Report From the Underground: Music Criticism

Last month, I wrote what ostensibly turned out to be the introduction to a problem I’ve been pondering lately, that is, why have I not seen any music criticism on par with more established criticisms, such as literary and art? Of course, the answer may be just that I haven’t been exposed to real music criticism, that it inhabits the concealed corners of academia, relegating this question to the dust bin of ambitious yet frightfully uninformed inquiries, and actually some of the research I’ve been doing and some of the comments people have sent in make me think something along these lines is true, but still, I wonder why something more public doesn’t exist, and so we continue…

The previous topic, music criticism, i.e. real analysis, as a possible outgrowth of music reviewing, ran up against a teleological brick wall - music reviews have a specific economic purpose with particular constraints such that reviews aren’t really the best forum for analysis, especially when your main goal is trying to interest (or possibly dissuade) people. While there are many other problems with music reviewing that do in fact inhibit any real inquiry, from a tendency for some to sheathe their comments in mere gimmickery to the amount of tripe we often have to examine to people, myself included, just simply relying on the biography-description-recommendation tack, which is of course the most effective from a commercial standpoint, all these compositional options are non-essential; however, none can dispute what the actual purpose of a review is, leaving it as the sole bearer of the blame, and while I want to lament it for its lack of verdure, perhaps I was a bit too hard on our beloved avocation. Perhaps I shouldn’t blame it for being what it is anymore than I should blame, say, a stapler for, well, being only good for stapling. I suppose if I really wanted to write something more substantial, I’d stop writing about new records, and maybe that’s something to look into.

This idea of economics inhibiting real investigations (“real” as opposed to the reviews being just glorified advertisements) is, I believe, a very foundational one though. The more I look at how the - well, let me begin with my original train of thought, and then hopefully it will be easy to see where I ended up. When I first thought of this topic, I had immediately rejected a few answers out of hand, not even bothering to write about them then - like music being aural and literature and art being visual, so how can one write, a visual medium!, effectively about sounds?, which I still think isn’t a serious enough objection to warrant anything more than a passing snort of derision, but one rejected answer to my query looks somewhat promising the more I looked at it: that interesting music hasn’t been around as long as interesting literature, therefore literature had a heads up in the criticism department. One moment of thought though will raise a few supercilious brows. Ives and Schoenberg were contemporaries of Joyce, so this can’t be, and of course that is rightly so, and really, one doesn’t need music to be interesting (“interesting” in the extremely elitist way I too often use it) to analyze it, it just makes it easier if it’s more complex or different.

However, one thing literature has had for far longer than music was a viable delivery system to the masses. Since roughly the 1400s, The West has had the means to disseminate its ideas, relatively cheaply and efficiently, while music had to wait for fin de siecle technology to allow it the same means of transmission. Even then, records don’t become big business for more than a score of years with Tin Pan Alley’s focus moving from sheet music to records to the eventual shifting of record producing to what becomes the record industry. So, where people could discuss written works in a public forum for hundreds of years, music’s only had eighty years for it to be the focus of public consideration.

While classical music and operas and folk music and more existed and could be discussed prior to sound recording technology, the ability for large groups of people to hear the exact same thing obviously didn’t exist, so even though live music could have been discussed, each performance was an entity unto itself and therefore there was no definitive example of the musical piece to analyze. Furthermore, unless that certain piece was being played where you were, you might never hear it. Through technology, and the economics that helped that technology circulate to large amounts of people, the basis was set for there to be something public that could be the focus of a discipline called music criticism.

Lit Crit as we know it though, has only become an academic subject within the last fifty years, but before that, there is a rich history of literary criticism in the public sphere, Twain, Orwell, etc. and even today publications like The New York Times Book Review, while not necessarily cutting edge, are still a decent mass forum for literary discussion, but maybe then this is because of the image books have, that is, books are an intellectual medium and music is mainly for pleasure, and so book reviews might necessarily contain more analysis merely because of the way culture views the objects being reviewed. Possible. Regardless, we find ourselves back at the beginning of my original question, no better for having asked it, for searching for real criticism in the public sphere seems to have been a foolish jaunt.

Next month, for sure this time, we’ll look at the emergence of what can probably be called music criticism in academia.