Musical Performance: A Philosophical Study

Front Cover
Psychology Press, 1998 - Music - 172 pages

Most music we hear comes to us via a recording medium on which sound has been stored. Such remoteness of music heard from music made has become so commonplace it is rarely considered.
Musical Performance: A Philosophical Study considers the implications of this separation for live musical performance and music-making. Rather than examining the composition or perception of music as most philosophical accounts of music do, Stan Godlovitch takes up the problem of how the tradition of active music playing and performing has been challenged by technology and what problems this poses for philosophical aesthetics. Where does does the value of musical performance lie? Is human performance of music a mere transfer medium? Is the performance of music more expressive than recorded music? Musical Performance poses questions such as these to develop a fascinating account of music today. musicians - but via some recording medium on which sound has been stored.

 

Contents

Acknowledgements
vii
Central themes
1
Performance and the aesthetics of music
2
The contents surveyed
3
Unfinished business
7
Central aspects of performance
9
A model of musical performance
11
Preliminary groundclearing
12
Is performance necessary?
90
performing as storytelling
91
Computers readymades and artistic agency
97
indirect causation
98
readymades
104
Experiments with musical agency
109
Preliminaries
110
Quasireadymade experimental performance
111

Constituents of performance
13
Taking stock
49
Skills and Guilds
52
Skills primary causes and primary crafts
53
The Guild tradition
61
Challenges to the model
79
Performances and musical works
81
Improvisation and scoreguided playing
83
Fidelity musicality and instantiation
84
The fixity of the work
85
Underdetermination
86
Musical instantiation as invited variety
88
Artists programs and performance
125
The simulation setting
126
How the simulators work
128
Performance and the artworld
130
Blindfold tests
133
How competitions are judged
135
Performers as persons
138
Epilogue
143
Notes
145
Bibliography
159
Index
166
Copyright

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Page 162 - Musick's Monument, or A REMEMBRANCER OF THE BEST PRACTICAL MUSICK, BOTH DIVINE AND CIVIL, that has ever been known to have been in the World.

About the author (1998)

Stan Godlovitch is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at Lincoln University, New Zealand.

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