Fertile territory. Where are the lines of flight?
As I was reading Dial M’s blogpost ‘Where is the self that performs?’, my initial reaction was: what about those musical practices which actively subvert the work-concept and notions of authorial or compositional intentions, which shift and question the notion of the self? Can’t we turn to free improvisation, graphic scores, open forms, and indeterminacy—what about the DJ? Minimalism?—to see different notions of performance and subjectivity? And this is all still ‘concert music’. Do not these diverse approaches open up the possibility of thinking differently about the composer and the performer?
Phil Ford’s blogpost, in which he asks where is the self that performs, and Douglas Boyce’s response, in which he pushes on the work-concept and urges us to move away from the notion of a fixed self, have zeroed in on questions at the heart of the ontology of music, of musical practice, and of music as cultural practice.
In what ways is asking the question of the self intertwined with the work concept? Lydia Goehr, in her Imaginary Museum of Musical Works, writes:
‘The musical work-concept found its regulative function within a specific crystallization of ideas about the nature, purpose, and relationship between composers, scores, and performances…It shapes a standard interpretation of work-concept and practice and it regulates and motivates classification of examples of musical works. (p. 253)
Isn’t the self itself a regulative concept, one that emerged out of the Enlightenment at around the same time as the emergence of the musical work-concept?
There are many possible lines to explore running out of this discussion, however I would like to concentrate on the question of the self and the act of querying the self in Phil Ford’s Dial M post because I think that there is a healthy restlessness here indicative of a desire to question the assumptions and rigidified practices of classical music culture, yet, the question of the self that performs leaves us in a cul-de-sac.
Phil Ford writes:
So in a situation like this, where is the self that performs? Where is the subjectivity to which we can ascribe intention, and whose intentions form the basis of our interpretations? It suddenly seems to me that the problem of consciousness is a great and unexamined problem of performance studies. And perhaps it is also a problem of musicology in general. Where is the self that composes?
In the following series of comments and questions, I would like to problematize further the notion of the self in musical performance as well as Ford’s suggestion that we see recordings as works, which, I hope, will open new directions for thinking about these issues and their implications.
- Is asking ‘where is the self that performs?’ the question to ask? Is it necessary even to posit a self? Even if we somehow ‘locate’ it, what kind of self is it?
- Isn’t the ‘self’ already the result of performance, already performative? I am thinking of performative notions of the ‘self’ found in Judith Butler’s work or the early Heidegger.
- Why is it necessary to ascribe intention to a work, and why is this ascription necessary to generate the possibility of analysis and interpretation? Must interpretation be based on a localizable subject with intentions? Must we postulate a critical consciousness?
- What is masked by focusing on the self as an autonomous individual who makes decisions (or not as Ford points to in ‘flow states’. Bergson’s notion of the body as the site of action could prove fruitful here.) and carries out actions in a performance context?
- Isn’t it the case that the work exceeds authorial intentions, spills beyond the ‘author(ity)’?
- What do perspectives on music without a notion of the self look like? What are the limitations of positing the self at the center of the work-concept and what are the paths opened by emphasizing a more hermeneutical understanding of music and culture and a more inter-subjective, communicative-action-grounded aesthetics?
- What about the audience? Does the audience also perform? Focusing on the self that performs excludes the reception of the ‘work’.
- How do we tell the history of music through the frame of selfhood? What is excluded from this history? In what ways has this history of the self, if you will, grounded and generated systems of cultural domination? How does this shape our stance in relation to the future?
- Isn’t considering a recorded performance as a work and thus as an object of analysis simply repeating the structure of the work-concept? ‘Notating’ or ‘measuring’ the recording as a translation back to the ‘score’? Doesn’t this further motivate the ‘classification of examples of musical works’—atomizing works to fit classificatory schema—built into the work-concept?
- Isn’t the attempt to expand the notion of the recording-as-work simply a doubling over the work-concept rather than an opening onto new territory? Does this not ‘objectify’ the music? A move away from music as a practice, and its values of engagement, involvement, inter-subjective communication and action… There is a tendency to isolate the composer and the performer by asking this question ‘where is the self?’ Such a question suggests that the self is something to which we can point. Lurking behind this question is the presupposition of the self as a fixed entity. Where is the self located? Who is the author? Who has the rights to the ‘work’? Is this not a repetition of the work-concept structure?
But what is at stake here? Why is it vital that we question and attempt to move beyond the work-concept? The work-concept is not innocent. With the work-concept, there are hierarchical systems of control at play. Lydia Goehr explains that:
It also points to a blatant manifestation of conceptual imperialism pervasive in more recent times. Thus, many persons, convinced nowadays by the greatness of classical music, have found reason to describe all the types of music in the world, of whatever sort, by means of a work-based interpretation. Such persons have believed that the closer any music embodies the conditions determined by the romantic work-aesthetic, the more civilized it is…(pp. 248-9)
How should we respond to the task of challenging the work-concept’s regulative force? How can we conceptualize the emergence of new musical practices and community to replace the dismantled work-concept?