Challenging Performance, Chapter 22.3 : Expression is dangerous
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 Dec 20243min
Challenging Performance, Chapter 9.1 : Criticism
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 Dec 20245min
Challenging Performance, Chapter 9.2 : The language of record reviews
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 Dec 202428min
Challenging Performance, Chapter 9.3 : The value of record reviewing
How buying advertising can lead to favourable reviews.
21 Dec 20244min
Challenging Performance, Chapter 9.4 : Performance criticism in social media
Vicious comments typical of social media can be used by distinguished musicians to criticise their peers.
21 Dec 20245min
Challenging Performance, Chapter 9.5 : The risk performers take
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 Dec 20243min
Challenging Performance, Chapter 9.6 : The lack of intellectual debate about classical music
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 Dec 20244min
Challenging Performance, Chapter 10 : Normativities
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 Dec 202413min
