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ABSTRACT
While all agree that score compliance in performance is valuable, the source of this value is unclear. Questions about what authenticity requires crowd out questions about our reasons to be compliant in the first place, perhaps because they seem trivial or uninteresting. I argue that such reasons cannot be understood as ordinary aesthetic, instrumental, epistemic, or moral reasons. Instead, we treat considerations of score compliance as having a kind of final value, one which requires further explanation. Taking as a model the Humean account of fidelity as an artificial virtue, I sketch a practice-theoretic account of the nature and source of such reasons, one on which we can say that they are, after all, aesthetic, but only indirectly so.
Disclosure Statement
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Notes
1 Stephen Davies’ [Citation1987: 47] formulation of this assumption, endorsed by Dodd [Citation2015: 485], that ‘A performance is better, ceteris paribus, for being more score compliant’, would also be fine, provided that one hears the ‘better’ as ‘has more reason’ and not just as ‘would sound better’ or ‘has more aesthetic value’. Assimilating these conceals just the cases that matter.
2 Our reliance on scores makes our practices world-historical outliers, but there are equally ‘high-compliance’ oral traditions in which one has reason to play all of the notes—e.g. the Enemy Way repertoire of the Navajo [McAllister Citation1954], or the sacred songs of Yoruba [Amira and Cornelius Citation1992]. It is hard to generalize about popular music, but, ‘covers’ aside and keeping in mind their thinness, compliance standards are relatively high.
3 This points toward a way of delineating what is improvisational performance, or aspect of performance, without its just being a matter of how far in advance one’s decisions are made, the sort of account found in Young and Matheson [Citation2000] and Kania [Citation2011].
4 Isn’t the instrumentality here causal? We do play instruments in order to produce sounds. This is true, say, of the plucking, for the plucking causes sounds, which stand in a constitutive relation to the whole of the sound of the performance. Indeed, the structure of the action derives from the structure of the sound of the piece, to which it is isomorphic. But dividing into cause and effect here is artificial, for plucking in a vacuum is no playing at all. Part of what it is to pick out and describe the plucking as a playing, the proleptic description under which it counts as an intentional action, already includes the fact of its audibility, for which reason the instrumentality here is best described as constitutive-instrumental despite its causal underside.
5 Note the ‘majority of’ qualifier here and in what follows [Davies Citation2001: 207, 241, 249].
6 See, for example, Levinson [Citation1980: 26] and Davies [Citation2001: 160].
7 To be clear, neither Dodd nor Davies advocates such a view. Dodd [2012] is only working to establish ‘insight’ as a source of value in performance distinct from compliance. Davies [Citation2001: 249] explicitly disavows a ‘rule consequentialist’ reading of his view, although only because he denies that the point of authenticity is to maximize pleasure. It is unclear whether he thinks that we might be understood as maximizing some other, more sophisticated, candidate for aesthetic value or, rather, that we cannot be understood to be maximizing at all.
8 See, standardly, Williams [Citation1973: 90].
9 In what follows, I draw heavily on Thompson [Citation2008: 149–210]. Select aspects of the appeal overlap with those found in MacIntrye [Citation1984: 181–203], Goldie [Citation2007], Lamarque [Citation2010], and Wolterstorff [Citation2015: 83–106].
10 Although we are thus in the neighbourhood of a virtue, conceived of along Aristotelian lines, I am setting aside, for simplicity’s sake, the parallel Aristotelian connection between these considerations and what one ought to feel, despite the obvious interest of this connection for aesthetics. See Goldie [Citation2007: 383].
11 Cf. Lamarque [Citation2010: 384] and Davies [Citation2012].
12 Here we have a clear-cut example of what MacIntrye [Citation1984: 187–94] would call ‘a practice-internal good’, the sort that make possible new kinds of excellence, as well as virtues that promote such excellences.