Words & Music

Jazz writer Howard Mandel, one of the bloggers over at ArtsJournal.com (my "other" employer,) spent a couple of days last week ruminating on the uneasy relationship between musicians and music critics. The catalyst for the discussion was the New York-based composer John Zorn, who is (in)famous for requesting that critics not review any of his premieres. Mandel's take on Zorn's aversion to press: "He's of the opinion. I'm afraid, that music journalists are ill-informed and demeaning, unnecessary and maybe parasitical, not just unsupportive but actually obstacles to the realization of musicians' potentials."

Now, Zorn may be unusual in that he is brazen enough to actually attempt to block writers from writing about his work, but I would have to say that his low opinion of critics as expressed by Mandel is shared by a large number of performing musicians. To make matters worse, with newspapers slashing their budgets for cultural coverage and Americans getting their news from an ever-broadening array of sources, many arts writers are enduring a painful discussion of whether they are rapidly becoming irrelevant. (You won't hear many musicians offering sympathy in that regard, either. Since these are the same writers who have spent decades writing lazy, repetitive, uninformed articles predicting the coming irrelevance of classical music, which has yet to occur, it feels somewhat appropriate that they should be forced to face the prospect themselves.)

Still, for musicians to dismiss the role of those who write about music is to write off one of the best methods we have of communicating about an art form that is notoriously difficult to explain. I'm not really talking here about concert reviews, per se, since I do tend to come down on the side of those who believe morning-after reviews to be largely irrelevant exercises, unread and unregarded by an increasingly large percentage of our audience. I'm talking about the sadly dwindling number of serious music writers who seek a broader perspective than those of us on stage can afford to have, and who make our listening richer with their insights.

Writing about music is an exceedingly tricky business, not least because of the widely varying degree of expertise of the modern audience when it comes to listening. Write too technically, or with too dry and academic a tone, and you'll insure that your work is never read by anyone outside a conservatory classroom. Take the opposite approach, and you'll likely be accused by musicians and other writers of either talking down to your readership, or dumbing down a serious art form. It's a delicate balancing act, and a dilemma that goes a long way towards explaining why musicians find it so easy to dismiss their local critic.

Still, in an age when the most sensationally self-promoting blowhards find it absurdly easy to score book deals, there remain a number of writers pumping out intelligent, eminently readable essays and books on music. Minnesota's own Michael Steinberg has been reliably producing beautifully written primers on symphonies, concertos, and the like for years now. (Full disclosure: Michael is a good friend, an occasional Inside the Classics co-conspirator, and he is married to the concertmaster of the Minnesota Orchestra.) Justin Davidson, formerly of Newsday and now on staff at New York magazine, churns out fantastically readable reporting and analysis of the music world as seen from the Big Apple. And the indispensable Alex Ross of the New Yorker has blown away the field this year with his recently released tome on the music of the 20th century, The Rest Is Noise.

Ross has a knack for the kind of writing that makes you feel as if someone has reached into your brain and finally arranged your own thoughts and feelings into a coherent verbal form. He doesn't imply that you're a craven idiot because the music of Milton Babbitt sounds to you like a wall of impenetrable noise; instead, he calmly explains what that wall of noise sounds like from a different mental angle, and leaves it to the reader to decide whether the new angle is interesting enough to prompt a reexamination of the music itself.

This type of music writing - let's call it accessible intellectualism - is, to my mind, far more valuable than the overly simplistic, conversational tone adopted by a lot of American critics in an effort to engage readers that have never stepped inside a concert hall. (Why they feel the need to engage such a demographic is beyond me. It's as if a baseball beat writer wrote every article with an eye towards insuring that cricket fans would understand every word.) It's also a lot more fun to read than the endless petty sniping that passes for music criticism in places like London, where the professional critics are increasingly indistinguishable in tone from the shrieking bloggers who are so reviled by "real" journalists.

I guess the bottom line is that I understand why John Zorn doesn't see any upside to having his music reviewed in print. (To be perfectly honest, I live in fear of the day that one of our two local dailies sends someone to review one of our Inside the Classics concerts for much the same reason. A good review probably wouldn't result in more than a handful of additional ticketbuyers, whereas a review from an old-school critic that accused us of ruining classical music with silly jokes and a lack of appropriate respect could do a lot of damage.) But rather than shut out the press entirely, it seems like it would behoove us as musicians to instead find ways to encourage more and better writing about the music we play.