admits of no obvious extension to structural fea-
tures of a recorded musical performance, which we can presumably register
in memory, and which will then, according to Sessions’ argument, become
increasingly familiar, and incapable of surprising us, with repeated auditions
of the recording. Second, even in the case of those performative inflections
that we cannot memorize in their full glory, we can surely anticipate the
thrill of hearing a particular passage or solo, if not the “color” of the passage
or solo itself. Thus we lose the surprise of being thrilled, even if we are still
thrilled, by the distinctive tone of the guitar solo on “Louie Louie.” And,
third, it is not clear that what applies to our general powers of recall also
applies to our experience in listening to a familiar recording of a musical
work. Stephen Davies makes this point against Gracyk’s use of Raffman’s
research. Even if we grant that people are incapable of “replaying” every
detail of a recording in memory, “the issue ... is whether they can anticipate
what is coming next as they listen to a recording. My experience suggests
to me that this is possible. If I know the disc very well, sometimes I have an
eidetic aural ‘picture’ of what is about to happen a few milliseconds before it
occurs” (S. Davies 2001, 305).
While Sessions intended his argument to apply to the artistic contents
articulated in recordings of performable works, his argument can also be
applied to recordings of improvisations , and here it takes a very different
focus. Lee B. Brown, in a couple of papers (1996, 2000) has questioned
whether recordings can do justice not to the content of an improvised per-
formance but to the fact that it is improvised. Can a recording preserve
“the spontaneous dimensions of musical performances” (Brown 2000, 117)?
A recording of an improvisation differs from a later performance that rep-
licates the sound structure of an improvisation – as in The Musical Offering
example – in presenting a performance that itself involves real-time choices
as to its own development. But it is questionable whether it can also make
this aspect of the performance “live” to listeners, and thus whether listeners
can thereby appreciate the improvised performance. Indeed, Brown argues,