The way it's described here, it sounds like a vast conspiracy to
discredit instrumental medieval music. If so, let's be thankful it was
one perpetrated by tweedy music critics for a very serious magazine
with a limited readership, which I suppose is why Sequentia, the Boston
Camerata, Ensemble PAN, Ensemble Alcatraz, the Dufay Collective,
Ensemble Unicorn and many, many others have since done wonderful, if
sometimes a little weird, work and instrumental students at early music
programs still spend at least a semester hawanging on musty old
hurdy-gurdies, vielles and gothic harps, struggling through Ars
Subtilior music while their singer friends mispronounce old French or
fail to get the rhythms of Landini ballate. To think it might all have
been brought to nought, but thank goodness we mostly rely on critics
for nice quotes to put in our press packets, grouse a little bit when
they savage us, and otherwise view most of them as grumpy eunuchs.
Regarding the ethics of music criticism, I'd be interested to see if we
could have a bit more conflict of interest and get more serious
musicians, hopefully better writers than I, to write criticism, and if
it would make the field more vibrant. Nobody faults Schumann or
Berlioz, two of the most readable critics of the nineteenth century,
for their conflicts of interest, do they? Schumann had it right about
Chopin and Brahms, huh?
> Date: Sun, 5 Feb 2012 12:35:21 -0800
> To: lute@cs.dartmouth.edu
> From: howardpos...@ca.rr.com
> Subject: [LUTE] Re: Saturday quotes
>
>
> On Feb 5, 2012, at 8:29 AM, Ron Andrico wrote:
>
> > While I am also a great admirer of Page's work, I am a little
incensed
> > that a reviewer admits to deliberately panning commercial
recordings
> > with the intent to advance one point of view. Ethics?
>
> Would you be incensed by a reviewer who panned Herbert von Karajan's
recordings of Bach because the critic's "one point of view" was that
Bach should be played with attention to historical performance
practice? Or a reviewer who admitted that in the 1970's he had
deliberately conveyed the message to buy the period-instrument
recordings of Bach's cantatas by Harnoncourt and Leonhardt and "leave
the rest" (modern-instrument performances by Richter and Rilling and
whoever)?
>
> Or, closer to home on this list, is it wrong for a critic to opine
that lute recordings on instruments built like modern guitars are not
the ones to buy?
>
> Critics are paid to convey information and make judgments. If a
critic writing for a publication about early music has reached a
conclusion that voices-only performance is "correct," and that any
instruments make it as wrong as Karajan's Brandenburgs, it isn't
unethical for that viewpoint to inform his writing--indeed, how could
he possibly put it aside and pretend he didn't think the performances
with instruments are historically wrong (just as you might conclude, if
the instruments were saxophones)? You might find his viewpoint wrong or
overly limited, and maybe you're right. But it isn't unethical for a
critic to approach his work with his own ideas.
>
> The potential ethical problems stem from the small-world nature of
the early music community, where the prominent performers and scholars
all know each other, and cronyism, or the reverse, is always a problem.
When I was review editor for the LSA quarterly, I told some folks (all
of them on this list, I think) that there were ethical problems because
they were performers writing about other performers or publishers
writing about other publishers ("competition" in common parlance),
making for inherent conflict of interest. I don't think anyone had ever
brought it up before, and while the (soon-to-be former) reviewers
themselves seemed to understand, or at least accepted, my insistence on
avoiding systemic conflict of interest, the responses I got from the
LSA officialdom was much the same response I would have gotten if I'd
said only Martians could write reviews for the Q. And maybe they were
right: perhaps if the community is small enough, you have to put up
with conflic!
> t of interest if you want a pool of reviewers.
> --
>
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