The arguments developed in Part One—about the legitimacy of evaluative judgment, the distinction between solicited and unsolicited evaluation, and the pathology of the comprehensive audit—are not offered from a position of theoretical detachment.
I have spent over three decades as a concert pianist, have been reviewed regularly in the national and international press, and have written reviews of performers and composers myself. I have been peer-reviewed and have acted as a peer reviewer in turn, sat on appointment panels, adjudicated composition and piano competitions, set and marked student work across music and sociology, examined doctoral theses, and served on many academic misconduct panels.
I have campaigned, researched and published on abuse in music education and on academic freedom. I have sustained a wide public presence through journalism, blogging and social media. And I have lived through a large number of intimate relationships and close friendships of varying degrees of commitment, in which mutual judgment of character, desire and conduct is continuous, often unspoken and rarely neutral.
These are not credentials offered as a guarantee of authority. They are the conditions under which the following case studies were formed. What Part One examined in the abstract, this part tests against the resistance of concrete situations. The situations listed also create an obvious risk: that the author may appear to install himself as judge of all judges. That risk must be admitted at the outset. What follows is not a claim to exemption from evaluation, but an attempt to think from within its practice.
My own judgments have certainly not been without flaws: there are composers whose work I once valued primarily on grounds of novelty, or their adherence to aspects of modernist aesthetics, but whose music I have since recognized exhibits less of the deeper quality that sustains lasting interest. My failure was over-reliance upon reified criteria: mistaking the general for the particular. More uncomfortably, I have written on composers I admired and continue to admire—Michael Finnissy, Pascal Dusapin, Helmut Lachenmann—in terms I would now recognize as over-defensive, at times approaching the hagiographic register this essay criticizes elsewhere.
I have stayed too long in relationships which were obviously unworkable, either when over-flattered by the other person, or when the fear of an unknown future alone outweighed honest assessment of a known present. Recognizing such failures in oneself is part of what can sharpen the critical eye one subsequently brings to others—and what makes one more alert to the judgments being made of oneself in return.
Bad Reviews and the Development of Resilience
No-one likes receiving a bad review. Most of the reviews I have received have been as a pianist, in publications in various countries. The number of genuinely bad or hostile ones has been relatively few, certainly well-outweighed by highly positive assessments. But I won't deny that having a very negative review in a national newspaper is a highly unpleasant experience. A musician, unlike a scholar, has no right of reply, no opportunity to address the public audience to whom the review is directed. The asymmetry between reviewer and reviewed is structural rather than personal.
I won't deny that having a very negative review in a national newspaper is a highly unpleasant experience.
Furthermore the reviewer has no obligation to demonstrate work of their own in a comparable fashion to the artist, and few critics are practising performing artists. But that asymmetry is probably unavoidable, and perhaps preferable to the obvious conflicts of interest that would arise otherwise. But the reviewer should have earned their authority through a track record showing verdicts grounded in knowledge, attention and wide comparative experience rather than whim, fashion or personal investment. In this sense, a review also evaluates its author.
I would never wish to claim that those who have given me bad reviews have committed an invalid act. I might dispute the emphases, the selectivity, or aesthetic assumptions, but they had every right to publish their reviews. Public performance and publication solicit evaluation: they place work before an audience and invite response. Yet there is a growing presumption that a review is legitimate only if it is positive—that performing or publishing is courageous, and that courage deserves protection rather than scrutiny. That is not an ethical position but a sentimental one.
