Law, Music, and Other Performing Arts
ESSAY/BOOK REVIEW LAW, MUSIC, AND OTHER PERFORMING ARTS SANFORD LEVINSON AND J. M. BALINt "[I]nterpretation" is a chameleon. When a performing musician "interprets" a work of music, is he expressing the composer's, or even the composition's, "meaning," or is he not rather expressing himself within the interstices of the score? 1 -Richard Posner Today the conductor, more than any one musical figure, shapes our musical life and thought. That may not be how things should be, but it is the way they are. In a future, fully automated age, it may be that the conductor, along with all performing musicians, will be obsolete. Musical creators are working toward that day, assembling electronic scores that, once put on tape, never vary.... But until that unfortunate day is here, let us be thankful that there still remain interpretive musicians to synthesize the product of the composer. For without the interplay between the minds of the creator and interpreter, music is not only stale, flat and unprofit- able. It is meaningless.... Musical notation is an inexact art, no matter how composers sweat and strive to perfect it. Symbols and instructions on the printed page are subject to various interpreta- tions, not to one interpretation. 2 -Harold Schonberg The legislature is like a composer. It cannot help itself: It must leave interpretation to others, principally to the courts. -Jerome Frank3 t Levinson is St.John Garwood Chair in Law, University of Texas School of Law. Balkin is Charles Tilford McCormick Professor of Law, University of Texas School of Law. The authors wish to thank Joseph Dodge, Doug Laycock, Dennis Patterson, Richard Posner, Robert Post, Tom Seung, Allan Stein, Carol Weisbrod, and Jay Westbrook for their comments on previous drafts, as well as the participants in faculty workshops at Rutgers-Camden School of Law and the University of Texas School of Law, where earlier versions of this essay were presented.
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