appreciating performable works in performance 53
the composer, referring to the markings of “ lugubre ” and “ lento e suave ” in the
score. Given the nature of these kinds of qualities, we can appreciate them
only through hearing the work performed. It might be thought that this is
because we recognize expressive qualities in virtue of ourselves being put
into the relevant emotional states. But we need not subscribe to such a view
to see how hearing performances of a musical work matter for grasping
its expressive qualities. Whether or not listening to the music puts us into
a melancholy or sunny frame of mind, the melancholy or sunny nature of
the music can be taken to be qualities of the music itself that relate by their
very nature to what can be heard in it. If so, they can be given to us only in
a hearing of the music, and this will be one reason why a performable work
such as Sibelius’s Second Symphony is properly appreciable only through
its performances. It is in the hope of better understanding and appreciating
these kinds of qualities in a work like the Second Symphony that aficionados
like Berthold come to concerts like the one described at the opening of the
previous chapter.
2 Can Performable Works Share Artistic Properties
with Their Performances?
The nature of musical expression is a fascinating issue upon which much
insightful work has been done.^3 But this is not the issue that concerns us here.
Rather, our interest, at least initially, is in how the expressive and timbral quali-
ties heard in a performance of a work like the Second Symphony can bear
upon the appreciation of the work performed. This question may not have
occurred to most of us in our appreciative engagement with musical works in
performance. Indeed, in elaborating upon Day’s critical analysis of the Second
Symphony, we simply assumed that the expressive and timbral properties of a
performance gave us appreciative access to the same properties of the work.
But this assumption requires further defense in light of our discussion, in the
previous chapter, of the nature of the performable musical work. Of the differ-
ent accounts of the performable work that we examined, all but the fictionalist
and the continuant accounts ascribe a role to types of some kind of which work-
performances are the tokens. This is most apparent in the case of the sonicist
and instrumentalist accounts, where the work itself just is a norm-type that
prescribes the properties required in its correct performances. However, as we
saw, Levinson’s contextualist theory still identifies works with types – albeit
initiated types – of which performances are tokens. And types also play an
essential mediating role in the theory of performable works as the indicatings
of norm-types, since it is through the indicated norm-type that we identify the
class of performances that bear on our appreciation of what was done.