CONCEPT
Score and Performance
The composer specifies identity in the score; the performer fills what notation leaves open—a division of labor that AI collaboration reproduces without notation's precision.
In Goodman's analysis of allographic arts, the score-performance relation is paradigmatic: the composer provides a notational specification of the work's identity-determining features (pitches, rhythms, dynamics in broad categories), and the performer fills the interpretive space the specification leaves open (timbre, micro-timing, expressive phrasing). The work's identity is preserved across performances because the notation fixes what matters for identity and explicitly leaves the rest to performance. Glenn Gould's 1955 and 1981 recordings of the Goldberg Variations are radically different performances—different tempos, different articulations, different emotional characters—but they are instances of the same work, because both comply with Bach's notational specification. The performer's contribution is genuine and substantial—performance is not mechanical reproduction but skilled interpretation—but the contribution operates within constraints the score establishes and maintains. The constraints are formal: the notation's syntactic differentiation and semantic unambiguity ensure that what the composer specifies stays specified across the performer's realization. The score is the bridge between the composer's intention and the performer's action, and the bridge holds because notation eliminates indeterminacy at the level of work-identity.