Report From the Underground: Music Criticism

When I first started writing this series of columns on music criticism, the original intent was, or rather the original questions I wanted answered were: Why are reviews the end all and be all of music discussion in the public sphere and in academic circles, why was there no such thing as music criticism? I began an inquiry into the first question in the hopes that I could discover a way for reviews to be more than reviews, for them to be real criticism, but what I was missing was the reason reviews exist in the first place: most serve an economic function, or, in the case of magazines like FakeJazz, to expose people to music they might not have otherwise known about. Along with some insights into how the music industry works and how we listen to music, the conclusion I came to last time was that there’s nothing in the public sphere that should make me think there is serious discussion of any media: movie and book reviews are almost just forums for plot exposition and even more prestigious magazines (NYT) are just fancier versions of this.

So, ha ha, the joke’s on me, I guess, but that still leaves the second question, which requires a little more effort than the armchair theorizing I engaged in before. So, after confirming my suspicions over the state of Music Criticism, that is, the lack of a cohesive discipline, by talking to an actual music student, I decided to e-mail a few professors and ask them what they thought.

To get the side of the story from the music studies end, I e-mailed Fred Frith, (Does he need an introduction? Well, formally of progressive rock bellwether Henry Cow and The Art Bears among countless other compositional activities and collaborations) who now teaches classes at Mills, one of the more renowned music schools in the US. He was immensely helpful in answering my ill-informed questions, the major one being: Is there an actual thing called Music Criticism and what is its scope? “There is, but it's applied in very specific and specialist circles - mostly academic, and invariably concerning serious "classical" music. Music has quite an array of analytical techniques, they are the staple of university musicologists. I'm sure you could find equivalents, along the lines of how many times certain words appear in Shakespeare, for example!” This actually doesn’t seem so far removed from the conservatism that plagues lit departments, where, invariably, 95% of the classes will be dedicated to old literature and theories. So, music schools do have a kind of music criticism, it’s just that it’s very backward looking, even jazz is analyzed “rather conservatively”. As a bright spot though, Frith does say that depending on the context (such as his classes) more vibrant forms of music are discussed.

I also e-mailed Jonathan Sterne, a musician and cultural studies professor at my alma mater, The University of Pittsburgh; Sterne backed up what Frith had to say about criticism in music schools, “Music criticism in Music Departments means the criticism of canonical music, or noncanonical music in canonical styles (by transcribing it, for instance, which would tell you almost nothing of significance about a rock song).” However, this is not the only place to look. “There is...a whole field called ethnomusicology that encompasses both musical anthropology and the ethnographic study of music in the United States...And there are individuals in Music departments who have crossed over. The first major feminist text in academic musicology was published in 1991 (to give you an idea of how far behind that field was)....” While Sterne cautions that “for me and lots of other cultural studies music scholars, music does NOT follow in the steps of literary criticism, but it does share some of the same theoretical points of reference (especially French and German authors).”

What I’ve been looking for all along then is under the aegis of ethnomusicology and, to some extent, cultural studies. Not very surprising, I suppose. Next time I will try an look at some of the literature of the discipline.