Analysis of Value Judgement - Who Judges Analyses? "Quality" and Quality Standards in Music Research

Fifty years after Carl Dahlhaus' much-discussed text Analyse und Werturteil (Analysis and Value Judgment, 1970), this article once again poses the question of aesthetic judgment. First, the article discusses the question of "quality," often considered to be obsolete in times of postcolonial and feminist criticism, and, second, it provides a brief description of the different levels of aesthetic judgement. Third, it outlines the connection between different standards of quality and musical analysis since the nineteenth century. Fourth, an examination of quality judgements about works by female composers highlights the standards applied. The concluding perspective on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries points to a variety of possible criteria which, according to the author's hypothesis, can already be assumed for the (more remote) past. While "value judgement" basically implies a more or less positive or negative distinction of a certain phenomenon, "quality" might also designate the sum of specific characteristics of an object, regardless of its value. The article pleads for a considered reintroduction of a subjective perspective (including value judgement) into analysis and music historiography, especially where gender issues are concerned - in full awareness that there is no absolute value standard in art, that music cannot be weighed "like sugar and butter," to quote Virginia Woolf.