Philosophy of the Performing Arts

challenges to the classical paradigm in music 89
explained in terms of the paradigm, or in terms of some alternative model
of artistic performance.
To see how the classical paradigm might be extended to the performing
arts more generally, we may consider Paul Thom’s account of the latter.
Thom defines a performable work as “the directed content of a perform-
ance directive” issued by the artist (1993, 44). Such a directive prescribes
what must be done to execute the work. In line with Wolterstorff and
Stephen Davies, Thom holds that a directive must be understood against
a background of assumptions concerning performance practice that the
artist shares with those he or she expects to perform the work. His account
allows performable works to differ from one another in a number of ways
(Thom 1993, 51–55). First, we may, but need not, have an explicit speci-
fication of the content of the directive. What matters is that this content
be somehow transmissible so that, as with a musical score, we have a point
of reference in determining when we have different performances of the
same work, and when we have performances of two different works. But
nothing in the model excludes performable works that are orally trans-
mitted and that undergo a measure of change through such transmission
over time. We might expect musical performances in medieval times and in
non-Western cultures to be of performable works that fit this description.
Second, the directive may be more or less determinate in its prescriptions.
Thom cites, as an example of a “minimalist” directive, La Monte Young’s
Composition 1960 #7 which prescribes only that a B and an F sharp be “held
for a long time” (Thom 1993, 54). Goodman cites a kind of “deviant scor-
ing” for musical works used by John Cage in his 1960 work Concert for Piano
and Orchestra, Solo for Piano :
Dots for single notes are placed within a rectangle; across the rectangle, at
varying angles and perhaps intersecting, run five straight lines for (severally)
frequency, duration, timbre, amplitude, and succession. The significant fac-
tors determining the sounds indicated by a dot are the perpendicular dis-
tances from the dot to these lines. (Goodman 1976, 187–188)
Goodman is concerned that this method of “scoring” fails to meet the
requirements for a notation. But, as we saw in Chapter 3, as long as we let
the circumstances of performance play a part in determining what work a
performance is of, there are no obstacles to the use of such heterodox means
of specifying performable works.
Thom’s account generalizes from musical performances to the other
performing arts through another dimension in which artists’ directives can
vary: the medium in which the content of the directive is to be executed.
In the case of music, what is prescribed is the production of a particular