ABSTRACT
Goodman treats his central categories of the arts as exhaustive and mutually exclusive. He states, concerning the classification of music, that it is "non-autographic, or allographic". A systematization of art would be simpler than it is if all art came packaged in the form of relatively enduring things. An acoustic clone of an authentic performance of a given work, whether intentionally copied from the former or not, counts as a genuine instance of that work. After all, they will both conform to the same notated sound structure. Returning to the allographic/autographic distinction, there is a prima facie reason for locating improvisations in the sphere of autographic art. In sum, improvisations are not subject to either kind of Goodmanian reidentifiability. The comparison of them with standard examples of autographic art shows an improvisation to be a certain kind of ephemeral process, namely, an action in which the artist must be present to the portion of the work created.
