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

If how music feels matters more to our biology and psychology than how obedient it is—to traditions, rules and norms—then this only adds to its danger for those who feel entitled to rule on how it sho...

23 Des 20243min

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.

21 Des 20245min

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 rec...

21 Des 202428min

How buying advertising can lead to favourable reviews.

21 Des 20244min

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

21 Des 20245min

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 l...

21 Des 20243min

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.

21 Des 20244min

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 mu...

21 Des 202413min