Philosophy of the Performing Arts

66 performance and the classical paradigm
Instrumentalists and contextualists sometimes fail to distinguish these
questions. They assume that, if musical works are partly individuated in terms
of the context in which they are created, or in terms of the instruments
prescribed for their performance, and if two works differ in their contexts of
creation or in their prescribed instrumentation, then they must also differ
in their work-instances. Levinson (1980), for example, takes it to be a con-
sequence of his instrumentalist and contextualist views on the nature of the
musical work that instances of a musical work must be performed on the
prescribed instruments and must also be performed by musicians who stand
in the right kind of intentional-historical relation to the creative activity of
the composer. We have seen that, while this is the case for performances,
there is no general reason why it should also be so for work-instances.^21
That a performance of one performable work can count as a work-
instance of another such work is not as surprising as it may seem. It is possi-
ble because the notions of performance and work-instance do different kinds
of jobs. The notion of performance helps us keep track of which playings are
playings of a given work in a way that doesn’t invest all authority in the score
but accords a role to history of production. It allows us to evade the radically
revisionary implications of accepting the Goodman argument. The notion of
work-instance, on the other hand, is defined in terms of a particular role that
something can play in the appreciation of an artwork. A work-instance of a
work, in whatever artistic medium, is something that makes available to a
receiver all of the manifest qualities of a work’s artistic vehicle that bear nec-
essarily upon the appreciation of the work.^22 It is possible for a performable
work to have work-instances that are not performances because an event
can play the relevant role in appreciation without standing in the relevant
intentional-historical relation to the composition of the work.
Once we grasp the importance of this distinction, we might be attracted
by the idea that it can obtain, at least in principle, in any art form.^23 A per-
fect forgery might indeed be a work-instance of a painting, contrary to
Goodman’s claims, without standing in the right intentional-historical rela-
tion to the painter’s activity. But it is the intentional-historical relation in
which the painter stands to the original that determines, at least for the
contextualist, the kinds of considerations that need to be brought to bear
in properly appreciating the artwork on the basis of the manifest proper-
ties that, ex hypothesi , the original and the perfect forgery share. But forgery
matters, in the case of paintings, for the reasons Goodman cites. We are
unable, in practice, to know whether a given entity is a work-instance of a
work without referring to its history of making, since there is no other way
of establishing that the entity possesses those properties required in order to
fully qualify to play the experiential role in the appreciation of the work. We
must not forget that the perfect forgery, if it is guaranteed to be perceptually