EVALUATING RECORDED PERFORMANCE An investigation of music criticism through Gramophone reviews of Beethoven piano sonata recordings Elena Alessandri Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at the Royal College of Music, London September 2014 Declaration I hereby confirm that the entire submission is my own work and has not been submitted for a comparable academic award. 2 ABSTRACT Critical review of performance is today one of the most common professional and commercial forms of music written response. Despite the availability of representative material and its impact on musicians’ careers, there has been little structured enquiry into the way music critics make sense of their experience of performances, and no studies have to date broached the key question of how music performance is reviewed by experts. Adopting an explorative, inductive approach and a novel combination of data reduction and thematic analysis techniques, this thesis presents a systematic investigation of a vast corpus of recorded performance critical reviews. First, reviews of Beethoven’s piano sonata recordings (N = 845) published in the Gramophone (1923-2010) were collected and metadata and word-stem patterns were analysed (Chapters 3 and 4) to offer insights on repertoire, pianists and critics involved and to produce a representative selection (n = 100) of reviews suitable for subsequent thematic analyses. Inductive thematic analyses, including a key-word-in-context analysis on ‘expression’ (Chapter 5), were then used to identify performance features (primary and supervenient) and extra-performance elements critics discuss, as well as reasons they use to support their value judgements. This led to a novel descriptive model of critical review of recorded performance (Chapters 6, 7, and 8). The model captures four critical activities – evaluation, descriptive judgement, factual information and meta-criticism – and seven basic evaluation criteria on the aesthetic and achievement-related value of performance reliably used by critics, plus two recording-specific criteria: live-performance impact and collectability. Critical review emerges as a highly dense form of writing, rich in information and open to diverse analytical approaches. Insights gained throughout the thesis inform current discourses in philosophy of art and open new perspectives for empirical music research. They emphasise the importance of the comparative element in performance evaluation, the complexity and potentially misleading nature of the notion of ‘expression’ in the musical discourse, and the role of critics as filters of choice in the recording market. Foremost, they further our understanding of the nature of music performance criticism as a form of reasoned evaluation that is complex, contextual and listener specific. 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS My first thanks go to my advisor, Aaron Williamon, for the support throughout this work, endless readings of chapter drafts and for the always straightforward and reassuring attitude in difficult moments. Your flexibility and openness made this research journey possible beyond distance and logistical constraints. Thank you for your warm hospitality and friendship, and for treating me as a researcher, and not as a student, from the beginning on. I owe the utmost gratitude to my second supervisor, friend and mentor Hubert Eiholzer. His contribution impregnates this whole work and extends far beyond it. You saw the path I was supposed to go far before I did, and supported me throughout the way with disarmingly altruism. Thank you for all our absorbing discussions, debating everything from artistic integrity to wine tasting. You nurtured my curiosity, passion for research, and thirst for clarity. Thank you for inspiring me. I would like to thank my practical consultant, Olivier Senn, for the personal and institutional support to this research, and for trusting me with a research outside your field of expertise, allowing me the freedom necessary to carry on with the project. Your careful, thoughtful readings and almost painstaking obsession with graphs and diagrams significantly improved this work in the final stage. A special thank you goes then to my ‘fourth’ de facto advisor, Vicky Williamson. During your ten months in Lucerne you have given invaluable inputs to this research and helped me understand what it means to be an academic, and what kind of academic and person I would like to become. I would love to be one day half as good as you are in dealing with colleagues, students, and busy schedules! Thank you for the endless chats on the most disparate research (and off-research) topics, for your patience with my thousands questions and for all the intense hours spent on the review texts. This project has been partially supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Swiss State Secretariat for Education, Research, and Innovation, the Conservatorio della Svizzera italiana, and, in larger part, from my current institution, the Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts, School of Music. 4 The whole research would have not been possible without the Gramophone permission to access and study their published material so extensively. I am thus most grateful to Luca Da Re and the magazine commission for their collaboration. I would also like to thank Prof. King and the Institute for Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University for permission to use their text analysis algorithms and for the methodological support in this regard, and Alessandro Cervino for his assistance in collecting data. Many other persons have contributed to the completion of this work in different ways over these four years. Thank you to Dorottya Fabian, Thüring Bräm, and Daniel Leech-Wilkinson for their valuable comments and inspiring conversations. Thanks to Noola Griffiths and Ivan Hewett for their feedback on the first part of the thesis, and to Rosie Perkins and David Weasley for their advice on methodology and data analysis. I would also like to thank Jürg Huber for taking me on concerts, and letting me experience first-hand the process of critical review writing and the challenges, even ethical ones, that this work may entail. Finally, I would like to thank the people that have encouraged and supported me with their friendship and love. Thank you Lisa, Geordie, Liliana, Sara, Louise and all the CPS staff for letting me feel part of the group although I was so rarely there. Thank you Ruta for your PhD-fellow advices and for forcing me out of the office on sunny days (and not giving up on me not answering calls and messages). Most of all, my gratitude and appreciation go to my family. To my mom and dad, who have always been there for me and my brother, and supported all my unconventional choices. To Sim, who is unarguably the best brother one could wish for, and Angela, for her enthusiasm whenever we meet, and her reluctance to let me go every single time. And to my Holger. He dealt with all my ups and downs with infinite patience and loving care, always reminding me of the beauty waiting outside the doorstep. Your love and genuine simplicity make me so much stronger. I love you all dearly. Elena Alessandri 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Publications _______________________________________________ 13 List of Tables and Figures _________________________________________ 14 Introduction _____________________________________________________ 19 ON THE VALUE OF MUSIC PERFORMANCE ______________________ 23 The Standard of Taste _____________________________________________ 25 Modalities of evaluation __________________________________________ 26 The Reasoning Model __________________________________________ 26 Holistic versus Segmented schemes _______________________________ 27 The agreement of experts _________________________________________ 31 Judges’ consistency ____________________________________________ 31 Judges’ reliability _____________________________________________ 33 The role of expertise ___________________________________________ 35 Open concerns __________________________________________________ 36 The Process of Performance Evaluation ______________________________ 37 McPherson and Schubert’s model of performance assessment ____________ 38 Non-musical factors _____________________________________________ 40 Gender and race _______________________________________________ 40 Order of performances _________________________________________ 41 Extra-musical factors _____________________________________________ 42 Performer-related aspects _______________________________________ 42 Context-related aspects _________________________________________ 45 Evaluator-related aspects ________________________________________ 47 Musical factors _________________________________________________ 52 Explanatory and non-explanatory reasons __________________________ 52 General principles of musical value _______________________________ 54 Value(s) of musical performances _________________________________ 57 Performance as event ____________________________________________ 60 Music Criticism __________________________________________________ 63 6 Seeking further understanding _____________________________________ 63 Quantitative assessment versus Verbal feedback _____________________ 63 Verbalization of music perception ________________________________ 65 Focus on music critics __________________________________________ 68 Criticism as evaluation ___________________________________________ 69 Historical grounds _____________________________________________