All Quiet On The Western Front...Page
Logan K. Young
January 16, 2008
Unlike the composer/conductor duality which has since Wagner, or better yet Lully, given us the genius of Mahler, Webern, Bernstein, Boulez, Pendereski, and now John Adams and Salonen (but also, lamentably, the insatiably vapid music of John Williams and the "authentic"-a-la-Robert-Craft Stravinsky recordings), the composer-critic dichotomy has no such pedigree upon which to boast. What was codified with Berlioz, perfected by Schumann, and saw its last great disciple in Virgil Thompson, the modern composer-critic - as a truly twofold existence - is virtually extinct. And perhaps he should be. After all, in a socio-musico climate where one need only be armed with a cute face, a reliable dial-up connection, and a working knowledge of aesthetic theory in order to pass judgment on the hollow strains of the proletariat's music, real, artistically substantiated music criticism is unfortunately out of season. Alas, no such market exists for the printed fruits of its written labor. Essentially, no one really cares what composers have to say anymore. And yet as program notes become exponentially shorter with each premiere and the once scathing polemics like "Schoenberg est mort" and "Who Cares If You Listen" all but disappear from the critical vernacular, it appears that composers no longer have anything to say. (Maybe they do, but they're too scared or too lazy or "too consumed with the passion that fuels their creative fancies" or whatever neo-Romantic treacle they often profess.) At any rate, it's a damn shame; for when engaged in the act of critique, especially music criticism by musically literate persons, one's most cherished philosophical convictions are made manifest. In the end, creation and criticism are just like any other pursuit of humanity – they become nothing more than the concrete distillation of the creator's own abstract proclivities and ideologies.
In its finest hour, criticism exhibits the same epistemological introspection as that of a granulated philosophy, but remains tempered by a real-world sense of pragmatism. And while philosophical musings can, and indeed often do, inhabit that wonderful world of ambiguous relativism, criticism dispenses with such questioning in favor of a more hard-lined and subjective rendering of a given, person-specific belief. According to the contemporary music philosopher Wayne Bowman, "it is hardly possible to engage in criticism without employing, at least implicitly, beliefs as to what constitutes good or proper musical practice: beliefs whose formulation and examination are explicitly philosophical undertakings." Thus, criticism and philosophy are not mutually exclusive entities in and of themselves; they co-exist in a sort of intellectual symbiosis. When a composer is called upon and agrees to offer his honest appraisal of a said piece of music, in print - an instance that is, unfortunately, as rare as a second performance of his recently commissioned "six to eight minute festive concert opener" - he will undoubtedly employ the aforementioned process as described by Bowman. That is, he will pass judgment, good or bad, on the work itself based upon his own edicts of what constitutes sound musical construction. In so doing, his own dogma shall have been preserved, at least in a few paragraphs, just as it was in the score to his "six to eight minute festive concert opener" that will never see the second light of day. And while it will no doubt irritate him that his Fanfare X or Overture Y for orchestra that he toiled over for three months during a summer at MacDowell will never get played by an American Symphony Orchestra League member ever again, he sure as hell won't pick up a pen and criticize this fact in print.
For all its supposed perks, the noble endeavor that is criticism is not necessarily infallible. Given its extremely personal bias and the fact that the idiom itself caters to the individual himself, and that its postulates are governed not by empirics by rather tendencies and dispositions, criticism is certainly not capable of confronting the sheer plurality of music in the matter that philosophy attempts. But then again, that's what philosophers are underpaid to do. The critic on the other hand has but one simple task: attend a concert or listen to a recording and explain why it was good or bad, or at least why you did or did not like it. As for the composer and critic: do the same (just don't forget to raise the leading tone of the V chord in the minor mode). So, to Phil, Osvaldo, Mr. Reich, Professor Mackey, and Bright, let us know what you're thinking about sometime. It's been a while since we last heard from Mr. Rorem, and I don't think Virgil's got anything left to say.
In its finest hour, criticism exhibits the same epistemological introspection as that of a granulated philosophy, but remains tempered by a real-world sense of pragmatism. And while philosophical musings can, and indeed often do, inhabit that wonderful world of ambiguous relativism, criticism dispenses with such questioning in favor of a more hard-lined and subjective rendering of a given, person-specific belief. According to the contemporary music philosopher Wayne Bowman, "it is hardly possible to engage in criticism without employing, at least implicitly, beliefs as to what constitutes good or proper musical practice: beliefs whose formulation and examination are explicitly philosophical undertakings." Thus, criticism and philosophy are not mutually exclusive entities in and of themselves; they co-exist in a sort of intellectual symbiosis. When a composer is called upon and agrees to offer his honest appraisal of a said piece of music, in print - an instance that is, unfortunately, as rare as a second performance of his recently commissioned "six to eight minute festive concert opener" - he will undoubtedly employ the aforementioned process as described by Bowman. That is, he will pass judgment, good or bad, on the work itself based upon his own edicts of what constitutes sound musical construction. In so doing, his own dogma shall have been preserved, at least in a few paragraphs, just as it was in the score to his "six to eight minute festive concert opener" that will never see the second light of day. And while it will no doubt irritate him that his Fanfare X or Overture Y for orchestra that he toiled over for three months during a summer at MacDowell will never get played by an American Symphony Orchestra League member ever again, he sure as hell won't pick up a pen and criticize this fact in print.
For all its supposed perks, the noble endeavor that is criticism is not necessarily infallible. Given its extremely personal bias and the fact that the idiom itself caters to the individual himself, and that its postulates are governed not by empirics by rather tendencies and dispositions, criticism is certainly not capable of confronting the sheer plurality of music in the matter that philosophy attempts. But then again, that's what philosophers are underpaid to do. The critic on the other hand has but one simple task: attend a concert or listen to a recording and explain why it was good or bad, or at least why you did or did not like it. As for the composer and critic: do the same (just don't forget to raise the leading tone of the V chord in the minor mode). So, to Phil, Osvaldo, Mr. Reich, Professor Mackey, and Bright, let us know what you're thinking about sometime. It's been a while since we last heard from Mr. Rorem, and I don't think Virgil's got anything left to say.
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