Classical and Pop Reviews (4)

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Classical and pop reviews (4)

July 20, 2008 by Greg Sandow
Behind all the discussion we’ve been having about pop and classical reviews lie some big differences —
differences in how people think about pop and classical music.It’ll be good, I think, to clarify these, at
least as I see them, before I go on to compare more reviews. (See also this post, and this one.)
For classical music people, a piece of music is, so to speak, an object, something that lies behind every
performance, and has an existence of its own. Typically we’d identify this as the score of the piece — the
written notation specifying what the composer wrote. In passing, I’ll note that this in fact turns out to be
a complicated concept, surprisingly elusive when you try to specify exactly what it means. Scholars
working in the discipline called philosophy of music have written endless papers arguing about this. See
Lydia Goehr’s book The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works for a trenchant analysis.
But still, the concept makes intuitive sense, in a classical context. A composer writes a piece; musicians
play it. The piece came before the performance, and we think — especially if we’re talking about one of
the great classical masterworks — that the piece is more important than the performance is. And so
classical critics care more about pieces than performances. In fact, that’s a badge of honor, proof that
you’re serious. A performance is judged by how well it brings across the piece being performed, whose
qualities — structural, emotional, whatever — are thought to be the source of all the meaning that the
piece might have. The meaning, in other words, exists independently, apart from all performances,
unaffected (at least in theory) by what anybody thinks it is.
In pop music, things are very different. There isn’t any piece of music on display. Sure, somebody writes a
song, and then it’s recorded, getting reshaped in the process, but also taking on its nal form, with
instruments and voices, a process that might vaguely be compared to the orchestration of a classical
piece. Somebody, at least in theory, could prepare a score of what was sung and played. (These scores
https://www.artsjournal.com/sandow/2008/07/classical_and_pop_reviews_4.html 1/10
actually exist for many metal songs, even complete albums, and can be bought. They’re written in guitar
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notation, but still they specify every note, just as the score of a
Beethoven symphony does.)
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But what matters most in pop is the performance — or, even more, the entire musical event, the music
that’s sung and played, the lyrics, the tone of the singer’s voice, the clothes the musicians wear, their
body language, and, not least, the reaction of the audience. In fact, what classical music people often call
the “reception” of a piece of music — the way the world reacts to it — becomes part of a pop song’s
meaning, and might even be the most crucial part.
And so of course this leads to vast differences in criticism. Classical critics for the most part keep
themselves out of their reviews, which seems appropriate, because the focus is on something bigger and
more important than any personal reaction, the piece itself. But pop critics feel free to make themselves
a crucial part of what they write. Lester Bangs, writing about Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks, starts by
telling us what his life was like when he rst heard the album. And why not? The meaning of the record, a
rock critic would think, is at least in part created by everyone’s reaction to it, and Bangs’s own experience
could be both relevant and illuminating.
And we can also see why classical music people read pop criticism, and complain that the critics don’t
talk about the music. A classical reader wants to know, in objective terms, how the music sounds and
how it’s written. And a pop person wants to know how the music feels, what view of life it gives us, what
kind of people like it, or how people change when they hear it. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen someone
from the pop world react to classical reviews, but maybe they’d think that classical critics never talk
about anything important. Or, more strongly, that they don’t talk about anything real. That they pick the
least important things about music, and make a fetish of them.
The more I explore this gap, the wider it seems. In one of the essays in Stranded — a book in which many
rock critics decide what album they’d take to a desert island (and which I’ve cited as one of several good
places to start, if you want to see how rock criticism works) — Ed Ward writes about Dedicated to You, an
album by the “5” Royales (that’s how their name is written). He talks in great evocative detail about the
group’s history — and then he tells us that made it up!
From a classical music point of view, that’s completely — grossly, outrageously — irresponsible. but Ward
says that simply thinking about the group (in the context, of course, of exhaustive knowledge of rock and
R&B history) gives him more than any scholarship or history could ever convey. And besides, he wants to
bring the mystery back to rock & roll. So he’d rather communicate in fables, in the kind of truth that may
be, in the end, be more truthful than the merely objective facts.
Which isn’t to say that classical music writing doesn’t also tell us crucial things. I’ll repeat what I said in
another post — I’m not trying to prove that pop writing is better than classical writing, or that pop music
is better than classical music. I just want to show some differences — and show how these differences
seem to make pop writing more accessible to a general audience, which is something classical music
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as they try to ARTSJOURNAL
nd more listeners for classical music.
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(1) It’s perfectly possible to do musical analysis, in classical music style, of pop songs. You then can
show, rst, that pop songs show coherent musical thought, just as classical music does. And then you
can show how the objective structures you’ve unearthed help create everything that rock critics like to
notice. See for instance Robert Walser, Running With the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy
Metal Music.
(2) The difference I’m describing here helps show why classical music favors a pure and clean vocal and
instrumental sound, while pop music lets people shout and scream, and put hair on electric guitar
sounds with distorted feedback. Of course, there are many reasons for this, ranging from historical
evolution to social class (classical music has tended to be music of the upper classes, while pop, ever
since rock began, has evolved from folk music, blues, gospel, country music, and R&B, which all are
musical styles that came from black, rural, and working class cultures. But still there’s a connection with
the difference I’m exploring. If your job in music is to realize a composer’s piece, then it helps to do so
with a pure, clean sound, so everyone can hear what the piece is. (And especially its structures, based on
motifs and harmonies that have to be clearly presented.) But if your job — as it is in pop — is to create an
event, then anything goes.
(3) There’s also a connection in all of this to the famous Roland Barthes essay, “The Grain of the Voice,”
perhaps the only piece of writin
g in which a major cultural theorist examines classical music criticism. He’s not encouraging. “[I]t can
readily be seen that a work (or its performance) is only ever translated into the poorest of linguistic
categories: the adjective….this music is this, this execution is that.” He notes (I’m paraphrasing him) that
critics note emotions they might have, as they write in this way, but don’t seem to be disturbed by them.
They remain “constituted,” unru ed, to some degree removed from the music as they make their
judgments. Barthes prefers to let his heart and body respond to what he calls the “grain” of a sound,
especially a singing voice, the grain being de ned as something that one’s body vibrates with (a phrase
far too sentimental for Barthes!), something that lies beyond objective measurement. Here’s one way
that he describes this:
“ I shall not judge a performance according to the rules of interpretation, the constraints of
style…(I shall not wax lyrical concerning the “rigor,” the “brilliance,” the “warmth,” the “respect
for what is written,” etc.) but according to the image of the body given me. I can hear with
certainty — the certainty of the body, of thrill — that the harpsichord playing of Wanda
Landowska comes from her inner body and not from the petty digital scramble of so m any
harpsichordists…As for piano music, I know at once which part of the body is playing — if it is
the arm, too often, alas, muscled like a dancer’s calves, the clutch of the ngertips (despite
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of the wrists), or if on the contrary it is the only erotic part of a
pianist’s body, the pad of the ngers whose “grain” is so rarely heard…
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Whatever you think of Barthes’s highly personal reactions here, I think it’s safe to say that Classical
criticism, for all the reasons I’ve cited, is more or less as Barthes describes it. While pop criticism goes
straight for the grain of the voice. Which gives us another vicus of recirculation — the classical critics
once more say (and they’re entirely right, from their point of view) that pop critics don’t talk about music…
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Aaron says
July 21, 2008 at 12:07 pm
Pop critics’ taste for any song at its performance is manifestly tied to the world around them. Look
at how a times critic explains her changing attitude to the Billy Joel song,”We didn’t start the re.”
This much-maligned song, with its jumbled litany of historical touchstones, may have nally
graduated to relevance as a kind of unwitting comment on Google-age information overload, even
if it has faded as a baby-boomer exoneration. Here the song’s reception mutates with changes in
the world around it, ie the demise of the baby boomer’s and emergence of google. The criticism
makes sense regardless of whether we have heard the song because the references are familiar
and current, a key difference that makes almost every pop review more incluse than a classical
one. Praise and criticism for the song turns on its relevance to the people listening to it.
Moreover, pop criticism’s link to the contemporary world reinforces the distinction you make
HOME ABOUT “object”
between classical AJBLOGS ARTSJOURNAL
music and pop “event” music. Whereas pop criticism changes over
time, even as pieces stay the same, the style of classical criticism is otherworldly. The same
performance could happen once and twenty years later with out
SEARCH THEany difference
SITE ... in the review. It
takes a Michael Tilson-Thomas recording of Mahler 6 the week after 9/11 for classical critics to
notice how the music has changed. And the root of this difference is as you say, the de nition of
classical music as an “object.” The only question at a classical performance is unworldly and
extra-temporal: how well has the written music been represented? Aside from the question’s
irrelevance to current life, this approach is problematic because it presupposes a knowledge of the
original written piece for anyone to understand it. This leaves reviewers of even the most
penetrating and personally affecting classical performances with only the usual bundle of
pretentious adjectives and phrases – “elegantly,” “imaginatively,” “forcefully, “nuanced interpretive
style” – to write something that’s about as easy as saying “yes, they played that song.”
Suzanne Derringer says

July 22, 2008 at 12:40 pm
Hi, Greg –
I’ve been out of touch for a while – just wanted to note that, with contemporary pop songs, the
written score often comes later: somebody (often not the “composer” – who may be musically
illiterate)has attempted to capture them with little black marks on paper, from a recorded
performance. Bob Marley’s songs come to mind; the songbooks which are available are more or
less unsingable, and certainly don’t give a sense of Marley’s phrasing, etc. And there’s a really
interesting Irish dude named Kieran Halpin, singer/songwriter who plays lots of smalll-venue gigs
in the UK, Holland, Germany (last I heard of him, he was in Australia for a year). He has one or two
songbooks now, but someone else wrote them down. I don’t have these songbooks (I do have the
Marley) but I would guess that one can’t reproduce the living songs from the paper in his case,
either. Vocal style is so intensely personal in pop music; songs are inevitably etched in one’s mind
as sung and played by their creators.
Even with earlier popular music – one of my passions is American music between the World Wars
– though these songs were usually written by professional songwriting teams before they were
performed and/or recorded, still, the music sheets furnish only a guide to the living song.
Obviously, one great difference between popular music of the 20th century and “classical” music
from whatever era is that popular music is disseminated via technology: recordings,radio, lm and
television, then CDs, music videos, MP3s, internet. The experience is aural and direct – and, as you
say, speaks of contemporary life to a contemporary audience. No footnotes required.
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GREG SANDOW
Though I've been known for

many years as a critic, most of
my work these days involves
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RESOURCES
How to write a
press release
As a footnote to my posts
on classical music
publicists, and how they
could do better, here's a
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The future of
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classical music will be.
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frequent updates! I
Classical music is in trouble, and there are well-
known reasons why. We have an aging audience,
falling ticket sales, and — in part … [Read More...]
Timeline of the
crisis
Here — to end my posts

on the dates of the
classical music crisis —
is a detailed crisis
timeline. The information
in it comes from many sources, including published
reports, blog comments by people who saw the
crisis develop in their professional … [Read More...]
Before the crisis
Yes, the classical music

crisis, which some don't
believe in, and others
think has been going on
forever. This is the third
post in a series. In the
rst, I asked, innocently enough, how long the
classical music crisis (which is so widely talked …
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Four keys to the future
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key things we need to do,
if we're going to give
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When I wrote this, I was
thinking of people who
present classical
performances. But I think
it applies to all of us — for instance, to people who …
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Age of the
audience
Conventional wisdom: the

classical music audience
has always been the age
it is now. Here's evidence
that it used to be much
younger. … [Read More...]
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Though I've been known for

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Yes, the classical music

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Conventional wisdom: the

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