Alibis, and why performers don't have them

Abstract

Musical performers confront, deal with, and participate in musical “events”. These musical events present the performer with a number of obligations to uphold. One particular kind of obligation precedes and overrides the other kinds of (aesthetic) obligation — compositional, historical, critical-interpretative, physiological, for example — and lies at the root of the “contingencies”, “illusions”, and “anxieties” of which performers and commentators often speak. In this essay I illustrate the nature of this non-foundational obligation through a meditation on a concept of Bakhtin's: the “alibi”. All imperatives command either hypothetically or categorically. Kant

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