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.
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)
2. Subjectivity and objectivity.
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 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).
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 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.
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 it as a genre of music criticism.
Interpretative and evaluative language about music are variable and can become topics of debate. Terms of praise and disparagement change, and choices reflect historical contingencies of evaluation. Enlightenment writers' discussions of ‘beauty’ and ‘sublimity’, or Hanslick's theoretical focus on ‘beauty’, give their treatments a specific character, raising certain issues at the cost of others, as do Donald Tovey's discussions of ‘infinity’ or Schoenberg's ‘idea’. The same is true of the range of evaluative terms in any critic's practice.
Descriptive and interpretative language in criticism ranges from technical analysis, to attributions of affect or expression, to the many diverse possibilities of figurative language. Beyond issues of vocabulary there are broader literary options, such as Schumann's critical essay in the form of conversations among fictional characters, or the attribution of programmatic content beyond a composer's authorization. Critical language used in interpretation of music can itself become a topic for interpretation; the interpretative issues include, on one hand, the relation of the critical language to the music and to listeners' experiences, and on the other hand, the relation of the language to other discourses of arts criticism, literature, philosophy and so on.
Music criticism often describes and evaluates musical works, compositions. But there are ambiguities and complexities in criticism of musical works, and often criticism concerns itself with other objects. Musical works are not identical with performances or scores; they are, perhaps, abstract entities that can be apprehended through performance and that have their identity fixed through scores. Some music criticism, possibly in imitation of literary criticism, treats musical works as the basic units for critical evaluation and interpretation; this was true, for instance, of scholarly criticism as pursued by some North American musicologists in the 1980s. However, the central role of performance in musical life does not match any aspect of prose fiction or poetry, and criticism that centres on musical works often neglects the contribution of performance.
Music criticism has often shown a particularly intense concern with a canon of musical works, evaluating new compositions in light of their potential contribution to the existing canon (see Canon (iii)). On one hand, since the musical canon is commonly understood to be a collection of musical works, this approach may reinforce the emphasis on works as the primary objects of criticism. But on the other hand, as performances of old, critically accepted compositions have become the norm in 20th-century concerts, criticism of performance has often been the dominant kind of professional critical discourse.
Thus, paradoxically, the complete domination of concert life by an established canon can direct attention away from the individual works in the canon and towards the performances of them; or, in a further twist, attention may turn to the developing careers and characteristics of individual performers, who themselves take on the aesthetic qualities of a work of art, inviting study, appreciation and interpretation on their own. Thus, rather than writing an appreciation of a particular composition, a critic may write primarily about Horowitz or Callas. Within professional criticism, such a focus on performers and performances has been much more characteristic of journalistic writers than of academic ones; in the last years of the 20th century, however, musical performance also became a significant topic within scholarly musicology.
Music criticism can also take musical styles, encompassing many individual works, as a central topic. In fact, changes of style have historically been a basic concern of professional criticism, as the historical portions of this article show clearly. The tradition continues to the present, though journalists' persistent declarations of the death of serialism may lack the currency and intensity of earlier stylistic debates.
Finally, new technology has introduced recordings as a distinct object of critical consideration. For some types of music, including much popular music and almost all electronic music, recordings are obviously the appropriate object of judgment, not only because they are the marketed objects about which musical consumers make decisions but because the musical work is itself a work created in sound: in such cases, recordings do not document performances but, instead, present the work directly. But for more traditional classical music – that is, music where scores determine the identity of works and performers offer live and recorded performances – recordings also threaten to eclipse other, more traditional objects of critical attention.
The historical sections of this article that follow are concerned with European and North American music criticism, and for the most part they begin their chronicles in the 18th or 19th centuries. This focus may seem limiting, but more probably it reveals that music criticism as a distinct form of thought is geographically and historically specific.
Plausibly, the existence of criticism requires particular conceptions, institutions and practices. This interdependence of criticism with other contingent aspects of musical life is clear for professional music criticism (which, for example, depends on the existence of public concerts and, more recently, the circulation of recordings) but may extend, more broadly, to critical judgment as a whole. Perhaps music criticism, as a distinct form of thought, depends on many of the historically specific phenomena already mentioned, such as the conception of a system of art forms; the high value placed on individual experience, along with ambivalence about the authority of public critics; the complex dialectic between common humanity and a special, exclusive musical training; the interactions among scores, performances and works; the development of a musical canon; and the notion of music history as a succession of stylistic transformations (see Reception). Perhaps one can imagine a music criticism that lacks most of these historical attributes, perhaps not; it would be different from criticism as musicians and audiences in European traditions have come to know it.
Like any specific type of thought, music criticism is suited for certain goals and unhelpful for others. As a form of thought shared among members of a musical community, criticism promises to intensify an awareness of shared musical experience, circulate influential models for musical listening and creating, and also, through the formulation of discrepant evaluations and interpretations, enhance awareness of diversity within a musical community. Because of its emphasis on individual experience as the source of insight, and on membership in a musical community as a criterion of critical validity, music criticism is less suited to gaining knowledge of remote cultures. It may seem irrelevant or even offensive for an ethnomusicologist to evaluate the music of a foreign culture in critical terms. However, some recent approaches to ethnography and ethnomusicology decrease the starkness of the contrast with criticism. The traditional notion of the ethnomusicologist as an outsider to a culture, and the related notion of ethnographic objectivity, may need revision. If ethnography is conceived as an individual person coming, through a continuing series of interactions, to share the lives and musical experiences of other people, ethnomusicology may come closer to music criticism than one might have expected. Still, even if one writes ethnomusicological texts by weaving together cultural description with one's own experiences, including musical experiences, the results will lack many of the distinctive traits of traditional music criticism. In particular, an ethnomusicologist's personal descriptions of musical experiences in the field will lack the critic's authoritative tone; instead, the ethnomusicologist will present one perspective, a distinctly finite one, on musical phenomena for which other perspectives, based on more extensive experience, are also possible.
Such a refusal of critical authority is also possible within one's own culture. Some recent ethnographic studies have mapped attitudes of ordinary people or musical fans, in a democratic spirit that grants the writer no special critical standing.
More radically, some writers have challenged the validity and self-understanding of criticism quite generally; Theodor Adorno and Pierre Bourdieu have offered especially sustained, troubling accounts. Adorno argued that the lack of individual freedom in modern life, along with the commodification of music, left no-one in a position to make the kind of free, individual aesthetic judgment that Enlightenment thinkers described. The Enlightenment conception of aesthetic evaluation persists, according to Adorno, only as an ideology that covers the reality of commercial exploitation of musical consumers. Bourdieu argued that musical and other artistic tastes served primarily as a medium of social signification, specifically a means of locating oneself within hierarchies of economic class, employment and education. Philosophical accounts that ground taste in a special artistic sensitivity are, according to Bourdieu, an ideology that hides the more mundane operations of taste as a marker of social location. The claims of these influential writers might suggest that one cannot, in honesty, continue to practise traditional musical criticism. Readers who find their diagnoses insightful but exaggerated are left with the task of assessing how one might, in light of Adorno's or Bourdieu's best ideas, continue to pursue some kind of critical discourse.
Some recent writing has explored more specific conceptions of subjectivity, creating a discourse that resembles criticism without aspiring to general validity. Arguably, criticism that claims to represent the shared experiences of a musical community is more likely, in fact, to represent the subjectivity of some privileged group within that community. Feminist critics have suggested that the privileged perspective of critical discourse is masculine; gay and lesbian critics have suggested that mainstream critical discourse assumes a heterosexual orientation. Feminist, gay and lesbian writers have often shown sensitivity in negotiating the relation between individual and collective experiences: while suggesting that dominant discourses have excluded some voices, they offer alternative perspectives poised between individual statements and more general representation of the minorities for which they hope to speak (see Feminism and Gay and lesbian music).
Criticism of Popular music has been one of the most accomplished and productive areas of recent professional criticism. Several writers, notably Simon Frith and Greil Marcus, have moved between journalistic criticism and sustained scholarly writing with remarkable ease and success. Frith has argued that evaluation of popular music draws on a range of different criteria, including the individualistic artistic standards of art music, the more collectively orientated standards of folk music and the commercially inflected standards of pop itself. In its blend of contrasting criteria, such discourse may exemplify valuable extensions beyond traditional music criticism. Marcus has produced several bold studies that shift provocatively among personal description, critical judgment and imaginative 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.
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)
M. Kisliuk: Seize the Dance! BaAka Musical Life and the Ethnography of Performance (New York and Oxford, 1998)
Criticism, §II: History to 1945
Criticism, §II, 1: History to 1945: Germany and Austria
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 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 literature. Hiller relied on reports by correspondents in German and foreign cities; he focussed on newsworthiness as well as scholarship, and even in the more learned articles a concern for intelligibility and popularity is evident. Forkel and Reichardt (Musikalisches Kunstmagazin, Berlin, 1782 and 1791, and later publications) placed even more emphasis on detailed work critiques that included musical examples, and which were often harshly judgmental. Nonetheless, their reviews rarely delved deeply into the music, eschewing analysis and relying instead on vague aesthetic argumentation of a general nature. One notable exception is Forkel's review of Benda's Ariadne auf Naxos (Musikalisch-kritische Bibliothek, iii, 250–85), in which he made minor revisions to selected passages in the opera and compared them to Benda's originals in order to demonstrate their shortcomings. Operas, church music, keyboard music and song collections were the preferred genres for criticism.
Criticism, §II, 1: History to 1945: Germany and Austria
The Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung of Leipzig, often considered the first modern music journal and the first organ for modern music criticism, was neither. Friedrich Rochlitz, its founder (1798) and long-time editor, consolidated the innovations begun by Hiller, adding more work and performance criticism by drawing on primarily amateur correspondents in many cities (particularly for concert reviews) across German-Austrian territories and abroad. The journal's success and influence derived in part from its ability to meet the needs of a growing musically literate public (both amateur and professional) in a time of rapid expansion of published music and public concerts. It became a model for the music journals that proliferated in German-speaking Europe and contributed significantly to the development of a modern musical culture.
The Rezension continued to be the major forum for work criticism in the 19th century. Such criticism had three distinct emphases: explication of a work's structure and style – the forerunner of modern analysis; evaluation of a work's artistic success, with or without an explanation of the critic's own aesthetics and stylistic preferences; and interpretation of a work's content (Inhalt), ideas (Idee) or spirit (Geist) – a type of inquiry described today as hermeneutic. Early in the century criticism in the last category often relied on generally descriptive language, later, and continuing into the 20th century, poetic allusions and programmes were common.
The challenges posed by Beethoven's music provided a major stimulus to the development of German music criticism. E.T.A Hoffmann's celebrated review of the Fifth Symphony (AMZ, 1810) began a tradition of serious Beethoven criticism in Germany and elsewhere. As the century progressed, Beethoven interprtation drove a wedge between the practitioners of ‘absolute’ criticism focussing on form and style and those favouring biographical and programmatic modes of explanation. It was the ‘newness’ of Beethoven’s music, its often startling departures from stylistic conventions, that required explanation and interpretation. At the same time, explanations were required for the music of J.S. Bach and other Baroque and Renaissance composers, who had in the 18th century attracted the attention of historically orientated critics (Forkel on Bach, Herder on Palestrina). This music, which gradually became more widely known through occasional performance and publication, was for contemporary listener also startlingly new in its historical distance, its very oldness. Marx's discussion of the St Matthew Passion in the Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in the weeks leading up to its revival under Mendelssohn in March 1829 was a critical milestone. Rochlitz also made a significant contribution to historical criticism with his book Für 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.
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.
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 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).
The concern with progress is closely associated with the critical agendas of 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
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 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 non-Aryan musics was to be maintained as a bulwark against influences that had formerly undermined the purity of German music. All writing about music, popular and scholarly, was (or was supposed to be) critical; it was (or was supposed to be) informed by an evaluative racial theory, a belief in Aryan cultural superiority and a commitment to a National Socialist revolution. With its mission of educating the population (Volksbildung) in light of this commitment, music criticism in the Nazi period perverted – but in its perversion continued – a 200-year tradition.
Criticism, §II: History to 1945
(ii) National identities and styles.
Criticism, §II, 2: History to 1945: France and Belgium
Tinctoris's evaluations of his predecessors and contemporaries, as presented in his 15th-century treatises, mark the start of a rich tradition of criticism in France and Belgium. Nevertheless, music criticism per se was sporadiz before about 1700; thereafter the dominant media for comment were the polemic pamphlet, encyclopaedia and newspaper articles, and music histories. In the 19th century the polemic pamphlet was absorbed into the increasingly popular genre of the newspaper feuilleton, an often witty essay on a topical subject which filled the lowest part of one or more pages. The sudden proliferation of the specialist musical press immediately before and during the July Monarchy (1830–48) served to define most of the parameters and functions of music criticism up to 1945. Periodicals devoted to piano music, church music, the orphéon repertory, composition, children's musical education and the café-concert appeared between 1833 and 1870.
Detailed comments on performed interpretations became common only in the 1850s, and were often intimately linked with questions regarding the upholding of the performance traditions of works in the canon. Journals such as Le ménestrel, La revue et gazette musicale and, in Belgium, Le guide musical blurred the boundaries between music criticism, aesthetics, concert reviewing, music theory and analysis, and provided a forum for a discipline which gained autonomy in the early 20th century: historical musicology. Jules Combarieu's Revue d'histoire et de critique musicales, begun in 1901, marks a transitional stage in the separation of criticism and musicology within the periodical literature. The first musicological journal, in the modern sense, was L'année musicale (1911–13).
Until 1820 the concept of the professonal music critic hardly existed. Littérateurs and philosophers such as Diderot and Raguenet routinely included music in their purview, as did the musically illiterate Geoffroy, the ‘inventor’ of the newspaper feuilleton who wrote for the Journal des débats between 1800 and 1812. It was Castil-Blaze, critic of the Journal des débats from 1820, who proclaimed it necessary that a critic possess specialist musical credentials, an issue later taken up by François-Joseph Fétis. The phenomenon of the composer-critic, which stretched from Berlioz to Poulenc and beyond, reinforced the professional status of music criticism in the early 19th century. However, Romanticism's emphasis on the interpenetration of the arts ensured the survival of the amateur or artist-critic, and professional and non-professional streams in music criticism co-existed until the advent of strictly musicological journals.
The roots of modern French music criticism in debates dominated by littérateurs encouraged a literary mode of presentation which continued through the 19th 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
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 performances of Pergolesi's La serva padrona in 1752, the debate exploded only the following year, after the première of Mondonville's Titon et l'Aurore. Pro-Italians included Grimm, Rousseau and Diderot; the pro-French camp counted Jourdan, Fréron, Laugier and – tardily but decisively – Rameau. The third major critical quarrel with Italy, centring on Gluck's final visit to Paris in 1777, was foreshadowed by an exchange between Du Roullet and Gluck in the Mercure de France in 1772. Du Roullet presented Gluck as a staunch francophile in matters of operatic aesthetics, while Gluck denied any partisan allegiance. Nevertheless, in the late 1770s Gluck cast himself as the upholder of French standards of dramatic realism which the Piccinnistes, among them Marmontel and La Harpe, decried as entailing the sacrifice of the highest ideals of symmetrical periodicity and pleasing melody.
New genres of absolute music reached France from Germanic lands in the late 18th century. Early criticism such as that in Garcin's Traité du mélo-drame (1772) focussed on an issue that characterized writings on German music throughout the 19th and early 20th centuries: its harmonic complexity. Haydn and Mozart, among the first composers after Lully to retain their place in the French repertory after their deaths, became test-cases in the critical formulation of a canon of masterworks whose conditions of entry were hotly debated thereafter. General acceptance from 1759 of Haydn as a symphonist and composer of chamber music did not extend, later in the century, to Mozart. During and after the Revolution, Republican critics on the far left argued for the abolition of all music which had flourished under monarchical absolutism. Conservatives and pro-Italians such as Geoffroy found Mozart's operas too symphonic, too complex, and over-charged with melodic ideas that were not truly lyrical; yet Geoffroy recognized the fusion of Italian and German principles that Mozart's operatic style represented. German-Italian polarization was revealed again in Stendhal's writings and in Joseph d'Ortigue's critique of Rossini (1829), which pitted Italian superficiality against the German profundity epitomized by Beethoven. Such squabbles did little to mask critical unease regarding the value of Franco-Belgian music, particularly opera, where the perception of national styles of opéra comique and grand opera which sat squarely between the Italian and the German, avoiding the excesses of each, gained a strong philosophical underpinning only during the eclectic period of the July Monarchy.
Criticism, §II, 2: History to 1945: France and Belgium
The mixed early critical response to Beethoven was encapsulated in a comment of 1811 in the rabidly pro-Italian journal Les tablettes de Polymnie that his music ‘harboured doves and crocodiles together’. Intense and protracted debate was sparked only in 1828, with the re-institution of regular concerts at the Paris Conservatoire. Fétis (Revue musicale), Castil-Blaze (Journal des débats) and, later, Berlioz (Gazette musicale) were instrumental in moulding public opinion regarding Beethoven's orchestral music; concentrated discussion of the late chamber music, promoted by the Pierre Maurin quartet, did not appear until the 1850s.
Fétis was the central figure in Franco-Belgian music criticism from 1827 to well after the Franco-Prussian War. A Belgian who divided his career between Paris and Brussels, he had a decisive influence on the discipline in both countries. His eclectic aesthetic, which resulted in support for Meyerbeer, Mendelssohn and Halévy, was antipathetic to the Romantic view of his main critical rival, Berlioz, though he is remembered chiefly for his writings on music of which he disapproved (Berlioz, Wagner) or about which he was ambivalent (Beethoven, Liszt). Fétis's work on Wagner illustrates how his writing could shape an entire controversy. He opened the Wagner debate in 1852 with an assessment of the composer's writings rather than his music, much of which he had not heard. His view that Tannhäuser and Lohengrin were the product of Wagner's theories as stated in Oper und Drama fundamentally affected the terms in which both adversaries and supporters of Wagner couched their reviews of the Paris Tannhäuser.
The various stages of the Wagner debate, which took on a particularly nationalist allure after 1870, 1914 and 1939, were notable for their tendency to concentrate on an idea of Wagner, rather than on the operas and music dramas themselves. Linguistic limitations meant that Dujardin's Revue wagnérienne, which brought together symbolist poets including Mallarmé, could engage only tentatively or at second hand with Wagner's writings and librettos, few of which were available in translation. The result was a highly idiosyncratic view of Wagner which was almost inevitably disappointed with the reality of the French première of Lohengrin in 1887. Fin-de-siècle Wagnerism was better served in Belgium by the writings of Kufferath.
In France, critical reaction against Wagner at the end of the 19th century and the beginning of the 20th involved two disparate groups: conservatives and followers of the Saint-Saëns school, including Arthur Pougin and Camille Bellaigue, who argued the pernicious nature of Wagner's influence on French and Belgian music and the resultant degeneracy of national culture; and those who believed they had found Wagner's antithesis in Debussy, particularly after Pelléas et Mélisande (1902), which found an immediate and improbable supporter in Vincent d'Indy and became a symbol of national solidarity during both world wars. The nationalist poetics of Debussy's own criticism, particularly his article on Frenchness in Rameau, undoubtedly helped cement such attitudes. Debussy's music prompted new critical questions concerned primarily with perceived national character traits (restraint and clarity) and a new emphasis on colour. With Debussy, ‘matière sonore’ first became a parameter of composition worthy of critical attention. Yet his status as a saviour of the French from Wagner was never safe from attack, and it was not only members of the old guard who labelled him a decadent threat to French composition.
Criticism, §II, 2: History to 1945: France and Belgium
The most widely acclaimed foreign music to reach France in the first decade of the 20th century was that of the Russian ‘Five’ and their successors. Here, as Emile Vuillermoz explained in 1905, was a vibrant music untouched by the ‘mal du siècle’ which dogged other composers, Debussy included. By the 1920s critics such as Schmitt were apt to view both Debussy and The Five as killers of the Bayreuth giant. The presence in Paris of the Ballets Russes from 1909 onwards ensured regular attention to new Russian music in the period up to 1914, climaxing with what Le ménestrel dubbed ‘Le massacre du printemps’ in June 1913. Other foreign composers attracting attention before 1914 included Strauss, Mahler and composers of verismo opera, who drew nearly universal condemnation. Strauss was particularly problematic to French critics, who oscillated, often in a single article, between revulsion from the banality and tastelessness of his primary material, and admiration for the opulent originality of its presentation. In times of heightened nationalism, Strauss, as Wagner's successor and the incarnation of German artistic values, was among the first whose ‘quarantine’, to use Gaston Carraud's term, was demanded. Nationalist concerns were pre-eminent during and after World War I, with critics such as Carraud preaching isolationism even from the music of France's allies. Among music journals, La musique pendant la guerre (1915–17), headed by Francis Casadesus, most closely approached propaganda.
Among the new topics of criticism that surfaced in the interwar years was the relationship of music and technology in the forms of cinema and the gramophone. As early as 1903 Jules Combarieu welcomed the gramophone and lamented its invention after the deaths of Falcon, Mario and Rubini; record reviews date only from the late 1920s. Cinema music was more contentious, provoking aesthetic debates concerning the problem of adapting pre-existing music to moving images, and prompting critics, among them Gabriel Bernard in Le courrier musical and Jean d'Udine in Le ménestrel, to call for dedicated film music composed in the tradition of the symphonic poem. A second new strand of criticism dating from around 1920 reflected an interest in the socio-political contexts of new music; it focussed initially on Bolshevik Russia and broadened in the 1930s to take in Germany, Italy and democratic nation-states. While editors such as Henry Prunières prided themselves on an apolitical stance, journals such as Le courrier musical in France and La revue internationale de musique in Belgium, provided a forum for socio-political criticism of music and its institutional bases.
A third brand of criticism, dating from the 1920s, concerned jazz, whose reception was characterized by a sectarianism among critics which was unknown in other areas of music criticism. Specialist jazz magazines with a strong American flavour and sometimes bilingual format appeared from 1930, their critics jealously defending their specialist status in contradistinction to writers in mainstream art music periodicals such as the Revue musicale, which printed several positive articles on jazz from 1927, of which one was written by the acknowledged leader of jazz criticism in France-Hugues Panassié, whose style of writing could hardly have been further removed from that of his jazz-magazine supporters. For Panassié, defining ‘swing’ adequately and defending the status of the jazz musician as a creative and technically sophisticated artist were necessary preconditions for the legitimation of jazz, which, until the first concert of ‘hot’ jazz at the Paris Hot-Club in 1933, the French art music world had experienced only through dance bands and the music of Krenek, Weill and Gershwin. In the later 1930s, attention focussed on the increase of white influence (a row catalysed by the perceived status of Benny Goodman in comparison with that of black clarinettists) and its attendant slick commercialism, which writers such as Joost van Praag (Le jazz-hot) saw as portentous of a loss of the ‘authenticity’ of the black style.
In the 1920s Jean Cocteau's aesthetic as promulgated by ‘Les Six’ received a warm welcome from critics such as J.-M. Lizotte, who detected in it a return to the simplicity of line and texture, health and clarity of quintessentially French music – features that were also attributed to Ravel in contrast to Debussy. Among the international musical styles presented to critics in the interwar years, that of the Second Viennese School caused the most heated debate. Conservative journals such as Le ménestrel poured scorn upon Schoenberg, the ‘integral cubism’ of whose music was, even by supportive modernist journals such as Prunières' La revue musicale and La revue internationale de musique, compared unfavourably to that of Berg. Only Schmitt proved a consistent champion of Schoenberg and Webern, calling Pierrot lunaire ‘compressed beauty’. The increasingly virulent criticism of Modernist styles caused concern among composers. A sense of cultural crisis is apparent in the opening numbers of Musica viva (1936), a multilingual modernist journal published in Brussels which attracted articles from Krenek, Martin, Busoni, Markevitch and Closson. In France more pressing nationalist concerns came to the fore after the outbreak of World War II, prompting Collaer and others to delve deep into French cultural history and highlight elements of French civilization that demanded protection and renewal. The German occupation caused more complex difficulties. According to Robert 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
Criticism, §II, 3: History to 1945: Britain
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 important things to say, based on neo-classical doctrine and practical experience. These are found not only in prefaces to their librettos (1656–1708), discussing conflicting claims of music and poetry, and language in speech, song and recitative, but also, for the first time, in public journals. Both Motteux's Gentleman's Journal (1692–4) and Addison's Spectator (1711–12; 1714) contain critical opinion on opera as a genre. (The Spectator's shrewd mix of social observation and criticism touched popular and religious music as well, and, as a new approach to public discussion, influenced Johann Mattheson in his founding of Critica musica.) In this context Addison is best known for his satirical treatment of the extravagances of Italian opera – new to London in 1705 – yet he was by no means insensitive to the possibilities for an eloquent accommodation between music and poetry, for a rational opera in English. By comparison his friend Richard Steele was reactionary and xenophobic; in his plays and verse, and his essays in The Tatler (1709–11), Steele ridiculed every association of opera, from castratos and the supposed effeminacy of the form to imagined threats against English spoken drama and the Anglican Church. Despite its early detractors, Italian opera established itself and found articulate support throughout the 18th century; John Brown's Letters upon the Poetry and Music of the Italian Opera (1789) made convincing reading well into the 19th century.
Apart from moral, political and practical concerns about music-making, various 18th-century writers addressed music philosophically, as an agent of meaning and emotion in human experience (see also Philosophy of music, §III, 1). Following in the wake of John Locke but also echoing the theory of the affects, these critics sought to explain music's position in relation to painting and poetry, to investigate its closeness to nature, and to account for its ability both to give pleasure and to represent or stir emotions. James Harris, Charles Avison, James Beattie, Daniel Webb, Archibald Alison and Adam Smith all contributed to the discussion (some would say confusion) about these points, usually under the headings ‘imitation’ and ‘expression’ (see Expression, §I, 1). Despite differences of position, terminology and example, however, none actually moved very far beyond the concept of mimesis: that is, at the end of the 18th century music still had to mediate to the listener some kind of precisely defined content. Smith (1795) allowed, fleetingly, that instrumental music could activate memory and produce ‘considerable effects’ without imitation, but even he placed such music beneath vocal music in its powers over the heart. Theoretically, at least, the idea of music as an autonomous art was still some way off.
Avison's Essay on Musical Expression (1753) made a greater mark in its attempt at systematic description of the musical factors ordinary listeners should consider when assessing a style or composition. His aim was educative, and his goal good taste; the book attracted attention. Not everyone agreed with his exemplars – he appeared to favour Marcello and Geminiani over Handel – but the resulting controversy increased Avison's celebrity and the circulation of his ideas, among them that harmony and counterpoint were more vital to good music than the currently fashionable emphasis on melody. Like Pepusch and later Hawkins, Avison sided with the ‘ancients’, or Renaissance-Baroque polyphonists, in the larger 18th-century debate over musical style. While Charles Burney thought Avison's judgment ‘warped’ in this regard, he later praised him as a kind of founding practitioner of English music criticism. Burney himself was the ultimate spokesman for the glories of modern Italian opera and the new instrumental and symphonic style, especially Haydn's. In his published tours about contemporary European music (1771, 1773) as well as in his General History of Music (1776–89) – all undertaken to put music on a firm, progressive historical footing precisely in order that its criticism could be well informed – he wrote frankly of the principles behind his own taste; these he also invoked as a professional music-book 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 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 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
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 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 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
Criticism, §II, 4: History to 1945: Italy
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 musical and theatrical commerce began to merge as music publishers, led by Giovanni Ricordi and Francesco Lucca, arrived on the scene as both journalists and impresarios. The periodical I teatri, which Giacinto Battaglia and Gaetano Barbieri founded in 1827, served as a model for numerous theatre and music journals which flourished during the 1830s. Censore universale dei teatri, Fama, Figaro, Pirata and others were soon associated with theatrical agencies.
The almost complete dominance of opera meant that journalistic criticism was still considered a literary exercise; its earliest practitioners were writers such as Enrico Montazio and Geremia Vitali, and poet-librettists such as Luigi Previdali, Antonio Piazza, Felice Romani, Antonio Ghislanzoni and M.M. Marcello. All the most influential Italian journalists in the mid-19th century were literary figures, among them Giuseppe Rovani of the Gazzetta di Milano, a Rossinian and defender of the unity of the arts, and Tommaso Locatelli of the Gazzetta di Venezia. From the 1840s however, music publishers began to bring out journals of their own, in Milan, Florence and Naples. After collaboration with the Milanese periodical Glissons, n'appuyons pas, Ricordi published the Gazzetta musicale di Milano from 1842 until the beginning of the 20th century. Lucca followed with L'Italia musicale, Guidi with the Gazzetta musicale di Firenze (later Armonia) and the Stabilimento Musicale Partenopeo with the Gazzetta di Napoli. These specialist periodicals invited contributions from musicians, who expanded the scope of criticism to include analysis and historical research. Several figures came to the fore: Alberto Mazzucato and Raimondo Boucheron (and later, for a short period, Arrigo Boito) in Milan; Pasquale Trisolini and Michele Ruta in Naples; and, most importantly, musicians working in Florence, the capital of a grand duchy where instrumental and chamber music were cultivated assiduously despite the predominance of opera: Abramo Basevi, L.F. Casamorata, G.A. Biaggi, Ermanno Picchi and Luigi Picchianti. It was they who laid the methodological foundations for criticism increasingly predicated on technical knowledge – Basevi's Studio sulle opere di Giuseppe Verdi (1859) is fundamental in this regard – and gave a decisive thrust in the direction of theoretical debate and scholarly research. Among writers on music whose approach was primarily philosophical or theoretical, the leading figures were Giuseppe Mazzini (La filosofia della musica, 1836), Nicola Marselli (Ragione della musica moderna, 1859), Antonio Tari (Saggi di estetica e metafisica, 1911) and, more marginally, Giovanni Bovio.
When Italy attained political unity (1860–61), and with it freedom of publication, theatre periodicals were more or less transformed into house organs of various theatrical and artistic agencies. With a few exceptions such as Boccherini in Florence, Il mondo artistico and Il teatro illustrato in Milan, Paganini in Genoa and Napoli musicale, as well as periodicals of mainly musical interest, their function was limited in large part to providing information and advertising. Music criticism moved to journals of opinion, and thus began the age of the great commentators such as Filippo Filippi, Francesco D'Arcais, Amintore Galli and Cesare Dall'Olio. They were joined by theatre critics and literary figures (some of whom were also active in the theatre as librettists or impresarios) such as Enrico Panzacchi in Bologna, Leone Fortis, Aldo Noseda, Carlo d'Ormeville and Alessandro Fano in Milan, Giulio Piccini (Jarro) in Florence, Giuseppe Depanis, L.A. Villanis and Ippolito Valetta in Turin, and Eugenio Checchi and Gino Monaldi in Rome.
In the second half of the 19th century there was increasingly lively debate prompted by the crisis in Italian opera (which only Verdi seemed able to overcome), the ideas of the new generation (from Boito and Gomes to the young Puccini), the growing presence of French opera (Meyerbeer, Gounod, Massenet) and above all the appearance of Wagner, who had in Filippi, Depanis and Panzacchi his first supporters in Italy. The ensuing controversies over the ‘opera of the future’, Italian versus German music, and vocal versus instrumental music 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
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 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 taken by composers, despite the official approval bestowed on some music (generally post-verismo in origin) and composers whose nationalism was gradually sinking into pure provincialism. Nor did fascism impinge to any great extent on critics' freedom of expression. Allegiance to the regime was all that was expected; the price for failing to conform was paid mostly in curbs on space and resources. This situation sanctified the traditional political and civil disengagement of the Italian intellectual; it also demonstrated that the roots of Italian musical culture, even at its most Modernist, lay in the petit-bourgeois idealism which also gave birth to fascism. Although the regime drew on the vital strength of Futurism and initially supported Casella's avant-garde ventures, in the 1930s it embarked on a programme of censorship and cultural centralization whose aim was to contain the various trends within the straitjacket of extreme reactionary rhetoric and demagogy.
Nevertheless, less orthodox ventures and ideas continued to find outlets for expression – for example the wave of anti-idealist internationalism which Luigi Rognoni brought to the Rivista musicale italiana in 1936 when it took avant-garde music and jazz on board. (As a result of this extreme polemical impulse Rognoni was forced to resign as editor of the journal.) During the same period the Rassegna musicale also published notably forward-looking criticism by Ballo, D'Amico, Dallapiccola, Mantelli and Mila in particular. Generally speaking, by the late 1930s music criticism which was not strictly idealist or which contained sociological or political observations was to be read only ‘between the lines’ in such periodicals as the journal Corrente and such daily papers as L'ambrosiano. Yet anomalies persisted even at the height of the war: in 1942, when the music of Alban Berg had long been banned in Germany as ‘degenerate art’, Wozzeck received its first performance in Italy, in Rome of all places, to great acclaim from audiences and critics of all political persuasions.
Criticism, §II: History to 1945
Distinctions between the educational, chronicling, propagandistic and evaluative functions of writing about music are not easily drawn when examining Russian music criticism. Beginning at a time when Russian musical life was itself as yet on a small scale, criticism started at a correspondingly low level. In the late 18th century and the first half of the 19th much of the music performed in Russia was imported, so that critics bent their efforts to assessing the relative merits of different masters (as was the case with the debate about Mozart and Rossini as composers of opera that was conducted in Moscow in the early 1820s). In the absence of controversy about the worth of the compositions of foreign masters (whose quality was felt to be guaranteed by their provenance and foreign successes), attention was focussed on comparing the strengths and weaknesses of particular executants, who again were often international virtuosos visiting Russia for more or less short periods. In this context the books of A.D. Ulïbïshev, Nouvelle biographie de Mozart (Moscow, 1843) and Beethoven, ses critiques et ses glossateurs (Leipzig and Paris, 1857), stand out, the former especially, as attempts to interpret and assess the compositions of their subjects.
As indigenous composers emerged and won a degree of renown, however, their champions took to the columns of the newspapers to laud their achievements. A major issue considered by Russia's 19th-century critics, then, was the right of repertories composed by Russians to exist alongside the imports, chiefly theatre music from Italy and France and instrumental music from Germany. At least in the earlier part of the century, this was considered more important than determining the virtues and defects of new Russian compositions. Although debate on this issue developed momentum with the appearance of Glinka's A Life for the Tsar in 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 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
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 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 critic, more open-minded than some commentators have credited.
After the Civil War, musical activity in Chicago and Cincinnati caught up with that in the eastern cities and was covered by such critics as George Upton (Chicago) and W.S.B. Mathews (Chicago and elsewhere). Literary magazines such as Century Illustrated, Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, and Scribner's, emulating the transcendentalist magazines of the 1840s, published many articles and essays about music, by both literary figures and newspaper critics.
The leading New York newspapers sent correspondents to cover the first Bayreuth Festival in 1876. By the last quarter of the 19th century the writings of music critics began to have a demonstrable effect on public policies. Dwight's advocacy of university chairs in music was followed by the first such appointment in the USA, that of John Knowles Paine at Harvard; Upton's championship led city fathers to found the Chicago SO under the baton of Theodore Thomas. The founding of the Boston SO in 1881 and the Metropolitan Opera in 1883 roughly coincided with the emergence of a new generation of critics who remained influential into the 1930s. In New York the big four were Henry E. Krehbiel at the New York Tribune (1884–1923), William J. Henderson at the New York Times (1887–1902) and New York Sun (1902–37), Henry T. Finck at the New York Post (1881–1924; many of Finck's reviews were ghost-written by his wife, Abbie Cushman) and James Gibbons Huneker, a well-trained pianist who wrote about music, theatre, literature and painting for many newspapers and magazines from the 1880s to 1921. In Boston the leaders were William F. Apthorp, who wrote primarily for the Boston Evening Transcript (1881–1903), Philip Hale of the Boston Herald (1903–33), Louis Elson of the Boston Daily Advertiser (1886–1920) and H.T. Parker of the Evening Transcript (1905–34). Krehbiel, a brilliant autodidact who never attended college, was a physically imposing man noted for his humourless pontificality; he believed that not only intonation but correctness of phrasing and balance of tone in an orchestra were ‘matters of fact’. Henderson, also brilliant though an especially caustic reviewer, was considered the ultimate authority in the USA on operatic singing. In contrast to Krehbiel and Henderson, Finck was amiable and rarely destructive. All three were militant Wagner enthusiasts who helped establish the composer's success in the USA. Of the Boston critics, Apthorp was closest to Finck in relaxed prose style and lack of dogmatism, while Elson's reviews were like witty critiques of bad grammar. Hale became best known for his mammoth programme notes for the Boston SO, and Parker's musically untutored impressionism was somewhat akin to Huneker's style. The writings of these New York and Boston critics did much to consolidate a consensus on the canon of great composers.
From around the 1880s to World War I, the ‘Gilded Age’, when opera reached its peak of popularity and prima donnas were viewed like movie stars, critics attained a celebrity they never again enjoyed in the USA. The opera-going public followed their reviews as if they were reading sports scores; Krehbiel even appeared in billboard advertising for the New York Tribune. At critics’ funerals tributes poured in even from the conductors and singers they had reviewed. Although the Gilded Age critics sometimes fraternized with musicians, they stopped taking graft as many of their predecessors had done. Poorly paid, almost all had to supplement their incomes by writing music appreciation books, giving lectures and teaching.
Huneker differed substantially from his colleagues in his forward-looking attitudes toward such avant-garde composers as Debussy, Strauss and even Schoenberg, in his polymathic grasp of other art forms, and in his highly literary, poetic prose. The mantle of Huneker's iconoclasm was inherited by the journalist H.L. Mencken, who wrote opinionated and verbally vibrant criticism for the Baltimore Sun and the American Mercury, as well as programme notes for the Baltimore SO. The heirs to 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
Criticism, §II: History to 1945: Bibliograph
MGG1 (H.H. Stuckenschmidt)
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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
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
M. Barthélemy: ‘Essai sur la position de d'Alembert dans la Querelle des bouffons’, RMFC, vi (1966), 159–75
M. Barthélemy: ‘Les deux interventions de Jacques Cazotte dans la Querelle des bouffons’, RMFC, vii (1968), 133–73
S. Sacaluga: ‘Diderot, Rousseau et la Querelle musicale de 1752: nouvelle mise au point’, Diderot Studies, x (1968), 133–73
L. Guichard: ‘Liszt et la littérature française’, RdM, lvi (1970), 3–34
J. Bailbé: Berlioz, artiste et écrivain dans les ‘Mémoires’ (Paris, 1972)
P.A. Bloom: François-Joseph Fétis and the ‘Revue musicale’ (1827–1835) (diss., U. of Pennsylvania, 1972)
M. Mila: ‘Fetis e Verdi, ovvero gli infortuni della critica’, Studi Verdiani III: Milan 1972, 12–17
P.A. Bloom: ‘Critical Reaction to Beethoven in France: F.J. Fétis’, RBM, xxvi–xxvii (1972–3), 67–83
N.S. Josephson: ‘F.-J. Fétis and Richard Wagner’, RBM, xxvi–xxvii (1972–3), 84–9
H.R. Cohen: Berlioz on the Opéra (1829–1849) (diss., New York U., 1973)
M.B. Ellison: The ‘Comparaison de la musique italienne et de la musique françoise’ of Lecerf de la Viéville: an Annotated Translation of the First Four Dialogues (diss., U. of Miami, 1973)
L. Goldberg: A Hundred Years of Berlioz's ‘Les Troyens’ (diss., U. of Rochester, 1973)
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S. Baud-Bovy: ‘Jean-Jacques Rousseau et la musique française’, RdM, lx (1974), 212–16
C. Casini: ‘Il decennio della fortuna critica di Donizetti a Parigi’, Studi donizettiani I: Bergamo 1975, 571–94
H.R. Cohen: ‘H. Berlioz critique musical: ses écrits sur l'Opéra de Paris, de 1829 à 1849’, RdM, lxiii (1977), 17–34
M. Eigeldinger: ‘Langage musical et langage poétique selon Rousseau’, Revue musicale de Suisse romande, xxxi/4 (1978), 177–85
P.A. Bloom: ‘Friends and Admirers: Meyerbeer and Fétis’, RBM, xxxii–xxxiii (1978–9), 174–87
P.A. Bloom: ‘Berlioz and the Critic: la Damnation de Fétis’, Studies in Musicology in Honor of Otto E. Albrecht, ed. J.W. Hill (Kassel, 1980), 240–65
J.F. Fulcher: ‘Melody and Morality: Rousseau's Influence on French Music Criticism’, IRASM, xi (1980), 45–57
H. Schneider: ‘Probleme der Mozart-Rezeption im Frankreich der ersten Hälfte des 19. Jahrhunderts’, Mozart-Jb 1980–83, 23–31
G. Cowart: The Origins of Modern Musical Criticism: French and Italian Music, 1600–1750 (Ann Arbor, 1981)
H. Garceau: ‘La maîtrise’ (1857–1861): Journal de musique religieuse (diss., U. of Laval, Quebec, 1981)
R. Pečman: ‘Baron Friedrich Melchior Grimm und die Musik. Ein Kapitel aus der Geschichte der französischen und italienischen Oper’, Der Einfluss der französischen Musik auf die Komponisten der ersten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts: Blankenburg, Harz, 1981, 39–42
P.A. Bloom: ‘A Review of Fétis's Revue musicale’, Music in Paris in the Eighteen-Thirties: Northampton, MA, 1982, 55–79
S. L’Ecuyer-Lacroix: ‘Joseph d'Ortigue et la linguistique de la musique’, Etudes littéraires, xv/1 (1982), 11–31
K. Reeve: ‘Rhetoric and Reason in French Music Criticism of the 1830's’, Music in Paris in the Eighteen-Thirties: Northampton, MA, 1982, 537–51
H. Schneider: ‘Rameau et la tradition lulliste’, Jean-Philippe Rameau: Dijon 1983, 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 Press’, Music and the French Revolution: Cardiff 1989, 302–14
J. Pasler: ‘Pelléas and Power: the Reception of Debussy's Opera’, Music at the Turn of the Century: a 19th-Century Music Reader, ed. J. Kerman (Berkeley, 1990), 129–50
J.-M. Bailbé: ‘La critique musicale au Journal des débats’, La musique en France à l'époque romantique: 1830–1870 (Paris, 1991), 271–94
D. Bouverot: ‘L’“Expression” en peinture et en musique (1830–1850)’, Romantisme, xx (1991), 69–84
B. Cannone: La réception des opéras de Mozart dans la presse parisienne (1793–1829) (Paris, 1991)
M. Stockhem: ‘Le premier centenaire de Mozart en France et en Belgique, ou la difficulté d'être suranné’, Mozart: origines et transformations d'un mythe: Clermont-Ferrand 1991, 103–15
R. Stricker: ‘Lorsque Berlioz aime Rossini’, L'avant-scène opéra, no.140 (1991), 94–7
H. Vanhulst: ‘Les revues musicales et la critique en Wallonie et à Bruxelles au XIXème siècle’, Periodica musica, ix (1991), 14–22
J.H. Johnson: ‘Beethoven and the Birth of Romantic Musical Experience in France’, 19CM, xv (1991–2), 23–35
A. Galliari, ed.: Au concert: Colette (Paris, 1992)
D.G. Gíslason: Castil-Blaze, ‘De L'Opéra en France’ and the ‘Feuilletons’ of the ‘Journal des Débats’ (1820–1832) (diss., U. of British Columbia, 1992)
T.S. Grey: ‘Metaphorical Modes in Nineteenth-Century Music Criticism: Image, Narrative, and Idea’, Music and Text: Critical Inquiries, ed. S.P. Scher (Cambridge, 1992), 93–117
S. L'Ecuyer: La vie et l'oeuvre de Joseph d'Ortigue (1802–1866): critique musical (diss., U. of Laval, Quebec, 1992)
D. Charlton: ‘Cherubini: a Critical Anthology, 1788–1801’, RMARC, no.26 (1993), 95–127
E. Toulet and C. Belaygue, eds.: Musique d'écran: I'accompagnement musical du cinéma muet en France, 1918–1995 (Paris, 1994)
Der Wagnérisme in der Französischen Musik und Musikkultur: Berlin 1995
M. Brzoska: Die Idee des Gesamtkunstwerks in der Musiknovellistik der Julimonarchie (Laaber, 1995)
K. Ellis: Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Century France: ‘La Revue et gazette musicale de Paris’, 1834–1880 (Cambridge, 1995)
S. Bernstein: Virtuosity of the Nineteenth Century: Performing Music and Language in Heine, Liszt and Baudelaire (Stanford, CA, 1998)
Criticism, §II: History to 1945: Bibliograph
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E. Burke: A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London, 1757, rev. and enlarged 2/1759/R)
H. Home of Kames: Elements of Criticism (Edinburgh, 1762, 11/1839)
J. Potter: Observations on the Present State of Music and Musicians (London, 1762)
J. Brown: A Dissertation on the Rise, Union, and Power, the Progressions, Separations, and Corruptions, of Poetry and Music (London, 1763/R)
D. Webb: Observations on the Correspondence between Poetry and Music (London, 1769/R)
J. Beattie: Essays: on Poetry and Music as they Affect the Mind (Edinburgh, 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 Century’, MQ, xxxiv (1948), 544–66
M. Winesanker: ‘Musico-Dramatic Criticism of English Comic Opera, 1750–1800’, JAMS, ii (1949), 87–96
H.M. Schueller: ‘The Pleasures of Music: Speculation in British Music Criticism 1750–1800’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, viii (1950), 155–71
E.D. Mackerness: The English Musical Sensibility: Studies in Representative Literary Discussion and Periodical Criticism from Thomas Morley to WJ. Tumer (diss., U. of Manchester, 1952)
H.M. Schueller: ‘The Use and Decorum of Music as Described in British Literature, 1700–1780’, Journal of the History of Ideas, xiii (1952), 73–93
H.M. Schueller: ‘Correspondences between Music and the Sister Arts, According to 18th-Century Aesthetic Theory’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, xi (1953), 334–59
F.H. Teahan: The Literary Criticism of Music in England, 1660–1789 (diss., Trinity College, Dublin, 1953–4)
J. Wilson, ed.: Roger North on Music (London, 1959)
H.M. Schueller: ‘The Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns’, ML, xli (1960), 313–30
R. Lonsdale: Dr. Charles Burney: a Literary Biography (Oxford, 1965/R)
C. Grabo: ‘The Practical Aesthetics of Thomas Busby's Music Reviews’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, xxv (1966), 37–45
W.E. Houghton and J.H. Slingerland, eds.: The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824–1900 (Toronto, 1966–89, 2/1999 as electronic database)
L. Lipking: The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England (Princeton, NJ, 1970)
L.M. Ruff: ‘The Social Significance of the 17th Century English Music Treatises’, The Consort, no.26 (1970), 412–22
K.G. Ruttkay: ‘The Critical Reception of Italian Opera in England in the Early Eighteenth Century’, Angol és amerikai filológiai tanulmányok [Studies in English and American philology], i (Budapest, 1971), 93–169
T. Fenner: Leigh Hunt and Opera Criticism: the ‘Examiner’ Years, 1801–1821 (Lawrence, KS, 1972)
J.W. Binns: ‘John Case and The Praise of Musicke’, ML, lv (1974), 444–53
J.C. Kassler: The Science of Music in Britain, 1714–1830: a Catalogue of Writings, Lectures and Inventions (New York, 1979)
P. Lovell: ‘“Ancient” Music in Eighteenth-Century England’, ML, lx (1979), 401–15
C. Kent: ‘Periodical Critics of Drama, Music & Art, 1830–1914: a Preliminary List’, Victorian Periodicals Review, xiii (1980), 31–55
R.B. Larsson: The Beautiful, the Sublime and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-Century Musical Thought in Britain (diss., SUNY, Buffalo, 1980)
S. Banfield: ‘Aesthetics and Criticism’, Music in Britain: the Romantic Age, 1800–1914, ed. N. Temperley (London, 1981/R), 455–73
D.H. Laurence, ed.: Shaw's Music: the Complete Musical Criticism (London and New York, 1981)
W.J. Gatens: ‘Fundamentals of Musical Criticism in the Writings of Edmund Gurney and his Contemporaries’, ML, lxiii (1982), 17–30
K.S. Grant: Dr. Burney as Critic and Historian of Music (Ann Arbor, 1983)
L. Langley: The English Musical Journal in the Early Nineteenth Century, ii: A Descriptive Catalogue of English Periodicals Containing Musical Literature, 1665–1845 (diss., U. of North Carolina, 1983)
R. Bledsoe: ‘Henry Fothergill Chorley and the Reception of Verdi's Early Operas in England’, Victorian Studies, xxviii (1984–5), 631–55
T. McGeary: English Opera Criticism and Aesthetics, 1685–1747 (diss., U. of Illinois, 1985)
C. Kent: ‘More Critics of Drama, Music and Art’, Victorian Periodicals Review, xix (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
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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)
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Criticism, §II: History to 1945: Bibliograph
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
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
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
C. Cui: La musique en Russie (Paris, 1880/R)
A.N. Serov: Kriticheskiye stat'i [Critical articles], ed. N. Stoyanovsky and others (St Petersburg, 1892–5)
G.A. Larosh: Muzïkal'no-kriticheskiye stat'i [Articles of music criticism] (St Petersburg, 1894)
V.V. Stasov: Sobraniye sochineniy 1847–1906 [Collection of works 1847–1906] (St Petersburg, 1894–1906)
P.I. Chaykovsky: Muzïkal'nïye fel'yetonï i zametki [Musical feuilletons and notes] (Moscow, 1898)
Yu.D. Ėngel': V opere: sbornik statey ob operakh i baletakh [At the opera. A collection of articles about operas and ballets] (Moscow, 1911)
G.A. Larosh: Sobraniye muzïkal'no-kriticheskikh statey, ed. N.D. Kashkin and V. Yakovlev, i (Moscow, 1913) [on Glinka]; ii (Moscow, 1922–4) [on Tchaikovsky]
Ts.A. Kyui: Muzïkal'no-kriticheskiye stat'i [Critical articles on music] (Petrograd, 1918)
V.G. Karatïgin: Zhizn', deyatel'nost, stat'i, materialï [Life, career, articles, materials] (Leningrad, 1927)
I.I. Sollertinsky: Izbrannïye stat'i o muzïke [Selected articles about music], ed. M. Druskin (Leningrad and Moscow, 1946)
A.N. Serov: Izbrannïye stat'i [Selected articles], ed. G.N. Khubov (Moscow, 1950–57)
B.V. Asaf'yev: Izbrannïye stat'i o russkoy muzïke [Selected articles about Russian music], i, ed. N. Braudo (Moscow, 1952)
Ts.A. Kyui: Izbrannïye stat'i [Selected articles], ed. Yu.A. Kremlyov (Leningrad, 1952) [incl. nearly complete list of pubd articles on music]
V.V. Stasov: Izbrannïye sochineniya: zhivopis', skul'ptura, muzïka [Selected works on art, sculpture and music], ed. Ye.D. Stasova and others (Moscow, 1952)
B.V. Asaf'yev: Izbrannïye trudï [Selected works], ed. T.N. Livanova and others (Moscow, 1952–7) [incl. complete list of works, v, 295–380]
N.D. Kashkin: Stat'i o russkoy muzïke i muzïkantakh [Articles on Russian music and musicians] (Moscow, 1953)
N.D. Kashkin: Izbrannïye stat'i o P.I. Chaykovskom [Selected articles on P.I. Tchaikovsky] (Moscow, 1954)
V.F. Odoyevsky: Muzïkal'no-literaturnoye naslediye [Musical literary heritage], ed. G.B. Bernandt (Moscow, 1956) [incl. complete list of writings]
I. Sollertinsky: Muzïkal'no-istoricheskiye ėtyudï [Studies in music history], ed. M. Druskin (Leningrad, 1956)
N.D. Kashkin: Izbrannïye stat'i o M.I. Glinke [Selected articles on M.I. Glinka] (Moscow, 1958)
A.V. Ossovsky: Izbrannïye stat'i, vospominaniya [Selected articles, reminiscences], ed. Ye. Bronfin (Leningrad, 1961)
I.I. Sollertinsky: Istoricheskiye ėtyudï [Historical studies], ed. M. Druskin (Leningrad, 1963)
I.I. Sollertinsky: Kriticheskiye stat'i [Critical articles], ed. M. Druskin (Leningrad, 1963)
N.Ya. Myaskovsky: Sobraniye materialov v dvukh tomakh [Collection of materials in two volumes], ii: Literaturnoye naslediye [Literary heritage], ed. S.I. Shlifshteyn (Moscow, 2/1964)
B.V. Asaf'yev: Izbrannïye stat'i o muzïkal'nom obrazovanii i prosveshchenii [Selected articles about musical training and education], ed. Ye.M. Orlova (Leningrad, 1965)
V.G. Karatïgin: Izbrannïye stat'i [Selected articles] (Moscow, 1965)
B.V. Asaf'yev: Kriticheskiye stat'i, ocherki i retsenzii [Critical articles, essays and reviews], ed. I.V. Beletsky (Moscow, 1967)
F. Jonas, ed. and trans.: Vladimir Vasilevich Stasov: Selected Essays on Music (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)
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
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)
H. Krehbiel: How to Listen to Music (New York, 1896/R)
W.J. Henderson: What is Good Music? Suggestions to Persons Desiring to Cultivate a Taste in Musical Art (London, 1898/R)
L. Karr: ‘Musical Critics of the New York Daily Press’, Musical Leader and Concert-Goer, ix/10 (1905), 16
O. Sonneck: Early Concert Life in America (1731–1800) (Leipzig, 1907/R)
G. Seldes: The Seven Lively Arts (New York, 1924/R)
MM [League of Composers's Review to April 1925] (1924–46) [see also M. Lederman (1983) and R.M. Meckna (1984)]
H.T. Finck: My Adventures in the Golden Age of Music (New York, 1926/R)
J. Huneker: Essays, ed. H.L. Mencken (New York, 1929/R)
O. Thompson: Practical Musical Criticism (New York, 1934/R)
P. Rosenfeld: Discoveries of a Music Critic (New York, 1936/R)
D. Taylor: Of Men and Music (New York, 1937)
O. Thompson: ‘An American School of Criticism: the Legacy Left by W.J. Henderson, Richard Aldrich, and their Colleagues of the Old Guard’, MQ, xxiii (1937), 428–39
R. Sabin: ‘Early American Composers and Critics’, MQ, xxiv (1938), 210–18
P. Hale: Great Concert Music: Philip Hale's Boston Symphony Programme Notes, ed. J.N. Burk (New York, 1939/R)
V. Thomson: The State of Music (New York, 1939/R, rev. 2/1962)
R. Aldrich: Concert Life in New York, 1902–1923 (New York, 1941/R)
M. Graf: Composer and Critic: Two Hundred Years of Musical Criticism (New York, 1946/R)
V. Thomson: The Art of Judging Music (New York, 1948/R)
R. Faner: Walt Whitman and Opera (Philadelphia, 1951/R)
W.T. Upton: William Henry Fry: American Journalist and Composer-Critic (New York, 1954/R) [see also review by C. Hatch, MQ, xl (1954), 606]
R.F. Goldman: ‘Music Criticism in the United States’, The Score, no.12 (1955), 85
H. Pleasants: The Agony of Modern Music (New York, 1955)
C.R. Reis: Composers, Conductors, and Critics (New York, 1955)
L. Cheslock, ed.: H.L. Mencken on Music: a Selection of his Writings on Music together with an Account of H.L. Mencken's Musical Life and a History of the Saturday Night Club, ed. L. Cheslock (New York, 1961/R)
A.T. Schwab: James Gibbons Huneker: Critic of the Seven Arts (Stanford, CA, 1963)
I. Lowens: Music and Musicians in Early America (New York, 1964)
V. Thomson: Music Reviewed, 1940–1954 (New York, 1967)
J.A. Mussulman: Music in the Cultured Generation: a Social History of Music in America, 1870–1900 (Evanston, IL, 1971)
L. Engel: The Critics (New York, 1976)
H.C. Schonberg: ‘What Happens when Music Critics Get Together’, New York Times (28 Aug 1977)
M. Lederman: The Life and Death of a Small Magazine (‘Modern Music’, 1924–1946) (Brooklyn, NY, 1983)
I. Sablosky: What they Heard: Music in America, 1852–1881, from the Pages of Dwight's Journal of Music (Baton Rouge, LA, 1986)
V.B. Lawrence: Strong on Music: the New York Music Scene in the Days of George Templeton Strong (New York, 1987)
R. Kitson, ed.: Dwight's Journal of Music 1852–81 (Ann Arbor, 1991)
J. Horowitz: Understanding Toscanini: a Social History of American Concert Life (Berkeley, 1993)
G.D. Goss: Jean Sibelius and Olin Downes: Music, Friendship, Criticism (Boston, 1995)
O.F. Saloman: Beethoven's Symphonies and J.S. Dwight (Boston, 1995)
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)
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 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.
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 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 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’.
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 observer. He treated each event as part of an elaborately evolving tradition of composition and interpretation. In his leisurely feuilleton-like essays, Porter stressed place and tradition in music at a time in American culture when both had become subsidiary to impact and effect.
By the 1980s Modernism and serialism were increasingly under attack from composers as well as critics. In the USA, the dismantlement of school orchestras and music education produced a generation of younger listeners who found the entire debate about modern music irrelevant because the classical tradition itself was becoming alien. This decline in centrality anticipated by about a decade signs of shifting emphasis in Europe as well. With the weakening of public support for the arts in Europe, the development of a worldwide pop industry and the burgeoning of multi-cultural communities throughout the West, many of the problems first defined in American criticism began to be raised elsewhere. Ironically, the only countries where the European classical tradition retained its prestige were those in which it had become important after World War II: Japan and South Korea, which by the 1980s had also become the world’s largest manufacturers of the quintessentially Western instrument, the piano.
Much criticism often examined the unusual condition of art music, its relationship to the public, and the dominance of recordings over live concerts. In Czechoslovakia, the musicologist and critic Ivan Vojtěch continued Adorno's project in discussions of the political meanings of music. Joachim Kaiser, writing for the Suddeutsche Zeitung in Germany, and Gérard Condé writing for Le monde in France were highly respected critics with a wide range. While in the Eastern bloc, until the fall of Communism, the classical art music tradition was preserved as if in amber from the forces of commercial and pop culture, elsewhere changes were unmistakable, particularly in the USA. In the 1980s and 90s, many of the American Music magazines that had regularly run essays on music and record reviews, including High Fidelity, Ovation, Keynote, Opus, Musical America and Fi, ceased publication, and journalistic coverage of classical music was greatly diminshed – symptomatic of the weakening of the art music traditions in all Western countries. Many British magazines like Gramophone and HiFi News and Record Review continued to thrive, their number even increasing with the introduction of the BBC Music Magazine, but this was more a reflection of the different economics of English magazine distribution and advertising than a reflection of a British Renaissance in art music culture. Specialist magazines dealing with particular instruments or performance styles also continued publication, benefiting from a dedicated, if small, readership. But at many American newspapers, music criticism fell on particularly hard times. The expectation at some was that concerts would be written about only if they were repeated, so the review could serve explicitly as a consumer guide. The declining importance of classical-music criticism became a regular subject of anxious conversation among critics. This decline, though, also signaled a shift in cultural interests which for some, were not entirely unwelcome. John Rockwell, who wrote sympathetically about almost all genres of music, argued that ‘a “music critic” had no business excluding entire traditions that most of the world thought of as “music” just because they didn't conform to his own cultural prejudices’. He celebrated eclecticism, refusing to draw clearcut aesthetic distinctions among performance artists like Laurie Anderson, rock groups like the Rolling Stones and composers like Philip Glass. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Samuel Lipman, a fiercely polemical critic whose tastes were a mixture of conservative populism and intellectual elitism, attacked critics for lacking conviction, audiences for embracing ‘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 scholars, unhampered by geographical limitations. The discussions could turn banal and petty, but more often they took on the character of criticism in progress, as posted responses expanded upon earlier comments and led to ‘threads’ of continuing discussion. In addition, the availability of international newspapers on the Internet made it possible to read reviews from Germany, England, France, the United States, or Japan, at the same time as the readers of the local newspapers. This, along with international scholarly discussions, increased the sense that a world music culture was taking shape, as similar issues and debates took place without reference to national borders.
Despite these changes, though, at the beginning of the 21st century the future of traditional music criticism was more uncertain than it had ever been. The profession of music critic no longer implied an intense devotion to and understanding of the Western classical tradition. The power of critics to influence acceptance of new composition or the careers of performers also seemed much weaker than before, particularly in comparison with the forces of mass marketing. Few critics believed that vast portions of the repertory would ever be of interest to a wide public. Younger critics, like Alex Ross at The New Yorker, who were trying to restore critical vigour by loosening the boundaries isolating the classical tradition from the world of politics and popular culture, resisted pessimism. But many critics felt that the state of criticism would not improve until new relationships developed between composers and audiences, listeners and critics; no one knew, though, how such a change might occur. Peculiarly enough, as music criticism became less central, musicology – with its attentiveness to political influence, musical meanings and reputations – took on some of the broader ambitions that once were the province of music criticism. As the 21st century began, it was increasingly clear that the future nature of music criticism was increasingly unclear, leaving feelings of dismay along with hope for as yet unforeseen possibilities.
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