1 Introduction: The Classical Paradigm

in the Performing Arts

In the last three chapters, we have examined the classical paradigm. The latter

provides us with an account of what it is to be, and to be appreciated as,

an artistic performance. According to the classical paradigm, performances

are of performable works and play a necessary part in their apprecia-

tion. Performable works prescribe certain things to performers, and are

appreciated for the qualities realizable in performances that satisfy these pre-

scriptions. Theorists differ, as we have seen, as to the kinds of things that are

prescribed and the nature of the things that do the prescribing. Performers

are also in a sense collaborators with composers, for they are expected to

exercise their creative freedom in interpreting what is prescribed. Only

where this kind of interpretation is called for in generating work-instances

of a multiple artwork do we think of it as a performable work. This, we will

recall, grounds Kivy’s concern that the demand for historically authentic

performance threatens the status of musical works as performable works

because it denies the performer a sufficient degree of interpretive freedom.

The need for interpretation in artistic performances is clear if we com-

pare music to film. Many individuals play a part in enabling a film to be

screened – those who generate a copy of the master encoding of the film, for

example, and those who project the film by means of this copy in a cinema.

But we do not take such individuals to be “performing” the film. They merely

realize for the viewer, in the screening, already determined appreciable qual-

ities of the film. They do not themselves determine some of these qualities

5

Challenges to the Classical

Paradigm in Music

Philosophy of the Performing Arts , First Edition. David Davies.
© 2011 David Davies. Published 2011 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.