Philosophy of the Performing Arts

appreciating performable works in performance 63
be uniquely retrievable from performances of the work? What motivates this
second requirement of unique retrievability? The idea, as noted earlier, is that
we can explain why there are no forgeries of performable works by pointing
to the role that the score plays in divorcing status as a work-instance of a per-
formable work from history of production. It is the score alone, Goodman
maintains, that preserves the performable work from performance to per-
formance, and it can do this only if we deny any measure of indeterminacy in
retrieval. Allow such indeterminacy and we get the dire consequences that
he describes. But what should puzzle us is why the score should be assigned
any role in retrieval at all. It is not as if it is part of our musical practice to
construct scores on the basis of performances. Indeed, as we shall see in
Chapter 6, it is because choreographic scripts for dance performances are
often generated in this way that it is unclear whether dance fits the classical
paradigm. Rather, in our practice scores only play the first of the two roles
distinguished by Goodman, that of defining a work by enabling us to identify
its performances. But they play this role by reference to the circumstances in
which a performance takes place. We group performances as performances
of a given work by reference to the score from which the musicians are intending
to play. If, on two occasions of performance, we believe that the musicians
are (with reasonable success) attempting to comply with the same set of
requirements encoded in scores they take to have the same historical origins
in a particular compositional act,^17 then we take the two performances to
be of the same musical work, even if one of them is flawed in certain minor
respects. This allows us to recognize genuine performances of a work that
fail to be work-instances of that work. This doesn’t pose a problem since we
don’t ascribe any role to the retrieval of score from performance in preserv-
ing the identity of the work. And it also allows us to assign a work-defining
role to verbal instructions in the score, since, even if these instructions are
imprecise or overlapping in the way described by Goodman, we can still
determine which work is being performed on a given occasion by determin-
ing which score the musicians are attempting to comply with.
Of course, if this is indeed our practice, it requires that we attend to
the circumstances and performative intentions of the performers in deter-
mining whether something is indeed a performance of a given work. Thus
we have not divorced status as performance of a work, and therefore status
as a correct performance of a work, from the conditions under which a
performance takes place. We therefore cannot avail ourselves of Goodman’s
solution to the puzzle about forgeries with which he begins. But the puzzle
itself allows of a much simpler answer. For the issue about forgeries is not
merely whether we can tell whether something is a work-instance of a work
independently of its history of production, but whether its having a par-
ticular history of production matters for its role in the appreciation of the