J. S. BACH Jonathan Berkahn - Victoria University - Victoria ...

thought and practice until very recently. 13 The situation is more complicated for music
than it is for poetry. Not only are questions of authorial intention relevant to
hermeneutic interpretation of what a given work ‘means’ (an inquiry roughly
equivalent to that of Wimsatt and Beardsley), but they are equally relevant to issues of
performance, editions, realisations, and arrangement. In no case is this knowledge of
intention both more desirable and more definitively irrecoverable than in the case of
unfinished works. This being so, there is always a sense in which any given
completion is going to be ‘unsatisfactory’, the best of a bad job—as expressed, for
example, by Toscanini’s bad temper toward Alfano’s completion of Turandot (‘I saw
Puccini coming in and slapping my face!’) and Richard Swift’s argument that the
sketches of Mahler’s 10 th symphony are too incomplete to permit completion of the
piece by anyone other than the composer himself—by anyone at all, that is. 14 The
advocacy of this last position testifies to the extent that, in our culture today, a musical
work can exist purely as text without even the possibility of performance. 15
13 ‘The intentional fallacy’, Sewanee Review (1946), 466-88; reprinted in On literary intention, de. D.
Newton-de-Molina (Edinburgh, 1976), pp.1-13. This assumption has been problematised in relation
to music by R. Taruskin, Text and act: essays on music and performance (Oxford: Oxford
University Press; 1995) and many other articles: I. Anhalt, ‘Text, context, music’, Canadian
University Music Review/Revue de musique des universités canadiennes 9/2 (1989), 1-21; V.
Rantala, ‘The work of art: Identity and interpretation’, Semiotica 87/3-4 (1991), 271-292; C.
Dahlhaus, ‘Textgeschichte und Rezeptionsgeschichte’, in Rezeptionsästhetik und
Rezeptionsgeschichte in der Musikwissenschaft ed. F. Krummacher and H. Danuser (Laaber: Laaber-
Verlag, 1991), pp. 105-114.
14 ‘Mahler’s Ninth and Cooke’s Tenth’, 19th-century Music 2/2 (November 1978) 165-72.
15 Nicholas Cook is hostile to this way of thinking about music: ‘Between process and product: Music
and/as performance’, Music Theory Online 7/2 (April 2001),
http://www.societymusictheory.org/mto/issues/mto.01.7.2/mto.01.7.2.cook.html (accessed 30
September 2006), and Nelson Goodman attempted to do without reference to the work as an abstract
concept, defining it simply as the set of its accurate performances (Languages of art; an approach to
a theory of symbols (London: Oxford University Press, 1969), pp.112-22, 177-92; while Jerrold
Levinson was less reluctant to accept the existence of the musical work as a quasi-Platonic entity, he
saw the means of performance as an essential part of the work (‘What a musical work is?’ and ‘What
a musical work is, again’, Music, art, and metaphysics: Essays in philosophical aesthetics (Ithaca,
N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1990). In The imaginary museum of musical works: an essay in the
philosophy of music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), Lydia Goehr sought to supplant the
essentialist definitions of Goodman and Levinson with the emergent, socially negotiated idea of the
‘work concept’, which she identified as having arisen around 1800. Swift’s argument in relation to
the completion of Mahler’s 10 th can be seen as an extreme consequence of this Werktreue ethic, in
which the performance most in accord with the composer’s intentions is—none at all. See also J.
Anderson, ‘Musical identity’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 40/3 (Spring 1982), 285-91;
K. Stierle, ‘Der Text als Werk und als Vollzug’, Der Hörer als Interpret, ed. H. de La Motte-Haber
and R. Kopiez (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang; 1995), 11-28; and B. Edlund, ‘On scores and works
of music: interpretation and identity’, British Journal of Aesthetics 36/4 (October 1996), 367-380.
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