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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