users. This is called the principle of autonomy, and it is pretty universally regarded today as a
requirement for aesthetic appreciation—that is, for evaluation as a work of art. A trope certainly fails this
test, but then so do all the other musical artifacts of its time.
For music only became autonomous when it stopped being useful; and this did not happen until
conditions allowed such a thing to happen. Some of those conditions were beginning to exist a thousand
years ago. The potential for autonomy existed as soon as the means of recording music in writing existed.
Until then, music was only an activity—something you did (or that others did while you did something
else). All of the music we have been considering thus far falls into that category. It is both literally and
figuratively service music: music for the divine service and music that serves a divine purpose. And yet
the divine service was after all a human activity, and the music that both accompanied this activity and
gave it shape was a music that functioned in symbiosis with a social framework as yet undivorced from
daily life. A lot of music is still like that; we call it “folk.” But some music has since been objectified as
“art.” It happened in stages, of which the first, as we know, was writing. In written form music at last
possessed (or could possess) some sort of physical reality independent of the people who made it up and
repeated it. It could outlive those who remembered it. (And it could reach us, who no longer have a use
for it.) It could be silently reproduced and transmitted from composer to performer, thus for the first time
completely distinguishing their roles. With the advent of printing, almost exactly five hundred years ago
(and also almost exactly five hundred years after the introduction of music writing), reproduction became
easy and cheap. Music could be disseminated much more widely than before, and much more
impersonally. In the form of a printed book, music could be all the more readily thought of not as an act
but as a thing. Philosophers have a word for this conceptual transformation: they call it reification (from
res, Latin for “thing”). The durable music-thing could begin to seem more important than ephemeral
music-makers. The idea of a classic—a timeless aesthetic object—was waiting to be born.
For reasons that we will later need to consider in detail, its birth had to await the birth of
“aesthetics,” which was a by-product of romanticism, an intellectual and artistic movement of the late
eighteenth century. Only then do we encounter notions of transcendent and autonomous art—art that was
primarily for contemplation, not for use, and for the ages, not for you or me. Since then the reification of
music has reached new heights (and depths) with the advent of actual sound recording, leading to new
sorts of music-things like compact discs and digital audiotapes. Thanks to these, music was
commercialized in the twentieth century to an extent previously unimaginable, yet it has also been more
completely classicalized than ever before. A recording of a piece of music is more of a thing than ever
before, and our notion of what “a piece” is has been correspondingly (and literally) solidified.
So if a set of interpolated tropes—or a vagrant melisma, or a now-you-see-it-now-you-don’t prosula
—challenges or “problematizes” the notion of a piece of music as an autonomous work of art, we should
realize that the problem thus created is entirely our problem, and that it arises out of an anachronism. Our
casual assumptions about music and art are no longer congruent with those that motivated the Frankish
musicians of a thousand years ago. Realizing this can help us approach more realistically not only the art
products of the distant past but also the ones with which we are most familiar—precisely because, in a
context of alternative views, the familiar is no longer quite so familiar. When things are no longer taken
for granted they can be more clearly and meaningfully observed; when we allow our values to be
challenged by different ones, they can be more fully and discerningly understood. They are in fact more
our own once we have reflected on them.
None of this should imply that the musicians of a thousand years ago, and the people who heard them,
could not enjoy their work sensuously. Indeed, Saint Augustine admits to just such an enjoyment of
liturgical singing in his Confessions. And yet although he admits to it, he does not admit it. Recognizing
that “there are particular modes in song and in the voice, corresponding to my various emotions and able