[1] Historians of Western music have long assumed that a composition exists as a determinate object — a work fixed by its score, identical across performances, and attributable to a single author. [2] A revisionist current, however, holds that this “work-concept” is not a perennial feature of musical practice but a historically contingent one, becoming regulative only around 1800. [3] On this account, musicians before the late eighteenth century did not typically regard a piece as an inviolable text to be reproduced faithfully; rather, notation furnished a flexible armature that performers were expected to elaborate, transpose, and recombine. [4] The score, in short, prescribed less than it later would, and the boundary between composing and performing was correspondingly porous.
[5] Proponents adduce several correlated developments. [6] The rise of public concert life detached music from the liturgical and courtly occasions that had once dictated its use, encouraging audiences to attend to compositions as autonomous aesthetic objects rather than as adornments to ceremony. [7] Copyright regimes and the growth of music printing lent the composer a proprietary authority over the text, while the emerging repertoire of “classics” invited the metaphor of a museum in which finished masterworks were preserved and repeatedly exhibited. [8] Performance, once a site of invention, came to be governed by an ethic of fidelity: the interpreter's task was now to realize the composer's intentions, not to supplement them.
[9] Critics of the thesis object that it mistakes a change in emphasis for the birth of a concept. [10] They point out that some earlier repertories — the polyphonic Mass, for instance — were transmitted with notable textual stability and were sometimes copied with evident reverence for their authors, suggesting that a rudimentary notion of the fixed work predates the chronology the revisionists propose. [11] The revisionists reply that isolated instances of textual fidelity do not amount to a governing norm: what matters is whether the work-concept functioned regulatively — whether it structured the expectations of composers, performers, and listeners alike — and this, they maintain, is demonstrable only for the later period.
[12] The dispute is not merely chronological. [13] At stake is whether the categories through which we now hear music — the autonomous work, the faithful performance, the authoritative text — are natural to the art or are the sediment of a particular history, and thus whether applying them to earlier music risks anachronism. [14] The revisionist case, whatever the precise date it assigns, has at least made that risk visible, and in doing so has unsettled the assumption that the museum was always there to be entered.
