Performability and the Appreciation of the Musical Work: Variations on a Theme by Peter Kivy

Abstract

Kivy considers a hypothetical situation in which our only exemplifications of at least some musical works are digitally constructed sound sequences of a certain type. Kivy was moved to consider this kind of hypothetical scenario by an actual proposal to produce a digitally constructed version of Wagner’s Ring cycle. He presents a simpler thought experiment, where the work digitally exemplified is Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. The morals that he wishes to draw from this thought experiment are twofold: first, in the doomsday world where only digital works remain, all is not lost. We can recover the works themselves and access them via the “translation” of them into musical notation. But second, in our world, let us remember that if a digital performance does transpire, it is not a “performance.” I agree with Kivy that were the kinds of ‘digital versions’ of works hypothesised actually realised, they would not be performances of those works, and could not be appreciated as such performances. However, I think that Kivy’s argument in support of the ‘less important’ first moral is philosophically much more interesting. It is therefore upon the theme sounded in the second half of Kivy’s paper that I shall develop some variations that will lead us to important but relatively unremarked issues concerning what is involved in the appreciation of musical works in the Classical tradition, and, in particular, what is involved in appreciating such works through their performances.