Philosophy of the Performing Arts

64 performance and the classical paradigm
work. In the case of paintings it does matter because we cannot determine
whether an entity has the properties something must have in order to play
the relevant experiential role in appreciation without knowing its history of
making. Only if this canvas is from the hand of Leonardo can we have any
confidence that it possesses the manifest properties necessary if it is to serve
as a work-instance of the Mona Lisa. Even the greatest copyist may produce a
canvas that differs from the original in subtle ways that bear upon the work’s
appreciation. In the case of literary works however, as Goodman points out,
we assume that no such information about the history of making of a given
text is necessary, once we have a canonical text with which to compare other
texts. Any text that matches the canonical text in specifiable respects will
provide equal access to those textual properties that bear upon the apprecia-
tion of the literary work.
It doesn’t follow, however, that we can therefore identify literary works
with texts. For factors other than the manifest properties of their texts – for
example, contextual factors – can bear upon the appreciation of literary
works. Philosophers of literature often point to a short story by Jorge Luis
Borges about a fictional French writer Pierre Menard, at the turn of the
twentieth century, who authors a text that is word-for-word identical to a
fragment of Cervantes’ Don Quixote (Borges 1970). The two texts, Borges’
narrator argues, instantiate distinct works in virtue of the different contexts
in which the texts were written. But since the two works share all their
textual properties, it doesn’t matter if, in trying to appreciate Menard’s
work, the text I am reading stands in an intentional-historical relationship
to the writing activity of Cervantes or to that of Menard. In either case, the
text is fully qualified to play the experiential role in the appreciation of the
work. All that is necessary is that I locate the textual properties of what I am
reading, whatever its own history of making, in the context of Menard’s
act of authorship. In fact, since we defined a work-instance of a work in
terms of the experiential role that it plays in the appreciation of that work,
the text, whatever its own history of making, can stand as an instance of both
Cervantes’ and Menard’s distinct literary works so long as we have a prior
guarantee that the works have identical texts.
The same line of reasoning can be applied to performable works of
music. A performance of a work makes available to us certain audible
qualities that bear upon the appreciation of the work performed. Suppose
for the sake of argument that these qualities include the timbral proper-
ties that would be generated in realizing the prescribed sound sequence
on the instruments prescribed by the composer. Since the sound of a cor-
rect performance of a work W on these instruments might, ex hypothesi ,
be duplicated by a performance of W ’s prescribed sound sequence on a
PTS, exactly the same audible properties bearing upon the appreciation