Matteo Ravasio

In these comments to Marta Benenti’s book Expressiveness, I make two points. The first concerns the relation between the proposal defended by Benenti and what are generally referred to as resemblance theories of expressiveness. My aim is to understand how far we can take Benenti’s case against the role of resemblance in expressiveness. The second is related to a debate internal to the philosophy of music, namely, the one concerning formalism. While taking a position with respect to this issue falls outside of the aims and scope of Benenti’s book, I note that her proposal may have interesting consequences for the future of this central debate.

This paper discusses mistakes that occur in improvised musical performance. I first develop a couple of distinctions that are useful to understand the varied nature of such mistakes. Particularly, I think that it is important to distinguish mistakes that depend upon formal features of the music, and mistakes that are such in virtue of a failure of the performer’s intentions. Within this latter category, I argue that it is useful to distinguish between two different layers of performance intentions. Subsequently, I discuss the idea that, in improvised performance, mistakes are not merely tolerated but are, in some sense, valuable, showing how the distinction I develop can shed some light on these issues.