258 Work

See also: subjectivity, work

Further reading: Burnham 2013; Dahlhaus 1983b; Garratt 2014; Gracyk 2011;
Kieran 2001; Kramer 2011

WORK

The concept of a musical work can arguably be dated back at least as far
as the fifteenth century, when composers such as Dunstable and Dufay
were increasingly identified on musical sources; there is also evidence of
the concept in writings by Renaissance humanists (see Strohm 1993).
However, from the late eighteenth century onwards, musical works
became the basic unit of artistic production and consumption, largely
as a result of increased links between music and state institutions and
wider access of the public to ‘art’ music. Subsequently, through German
Romanticism, a new concept of an autonomous (see autonomy), often
purely instrumental work (see absolute) arose, along with determining
criteria such as structure, unity (see organicism, analysis), wholeness,
coherence and genius. However, the work concept developed in dia-
logue with other tendencies, such as programme music, which promoted
the idea that music’s meaning lay beyond itself, in a set of musico-poetic
images, and the rise of the virtuoso performer-composer, which often
led to a sense that the ‘performance exceeded the work’ (Samson 2003,
4). Certain technical practices have also existed in a critical relationship
to the concept of the musical work, including borrowing, quotation (see
intertextuality), re-composition, arrangement and transcription (see
Hamilton 2014).
The concept of the musical work has come under some scrutiny, most
notably by philosopher Lydia Goehr, who has been concerned with the
philosophical problem of the ontological status of a work (Goehr 1992).
Goehr’s central claim is that the work concept has directly shaped mod-
ern musical attitudes since its emergence around 1800, in particular by
helping to construct a canon of works that are deemed more important
than others (see value), a system that is still in place today (see Strohm
2000; Goehr 2000).
Central to Western conceptions of the musical work is the existence of
a published score. The purpose of a score is primarily to preserve music,
but it also facilitates its reproduction, and this is clearly central to the
continued existence of a work, ensuring that it has an afterlife. However,
it has been contested that the musical score is a very imprecise medium
(Boorman 1999, 413), and, in many cases, such as nineteenth-century
 Work 259
keyboard improvisations, the score has merely provided a starting point
for performance. In some musical periods (see periodization), perform-
ers have been required to embellish a score, a fact that composers such
as Machaut, Josquin and Handel would have appreciated. Conversely,
more verbal instruction, as in the scores of Debussy, and precise notation,
in the case of Ferneyhough, have (sometimes deliberately) opened the
space between the score and its realization in performance even more,
either because directions in words leave too much to the imagination, or
because an overload of graphic information is impossible to reproduce
exactly (see Pace 2009). A score is therefore only one possible version
of a work. Even an urtext, which is intended to represent a composer’s
original intentions, excludes revisions and is based on an interpretation
of manuscripts.
Implicit in the idea of the musical work has been the assumption that
what is composed, performed and received by an audience is the same
fixed, unchanging object (Talbot 2000). However, this assumption can
easily be disproved, especially in relation to changing performance and
conducting traditions (see authenticity, reception). As works enter dif-
ferent social and historical contexts, so their meanings (see meaning)
will change, while some composers have a habit of revising their works
during their own lifetimes. Throughout history, different ways of listen-
ing have also been developed. Nineteenth-century music critics, such as
A.B. Marx, encouraged far more ‘informed’ listening habits in audiences
and emphasized the importance of an awareness of structural matters.
However, set against this mode of listening would have been a well-
established cultural consciousness of the multiple aspects of a work, the
contrasting styles, genres (see style, genre) and references to traditional
folk and popular musical forms.
Another question that arises from the work concept is one of author-
ship. To whom is the work attributable? Is there a single author, or, as
in opera, is the work a collaboration (see Petrobelli 1994)? Questions
of authorship intersect with the associated concept of text; this can be
applied in the sense of a written or published object, but it can also apply
to any form of cultural material from which social, historical and aes-
thetic meaning can be read. A musical score would be one representation
of text. Another would be the existence of manuscript or sketch material
that predates the final published work.
Much critical work has tended to stress the role of the author (com-
poser) over the interpreter (reader, critic). However, in the 1950s, a
number of American literary scholars, so-called ‘new critics’, separated
authors from texts in order to clear the way for their structuralist read-
ings (see structuralism; see also Wimsatt and Beardsley 1954; Pease
260 Work
1990). The separation of author and text was subsequently developed
in a different way by various post-structuralists (see deconstruction,
post-structuralism), notably French philosopher Jacques Derrida and
French literary theorist Roland Barthes. Through their insistence on the
multiplicity of meanings inherent in any text, the sense of a literary work
as fixed and immutable was seriously undermined. Barthes argued for
interpretation (‘the birth of the reader’) as the site of meaning in a
literary text rather than any form of authorized control (Barthes 1977,
142–8). The resulting reader response theory has been adapted to music,
for example in the work of Gary Tomlinson (Tomlinson 1984) and
Carolyn Abbate (Abbate 1991, 1993). These musicologists consider the
musical work in its wider, intertextual context, as the site of intersecting
cultural texts. In this move, the concept of text is applied in its broadest
sense, embracing cultural topics as expressed in a range of forms, includ-
ing painting, cultural studies, poetry and literature. Following these
developments, Stanley Boorman has concluded:

The notated text is no longer the definer of a musical composi-

tion as we understand it . . . it is no more than a definer of a spe-
cific moment in the evolving history of the composition: it presents
only those elements that a copyist, printer, or performer felt were
important.
(Boorman 1999, 420)

More recently, the musical avant-garde, active since the 1950s, has
further undermined the status of the score, either by overloading it with
notation too complex to perform naturally or by introducing chance
techniques and offering choice to performers, thereby distancing the
composer from the musical work, composing ‘in ignorance’ of the final
result (see Iddon 2013b; Beard 2015). These experiments deepen a nine-
teenth-century belief that the musical score is an imperfect realization of
a composer’s idea and the performance an even less perfect stage in the
act of interpretation.
The centrality of the work concept found in recent classical traditions
is not precisely replicated in popular music or jazz, which generally
eschew the idea of work. However, Richard Middleton has pointed out
that these forms are not entirely free of work-centred thinking (Middleton
2000b). Frequently, a recording will take on the status of text. Although
ethnomusicologists and popular music scholars have contributed much to
undermining the idea of a fixed, stable, unitary work, they have had to
study closely the impact of recording technology, a principal means by
which the idea of a musical work has been sustained and disseminated
 Work 261
(see Moore 2012). A remnant of the work concept is also contained in,
but simultaneously problematized by, the prevalence of the cover ver-
sion. Further evidence of the persistence of work-centred thinking in
popular music is provided by the ‘greatest hits’ compilations and ‘100
greatest’ lists of albums, songs and artists in magazines, online and in tel-
evision documentaries, as well as the continued use of the term ‘classic’
when referring to songs or artists of seminal status in pop or jazz history
(see canon; see also Jones 2008). Middleton has also noted the existence
of networks of printed and performed songs in popular music that vary
but are demonstrably related to one another. He describes these groups
as tune families, a feature that is illustrated by African and Afro-diasporic
practices such as dubbing and remixing in reggae (Middleton 2000b; see
also Hebdige 1987). Following the literary theory of Henry Louis Gates
Jr, Middleton argues that these practices define culture ‘as the continual
paradigmatic transformation, inter- or intra-textual, of given material,
the repetition and varying of stock elements, the aesthetic of a “changing
same”’ (Middleton 2000b, 73).

Further reading: Butt 2005; Davies 1988; Herissone 2013; Ingarden 1986; Kramer
2008; Sallis 2014b; Tagg 2000