Philosophy of the Performing Arts

58 performance and the classical paradigm
conceived as continuants depend upon their occurrences in some way. This
suggests that performable works, if there are such things, are inextricably
linked to particular conceptions of their performances. Indeed, while from
one perspective it is performable works that impose conditions on their
performances, the arguments offered to clarify the nature of performable
works generally run in the opposite direction. It is because we take certain
features of performances, and certain kinds of differences between perform-
ances, to bear upon the appreciation of the works performed, that we are
drawn to particular views about the nature of the performable works them-
selves. We have seen this in the kinds of arguments offered for the signifi-
cance of timbral, instrumental, and contextual features of performances for
the appreciation of such works.
Indeed, this is surely the way it should be. Performable works, assum-
ing that they exist, are things that play a particular role in animating cer-
tain human practices. Our task, in asking about the nature of performable
works, is to clarify both the nature of this role and the kinds of qualities
that performable works must have in order to play it. Thus we must start
with features of those practices themselves – the kinds of distinctions that
we make both in our talk about and in our practical commerce with artistic
performances, and the kinds of qualities that we seek out in our engagements
with them. This is not to say that everything in our practice will stand up
under rational scrutiny. There may be inconsistencies in that practice taken
as a whole, and we may be moved to revise some features of that practice as
a result of reflection. But rational reflection on the nature of the perform-
able work must begin with practice, and must counsel revisions only in the
interests of making better sense of our practice taken overall, given the goals
that it is reasonably taken to serve.^10 In line with this general methodological
directive, we have assumed a number of things in our discussion thus far. We
have assumed, for example, that a work can have incorrect performances.
Our discussion of Sibelius’s symphonies also suggests that timbral qualities,
and the use of particular instruments, bear upon the appreciation of at least
some musical works through their performances. And, while our discus-
sion of contextualism looked not at actual practice but at hypothetical cases,
these were intended to mobilize intuitions that presumably guide our actual
practice by asking us to consider how we would view such cases were they
to be actualized.
But there is a famous argument that proceeds by reference not to our
actual practice but to more general conditions to which, it is claimed, this
practice must conform if we are to have a coherent conception of perform-
able works. Here it is assumed that the demands of theory should regi-
ment our practice rather than vice versa. Nelson Goodman’s argument, in
Languages of Art (1976), would, if accepted, compel us to accept a view of