Classical Music and Visual Bias in Performance

The emphasis on the sensational attributes of classical music visual performance have largely been trivialized in the profession. Where classical music had rigid etiquette and emphasis on standards of style and technique, recent trends of globalized media are reshaping that model with more diversity. In this essay, I argue that the visual element of performance constructs bias in classical music, where visual and aural quality both produce an artistic effect on performers. The discussion concludes that a new emerging order challenges normative racial and gender roles in visual performance.

A study that examined the aural and visual effect of music performance on spectators found that visual information had more impact than aural information on an audience’s evolution, regardless of the audience’s level of music expertise (Griffiths and Reay, 2018). This finding has profound implications for critically reflecting on classical performance, where biases of visual judgement can impact the evaluation and reception of a performance according to racial and gender categories.

Furthermore, Professor Mina Yang discusses this circulating theme in regard to Asian identity and its global reception in classical music. In her commentary on ‘The Case of the Little Orange Dress’ (2014), she discusses the performance of pianist Yuja Wang in Los Angeles Philharmonic’s summer concert in 2011 where she performed Rachmaninoff’s ‘Piano Concerto No. 3’ in a controversial short orange dress that showed more of her body than what is thought of as usual for classical music performance dress code.

This performance was highly popular due to the attention and criticism it drew because of the fashion choice, overlooking the musical quality of the performance. Yang analyses this overwhelming response to the dress bringing attention to the anxiety it symbolized within classical music discourse. The sensational aspect of Wang’s visual performance popularized classical music and opened the horizons to new audiences, largely underestimating the prestige of style, technique and overall aural quality of the performance. To a lot of music critics, the performance deserved criticism as it violated a tradition in performance where its visual form is most highlighted. However, Yang links the polarizing conversation about the performer to the exclusion of Asian musicians from the hegemonic image of Western classical music.

For Yang, this response to the performance of Wang is closely connected to a Western prejudice against Asians, and particularly against Chinese people, as a result of political structures underlying the move towards the emerging central power of China. As for music performance, Chinese classical musicians and pianists are introduced to a more global scene, and the Western fear of Chinese influence appears most clearly where Asian performers are attracting novel and less elitist listeners to the genre. This is shown visually in new sexual and gendered identities that divert from the standard image of classical music.

Similarly, Professor Eric Hung tackles the Western reactions to Asian performer Lang Lang (2009). He brings up Lang Lang’s debut at the summer festival of classical music in London, where he performed Rachmaninoff's ‘Third Piano Concerto’ with the St. Petersburg Philharmonic Orchestra at the Royal Albert Hall. After concluding the program, Lang Lang announced that he would play a traditional Chinese folk song, when the audience burst into laughter. This reaction to the performance is in many ways similar to the response to Yuja Wang’s dress, where both performers are rendered non-normative in their racial and gender identities through the visual form. In fact, Hung demonstrates how this is emblematic of a certain racist stereotype Asian performers are subjected to from Western culture, understanding it from the lens of Orientalism. He explains how in a sense, on the flip side, Lang Lang is paradoxically also pressured to perform this image to pleasure the Western gaze.

According to a study that explored the existence of Asian stereotypes in music performance (Peynircioğlu, Bi and Brent, 2018), it was revealed that bias against Asian musicians was prominent in those who had participated. Moreover, the visual examination found that for Asian performers, it was thought that they showed less expressivity which undermined their skills against non-Asian performers. Yang tackles this bias in another discussion of racial identity in music performance (2007). She argues that racism against Asian performers stemmed from the glorification of a Western higher culture, which followed an erasure of the notion of race where the predominately white image of music performance is regarded as the norm, in opposition to the non-normative Asian identity.

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Here, the visual form of racial identity is re-conceptualizing the traditional understanding of performance. The notion of visual normativity in racial and gender identity represents a new global image in classical music. Yang argues that this globalized image necessarily encompasses people who have historically been excluded from classical music, and so challenges the elitist assumption of a unified Western image in performance. Nonetheless, it is in fact this new visual image that perhaps changes the idea of musicality itself, where non-normative performance is reshaping the audience perception of normativity. In effect, it remains highly important to reflect on the visual bias that constructs the definition of a normative musical space in which performance takes place.

Researcher Anna Rastas states that in popular music, it is difficult to imagine a performance now without the visual aspect that has been highly emphasized (Rastas and Seye, 2019). In this regard, it follows naturally that some performers are racialized more than others where a space is determined by a space where whiteness is the norm. This critical conclusion applies to the discussion of classical music, where racialized performers are now even challenging the traditional Western etiquette of dress code, folklore and overall wide-spread image. Musicologist Taru Leppänen points out that Asian music performers face rejection as a result of the notion that their music performances are usually regarded as ‘less than’ (2015). Even when Asian competitors are described as technically brilliant, there remains an assumption that the interpretation of Western music does not meet a normative standard.

Leppänen argues that this racial bias in music performance is reproduced by an ethnic dominance of Western art where inequality and racism are justified. Racial minorities are subjected to this visual bias and are considered musically inferior to their white peers, as is explained by the negative attitudes and subtle acts that oppress them. Here it becomes clear that, for instance, when Wang challenges classical dress code in a concert hall, she is in fact just highlighting and not creating the bias towards her that is inherent in white normative spaces. In other words, she uses the visual quality to challenge the Western image further and in doing so creates a new visual form that expresses her individuality.

This discussion of visual normativity extends, as pointed out earlier, to gender identity. Wang’s dress controversy is in fact symbolic of this occurrence. In a study conducted to examine the effects of dress effects and physical appearance on the perception of female solo performers (Griffiths, 2008), researchers found that performers were deemed to have varying levels of music skills depending on their visual appearance. An individual’s body movements were considered to be very important factors in their visual appeal, and this disproportionately affected women and did not allow them equal credit for visual performance and artistic qualities.

This evidence should be taken seriously when constructing expectations for music performers. Race and gender can be important factors that also influence student performance and achievement in minority groups (Elliott, 1995). In the discussion of Wang’s dress, this controversy of visual appeal seems to be misdirected at women who do not conform to this visual bias rather than towards those who are effectively enforcing it.

In addition, when Asian performers such as Wang and Lang Lang use visual appeal to construct their musical identity as performance, as Yang points out earlier, they face resistance to that visual individuality. This should be regarded as an effort to regulate a white-normative space in classical music performance. Even now as the body of the performer is increasingly pressured by a more globalized and open attraction to audiences outside the direct classical style, the visual quality of performance represents a global order that is more diverse and open to change.

In conclusion, the anxiety of the visual performance in classical music is caused by a changing structure towards more global, and therefore less elitist, audience and reception. The effort to maintain a normative space in visual quality negatively affects performers who are not considered ‘normal’. This changing order should therefore embrace diverse racial and gender identities of performers that do not conform to the global image of classical music.