Home to Roost: Some Problems for the Nested-Types Theory of Musical Works, Versions, and Authentic Performance

A critical note on Nemesio G. C. Puy, ‘Interpretive Authenticity: Performances, Versions, and Ontology’, Estetika 59 (2022): 135–52. Home to Roost: Some Problems for the Nested-Types Theory of Musical Works, Versions, and Authentic Performance Andrew Kania Trinity University, US CORRESPONDING AUTHOR:


I. HATCHING PROBLEMS FOR SCORE COMPLIANCE
Puy attempts to summarize Davies's and my objection to Dodd's view in his threepremise 'objection from ontology ' (p. 142). I cannot speak for Davies, but I have reservations about the argument as it stands. 5 As Puy notes (p. 142, note 22), my reservations are connected with his view (which he seems to think Davies and I should endorse) that an authentic performance of a work must be a properly formed instance of the work: '[d]isobeying W's score results in improperly tokening W, which disqualifies those performances as authentic performances of W' (p. 141). It seems 1 Henceforth I take the 'Western classical' -and often 'music' -qualifiers as read. Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.360 to me that requiring an authentic performance of a work to be a properly formed instance of it misses the point of introducing the concepts of (im)properly formed instances, and thus norm types, in the first place. If a work can have improperly formed instances, then these are authentic -though not ideal -instances of the work.

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As I read Davies, he would finesse this point by claiming that authenticity is a matter of degree, and thus that, to the extent that one departs from the score (in error or on purpose), one's performance is less authentic, until the threshold of unrecognizability is reached, at which point the performance ceases to be of its target work. 6 There are various ways in which Puy's argument from ontology could be altered to reflect Davies's view, but I leave that exercise to the reader.
My own view, as Puy notes, is that only intentional departures from the score preclude a performance's being authentic; mistakes are another matter. 7 Puy objects that this view is untenable: suppose Herbert von Karajan, on a visit to New Zealand, directs the Auckland Philharmonia to perform Beethoven's Fifth Symphony as he has long led the Berlin Philharmonic in performing it -with horns playing the fanfare that is scored for bassoons in the recapitulation of the first movement. Forgetting Karajan's instructions in the heat of the moment, however, the horns remain silent and the bassoons play the fanfare, as they have always done. Puy claims that this performance must count as inauthentic on my view, since Karajan intended to depart from the score. Yet the performance does not actually depart from the score, so it must be authentic. Hence my view must be modified.
There are a number of responses available. I could accept Puy's proposed amendment that only successful intentional departures from the score count against authenticity.
Alternatively, I could resist Puy's claim that Karajan's Auckland performance is an authentic performance of Beethoven's Fifth. The basic, and widely accepted, idea would be that a performance's sonic properties are never sufficient for that performance's being of a particular work; also required is some sort of intentional connection between the sounds and the work. If a malicious demon sabotages the orchestra's instruments so that, when they try to play Beethoven's Fifth, the sounds of Mahler's First emerge, it is not obvious that (on philosophical reflection) we should consider the result a performance of Mahler's First. Less extravagantly, if we discovered a long-lost manuscript of Carl Maria von Weber's that was (coincidentally) qualitatively identical to the score of Beethoven's Fifth, we would not thereby discover that all performances of Beethoven's Fifth were also performances of Weber's work. 8 The best response to Puy's supposed counterexample, however, is to question its coherence. Puy claims that the Auckland performance counts as inauthentic on my view because 'Karajan's intention was not to comply with Beethoven's score ' (p. 142, note 22). But this is misleading in two ways. The first can be illustrated by a simpler case: a pianist, inspired by Dodd's work, intends to perform the 'Rondo' in a playful, Staier style. Alas! On stage, she chokes and ends up performing the work in her usual, perfectly score-compliant way. In what we might call the distal sense, this performer intends (or intended?) to depart from the score -that is (was?) her plan. But this is 6 Stephen Davies, Musical Works and Performances: A Philosophical Exploration (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 160-61. 7 In fact, as I suggest elsewhere ('Heart of Classical Work-Performance', 133), my view could be considered a different interpretation of various things Davies says from that given in the previous paragraph.  13 It is not entirely clear to me what Puy takes the 'normative profile' of score compliance to be. According to Dodd, score compliance is valued 'for its own sake, yet only under the condition of its instrumentality' (Being True, 144). That is, it has final value, but only because of its tendency 'to facilitate [works'] insightful interpretation' (ibid, 163). Puy says that interpretive authenticity has the 'same normative profile' 'in the practice of composing musical versions' as it does 'in the practice of performing musical works', including being 'a final value' (p. 144). But since Puy thinks that scores directly notate versions, rather than works themselves, it would seem that version compliance would take the place (in Puy's theory of the normative profile of the practice) that Dodd grants to score compliance. I would think that (version) score compliance would, in turn, be less fundamental than version compliance, according to Puy. Or do they share the second tier?
It is also worth remembering that the determination of the work by the score (on views such as Davies's and mine) is a complex matter. Sometimes, Puy seems to suggest that score compliance is a matter of translating all and only those properties recorded in a score into sound (pp. 136, 140-41). But, as Davies has discussed at length, the situation is much more complicated. 14 A score is a contextual artefact, whose understanding requires familiarity with many conventions concerning, for instance, transposing instruments, the presence of a conductor, stylistic matters concerning articulation, rhythm, ornamentation, and so on. 15 Keeping these issues clearly in mind neutralizes one supposed problem Puy raises for my (and presumably Davies's) view. He points out (i) that we often have no, or only a partial, autograph score (that is, one handwritten by the composer) for many pre-twentieth-century works, (ii) that autograph scores often do not capture the composer's 'final instructions', and (iii) that editors, who may make changes to what the composer intended, are inevitably involved in the production of published scores. This is particularly relevant for the central example of the 'Rondo', according to Puy, because four of the nine pages constituting Mozart's autograph score of the sonata have been lost, and only one of the extant pages contains any part (the ending) of the 'Rondo'. 16 Thus 'there is no […] score' for the work (p. 143).
This conclusion strikes me as absurd. Mozart oversaw the publication of the first edition of this sonata, and the discovery, in 2014, of four of the five (known) extant pages of the autograph score confirmed that the published score is almost identical to that autograph in all relevant respects. The discovery did allow, as is often the case, for a couple of minor clarifications, but even here editors and musicians were aware that small errors must have been introduced into the first edition, and were unsure only of how to properly correct them. Moreover, the problems Puy sees with both the role of editors in the publication of scores and the fact that composers revisit their scores in a range of ways betray a simplistic intentionalism about the nature of artworks. As with a published novel, the content of a published musical work is basically determined by what ends up in print in an 'authorized' edition. Publication, though, is a messy process, involving the participation and influence of many people, even in the case of what we consider single-authored works. To insist that the work is determined by the artist's 'final intentions', independent of the published text, score, and so on, suggests an outmoded Romantic-genius theory of artistic creation. I do not mean to deny that we are in a less-than-ideal epistemic position with respect to the details of many artworks, including musical works with authorized published scores. But these issues seem to me quite similar in lack of importance to the main questions in this debate as issues of practical considerations, such as whether one has the relevant instrument on hand. We can safely bracket them to discuss the question of authentic work-performance. 17 14 Davies,Musical Works and Performances, For the sake of argument, however, suppose that this problem can be solved. Let us proceed on the assumption that the 'Rondo' is a single-movement work. It still seems that Puy's characterization of this (nesting) work is too detailed. Puy once characterized the work's individuating properties in musical notation (see Figure 1). 23 In the final version of the paper, Puy characterizes the 'Rondo' only verbally, saying that:   Estetika DOI: 10.33134/eeja.360 or 4/4 time, would we have a different version, or merely a different notation of that version? Whatever our answer to that question, a version in 3/4 or 6/8 time would surely not be the same 'version' as Mozart's. But it is surely acceptable to talk (as I just did) of such a piece of music as a version of the same work. have it) is plausibly 'an ethnic showpiece', but I can imagine someone arguing that this is an unfortunate artistic shortcoming, and perhaps politically offensive aspect, of this score and producing a 'less Turkish' performance or score -claiming, of course, that it is a version of Mozart's work.

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The resolution of these problems clearly requires some account of what determines the content of the nesting work, according to Puy's theory. With this account in hand, we would be able to draw a principled distinction (at least in theory) between, as Puy puts it, versions of a single target work and distinct works inspired by the target work.
But I see no such account of work-determination in Puy's discussion of the theory here or elsewhere. I presume that, ultimately, such an account would be part of something like a rational reconstruction of the relevant musical practice. There is disagreement about how exactly such reconstruction should proceed, 27 but more problematic here is the fact that musical practice is much less regimented when it comes to what counts as a version, transcription, arrangement, inspired work, and so on than it is 26 One might reasonably object that the thinness of nesting works precludes their clear and accurate representation in standard musical notation. (Perhaps this is why Puy refrained from supplying this representation in the published version of his paper.) After all, standard musical notation developed as a way to characterize the content of workversions (in Puy's terminology), not works themselves. To my mind, however, this raises issues about the concept of a musical work to which I turn in the next section. with respect to what counts as a performance of the musical entity represented in a score. This suggests that any account, like Puy's, that attempts to precisify the notion of a version will be justified primarily in terms of more general theoretical benefits rather than in terms of verisimilitude to musical practice. 28 Yet Puy seems to think that the primary justification for his view is to be found in closer attention to musical practice -in particular, the practice of creating, performing, and referring to versions.
I concur with David Davies in finding these justifications inadequate. 29

III. EGGS AND BASKETS: NESTING TYPES, NESTED TYPES, AND WORKS
Let me now put aside this first problem of what determines the content of a work on Puy's view and move on to the second. Suppose we accept Puy's ontology for the sake of argument. It seems to me that now Dodd, Stephen Davies, and I will want to reframe our disagreement in terms of versions. That is, Davies and I will maintain that a fully authentic performance of a version must comply with the score of that version, while Dodd will insist that a performance may sacrifice such score compliance for the sake of eliciting a subtle or profound understanding of the version in listeners.
But Puy presumably thinks that this debate rests on a mistake -a mistake that is thrown into relief once we have adopted his ontology and its terminology. This can sound like a merely verbal dispute because Davies and I don't seem obliged to reject the existence of anything in Puy's picture; we would simply label things differently (see Figure 3). 30 To return to an earlier issue: the inclusion of musical notation should not be misconstrued as implying that musical works or versions are scores on any of these views. The notation is just a convenient way of representing distinct musical entities, whatever their fundamental ontology. If there's more than a verbal dispute here, it seems to me that it resides in the role of the work concept. Like many others, I take 'work' to be a quasi-technical term referring to the kind of thing that is a primary target of appreciation in an artistic practice. And it seems obvious to me that when people talk about Mozart's 'Rondo alla Turca', they are talking about a musical object with a specificity very close to that of Mozart's score. And that is, in part, because of how scores function within the practice. Mozart could, of course, have written a score that continues in the style of    work, as opposed to being of a version of a work. Note, however, that the notation at the lowest level here is not of individual performances; it is intended to indicate that both 'score-compliant' performances (for example, 1 and 2) and 'interpretively authentic' but non-score-compliant performances (for example, 3 and 4) are of a single work, on Dodd's view.)

IV. CONCLUDING REMARKS
Nothing I have said here constitutes a knockdown argument against Puy's ontology.
Choosing between ontologies requires careful consideration of the full range of costs and benefits of each theory. This is not the place to do that, but I hope to have shown that the nested-types view cannot be used to resolve the debate between Dodd, on the one hand, and Stephen Davies and me, on the other, without further work to defend the plausibility of the view.