Abstract
The purpose of this article is to address the process/product dichotomy focusing on improvisational phenomena, in which most of musical ontology’s assumptions—the duality between work and performance, creation and rendition, essence and context—seem to be flawed. I will focus on the notions of artefact and performance, seeing them as complementary counterparts in what I would call musical act. The idea is to consider improvisation as the ideal paradigm in which performance conditions enter directly into the constitution of an aesthetic artefact, and, hence, a musical act takes place.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
The type/token model was first used in Peirce 1960, in a context strongly influenced by linguistic analysis.
- 3.
See the third part of this article.
- 4.
See the comments on musical experience as non-repetitive in Adorno (1973).
- 5.
As we shall see in the last two parts of this article, a musical artefact can be a work and a performance as well.
- 6.
From this point of view, as we shall see, improvisation can play a fundamental role.
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Zanetti, R. (2019). What Is a Musical Act? Understanding Improvisation Through Artefact and Performance. In: Stanevičiūtė, R., Zangwill, N., Povilionienė, R. (eds) Of Essence and Context. Numanities - Arts and Humanities in Progress, vol 7. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-14471-5_17
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