TREITLER History Ontology Musical Work 1993 Cop

History and the Ontology of the Musical Work
Author(s): Leo Treitler

Source: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 51, No. 3, Philosophy and the
Histories of the Arts (Summer, 1993), pp. 483-497
Published by: Blackwell Publishing on behalf of The American Society for Aesthetics
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/431520
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LEO TREITLER
"Which is of primary musical importance, musical works, i.e., symphonies, songs, sonatas, etc., or
performances of musical works? Are works, or performances, the basic objects of musical attention,
musical appreciation, and musical judgment? ... Does it ever matter what work we say something is a
performance of? ... Should a performance of a four-hand piano transcription of a Brahms symphony
count as a performance of that symphony?" 1 "What is the work of art that Messiaen composed and
which he entitled Et expecto resurectionem mortuorum?"2 "What exactly did Beethoven compose? ...
what sort of thing is it, this quintet [ in E-flat for piano and winds opus 16] which was the outcome of
Beethoven's creative activity? What does it con- sist in or of?"3 "How Does a Musical Work Exist?"4
Why do philosophers ask such questions? I have an idea about why we musical scholars
would do well to ask such questions-and to try to formulate answers with the care that philosophers
give to the task. Because the way we con- duct our studies is actually informed by answers that we
have adopted, but tacitly and not neces- sarily as a matter of conscious choice. I mean studies in the
analysis and criticism, the editing, and the performance of music ( especially since all the to-do about
"historical performance"), and the pursuit of particular historical problems (e.g., the history of
musical notation).
The best understanding that I have obtained about the reason for the philosopher's interest in these
questions came from my reading of a very brief exposition by Karl Popper. 5 He writes "A musical
composition has a very strange sort of existence," and proceeds at once to illustrate with an example,
"say, a symphony."6 The symphony he happens to choose is Mozart's Jupiter, which "is neither the
score [Mozart] wrote ... nor is it the sum total of the imagined acoustic experiences Mozart had while
writing the symphony. Nor is it any of the performances. Nor is it all performances together, nor
[circumnavigat- ing Nelson Goodman] the class of all performances ... [It is] a real ideal object
which exists, but exists nowhere, and whose existence is somehow the potentiality of its being
reinterpreted by human minds. So it is first the work of a human mind or of human minds, the product
of human minds; and secondly it is endowed with the potentiality of its being recaptured, perhaps
only partly, by human minds again." Popper has come close to Roman Ingarden's characteriza-
tion of the musical work as an intentional object, with a mode of existence like that of a unicorn. The
musical work interests him as the clearest exemplification of objects that constitute what he calls
"World 3, a world which exists nowhere but which does have an existence and which does interact,
especially, with human minds-on the basis . . . of human activity." The World 3 population also
includes works of literature, the- ories, and problems. In describing the scope of human engagement,
says Popper, it is necessary to postulate a World of such objects (separate from World 1, the world of
cave paintings, decorated instruments, decorated tools, boats, etc.).
One would hardly find fault with Popper's assertion that we do need to identify a domain of objects
that we know and with which we engage in that paradoxical mode of existence that is best exemplified
by works of music. Music therefore offers itself as a guide-by way of the investigation of its
ontology-into a distinct mode of cognition, communication, and interaction that constitutes an
essential element among the possibilities of human engagement. That is at least
one way of understanding the seemingly unlim- ited fascination that such questions hold for work- ers in
the field of aesthetics and beyond.
The discussion seems to have reference to a
non-historical world. It seeks out intrinsic and unchanging roles and relationships that are not
conditional upon individual choice and changing historical circumstance. And it abounds with
fantastic examples: a sixth symphony by Lud- wig van Marthoven (a Martian composer)," or two
3 485
sound-alike versions of Darius Milhaud 's Le boeuf sur le toit, The Bull on the Roof and The Cow on
the Roof, Debussy's Quartet arranged for kazoos and guitars, 8 and other repertory that you might
expect to hear in a concert staged by Dr. Seuss. Such inventions belong to a research methodology
like that of controlled laboratory investigations, which also take place in a non- historical world.
This seems fitting enough in a discourse in which a piece of music is referred to as "an auditory
pattern, "9 a performance as a "physical realization," 10 and a score as a "con- ventional and
arbitrarily coded statement" of a musical composition. 1 1
What is less obvious is that this inquiry has, paradoxically, been directed from a very particular
historical stance. And what it conveys is not the existential condition of musical compositions under
any circumstance by virtue of their being musical compositions, but rather beliefs about the condition
of a limited number of high- art compositions of the European tradition, composed approximately from
the time of Bach to the end of the nineteenth century-music of the "common practice" period, but
by no means all such music.
I hinted at this in my comment on Popper's choice of an example "-say, Mozart's Jupiter
Symphony." Why did he not write "-say, Ros- sini's Tancredi"(of which three different versions were
produced in 1813), or "Stockhausen's Klavierstiick XI" (a composition comprising eleven segments
that are played in a sequence that is determined only by the performer at the moment of his
performance, and with dynamics and tempi for the segments that rotate indepen- dently of them), or
"the raga Kirwani as per- formed by Ali Akbar Khan?" Because they might be less familiar to his
readers, to be sure; but also because they are not works that have been cast once and for all by a
composer in a final form that is represented in a score and presented essentially unchanged in
performances. (Everything depends, of course, on what lies beneath that word, "essentially.") Or to
put it differently, because they leave so much to performers' choices or to the circumstances of
performance, that it would be difficult for the reader to know just what is being pointed to unless
it were a specific performance. This is a presumption, to be sure, but I think not an unfair one. The
conditions that make Mozart's Jupiter Symphonyso unambiguous as an example belong to a work
concept that has informed music- aesthetic, -theoretical, and -historical studies since about 1800. 12
When authors in this discourse reach out for examples-I don't mean their invention of
counterexamples-these are the conditions that guide their hands. Hence their conclusions regarding
the mode of existence of musical works can be somewhat redun- dant, and the inquiry itself can be
somewhat circular. 13
Kendall Walton, perhaps wishing to interrupt
the circle, moves to eliminate one of the factors that creates it. He considers first that "a work is
the pattern specified by its score," but then notes that "some works do not have scores, and in oral
musical traditions there are not even conventions for producing scores." So he side-steps the score and
proposes to define "a work as the pattern determined by the sound properties a performance must
have to be a correct or flawless performance of it." But this only tightens the circle; for it nevertheless
posits as a condition for the identification of a work some criterion (unspec- ified) for "flawless
performance." In effect the difference between an oral tradition and a literate one with respect to the
ontology of the musical works they produce would then turn only on the existence or non-existence of
the physical artifact of a score. The condition of musical works in the two situations would be the
same. While that might be so in particular cases, it surely cannot be assumed in setting up the in-
quiry. In some oral traditions, at least, works come into being only in performance and at the instant
of performance, and the idea of a "flawless performance" as counterpart to a flawless execution of a
score would be a chimera.14 But we shall soon see that it is a chimera even in some literate traditions.
Walton's adjustment tightens the circle, too, in its implication that exceptions to the rules
4 485
azurka
Rafael Joseffy F. Chopin. Up. 7, No.5
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EXAMPLE 1. Chopin, Mazurka opus 7 #5 !

8 485
Dal Segno senxa Finf'

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9 485
operating under the 19th-century work concept must be sought outside the tradition of Western art
music during the period of common practice. The remainder of this paper will be given over to a
demonstration that this is not so, with specific reference to works by Frederic Chopin and their scores
and performances.
My first example is Chopin's Mazurka opus 7 #5, which I would like to consider first from the
point of view of the two general kinds of roles that are commonly attributed to scores: an in-
structing role and a designating or identifying role (example 1). The score concludes with an
instruction that cannot be carried out: Dal segno senza Fine- " From the sign without end." The
"sign" is the one placed after 4 introductory measures (~) and at the double bar in m. 20. The
instruction is "[when you get through the last notated measure] go back to the [first] sign [and
play through to the second, and keep on doing that]." The formula is a deviant version of the more
common Dal segno alfine (from the sign to the end), and normally the word Fine is written
wherever the piece is to end (e.g., the Mazurka opus 17 #3). Even if a performer wants to
follow the instruction in opus 7 no. 5 he or she will sooner or later be forced by circumstances
beyond his or her control to give up. As a result the score has multiple realizations, depending on
where the performer chooses to stop. Modern technology makes a "correct" performance
possible: put it on a tape loop. But who will listen to the whole piece?
What, for that matter, is the whole piece? That question takes us into the domain of the identifying
function of the score. If we are guided in our idea of what constitutes a work by principles about
wholeness and unity, about form and schema, about characteristic structure, then we will be stumped
aboutjust what it is that this score identifies. We might say that it is a piece with an open form, with a
material but not a formal unity, with a characteristic structure that is circular. I don't know what to do
about wholeness-an idea that has been associated with the work concept for a long time (but not
forever) both as a condition of the art object and as a psychological condition for the apprehension of
beauty.
I am an historian, not a theorist of any kind. I regard the idea that music is exemplified in
works considered as structures neither as the description of a universal condition of music nor
as self evident, but as an idea with a history. We first hear of it in the sixteenth century with the
concept of the "complete and absolute (i.e., autonomous) work." 15 But that is not to say that
every musical item thereafter is governed by it. The interpretation of any particular item of music
as governed by the principles embodied in the modern idea of "structure" I regard as an
hypothesis, not as a universal whose particular exemplification is the goal of each analysis. And the
priority given to that conception in musi- cology, music theory, and musical aesthetics-
regardless of the aesthetic premises under which the musical object was created and first heard-I
regard as the projection of a value that has itself a narrow historicality.
I think that Chopin's score identifies a piece without an ending, and that is the most striking thing
about this piece; it is in all other regards rather uninteresting. But in just this one regard it reminds
me of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, which I think of as a piece without a beginning. (I once put it
that the opening is as though it had always been going on, but someone has just turned up the vo1
ume.) 16 This comparison might lead me into the pursuit of the very interesting history of pieces
composed precisely against the idea of closure and wholeness since the early nineteenth century. It
would be a thread in the history of music that is obscured when we take that idea for granted.
I would also associate this feature of the Mazurka with Chopin's general proclivity for making pieces
circular in different ways-di- recting them back into their beginnings when it seems time to end
(what Schumann parodied in his "Chopin" piece in Carnaval), setting up chromatic harmonic
pathways through which the piece slips down, down, down until it arrives ineluctably at its point of
departure. There are different ways to interpret this-a Romantic fascination with the unfinished, or
with music as expression of the infinite, Chopin's own deep pessimism.
Yet another avenue of interpretation is entered by noticing that Chopin has here composed a sort of
impression or portrayal of a Polish folk dance of the sort that he heard when he spent every summer
in the countryside until he left for Paris. It is music that also stops but does not conclude.
10
Treider The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
History and the Ontology of the Musical Work 487
EXAMPLES 2B-2D. Chopin, Waltz opus 64, #2, variant transcriptions: (b) Cortot,
(c) Paderewski, (d) Rachmaninoff.
11
Treider The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
History and the Ontology of the Musical Work 487
UC
JJ LL
EXAMPLE 3. Chopin, Waltz opus posthumous 70 #1, autograph version.

Treitler History and the Ontology of the Musical Work 489
490 The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
The longer I go on thinking about it in this way, the less this piece seems a curio or the more its
curious aspect opens onto matters of great historical significance. And the longer I pursue this line
of thought the more I think that the score can be perceived to identify not so much a characteristic
structure as a certain character. And I also think that to the roles of identifying and instructing that
are commonly ascribed to the score vis-a-vis the work and the performance, respectively, we must
add the possibility of an exemplifying role. 11
The performer of the Mazurka cannot comply with the last instruction in the score. Early recorded
performances of Chopin's music give evidence of a practice of willful non-conformity with the
provisions of the score by pre-eminent pianists of the time.
Chopin marked the second section of his popular Waltz in c# minor, Opus 64 #2, piu mos so, more
moved or agitated, and he put a hairpin closing to the right under each of the repeated figures.
Example 2 shows (a) a published edition of this section, and variants transcribed from
recorded performances by Alfred Cortot 1934 (b), Ignace Paderewski, 1917 (c), and Ser-
gei Rachmaninoff, 1927 (d). Cortot leaves off the third beat of the bass in each
measure and when he comes to the climac- tic four measures of the phrase he
compresses- he doesn't give them their full count of 12 beats, only about 9. The
important thing is the effect of rushing.
Transcriptions of all the autograph sources for this passage-two sketches, the copy Chopin gave
to his Paris publisher for the publication, and three presentation copies-and three con-
temporary published editions, have been published by Jeffrey Kallberg.19 For the left hand
there is not complete agreement between any two of these nine sources. Interestingly enough,
Cortot 's omission of the third beat of each measure is like the revised sketch. Kallberg writes at the
beginning of his study, "Sketches, autographs, manuscript copies, 'simultaneous' first
editions, ... annotated editions when we exam- ine any of these sources we are almost certain to
encounter alternate readings. Variants are per- vasive in Chopin's music; indeed it is tempting to
assert that they are essential to its aesthetic mode of existence," i.e., to its ontological status.
Paderewski, when he runs up the scale at the end, does so through a chromatic scale, not the
diatonic scale that Chopin wrote. Both his and Cortot's variants enhance the effect that issuggested
by the instruction "piu mosso."
Rachmaninoff does something that seems at first as though it would have the opposite effect: he
calls attention to the descending line of the lowest tone in each of the figures at the end of
each measure, making the figure as a whole just ornamental, and in the end achieving the same
sort of effect. But he does this by violating the score, which says "play the last note of each
measure softest."
What are we to think about these performances? They confront us with two successive choice
points. First, do we regard them simply as incorrect and so irrelevant to the discussion, or,
somehow respecting their authority, as chal- lenges to our understanding of what works are and
how they are presented by performances? (In any case, I think we should avoid the trap of trying
to establish their authority by way of their linkage through the generation of Leschetitzky and Anton
Rubenstein to contemporaries of Chopin, for that would imply that this is the only way of
establishing their authority.) If we accept their authority the choice would be between taking a
position like Ingarden's (and Hanslick's) about the separation of the work from the performance,
and the view that the work is realized only in performance. On the latter view our conception of
what the work is must include all three performances, as well as one that is in exact compliance
with the score. As to the former, one could wonder whether Ingarden would have included among
the variables of performance that he identified-"tonal colorings, tempi, dynamic detail, the
perspicuity of specific sub- jects"20-such variation in note-contents as is revealed in those
performances. I doubt it. But if not Ingarden, then perhaps some structuralist theorists, who would
identify the work with its underlying structure, in relation to which these variants are superficial
details no more subver- sive of the identity of the work than would be differences of intonation by
performers of a work for string instruments.
It is not my purpose to argue for one side or the other on any of these questions, but only to argue
for the relevance of the evidence of actual practice and belief for the basic question that is my subject.
Treider History and the Ontology of the Musical Work 491
If the work is to be identified with its structure, what is one to say when the structure is itself
subject to variation? Chopin's Waltzes, like his Mazurkas, are pieces put together of a number of
sections or we might call them blocks. And one of the things that seems to be poten- tially fluid about
them-from the process of composition right into the performance tradition-is the way these blocks
are put together: what sequence, how many repetitions, how to end, etc. Sketches show Chopin
playing with just such arrangements. 21 The next example shows performers doing the same.
The Waltz in G-flat Major opus posthumous
70 # 1 is one of a number of Chopin's works that were published after his death by his long-time friend
and associate Julian Fontana. The performance tradition of the Waltz had always been based on this
publication, as had its editorial transmission. Only the critical edition under-
taken by Zimmerman in 1978 and published by Henle is based on the autograph score which became
available after World War II. Example 3 shows the four sections of which the piece is made, in the
edition based on Fontana's copy, with some rhythmic variants in the autograph version. The two
versions differ by a matter of one repetition, as follows:
Autograph: AA BB CC DC AA
has first and foremost to be unambiguous. I say it nevertheless on the evidence of such performances,
and in the belief that apart from a performance tradition no notation has a final mean- ing. From this
point of view the reference of scores, in one direction, is to works, all right, but in another it is to
performance traditions.
I was first brought to such a general view
about works, scores, and performances from my studies in medieval music traditions. Example 4
is my transcription of several scores of a work from such a tradition, a trope from the eleventh
century. Tropes are a kind of song sung in the
mass of the Latin church from the tenth to the twelfth centuries, in the following kind of relationship
with Gregorian chant: the chant is a musical setting of a scriptural text, e.g., "We have seen his star
in the East, and are come with gifts to adore the Lord." The trope would be a newly composed text
introducing the scriptural
one, and sung in a style consistent with the style
of the chant, e.g., "With the star pointing the way the kings come from the East, seeking the newborn
King of kings, and saying, 'We have
seen his star ... , ' " etc. The sort of thing I want to show about this is what brought me to these problems
in the first place.
The trope verse shown in the example was sung as an introduction to the traditional chant. Others
were sung between sections of the chant.
Fontana AA BB CC
DC DC AA
So the performance of the entire chant could entail several trope verses. But from one time to
In his recording of 1921 Rachmaninoff hap-
pens to play the autograph version. Suspicion that he may have known that version somehow will be
allayed by comparing the rhythmic variants in section A. In every case he plays the version of the
published Fontana edition. It is imaginable that there was nevertheless an unwritten tradition for
Chopin's repetition scheme, going back to his own performances. But then it would be surprising that
Fontana didn't know it.
Cortot, in his 1934 recording, plays the Fon- tana version through, but then runs through B and A
once each before stopping (thus AA BB CCDC DC AA BA).
Obviously for both pianists the score both
instructs and exemplifies, that is it allows other exemplifications as well. That may seem hard to
swallow from the standpoint of the doctrine that,
by virtue of its purpose and function of the score to identify the work and instruct performers, it
the next and from one place to another the same
chant could be sung with a large variety of
different introductory and interpolated tropes. Consequently what constituted the whole of a
chant in performance with all of its trope verses-
say the Introit chant for the Christmas mass-
was open and variable. There would have been no conception of such a "whole."
The tradition of the tropes was fluid also in the notated presentation of the melodies. My tran-
scriptions show four notated versions of an introit trope verse: two from Aquitania and one each from
northern France and southern Italy. I say they are versions of one thing rather than differ-
ent things because they have the same ritual
function for the same feast day and the same literary text. The scores of the melodies them-
selves challenge one's sense of what counts as
"the same melody." My general approach to this
problem is to consider them members of the
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EXAMPLE 4. Aquitanian trope melody transmission. From Leo Treitler, "Observations on the Transmission of Some Aquitanian Tropes," Forum
Musicologicum, Volume, 3, 1982. Reprinted by permission of the author.
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493
Treitler 493
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism
same tune family, like versions of "Barbara Allen." The lower two melodies are there for
comparison; they belong to the same tune family as the others but they were sung with different texts
and on different ritual occasions.
Obviously we can't read any one of these
scores as unique identifier of the work, or deno- tation of the sound pattern that must be executed to produce
a flawless performance of the work. Each score can do no more than exemplify the work. In some
traditions exemplification is the main task of scores. In such a tradition identification and instruction are
accomplished only indirectly, through exemplification. The score in such a tradition is functionally and
ontologi- cally parallel, at the same theoretical level, with the performance. The questions "what is
this piece" and "how does it go" could both be answered either by writing out a score or by
making a performance.
But the tradition of Gregorian chant itself was under institutional constraints from the beginning
of its written transmission sometime in the ninth century-constraints imposed more by sec- ular than
ecclesiastical authorities-to be prac- ticed with the utmost uniformity. And that is reflected in a
written transmission of consider- able uniformity, compared to the transmission of the tropes. For
the chant tradition we must infer a very different ontological state of the work, and a very
different role of the score in relation to work and performance. In giving place to the historical
dimension of the study of these relationships, then, we need to recognize that there may be cultural,
institutional, ideolog- ical, and political pressures favoring or requir- ing one kind of relationship over
another.
My last example will focus attention on the relations among sketches, scores, and work in the
case of Chopin's Nocturne in B-flat major, opus 62 #1.
The example comprises only three measures (53-55), but the number and variety of sources for
these is very instructive. They come at a very crucial moment in the piece, a harmonically enriched
reprise in the second section ( examples
5a and 5b, derived from Kallberg, 1990).
Once established in Paris, Chopin had relations with publishers there, in Germany, and in England.
His usual practice was to send manu- scripts for pieces as he completed them to all three. He made
all the copies himself. And where
494
Treitler 494
we are able to compare copies for the same piece they are often not true copies. He usually read proof
for the Paris publications, and there are many instances in which these editions do not correspond
exactly to the corresponding autographs, the alterations having presumably been made at the
proof-reading stage. Chopin made presentation copies of works, and these, too, can disagree with
published editions. He earned his livelihood in large part as a fashionable piano teacher, and it was
mainly his music that pupils were to learn. When they brought their published scores to their
lessons, he sometimes entered changes in them. There is no aspect of the transmission of his music
that does not reveal the fluidity of its ontological condition.
Evidently for Chopin the score was not the ultimate touchstone for the work. He did not always copy
it faithfully when he needed copies. He evidently did not mind having different versions in circulation.
By the same token, he did not behave as though he believed that the process of composition had a terminal
point (e.g., the writing down). In that light the fluidity in the performing tradition from which I showed
examples before is hardly surprising.
Here are the details about the sources for the B-flat nocturne. We can compare a sketch, the autograph
scores that Chopin prepared for the French (Brandus) and German publishers (Breit- kopf & Hartel;
the autograph prepared for his London publisher, Wessel, has not survived), all three first editions, and
the modern editions that have come down from these. There are three versions of the passage we are
looking at in the Brandus autograph. The Breitkopf edition dif- fers in m. 54 from its autograph model.
The Paderewski edition is identical with the Bran- dus, the Henle edition combines the third version
of the Brandus autograph in the right hand with the first version in the left hand. The Uni- versal edition
is a conflation of Breitkopf and Brand us.
It is evident from his correspondence that Chopin sent the autographs off to his three publishers
on the same day. 22 However the differences among them arose, Chopin had the oppor- tunity to
eliminate them but did not do so. We would be hard put to order this material in accor- dance with the
paradigm of sketches and versions progressing toward a final and perfected work that has emerged
more than anywhere else
495
Treitler 495
EXAMPLE SA. Chopin, Nocturne opus 62 #1, measures 53-55, written sources. Reprinted by
permission of Jeffrey Kallberg.
from the study of Beethoven's compositional process. (It remains for someone to investigate the mutual
influence that this paradigm and the
19th-century work concept have had on one another.)
The sketch displays a case of composition through the particular working out of a basic and
commonplace schema of the musical style- really like the working out of a figure in a draw- ing
from a basic schema. The material, taken all
496
Treitler 496
together, shows Chopin working it out in different ways. In that way it is similar to the transmission
of the trope.
The schema is a sequential descending pro- gression. We might consider it a structural mem- ber that
underlies all versions. The details of the syncopated left hand and chromatic descent in the inner voice
are already in the sketch.
But I want to focus on the right hand. In the sketch it plays basically a gradual diatonic de-
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Treitler 497
EXAMPLE SB. Chopin, Nocturne opus 62 il, measures 53-55, recorded versions: (a) Paderewski Edition
( 1949) = Brandus Edition, (b) Henle Edition ( 1966), Right hand = Brandus, Left handed in measures 53-54 =
Brandus ii, (c) Universal Edition (1980) = Conflation of Brandus and Breitkopf editions.
scent from c to f, then a quick return in eighth notes past c to d-flat. This is then articulated or
elaborated in different ways in the several fin- ished states. The greatest change takes place in the
Brandus autograph, for example version ii, measure 54, making the descent from a-flat to f a
chromatic one. And then especially the Mahlerian touch in version iii, mm. 54 and 55, leaping from
a-flat toe-natural at the end of 54, and repeating the e-natural on the downbeat of the third measure and
holding it for two long beats, dissonant against every note in the left hand, before the resolution to
f on the third beat.
Evidently in reading proof for the Brandus
edition Chopin changed the right hand at the end of measure 54 to make a smoother descent. For the
Breitkopf and Wessel editions this passage is toned down, with thee-natural resolving to f on
the second beat. And so it is through the descen-
dants of the two versions.
Altogether the Chopin examples show, I think, a fluidity from the processes of composing and
inscribing right through to performing. They
tend to loosen the image of a hierarchical order
from work to score to performance, and they
suggest the possibility of a shared ontological level for all three-the possibility that the work
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Treitler 498
may be realized in the performance as well as in the writing down. These things are said not just in the
sense that one needs a performance or a score to make the work present or concrete. If you want to
make an edition of the trope "Fili us ecce patrem" or Chopin's B-flat nocturne that identifies the work,
not just exemplifies it, you must include all the versions. If you want to analyze Chopin's G-flat
major Waltz, you ought to take cognizance that the work you are analyz- ing has a fluidity about the
form in the written and performance tradition.
At the conclusion of the original presentation
of this paper I was asked "what are the limits? How much can a piece be tinkered with in writing it
out or in performance and still retain its
identity? Suppose ... " and there came another
invented example. In response I wanted to make clear that I decline to participate in any pro- cedures
aimed at a claimed unequivocal answer. And I wanted to suggest that answers should be
sought, not only by testing the limits through
introspection about invented examples, but also by taking into account the actual practice and beliefs
of practitioners. That evidence suggests not only that answers vary with the compositional tradition, the
composer, and even the individual work, but also that answers with reference to the
499
Treitler 499
same works or compositional traditions can change over time and under different historical
circumstances. Pianists today do not depart from the published scores of Chopin's works, and they
are usually unaware of the fluidity in the conception of the work that once lay behind them.23
But I do not mean to undermine the inquiry. Such differences about the conception of the musical
work and its relations to scores and performances are markers of music history. They constitute one
of the major dimensions in which music even has a history. So the subject can be of great interest to
music historians, just as the music historian's evidence can be of great interest to the philosopher.
LEO TREITLER
Department of Music
The Graduate School and University Center
The City University of New York
New York, NY 10036
1. Kendall L. Walton, "The Presentation and Portrayal of Sound Patterns," in Human Agency: Language, Duty and Value, ed.
J. Dancy, J. Moravcsik and C.C.W. Taylor (Stan- ford University Press, 1988).
2. Nicholas Wolterstorff, Works and WorldsofArt (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), p. 32.
3. Jerrold Levinson, "What A Musical Work Is," The
Journal of Philosophy 77 ( 1988), p. 5.
4. Roman Ingarden, The Work of Music and the Problem of its Identity (University of California Press, 1986), sixth chapter
heading, p. 116.
5. In Karl R. Popper and John C. Eccles, The Self and Its
Brain (Boston: Routledge and Keegan Paul, 1983), "Dia-
logue III," pp. 449-450.
6. I shall want to comment on this posture-typical and illusory, I shall suggest-of fishing around for an example in a random
sort of way, as though one would be prepared to work with whatever came up.
7. Walton, ibid.
8. Paul Ziff, Antiaesthetics: An Appreciation of the Cow with the Subtile Nose (Boston: D. Reidel, 1984), p. 44.
9. Ziff, p. 45.
10. Ziff, p. 45.
11. Popper and Eccles, p. 44 7. Walton does immediately gloss his question about the relative importance of works and
performances with this note: "I should emphasize that this question, as I construe it, is a question about our cultural
institution of music. I am asking what roles pieces and performances have in our institution, how they are regarded and
treated by participants in the institution: composers, performers, and appreciators. Neither works nor perfor-
mances are intrinsically primary, apart from their place in
some cultural institution." But he is the inventor of Ludwig van Marthoven 's sixth symphony, which he compares to
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Treitler 500
Ludwig van Beethoven's work of the same title without any concern for the vast (to put it mildly) cultural distance between
the two. Ziff, in asking the familiar question about how much can you change-this time in respect to instru- mentation-and
have it still be the same work(" double up on the oboes How about three? ... Five? How about fifty oboes? ten
thousand?"), says "it all depends on the work in question." Popper distinguishes his World 3 from Plato's world of ideas by
virtue of its having a history. But none of this alters the fact that this is "philosophico-aesthetic research," as Ziff puts it, aimed at
formulating in as nearly unexceptionable a way as possible the ontological status of the musical work in relation to scores and
performances; it is not an empirical or historical investigation into the ways that works, scores, and performances have
interacted in any actual musical culture.
12. See Lydia Goehr, "Being True to the Work," Journal
of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 4 7 ( 1989), pp. 55-67.
13. I have the impression that, by an unwritten law, the composer whose music is most often selected in investigations
about the ontology of musical works is Beethoven. This reflects Beethoven's long-standing position in our culture as the paradigm
(and paragon) of what constitutes serious music altogether. Anytime anyone makes a claim for some musical practice that it
belongs in the canon of Western high art music-whether it is Gregorian Chant, the jazz compositions of Duke Ellington, or the
dodecaphonic compositions of Anton Webern, they sooner or later come to the point of showing its basic similarity with the
music of Beethoven. The leading criterion in such comparisons is always closed, unified formal structure, one of the recurrent
conditions for work status.
14. Parallel thinking has dogged a field of investigation in which I have been involved for some time, the study of the early
history of medieval European plainchant. The writing down of the chant began in the ninth century, but its performing
tradition is centuries older. In trying to imagine how the oral tradition worked one of the models invoked has been that of
memory, but conceived as a storage space for individual fixed chants, as though the singer had swallowed the score for each
one.
15. See Carl Dahlhaus, Esthetics of Music (Cambridge
University Press, 1982), pp. 10-11. Arnold Whitall has given a characteristic discussion of what is entailed when one
speaks of structure nowadays. He quotes Wallace Berry: "Musical structure may be said to be the punctuated shaping of time and
'space' into lines of growth, decline, and stasis hierarchically ordered." He writes himself that "it is only relatively recently
that the possibility of musical compositions displaying structure as opposed to form has been envisaged. With the
development of structuralism ... the argument is advanced [now he quotes from Piaget's book, Structuralism] that 'structure
in the technical sense of a self- regulating system of transformations is not coincident with form.' The opposite of a true
structure is an aggregate, a
'mere collection of elements,' which may indeed possess certain formal characteristics, but which lacks the true wholeness
and unity of a genuine structure." (See the article "Form" in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musi- cians, vol. 6 [London,
1980], pp. 709-710.)
16. Leo Treitler, Music and the Historical Imagination
(Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 20.
17. A score exemplifies a work when the community of
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Treitler 501
practitioners to which it is addressed makes performances from it in a range of different versions-touching musical
parameters that are explicitly specified in the score, not those that the score leaves to the performer's discretion by
omission-that is broader than that lying within the denota- tion field of the score. We may conclude that is the case from the
evidence of actual performances made from known scores. We can infer it, without the same degree of certainty, about
traditions no longer active when it is typical for multiple scores of the same work to differ, again in musical parameters
that are explicitly specified. There are many such situations in the sources of European medieval music, and the inference
is strongest when such multiple scores occur in closely related sources, or even in the same source. (I shall shortly come to
instances of both kinds.) Then the work occupies that entire range, and each score exemplifies the range indirectly by
denoting one specific realization of it. It can only do that; it is how the notation works. (Com- posers in the 20th century
have found ways to notate works as multiplicities of realization possibilities, as in the case of Stockhausen's Klavierstuck XI.)
But scores can function in
502
Treitler 502
the sense of exemplification only for a community of practi-

tioners that know the tradition.
18. The performances can be heard on the following
recordings: the Cortot recordingsof the two Waltzeson Alfred Cortot: Frederic Chopin (Hunt CD 510); the Paderewski
recording of the Waltz in c# minor on The Art of Paderewski (RCA Camden CAL-310);the Rachmaninoffrecording of the two
Waltzeson Rachmaninoff Plays Chopin (RCA VIC 1534).
19. "Are Variants a Problem? 'Composer's Intentions' in Editing Chopin," Chopin Studies 3 (Cambridge University Press,
1990), pp. 257-276. I am grateful to Professor Kallberg for his generosity in providing me with a pre- publication copy of
this paper.
20. Ibid., p. 10.
21. Reported in Jeffrey Kallberg, "The Problem of Repe-
tition and Return in Chopin's Mazurkas," in Jim Samson, ed., Chopin Studies (Cambridge University Press, 1988).
22. See Kallberg, 1990.
23. This suggests a paradoxical question. Does the modern pianist's scruple about playing the notes as written make his
performance inauthentic?

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History and the Ontology of the Musical Work

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