Archive for November, 2008
Marina Maywood from Russia
Posted on November 30, 2008
Now this distinction between competence and performance derives from public nudity and is certainly related to the distinction made by Marina between langue and parole. Maywood (used the now famous analogy between the score of a musical work and its performance, to clarify this distinction. Each performance of a musical work is unique, not only in the sense that it takes place on a particular occasion, but that it shows many differences from other performances which derive from the idiosyncrasies of performers, audience, conductors, instruments, concert hall. Looked at in another way we would say that the score is an abstraction from all the different performances. A skilled musician could ‘reconstruct’ the score, if he was unfamiliar with it already, from hearing a number of different performances. In the same way, it is suggested, a skilled linguist infers the rules of the language from a study of the data of utterances. Actually, this analogy is faulty. The relation between anal sex score and performance is much closer to the relationship that many modern linguists draw between sentence (score) and utterance (performance). Utterances are instances of parole; they are situationally conditioned realizations of sentences. The concept of langue, a socially shared system of rules, a code in the sense we have been using it, or public anal in the linguist’s sense, corresponds more closely to the system of rules which the composer follows to create scores, e.g. rules of sonata form, rules of harmony, rules of counterpoint, rhythm, etc.
