Evaluating Musical Performance

Abstract

This essay will have the following theme: performances of music are legitimately evaluated from a number of different perspectives, and thus, as a result, there is little use for the notion of a good performance simpliciter of a given piece of music. I will call this idea the perspective relativity of evaluation of performance, or PREP for short. According to PREP, a performance that is just fair from one point of view might be quite good from another, or vice versa. According to PREP, there is no single, overriding point of view concerning performances such that whatever seems good from that point of view qualifies in effect as an absolutely good performance of the work, although there may be a particular point of view that is arguably most central to evaluative assessment, so that grading of a performance without further specification will naturally be taken to refer to that point of view. Such a perspective might have special force without being incommensurably privileged with respect to other perspectives. In short, what I am urging is that the judgment P is a good performance of W is particularly subject to the further query: For whom, or in regard to which purposes or objectives? The reason is that there are several perspectives to consider, several contexts in which musical performances occur, several ends musical performance may justifiably serve. To recall that the musically involved can be sorted, first of all, into listeners, performers, and composers is only to begin to limn the multiplicity of relevant perspectives. I hope to fill out some of the detail in this picture as we proceed. Let me begin with some preliminaries. First, I shall be concerned primarily with the evaluation of performance in that sphere for which there is