The Musical Work: Reality or Invention? Michael Talbot (ed.)

Symposium which produced this publication is the result of a belief that: “It is [. . .] useful for students of so-called classical music to learn of (and, if appropriate, adopt or adapt) the concepts and terminology of modern popular music studies, just as the reverse must equally be true” (p. 1). At face value this is a glorious understatement; the progressive erosion of the boundaries of popular music studies and ethnomusicology gives way to the more radical reappraisal of western musicology in a wider context suggested by the title of the symposium and this publication. This was itself suggested after Talbot’s reading of Lydia Goehr’s “essay in the philosophy of music” The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works (Goehr, 1992) which is useful to read to follow many of the arguments in this volume. Goehr painstakingly builds up her argument. She examines first the various definitions of “work” from idealist and empirical philosophical traditions; these she then places against her own argument that the “work-concept” is a historical construction with a clear beginning which she places in the years immediately around 1800. Indeed some contributors to the symposium refer to her argument directly and her own contribution to the volume robustly defends that position against a major critique from Reinhard Strohm (see below). The meaning of words is negotiated in their use and evolves with time – notwithstanding occasionally attempts to have them anchored in an encyclopedia or dictionary. If (not just) students begin to share terms across what were once discreet disciplines, the meaning of such terms and the concepts they attempt to embody, may change. The family of meanings is extended. At least that may very well be true for this book which has its own sociology every bit as fascinating as that of the music examined. There are three clear kinds of discussion in its pages: discussion of the terminology, usually in an attempt to frame key questions more clearly; discussion of the subject of Lydia Goehr’s thesis, the meaning of the “work-concept” in contemporary or historical use; and finally, discussion of a relation to the “other” musicology seen across the symposium table, an attempt to “adopt or adapt” ideas to mutual advantage. I am sad to see how little of this third approach is in evidence. It is as if arguments fly over the shoulder of colleagues from differing backgrounds. The atmosphere is not apparently adversarial but the degree of true exchange seems minimal. To be sure a book can never encapsulate the informal exchange which is so often the major achievement of such a symposium. But the inevitable coming together of the musicology of the Western European Classical Tradition (WECT) and so-called ethnomusicology (in a sense which embraces all non-WECT traditions) into a truly systematische Musikwissenschaft has a long way to go. Of course the creation of a monolithic entity is not the aim but a network of “music knowledges” with methods and concepts most suitable to their subjects. The essays in the volume are divided into four broad groups. A set that remains firmly in popular music studies (David Horn, Serge Lacasse, Richard Middleton and Catherine Moore); a second group of two contributions from Jim Samson and Reinhard Strohm which more-or-less counter Goehr’s principle thesis on its own grounds; a group which examines the work-concept from a variety of critical stances (Philip Tagg, Michael Talbot, John Williamson) and a single contribution from James Wishart which analyses identity of material (and hence “work”) in three recent compositions to include material by Schubert. The volume concludes with a contribution from Lydia Goehr both defending and expanding on her argument for the work-concept’s emergence around 1800. David Horn (“Some Thoughts on the Work in Popular Music”) starts from a strictly empirical position, examining the way words such as “piece,” “track,” “song,” “number” are used clearly in preference to “work” through the examination of a range of literature on popular music. He creates from this a kind of fluid taxonomy of descriptors. The crux