Challenging Performance: Classical Music Performance Norms and How to Escape Them

Performance criticism identifies details that the critic feels do not belong. And so critics draw easily, unthinkingly, on metaphors of difference, often indexing gender, sexuality, class and race.

The purpose of journalistic performance criticism is to promote and reward the most persuasive normative performances and to discourage everything else. Quotations representing almost 100 years of record reviewing illustrate how that is achieved through their reaching into, and faithfully mirroring, many dark corners of white western heritage.

How buying advertising can lead to favourable reviews.

Vicious comments typical of social media can be used by distinguished musicians to criticise their peers.

Classical musicians would be healthier, happier, and classical music more widely enjoyed and better rewarded if there were more of the non-normative performances that critics spend too much of their lives trying to prevent.

Among the educated liberal elite classical music is no longer seen as something that they need know anything about. For this it has only itself, and its parochial ideology, to blame.

Norms from the past -- unwavering obedience, faithfulness to tradition, patriarchy, homophobia, misogyny, class entitlement -- are reproduced and naturalised in a great variety of ways in classical music culture.

Is it sensible to believe that the word of a long-dead composer must for ever be obeyed? Are the dead composers somehow still alive, able to be hurt? Are scores their wills, to be executed repeatedly? Is it healthy to think like this about composers and scores?

Some recent philosophers' views on obligations to the dead, some of them very curious indeed.

An attempt to take an unsuperstitious and humane approach to thinking about what we might ethically owe composers, living and dead, and what we might owe new generations of performers and listeners.

Teachers, examiners, adjudicators, fixers, concert planners, managers, record companies, music journalists, critics, broadcasters, bloggers, musicologists, and co-performers: all are in effect policing musicians’ performances to ensure conformity with norms.

Music that is well-composed and well-performed always seems, unlike the sequences of feelings we experience in everyday life, to be ideally shaped: it models a better self than ourselves, and allows us to practice, in a safe space, how to have a good relationship with our feelings and with others’.

The incentives for classical performers to police themselves are many and irresistible. Only superlative obedience and competence succeed. And so the normative highest standard is the only target at which one dare aim. Hence, self-policing plays a large role in the construction of current classical music Utopia.

Musicology, too, plays a role in the policing and oppression of classical performers, both through wielding texts from the past—and also through endless new 'Urtext' editions (for somehow the previous Ur-text is never quite Ur enough)—as police batons to keep the performer in their place.

Performer-teachers lie at the centre of a circular Classical Music State. As teachers they police, and as performers are policed by, a shared ideology which is thus constantly repeated and reinforced.

Through the way classical music is taught to young children, obedience, hard work, love, praise and musicianship are all bound-up together at a formative stage, as self-esteem interlocks with self-discipline and self-policing: the teacher’s guidance, the composer’s intentions, the score’s instructions all come to seem indistinguishable.

Through their criteria for good marks, the music exam boards schematise and institutionalise standard practice and enforce conformity. But they could and should encourage creativity.

Juniper Hill calls for 'a relatively judgment-free space in which musicians experience less fear and anxiety about receiving negative feedback and thus feel freer to explore, experiment, develop new ideas, and take creative risks.'

We may readily agree that it’s the job of conservatoires to fit their students for work. But an ethical music school should not be gatekeeping to suit the gatekeepers: it should be putting pressure on them to rise to the challenge of thinking and responding as imaginatively as its most creative students.

Izabela Wagner’s Producing Excellence: The Making of Virtuosos (2015) raises huge questions about classical music training, and whether the artistic results, wonderful as they are, are truly worth the level of physical and psychological pain or the level of abuse that children suffer in the (usually fruitless) quest for success.

A model of classical music policing shows how normative concert life is squeezed between the pressures applied by critics, agents, etc., and the long preparations through teaching and competition.

While jurors may claim that they are looking for a performer who can bring something new to the performance of a score, they often disagree so much on what is good that only the most brilliant performer of convention can emerge as their winner.

Whether we look at childhood teaching, examining, conservatoire, the virtuoso studio, competitions, the same abuses are found. Much better protection of students is needed. We need to foster teaching of classical performers that encourages and accepts more, and denigrates and punishes less.

What is this audiobook about? Who is it for? Will you like it? How to provide feedback.

Classical music can be -- and has been -- performed very differently and still be wonderful. Why is the classical music business so frightened of difference? Alternatives are illustrated. How might performers benefit from them?