The Music Criticism of Kingsley Amis

Of course, Kingsley Amis (1922 - 1995) father of novelist Martin Amis, was not a music critic at all. But in his novel Girl, 20 (1971) he does a very convincing job of depicting his central character, Douglas Yandell, as a pianist and music journalist. Usually I find that when writers who are not musicians talk about music, they make the most elementary mistakes. But as Wikipedia notes,

Girl, 20, for instance, is framed in the world of classical (and pop) music, of which Amis was not a part – the book’s relatively impressive command of musical terminology and opinion shows both Amis’s amateur devotion to music and the almost journalistic capacity of his intelligence to take hold of a subject which interested him.

Amis's most famous novel is the absolutely hilarious Lucky Jim, a farcical depiction of college life. Girl, 20 is about the romantic misadventures of a famous conductor and violinist and manages to deliver some delightfully brief off-hand musical criticisms. After inadvertent exposure to some pop music which he describes as "wordless yelling" and "various mechanical noises, chiefly metallic" Douglas muses on how suddenly the prospect of listening to all of Bruckner's 8th Symphony didn't seem so bad. After a subsequent exposure he notes:

I was sorry for having too hastily rejected those musical works which consist of a stated period of silence under concert conditions. First Bruckner, I thought, now John Cage. Who next? Nielsen, Busoni, Buxtehude? Yes, listening hard to the works of any or each would almost certainly prove less onerous than having a tooth drilled down to the gum without anaesthetic.

 What is so charming about this is the freedom and ease with which Douglas, in his inner thoughts, evaluates and dismisses various composers. In most places, popular journalism, blogs, even a lot of musicological writings, all 'classical' music is lumped together as 'good'. Or perhaps all lumped together as 'irrelevant' and fading away. But the truth is that all classical music is not easily lumped together: some of it is good, some of it is great, some of it is bad and some of it is simply too long, ponderous and wearing to listen to. Like Bruckner's 8th. Here is the whole 86-minute-long piece:

One of my favorite bits is when he responds to the conductor's wife asking, "Isn't pop music music?" His simple answer: "No." He refers to a Miles Davis record as "faithfully render[ing] that tiny, elementary universe of despair and hatred."

His longest bit of music criticism is his reaction to a rehearsal of a Mahler symphony:

The movement turned out to be the first movement of the First Symphony: a considerable mercy, seeing that it might so easily have been something broad, full, ample, spacious, massive, leisurely and going on for over half an hour from the Second or the Third. Thanks to some paroxysm of curtailment on the composer's part, I was in for little more than fifteen minutes' worth. ... At first against my will, I listened to Mahler's enormous talentlessness being rendered by Roy and the N.L.S.O. As they went on, flecks of seeming talent began to insinuate themselves. Factitious fuss turned itself into a sort of gaiety; doodles in the horns and woodwind were almost transformed into rustic charm; blaring and banging acquired a note of near-menace; even that terrible little cuckoo-motif reflected something more than the great man's decision to let the world know how jolly preoccupied he had been in those days with the interval of the perfect fourth.

Let's have a listen to that movement. Hmm, the first interval we hear (and the second, the third, the fifth, etc.) is that perfect fourth. Unfortunately, this clip does not contain the whole first movement.

I can't find the continuation of this performance, so here is another clip of the whole first movement, in a performance by a quite good college orchestra:

We can actually listen to this music, with its long-held high notes, mutterings in the bass, cuckoo-like motifs, horn doodles and so on in the respectful, admiring way that Mahler's music has more and more been listened to in recent decades. Here is a good newspaper article on Mahler that quotes some of the criticism of him, like Vaughan Williams' comment that he was a "tolerable imitation of a composer". But mostly conveys how Mahler is currently regarded: as perhaps the most important symphonic composer. The article, reluctant to actually say something as judgmental as "Mahler's symphonies are great musical works" instead cryptically says, "His symphonies live in the present tense, progressing on their nerves, each fearlessly unconventional and unpredictable." I'm sure we are meant to take this as praise.


But we could also listen to this movement and agree with Amis that it exhibits an "enormous talentlessness", couldn't we? Can we see what he meant? There is a kind of ridiculousness to that ever-recurring descending fourth, a kind of pointlessness to the themes, a kind of pompous fakery. Or we can hear it as "fearlessly unconventional and unpredictable". Except that it really isn't! Except for the length and the music's conviction that it is profound, there is really nothing unconventional about the music, and the return of that descending fourth and a lot of other things is very much predictable!


I'm starting to think that, for a novelist, Kingsley Amis was actually a pretty good music critic. For one thing, in his going against the grain of public consensus he often strikes closer to the truth. Public consensus about the relative merits of this and that composer often has to do with fad and fashion and it is nice to be reminded from time to time that everyone might have a quite erroneous opinion. The composer that everyone is admiring might indeed be enormously untalented... If you want to compare Mahler to another composer of symphonies who really is talented, you might have a look at this post.


UPDATE: One commentor took me to task for my off-hand dismissal of Bruckner's 8th Symphony. Looking over the post I see that I did go too far. So I spent some time with Furtwangler's 1954 recording and yes, it is pretty good stuff. I suspect that Bruckner might be a stronger symphonic composer than Mahler, though the latter gets all the attention these days.

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Rosen on Freedom

I have mentioned before that the three greatest writers and critics of music of today are Joseph Kerman, Richard Taruskin and Charles Rosen. A recent article in the New York Review of Books is a great example. Rosen writes on Freedom and Art and shows both brilliance of understanding and breadth of knowledge. With scholars like this, it sometimes seems as if they have read--and listened to--simply everything!

Rosen points out that art, especially music, has an inherent freedom and fluidity of meaning. Society lives by accepted mutual conventions, but in art these conventions can be subverted. The archetypal musical example is the deceptive cadence: everything is prepared for a normal cadential conclusion to the harmonic progression, but instead of ending up on the tonic, we end up on the submediant. Rosen's examples are more complex, of course. He cites passages in Mozart and Beethoven that exemplify in music the urge for political freedom that was so strong towards the end of the 18th century.

A lot of the essay is about the divergence between style and idea, between the signified and the signifier. In music you can write a simple dance that does nothing but exemplify the essentials of the form--but composers worth their salt usually do a lot more. The music takes on a life of its own, a playful or profound flourishing of the simple dance into something more. There are a host of examples: the Alla danza tedesca from Beethoven's String Quartet op 130 in B flat is a pretty good one:

Or the music could furnish an ironic version--not a subtext, because there is nothing "sub" about it--but an expression that is really at odds with the form. Shostakovich is the first place to look. Take the sardonic waltz that is the second movement of his Fifth Symphony:

But go and read the whole essay as a brilliant example of what music criticism is at its best.

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Critical Judgment!

Now here is something I wish I had written:

After many discussions in the past year about what makes a good music critic, change is afoot. A consortium of directors drawn from the ranks of arts editors, conservatoire heads and senior figures from the highest echelons of the musical profession is preparing a new scheme whereby every music critic is to be vetted for his or her abilities - as a musician. The panel will be headed by the principal conductor of the UK's top orchestra: Valery Gergiev (right), who has made time in his busy schedule to undertake this vital task. Each critic will be required to perform three contrasting pieces of music in front of Maestro Gergiev and his colleagues.

 Heh. Read the whole thing here and don't fail to notice the date...

Musicians, i.e. performers and, I suppose, composers, are always going onstage to be judged. So it is enormously amusing to them to imagine their tormentors, i.e. critics, being put to the test as well. Frankly, as a guy who wears three or four hats himself, this doesn't sound too crazy. I would be very interested to hear what critics sound like when they try to play music. Or are there music critics who do not, in fact, play any instrument at all? That would be interesting too! But I imagine most critics play a bit. As do composers, of course. If we set aside the expectation of virtuosity, which is a full-time job to maintain, then I think it would be lovely to hear what sort of musicians writers on music might be. After all, we often hear how verbally articulate performers and composers are when they are interviewed in the media. Some of them even write things occasionally.

On far too many occasions I have been in the position of being a professional judge of music students at varying levels. Music festivals, competitions, graduating recitals and year-end exams in performance all involve students performing and teachers judging. This is actually a very healthy thing as long as we all understand the roles and what is supposed to be going on. Judging a performance is exactly like teaching a music lesson because a part of the latter is exactly the former. After years of going to play for your teacher and hearing his or her comments, how much more worrisome could it be to play a concert and have a music critic comment? True, the comments are going to be very public, but on the other hand also likely to be far less detailed and penetrating.

Let me give you an example. When I was an undergraduate in performance in guitar my girlfriend was an undergraduate in performance in harpsichord. One of the judges on her graduate recital (there were three, two from within the department and one from outside) was a Dominican monk whose vocation was playing the harpsichord. Afterwards we had a fascinating conversation with him. His knowledge of the repertoire was prodigious. I remember him saying things like "in measure 14 of the allemande to the Ordre by Couperin, perhaps you should do more inegale--oh yes, and in the final cadence, it would be very nice to fill in the third." And on and on. He went over much of the program with my girlfriend in that kind of detail. Oh, and he was citing those measure numbers from memory! Now you might think this was a freak occurrence, but no. Years later I had the great privilege of working with one of the great masters of the violin, Paul Kling (whom I blogged about here). We did a number of concerts together and every rehearsal was a treat. After we played each movement he might comment "what happened in measure 53?" What happened was that I had missed a note or something. I have never had this kind of incredible memory and I can see how it is part of being a superb musician. On the other hand, I have different skills such as the ability to create music--I think it is called composition!

We seem to have a  bit of a pathological fear of judgment these days. But I have never minded it that much. Once I got used to thinking of myself as a musical professional, I figured it just came with the territory. Good critical comment I receive willingly, even happily. And I can recognize when the comments veer into the non-useful. I spent a summer studying with a very fine teacher once, but one who was a tad moody. He also hated Argentinian music. Not knowing this I went up to play a suite by a young Argentinian composer one morning (this was in a master-class with perhaps twenty students). Afterwards the maestro just started making bad jokes about Argentinians. Recognizing this was not useful, I just sat there waiting for him to get it out of his system. Finally he stopped, looked at me and said, "you're not listening to this, are you?" I just replied, "nope." After that, we were friends... Here is one of the pieces I played in a performance by Grant Hooper:

Nice piece, but I think he messes up the rhythms in the middle section.   ;-)

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Daring to be Critical

Anne Midgette, classical music critic for the Washington Post (and married to Greg Sandow) has an article up about music criticism that is worth reading. She is reacting to the uncritical kind of reception classical music often receives from people who have no real expertise in the area. Read the whole thing. Here is one paragraph:

Time and again, artists and thinkers who are sophisticated observers of their own fields step back and goggle when they see classical artists at work. I often cite a Shakespeare concert presided over by Adrian Noble, the acclaimed stage director who was just about to make his Metropolitan Opera debut with Verdi’s setting of “Macbeth;” a few weeks before the show, the Met co-presented a performance that juxtaposed readings of Shakespearean monologues with singing of Shakespeare-based opera arias. Noble spoke between the pieces: he had acute insights about the spoken monologues, but after the opera selections he was reduced to the equivalent of, “Wasn’t that great.” 

These are undoubtedly accurate observations. Midgette seems reluctant to state the underlying assumptions, though. Isn't the fundamental one that if you want to speak intelligently about an art form, you need two kinds of expertise: first in critical thinking generally and second, about the materials and methods used in the particular art form? One of the brakes on good criticism in music is probably the fact that the consumers of criticism are no longer well-educated in music. Time was when most books written on music for the general public were stuffed full of examples from the score that you could play over on the piano. An example: The Wagner Operas by Ernest Newman, first published in 1949 and still in print. But books aimed at the general public are now cleansed of any trace of music notation--even ones that purport to be in-depth discussions of specific repertoire. An example: Shostakovich: Symphonies and Concertos, An Owner's Manual by David Hurwitz, published in 2006. The result is that all discussion, even about detailed events in individual movements as in the Hurwitz book, is reduced to description through metaphor:

Brittle trills on woodwinds and xylophone, topped by suspended cymbal crashes, launch the initial strident march, blasted out by the brass against a stubborn repeated-note accompaniment. The music is deliberately crude and rises quickly to a huge climax with assistance from the bass drum and tam-tam, with high horns and whiplike chords on brass and woodwinds. A contrasting, more lyrical idea follows in the strings, interspersed by bits of march: repeated-note figures, soft snare-drum riffs, and fragments of brass fanfares...

I put up enough of the description to give a real sense of it. Now, what piece by Shostakovich is he talking about? Any idea? Trills in woodwinds, marches, repeated notes and so on are fairly frequently occurring elements in a Shostakovich score. Now how about this:

Click to enlarge

With only a bare minimum of musical literacy you can probably identify this theme by poking it out, with one finger, on the piano. I don't even have the score to copy from so I created this musical example just by listening to a bit of the recording to be sure what note it started on. This is the passacaglia theme from the first movement of Shostakovich's 7th Symphony. Hurwitz is talking about the first movement of Shostakovich's 4th Symphony on page 63 of his book. I suspect only many, many hours of research and listening would enable you to identify the piece from that description.

The perception is that music notation is very difficult--and there are certainly lots of very difficult to read scores around. But basic literacy in music is really not hard. My students are reading music from the first lesson. Compare to studying French. The best French course I ever had was taught in the same way: everyone was speaking nothing but French from the first class. When we consider the costs of helping a population become literate, it is always useful to consider the considerably greater costs of them remaining illiterate! But literacy in music is not only undervalued, it now seems to be regarded as an extremely esoteric skill like dowsing or reading Ancient Greek. There are reasons for this, of course. One is that a great deal of music has always been non-literate, improvised. Some of this is very fine music indeed. Another is that we seem, since the 60s, to be moving into a post-literate musical culture. When Paul McCartney can become the richest musician in history without learning to read a note, what good is musical literacy? Not much to him!

But when we talk about music, as either musicians, or music lovers or music critics, musical literacy is hugely useful. Go back to my two examples above. In over 80 words, Hurwitz can only give a description so vague that even someone intimately familiar with the symphonies of Shostakovich would be hard-pressed to know which one he was talking about. Each of these words in turn, is composed of several different symbols. On the other hand, the musical notation, clearly and simply, precisely identifies one and only one theme by Shostakovich--and it doesn't need hundreds and hundreds of symbols. There are only ten noteheads on the staff, two beams and four dots. Music notation is astonishingly accurate and efficient. Spoken and written language was never designed to be able to describe music and only does so with extreme vagueness.

Most of what is written on this blog is my own brand of music criticism. Much of it is only possible because I can embed YouTube clips to everything I talk about. But when it would aid understanding I do not hesitate to insert musical examples. Why don't all music critics do the same? If we push back against musical illiteracy we will either get fired or perhaps start to turn the tide...

Here is the first movement of the Shostakovich 7th Symphony. The theme notated above doesn't start until the 5:41 mark.

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NPR and Musical Taste

NPR's music blog, Deceptive Cadence, has a piece up titled "Why Do People Hate Rap and Opera?" Tempted as I am to take that straight line and run with it, instead, let's look at what they're saying. This item came about after a previous piece called "Where Are Your Musical Blind Spots?" Ah, now I see what's what. Let's, as serious musicologists (and Socrates) might say, 'interrogate' the assumptions behind this. The musical 'blind spots' piece begins with this paragraph:

Sure, the internet has made musical generalists out of us all, with everything from Indonesian degung, Renaissance madrigals and Lil' Kim right at our fingertips, but let's face it, even serious music geeks have blind spots. What's yours? That's the question we're asking this week.

As my readers know, I have put up posts on gamelan music, Renaissance music and while I have yet to get to Lil' Kim, lots of stuff on pop artists, but I approach all music with the same idea: there is good music and bad music and just uninspired music and the interesting thing is to figure out which is which and why. The folks at NPR assume that all music is good music and if you can't see the good in some particular music, then that is a 'blind spot'. You're just wrong! Critical judgments are forbidden a priori. Now let's look at the opening of that second piece, about hating rap and opera:

For some people, taste — why we dislike one thing and prefer another — is complicated. It's connected to self-esteem, personal branding and creating social divisions based on things like class and education. In a 1996 article for the American Sociology Review, Bethany Bryson attempted to show that people use their musical tastes to erect what she calls "symbolic boundaries" between themselves and others.

There's little doubt that both rap and opera have traveled with significant prejudicial (if stereotypical) baggage: Opera is for rich, white, elderly snobs; rap is made by poor, young, black thugs. Some people reject both groups, while others relish degrees of perceived inclusion. Bryson would say perceptions help determine musical choices and vice versa.

On a less academic level, I asked a couple of my NPR Music colleagues to weigh in...

"For some people taste is complicated"? Sheesh, this is all straight from French cultural theorist Pierre Bourdieu. I don't know about you, but I'm not terribly interested in trading my own unexamined assumptions for his. I would much rather have a look at the assumptions and critique them a bit. OK, instead of the assumption the NPR folks are making, that taste is an instrument of self-esteem, personal branding (yeah, that's what I think about every morning while I'm looking at myself in the mirror shaving) and creating social divisions, why don't we ask ourselves what taste really is. Contrived, artificial taste, might be as they say. You know, in high school you wear this and don't wear that to be accepted. But is this why we prefer Bach over Telemann? Hey, don't do it to be accepted by me! The only thing that really interests me is why you prefer one over the other. Taste, in the more traditional and, I think, true sense, has to do with the desirability of the object in question. As Aristotle implies in the Metaphysics, we desire good things because they are good; they are not good because we desire them. If you are listening to Lil' Kim because your friends like her music, and not because you like her music, then this is not genuine taste, but fake taste. You are not allowing yourself to respond to Lil' Kim, but only to your friends opinion. You are allowing your taste to be oppressed by theirs. Cast off your chains, I say! Have taste of your own.

Taste is something acquired, not from your friends or 'society', but from exposure and knowledge. It can improve over time as your knowledge and exposure grows. The first time I heard some particularly challenging music, such as the Hammerklavier piano sonata by Beethoven, it made no sense to me. My taste in this area has grown over time and is better then than now. Taste, like most other things, can be better or worse.

Now go back and re-read that second quote from NPR. Isn't that the biggest pile of horsepucky you have seen all week? What could possibly be meant by "perceptions help determine musical choices and vice versa"? No, really. Especially the 'vice versa'. The crap we are expected to swallow just gets bigger and bigger.

Honestly, if these are the ideas about music being purveyed by our intellectual elite, then it is no wonder that classical music is in decline.

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The Future of Music Reviews

I just wanted to add my voice to Norman Lebrecht's recent post about music reviews. YouTube really changes everything. If you are talking about a particular piece of music, you can just put up a clip of it. If you want to compare different performances, as I did in this post, then you can insert them into your text. Here is the review that Norman links to, a superb example of how to review using examples from YouTube.

A friend of mine keeps asking when I am I going to write that book on music criticism. I guess my answer is, as soon as I figure out a way to duplicate how I work on this blog in a book.

For example, wouldn't it be great to be able to do in some kind of book format a section like this post on the Bach family that includes music by Bach pere and his three famous composer sons?

But let's not kid ourselves, even with YouTube for illustrative examples, if you really want to get down to brass tacks and talk about the musical details, you are going to have to use musical notation. We didn't spend a thousand years developing it for nothing! Have a look at this post to see what I mean.

Appropriately, let's end with a clip:

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Ad hominem of the day

I think I'm developing an allergic reaction to Jim Fusilli, the rock critic of the Wall Street Journal. For the second time this week he has annoyed me. And now he will know the consequences!

Here is the article. Go ahead, follow the link and read it first. I'll wait...

Back? Ok. This is the saddest argument I have read in a long time. The only thing that makes it publishable I suspect is the cute opening:

It's 1955 and you're in a record shop. The proprietor puts on "Maybellene" by a newcomer named Chuck Berry. You're enjoying it, but a fellow customer saunters over: "That's nothing more than Roy Acuff's 'Ida Red' with different words," he says, pointing out that Acuff cut his track in 1939. "I wouldn't call that original."

Jim thinks that there are a whole lot of 'generationally biased' people out there who only like music they heard when they were in their teens. As a sociological claim, this could even be true. But its real function is to offer an ironclad defence against anyone who says they dislike the bands that Jim happens to like, like Radiohead. The argument Jim offers, that people who don't like the new bands that Jim likes are 'generationally biased', is an old fallacy called an ad hominem. From Wikipedia:

Abusive ad hominem (also called personal abuse or personal attacks) usually involves insulting or belittling one's opponent in order to attack his claim or invalidate his argument, but can also involve pointing out true character flaws or actions that are irrelevant to the opponent's argument. This tactic is logically fallacious because insults and negative facts about the opponent's personal character have nothing to do with the logical merits of the opponent's arguments or assertions.

The paragraph in the article that illustrates the most ad hominemesque features is this one:

This kind of obduracy isn't new, but it does seem especially egregious among boomers. It may be because the recording industry in the era immediately following Woodstock was so powerful that even today some fans in their 50s and 60s still fail to realize their opinions were shaped by marketing prowess. Music back then was sold more as a lifestyle product than an art form, its performers presented as gods rather than gifted artists. At the same time, a Gee-Bee's loyalty to the music of his youth is often linked to a profound sense of identification with the period and its causes—opposition to the Vietnam war, for example, or support for equal rights for women and minorities. For some Gee-Bees, that identification is a form of validation. To say that there may be better music now isn't merely a challenge to a Gee-Bee's taste. It's a challenge to his self-perception.

You see how it works? If I like the Beatles it's because of the recording industry or Vietnam or something. Boomer bands were lifestyle products not art forms like today's music! I had no idea. Wait, I think there is another fallacy here, something called "begging the question". Jim assumes that I can't have a good reason to dislike Radiohead, for example, so I must be a "Gee-Bee" as he charmingly calls them. Here is his clincher:

Gee-Bees are free to dismiss new music, but let's remember they do so not because they know something about music we don't. It's quite the opposite. We know something they don't—that new music is a joy that enriches our lives and will do so for as long as we choose to listen.

If I dismiss new music (uh, do I have to dismiss ALL new music, or can I pick and choose?), it's because there's stuff I just don't know. Mysterious, mystical knowledge that Jim chooses not to share with us. Wow, and here I thought he was just being condescending.

Ironically, the post I put up a few days ago, critiquing Jim Fusilli's article on 2011 concerts focused on Radiohead. Here it is. I'll say this for Radiohead: they aren't nearly as annoying as U2.

Just to clarify, a lot of the music I like the best was written when I was, lemme see, minus 230 years old. I guess that means I'm "centennially biased". Good to know.

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2011 in music

Now is the time of year when people publish summing up stories. The Wall Street Journal has one on the music of 2011 here. I like to check into popular music from time to time because sometimes you find some really good stuff. So I started reading this article with interest, hoping to discover some interesting music. Lucinda Williams? I tried out a couple of songs, but really? Same old country blues. I didn't hear one thing that was interesting.

Next, Paul Simon. He's done a lot of good things over the years and the song "So Beautiful So What" isn't bad. But has he completely given up on harmony? I mean the musical content of this song is a single lick that never changes and the contrasting chorus simply consists in stopping the lick briefly. The harmony never changes.

Next, Elbow's album Build a Rocket Boys!

The previews are perfect for my purposes because I just want to see if there is something going on. They have the flattened affect that so many of the new bands seem to have. But some interesting things for sure. For one thing, they seem to have more than just one sound. And there are references to other musical styles. Sometimes a kind of lyrical hymn-like quality. Occasionally a melody. Worth some investigation...

Next, Anna Calvi.

Now this I liked! Some passion, some harmony and the music had some real direction. And these things are not unrelated... Next, Joy Formidable, The Big Roar. The first half of the song sounds like The English Beat with a ska-like riff. The second half seems to have succumbed to the tedious influence of Radiohead.

Next, an interesting cross-cultural collaboration: Vincent Segal and Ballaké Sissoko's "Chamber Music" 

Now this is pretty nice: subtle, restrained and with a floating charm. Not terribly common qualities these days! How about someone else from Mali? The guitarist Vieux Farka Touré.

At first this reminded me of the "high-life" music of King Sunny Ade, but more one dimensional. By three minutes in I was really longing for something to happen. But it never did. What King Sunny Ade had was a spectacular rhythm section backing him up:

The next collection in the article contains the work of "high-profile rappers" so I think I will stop right there and let you go on and check out the others for yourself. I want to mention that the original article itself is rather odd, though. It's not a traditional puff piece which is solely to promote a single artist. It is not a work of music criticism as it contains not a single critical comment. What it is, is a kind of rhapsody of purple prose glorifying everything in sight. You would almost think that 2011 was the greatest year in music since 1965. Or 1721. The writer sounds as if he just loves everything. Everything is an "absolute delight". I don't know what to think of that. How can everything be an absolute delight? It can't, of course. So how does he sort out the more absolutely delightful from the less absolutely delightful? 

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Now this is music criticism...

I just ran across this article in the Guardian.

There are too many writers that never have a critical word to say about anyone--and too many classical music critics too! So it is nice to read something where the writer pulls no punches. 'Nice'? Well, enjoyable. You have to love someone who says that the 'evil' Grammy nominations concert is a collection of the worst music of the year.  The only problem for me is that while she throws a lot of mud, almost none of it is musical mud. She criticizes musicians for their lyrics, dancing, costumes, facial expressions and general cultural boorishness. Notice what's missing from that list? Yes, the music! Wait, now she did call someone's performance 'tedious' which is pretty small beer in my books. I might say to someone I knew personally that their performance was a bit tedious. C'mon Hadley, you can do better than that! I didn't see the evil special, but let me help you out with some handy musical criticisms you can apply as needed like grape jelly on french toast.

Rap musicians: "snarling tunelessly like the barbarians they are"
Country: "fine if you like nasal whine"
Divas: "a clunky, auto-tuned xerox of bad Whitney Houston"
Lady Gaga: "an obsessive fascination with bad disco themes"

Notice how I avoided any technical vocabulary? You don't have to come across as an elitist swine while you are critically eviscerating this all-too-easy prey. Remember the immortal words of Oscar Wilde: "One would have to have a heart of stone to read the death of little Nell without dissolving into tears...of laughter." There is some music that deserves to be ridiculed. It's a public service!

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Relativism hasn't won--not completely

One of the things hampering criticism generally and music criticism in particular, is the assumption of relativism. The Latin maxim "de gustibus non est disputandum" meaning "there is no arguing about taste" is often used as a stopper to end any disagreements about taste. I dislike this kind of injunction on argument because, as one with some background in philosophy, I regard argument--the philosophical kind--as being the best way to uncover truths and untruths. The idea that all tastes are equivalent is an odd one. The perfect philosophical counter to the statement "everything is relative" is the rejoinder "is that an absolute truth?"

The idea of taste itself may seem a bit out of step with our times, but lots of valuable things are so that doesn't bother me in the least. Tastes do certainly vary from one person to another and, even more interesting, from one period in a person's life to another. I've just been reading in The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics (published in 2004 so reasonably up to date) and discovered a useful essay by Ted Cohen on "The Philosophy of Taste: Thoughts on the Idea". I won't recapitulate his discussion, but take it as a springboard for my own.

Just looking at a single person's history of taste, it is perfectly normal for it to change over time. Musically, for example, it is entirely usual for one's taste to change over time, especially if one is undertaking a course of study in music. With exposure to more and more different styles in music, different historical periods and with training in theory and audible recognition (ear-training), one's taste develops. It becomes possible to distinguish different kinds of music just as one might distinguish different varietals of grapes from going to organized wine-tastings. With the ability to distinguish French Baroque music from Italian or the lute fantasias of John Dowland from those of Francesco da Milano might also come the slightly different ability to distinguish greater from lesser quality--to be able to hear the difference between the counterpoint of Bach from that of, say, Telemann.

If one's taste can develop with exposure, training and study, then the only way to make sense of this is to assume something like a 'standard of taste'. One can only understand one's own improved taste over time in terms of being able to better distinguish the elements of a musical composition and comprehend better its structure and expression. To those for whom relativism is an 'absolute truth' this may well be anathema, but relativism exacts an enormous price: not only does it make it impossible to discuss disagreements over taste, it even makes it impossible to understand one's own improvement in taste over time.

I am always looking to improve my own musical taste because I believe there is a direct link between that and my compositional choices. It is of enormous benefit if I can look at something I just wrote and say, "hmm, well, that's not quite good enough..." If I can do that with my own music, then why can't I do that with the music of others? Assuming one has the necessary competence, of course.

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Almost Music

This is a phenomenon not much talked about. At any given time there are a cluster of artists working in a particular genre: landscape painters, watercolorists, cubists--all working with similar materials to similar ends. Then a hundred years later only one or two names survive, because these were the ones that were doing something significant and lasting. Of the rest some just lacked talent. But others may have been very well known, perhaps even the most popular at the time. What were they up to? Whether knowingly or not, they were copying what the creative ones were doing, but without any creativity themselves. They were not making art, they were aping art. To the general public this may often be not only acceptable, but preferable!

But let me give credit where credit is due: successful aping of creativity is not easy. Only a few do it well. How to do it depends on understanding the basic aesthetic challenge of the field. Not meeting it, of course, but faking what it might look like to meet it. Difficult, but still easier than actual creativity. I think we are ready for an example so let me propose the British artist Damien Hirst and from the classical avant-garde Karlheinz Stockhausen. One good indicator of fakery is a flashy presentation. By flashy I mean anything that instantly draws attention, like a 14 foot shark suspended in a tank:

Or a string quartet where each member is in a different helicopter. Here is how Wikipedia describes that piece:

Stockhausen had dreams of flying throughout his life, and these dreams are reflected in the Helikopter-Streichquartett (the third scene of Mittwoch aus Licht), completed in 1993. In it, the four members of a string quartet perform in four helicopters flying independent flight paths over the countryside near the concert hall. The sounds they play are mixed together with the sounds of the helicopters and played through speakers to the audience in the hall. Videos of the performers are also transmitted back to the concert hall. The performers are synchronized with the aid of a click track, transmitted to them and heard over headphones.

And here is an excerpt:

In the context of this kind of avant-garde modernism traditional aesthetic values are hilariously inappropriate. In the past, the joke has been on the traditional aesthetic value. But I think that time is over. The joke is really on us. We fell for it. Especially someone who paid nearly ten million pounds for a shark in a tank. Or the music festivals who rented those helicopters. Not to mention the audience who thought they were hearing something of some significance. Well, I don't think so.

A different genre requires a different kind of fakery, though. In pop music, you need to look around, see what is fashionable, or perhaps not quite fashionable yet, or something that was fashionable and due for a revival. That bring us to pop music and this article in today's Globe and Mail about the 20th anniversary of this album. Here is a song from the album:

And another:

What's wrong with them? This is professional music-making, of course. Just like Damien Hirst and Karlheinz Stockhausen, U2 know what they are doing. But on the aesthetic level, this is merely perfunctory. All the gestures and execution are predictable, merely reproducing what has been done a thousand times. None of the irregularities and quirks that signal genuine creation. As the band-members themselves tell us, they felt creatively empty and searched for inspiration in many genres. The resulting album was hugely successful commercially, but still just a mishmash of generic music. Four bars of this, four bars of that, typical guitar lick, voice with the calculated right amount of roughness to suggest sincerity. But no real quality, no real individuality...

I think if you read the interview in the Globe and Mail you can pick up from the BS and posturing that these guys know perfectly well what they got away with and are hoping to keep getting away with...

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Music Journalism

Most music journalism is news about artists and events, new releases, hirings, firings and so on. But it also includes reviews of recordings and performances which is when it becomes, potentially, interesting from my point of view. Here is a piece about a new album, a collaboration between Lou Reed and Metallica. I find it very odd, but then I find most reviews very odd. It seems to start with the conclusions, then go on to discuss specifics, but without ever linking them to the conclusions. I wonder if this is because of the distorting demands of journalism that seem to turn most stories upside down so you have to read to the end to find the most pertinent details that should have been at the beginning. Here is a bit from near the beginning:

It's not really designed for people who like music. It sounds like what it is: an elderly misanthrope reciting paradoxical aphorisms over a collection of repetitive, adrenalized sludge licks.

I went to listen to the album but couldn't get past the first thirty seconds of the first three cuts; but they do seem to bear out this comment. The article goes on for much longer, but after that beginning, I wonder why? He does make an interesting point towards the end. This collaboration is a free initiative by the artists, bowing to no commercial demands. The writer, Chuck Klosterman, comments:

For much of my life, I lived under the myth that record labels were inherently evil. I was ceaselessly reminded that corporate forces stopped artists from doing what they truly desired; they pushed musicians toward predictable four-minute radio singles and frowned upon innovation, and they avariciously tried to turn art into a soulless commodity that MTV could sell to the lowest common denominator. And that did happen, sometimes. But some artists need that, or they end up making albums like this.

There are some half-truths there. It is true that art needs discipline. Often that discipline is imposed from the outside--by the noble patrons of the Renaissance, for example. More often it is an essential part of the work of the composer to impose self-discipline. But a creative pop artist faced with, say the four-minute (or even two-minute) limits of a radio single, does not turn out the predictable, because that won't get you to number one!

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The Mesopotamian Manner

I was just over at Greg Sandow's blog reading about his music criticism course and leaving a comment. One of his reading assignments was this essay by George Bernard Shaw in his role as one of the great music critics. He makes fun of a new (at the time) book on music theory by H. H. Stratham called Form and Design in Music. Shaw doesn't like it for a couple of reasons. One is that Stratham chooses a melody by Wagner as an example of bad melodic writing and Shaw, of course, is a famous Wagnerian. The other is that Stratham engages in what Shaw calls the "Mesopotamian manner", that is, he talks about music using technical vocabulary such as "the dominant of D minor". Shaw delivers a brilliant satire of this by subjecting Hamlet's soliloquy to the same technique. A sample: "Shakespeare, dispensing with the customary exordium, announces his subject at once in the infinitive..." Brilliant, funny and almost telling. But it is really a straw man, isn't it? It is usually quite unnecessary to discuss Shakespeare in this manner because he is writing in what we almost recognize as our own tongue (though more and more remote from us with every decade) and there is hardly a need to point out that "To be or not to be" is in the infinitive, because we know it by virtue of speaking English. But the dominant of D minor is not necessarily obvious until it is pointed out, and it has a very definite function and role that may be worth mentioning.

Unlike Shaw, we are living in a time when fewer and fewer books on music contain what I would recognize as talk about music. If I buy a book on Shostakovich symphonies and concertos, I hope very much that it will inform me about them. I hope to find the important themes in musical notation, discussion of the harmonic structure and so on. But that is no longer the case. A book on Shostakovich symphonies and concertos contains no musical examples whatsoever, but merely the author's attempt to communicate, in metaphor, his impressions of those themes. You can talk all you like about passionate reveries and juggernaut marches, but at the end of the day it is just vague metaphor and I know very little more than I did before. Instead of ten pages of rambling metaphor, I would much prefer a line or two of musical examples.

Shaw delivers some scathing criticism of Brahms in this review and while I think he is actually too kind, I think the argument would have benefited from a couple of specific examples. Having strong opinions is all very well,  but it is even nicer to mention why. The internet provides us with some amazing resources. Not only can we put up thoughts in writing, but we can also put up musical notation and even performances to demonstrate our points:

Sometimes, we can do both simultaneously! I leave you to find on your own the other seven (7!!!) clips that make up the rest of the piece.

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Music Criticism and the Music Business

I just read the most amazing post over at Norman Lebrecht's Slipped Disc called "How to Buy a Record Review". Go and have a look. It boils down to the most well-known American publisher of reviews of classical recordings offers favorable reviews in exchange for buying ads. A nice piece of behind-the-scenes corruption. Now doesn't that explain why a number of artists seem to have much better careers than they deserve? My experience with the music business is that it is a very tough business indeed and many musicians are simply at the mercy of shady operators.

I think that the best way to fight corruption in the music business is through focus on quality. If musicians and audiences look for quality that can filter out the poor musicians. It is not the outstanding musicians that need to buy record reviews--well, maybe in a corrupt situation, they do. But in a halfway fair system they won't need to. The only answer to the celebrity, super-model trend in classical music, is to return the focus to the music instead of Yuja Wang's dress. Here are several posts of mine on what music criticism can do:

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2011/08/classical-music-criticism_7912.html

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2011/08/music-criticism.html

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2011/08/negative-criticism.html

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2011/07/practice-that-dare-not-speak-its-name.html

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2011/08/in-defence-of-music.html

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2011/10/music-of-plants.html

http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2011/08/classical-music-with-pop-sensibility.html

Enjoy!

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5 against 4

5 against 4 is the name of a blog by composer Simon Cummings. He has recently released a collection of electronic compositions titled Simulated Music. Generally I find myself uninterested in electronic music, but these pieces seem, well, listenable. Here is the 11th Simulation. Give it a listen! But what really attracts me to his blog is his music criticism. It is well-written, intelligent and above all, critical! You would be surprised how rare real music criticism is these days. He describes a new piece by Peter Maxwell Davies, premiered at the 2011 Proms as having "a shudderingly cringeworthy epicentre in which a flat litany of vacuous platitudes is chanted, with all the solemnity of psalms recited by mental patients". He describes a piece by John Taverner as "one of the most fantastically horrific demonstrations of pseudo-composition ever to be heard at the Proms, or indeed any concert". His praise is equally direct. Of an orchestral arrangement, or better to say perhaps "re-composition" of Purcell's Chacony in G minor by Joby Talbot, Simon refers to its "staggeringly beautiful conclusion to an unforgettable arrangement".


Now I haven't taken the time to listen to most of the performances he mentions so I don't know if I agree with the estimations. With one exception: I did listen to the Talbot 'arrangment' and it is very beautiful indeed. If you go to this post, you will find a downloadable version at the bottom. Have a listen!


But what I like about the blog is that he expresses his views clearly and describes why he thinks so. You would think this would be common...

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The Music of Plants

In the local paper yesterday there was an article about an art installation at our botanical gardens. It began with this sentence: "Plants are capable of producing extraordinarily sweet and relaxing music." That does bring to mind a begonia I once knew that really had a way with Ravel... The article goes on to mention that the artist wants to "appeal to the free exercise of human spirit that searches to solve enigmas and mysteries through sensations and emotions." Well you might search for some explanation or description of these enigmas and mysteries, but I'm afraid the rest is just more of the same. I was sitting with an artist acquaintance when we ran across this and for some reason I went into my guerrilla musicologist mode where I hoist the black flag and start being provocative. I said that plants don't make music, she said, it's an art installation, I said, but it says it's 'music' so that puts it on my turf and so on. I ended up by claiming that I strove to have the narrowest, most closed-minded approach to music possible. At which point, everyone laughed.

Isn't it odd that if you say very radical and possibly true things in a certain tone of voice, everyone will chuckle and think you are charming? But if you say them in the voice of a jihadist fanatic, everyone will back away slowly. You see I do work to have a narrow, though I like to call it 'focused', approach to music. I think if you set out to "solve enigmas and mysteries through sensations and emotions" you just end up wallowing in confusion because you don't actually know what you are doing. Some people tend to use words for their color without actually knowing what they mean. What I try to do is look at the specifics. If you look over the posts on this blog, which range from discussions of John Cage, to gamelan, to U2, to Radiohead, to Bach, to Mozart and on and on--if you look at the list of posts you might think that I am very open-minded and diverse in my tastes. I'm really not. I only like good music. But you can find good music in a lot of surprising places. Unfortunately you also find bad music in those same places. There is a lot of very bad classical music. It won't cause you to bleed from your ears like some genres of pop music, but you will be regretting that part of your life you lost forever listening to it!

This brings to mind a principle that Karl Popper contributed to the philosophy of science: empirical falsification. This roughly means that any genuine scientific theory must, in principle, be falsifiable. It must be possible to make empirical observations that could confirm or deny the theory. I apply this to music criticism in this way: it must be possible to decide whether a piece of music is worth listening to or not. There must be qualities that the piece possesses that we can hear and enjoy--enjoy in the widest possible sense. That seems rather simple and obvious, but some kinds of music don't have these qualities. Music from plants (which is actually sounds produced by an artist installation), for example. Or music written so as to defy any aesthetic judgment by using chance procedures or just silences. If the composer has no aesthetic intentions, then one can hardly accuse him of failure! This was the point of my joking remark in a previous post on John Cage's Water Walk, when I accused him of making several mistakes in the performance. If you cannot make mistakes, if it cannot be a bad performance, then it certainly can't be a good performance. This is the principle of falsifiability...

Here is John Cage playing an amplified cactus and plant materials with a feather so you can hear for yourself:

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Not Everyone Loves the Beatles

Heh. Just read a hilarious little piece in the Wall Street Journal of quotes from various people on the Beatles. Some were from early on, the first wave of Beatlemania in 1964, but some others are from just a few years ago. Here is a sample:

"Musically, they are a near disaster; guitars slamming out a merciless beat that does away with secondary rhythms, harmony and melody. Their lyrics (punctuated by nutty shouts of "yeah, yeah, yeah!") are a catastrophe, a preposterous farrago of Valentine-card romantic sentiments."

—Newsweek reviewer, Feb. 24, 1964

And here is a comment on the article:

This article is a fine demonstration of why you should never listen to critics. The only trustworthy judge of music is your own ears.

 A number of years ago the music critic Nicolas Slonimsky published a fascinating book titled The Lexicon of Musical Invective that was a collection of nasty things said about composers. Sample: "The music of a demented eunuch," writes one 19th-century critic of Wagner. No-one is immune: you would scarcely believe the incredible things people said about Beethoven during his lifetime.


However, neither the current article, nor the earlier book prove quite what the commentor thinks they do: that critics should never be listened to. Of course, as I complain sometimes, most music criticism today is really nothing of the kind. Instead it is just puff pieces to promote the latest fresh young thing, whether performer or composer. Or it is just the cranky ramblings of a curmudgeon--though I suspect that fewer and fewer of them even exist. By all means, feel free to ignore music critics. Unless they have something worth hearing. Some of them do. I have mentioned before the people that I think are real music critics and oddly enough, none of them have that actual job description. You should pay a great deal of attention to anything written about music by Richard Taruskin, Joseph Kerman or Charles Rosen. Taruskin is a musicologist who occasionally writes for the mainstream press, Kerman is a professor emeritus of musicology and writer and Rosen is a pianist and writer on music. I rather doubt whether they would have written anything so intemperate or ignorant as the things written about the Beatles in the article. Why not? I think that one mark of a good critic, or any good professional, is that you recognize the limits of your knowledge and understanding. I don't opine on Japanese calligraphy or break-dancing (or is it "dub-step" now?) because I know nothing about them. I do wander into pop music pretty frequently, but I think the fact that I grew up with the Beatles, played bass guitar, electric six-string and sang in a band when I was young and the fact that I have studied or listened closely to pop music for forty years does qualify me.


But most stuff written under the rubric "music criticism" is, as the commentor says, not worth reading. Other stuff is essential reading. Similarly with your ears: they may be trained ears or ignorant ears, in which case they may or may not be a good guide. Let's go back to that first quote. The Newsweek reviewer mentions a number of elements: "merciless beat" and "secondary rhythms" (that the beat "does away with"). Since he mentions "yeah, yeah, yeah", let's have a listen to "She Loves You" and see what he is talking about:

Hmm. Nothing 'merciless' about that beat and the song is stuffed full of "secondary rhythms". The leading theorist on the music of the Beatles, Walter Everett, regards this song as "the foremost example of the Beatles' ardent early works." He notes:

The surface of "She Loves You" is tension-filled. This is partly due to a strong rhythmic drive created by such devices as the strongly-accented beat-dividing syncopations in the strumming throughout and in the syncopated snare flams that follow the "yeah-yeah-yeah" motto within the chorus, the stop-time fourth beat rests near the end of the chorus, the unexpected repetitions of the final phrase of the last chorus ... and the suspension of the tempo at the song's structural, dramatically embellished V7. [score references omitted]

Oh yes, nothing but 'merciless beat' and no secondary rhythms whatsoever! I won't bother with the critic's sneer that the song has no melody or harmony, just to mention that Everett regards the song so highly that he spends six pages on it, much of it devoted to melody and harmony, in his two-volume monograph on the Beatles. The Newsweek critic simply knows nothing, including how to listen.

The only trustworthy guide to music is a trustworthy guide to music! Heh. That might be your own ears, if they happen to be highly trained and knowledgeable ones. Or they might be someone else's ears, likewise. Some music critics are excellent guides.

Let me close with one other quote from the article:

"The Beatles are not merely awful, I would consider it sacrilegious to say anything less than that they are godawful. They are so unbelievably horrible, so appallingly unmusical, so dogmatically insensitive to the magic of the art, that they qualify as crowned heads of anti-music."

—William F. Buckley, author and commentator, 1964

This one rather saddens me because Buckley was such a stimulating and brilliant commentor on so many things. You have to love a guy who ran for mayor of New York with the campaign slogan "Don't immanentize the eschaton!" But here he is all wet, committing the fatal flaw of so many brilliant people of venturing opinions in areas in which they have no professional expertise.

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Problems of Music Criticism

An anonymous reader left some excellent comments on my post "Negative Criticism". As they led to an interesting discussion, let me quote them here:

I don't "get" U2 at all. I've never heard any catchy melody, any interesting arrangement, any ear-catching rhythm from those guys. Nothing. Just droning, achingly dull banality. In fact the laws of statistics suggest that out of so many tunes at least a couple of them should be interesting. But not even that. My sense is that no one in U2 actually knows the first thing about music. This is not some sort of elitist criticism that will dismiss all of rock as uneducated music. Far from it. Though lacking any formal training, Robert Johnson and Jimi Hendrix were extremely subtle, creative, sophisticated musicians. My problem with U2 is that I don't see that they ever got past the 3-chord stage of an 8th-grader who gets a guitar for Xmas. And yet their enormous popularity tells me I must be missing something. Or are people so conditioned by bad music any mediocre band stands a chance to make it if they play their cards right?

I replied:

I couldn't be more in agreement. I first started thinking about U2 after reading a book by Roger Scruton. Here is the post: http://themusicsalon.blogspot.com/2011/07/music-and-philosopy.html

It must be time to look at how U2 got to be so popular... I feel a post coming on!

Then anonymous said:

Scruton is a good philosopher (despite his ueber-conservative disposition). He once dissed REM's "Losing My Religion" for all sorts of musical reasons, mostly sound and valid. And yet his argument left something to be desired. The reason is this.

I could argue why the St Matthew Passion's opening is the greatest piece of music ever written, and whether right or wrong, I think I could make a persuasive case for it. Just as Scruton can make a persuasive case that REM's music is bad. But there is one problem. I happen to believe that "Kommt, ihr Töchter" is indeed the greatest piece of music I've ever had the good luck to hear, but that's not because of the technical argument I could mount in support of that belief. After all, I could easily imagine a piece of music that is just as technically impressive and yet left me cold. The technical case for "Kommt, ihr Töchter" can only add plausibility to the claim that its greatness is unsurpassed but it cannot establish it. For its greatness is not reducible to any set of merits that can be put in words. The only argument that, in the end, clinches it for me is my subjective judgment that no other piece of music has ever moved me so deeply and lastingly
and so enriched my musical sensibilities.

So now let's go back to REM. I find "Losing My Religion" quite catchy and for me, anyway, as a piece of pop music, it works. And yet Scruton's arguments about its inferiority might well be correct. But how much do they matter? My problem with U2 is that it's never moved me the slightest bit. I try to rationalize it by saying they don't know squat about music. But highly trained pop musicians (say, Joe Satriani) don't really move me either. I feel my approach to music is extremely primitive and physical. At the end of the day, the reason I worship Bach is because he, more than anyone, can bring tears to my eyes. I wish there was a way to argue about the "qualia" of music that didn't inevitably fall back to its objective "manufacturing" nature. So that Scruton's complaint that REM doesn't invert triads wouldn't sound so trite.

And I answered:

Where was Scruton's discussion of "Losing My Religion"?

You put your finger on a crucial problem in aesthetic judgment: a large part of our response to music is deeply subjective. This is beyond the limit of music theory. Theorists have long since given up on aesthetic judgment, of course. They would rather not get involved in that messiness! But theory severed from aesthetic judgment tends to be sterile analysis. Similarly, subjective responses to music tend to be excessively shaped by whatever you were exposed to when you were young. I often puzzle over whether some of my high regard for the Beatles is simply because they were a big part of what I listened to when I was in my later teens.

But let me make some distinctions here: music poses problems for a philosophical discussion because the creation and reception of it is located in a non-verbal part of the self (brain, mind). You don't (verbally) think your way through a performance either playing or listening. But that does not imply that it is entirely subjective. Let me give an example. When we watch/hear a string quartet perform, they are engaged in a very subtle non-verbal communication (conversation). The first violin plays a theme and the second takes it up. The viola threads in a counter-melody and the cello supports it all with long bass notes. Then they all slow down together to meditate on it. All this is quite real and also quite non-verbal. We can talk about it, but only rather indirectly. As I write, I am imagining exact sounds, but I'm not sure what you, the reader are imagining.

So, none of this is subjective, though it is beyond the reach of words. I think that good aesthetic judgments about music can also aspire to the objective, though they will be difficult. I try to do it through direct comparisons. Instead of trying to describe the indescribable, I just put up a clip from YouTube and let you decide.

Going back to the subjective: I think one can overcome the biases that come from what you listened to when you were young. For example, in my first couple of years of listening I probably spent as much time listening to Eric Burdon and the Animals and the Rolling Stones as the Beatles. It was over a long period of time that I began to distinguish the extraordinary music of the Beatles from the other music of the same time. In the same way, we have, over a long time, come to see the music of Bach as being of quite a different order than that of, say, Telemann or Johann Friedrich Fasch.

In order to engage in really telling music criticism, you have to do more than just complain about how triads are inverted. But you can make that complaint. Applied to rock music it is a bit odd, though. Rock harmony doesn't have a lot to do with inversions because on rhythm guitar, you play whatever inversion lies easily on the fingerboard. I think good criticism should have at its disposal the whole repertoire of theoretical learning, but only use what is appropriate to the context. For example, to accuse early Steve Reich of boring repetition is somewhat to misunderstand what he is up to. But to accuse Fasch of boring repetition is to hit the nail on the head!

I find a blog to be a superb locale for music criticism because I can talk about something, then embed a clip as an example. I can put up an excerpt from a musical score to clinch the point. The discussion can wander from the verbal to the musical performance to the written score and thus make up for the limitations of language.

Thank you, anonymous, for an excellent comment!!!

Here are the pieces we were talking about. "Losing My Religion" by REM:

And the opening chorus from the Matthew Passion:

 

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