ABSTRACT
The idea of music as reproduction has a long past, stretching back to Platonic concepts of mimesis. The key insight behind Raymond Monelle's groundbreaking development of topic theory was that there is no such thing as a 'pure' icon in music: in all musical signs there is an element of the symbolic, and hence of historically and culturally embedded interpretation. Perhaps in no field is this more pertinent than in the study of performance, which is bedevilled by the concept of 'reproduction'. Cursive script adopts a series of shortcuts, conventions of abbreviation which are arbitrary and hence historically contingent. Official and regular scripts, with everything explicitly spelled out, are the equivalent of the structural hierarchies modelled by music theory. Both the mazurka genre and sonata structure are signified rather than reproduced. The development of electrical recording, American phonograph manufacturers, particularly Edison, undertook an ambitious programme of what were called 'tone tests'.
