Art Music, Perfection and Power: Critical Encounters with Classical Music Culture in Contemporary Cinema

During the last three decades music scholars have provided a growing amount of critical accounts of what they contend is a fundamental conceptual support behind the performance of classical music, namely the belief in aesthetically autonomous and endurable musical works free-standing from any cultural and social context. According to this ontology, the primary obligation of the performer is to present and interpret the musical work, a performance ideal that has been claimed to foster a musical culture obsessed with perfectionism and permeated by problematic relations of power. Such critical assessments have of late migrated beyond the academic discourses of music scholars into the venues of popular culture, a phenomenon evidenced in particular by a variety of recently released feature films. This article argues that current screen media representations of classical musicians are involved in a complex critical dialogue with deep-rooted aesthetic ideologies clustering around classical music and its performance. Although such representations advance a view of classical music culture as being deeply permeated by structural inequalities, performance anxiety and unreasonably high standards of perfection, they do not necessarily reject the notion of the musical work or devalue the high-art status and emancipatory potential traditionally ascribed to classical music.