Playing by the Rules: A Pragmatic Characterization of Musical Performances

Abstract

The central problem of musical ontology-and a problem whose special qualities can be overlooked when it is so easily pigeonholed as an aesthetic one-is the problem of how performances are related to compositions. There have been a great many different solutions. The performance of a work has been called an instantiation of a universal, a token of a type, a species of a genus, and even a member of a class. These differences will not concern us directly here. Whichever sort of a composition is, there will have to be conditions that must be satisfied in order for a particular performance to be identified as a performance of that work. It is how these conditions might be characterized that interests us here, and not the ontological structure to which they relate. I will, however, assume a minimal account based on the type/ token model, which will be fleshed out a little as the argument progresses. It will be tempting from the start to take as our subject that admits the general characterization of compositions that can have multiple performances that are substantially similar. Too many writers have assumed that European classicism can be taken as a paradigm case for all musical traditions, and this despite the fact that European classicism offers the easiest case for a model that separates composition and performance. As a result, ontological characterizations of music often apply in reality to only a narrow range of musical activities. Musical practices such as improvisation and recording-two extremes in terms of the regularity of instances compared with the generic entity itself-tend to pose serious problems for such models. This said, it is still possible to begin with the canonical situation of a composition that is created by one person, encoded, and then performed by other persons. Put naively, composers have a series of musical ideas that they write down in a score. We are not concerned here with anything prior to the production of the score, since prior to this point there is nothing to be ontologically concerned about. Idealists, who might object that this begs the question since the work of may precede the score's production, would be missing the point that it is not the composition's ontology that interests us so much as it is its ontologically determinate relation to performances. These performances are carried out by persons who have learned how to interpret the code of the score as a set of instructions for action, and who have executed this set of instructions successfully. On the face of it, there seem to be many similarities between this situation and the situation in respect of games. The game of chess, for example, consists of two things: a set of physical objects (the board and pieces) and a set of rules for what to do with them. The game of chess is analogous to a composition; and it may result in many games of chess, played by people with the proper equipment and knowledge of the rules. As John Searle points out, there is a difference in chess between rules and conventions: