The Musical Work: Reality or Invention?

The ostensible topic of this collection takes as its starting-point the idea of response to Lydia Goehr's 1992 essay, The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works. In reality, the book is about various forms of intertextuality, in the sense that a circumscribed work can only be known by demarcating it from others which it is not. The book originates in a symposium called to aid the growing dialogue between popular music and formal (art, serious, classical, 'unpopular') music, and, of eleven essayists, four overtly (and one more in passing) address our field of popular music. Richard Middleton's chapter ('Work-in-(g) practice: configuration of the popular music intertext', pp. 59–87) takes many turns, beginning from Bill Laswell's takes on Miles Davis and Bob Marley, though signifyin(g) and dialogism to a recovery of authorial agency (and not the first thing I have read recently to take this line), by means of which singers and producers have inherited the aura bathing the composer of the formal work. By focusing on the popular music intertext, he argues that 'work' is a broadly unhelpful concept, skating over the necessary nuances which lie between music as process and music as product, some of which are recaptured by recalling exactly what a 'record' actually does. And yet, the 'intertext' is itself problematic, so frequently erasing the identifiable agency from 'the ethics of musical practice that we badly need' (p. 87). Middleton finds it unnecessary to make clear categorical distinctions between classes of intertext – the confusions surrounding Laswell's work remind us that theory's clarity is practice's unreality (pp. 62–71). Serge Lacasse's discussion of 'Intertextuality and hypertextuality in recorded popular music' (pp. 35–58) itself creates as intertext topics from Gérard Genette in order specifically to address recordings motivated by sampling practices. The distinction in his title refers (very loosely) to the difference between quotation (explicit reference) and imitation (implicit reference). He develops a whole series of sub-classes of remix. He summarises these practices in a matrix measuring paradig-matic and syntagmatic against 'autosonic' and 'allosonic' categories. His chief conclusion is to call for a dual conception of the recording, existing both as ideal (consisting of melodies, rhythms. . .) and actual (a performance consisting of sounds). His is a potentially useful vocabulary but, as with all such attempts to specify terminology in the early life of a discourse, it remains to be seen how pertinent it is. In this respect, there …