Musical, linguistic, and other practices: minor variations on several major themes

Abstract

One major theme of this paper is a pragmatist approach to human practices, another is the way specific practices provide invaluable resources for framing such an approach, and yet another is the way musical practices are especially illuminating in this regard. The emphasis of such an approach to practices falls decisively on performance, rather than an antecedently established score, script, or interpretation. In other words, human practices are from the pragmatist perspective variable contexts in which improvisational or extemporaneous performances are the rule rather than the exception. They are moreover incalculable resources upon which improvisational actors can draw, including the resource of exemplary or paradigmatic performances. In one of the dominant traditions of Western music, however, the Werktreuer would seem to offer a stumbling block to such a pragmatist approach to musical practices. Part of the argument here is to follow the lead of such theorists as Richard Taruskin, Lydia Goehr, and Christopher Small. This means interpreting, say, the musical score as a codified distillation of an ideal performance, but in turn this means conceiving the score as a resource for a performance (not the performance as simply an imperfect approximation of a timeless form). The temporal and historical dimensions of what Small calls musicking need to be given their due. This drives us to appreciate how every aspect of any human practice is an irreducibly temporal and historical feature of what is, after all, always evolved and evolving affair. This includes even seemingly timeless or atemporal matters such as musical scores.