The Musical 'Work'

[IanP]

There have been many writers who have wrestled with the notion of what exactly constitutes a musical 'work', if such a concept is indeed of use at all. Primary amongst these is Lydia Goehr with her book The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works. She would argue that the so-called 'work-concept' (the idea of the work having some identity over and above its possible manifestations in performance) did not really come into being until the nineteenth century (and then only quite gradually). Many others have built upon this idea (and some have critiqued it), suggesting that, for example, in cases where it is difficult to ascertain a singular 'correct' version of a work (as with Chopin, or Bruckner, say), there is no singular 'work'; others (including myself) have sought to think of the 'work' more in terms of a field of possible performances, without any one such performance possessing any ontological primacy. This is all tied in with a rethinking of a post-romantic music history which privileges composers and 'works' above all (this conception is especially prevalent in much thinking about contemporary music), and which has quite major consequences in terms of how we view the activities of performers. I am simply interested to know what posters here think about these subjects, and hopefully start a debate on this important topic.

[Reiner Torheit]

others (including myself) have sought to think of the 'work' more in terms of a field of possible performances, without any one such performance possessing any ontological primacy

And yet you have written with some passion against contemporary opera-directors who have staged operas in ways you allege (without always having seen the results, ehem) are a dissservice to the "work" (sic) in question?  How do you justify the apparent mis-match in your approach here?

I ask out of genuine interest, and not with the intention of spurring your antagonism.

[Serenus Zeitblom]

I think it is difficult to approach this subject without considering the role of the concept of canon, and how it distorts the performance of music.  It is clear that canonic considerations have meant that works are often performed in a way which distorts them - in the nature of the venue and audience for the performance, the performance style, or the instrumentation.  To take one example of Wagner, there is plenty of documentary evidence that many modern performances of Wagner are much slower than the composer directed; but there is an imperative that states that a good or even a "great" performance conforms to those distortions imposed by tradition (look, for example, at the brickbats thrown at Boulez for trying to get back to something like the original tempo).  I'd sometimes like to get away from the nagging feeling that we're hearing Cosima's rather than Richard's Wagner.

I am concerned about the way in which, rather than hearing the work, we may hear not only the accretions of performance traditions, but the changes of the circumstances of performance and regard those accretions and changes as the work itself.  As I think I've said here before, it seems to me that one of the effects of canon is to make music safe; it bowdlerises the music, because it ensures that the music carries a range of social, political and musical signifiers.  Canon is what stops music from re-inventing itself.

Just one thought about opera productions - I despair when I read people attacking innovative opera productions and demanding just to be given what's in the score.  Glancing at my shelf full of opera scores, I see virtually no production instructions -  in most cases just a mise en scene.   There are clearly plenty of people who are quite happy to see concert performances in fancy frocks against painted scenery, but that clearly isn't opera.  The balance I suppose is to try and produce in a contemporary audience something of the relevance and self-recognition that the original audiences might have experienced.  Given that most of the operas performed at all regularly come from quite a narrow time period - 1770 to 1914 - that's quite a challenge.

[IanP]

others (including myself) have sought to think of the 'work' more in terms of a field of possible performances, without any one such performance possessing any ontological primacy

And yet you have written with some passion against contemporary opera-directors who have staged operas in ways you allege (without always having seen the results, ehem) are a dissservice to the "work" (sic) in question?  How do you justify the apparent mis-match in your approach here?

In that case, or with respect to other issues of interpretation, it is because accepting a 'field' of possible performances doesn't imply that any performance is equally appropriate. The fields have boundaries whilst allowing for plurality. To put it more broadly, there are many ways of performing a Beethoven sonata, or a Wagner opera, or a Chaikovsky Symphony (and in some sense the 'work' encompasses these pluralities), but there are still some performances that we could definitely say are not of those works (to take an obvious example, if someone gave a boogies version of 'Happy Birthday', that would not be of any of those). Though where precisely the boundaries are to be drawn is tricky.

Just one thought about opera productions - I despair when I read people attacking innovative opera productions and demanding just to be given what's in the score.  Glancing at my shelf full of opera scores, I see virtually no production instructions -  in most cases just a mise en scene.   There are clearly plenty of people who are quite happy to see concert performances in fancy frocks against painted scenery, but that clearly isn't opera.  The balance I suppose is to try and produce in a contemporary audience something of the relevance and self-recognition that the original audiences might have experienced.  Given that most of the operas performed at all regularly come from quite a narrow time period - 1770 to 1914 - that's quite a challenge.

Just to clarify, my beef isn't in any sense with innovative contemporary opera productions, just with those that sacrifice most else in favour of what most easily gets bums on seats (just tokenistic sex and violence, shock tactics, etc.). Rather like I feel about Vanessa-Mae playing in a wet t-shirt. But that's an issue for another thread.

[guest2]

It happened that I read the article about Madame Goehr in Grove's Dictionary just the other day, while looking up some information about her father. My reaction was first pleasure but then consternation:

"Lydia Goehr, (b London, 10 Jan 1960). Philosopher, daughter of Alexander Goehr. After her first degree in philosophy at the Universities of Exeter and Manchester (1982), she took the PhD at Cambridge with a dissertation, The Work of Music (1987). She subsequently held academic posts at the University of Nevada at Reno (1986–7), Boston University (1987–9), Harvard University (1989–90) and Wesleyan University (1989–97) before being appointed professor of philosophy at Columbia University (1995). Her book The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (1992), adapted from her dissertation, engages in a radical way with discussions by analytic philosophers about the question of the ontology of a musical work. An ontological question asks what it is for any entity to have existence, or to ‘be’; applied to music, it takes the form of asking what it is for a piece of music to be defined as a ‘work’ or to have a singular ‘identity’. (Is the work a material thing? Does it consist in the score? Is it an ideal in the mind of the composer? Is it a compendium of possible performances?) This question was opened up most notably by the philosopher Roman Ingarden, who approached it from a phenomenological point of view (1928), but Goehr’s concern is mainly to refute its treatment in the English-speaking analytic tradition. This school of thought typically dissolves philosophical questions through the linguistic analysis of the basic terms in which they are couched, and so encourages an approach to the question of a work’s identity through an analysis of how the term ‘work’ could be used in ‘ordinary language’."

"Oh good," I thought at this point, "if she is going to refute that she must be a sensible little lady with something useful to say." But then Grove goes on:

"Goehr shows that because this approach is insensitive to historical developments in performance and composition, it fails to give an account of musical traditions which have, to varying degrees, embraced the improvisatory, or made limited use of notated forms, without being concerned about fixing the notion of a ‘work’. Only an historically attuned philosophy can, she argues, do justice to the range of ways in which ‘work concept’ may be used."

"Oh dear," I then thought, "that's not the way to do it at all!"

For completeness' sake here is the conclusion of the Grove article:

"Since her first book she has written many articles on problems of censorship, autonomy and politics as they pertain to 19th- and 20th-century developments in the philosophy of music, and . . . a book on the music, politics and philosophy of Richard Wagner (The Quest for Voice, 1998)."

"Work" in itself just means the result of labour or toil, does it not - which is what the composer does in the first instance. I suppose his work is done when it is published, and I would say it is almost completely separate from the task of the executants or performers. The expression "work of art" has a rather more restrictive meaning. Of course there are questions of varying editions, revisions of a work put out at different times, works with more than one author, editors' additions and omissions, later completions of incomplete works, works constructed out of some one else's sketches, boogie-woogie travesties, things changed beyond all recognition . . . there is a key word, "recognition" - but recognition is not enough, realizations/executions/performances have to be faithful to the composer's intentions - there are two more key words. The situation of the performers is in many ways not dissimilar to that of the publisher or editor is it not?

But I suspect member IanP is thinking more along the lines of Signor Nono:

"In his last decade, Nono saw his use of technology as having a positive role with regard to cultural, and hence social, emancipation. Nevertheless many commentators have continued to view the period quite differently, as one of individualism and the metaphysical; Nono’s image of Utopia redefined through his own concepts of ‘other ways of listening’ and ‘possible infinities’. These last works not only call for a new attitude to sound perception, but also require that spaces in which we listen, notation, the attitude of the performer and the whole conception of compositional work be changed. The position of performers and listeners was altered by placing individual instrumentalists or orchestral groups in different parts of the hall, while the fluctuating interior of the sound could now be controlled entirely through computer programmes, realized through collaboration with technicians. Such programming was adapted to every new environment, and this called for a new flexibility in musical notation, as well as the most sensitive understanding of the performers who – with their continuous micro-variations in pitch, dynamic and timbre – both act in and react to the overall sound production. There is now no longer a principal performer, but each member of the team, including the technicians, forms part of a larger reciprocally-acting mosaic of members. Virtuoso players are required, but not in the traditional sense of an athletic display of numerous notes and complex rhythmic figures; instead there is a sort of ‘static’ virtuosity, calling for concentration, control of the most subtle oscillations in sound and the ability to interact with the other ensemble participants. A work is thus no longer the product of a solitary composer, but the result of a continuous exchange of ideas within the triangle of composer–performer–technician."

[John Cummins]

This is very interesting and I'd like to contribute and ask your indulgence in my posting only an initial thinking-out-loud to the first message and take a promise to catch up with the rest later. 

There have been many writers who have wrestled with the notion of what exactly constitutes a musical 'work', if such a concept is indeed of use at all.

First reaction: "oh brother..."; second reaction: not surprised. 
Third, there is always value in a strenuous workout with analysis and definition. 

... Lydia Goehr ... would argue that the so-called 'work-concept' (the idea of the work having some identity over and above its possible manifestations in performance) did not really come into being until the nineteenth century (and then only quite gradually).

Knowing nothing about 'work-concept' scholarship, I'll guess that its proponents correlate its emergence with what social, philosophic and artistic trends are collected under the rubric 'romantic'?  And, speculating from this that the work-concept is affixed to those works composed less for church, court and theater and presumably more for the composers themselves and whomever might be inclined to experience them, for example the heroes, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Liszt, Schumann, Brahms, etc.? 

Yet those works were performed in court, salon, and theater, if not church, so is it reasonable to counter the 'work-concept' by proposing that it was not the concept of the work, but society that changed, allowing greater visibility of the artists' ownership of their works, and the artists' authoritative voice on them?  This is to address only one aspect of the 'work-concept' issue.   

Many others have built upon this idea (and some have critiqued it), suggesting that, for example, in cases where it is difficult to ascertain a singular 'correct' version of a work (as with Chopin, or Bruckner, say), there is no singular 'work';

What is the definition of the 'work'?  At this point, that the 'work's' definition seems implicitly limited to its score. 

others (including myself) have sought to think of the 'work' more in terms of a field of possible performances, without any one such performance possessing any ontological primacy.

My inclination too, and the size of the 'field of possible performances' is limited by the score. This issue has been touched upon by members at,

Music as a whole > The history of music > Interpretation and fidelity to the composer's wishes -  http://artmusic.smfforfree.com/index.php/topic,8.msg8.html#msg8

This is all tied in with a rethinking of a post-romantic music history which privileges composers and 'works' above all (this conception is especially prevalent in much thinking about contemporary music), and which has quite major consequences in terms of how we view the activities of performers. I am simply interested to know what posters here think about these subjects, and hopefully start a debate on this important topic.

Of what does the privilege consist?  How can a composer be privileged above a performer, or vice versa, if they have complimentary but different functions?  What should fairly cause one to give ground to the other?  Surely not a general ethos of equality? 

It's been said by others, but I know this principle from Lukas Foss's statement, "A conductor's authority [over the orchestra] comes from his knowledge of the score". A less knowledgeable conductor risks ceding ground to the band, the more contemptuous those persons, the more woe to the conductor.  On the other hand, the more professional the band, the luckier the conductor. 

Similarly with composer & musicians: their authorities compete, constructively or destructively, depending on their characters, where their respective areas of knowledge contact and overlap.  In the case of Mahler scores and performances mentioned here,

 http://artmusic.smfforfree.com/index.php/topic,8.msg12.html#msg12

and here,

 http://artmusic.smfforfree.com/index.php/topic,8.msg46.html#msg46 

the conductor might have to have done his work not only in the score, but also in the history of performance. 

...how we view the activities of performers.

Oh boy, the issues here...
1. Allowing the performer to improvise
- - because it is more virtuous, anti-patriarchical, socialistic, not to oppress them, deny their humanity and full creative equality with the composer, and their potential valid contribution to a shared work of art or forming of and participation in a creative community. 
2. Requiring the performer to improvise
- - because the language doesn't tend towards the closure of tonal music and the composer believes its expansive tendencies are well-served by limited improvisation.
- - because the composer cannot control their language so as to produce what they deem a finished work. 
- - because the composer wants to seen as the sort who promotes #1. 
- - because the language is one of improvisation and the musicians are masters.