Professional Documents
Culture Documents
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Criticism.
Music criticism may be defined broadly or narrowly. Understood narrowly, it is a
genre of professional writing, typically created for prompt publication, evaluating
aspects of music and musical life. Musical commentary in newspapers and other
periodical publications is criticism in this sense. More broadly, it is a kind of
thought that can occur in professional critical writing but also appears in many
other settings. In this broader sense, music criticism is a type of thought that
evaluates music and formulates descriptions that are relevant to evaluation; such
thought figures in music teaching, conversation about music, private reflection,
and various genres of writing including music history, music theory and biography.
I. General issues
II. History to 1945
III. Since 1945
FRED EVERETT MAUS (I), GLENN STANLEY (II, 1), KATHARINE ELLIS (II, 2),
LEANNE LANGLEY (II, 3 (i)), NIGEL SCAIFE (II, 3 (ii)), MARCELLO CONATI (II,
4 (i)), MARCO CAPRA (II, 4 (ii)), STUART CAMPBELL (II, 5), MARK N. GRANT
(II, 6), EDWARD ROTHSTEIN (III)
Criticism
I. General issues
1. Definition.
2. Subjectivity and objectivity.
3. Critical language.
4. Objects.
5. The historical phenomenon.
6. Limits and the future.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Criticism, §I: General issues
1. Definition.
Although many references to music criticism imply the narrow definition, it is
important to understand criticism broadly in order to see the continuity among
various activities of musical interpretation and evaluation. Professional journalistic
criticism is a specialized, if highly visible, instance of a more widespread
phenomenon. Members of an audience discussing a classical performance during
an interval, piano teachers persuading their students to favour certain styles of
performance and composition teachers responding to student projects all engage
in music-critical discourse, just as fully as the paid critic whose words will appear
in a newspaper or magazine. Again, a composer working on a score, a performer
preparing a performance or a listener at a concert will typically engage in critical
thought, even though they may not speak their thoughts or even formulate their
critical ideas linguistically.
Music criticism does not include every kind of evaluation of music. Music serves
many different purposes, such as worship, advertising, therapy, social dancing,
enhancement of public and commercial spaces and technical development of
performance students. Judgments of the usefulness of music for those purposes
fall outside music criticism, as normally conceived. But the concept is flexible and
it would be rash to delimit it rigidly. And some purposes, uses or functions of
music are relevant to criticism; purposes such as representation and emotional
expression have often figured in music criticism.
European traditions of music criticism centring on concert music and opera
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typically treat music as an art, as do critical traditions worldwide that derive from
European models. In such discourse, music is one of several art forms along with
literature, visual art, architecture, theatre and dance; this assumption reflects a
conceptual formation that is historically and geographically specific. Often, in
music criticism, the central goal is to evaluate and describe music as art, or as an
object of aesthetic experience. Thus the concept of music criticism links with
concepts of art and the aesthetic that are important in European and European-
derived cultures but which have been persistently controversial and difficult within
those cultures. Much complex debate in philosophical discussions of art concerns
appropriate definitions of art and aesthetic experience, and these discussions bear
directly on the nature of criticism (see Philosphy of music).
Criticism, §I: General issues
2. Subjectivity and objectivity.
Music criticism presupposes cultural competence, or what one can call an ‘insider’
role. Someone who makes critical judgments about music, whether as a
professional critic or not, must think about music as a member of some community
to which the music ‘belongs’, a community in which the music is important.
Membership in a musical community is a criterion of the validity of critical thought
about the music of that community. This criterion, although essential, is vague,
leaving room for dispute about whether, for instance, someone with extensive
literary experience may be qualified to evaluate music by virtue of generalizable
expertise in the arts, or whether a more specifically musical background is crucial.
But, however construed in detail, the fact that critical thought originates in the
sensibility of members of a musical or artistic community distinguishes it sharply
from objective or scientific approaches to music, which should be open to practice
by anyone, regardless of musical sensibility. Further, the primary audience of
critical discourse is also delimited by membership in an appropriate community.
Critics write about the music of their own group, for other members of that group.
Critical judgments of music originate in experiences. They depend on experience
of the object of criticism, whether a composition, a performance, or some broader
phenomenon such as a style. Enlightenment thought, which remains influential for
current conceptions of criticism (especially in philosophical aesthetics), tended to
emphasize the separateness and autonomy of individuals. Enlightenment thinkers,
not surprisingly, emphasized the origin of artistic or aesthetic judgments in the
experiences of distinct individuals and then found puzzles in the relationship
between individual subjectivity and the normative character of the judgment: it is
not easy to see how one individual's personal experience can lead to a claim that
is valid for others, a claim that has something like the authority of a statement of
fact. If the critical authority is legitimate, it seems there must be something special
about the critic, or about the experience, that explains the authority.
Some accounts of critical authority, from the Enlightenment on, focus on the
disinterested quality of aesthetic experience: aesthetic experiences can lead to
normative judgments because no personal, contingent, variable traits of the critic
have affected the judgment. Someone who makes a critical judgment can act as a
good representative of a larger audience, able to articulate judgments for them by
eliminating the distinctive feelings that separate the critic from others. Immanuel
Kant, in the best-regarded account of this type, stressed the absence of desire in
aesthetic contemplation as a way of explaining how aesthetic judgments could be
universal. Kant emphasized the contrast between a mere report of personal
pleasure and a judgment of beauty, the latter being free from desire and therefore
deriving from shared, non-contingent human nature. Although experiences of
pleasure and beauty are both subjective, only the judgment of beauty, because of
its freedom from individual idiosyncrasy, carries the implication that others should
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reach the same conclusion. Eduard Hanslick followed this tradition in his
arguments that emotional and bodily responses to music, since they vary with
different individuals, cannot contribute to musical beauty.
Another approach focusses on the special knowledge and training that support a
critical judgment, as when knowledge of music theory and music history are said
to be essential qualifications, for a professional music critic. The music critic, so
conceived, becomes a representative of experienced or cultivated musicians, and
can act as an educator in relation to a larger, diverse audience. A tension arises
between these two approaches, one grounding critical authority in the absence of
individualization, the other grounding critical authority in special knowledge and
training that distinguish the critic from many other people. Issues about critical
authority are not just issues about the proper philosophical account of the practice.
Such issues are internal to musical culture, creating a characteristic ambivalence
about music criticism, not least in its professional forms. Audience members may
wonder why one listener has the authority to make public judgments, and
musicians may wonder why someone who is not a distinguished practising
musician has the authority to judge musicians' work. Ambivalence about the
adequacy of linguistic communication about music casts further doubt on the
authority of criticism.
Music criticism in its professional, public forms emphasizes and perhaps
exaggerates the individualistic aspect of critical thought, separating one person
from the rest of the community, giving a voice to that person and, temporarily at
least, silencing others. Like Enlightenment aesthetics, professional criticism
creates an on-going drama of the isolation of an individual thinker from the rest of
the musical audience and draws attention to puzzles about their relationship. This
extreme individualism is probably misleading as a basis for general reflections on
critical thought; attention to the on-going evaluative and descriptive practices that
pervade other parts of musical life might provide a useful balance. In many
aspects of music education, for instance, teachers communicate critical judgments
as established, communally shared views rather than as products of individual
thought. And critical interpretation and judgment often take place in informal
conversations, through shared development and adjustment of thought rather than
isolated reflection. However, the individualistic conception of criticism matches
some other aspects of European and European-derived musical culture. Critics
resemble composers, solo performers and conductors in their presentation of
articulated, individualized products to a larger community. All these practices
create and sustain shared conceptions of individualized subjectivity. While critical
thought need not be as individualistic and isolating as Enlightenment theory or
professional criticism suggest, the most individualized kinds of criticism are
ideologically congruent with other components of classical music culture.
Criticism, §I: General issues
3. Critical language.
Critical thought can shape experience, performance or composition without
reaching explicit verbal formulation, and can find direct expression in performance,
composition or purchase of concert tickets or recordings. But professional music
criticism usually appears in writing, and other kinds of criticism find linguistic
expression as well.
Music criticism may balance evaluation and description, or it may emphasize one
over the other. Journalistic criticism will almost certainly include clear evaluative
judgments, along with variable amounts of description. Academic discourse, which
often values impersonality, may describe and interpret aspects of music while
withholding explicit evaluation; nonetheless the implicit evaluations are often
obvious, and the interpretative goals of, for instance, analytical writing often qualify
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historical narrative.
The figure of the isolated, prestigious professional music critic, while congruent
with the individualistic aspects of some musical cultures, is also, to some extent, a
product of limited technologies. As new technologies reduce the importance of
print communication, notions of music criticism may shift as well. Electronic
communication, through sites on the World Wide Web, electronic mail distribution
lists and newsgroups have already permitted an enormous increase in
communication among people with shared musical interests; the effects are
particularly striking for popular music fans, who have accepted the new media
avidly. Online, they can share information and opinions rapidly and can quote and
discuss print reviews as soon as they appear. Electronic communication allows
many people to circulate critical thought to an interested audience, an opportunity
previously available only to select professional critics. It also allows for fast-paced
exchange, and for the formation of opinion and perception through the interactions
of conversation, always a possibility in face-to-face interactions but now occurring
on a much larger scale.
Criticism, §I: General issues
BIBLIOGRAPHY
S. Cavell: Must we Mean what we Say? a Book of Essays (New York, 1969) [incl.
‘Music Discomposed’, 180–212; ‘A Matter of Meaning it’]
T. Adorno: ‘Über den Fetischcharakter in der Musik und die Regression des
Hörens’, Zeitschrift für SozialForschung, vii (1938), 321–56; Eng. trans. in
The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. A. Arato and E. Gerhardt (New
York, 1978), 270–99
P. Bourdieu: La distinction: critique sociale du jugement (Paris, 1979; Eng. trans.,
Cambridge, MA, 1984)
J. Burkholder: ‘Museum Pieces: the Historicism Mainstream in Music of the Last
Hundred Years’, JM, ii (1983), 115–34
E. Eisenberg: The Recording Angel: Explorations in Phonography (New York,
1987)
E.T. Cone: ‘The Authority of Music Criticism’, Music: a View from Delft (Chicago
and London, 1989), 95–112
G. Marcus: Lipstick Traces: a Secret History of the Twentieth Century
(Cambridge, MA, and London, 1989)
L. Treitler: Music and the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, MA, and London,
1989)
S. McClary: Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis, 1991)
L. Goehr: The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: an Essay in the Philosophy
of Music (New York and Oxford, 1992)
S.D. Crafts, D. Cavicchi and C. Keil, eds.: My Music (Hanover, NH, 1993)
P. Brett, E. Wood and G.C. Thomas, eds.: Queering the Pitch: the New Gay and
Lesbian Musicology (London and New York, 1994)
J. Kerman: Write all these down: Essays on Music (Berkeley and Los Angeles,
1994)
R. Taruskin: Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (New York and
Oxford, 1995)
G.F. Barz and T.J. Cooley, eds.: Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for
Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology (New York and Oxford, 1996)
S. Frith: Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (Cambridge, MA, and
London, 1996)
G. Marcus: Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes (New York, 1997)
D. Cavicchi: Tramps like us: Music and Meaning among Springsteen Fans (New
York and Oxford, 1998)
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M. Kisliuk: Seize the Dance! BaAka Musical Life and the Ethnography of
Performance (New York and Oxford, 1998)
Criticism
II. History to 1945
1. Germany and Austria.
2. France and Belgium.
3. Britain.
4. Italy.
5. Russia.
6. USA and Canada.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Criticism, §II: History to 1945
1. Germany and Austria.
(i) 18th century.
(ii) 19th century.
(iii) 1900–1945.
Criticism, §II, 1: History to 1945: Germany and Austria
(i) 18th century.
Johann Mattheson inaugurated the German critical tradition, publishing several
periodicals in Hamburg between 1713 and 1740. The prologue to the most
important of them, Critica musica (1722–5), defines criticism as ‘the precise
examination and evaluation of … opinions and arguments in old and new literature
about music … for the elimination of all possible primitive [grob] errors and to
promote greater growth in the science of pure harmony’. Mattheson published
annotated translations of English and French authors, and wrote lengthy reviews
of foreign and German writings on music as well as essays on theoretical,
compositional and aesthetic problems. His criticism includes neither performance
reviews nor critiques of entire compositions as integral works of art, though
specific works are occasionally criticized in order to demonstrate technical errors
(principally in part-writing) and stylistic weaknesses.
Mattheson's emphasis on rhetorical principles for formal organization and for a
unity of affect and figure motivated his inflammatory criticism of word repetitions in
J.S. Bach's cantata Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis (Des poetischen Vorhofes, ii, pt 8,
p.368). This and other equally polemical attacks, for example on Handel's St John
Passion, established a model for the disputatious tone of much subsequent
German criticism. Mattheson argued for dramatic church music; advocated a new
melodic style – practised by himself, Telemann and Handel – as opposed to strict
‘German’ polyphony; and, although wary of the ‘unnatural patchworks’ in Italian
instrumental music, called for a ‘mixed taste’ incorporating aspects of both French
and Italian music. The question of national styles and tastes dominated critical
discourse for much of the 18th century.
Mattheson's approach, expressed in a turgid literary style, was essentially
scientific, and it was soon challenged by new critical perspectives. Leading the
way was Der critische Musikus (Hamburg, 1737–40), a ‘moral weekly’ that was
somewhat less scholarly than Mattheson's journals and directed towards a
broader public. Its editor, Johann Adolph Scheibe, a disciple of Johann Christian
Gottsched, prescribed a critical view informed ‘only’ by ‘good taste’ (preface to
vol.ii), that was predicated on French classical-rhetorical ideals of rationalism and
simplicity, the imitation of nature and truth of expression. Although Scheibe's
(acknowledged) debts to Gottsched are deep, he and later critics with similar
values did not support Gottsched's denial (based on a reading of Batteux's Les
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beaux arts reduits) of the legitimacy of instrumental music. Criticizing the ‘blind
imitators of the Italians’, Scheibe distinguished between ‘taste’ and ‘style’ and
advocated a ‘purity of national [i.e. German] style’ that preserved the principles of
French good taste (Cowart, 1981, p.135). This led him to deplore the ‘unnatural’
qualities in Bach's music, which he admired in many other respects. In
emphasizing expression and good taste, rather than imitation and affect,
Scheibe's writings marked a distinct break with Baroque musical thought.
By 1750 Berlin had replaced Hamburg as the leading centre for criticism. (Only in
the 19th century did music journalism and criticism become permanently
established in southern Germany and Austria.) Topical essays and reviews of
scholarly publications retained their importance, and criticism continued to be
preoccupied with the relative merits of the French and Italian styles, and with the
broader questions of musical taste, unity and meaning. The francophile Friedrich
Wilhelm Marpurg (Der kritischer Musikus an der Spree, 1750) and Johann
Friedrich Agricola, who championed Italy, engaged in bitter polemic. Quantz
pleaded in his essay on flute playing (1752) for a ‘mixed taste’, but most Berlin
critics were conservative, anti-Italian and wary of the emerging Classical styles,
with their increased emphases on contrasts and virtuosity. In the last decades of
the century, critics such as Johann Nikolaus Forkel and Johann Friedrich
Reichardt approached the music of Haydn and Mozart (and even sometimes the
exemplary C.P.E. Bach) with caution, acknowledging its virtues but warning
against the dangers of the style in the hands of less accomplished or more radical
composers. Beethoven's early works confirmed their fears. Although these critics
shared many views with their mid-18th-century counterparts, they did not
consistently invoke such concepts as taste and national style; however, they did
maintain an emphasis on such traditional categories as naturalness, unity and
expressiveness. In the 1770s and 80s Gluck's operas became the subject of a
major debate. Conservatives (especially those connected with the Berlin court)
decried Gluck's lack of invention and expression, and compared him unfavourably
with Graun and J.A. Hasse; other Berlin critics (such as Carl Friedrich Zelter and
Reichardt) championed his reforms. Forkel devoted 150 pages of the first volume
of his Musikalisch-kritische Bibliothek (1776) to polemics against Gluck by various
authors. The attacks on the claims made by Gluck's supporters that his music was
(or should become) a model for the German nation anticipated arguments contra
Wagner a century later.
In part because critical writing in the 18th century focussed on style rather than on
individual works, criticism regularly appeared in non-journalistic publications such
as treatises on performance, counterpoint (Fux, Gradus ad Parnassum, 1725) and
thorough bass (Heinichen, Der General-Bass, 1728), and later in encyclopaedias
(Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie, 1775), aesthetic writings and compositional treatises
(Koch, Versuch einer Anleitung zur Composition, 1782). After about 1750 critical
writing by non-musicians such as K.W. Ramler, Nicolai and Lessing appeared in
publications of a general scholarly and aesthetic nature; their work, together with
the minimal but slowly increasing coverage of music and musical life in daily
newspapers in major northern cities, introduced the critical discussion of music to
the non-professional reader in Germany.
Johann Adam Hiller's Wöchentliche Nachrichten und Anmerkungen, die Musik
betreffend (Leipzig, 1766) laid the groundwork for future music journalism and
criticism by introducing non-critical information about new books and printed
music, musicians, public concerts, and musical activities at courts and churches;
performance critiques (usually sympathetic); and brief evaluative commentary
(usually positive) on new compositions, as well as occasional long reviews of
operas or instrumental works. In later criticism such commentary often fell under
the rubric Rezension, a term earlier critics had used for reviews of scholarly
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Freunde der Tonkunst (1824); it contained essays on Bach (notably the St John
Passion), Handel and other composers, some of which first appeared in the AMZ.
Rochlitz's discussion of Bach's style – notably his appreciation for Bach's
counterpoint in the AMZ essay Vom Geschmack an Sebastian Bachs
Compositionen besonders für das Clavier – displays remarkable insights clearly
expressed and free from Romantic gushing. Schumann, Wagner, Eduard Hanslick
and many other critics also republished their music journalism in book form.
Collections of essays, biographies and work-orientated monographs became
important vehicles for criticism in the 19th century.
(b) Newspaper criticism and feuilletons.
In the late 18th century the Vossische Zeitung, a political newspaper in Berlin,
began regular coverage of music with an emphasis on performance. Its first
distinguished critic was J.C.F. Rellstab; his son, Ludwig, became the paper's
music editor in 1826. The rapid growth of music journalism, especially after the
relaxation of censorship laws in the mid-1800s, gave rise to a new critical genre,
the feuilleton, derived from French journalistic practice (see 2(i), below). The writer
of the feuilleton could exercise great power. Wagner, a master feuilletonist and
opponent of most criticism, wrote: ‘It is the feuilleton that creates music’.
Newspaper criticism was largely non-technical, focussing on stylistic and aesthetic
questions and emphasizing pithy evaluation rather than elucidation. Hugo Wolf's
remark, in a review of Liszt's symphonic poems, that there was ‘more intelligence
and sensibility in a single cymbal crash in a work of Liszt than in all of Brahms's
three symphonies’ (Wiener Salonblatt, 27 April 1884) illustrates the sarcastic and
often cutting tone adopted by many feuilletonists. Wolf's broadside was aimed as
much at Eduard Hanslick, opponent of Liszt and Brahm's leading critical advocate,
as at the composer himself.
A new critical approach that considered musical works in relation to social
institutions, socially determined cultural values and political trends developed in
the feuilleton and in journals devoted to general culture (e.g. Zeitung für die
elegante Welt), as well as in popular and scholarly music journals. Heinrich
Heine's essays on Mendelssohn and Liszt for the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung in
the 1830s are among the first and best of their kind. Wagner attracted particular
attention from such critics as early as the 1840s: themes of nationalism, religion
and philosophy, and anti-Semitism (in the operas and the essays) in all prbability
more interesting to readers of the general press than questions of musical style,
structure and aesthetics. As early as the 1820s, and increasingly in the years
leading up to the revolutions of 1848, cultural and national destiny were viewed by
critics such as A.B. Marx and Franz Brendel as a symbiosis. In the decade after
World War I the controversy between the Weimar liberal Paul Bekker and the
reactionary nationalist Hans Pfitzner about the future of German music reflected a
wider debate about the future of German society. The feuilletonistic tradition was
the wellspring for the music criticism of Theodor Adorno, who combined social
theory (and journalistic wit) with detailed discussion of immanent music content.
However, the scholarly complexity of Adorno's writing was worlds apart from the
feuilleton.
(c) Critiques of criticism.
Until the advent of fascism, German music criticism had two continuing
preoccupations: criticism itself, and the concept and problem of progress
(Fortschritt) (see §(d), below). The legitimacy of criticism per se was closely linked
to the question of criteria and standards. As early as 1752 Quantz in the Versuch
einer Anweisung die Flöte traversiere zu spielen described the arbitrary way
criticism was usually practised. In 1802 H.G. Nägeli published a long essay in the
AMZ, addressed to reviewers for the journal, in which he attempted to determine
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norms for sound and fair criticism. Others discussed difficult questions of the
legitimacy of anonymous reviews, of reviews of works published by the firms that
also published the journals in which the review appeared, and of achieving a
balance of subjectivity and objective standards (if, in light of Kant's critical writings,
any notion of objective standards could be maintained). Under the influence of
Kant, Reichardt printed numerous music examples in his work critiques so that
musically literate readers could assess the basis of his judgments and form their
own. He also published excerpts from Kant's Kritik der reiner Vernunft on the
problem of a theory of artistic taste (Musikalisches Kunstmagazin, ii, 1791, p.65).
The Hegelians Marx and Brendel solved the problem of subjectivity by appealing
to the objectivity of historical progress. In the first issue of the Berliner allgemeine
musikalische Zeitung Marx justified a new music journal by arguing that the
Kantian perspective of the AMZ had outlived its usefulness. Nevertheless, Marx
acknowledged the essential subjectivity of criticism by publishing several reviews
of the same work, a practice also adopted in the important journal Caecilia (1824–
48).
The Neue Zeitschrift für Musik was conceived in part as a critique of criticism:
Schumann founded the journal in 1834 to combat the conservatism and low
critical standards of his personal antagonist Heinrich Fink, Rochlitz's successor at
the AMZ. Under the rubric ‘Journalschau’, the first ten issues of the Neue
Zeitschrift reviewed the work of its competitors. In his announcement of the new
journal (Der Planet, 21 March 1834) Schumann issued a summary judgment:
What, then, are the few present musical journals? Nothing but
playgrounds for ossified systems, from which, even with the best of
will, hardly a drop of the sap of life can be pressed, nothing but relics
of aged doctrines to which adherence is more and more openly
denied, nothing but one-sidedness and rigidity … individual,
eccentric opinions, prejudices, fruitless personal bickering and
partisanship so loathsome to the better young artists. None of this
number, with the possible exception of the Caecilia, is capable of
promoting the true interests of music.
Schumann's emphasis on professionalism – that is, on musicians rather than
dilettantes as critics – influenced the increasing trend in this direction after 1850. It
was further bolstered by the development of academic positions in music, with
professors such as Hanslick doubling as critics. In the late 1800s Hanslick and
other professional critics wielded far more power than writers for music trade
journals in shaping public opinion and influencing the establishment of permanent
repertories. Notwithstanding the literary qualities and the musical acumen of
Schumann's criticism, both his originality and his contributions to the development
of music criticism have been overemphasized; his literary conceits belonged more
to the past than to the future of criticism.
As the influence of critics increased, composers and performers grew ever more
sensitive to the real or imagined impact criticism could have on their careers. The
Gazette musicale de Paris (which reported on and was read in Germany) was
founded in 1834 by the publisher Maurice Schlesinger to give composers a
chance to write criticism; in the first number Liszt attacked critics as shallow and
ignorant and suggested they be subjected to knowledge and ability tests. In the
late 1840s a commission was formed by the Berlin Tonkünstler-Verein to consider
appeals from musicians who felt that they had been treated unfairly by critics; its
judgments were printed in the Neue Berliner Musikzeitung (Kirchmeyer, 1965,
p.237).
(d) The question of progress.
The concern with progress is closely associated with the critical agendas of
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Wagner and Brendel, Schumann's successor at the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik,
champion of Wagner and Liszt, proponent of New German music drama and
programme music, enemy of Brahms and Hanslick. Wagner's criticism constitutes
not only a defence of his own music and theory but also a critique of contemporary
German musical culture – musical style and values, notably with respect to opera,
performing practice, and musical and theatrical institutions – with unequivocal
recommendations for their reform. (Marx and other liberal mid-century writers also
called for a reform of musical institutions.) Brendel utilized the historical style-
critical essay, rather than the work Rezension, to make Hegelian arguments about
the exhaustion of tradition and the historical necessity of the genres and styles
that he and his colleagues advocated. Brendel's influence was great; he did much
to polarize German musical thought, yet also helped to identify the primary
aesthetic and stylistic problems in the decades after 1850.
The debate about progress began in the 1820s and 30s with the praise for Weber
and attacks on Spontini, as well as a less polemical discussion calling for reform
of operatic institutions and the creation of a truly German opera. Marx, like
Brendel and Wagner, posited Beethoven as a model for a future German music
that had to adjust to new social conditions and recognize the stylistic and aesthetic
advances he had achieved. Even Marx's criticism of earlier music was informed by
a view of history and progress: he declared Graun's Der Tod Jesu (which had
never disappeared from the concert repertory) inappropriate for a new musical
and social period, in contrast to Handel's oratorios and Bach's Passions which had
retained their value. Schumann's campaign against the empty virtuosity of
contemporary pianists (and the lack of a serious critical voice opposing them) was
driven by a concern for the future of German music in the wake of Beethoven's
and Schubert's deaths, and the consciousness that a period in German music had
come to an end. Yet Schumann, too, viewed Beethoven as the primary source
from which music could continue to rejuvenate itself. The dominance of the idea of
progress at mid-century can be measured by two examples: in 1846 Otto Lange, a
lead writer for the Neue Berliner Musikzeitung, proclaimed progress as the
standard for criticism (although a year later he attacked Rienzi for being too
radical), while the young Hanslick, invoking Fortschritt, praised Tannhäuser and
proclaimed Wagner ‘the greatest dramatic talent among the living
composers' (Wiener allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, vi, 1846, p.590), words he
no doubt later regretted.
For Lange, and for conservative critics such as the mature Hanslick and his
student Robert Hirschfeld, who was more sympathetic to Wagner, stylistic
innovation that disregarded the preservation of supra-historical structural
principles and aesthetic values, embodied principally in the music of Beethoven
and Mozart, did not constitute progress. The historical relativism of this view,
especially evident in Hanslick's dislike for most pre-Classical music, either did not
occur to the conservatives or did not disturb them.
Criticism, §II, 1: History to 1945: Germany and Austria
(iii) 1900–1945.
The problem of progress assumed increased urgency towards the turn of the
century, when the mature works of Strauss and Mahler began to appear, and
intensified after Zemlinsky and other radical innovators emerged. General
newspapers were the most significant arena for the often bitter debate about new
music, in which composers themselves sometimes joined (e.g. Schoenberg's
essay on ‘Brahms the progressive’). In larger cities, notably Berlin and Vienna,
critics engaged in intra-city polemics with political dimensions: those writing for
liberal and leftist newspapers (many of them Jews) generally sympathized with
new styles (although the atonal and 12-note music of the Schoenberg group
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presented problems for such writers as Guido Adler, Bekker and Alfred Einstein),
while critics of right-leaning newspapers opposed the musical avant garde and not
infrequently supported their attacks with nationalistic arguments and anti-Semitic
invective (see Botstein, 1985, p.1298 on Mahler criticism in Vienna). In ‘Arnold
Schönberg, der musikalische Reaktionär’ (1924), Hans Eisler opposed the
formalism and bourgeois character of the music of his former teacher; the essay
inaugurated the German Marxist critique of the musical avant garde, which after
World War II found its principal home in the German Democratic Republic. Ernst
Bloch (who also lived in the east after his return from exile) and Adorno (who
returned to West Germany) were the principal practitioners of an idiosyncratically
Marxist music criticism and philosophy associated with the ‘Frankfurt School’ of
social research.
Because of their immediacy, performance reviews of new works in general
newspapers were at least as important as Rezensionen; the latter appeared more
commonly in specialist publications. Yet even scholarly journals did not ignore the
controversies, and new publications such as Melos and Musikblätter des Anbruch
advanced the modernist cause. Melos was founded in 1920 by Hermann
Scherchen, who wrote a thunderous denunciation of Pfitzner in the first volume,
yet encouraged dissenting views as long as they remained within a general
philosophical consensus; the journal became a forum for the Schoenberg-
Stravinsky debate that occasioned Adorno's first published venture into music
criticism (‘Über die gesellschaftliche Lage der Musik’, Zeitschrift für soziale
Forschung, 1932), in which he argued that the cultural critique inherent in
Schoenberg's music constituted a progressive element (contrasting with the
reactionary character of Stravinsky's music) independent of the composer's
personal political convictions or his professional associations with mainstream
cultural institutions.
In the years following the Nazis' seizure of power in 1933, leftist, liberal and
Jewish music critics and academicians lost their jobs at newspapers and
universities; many of the most prominent liberal and Marxist critics (Adorno, Bloch,
Bekker, Einstein, Eisler, Stuckenschmidt, Weill) went into forced or voluntary exile
(see Nazism). Non-Fascist German music criticism survived principally in the USA
in the form of the scholarly critical essay. Thomas Mann's essay ‘Leiden und
Grösse Richard Wagners’, first given as a lecture in Munich in February 1933 and
published in Germany in April of that year, which precipitated a storm of protest
leading to Mann's exile, was one of the few public expressions of opposition to the
regime. Melos, which like other music journals and newspapers adopted an
increasingly conservative standpoint, was renamed Neues Musikblatt in 1925;
despite its support for Hindemith in the early 1930s, it succumbed to
Gleichschaltung, the centralization of every aspect of cultural life in the Third
Reich. To facilitate control by the Party, and also to save money, other
musicological journals were merged.
For the most part, active intervention by the regime in journalism and criticism was
not necessary; the academic backgrounds of many non-Nazi music critics inclined
them to musical conservatism, from which perspective many found sufficient
common ground with the reactionary nature of Nazi cultural politics to cooperate
(Lovisa, 1993, p.21). Despite the departure of the great majority of critics
intolerable to the Nazis, in 1936 Joseph Goebbels issued his Kritikverbot requiring
a positive discussion of German music and musical life. National Socialist critics
had no business condemning the efforts of National Socialist musicians;
constructive criticism was permissible, but divisiveness was inimical to the unity of
purpose that should motivate every cultural activity, and was therefore
embarrassing to the regime. On the other hand, critical vigilance against the
decadence of modernism and Jewish, Bolshevik, African-American and all other
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century in the criticism of Baudelaire and Champfleury, and into the 20th. The title
of Raguenet's Parallèle des Italiens et des Français (1702) was modelled on that
of a famous work in the 17th-century literary battle of the ancients and the
moderns: Charles Perrault's Parallèle des anciens et des modernes (1692). The
dialogue form of Le Cerf's anonymous response (see below) was rooted in a
French literary tradition also used by Claude Perrault in his De la musique des
anciens (1680), and which later reappeared in pieces as diverse as Diderot's Le
neveu de Rameau (c1760) and Wagner's Une soirée heureuse (1841). The use of
rhetorical and poetic prose characterized not only elaborate polemic outbursts but
also daily opera and concert reviews. In particular, towards the end of the 18th
century a rhetoric had to be devised for absolute music in a country in which
texted music had long prevailed. Writers in the early 19th century dramatized the
symphonies of Haydn in prose laden with metaphorical images intended to
stimulate an appreciation of the expressive content of the music, and
Hoffmannesque tales became a medium for music criticism in the early 1830s. By
contrast, early professional critics such as Fétis cultivated a selfconsciously arid
style in which displays of rhetorical prowess were subordinated to detailed
technical description. A fusion of both approaches may be seen in the work of
Berlioz, which served as a model still detectable in the criticism of Florent Schmitt
in the 1920s.
Criticism, §II, 2: History to 1945: France and Belgium
(ii) National identities and styles.
The importance of critical debate as a part of the assimilation process was aptly
expressed by Jean Chantavoine in the aftermath of Stravinsky's Le sacre du
printemps: ‘In France, music has often been less an object of immediate pleasure,
as in Italy or Germany, than a subject of controversy. It is often by means of their
influence on people's minds, the ideas which they have suggested and the
debates which they have aroused, that particular works have become
established’ (L'année musicale, 1913, p.287). Important debates concerned the
aesthetics of composition, the relationship of music and technology, and the use
of jazz in art music. From the reign of Louis XIV, however, most major debates
related in some way to the upholding of French tradition in contradistinction to
those of first Italy and then Germany. After Belgium's independence in 1830, such
isolationist attitudes were most pronounced in work published in Flemish.
Francophone critics such as Fétis and Paul Collaer, who divided their time
between Belgium and France, represented a more internationalist viewpoint.
Fétis's short-lived Gazette musicale de la Belgique (1833–4) contained a news
section on musical life in Belgium but was otherwise almost indistinguishable from
the French Revue musicale. It was succeeded by journals that emphasized
Belgium's national musics, though a strong injection of Wagnerism characterized
Maurice Kufferath's directorship of Le guide musical from 1890, and by the
outbreak of World War II Belgian journals were leading the way in the production
of multilingual, internationalist criticism.
The polemic on the relative merits of French and Italian operatic styles, which
began in the late 17th century with the writings of Perrin and De Callières,
dominated the 18th century and spilled over into the 19th. Raguenet's pro-Italian
Parallèle praised the French use of the bass voice and dramatic recitative, and the
elegance of their ballets, while somewhat inconsistently apologizing for the
dramatic, harmonic and orchestral boldness of the Italian style, the supremacy of
the castrato voice and the superiority of Italian staging. Le Cerf responded by
defending the classic qualities of Lullian opera, allying himself with the literary
‘ancients’. Nationalist factionalism based on similar arguments returned with the
Querelle des Bouffons of 1752–4. Traditionally ascribed to the catalyzing effect of
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Bernard, La revue musicale closed down in 1940 because it was no longer free to
support composers such as Milhaud, Hindemith and Schoenberg. Le ménestrel
and La revue internationale de musique also suspended publication, the former
permanently. In 1940 Bernard set up L'information musicale, his aims (as revealed
in the first post-war issue of the Revue Musicale) being to devote most of his
space to French composers and to ensure as frequent mention of prohibited
figures as was consistent with retaining permission to print. Despite its subversive
content, it was the only specialist music periodical published during the
occupation.
Criticism, §II: History to 1945
3. Britain.
(i) To 1890.
(ii) 1890–1945.
Criticism, §II, 3: History to 1945: Britain
(i) To 1890.
Among the earliest British writers who consciously sought to persuade readers of
a musical point of view are the philosopher John Case and the composer-editor
Thomas Morley. In Apologia musices (1588) Case was concerned to establish
music's utility in every aspect of life, as well as to analyse its categories and
conventional modes. He defended music in the theatre and instrumental music in
religious practice, and praised contemporary English composers including Byrd,
Morley and Dowland. Morley himself stands out as a propagandist for Italian styles
in his Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (1597), which became a
standard textbook of modern composition.
Throughout most of the 17th century, however, the correct uses of music
remained a matter for debate. Henry Peacham appealed to moderation in The
Compleat Gentleman (1622), advocating music in both church and home on
grounds of historical precedent and efficacy, but also warning against too serious
a devotion to it. Charles Butler's Principles of Musik (1636) likewise pleaded the
cause in both sacred and secular contexts, while sermon and pamphlet writers
weighed in on the Puritan side, firmly rejecting any music but congregational
psalm singing. The issue continued to exercise polemicists after the Restoration,
linked with a newer threat to national identity – music on the stage, especially
Italian opera. Meanwhile conservatism of a different kind surfaced in the treatise
by Thomas Mace, Musick's Monument (1676), which, among other things, pointed
out the decline in performance standards at churches and cathedrals, and
criticized the new French instrumental style that was displacing traditional English
forms. (John Evelyn's diary expressed similar thoughts.) Despite their critical
intent, however, none of these writers deserves the name of music critic as fully as
Roger North, whose range of interests, musical perception and literary approach
were unrivalled. In Memoires of Musick and The Musicall Grammarian (written
c1695–1728; both unpublished at his death) he treated musical life from the
Commonwealth to Purcell and Corelli, as well as musical aesthetics, the nature of
harmony, and musical styles appropriate to church, chamber and theatre. North
filled a comprehensive gap in criticism, though he lacked a contemporary
readership.
Some writers felt antipathy toward theatre music in particular. Arthur Bedford's
The Great Abuse of Musick (1711) is a notorious example, although his argument
for the renovation of music, and hence morals, hinged on a revival of earlier
religious styles and composers: at heart what he distrusted was modern music.
Among commentators better placed to treat the genuine artistic problems of
English opera, Davenant, Motteux, and especially Dryden and Addison had
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reviewer for London journals in the 1780s and 90s. Hawkins, too, aimed at a solid
basis for criticism with his more scientific approach to the facts of music history,
but he wanted to remove the element of ‘capricious’ personal taste that Burney
advocated. In the end it was Burney, much more than any other writer, who raised
the subject of music in British public estimation, giving it intellectual respectability
and literary elegance.
The burgeoning commercial market for music in the 18th century was bound to be
reflected in the periodical press. Philosophical discussions about style and taste
were one thing, the purchase of musical goods quite another. The musician John
Potter wrote theatre and oratorio reviews in the Public Ledger as early as the
1760s. Between the early 1780s and 1795 several London newspapers catered
for the fashionable ‘rage for music’ by publishing headed concert reviews.
Anonymous and frequently susceptible to influence, however, these are a less
reliable guide to public taste than careful analysis of other musical data in the
papers, such as advertisements. More relevant as criticism are the pioneering
music review sections in the monthly magazines, notably the European Magazine
(where Samuel Arnold wrote on new music publications from May 1784 to June
1785), the Analytical Review (to which Mary Wollstonecraft contributed music-
book reviews from 1789 to 1792), the Monthly Magazine (where Thomas Busby
reviewed new printed music from 1796 to 1816) and the British Critic (for which
John Wall Callcott covered music from 1800 to 1805). The earliest English music
periodical with a dedicated critical section was Musical Miscellanies (September–
December 1784), whose monthly ‘Review of New Musical Publications’ covered
printed music and some books. Conducted by J.C. Heck, this journal had special
praise for C.P.E. Bach and Haydn.
In the 19th century consumers and other interested readers increasingly turned to
the press for guidance about what to see and hear, what to sing and play, what to
think: the gap between public access to hearing great music and the ability to read
about it now became huge. This was because, for economic and social reasons,
the British press grew and diversified sooner than musical culture did. Indeed it
was largely the need for copy in this new journalizing age that created musical
writers in the first place; some were genuinely able as critics, others completely
inept. In the 1820s, for the first time, serious music journals had enough buyers to
keep going for more than a few months, and by the 1830s and 40s general news-
and arts papers had to have a music column to keep pace with competitors. The
occupation of music critic varied in status with the repute of the journal, but at
least it offered a viable professional outlet for a skilled writer with musical
knowledge, or a would-be musician unable to pursue performance or composition.
Many critics worked peripatetically, some contributing to more than one paper at a
time. Critical responses were often coloured by private motives; opinions could,
and did, change over time. A continual flux and variety of views was characteristic
of the age. Broadly speaking, reviews of music publications migrated in two
directions – book coverage to the new quarterly literary reviews and printed music
to specialized music journals. Reviews of performances dominated the music
columns in weekly and daily newspapers, and also appeared selectively in the
music press. Extended essays on aesthetic issues or ‘advocacy’ topics, such as
the increased emotional power of music or calls for an English national opera,
appeared first in the magazines and literary reviews, then increasingly in the
music press. Style-critical discussions were rare until after about 1850.
The audience for all this material was naturally mixed in social level and musical
sophistication. In Britain articulate critical opinion on music was never the preserve
of music specialists; still less did the nation have a leading composer-critic as
representative spokesman, or even a continuing creative tradition that could
validate critical authority. Yet any charge of backwardness in 19th-century British
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music criticism is surely naive, and stems from overemphasis on the two most
selfconscious ‘taste-makers’ working in London at mid-century, Henry Chorley and
J.W. Davison. Although neither had much musical training, they managed through
literary connections to get and keep long attachments to major papers (though
both the Athenaeum and The Times were outstripped in circulation figures by
other publications, notably the Daily Telegraph). Their clear authorial identities (in
an environment that was predominantly freelance and anonymous), strong
prejudices and trenchant language (confirmed and repeated in their published
memoirs) simply made them easy targets for a later generation. It is true that their
classical inclinations left them resistant to much new music; their purview was
anyway often limited to performance commentary. The degree to which Chorley
and Davison actually directed popular taste is another question, however: their
strictures on Verdi, for example, seem to have had little impact on the vitality of his
operas in London.
Throughout the century a number of less visible but highly skilled journalists
worked as music critics. Of those who could be called true musical amateurs with
a literary sensibility, Leigh Hunt, Richard Mackenzie Bacon and Thomas Love
Peacock were especially perceptive about English and Italian vocal music. In
Norwich, Bacon founded and edited the first English journal devoted entirely to
music literature and criticism, the Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review (1818–
30), and also wrote on music for two London monthlies. T.M. Alsager brought a
keen mind and open ear to his early crusade for Beethoven in The Times, while
George Hogarth contributed criticism to more than a dozen journals with diverse
readerships. Later, G.B. Shaw, passionate about Mozart and Wagner, equipped
with a biting wit and intent on social reform, aimed above all to provoke; no other
critic approached him in assurance, though his failure to detect real musical merit
(notably in Brahms) was a limitation.
Still more numerous were the music professionals – performers, teachers and
administrators – who, if rather earnest and overly concerned with educating,
nevertheless made substantial contributions to the diffusion of musical ideas in
Britain. William Ayrton on the Italian opera and Edward Taylor on the English
madrigal, Henry Gauntlett on Beethoven and Bach, Joseph Bennett on choral
music, Edward Dannreuther and Francis Hueffer on Wagner, F.G. Edwards on
Mendelssohn and J.A. Fuller Maitland on early music are only a few examples.
Remarkable by virtue of his intellectual qualities, elegant style and wide
sympathies – from Palestrina to Berlioz – was Edward Holmes, who wrote for
seven journals, including the Atlas and Musical Times, besides producing a
landmark book on Mozart. Holmes combined rare musical penetration with
humanistic feeling. On the ever-burning question of whether the English were a
musical people, he argued convincingly that, at least by the 1850s, the nation still
could not claim to love music for its own sake.
After a lull in the 1860s and 70s, the British musical press exploded in the 80s and
90s. Regional criticism bloomed and concert life underwent a transformation. In
the field of aesthetics, there was a world of difference between the early 19th-
century categorizing of a music academic like William Crotch (whose sublime,
beautiful and ornamental styles corresponded roughly to Baroque, Classical and
Romantic music, in descending order of greatness) and newer speculative
thinking about the origin and evolution of music. The latter topic occupied not only
the philosopher Herbert Spencer from the late 1850s but Edmund Gurney, whose
collected essays in The Power of Sound (1880) comprise the most substantial
English musical treatise of the century. Gurney offered remarkable insights into
the structure of melody and the psychology of musical perception. The writer
James Sully took Spencer's ideas further, trying to account for the rising emotional
power of music after Beethoven and Wagner. The dichotomy underlying this
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debate, between form and content, structure and expression, was addressed with
insight by John Stainer in his Oxford professorial lecture (1892); it continued to
challenge musical thinkers in Britain and elsewhere for decades.
Criticism, §II, 3: History to 1945: Britain
(ii) 1890–1945.
In the early 20th century the quantity and diversity of outlets for criticism in Britain
rose dramatically. While almost every other department of musical life became
increasingly professionalized, criticism remained largely the domain of semi-
amateurs and the part-time pursuit of composers, academics and teachers. The
established broadsheet newspapers, The Times, the Sunday Times, The
Observer, the Daily Telegraph and the Morning Post (amalgamated with the Daily
Telegraph in 1937), continued to provide substantial coverage of musical events
and associated issues while the newer tabloids favoured brief opera and concert
notices. Among provincial newspapers the Birmingham Post and the Manchester
Guardian were most significant, containing contributions from Ernest Newman,
Eric Blom and Neville Cardus.
Shaw relinquished his position as music critic in 1894, a year that marked a
watershed in British music criticism. A performance of the St Matthew Passion
conducted by Stanford in March of that year was severely criticized by Vernon
Blackburn in the Pall Mall Gazette. Five members of the musical establishment
(Mackenzie, Grove, Goldschmidt, Parratt and Parry) responded with a
controversial letter to the press that attacked Blackburn's ‘sheer inepitude’ and
initiated a debate on the function of criticism. John Runciman of the Saturday
Review (1894–1916) supported Blackburn and became the self-appointed leader
of the ‘New Criticism’, which extended Shavian lines of argument. It was also in
1894 that Ernest Newman's first articles were published in the New Quarterly
Musical Review.
The numerous music journals that sprang up from the 1890s reflected the move
towards greater plurality throughout British society. Few, however, could compete
with those supported by publishing businesses (the Musical Times, the Musical
Standard, the Monthly Musical Record) and advertising revenue (Musical Opinion
and Music Trade Review). Music criticism also continued to feature prominently in
literary reviews and political journals, including the English Review, The Academy,
the Nation and the Athenaeum and the New Statesman. From the 1920s the
broadcasting and recording industries provided further outlets, including the Radio
Times and The Listener. The cultivated minority audience of the 19th century that
read the old-style reviews, such as the Edinburgh or the Fortnightly, gave way to a
new and diverse ‘mass’ readership.
The market for music books also expanded, owing in part to the increase of music
education at all levels, the popularity of domestic music-making and amateur
groups, the widening of audiences, the declining cost of books and the
establishment of public libraries. Short histories, composer studies published in
series such as Dent's Master Musicians, and collections of analytical programme
notes, notably Donald Tovey's Essays in Musical Analysis (1935–9), held
widespread appeal. The volume of collected journalistic essays, such as
Newman's A Musical Motley (1919) or Blom's A Musical Postbag (1941), gave the
critic's work a greater permanence and also became the standard posthumous
tribute.
Before 1914 a pro-German stronghold was maintained by a group of critics with
Oxford connections, including Hubert Parry, W.H. Hadow, Tovey, Ernest Walker
and H.C. Colles, who dominated the production of reference and didactic works,
particularly Grove's Dictionary and the Oxford History of Music. Their shared
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articles of critical faith included the view that the laws of evolution accounted for
the development of musical style; that absolute music represented the greatest
contribution to the art; that sonata form was the highest structural ideal; and that
the German masters from Bach to Brahms represented the true classic tradition.
They maintained that criticism must rely on the formal description of music in order
to present an evaluation of aesthetic merit and consequently emphasized its style
and structure. These critics laid the foundation for the rise of musicology in Britain;
in the next generation Dent, Westrup and others turned away from journalism
towards academia.
Two new trends emerged after World War I. The first, a reaction against the
German repertory, focussed on Stravinsky and the composers associated with
Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. In line with an aesthetic view which set France against
Germany, Classicism against Romanticism and Paris against Vienna, Edwin
Evans, the most prominent literary advocate of contemporary music in the interwar
period, set the virtues of Stravinskian neo-classicism against the atonality and
serialism of Schoenberg. Leigh Henry represented a younger generation and
aligned himself with the aesthetic of Jean Cocteau's Le coq et l'arlequin in his
journal Fanfare and elsewhere. A second and more conservative tendency was
represented in the 1920s by two composer-critics associated with Philip
Heseltine's (Peter Warlock's) journal The Sackbut: Cecil Gray and K.S. Sorabji.
Like the poet-critic W.J. Turner, they found the notion of ‘popularizing’ classical
music distasteful and shared the hostility towards mass culture that was common
among the British intelligentsia during the inter-war years. For them, music was
the romantic art par excellence. They rejected Stravinsky and made provocative
claims for composers seen to be outside the mainstream, including Busoni,
Mahler, Sibelius and Delius. Many elements of their thought were expressed by
Constant Lambert in Music, Ho! (1934), the most important British critique of
contemporary music written between the wars.
The most influential and arguably the most widely read critic of the period was
Ernest Newman. As a rationalist he came under the influence of J.M. Robertson,
whose Essays Towards a Critical Method (1889, 1897) argued for a scientific
approach to critical theory. Robertson's work also informed Michel-Dimitri
Calvocoressi's The Principles and Methods of Musical Criticism (1923), which
marked an important advance over earlier discussions. While Calvocoressi took a
relativist position, Newman's absolutism demanded that aesthetic judgments be
argued from a basis of objective fact and not from personal taste. His
disillusionment with the apparent chaos of criticism in its response to
contemporary music led to a study of the critical process in A Musical Critic's
Holiday (1925), and to a series of articles expounding a ‘physiology’ of criticism.
The polemical criticism which sought to come to terms with Modernist aesthetics
mirrored the transitional stage through which European music was passing. The
Oxford critics maintained a pro-German stance after 1918, when Franco-Russian
Modernism was in the ascendant, and gave little consideration to new music from
countries other than Britain, providing one source of the friction that was
characteristic of the period. The rise of Modernism inevitably brought with it a
factional music press. While most contemporary composers found some degree of
support, the serial music of the Second Viennese School proved a particular
stumbling-block for British critics. It was left to Edward Clark at the BBC, and to
émigré composers and critics such as Egon Wellesz, Mosco Carner and Erwin
Stein, to counteract the widespread critical suspicion that tended to greet new
developments in Britain.
By the 1940s arguments that had dominated the early decades of the century –
concerning the evaluation of programme music, the nature of national musical
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identity and the relevance of folksong, the validity of returning to Classical models,
the nature of objectivity in criticism and the causes of divergent opinion – ceased
to invite further consideration. A younger generation of critics, including Martin
Cooper, Wilfrid Mellers and Peter Heyworth, and somewhat later Hans Keller and
Donald Mitchell, developed new lines of argument in journals of an international
perspective such as Tempo, the Music Review, The Score and Music Survey. A
strain of conservatism remained – Newman continued to write for the Sunday
Times until 1958 and Blom for The Observer until 1959 – but after 1945 the way
was open for a reassessment of values.
Criticism, §II: History to 1945
4. Italy.
(i) To 1890.
(ii) 1890–1945.
Criticism, §II, 4: History to 1945: Italy
(i) To 1890.
In the first quarter of the 19th century, especially in the Napoleonic period, music
criticism in Italy was a sporadic phenomenon, the work of journalists, theatre
chroniclers and occasional commentators who contributed to official gazettes and,
less frequently, literary periodicals. Because the level of literacy was low,
periodicals had limited distribution and, being heavily censored, consisted largely
of news reports and encomia; contributors were rarely allowed to sign their
articles. It was the rapid rise of Rossini, which sparked a more widespread and
lively interest in music (particularly opera), that marked the birth of music criticism
in Italy. The attention the composer received bordered on fanaticism, going far
beyond the limited circle of specialists or opera lovers. Yet it was still writers rather
than musicians who took up their pens to praise or criticize Rossini's art,
beginning with Michele Leoni in the columns of the Florentine Antologia; Stendhal,
whose biography of the composer (1824) aroused controversy when it was
immediately translated into Italian; and Giuseppe Carpani, whose study of Haydn
(1812) was followed by Le rossiniane, ossia Lettere musico-teatrali (1824).
Literature on Rossini ranged from questions of interpretation to gossip, from satire
to essays, and from polemics to moralism. In this context Giuseppe Baini's work
on liturgical music, on the life and works of Palestrina in particular, was
exceptional in its emphasis on scholarship rather than critical judgments.
Rossini's success, the establishment of an operatic repertory, and the construction
of opera houses in both large and small cities formed the basis for the rapid
growth of opera consumption (which an acute observer, Carlo Cattaneo, termed
the ‘industrialization of opera’). The same factors gave rise to the creation of the
first periodicals devoted to opera in Bologna, Venice and Naples. Almost all were
short-lived expressions of a journalistic specialization which had not yet been
consolidated. Peter Lichtenthal, who believed that ‘true musical criticism assumes
great, profound knowledge of the art and exquisite taste’, lamented that ‘most of
our modern-day Aristarchuses do not even know what a chord is, or at most
possess very superficial knowledge of the art upon which they write’.
Polemical or ‘militant’ criticism, associated principally with the ‘artistic’ journals,
began to increase in the 1820s in conjunction with the growth of the publishing
industry. This was concentrated in Milan, the former capital of the Napoleonic
Italian kingdom, which gradually replaced Venice, the cradle of theatre criticism,
and Bologna, traditionally the centre of the theatrical marketplace. Technological
advances and the restructuring of publishing allowed Milan to consolidate its
leading position in the evolutionary process which during the 19th century
transformed Italian journalism from a trade into a profession. At the same time
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coincided with the growth of non-operatic music, in particular the work of the
Società del Quartetto and the various orchestral societies, and with the debate on
sacred music reform. In this environment, critics, whether ‘progressives’ (Filippi,
Panzacchi, Galli, Valetta), moderates (d'Arcais, Villanis), pragmatists (Fortis) or
defenders of the so-called Italian tradition (Checchi, Monaldi), became a driving
force behind the modernization of the repertory particularly in instrumental music.
Specialist critics exerted a growing influence on the development of new music
even as the field of historical research broadened. Outstanding musicologist-critics
like Francesco Florimo, Alberto Cametti, Alfredo Soffredini, Giovanni Tebaldini,
Giuseppe Gallignani and Oscar Chilesotti, whose work appeared regularly in the
Gazzetta musicale di Milano, found new outlets, however short-lived, in
periodicals such as Paganini, La musica popolare, Musica sacra and above all
Archivio musicale, which accepted contributions from authoritative foreign critics
and can be considered the first Italian musicological journal.
Criticism, §II, 4: History to 1945: Italy
(ii) 1890–1945.
Daily newspapers catering for large national readerships and characterized by a
simple, concise prose style began to appear in Italy in the 1860s. This
phenomenon went hand in hand with the development in universal education
which, in the last decades of the century, increased the readership of both
newspapers and magazines. From being a tool of the élite, periodicals quickly
evolved into forms that led towards progressive ‘democratization’; they used new
techniques for reproducing illustrations and exploited less complex, more
attractive means of communication. At the same time music criticism split into
cultivated, sophisticated writing intended purely for specialists, and more popular
material aimed at the mass of enthusiasts. As the function and importance of
periodicals changed, the most well-established critics gradually abandoned them
in favour of the daily press; among these were Arrigo Boito, Eugenio Checchi
(who wrote under the pseudonym ‘Tom’), Achille De Marzi, Giuseppe Depanis,
Amintore Galli, Gino Monaldi, Aldo Noseda (who wrote under the pseudonym ‘Il
misovulgo’, ‘against the herd’), Primo Levi, Giovanni Battista Nappi, Enrico
Panzacchi, Lorenzo Parodi, Alfredo Soffredini, Michele Uda and Ippolito Valetta
(the pseudonym of Ippolito Franchi Verney).
Partly as a result of these journalistic developments, criticism of everyday events
was increasingly separated from musicological and historical commentary; the
latter found a home at the end of the century in Italy's first musicological journals:
Archivio musicale (1882–4) in Naples, Rivista musicale italiana (1894–1955) in
Turin and later Milan, and Cronaca musicale (1896–1917) in Pesaro. A new
critical attitude to the current state of Italian music began to take root: the increase
in historical studies, as well as the influence of music and musical thinking from
abroad, stimulated a reappraisal of the Italian music of the previous 100 years. A
reaction against the monopoly of Italian opera had been developing since the mid-
1800s; by the end of the century French and German operas were regularly
performed in Italian theatres, musicological studies on pre-18th-century Italian
music were progressing, and instrumental music was widely heard. This new
sensibility translated into a fierce condemnation by some critics of contemporary
Italian opera, which was seen as having degenerated into ‘commercialism’ and
capitulated to ‘popular’ taste. This was the atmosphere in which Fausto
Torrefranca's famous pamphlet Giacomo Puccini e l'opera internazionale (1912),
attacking contemporary Italian opera and its leading exponent, appeared. Italian
critics were divided between those who welcomed these ‘popular’ tendencies in
the operatic and instrumental repertories, and those who championed a fairly
radical renovation of Italian music, taking a generally élite view of culture. The
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former gravitated towards daily papers and magazines with high circulations, while
the latter tended to express themselves within the limits of the specialist review.
This critical debate was echoed in the pages of the Rivista musicale italiana. The
pro-Wagner, anti-verismo viewpoint of the journal's first editor Luigi Torchi (author
of the first Italian monograph on Wagner, in 1890) gave way, under the editorship
of Torrefranca, to a nationalistic view of Italian music which accorded with
Torrefranca's musicological research on instrumental music in Italy and the Italian
origins of Romanticism in music. This critical reorientation reflected a partial
change in the ideology of the Rivista; while its outlook remained essentially
positivist, it was not unaffected by idealistic influences. Italian music criticism of
the first half of the 20th century was sustained by these tensions between
opposing philosophies, as well as by the growing political and cultural nationalism
of the period.
La voce, a literary review of fundamental importance for Italian culture was
founded in Florence in 1908. An anti-positivist journal close to the idealism of the
philosopher Benedetto Croce, it published regular contributions from such
distinguished musicologists and musicians as Torrefranca, Giannotto Bastianelli
and Ildebrando Pizzetti. All were united against verismo opera and in favour of
reviving the pre-19th-century Italian musical tradition and reappraising
instrumental music. The themes explored and developed in this and other
Florentine literary journals influenced the new music journals that proliferated in
the second decade of the century, notably Ars nova, the journal of the Società
Italiana di Musica Moderna, founded in Rome in 1916 by Alfredo Casella, Ippolito
Pizzetti, Gian Francesco Malipiero, Carlo Perinello, Vittorio Gui and Vincenzo
Tommasini. The leading role played by these and other professional musicians in
20th-century Italian music criticism was a striking departure from 19th-century
tradition, which assigned the exercise of music criticism principally to
commentators with literary backgrounds and varying levels of musical knowledge.
Militant criticism almost inevitably complemented the creative output of such
composers as Pizzetti, Casella, Malipiero, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, and later
Luigi Dallapiccola and Gianandrea Gavazzeni.
In the early 20th century as well, Milan was overtaken by Turin as the centre of
music periodical publication, and so of criticism. The Rivista musicale italiana and
La riforma musicale, founded in Turin in 1913, were joined in 1920 by Il pianoforte,
which later (under the title Rassegna musicale) became the most important Italian
music journal of the first half of the 20th century. Edited by Guido Maggiorino
Gatti, it initially concentrated exclusively on the piano but soon embraced a wide
range of theoretical, historical and aesthetic topics, providing considerable
information on international musical life and trends. Il pianoforte was anti-
nationalist, having many authoritative foreign correspondents, and close to
Croce's idealism. One of its contributors was Giuseppe Radiciotti, who published
his impressive monograph on Rossini in 1927–9. When the journal changed its
name to Rassegna musicale in 1928, the editorial standpoint was further refined,
showing an openness both to idealist influences and to Modernist, European
tendencies, while remaining unattracted by nationalism. In the 1930s and 40s,
under the leadership of Guido M. Gatti, the Rassegna was the most culturally
advanced and inquiring Italian music journal. The cream of Italian critics were
among its contributors, including Ferdinando Ballo, Casella, Attilio Cimbro, Andrea
Della Corte, Gavazzeni, Malipiero, Alberto Mantelli, Guido Pannain, Alfredo
Parente, Gino Roncaglia, Luigi Ronga and Gastone Rossi-Doria, as well as
Massimo Mila and Fedele D'Amico, the leading figures in Italian music criticism
after World War II.
The Fascist regime that came to power in 1921 had little influence on the stances
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1836, it had already arisen with Verstovsky's ventures in opera in the 1820s.
The first people to write about music in Russia tended to be those who wrote on
other subjects and thus had access to the press. This is the case with Ya.M.
Neverov, O.I. Senkovsky, N.A. Mel'gunov, V.F. Odoyevsky and other contributors
to the discussion about Glinka's opera. In many cases their reactions display
insight and commitment, but also an inability to describe the music on a technical
level; there were also venal journalists who wrote with ignorant malevolence about
music, as about other subjects. The newspaper article was the principal medium
for music criticism, whether in the form of the feuilleton (see §2(i) above) or of the
report. The lengthy discursive article in a ‘thick journal’ (tolstïy zhurnal) was also a
significant vehicle for music criticism. Even contributions to newspapers could
extend over several issues and thus assume substantial proportions (as is the
case with F.M. Tolstoy's ‘analysis’ of Dargomïzhsky's Rusalka which spread over
four numbers of the Northern Bee in the summer of 1856, or Hermann Laroche's
Glinka i yego znacheniye v istorii muzïki (‘Glinka and his significance in the history
of music’) which came out in four issues of the Russkiy vestnik in 1867–8.
The great length at which Russian critics wrote about music in the 19th century is
explained by several factors. First, the question of what marked Russian national
identity was at the centre of many people's thinking, not only in music. Secondly,
as Russian music consisted disproportionately of operas, many on Russian
subjects, its consideration brought into play questions about the interpretation of
history and its personages which often (in conditions of censorship) touched
implicitly on present-day matters; authenticity of behaviour, costume and scenery
were also examined. Thirdly, many critics took their role to be to outline and reflect
upon in great detail not only a composition's wider context but also its particular
content, as in Rimsky-Korsakov's review of Cui's William Ratcliff (1869). A fourth
element, evident with special virulence in the case of Aleksandr Serov, is the
pedantic exposing of every error allegedly committed by previous venturers into
the field; V.V. Stasov's article ‘“A Life for the Tsar” and “Ruslan and
Lyudmila”’ (1860) illustrates the heavy sarcasm with which such criticism was
often laced. Press controversy about music in the 1860s was, if not a matter of life
and death, at least something which affected careers, as critics (sometimes
doubling as composers) sought performances of the works they favoured.
The extent to which critics wrote in a parti pris manner varied, as did their level of
technical attainment. Stasov and Cui served on the whole as spokesmen for the
Balakirev circle of composers, and Stasov later for those of the Belyayev circle;
from 1858 Serov combined his championship of Wagner with continuing support in
principle for Russian music, though not for all its manifestations. Laroche was the
critic best equipped with musical knowledge; he showed most sympathy with the
compositions of Tchaikovsky, much less for those of Rimsky-Korsakov and
especially Musorgsky, and followed some of Eduard Hanslick's thinking, notably in
his questioning of the basis of programme music and in his opposition to Wagner's
ideas of the relationship between music and drama in opera. N.K. Kashkin wrote
about musical events in Moscow from 1862 until the next century. Like A.S.
Famintsïn, who served as a critic in St Petersburg from 1868, he found his main
employment in the conservatory; these institutions founded in the 1860s enhanced
musical life through the development of musical scholarship and in many other
respects.
Specialist music journals in the 19th century often had brief or undistinguished
lives, as was the case with Serov's Muzïka i teatr (1867–8). The professionalism
encouraged by the development of Russian society in general, and in music by
the expansion of the conservatories, made possible the publication in St
Petersburg from 1894 to 1918 of the Russkaya muzïkal'naya gazeta edited by
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N.F. Findeyzen, among whose contributors was A.V. Ossovsky; this healthy
process continued with Muzïka, edited in Moscow by V.V. Derzhanovsky from
1910 to 1916; and Muzïkal'nïy sovremennik (‘Musical contemporary’) in Petrograd
from 1915 to 1917 under the editorship of A.N. Rimsky-Korsakov. Indeed, the
Silver Age of Russian poetry, the World of Art movement and the efflorescence of
the theatre arts around the turn of the century were combined with developments
in Russian art music which drew it into the mainstream of the Western tradition for
the first time. Neither Skryabin nor Stravinsky wrote criticism (the latter at least not
in his Russian years), but their compositions elicited sympathetic criticism from
L.L. Sabaneyev, Yu.D. Engel' and V.G. Karatïgin. The last, a leading protagonist
of musical Modernism and of Musorgsky, died young in 1925. Nikolai Myaskovsky
and Boris Asaf'yev had made their débuts as critics before 1917; both were also
active as composers. Asaf'yev went on to become the most influential figure in
musicology in the USSR until his death in 1949, writing and speaking prolifically
on an immense variety of musical subjects. A critic who exerted a strong influence
on his friend Shostakovich was Ivan Sollertinsky, a prodigiously gifted linguist and
theatre specialist who was a central figure in Leningrad from the 1920s until his
untimely death in 1944.
The cultural vitality of the early 20th century extended into the Soviet era, albeit in
straitened economic conditions and a new political framework. New publications
sought to give voice to the aspirations of, and to speak to, the newly enfranchised
segments of society. As time went on political considerations became increasingly
burdensome, making the expression of ideas outside the conceptual framework of
Marxism-Leninism difficult if not impossible (see Marxism). Attention was directed
towards the ‘classics’ of Russian music, contemporary Soviet compositions in a
conservative idiom, and such other music as was not held to be ‘formalist’ or in
some other way unhelpful to the building of socialist society (see Socialist
realism). All existing arts organizations were shut down in the first half of the
1930s and replaced by state-run artistic unions, including a Composers' Union
(which also admitted musicologists). The union's official organ Sovetskaya muzïka
was published, generally monthly, from 1933. The constraints of a narrowed
repertory, the severing of international links, the enforcement of received opinion
and the denial of expression to nonconformist views resulted in a climate in which
it was exceptionally difficult to practise criticism. Much Russian writing about
music in the decade or so up to 1945 (and beyond) is significant, but it demands
alert reading between the lines.
Criticism, §II: History to 1945
6. USA and Canada.
Newspaper coverage of performances of classical music dates back to colonial
times in the USA: Oscar Sonneck cited as the earliest known example a notice in
the South Carolina Gazette of 21–8 October 1732. Before about 1820, most such
journalism was confined to brief news stories in ornate language rather than
critical reviewing. Even Washington Irving, who frequently reviewed concerts for
New York newspapers between 1800 and 1810, wrote desultory ‘fan’ observations
rather than criticism.
Until the early 19th century, most Americans assumed that classical music meant
church music; the critic W.S.B. Mathews observed that the public understood ‘the
broadest function of music to be that of exemplifying gospel teachings’. Thomas
Hastings, the author of the first American text on music criticism (Dissertation on
Musical Taste, 1822), found even oratorio too vulgar to be artistic. But in the
1820s, as professional opera companies began to perform regularly in New York
and other large cities, weekly newspapers such as the Albion in New York started
printing unsigned reviews that treated music as art. At first these commentaries
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said more about the toilette and social prominence of the audience than about the
quality of the music. Most of the anonymous writers artfully concealed their lack of
musical understanding in florid but empty verbal encomia. But with the founding of
such daily penny papers as the New York Herald and New York Sun in the early
1830s, music reviews gradually became more professional. The Herald's founder,
James Gordon Bennett, was himself a music lover who had previously written
criticism for the New-York Enquirer. The penny papers' circulations were many
times greater than those of the weeklies that had preceded them, and their
reviews brought music coverage for the first time to a large, socially diverse
audience.
William Henry Fry, a political journalist who was also a talented composer, wrote
perceptive and musically knowledgeable reviews of performances of Beethoven
and other then-advanced composers in the daily Philadelphia National Gazette
(1836–41) and the New York Tribune (1852–64). In the 1840s the British-born
Henry C. Watson began to write reviews for several daily and weekly newspapers
in New York. Watson, a former boy soprano and a well-trained musician, was
probably the first person to make a full-time living as a music critic in America (Fry
had independent wealth) and was one of the first newspaper critics to eschew
vacuous verbiage and write analytically. Watson's tone was constructive but
occasionally severe; he too continued his career into the 1860s. Other competent
critics whose writings first appeared before 1850 include Richard Grant White and
Nathaniel Parker Willis in New York and George Peck in Boston. All these writers
attest the shoddy quality of much orchestra playing in the USA before about 1875,
even in some large cities. Before 1850, neither Mozart nor Beethoven was
regarded as canonical, and Verdi was received less enthusiastically than Bellini
and Rossini. Professional collegiality and civility among critics of rival papers did
not exist; libel lawsuits and even physical threats were not uncommon. The
practice of distributing complimentary tickets to a press list began in the 1840s;
nevertheless, graft was widespread. Not only was the concert presenter's
purchase of newspaper advertising considered a precondition for review
coverage, but critics accepted bribes for puff pieces.
Although the earliest known American musical magazine dates from the late
1700s, the first prominent such publications appeared in Boston in the 1830s (and
were free from graft). General magazines such as the Dial and the Harbinger,
published by the New England transcendentalists in the 1840s, ran copious
articles about music by Emerson, Margaret Fuller, George William Curtis, Charles
Anderson Dana and other intellectuals who were not music critics. It was common
throughout the 19th century for American writers and intellectuals to promote
classical music appreciation either through writing about it or by hosting small
concerts in their homes. Walt Whitman wrote extensive opera criticism for the
Brooklyn Eagle newspaper in the 1840s and 50s, and such writers as Irving,
Longfellow, Sidney Lanier, Owen Wister and William Dean Howells wrote articles
about classical music or held musicales.
The most influential critic to emerge from magazines was John Sullivan Dwight, a
Boston-born Harvard graduate, lapsed minister (like Emerson) and amateur
musician who had difficulty following an orchestral score. In his writings the
transcendentalist-influenced Dwight became the first American cleric fully to affirm
appreciation of art music as separate from religion (he dubbed music critics
‘missionaries of art’), though he tended to fall back into religious metaphor in
writing about Beethoven (‘not formal prayer, I grant, but earnest deep
unspeakable aspiration’). After writing for the Dial and the Harbinger, Dwight
published his own magazine from 1852 to 1881. Dwight's Journal of Music carried
reviews of concerts from all over the USA by Dwight and his correspondents.
Notwithstanding his worship of Beethoven, Dwight was a discerning and objective
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Huneker's avant-garde sympathies were Carl Van Vechten and Paul Rosenfeld,
who wrote for various newspapers and magazines from the 1910s. Both were
influenced by Huneker's rich prose style, as were Hale and Lawrence Gilman of
the New York Herald Tribune (1923–39). However, the new cultural magazines
that appeared in the 1910s and 20s were less committed to classical music
appreciation than their predecessors, and as a result classical music began to
fade from general cultural discourse in American magazines.
After World War I, the Gilded Age critics were gradually replaced by such leaner
prose stylists as Olin Downes (New York Times, 1924–55) and the composers
Deems Taylor (New York World, 1921–5 and New York American, 1931–2) and
Virgil Thomson (New York Herald Tribune, 1940–54). The down-to-earth Downes,
a champion of Sibelius, helped convince many American men that a love of
classical music was not effete. The outspoken Thomson demolished received
opinion and sacred cows in almost every review. Taylor, a brilliant explicator,
achieved his greatest impact through his radio broadcasts, reaching a greater
audience than any classical music critic before or since. Alfred Frankenstein in
San Francisco and Claudia Cassidy in Chicago also achieved national
reputations. The first important woman critic on a major metropolitan paper to
write under her own name was the pianist Olga Samaroff (New York Post, 1926–
8). African-Americans began contributing classical music criticism in black-owned
magazines and newspapers around 1900. One black music critic, Cleveland Allen,
also wrote for the mainstream press Musical America in the 1920s. A late 20th-
century trend in American criticism was presaged when Gilbert Seldes, classical
music critic at the Philadelphia Evening Ledger in 1914–5, bestowed classical
music's intellectual cachet on certain forms of popular music in his book The
Seven Lively Arts (1924). In the 1930s such established newspaper critics as
Irving Kolodin and Bernard Haggin began to review phonograph recordings.
Meanwhile, American avant-garde composers published their own music criticism
in the quarterly magazine Modern Music (1924–46), which was assiduously read
by the New York and Boston critics.
In Canada classical music criticism has been written in both English and French.
The first highly competent Canadian critic, the composer and church musician
Guillaume Couture, wrote in both languages in the late 19th century, chiefly for
Montreal newspapers. English-language newspapers in Montreal, Toronto,
Winnipeg, Vancouver and Victoria all had classical music critics in the first half of
the 20th century. The outstanding Canadian critic immediately before World War II
was the pianist-composer Léo-Pol Morin, who wrote in French, primarily in
Quebec City.
Criticism, §II: History to 1945
BIBLIOGRAPHY
a: germany, austria
b: france, belgium
c: britain to 1890
d: 1890–1945
e: italy
f: russia
g: usa, canada
Criticism, §II: History to 1945: Bibliograph
a: germany, austria
MGG1 (H.H. Stuckenschmidt)
R. Hirschfeld: ‘Musikalische Kritik in der Wiener Zeitung’, Zur Geschichte der
kaiserlichen Wiener Zeitung (Vienna, 1903), 197–235
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S. Pederson: ‘A.B. Marx, Berlin Concert Life, and German National Identity’,
19CM, xviii (1994–5), 87–108
S. Burnham: Beethoven Hero (Princeton, NJ, 1995)
S. Pederson: Enlightened and Romantic German Music Criticism, 1800–1850
(diss., U. of Pennsylvania, 1995)
S. Rumph: ‘A Kingdom Not of This World: the Political Context of E.T.A.
Hoffmann's Beethoven Criticism’, 19CM, xix (1995–6), 50–68
S. McColl: Music Criticism in Vienna 1896–1897: Critically Moving Forms (Oxford,
1996)
Criticism, §II: History to 1945: Bibliograph
b: france, belgium
A. Azevedo: Sur le livre intitulé ‘Critique et littérature musicales’ de M.P. Scudo
(Paris, 1852)
A. Ulybyshev: Beethoven: ses critiques et ses glossateurs (Leipzig, 1857)
A. Pougin: F. Halévy, écrivain (Paris, 1865)
A. Pougin: De la littérature musicale en France (Paris, 1867)
G. Le Brisoys Desnoiresterres: La musique française au XVIIIe siècle: Gluck et
Piccinni, 1774–1800 (Paris, 1872/R, 2/1875)
A. Jullien: Mozart et Richard Wagner à l'égard des Français (Brussels, 1881)
G. Servières: Richard Wagner jugé en France (Paris, 1887)
J. Carlez: Framery: Littérateur-musicien (1745–1810) (Caen, 1893)
J. Ecorcheville: De Lulli à Rameau 1690–1730: l'esthétique musicale (Paris,
1906/R)
H. Prunières: ‘Lecerf de la Viéville et l'esthétique musicale classique au XVIIe
siècle’, BSIM, iv (1908), 619–54
G. Cucuel: ‘La critique musicale dans les revues du XVIIIe siècle’, Année
musicale, ii (1912), 127–201
P.-M. Masson: ‘Musique italienne et musique française: la première querelle’,
RMI, xix (1912), 519–45
D. Chennevière: Claude Debussy et son oeuvre (Paris, 1913)
H. Gillot: La Querelle des anciens et des modernes en France (Paris, 1914/R)
A. Pougin: ‘Notes sur la presse musicale en France’, EMDC, II/vi (1931), 3841–
59
A. Corbet: Geschriften van Peter Benoit (Antwerp, 1942)
N. Boyer: La guerre des bouffons et la musique française (1752–1754) (Paris,
1945)
P.-M. Masson: ‘La “Lettre sur Omphale”, 1752’, RdM, xxiv (1945), 1–19
A.R. Oliver: The Encyclopedists as Critics of Music (New York, 1947)
I. Grempler: Das Musikschrifttum von Hector Berlioz (diss., U. of Göttingen, 1950)
R. Wangermée: ‘Lecerf de la Viéville, Bonnet-Bourdelot et l'Essai sur le bon goust
en musique de Nicolas Grandval’, RBM, v (1951), 132–46
M. Barthélemy: ‘L'Opéra françois et la Querelle des anciens et des modernes’,
Les Lettres romanes, x/4 (1956), 379–91
I. Mahaim: Beethoven: naissance et renaissance des derniers quatuors (Paris,
1964)
U. Eckart-Bäcker: Frankreichs Musik zwischen Romantik und Moderne: die Zeit
im Spiegel der Kritik (Regensburg, 1965)
D.V. Hagan: French Musical Criticism between the Revolutions (1830–48) (diss.,
U. of Illinois, 1965)
J. Kitchin: Un journal ‘philosophique’: La Décade 1794–1807 (Paris, 1965)
J.N. Pappas: ‘D'Alembert et la Querelle des bouffons d'après des documents
inédits’, Revue d'histoire littéraire de la France, lxv (1965), 479–84
L. Siegel: ‘Wagner and the Romanticism of E.T.A. Hoffmann’, MQ, li (1965), 597–
613
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287–306
K. Wauters: Wagner en Vlaanderen, 1844–1914: cultuurhistorische studie
(Ghent, 1983)
H.R. Cohen: ‘The 19th-Century French Press and the Music Historian: Archival
Sources and Bibliographical Resources’, 19CM, vii (1983–4), 136–42
H. Garceau: ‘Notes sur la presse musicale religieuse en France de 1827 à 1861’,
Periodica musica, ii (1984), 6–13
C. Goubault: ‘Frédéric Chopin et la critique musicale française’, Sur les traces de
Frédéric Chopin, ed. D. Pistone (Paris, 1984), 149–68
C. Goubault: La critique musicale dans la presse française de 1870 à 1914
(Geneva, 1984)
N. Brunet: ‘Musique germanique et modernisme en France à l'aube du XXe
siècle’, Revue internationale de musique française, no.18 (1985), 45–57
D. Pistone and others: La critique musicale en France: dossier, Revue
internationale de musique française, no.17 (Geneva, 1985)
E.-T. Forsius: Der ‘goût’ français in den Darstellungen des Coin du Roi: Versuch
zur Rekonstruktion einer ‘Laienästhetik’ während des Pariser
Buffonistenstreites, 1752–1754: Haltung, Widersprüche, Bezüge vor
Vorgeschichte und zur ästhetischen Tradition (Tutzing, 1985)
J. Mongrédien: ‘Les mystéres d'Isis (1801) and Reflections on Mozart from the
Parisian Press at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century’, Music in the
Classic Period: Essays in Honor of Barry S. Brook, ed. A.W. Atlas (New York,
1985), 195–211
L.C. Schulman: Music Criticism of the Paris Opera in the 1830s (diss., Cornell U.,
1985)
C. Gauffre: ‘Jazz: revues ou magazines?’, Revue des revues, no.2 (1986), 53–4
E. Poulin: ‘La presse': an Annotated Index of Articles on Literature, Art and Music
(1836–41) (diss., U. of Florida, Gainesville, 1986)
F. Vincent: ‘Le parcours historique des revues musicales’, Revue des revues,
no.2 (1986), 44–51
R. Wallace: Beethoven's Critics: Aesthetic Dilemmas and Resolutions during the
Composer's Lifetime (Cambridge, 1986)
J.-P. von Aelbrouck: ‘Annonces concernant la musique dans les gazettes et
périodiques bruxellois au XVIIIe siècle (1741–1780)’, Tradition wallonne, no.4
(1987), 761–99
S. Aitken: Music and the Popular Press: Music Criticism in Paris during the First
Empire (diss., Northwestern U., 1987)
P.A. Bloom: ‘“Politics” and the Musical Press in 1830’, Periodica musica, v
(1987), 9–16
J. Burg: ‘Der Komponist Anton Bruckner im Spiegelbild der französischen Musik
presse seiner Zeit’, Bruckner-Jb 1987–8, 95–112
M.-H. Coudroy: La critique parisiene des ‘grands opéras’ de Meyerbeer: Robert le
Diable, Les Huguenots, Le Prophète, L'Africaine (Saarbrücken, 1988)
B. Huys: ‘Belgian Music Journals: their National and International Interest’, FAM,
xxxv (1988), 179–84
B.E. Matzer: Heinrich Heine – Verbindungen zwischen Dichtung und Musik: eine
Untersuchung zur Rolle von Musik und Musikern in seinem Prosawerk als
Beitrag zur Musikmetaphorik (diss., U. of Graz, 1988)
K. Murphy: Hector Berlioz and the Development of French Music Criticism (Ann
Arbor, 1988)
T.S. Grey: ‘Wagner, the Overture, and the Aesthetics of Musical Form’, 19CM, xii
(1988–9), 3–22
M.-C. Casale-Monsidet: ‘L'affaire Dreyfus et la critique musicale’, Revue
internationale de musique française, no.28 (1989), 57–69
B.A. Kraus: ‘Beethoven and the Revolution: the View of the French Musical
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1776, 3/1779)
J. Brown: Letters upon the Poetry and Music of the Italian Opera (Edinburgh,
1789)
A. Alison: Essays on the Nature and Principles of Taste (London and Edinburgh,
1790, many later edns)
W. Mason: Essays, Historical and Critical, on English Church Music (York, 1795)
A. Smith: ‘Of the Nature of that Imitation which takes place in what are called the
Imitative Arts’, Essays on Philosophical Subjects (London and Edinburgh,
1795/R), 131–79
[G. Hogarth: ]‘Musical Literature’, Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, xxvii (1830),
471–81
W. Crotch: Substance of Several Courses of Lectures on Music (London, 1831/R)
G. Hogarth: Musical History, Biography, and Criticism (London, 1835, 2/1838)
G. Hogarth: Memoirs of the Musical Drama (London, 1838, rev. 2/1851/R as
Memoirs of the Opera in Italy, France, Germany, and England)
[E. Webbe: ]‘English Musical Literature – Mr. Hogarth's New Work’, Monthly
Chronicle, ii (1838), 239–52
[E. Holmes: ]‘Are the English a Musical People?’, Fraser's Magazine, xliii (1851),
675–81
H. Spencer: ‘The Origin and Function of Music’, Fraser's Magazine, lvi (1857),
396–408
H.F. Chorley: Thirty Years' Musical Recollections (London, 1862/R, 2/1926/R)
H.R. Haweis: Music and Morals (London, 1871/R)
J. Sully: Sensation and Intuition: Studies in Psychology and Aesthetics (London,
1874, 2/1880)
C.K. Salaman: ‘On Musical Criticism’, PMA, ii (1875–6), 1–15
E. Gurney: ‘On Music and Musical Criticism’, Nineteenth Century, iv (1878), 51–
74; v (1879), 1060–78
E. Gurney: The Power of Sound (London, 1880/R)
J. Stainer: ‘The Principles of Musical Criticism’, PMA, vii (1880–81), 35–52
J. Stainer: Music in its Relation to the Intellect and the Emotions (London,
1892/R)
C.H. Parry: The Art of Music (London, 1893, enlarged 2/1896/R as The Evolution
of the Art of Music, 2/1934/R)
J.F. Runciman: ‘Musical Criticism and the Critics’, Fortnightly Review, lxii (1894),
170–83
C.V. Stanford: ‘Some Aspects of Musical Criticism in England’, Fortnightly
Review, lxi (1894), 826–31
J.F. Runciman: ‘The Gentle Art of Musical Criticism’, New Review [London], xii
(1895), 612–24
J. Bennett: Forty Years of Music, 1865–1905 (London, 1908)
H. Davison: From Mendelssohn to Wagner: being the Memoirs of J.W. Davison
(London, 1912)
J.A. Fuller-Maitland: A Door-Keeper of Music (London, 1929)
M.C. Boyd: Elizabethan Music and Musical Criticism (Philadelphia, 1940,
2/1962/R)
S.A.E. Betz: ‘The Operatic Criticism of the Tatler and Spectator’, MQ, xxxi (1945),
318–30
M. Graf: Composer and Critic: Two Hundred Years of Musical Criticism (New
York, 1946/R)
N. Demuth: An Anthology of Musical Criticism (London, 1947/R)
H.M. Schueller: ‘Literature and Music as Sister Arts: an Aspect of Aesthetic
Theory in Eighteenth-Century Britain’, Philological Quarterly, xxvi (1947),
193–205
H.M. Schueller: ‘“Imitation” and “Expression” in British Music Criticism in the 18th
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(1986), 99–105
J. Neubauer: The Emancipation of Music from Language: Departure from
Mimesis in Eighteenth-Century Aesthetics (New Haven, CT, 1986)
L. Langley: ‘Italian Opera and the English Press, 1836–1856’, Periodica musica,
vi (1988), 3–10
D. DeVal: ‘The Aesthetics of Music in 18th and Early 19th-Century Britain: a
Bibliography and Commentary’, A Handbook for Studies in 18th-Century
English Music, ed. M. Burden and I. Cholij, ii (Edinburgh, 1989), 62–81
L. Langley: ‘The Musical Press in Nineteenth-Century England’, Notes, xlvi
(1989–90), 583–92
M. Chan and J.C. Kassler, eds.: Roger North's ‘The Musicall Grammarian:
1728’ (Cambridge, 1990)
T. McGeary: ‘Music Literature’, Music in Britain: the Eighteenth Century, ed. H.D.
Johnstone and R. Fiske (Oxford, 1990), 397–421
R. McGuinness: ‘Writings about Music’, Music in Britain: the Seventeenth
Century, ed. I. Spink (Oxford, 1992), 406–20
T. Fenner: Opera in London: Views of the Press, 1785–1830 (Carbondale, IL,
1994)
L. Langley: ‘Music’, Victorian Periodicals and Victorian Society, ed. J.D. Vann and
R.T. VanArsdel (Toronto, 1994), 99–126
R. Smith: Handel's Oratorios and Eighteenth-Century Thought (Cambridge, 1995)
P. Olleson: ‘Samuel Wesley and the European Magazine’, Notes, lii (1995–6),
1097–1111
S. McVeigh: ‘London Newspapers, 1750 to 1800: a Checklist and Guide for
Musicologists’, A Handbook for Studies in 18th-Century English Music, ed. M.
Burden and I. Cholij, vi (Edinburgh, 1996), 1–60
T. Muir: Wagner in England: Four Writers before Shaw (diss., CUNY, 1997)
R.T. Bledsoe: Henry Fothergill Chorley: Victorian Journalist (Aldershot and
Brookfield, VT, 1998)
C. Bashford: ‘The Late Beethoven Quartets and the London Press, 1836–c1850’,
MQ, lxxxiv (2000), 84–122
Criticism, §II: History to 1945: Bibliograph
d: 1890–1945
P.C. Buck: ‘Prolegomena to Musical Criticism’, PMA, xxxii (1905–6), 155–77
M.M. Paget: ‘Some Curiosities of Musical Criticism’, PMA, xlii (1915–16), 69–88
M.D. Calvocoressi: The Principles and Methods of Musical Criticism (London,
1923, rev. and enlarged 2/1931/R)
E. Newman: A Musical Critic's Holiday (London and New York, 1925)
E. Newman: ‘A Postscript to a Musical Critic's Holiday’, MT, lxvi (1925), 881–4,
977–81, 1076–9
A.J. Sheldon: ‘On Criticism’, MO, xlviii (1924–5), 1113–15, 1211–13; xlix (1925–
6), 44–5, 151–2
B. Maine: Behold these Daniels: being Studies of Contemporary Music Critics
(London, 1928)
P.A. Scholes: ‘Criticism of Music’, The Oxford Companion to Music (London,
1938, rev. 10/1970 by J.O. Ward, enlarged 1983 by D. Arnold as The New
Oxford Companion to Music)
A.H. Fox Strangways: ‘The Criticism of Music’, PMA, lxv (1938–9), 1–18
G. Sampson: ‘Notes on Criticism’, ML, xxiii (1942), 311–18
S. Fishman: ‘The Aesthetics of Sir Donald Tovey’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism, vi (1947), 60–67
P.A. Scholes: The Mirror of Music 1844–1944: a Century of Musical Life in Britain
(London, 1947/R)
J. Culshaw: ‘The Objective Fallacy’, MMR, lxxix (1949), 37–42
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W.B. Dean: ‘Music – and Letters? an Impertinent Enquiry’, ML, xxx (1949), 376–
80
W.B. Dean: ‘Further Thoughts on Operatic Criticism’, Opera, iii (1952), 655–9
W. Godley: ‘Some Notes on Criticism’, The Score, no.7 (1952), 51–64
E.D. Mackerness: The English Musical Sensibility: Studies in Representative
Literary Discussions and Periodical Criticism from Thomas Morley to W.J.
Turner (diss., Manchester U., 1952)
H. Raynor: ‘Towards a Rationale of Criticism’, MR, xiii (1952), 195–205
A. Walker: An Anatomy of Musical Criticism (London and Philadelphia, 1966)
R.E. Easter: Music Criticism: a Study of the Criteria and Techniques of the
Journalistic Critic, as seen in the Critiques of G.B. Shaw, Ernest Newman,
and Neville Cardus (diss., SUNY, 1972)
S. Banfield: ‘Aesthetics and Criticism’, Music in Britain: the Romantic Age, 1800–
1914, ed. N. Temperley (London, 1981/R), 455–73
W.J. Gatens: ‘Fundamentals of Musical Criticism in the Writings of Edmund
Gurney and his Contemporaries’, ML, lxiii (1982), 17–30
W. McKenna: W.J. Turner: Poet and Music Critic (Gerrards Cross, 1990)
N.C. Scaife: British Music Criticism in a New Era: Studies in Critical Thought
1894–1945 (diss., U. of Oxford, 1994)
Criticism, §II: History to 1945: Bibliograph
e: italy
G. Monaldi: Il melodramma in Italia nella critica del secolo XIX (Campobasso,
1927)
A. Parente: ‘Critica e storiografia musicale, premesse metodologiche’, RaM, iii
(1930), 372–96
G. del Valle de Paz: ‘La critica musicale in Italia, vita e cultura musicale intorno al
1870’, RMI, xxxix (1932), 493–512
G. Pannain: ‘La critica musicale come critica d'arte’, La vita del linguaggio
musicale (Milan, 1947), 131–40
M. Mila: L'esperienza musicale e l'estetica (Turin, 1950, 2/1965)
A. Della Corte: ‘Le critiche musicali di Filippo Filippi’, RMI, lvi (1954), 45–60, 141–
59 [also, liv (1952), 45–54]
A. Della Corte: La critica musicale e i critici (Turin, 1961)
L. Pestalozza, ed.: La Rassegna musicale: antologia (Milan, 1966) [incl.: F. Ballo,
‘Critica musica nell’Ottocento’, 240–49]
P. Rattalino: ‘Le riviste musicali italiane del Novecento I: dal 1900 al 1918’,
Rassegna musicale Curci, xx/2 (1967), 66–80; ‘II: dal 1918 al 1936’, xx/3
(1967), 142–57; ‘III: dal 1936 al 1967’, xx/4 (1967), 214–30
M. De Angelis: La musica del Granduca: vita musicale e correnti critiche a
Firenze, 1800–1855 (Florence, 1978)
M. Conati: ‘I periodici teatrali e musicali italiani a metà Ottocento’, Periodica
Musica, vii (1989), 13–18; repr. in La Musica come linguaggio universale:
genesi e storia di un'idea, ed. R. Pozzi (Florence, 1990), 89–100
F. Nicolodi and P. Trovato: ‘Il lessico della critica musicale italiana (LCMI),
1600–1960’, Le fonti musicali in Italia: studi e ricerche, v (1991), 227–35
M. Capra: ‘La Casa Editrice Sonzogno tra giornalismo e impresariato’, Casa
Sonzogno: cronologie, saggi, testimonianze, ed. M. Morini and N. and P.
Ostali (Milan, 1995), 243–90 [accompanying compact discs]
Criticism, §II: History to 1945: Bibliograph
f: russia
(i) Primary sources
C. Cui: La musique en Russie (Paris, 1880/R)
A.N. Serov: Kriticheskiye stat'i [Critical articles], ed. N. Stoyanovsky and others
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(London, 1968)
Yu.D. Ėngel': Glazami sovremennika. Izbrannïye stat'i o russkoy muzïke 1898–
1918 [Through the eyes of a contemporary. Selected articles about Russian
music 1898–1918] (Moscow, 1971)
A.V. Ossovsky: Muzïkal'no-kritcheskiye stat'i [Critical articles on music]
(Leningrad, 1971)
I.I. Sollertinsky: Stat'i o balete [Articles about ballet], ed. M. Druskin (Leningrad,
1973)
B.V. Asaf'yev: O balete: stat'i – retsenzii – vospominaniya [Ballet: articles –
reviews – memoirs] (Leningrad, 1974)
G.A. Larosh: Izbrannïye stat'i v pyati vïpuskakh [Selected articles in five volumes],
ed. G.B. Bernandt and A.A. Gozenpud (Leningrad, 1974–8)
V.V. Stasov: Stat'i o muzïke [Articles on music], ed. V.V. Protopopov (Moscow,
1974–80)
V.M. Bogdanov-Berezovsky: Stat'i, vospominaniya, pis'ma [Articles,
reminiscences, letters], ed. L.M. Kutateladze and M.A. Bochaver (Leningrad
and Moscow, 1978)
B.V. Asaf'yev: O khorovom iskusstve [The choral art] (Leningrad, 1980)
B.V. Asaf'yev: O simfonicheskoy i kamernoy muzïke [About symphonic and
chamber music] (Leningrad, 1981)
Ė.K. Rozenov: Stat'i o muzïke [Articles about music], ed. N.N. Sokolov (Moscow,
1982)
A.N. Serov: Stat'i o muzïke [Articles about music], ed. V.V. Protopopov (Moscow,
1984–90)
B.V. Asaf'yev: Ob opere: izbrannïye stat'i [About opera: selected articles]
(Leningrad, 1985)
P.I. Chaykovsky: Muzïkal'no-kriticheskiye stat'i [Critical articles on music]
(Leningrad, 1986)
S. Campbell, ed.: Russians on Russian Music 1830–1880 (Cambridge, 1994)
(ii) Other literature
Yu.A. Kremlyov: Russkaya mïsl' o muzïke [Russian thinking on music]
(Leningrad, 1954–60)
T.N. Livanova and O. Vinogradova: Muzïkal'naya bibliografiya russkoy
periodicheskoy pechati XIX veka [A musical bibliography of the Russian
periodical press in the nineteenth century] (Moscow, 1960–79)
T.N. Livanova: Opernaya kritika v Rossii [Opera criticism in Russia] (Moscow,
1966–73)
G.B. Bernandt and I.M. Yampol'sky: Kto pisal o muzïke: bio-bibliograficheskiy
slovar' muzïkal'nïkh kritikov i lits, pisavshikh o muzïke v dorevolyutsionnoy
Rossii i SSSR [Writers on music: a bio-bibliographical dictionary of music
critics and persons who have written about music in pre-revolutionary Russia
and the USSR] (Moscow, 1971–89)
A.M. Stupel': Russkaya mïsl' o muzïke 1895–1917: ocherk istorii russkoy
musïkal'noy kritiki [Russian thinking on music 1895–1917: an outline history
of Russian music criticism] (Leningrad, 1980)
Criticism, §II: History to 1945: Bibliograph
g: usa, canada
GroveA
H. Krehbiel: Review of the New York Musical Season 1885–1890 (New York and
London, 1886–1890)
W.S.B. Mathews: A Hundred Years of Music in America (Chicago, 1889/R)
W.F. Apthorp: Musicians and Music-Lovers and other Essays (New York, 1894/R,
5/1908)
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M. Kammen: The Lively Arts: Gilbert Seldes and the Transformation of Cultural
Criticism in the United States (New York, 1996)
M.N. Grant: Maestros of the Pen: a History of Classical Music Criticism in America
(Boston, 1998)
Criticism
III. Since 1945
1. Introduction.
2. 1945–65.
3. 1965–80.
4. Since 1980.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Criticism, §III: Since 1945
1. Introduction.
Superficially, music criticism during the second half of the 20th century conformed
to models developed 100 years earlier. Critics for newspapers and magazines
were expected to inform readers about a composition or performance by using
appropriate metaphors, images and adjectives, with only occasional reference to
analytical detail. The dominant critical method was comparison: juxtaposing a
particular performance with others by the same artist or with performances of the
same composition by different artists, or juxtaposing a new work with others by the
same composer or in a similar style. Criticism thus continued to be preoccupied
with issues of tradition.
On a deeper level, however, criticism changed dramatically during this period
because the world around it changed. Immediately after World War II the
European Classical tradition was the unchallenged focus of high musical
aspiration; the Romantic performing tradition remained vital, with some of its most
eminent avatars still active. By the end of the century, the main critical
controversies no longer concerned new music or performance styles, but whether
classical music had a greater claim on any culture's attention than other forms of
music and entertainment. This shift in circumstances and attitudes affected critics’
reactions to music and redefined their relationships with other segments of the
music world.
The critic's relationship with the music audience changed because readers could
no longer be assumed to share a similar background of musical experience. Pop
music and world music became more dominant, challenging the boundaries and
claims of classical-music criticism.
The critic's relationship with composers changed because the notion of musical
progress had become obsolete. The avant garde no longer had the power to
shock, indeed its rebellious gestures had become familiar mannerisms. A genial
eclecticism ruled the international scene. Critics were no longer presumed to
articulate ‘advanced’ tastes, and neither composers not critics issued manifestos
of the sort once associated with musical Modernism.
The critic's relationship with performers changed because the bulk of the concert-
hall repertory had long since solidified into a slowly mutating canon of basic works.
Every new performance competed with almost a century of recorded repertory.
Novelty often meant not unfamiliar music but theatrical concert lighting or
‘crossover’ programming in which pop selections were interwoven with art music
pieces.
The critic's relationship with the music business changed because there were
fewer virtuoso performers whose high fees were justified by their ability
consistently to fill large concert halls. Most classical recording companies were
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taken over by large corporations that were ever more concerned about bottom-line
earnings and the disparity between classical and popular recording sales. As
marketing pressures increased on both artists and record labels, the music
business and its impact on performance and composition became a larger part of
the critic's brief.
Critics were also influenced by trends in music scholarship, in particular the
growing emphasis on the political and cultural contexts of music and music-
making. These in turn related to such far-reaching cultural transformations as the
spread of the classical tradition in Asia, the increasing importance of the USA as
the centre of the music business, diminishing state support for classical music and
opera in Europe, and political changes that altered the institutions and cultural
orientation of the former Soviet bloc countries. In reshaping the traditions that
formed the critic's touchstones, these developments affected the critic's role in and
perspective on the music world.
Criticism, §III: Since 1945
2. 1945–65.
During the years after the Second World War, the vigour of the musical scene
included an unquestioned commitment to music criticism by newspapers and
magazines, along with an active readership. Criticism, both in the United States
and in Europe, was often energetic and contentious, indicating a sense that
something important was at stake in the music being heard. But there were also
fault lines in the musical scene that hinted at larger problems. By the 1950s, what
Virgil Thomson called ‘the “modern music” war’ led to an almost complete
disengagement, in both Europe and the USA, between mainstream concert
audiences and the major strands of contemporary composition. Symphony
orchestras, led for the most part by conductors trained in pre-war Europe, tended
to focus on 19th-century masterworks. In Darmstadt, Cologne and other centres of
the modernist avant garde, new institutions and audiences evolved out of those
associated with Modernist composers after World War I. American
experimentalists such as John Cage, Harry Partch and Conlon Nancarrow
attracted their own groups of players, supporters and listeners. The mainstream
audiences tended to resist the lures of what was called ‘modern music’, preferring
19th century repertory, or 20th century works by such composers as Britten,
Rachmaninoff and Menotti, whose musical language was rooted in late Romantic
tonality.
Critics responded variously to these developments. Some blamed performers for
failing to introduce listeners to new music; others argued that ‘middlebrow’
audience taste was the nub of the problem. Some criticized composers who
asserted that musical composition was neither dependent on nor answerable to
audience acclaim; others faulted composers (and fellow critics) for championing
music that intentionally shocked the very listeners that were supposedly being
courted. Defenders of Modernism pointed out that rejection of contemporary music
by audiences and critics was nothing new. In his Lexicon of Musical Invective
(1953), Nicholas Slonimsky adduced examples from history in support of his view
that ‘unfamiliar’ music typically took 40 years to win acceptance.
The pro-modernist position came under attack by populist critics, notably Henry
Pleasants, who in The Agony of Modern Music (1955) dismissed the classical-
music critic as an ‘effete descendant of a warrior clan decimated in battle and
discredited by history’ (p.59). Pleasants predicted the ‘end of the European
musical tradition’ and the ascendancy of pop music and jazz. Indeed, a
romanticism of the ‘folk’ developed alongside and in opposition to Modernism; it
was characterized by expressions of admiration for the supposedly more natural,
less rational musical idioms of non-Western cultures and jazz. The impulse had
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been strong even earlier in the century among art music composers like
Stravinsky and Bartók. Now it became associated with pop music and rock 'n roll
which found large and enthusiastic audiences who were either suspicious of or
uninterested in the intellectual complexities of ‘highbrow’ music. By the 1980s folk
romanticism, with its slightly condescending gaze at what Olin Downes called ‘the
genius of the simple people’, blossomed into fully fledged multiculturalism, which
rejected any claim of superiority, and questioned any claim of uniqueness, for the
Western classical tradition.
Despite these growing tensions, the music world in the immediate postwar
decades appeared to be in the flush of health. Critics wrote at length and to an
interested public about the débuts of new artists; orchestras expanded their
schedules; touring soloists sold out concert halls. Horowitz and Heifetz, Reiner
and Szell, Casals and Rubinstein possessed unquestioned prestige as masters of
their respective arts; they became cultural icons, appearing on the covers of news
magazines without appearing to be mere entertainers courting popular acclaim.
This vigorous performing culture, with its multiple performances of a limited
repertory had an impact on the style of criticism: reviews tended to focus more on
the event and on the details of performance style rather than on the music and its
construction. But there were also critics, who came to their maturity in the 1950s,
and combined advocacy for favoured new styles with close attention to scores.
The musicologist Paul Henry Lang, who wrote for the New York Herald-Tribune,
served as editor of the journal, Musical Quarterly and was known for his catholic
tastes and refined assessments. In Germany, Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt
continued his long career as an enthusiastic analyst of new music. In Switzerland,
Willi Schuh, writing for the Neue Züricher Zeitung wrote broadly on 20th century
music. In England, Neville Cardus, at the Manchester Guardian, wrote polemical
dissents, arguing that criticism had become sterile in its advocacy for atonal and
serial musical styles. But composers also became active as critics, sometimes
writing polemically, sometimes analytically, explaining their tastes and styles.
Boulez, Carter, Stockhausen, Rorem and others were active during this period;
Stravinsky appeared as an acerbic and mordant critic in the books of
conversations written by Robert Craft.
There were also many distinguished critics who approached the contemporary
musical scene with a scholar’s temperament and specialized knowledge who were
important figures for several decades. In England, Ernest Newman, the most
celebrated British critic of the century and author of a magisterial biography of
Wagner, finished his career in 1958, retiring from the Sunday Times. Martin
Cooper, as critic for the Daily Telegraph and editor of the Musical Times,
combined expertise in French and Russian repertory with an urbane style; Winton
Dean helped shape modern understanding of Handel, but was also known for his
writing on French and Italian opera. Stanley Sadie, who was just beginning his
career at the time, later extended the tradition of the critic-scholar on an unusual
scale, by editing the various editions of this dictionary. Other critics of the period
included Guido Pannain in Italy, who wrote for the Rassegna musicale, and Stefan
Kisielewski in Poland, editor of the musical weekly, Ruch muzyczny.
But as the canonical repertory congealed and recordings proliferated, some critics
also began to question whether music could be treated as an autonomous art form
that could be discussed in relative isolation from surrounding political and cultural
forces. The musicologist Joseph Kerman, in his influential book Opera as Drama
(1956), argued that opera should be treated as unity of disparate arts, none of
which could be split off from the whole. Beginning in the 1960s, the Marxist critic
Theodor Adorno began to have a greater influence on other scholars with his
densely packed social and political analyses of music that rebelled against the
notion of musical autonomy. Later, under the influence of literary theory, which
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was starting to examine the nature of texts and their interpretation, critics began to
describe music in a different way. The French literary critic, Roland Barthes, wrote
about the challenge of separating music criticism from its reliance on the
‘adjective’ and attempted to evoke the musical experience by examining such
notions as the ‘grain’ of a voice, or contemplating the difference between playing
music and listening to it. Other literary approaches were used in such journals as
Musique en jeu. By the 1980s, French literary theory had influenced the
vocabulary and style of much musical scholarship.
Among journalistic critics, Virgil Thomson stood out for relating music to its
economic, social and political surroundings. His writing combined graceful prose,
supple and often startling musical descriptions, and an insider's awareness of the
music world. In the 1962 edition of The State of Music (first published in 1939),
Thomson wrote that ‘What music needs right now is the sociological treatment, a
documented study of its place in business, in policy and culture’.
Criticism, §III: Since 1945
3. 1965–80.
In the mid-1960s, with the advent of an international counterculture foreshadowed
by Chuck Berry's song Roll over Beethoven, sociology did become more important
to musical culture, criticism and scholarship. Not only Beethoven had to roll over,
but high art and culture as conceived by the majority of classical composers and
critics. Folk romanticism, populist, egalitarian politics and an increasing focus on
youth culture all played a part in this revolution. In the USA such critics as Robert
Christgau, Greil Marcus, John Rockwell, Whitney Balliett and Nat Hentoff wrote
about rock music and jazz with the same seriousness as their classical
colleagues. In addition, new currents were transforming the classical tradition from
within. Composers like Philip Glass and Steve Reich were influenced by non-
Western cultures in which a composition was viewed not as a narrative drama,
complete with thematic characters and a picaresque tale of transformations, but
as a meditative experience involving slow-paced evolution or quirky rhythmic
variations. In the theatrical events known as ‘happenings’, the point was not the
sound itself but the deliberately dadaist or shocking uses to which it was put. Hans
Werner Henze, Cornelius Cardew and others wrote music of an explicitly political
nature which could not be judged by exclusively musical criteria.
These developments posed a challenge to journalistic criticism, which for the most
part remained focussed on the debates about audiences and modernist music.
Some critics, such as William Mann, Andrew Porter and Desmond Shawe-Taylor
in England, chronicled the evolution of various avant gardes and their musical
techniques. In the USA Leighton Kerner, Tom Johnson and Kyle Gann devoted
sympathetic attention to new music, while Michael Steinberg, Martin Bernheimer
and a few others wrote lengthy and serious appraisals of the changing musical
scene, mixing scholarly acuteness with passionate assessments. A prominent
conservative voice was that of Harold C. Schonberg, chief critic of the New York
Times from 1960 to 1981. An expert in the history of piano performance, he
favoured strong virtuoso personalities and became a thoroughly schooled
representative of mainstream audience tastes.
In England, where musicology and music journalism were less strictly segregated
than in the USA, the tradition of the critic-scholar included such figures as Ernest
Newman, Martin Cooper, Winton Dean and Stanley Sadie, all of whom regularly
took note of musicological news and discoveries. Among their counterparts in the
USA were the pianist Charles Rosen, the musicologist Joseph Kerman and
Andrew Porter, a South African long resident in England who in 1972 became
music critic of the New Yorker magazine. Unlike most American critics, Porter saw
himself as an active participant in the musical project rather than a detached
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‘easy listening’ music and government patronage for turning ‘art into
entertainment’. Another viewpoint was articulated by Edward Rothstein, who
suggested that the chasm between audiences and composers resulted from the
kinds of meaning music created and the different social and cultural purposes it
served. He argued that critics could assess different kinds of music on their own
terms, while also comparing them and making aesthetic judgments.
Controversies over musical meaning, politics and élite culture also became more
central to the academic study of music. Kerman (1985) argued that musicologists'
preoccupation with ‘analysis’ had ‘produced relatively little of intellectual interest’
because it completely ignored the question of ‘artistic value’; he urged them to
adopt the wider stance of ‘criticism’. Over the next decade musical scholarship did
undergo a major change; however, the emphasis was not on artistic value but on
the sociology of music, its political meanings and its cultural contexts.
Musicologists followed literary theorists in asking questions about the kinds of
ideas music promotes and why they succeed. Some scholars rejected aesthetic
distinctions altogether and treated music as a coded tract concerning sexuality
and politics; scholarly papers on the iconography of the pop star Madonna
became as common as studies of the Classical style. In the 1990s it sometimes
seemed that criticism in the broadest sense had become a goal of musicology,
while journalistic criticism often retreated to the comfort of ‘reviewing’. One major
exception to this trend was in the former USSR, where such critics as Lev
Lebedinsky, Leo Mazel' and Aleksander Ivashkin defined a new role for
themselves in the post-Communist era, reinterpreting the history of Soviet music
and evaluating the effects of freedom on art.
Two other major issues that engaged critics at the end of the 20th century arose
from the early music movement and the proliferation of digital recordings on
compact disc. In the long-running debate over historical ‘authenticity’, some critics
found period-instrument performances on the whole dry, distorted and reductive,
while others held that they cleansed the accumulated manners of Romanticism
from pre-Classical music. In many ways the arguments echoed the long debate
over taste begun by advocates of various avant gardes objecting to mainstream
Romantic tastes. For much of the 1980s and 90s this was an important issue of
contention in discussions of musical performance in general, particularly when
claims of authenticity were pressed too far (the more cautious term ‘historically
informed’ came to be preferred). In the digital era that began in the late 1970s, a
number of music and audio critics devoted special attention to the impact of
electronics on music and subtly analysed the nuances of digital sound and fine
audio equipment like oenophiles discussing the effect of grape fungus. Much of
this criticism focused on the limitations of digital recording, ultimately spurring
engineers to develop refinements in the technology.
Technology was also having a profound effect on the ways in which criticism and
ideas about music were communicated. With the popularization of the Internet in
the late 1990s, many of the companies providing Internet access, like America
Online, which had 23 million subscribers by 2000, included numerous ‘discussion
groups’, ‘bulletin boards’ or ‘forums’ devoted to music. Messages were posted by
anybody who joined the forum – ordinary listeners, fans, performers and even
professional critics – reacting to recordings, concerts, reviews, or news from the
music business. At best, these forums made criticism a social activity in which
alternate reactions to a musical event could be shared and discussed with ease.
More professional musical organizations, like the American Musicological Society,
also encouraged the establishment of ‘mailing lists’ of specialists in different
musical fields ranging from musical to ethnomusicology. Any scholar sending an
e-mail message automatically reached several hundred colleagues with similar
interests; research queries were posted and answered, often within a day by
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trans., 1976)
A. Walker: An Anatomy of Musical Criticism (London, 1966)
B.V. Asaf'yev: Kritischeskiye stat'i, ocherki i retsenzii [Critical aticles, essays and
reviews], ed. I.V. Beletsky (Moscow, 1967)
G. Schuller: Early Jazz (New York, 1968)
F. Jonas, trans.: Vladimir Vasilyevich Stasov: Selected Essays on Music
(London, 1968)
H.H. Stuckenschmidt: Twentieth Century Music, trans. R. Deveson (New York,
1969)
B. Schwarz: Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia: 1917–1970 (London, 1972)
G. Marcus: Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock and Roll Music (New York,
1975)
R. Barthes: Image, Music, Text, ed. and trans. S. Heath (New York, 1977/R)
H.C. Schonberg: Facing the Music (New York, 1981)
V. Thomson: A Virgil Thomson Reader (New York, 1981)
B.V. Asaf'yev: A Book about Stravinsky, trans. Richard French (Ann Arbor, 1982)
J. Rockwell: All American Music: Composition in the Late Twentieth Century
(New York, 1983)
J. Kerman: Musicology (London, 1985; repr. Cambridge, MA, 1985 as
Contemplating Music)
N. Cardus: Cardus on Music: a Centenary Collection, ed. D. Wright (London,
1988)
M. Cooper: Judgements of Value (New York, 1988)
J. Sullivan, ed.: Words on Music: from Addison to Barzun (Athens, OH, 1990)
E. Rothstein: Emblems of Mind: the Inner Life of Music and Mathematics (New
York, 1995)
R. Gottlieb: Reading Jazz: a Gathering of Autobiography, Reportage, and
Crticism from 1919 to Now (New York, 1996)
H. Haskell, ed.: The Attentive Listener: Three Centuries of Music Criticism (New
Haven, CT, 1996)
K. Gann: American Music in the 20th Century (New York, 1997)
P. Lebrecht: Who Killed Classical Music? (New Jersey, 1997)
A. Tommasini: Virgil Thomson: Composer on the Aisle (New York, 1997)
M.N. Grant: Maestros of the Pen: a History of Classical Music Criticism in America
(Boston, 1998)
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