CARS 06 · Humanities: music and philosophy of art
The Score and the Performance
A humanities passage on what a musical work is and what a performer owes it.
Passage
A musical score looks like the work itself: a page of signs, fixed and complete, from which the music can be read. It is natural to conclude that the work is what the composer wrote down, and that a performance is a kind of execution, as a builder executes a blueprint. On this picture, a good performance is a faithful one, and a performer’s skill lies in carrying out the instructions with as little distortion as possible.
The picture breaks down when one considers how much a score leaves unsaid. Notation specifies pitches and relative durations with some precision, but it says little about the quality of a tone, the exact flexibility of the pace, the length of a pause, or the way a phrase swells and relaxes. Performers fill in these matters constantly, and often without reflection. Two performances that obey every marking can differ so greatly that a listener might hesitate to say they were the same piece, and yet we do say it. Whatever makes a piece the same piece cannot lie entirely in the page.
One response holds that the work is the score after all, and that performances are only more or less imperfect copies of it. The difficulty is that this view makes the ideal performance the most literal one: a machine that sounded every note at exactly the marked value, with no variation at all. Listeners do not experience such a rendering as perfection; they experience it as lifeless. If faithfulness to the score were the standard of excellence, the machine would win. It follows that faithfulness can be, at most, a threshold that a performance must cross, not a measure of how good it is.
The opposite response holds that the work exists only in performance, and that the score is merely a memory aid for those who already know the music. This view has the opposite flaw. If the work is whatever happens in performance, then there is no way to say that a performance has gone wrong; a performer who played something entirely different could claim, with equal right, to have played the work. Yet audiences do make such judgments, and trained listeners make them with considerable agreement. They say that a passage was taken at a tempo that destroys it, or that a performer has simply not played the piece.
A better account treats the score as a set of constraints that marks out a range of acceptable performances, within which the performer’s choices are guided by a tradition of training and listening that no score can contain. On this view the work is less an object than a practice, one that includes the notation, the habits of those who play it, and the expectations of those who hear it. The account has a cost: it implies that there is no sharp line at which a performance stops being the work. But this is not a serious objection, since many perfectly good concepts have vague edges. No one can say exactly how many grains make a heap, and no one doubts that heaps exist.
Questions
Question 1 of 6
The main point of the passage is that:
This is the first view, which the author rejects because it would make a lifeless machine the ideal performer.
This is the second view, which the author rejects because it makes it impossible to say that a performance is wrong.
The author argues that faithfulness is only a threshold and not a measure of excellence.
Why the answer is what it is
The author rejects the score-only and performance-only views and ends with an account in which the score constrains performance within a tradition.
Question 2 of 6
The author describes a machine that sounds every note at exactly the marked value in order to:
The passage makes no prediction about machines replacing performers.
The author’s concern is that the score leaves too much unspecified, not that it contains too many markings.
Nothing in the passage compares recordings with live performances.
Why the answer is what it is
If faithfulness to the score were the standard, the literal machine would be the ideal performer. Because listeners find it lifeless, the author concludes that the standard is wrong.
Question 3 of 6
According to the passage, why does the author say that faithfulness to the score is “at most a threshold”?
The passage does not claim anything about composers’ intentions.
The passage makes no claim about performers’ technical limitations.
The author says that trained listeners can make judgments about performances.
Why the answer is what it is
The third paragraph says that the most literal performance would be experienced as lifeless. So crossing the threshold of faithfulness does not make a performance good.
Question 4 of 6
The author’s attitude toward the view that the work exists only in performance is best described as:
The author uses the audience’s judgments against this view, since it cannot explain them.
The author says that trained listeners agree considerably in their judgments.
The author argues that each view has a flaw and then offers a different account.
Why the answer is what it is
The fourth paragraph says that this view has “the opposite flaw”: it leaves no way for a performance to be wrong, though audiences clearly judge that some are.
Question 5 of 6
Which finding would most strengthen the author’s claim that tradition guides performers beyond what the score contains?
This would not show a guiding tradition within a school, though it might be consistent with different traditions.
This concerns composers revising scores, not the agreement among performers on matters that the score leaves unspecified.
Variation among performances shows that the score leaves room for choice. It does not show that tradition guides the choices.
Why the answer is what it is
Agreement among trained musicians on matters that the score does not settle suggests that something beyond the score, such as a shared tradition, is guiding them.
Question 6 of 6
Which of the following is most analogous to the author’s final account of the relation between score and performance?
This is more like the picture the author rejects, in which instructions fix the result completely.
This analogy has no connection to constraints that leave room for choice within a tradition.
This concerns accuracy and change over time, not constraints that permit a range of acceptable results.
Why the answer is what it is
The rules of chess constrain play without determining any single game, and they mark a boundary that some moves cross. This is parallel to the author’s account of score and performance.