Makes me wonder if all these harps, vielles, symphonies, gitterns, citoles, lutes, nakers and sundrie wind instruments weren't photoshopped into the paintings in recent times by early instrument manufacturers?
Bill [Is this how conspiracy theories start?] From: John Lenti <[email protected]> To: "[email protected] Net" <[email protected]> Sent: Monday, 6 February 2012, 8:08 Subject: [LUTE] Re: Saturday quotes 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: [1][email protected] > From: [2][email protected] > 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. > -- > > To get on or off this list see list information at > [3]http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html -- -- References 1. mailto:[email protected] 2. mailto:[email protected] 3. http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~wbc/lute-admin/index.html
