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What Is a Musical Act? Understanding Improvisation Through Artefact and Performance

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Of Essence and Context

Part of the book series: Numanities - Arts and Humanities in Progress ((NAHP,volume 7))

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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. 1.

    Apart from Goodman (1968), other interesting nominalistic approaches to the ontology of music were made in Predelli (1999, 2001).

  2. 2.

    The type/token model was first used in Peirce 1960, in a context strongly influenced by linguistic analysis.

  3. 3.

    See the third part of this article.

  4. 4.

    See the comments on musical experience as non-repetitive in Adorno (1973).

  5. 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. 6.

    From this point of view, as we shall see, improvisation can play a fundamental role.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Turin, Turin, Italy

    Roberto Zanetti

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  1. Roberto Zanetti
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Correspondence to Roberto Zanetti .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Music History, Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, Vilnius, Lithuania

    Rūta Stanevičiūtė

  2. University of Hull, Kingston upon Hull, UK

    Nick Zangwill

  3. Department of Music Theory, Lithuanian Academy of Music and Theatre, Vilnius, Lithuania

    Rima Povilionienė

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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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