This article offers a series of experiments exploring the potential for ‘distant reading’ in French music criticism. ‘Distant reading’, a term first coined by literary theorist Franco Moretti, refers to quantitative approaches that allow for new insights into a large corpus of texts by aggregating data. While the main corpus employed here is the Revue et gazette musicale de Paris (1831–1877), I also use secondary corpora of reviews of Félicien David's Herculanum in 1859, Berlioz's reviews of Gluck and Beethoven in the Journal des débats and reviews that mention Gabriel Fauré in the Library of Congress’ Chronicling America database. My experiments employ a text analysis tool named Voyant, built by Geoffrey Rockwell and Stéfan Sinclair, thereby also offering a basic introduction to the range of visualizations employed in distant reading. My experiments focus on areas in which quantitative methods are particularly well suited to generating new knowledge: corpus-wide visualizations and queries, moving beyond traditional text searching, investigations of music critics’ authorial styles and detecting sentiment in reviews, and finally, to geographies of music criticism.

本文提供了一系列实验，探索法国音乐批评中“远距离阅读”的潜力。“远距离阅读”是文学理论家弗兰科·莫雷蒂（Franco Moretti）首次创造的术语，指的是通过聚合数据对大量文本进行新见解的定量方法。虽然这里使用的主要语料库是Revue et Gazette musice de Paris （1831-1877），但我还使用了 1859 年Félicien David 的Herculanum评论的辅助语料库，Berlioz 在Journal des Débats中对 Gluck 和 Beethoven 的评论以及提到 Gabriel的评论国会图书馆编年史中的福雷数据库。我的实验使用了一个名为 Voyant 的文本分析工具，由 Geoffrey Rockwell 和 Stéfan Sinclair 开发，因此也提供了对远距离阅读中使用的可视化范围的基本介绍。我的实验侧重于定量方法特别适合生成新知识的领域：语料库范围的可视化和查询，超越传统的文本搜索，调查音乐评论家的作者风格和检测评论中的情绪，最后是地理音乐批评。