How We Got into the Reproducibility Canon and Why We Need to Get Out

Abstract

This essay aims to explore the roots and limits of the dominant performance ideology in the Western art music tradition. Starting from an analysis of the key concepts of interpretation, execution, and reproduction, it offers a reconstruction of the emergence of interpretation as the “reproduction” of an inviolable text — a notion that has become deeply entrenched in contemporary performance practice and reception. While “execution” originally denoted the material realization of the notated score, the idea of “reproduction” takes to an extreme the modern effort to render performance infinitely repeatable, shifting the centre of gravity from lived sound to written sign. Yet such a paradigm aligns only weakly with practices in use until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries — as documented in historical sources and early recorded evidence — and it proves equally incompatible with the lived experience of listening, which constantly reveals performance’s contingent nature. Far from safeguarding the vitality of the repertoire, a strict fidelity to the text ultimately impoverishes its cultural and social significance, confining it to an elite of listeners and performers convinced of the existence of a single “correct version”. Drawing on contemporary anthropological and philosophical perspectives, the essay argues that variability, unpredictability, and the performer’s relational responsibility are not threats but the very space in which music continues to signify, transform, and survive — and where it may now be urgent to intervene by recovering practices of extemporization and improvisation also in the performance of nineteenth-century music.

https://www.lim.it/it/chigiana/7110-chigiana-iii-7-lv-9788855435222.html#/2-tipo_prodotto-libro