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July 17, 2005

One view from New York

I'm not sure the critical conversation in New York is quite that one-sided. Admittedly, it's not like the days when there were a half dozen broadsheets, but we still have a handful of daily newspapers, And although the Times clearly has the greatest commitment to covering music (in terms of having a critical staff rather than a critic, and in terms of the amount of space devoted to criticism and other kinds of coverage), several of the papers do offer serious criticism, and there are weeklies with estimable critics as well.

While it's generally true that we don't tend to engage in hand-to-hand with our colleagues, it does happen, at least in a comparatively genteel way. Within the staff at the Times, we have differences of opinion that sometimes find an outlet in the paper, although we try keep it from seeming like squabbling. A few years ago I wrote a Critic's Notebook, occasioned by a performance by the new-music ensemble Eighth Blackbird, that extolled the virtues of performers playing from memory – a fairly uncontroversial topic, I'd have thought. Six months later, my colleague Tony Tommasini wrote a Critic's Notebook saying that the insistence on playing from memory was an unhealthy, anti-musical idea. So there you go!

Tony and others have squared off against Norman Lebrecht once or twice in our pages, and of course, Norman has had his say about us. So the possibility of transatlantic debate clearly exists. And I believe there have been times when one of us has referred to something written by a colleague elsewhere as a jumping off point for an essay of some kind.

It's true that this doesn't happen a lot, and I'm not entirely sure that it should. We read what each other has to say, and we agree or disagree, but basically, we have our own arrows in our quivers. And for the most part, we're reviewing performances that have half-lives of nano-seconds: we write our reviews, and then we're on to something else, because, fortunately, there IS something else. It's unlikely that a dissenting opinion from a colleague will cause us to stop in our tracks and take up a debate – and I'm not sure the readers would find such an exchange as interesting in practice as it might seem in prospect.

Having said all that, I agree that the field would be livelier and healthier if there were more papers offering more diverse views. And I agree with Joshua Kosman: those days are gone. Except, of course, on the internet. We don't get eight papers delivered to our doorsteps. But we can now quite easily read what any of our colleagues have to say anywhere in the world.

Posted by akozinn at July 17, 2005 09:22 PM

COMMENTS

As a American expat freelance writer living in Paris, I am in a good position to assess the difference in the level and amount media coverage of culture in France versus the US. The French newspapers cover the major music events. Not with the consistency of say, the NY Times, where opera cast changes result in reviews, but with a noteable thoroughness. The amount of writing is staggering. There are three widely-distributed magazines for classical music, not counting the one for opera and piano. The popular news magazines, like l'Express, routinely write about music and sometimes review major events. The television evening news often has a classical music or ballet segment when it is important. In a word, culture is part of the journalistic landscape, not just a marginalized interest, like beekeeping.

I have, over the last 50 years, watched the steady decline of American arts coverage in the media. When I was young, Renata Tebaldi might appear on the Sunday night Ed Sullivan Show, not to speak of the Bell Telephone Hour. Much later, Solti and Mehta might appear on the cover of Time Magazine and Sills and Pavarotti were on Johnny Carson and in People Magazine. Not anymore.
Classical music writing is in crisis but so is media attention to art and theater. The future relevance of culture to the American scene is in crisis.

Posted by: Frank Cadenhead at July 19, 2005 08:52 AM



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