Challenging Performance, Chapter 11.1 : Piety and the dead composer
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?...
21 Dec 202414min
Challenging Performance, Chapter 11.2 : Philosophical obligations to dead composers
Some recent philosophers' views on obligations to the dead, some of them very curious indeed.
21 Dec 20247min
Challenging Performance, Chapter 11.3 : Ethical obligations to composers
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.
21 Dec 20245min
Challenging Performance, Chapter 12.1 : Policing
Teachers, examiners, adjudicators, fixers, concert planners, managers, record companies, music journalists, critics, broadcasters, bloggers, musicologists, and co-performers: all are in effect policin...
21 Dec 20245min
Challenging Performance, Chapter 12.2 : Music as Utopia
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 ...
21 Dec 202410min
Challenging Performance, Chapter 12.3 : Self-policing
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 w...
21 Dec 20244min
Challenging Performance, Chapter 8 : Musicology and editions
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...
17 Dec 20246min
Challenging Performance, Chapter 7.1 : The place of teachers in the classical music State
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.
15 Dec 20247min
