Alex Ross ponders the death of music criticism
NewsThe Royal Musical Association marks its 150th anniversary with a conference in London this week.
Keynote speaker will be the New Yorker critic Alex Ross. His paper is titled: ‘The End of the Family Line: On the Probable Death and Possible Transfiguration of Music Criticism’.
I look forward to reading it when it’s available.
He’s probably right. One of the top opera reviewers is “Broadway World”. Oh the humanity.
Through the past century, power of voice and wallet— when it comes to culture— has been invested in the youngest among us.
One example can be seen in Taylor Swift, a popular artist among some adults, and largely beloved by children aged 3-9.
An effect of this is obvious— complexity in material and theme is reduced.
Another, which is partially influenced by the simplicity of subject matter, is the dominance of equivocation / deference to “subjectivity,” and emotional defense of taste.
Today, culture and politics are understood to be one and the same. There’s validity to this, and I don’t want to make political arguments. But, I can’t think of a way to approach an aspect I think is influential without alluding to it: identity sensitivities rendering criticism as hostility.
It can be difficult to really make any critical assessment without confronting questions of what identities and privilege a creator and even their audience comprise. And it can be professionally perilous to level criticism against work that comes from someone whose identity is vigilantly defended.
Taylor Swift’s key fanbase is between the ages of 3 to 9? That’s like saying the sky is green!
“Nearly three-fourths of avid Taylor Swift fans are white, and roughly half of her supporters are millennials, live in the suburbs and are Democrats.”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/marisadellatto/2023/03/14/more-than-half-of-us-adults-say-theyre-taylor-swift-fans-survey-finds/
I shall further quote critic Greg Sandow:
“The silly thing this critic believed was that pop music is sloppy and careless, that nobody involved with it cares about quality or fine details. What other silly things – about pop culture, and, in this post, specifically about pop music – have people said.
“Here’s a good one, from Julian Johnson’s book Who Needs Classical Music?
‘Our collective fascination with the imagery of youth and youthfulness effectively dissolves any boundaries between the cultural diets of children, adolescents, and adults. Seven year-old children and thirty-seven year-old adults are equally fascinated, it seems by a musical culture defined almost exclusively [my emphasis] by the images of singers between the ages of seventeen and twenty-seven.
“Tell that to Bruce Springsteen, Annie Lennox, Elvis Costello, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, and countless others, who sell records, attract large crowds, and get widespread media coverage, none of which Julian Johnson apparently notices. (Well, OK, he’s British, so maybe we’d have to rejigger some of my list.) Johnson might as well saying that the sky is green. He’s a respectable academic, a lecturer in music at Oxford . His book is published by Oxford University Press. He argues that classical music has, in the end, a transcendent ethical value. And yet he says things about pop music that are irresponsible, by any ethical or academic standard, things that aren’t even remotely true.
https://www.artsjournal.com/sandow/2008/02/a_serious_problem_2.html
The point is, that pop music asks for a very different perception type. It is, in the FIRST place, entertainment. Some types of pop can be made carefully and nicely, and there are popsongs which have a psychological depth comparable with classical music. But the nature of its aesthetics, and the quality of the sentiment expressed, can not stand comparison with classical music. In artistic terms, the whole genre is substandard in comparison with art music (= classical music). But in psychological terms – and this is another context – it can be as expressive and meaningful to listeners as art music.
That pop is loved by far, far, far more people than art music is never an argument for its artistic qualities, since most people have, by nature, low standards of quality concerning works of art. It this were not so, we would have so many more great works of art and so many more great musical works and so many more superb musical performers. This is a normal state of affairs: human society is like a pyramid: the more evolved, the smaller the numbers. In the arts, this is often seen as ‘unfair’ and ‘elitist’, but who could blaim Nature?
So, Johnson merely states a fact of life, and Sandow simply misses the point altogether.
Pop music is loved for its resonance with one’s own emotional and musical level of development. The same with classical music, and with sonic art. And one can appreciate very different types of music, also very different in artistic and emotional standards, because we have different bits of emotional needs in our psyche. But it helps to understand their nature.
Johnson is wrong to say that almost all pop stars are between the ages of 17 and 27, just like how I would be wrong to say the bulk of the classical repertoire is Spanish!
Probably he wanted to make the point that pop music is a product of ‘youth culture’ which only emerged in full swing after WW II. Almost all ‘entertainment music’, which is meant for the masses, is meant for juvenile people with a still undeveloped taste, and they are mostly under-thirties. Nothing wrong with that. And there are people who remain youngsters even far into middle age.
Just to be clear: I don’t want to denigrate pop music, I merely observe the psychological fact that the genre as a whole is, in comparison with art music, very substandard. (For lovers of pop music: ‘denigrate’ means ‘put down’.)
What has Taylor Swift to do with the decline in music criticism? It’s the death of newspapers and magazines added to declining readership and hence advertising that is squeezing out journalism.
When these music critics kept rehashing “shimmering” or “strapping” and such, it’s no wonder some of us stopped paying attention long ago. The death of serious music criticism travels in parallel with the death of opera.
When professional critics lament the death of criticism, what they are lamenting is the death of their own voice as the authoritative, revered voice.
Criticism is alive and well, just look at this site and the diverse commentators and comments expressed here on a daily basis.
What professionals hate is that “everybody IS a critic”, when THEY want to be the ONLY critic in town.
But gone are the days when the printed press had a monopoly on the technology of disseminating opinion.
Mr. Ross: Welcome to democracy, true democracy, where everyone’s opinion gets to be freely disseminated to compete with yours, and where acess is no longer controlled by paid, subscription-based elite East Coast newspapers and magazines.
That is why this site is so popular and vital, for all its flaws:
If one wanted to voice one’s criticism to a piece by Alex Ross or Zachary Woolfe, one would need to have a paid subscription to the New Yorker or the NYT, that is the number one barrier of entry: pay to play, or pay to critique!
Already, the New Yorker and the NYT block those who can’t afford a subscription from being heard. That’s the socio-economic barrier.
Then, it is up to the moderators whether your post will make it through. That’s the second socio-cultural barrier: what you can say, and how you say it, have to conform to what the New Yorker and NYT will allow you to say, so there is a lot of self-censorship involved.
That’s the gate-keeping model professional critics want.
“Already, the New Yorker and the NYT block those who can’t afford a subscription from being heard.” My public library offers free on-line access to the NYT; I’m sure others do the same.
Somebody reads the NY Times??!! When did that happen?
Or you can read NYT for free with a library membership.
I always liked reading Ross (maybe more before he became an unstoppable LA booster), and found the work he put in to both research and writing valuable.
Reading the work of a really good critic, whether you agree with them or not (Terry Teachout’s positions drove me insane, but his work was so worth reading) is a great experience that’s at least as worthwhile as the words of the online commentariat.
But yeah, of course he’s probably talking about the death of professional, paid criticism. That marks a cultural change–why shouldn’t he talk about it?
And that flat-earthers can be heard as clearly as everyone else doesn’t always seem like some great step forward.
I never understood the denigrating attitude towards people who say the earth is flat. You can see it, can’t you??!
Sally
Sally, you dare to say what others only think! Who needs Taylor Swift when there’s you?
Exactly!
Sally
Anyone who wants to read The New Yorker or The New York Times obviously doesn’t know:
https://archive.ph/
of which I learned about on this very website!
Yes, I can say what I want without any danger to be fired, and all times I was fired I simply came back. Democracy means that every opinion is as good as any other, so finally the totalitarian power of the over-educated is broken!
Sally
I can state with some certainty that democracy absolutely does not mean every opinion is as good as any other.
Yes but that is merely your opinion.
Sally
Chet, that’s right as far as it goes, but it’s worth asking whether you’re describing a good thing. Along with “everyone’s opinion gets to be freely disseminated” go two related things.
One is that there is no longer paid work for people who have the strongest talents and knowledge-base to write the kind of criticism we can read from authors like GB Shaw, Virgil Thomson, Andrew Porter, Henry Krehbiel, and so many others. Some people might not miss that, but others might.
Another is that “everybody’s music is as good as anybody else’s” – if you can get the likes and the clicks in the marketplace, why should anyone’s opinion matter? If you’re happy with the state of music right now compared to the less “democratic” past, you’re on the right track, though!
You might want to review the paper when you’ve read it rather than the title.
A well known design critic once used his keynote talk to criticise my paper, to be presented next, based purely on the title and abstract. Big mistake.
If you look at the title again you’ll see it’s one of hope.
Many prominent critics spent most of their time writing about new/niche music. The music they wrote about often had tiny audiences, of which a tiny portion read the critics’ writings. Eventually, nobody cared.
Try this instead: lengthy knowledgable reviews of the music that sells out orchestra hall 4 nights in a single week, and focus the writing on whatever on the program caused the sold out house.
In short, don’t be a snob.
Ross had a decent book or two but he drives a lot of the snobbery that dominates classical criticism these days. It’s all lavish tributes to serialist composers and modernist icons while looking down at those who dare compose in a more popular style. Good riddance.
He seems to have had a change of heart. In his ‘The Rest is Noise’ he breaks a lance for quite another way of looking at music history, outside the silly conventional modernist idea of one line from the past into the future defined by the thinking of Schoenberg and Boulez et al. But after that, he returned to that very bigotted idea, which is only still cultivated in completely outdated academic circles, isolated from concert practice.
Are you kidding! Ross was the biggest booster of crappy post-minimalism and the “indie-classical” aesthetic.
Ross is a total wind bag, blown up with his own pomposity. At least one of the daggers in the back of proper music criticism he lodged deep in its long suffering flesh with his own hands. UK based view, btw.
American commentators confuse America with the world. Again.
Music criticism, nowadays, has followed the same route as academia, which is replete with pretentious, sterile talk resembling a form of sophistry designed for insular audiences who paradoxically don’t actually understand much about music, because many of them actually fail to have ears. This, ironically, includes many people involved in musicology. They actually believe that knowing arcane details about music history will give them some special access to the repertoire.
People who wish to better understand classical music should simply listen to it on their own, without judging themselves — perhaps even actually learn an instrument in order to gain more hands-on experience of what music actually is. No amount of criticism has nor ever will help anyone actually understand Beethoven or Bruckner in their essence. Music is not primarily an intellectual pursuit — it is first and foremost an experience that one needs to undergo personally, faithfully, over a whole lifetime.
Correct.
All intellectual effort composers put into their work is a means to an end: a musical vision and that is an emotional one. It is very interesting to analyse the technical workings of a piece of music, but that is only the workings of the means and does not touch the spirit of the work itself.
The “music critics” hired by major publications are largely rank amateurs, hired by corporate types who wouldn’t know a music critic from a ground-hog, and they are usually recommended by the out-going “music critic” – so that their mediocrity continues undisturbed. The nonsense these idiots spew in their reviews is rooted not in musical expertise, but in personal agenda. The art of music criticism is dead.
With all respect to my fellow contributors here, we are very far from the same league as professional critics. We voice our opinions mostly in a shortened manner as befits a blog site. This is almost always our thoughts on just one aspect of a musician, a performance or course of action by managements etc.
I for one regret the end of the days of true critics from my younger years in the UK, those like Andrew Porter, William Mann, John Higgins, Gerald Larner, Michael Kennedy, Conrad Wilson and others whose prose was matched by an in-depth understanding of the material they were reviewing. And it’s not only in music that the art of criticism is being lost. Dilys Powell on film and Kenneth Tynan for drama, for example, were usually ‘must reads’.
So, who are the must-read critics of today? (apart from NL, of course)
At the risk of over generalizing, music critics today seem mostly employed for evaluating new artists, or familiar artists in new (to them) repertoire.
Music criticism at its beginning existed to evaluate new composers and new music, a constant stream of it, and the critic wrote all the while aware that the repertoire was organic and growing. Indeed in Beethoven’s time most critical writing was an evaluation of published sheet music, not live performances. THAT would be an interesting test for today’s music critics.
And so we can smile smugly at the hilarious misfires recounted in Slonimsky’s Lexicon of Musical Invective of beloved works which are now the standard repertoire (remember, Slonimsky only included the hilarious misfires), or the endlessly repeated (in concert and CD program notes) “wrong” dismissals by Eduard Hanslick of Wagner and Tchaikovsky, but we have to acknowledge that taking on the analysis and criticism of brand new music in Hanslick’s time, based only on a hearing without the availability of a score, took intelligence and bravery because it was still an era of great and important music. That is why it is interesting, after all these decades, to read the newspaper criticism of Ernest Newman of such works as Berg’s Wozzeck or Schönberg’s Five Pieces when the ink was still wet. He had no idea whether these particular works would live on or not, and no reason to suspect that they would, but he well knew it was an era when SOMEONE’S works would live on, as would the initial critical thought about it, so the stakes were pretty high to write informed and intelligent criticism. Today’s critics have the luxury of being able to assume that the new music they do hear and write about is of an era when and in the context that so little of it will live on that the future will neither laugh at them for getting it wrong, or lavish praise on them for getting it right.
They aren’t biting their nails worried that someone will make fun of them for what they write.
It would be great if ONLY Alex Ross stopped being a critic. Guy is almost single-handedly responsible for boosting so much awful music and composers over the years. From his writings back then, you’d have thought Nickuhly was the greatest living American composer and the LA Phil the most daring forward-thinking orchestra in the world. Can’t stand the guy.
In the 19th century, when famous and super-rich opera composer Meyerbeer had a premiere, a couple of days before the performance he invited all the important Parisian critics to a very generous banquet and made sure they had a good time, sprinkled with champagne. They always wrote enthusiastic reviews, which ensured forthcoming nice evenings. Those were the days.