The press coverage of contemporary music is essential to
its survival, but few would agree on exactly how a critic should approach a new
work. andante asked composer John
Corigliano and music critic Justin
Davidson — both Pulitzer Prize winners — to discuss the vital,
contentious enterprise of reviewing new music. Below is the first part of their
exchange.
From: John Corigliano
To: Justin Davidson
Dear Justin,
Reviewing a new work makes more stringent demands on a critic than reviewing familiar music does, and yet the stakes are considerably higher. A composer can puts months, or even years into the creation a work, the future of which is often influenced by the initial critical response.
There are at least two issues that arise when dealing with a new piece — one technical and one philosophical. Let me pose the technical one first:
Just as a masterpiece of the standard repertoire can be distorted by an indifferent or inept performance, so can a new work be mangled. It is relatively easy to separate a piece from its performance if one is well acquainted with a work. It is absolutely impossible to do so if it is a new work and the critic cannot refer to a score to clarify where a problem lies. Unless the performers stop playing or play noticeably out of tune, the blame for a bad performance is almost always shifted to the composer. I have had quite a few performances in which the music was primarily an improvisation by badly prepared artists (some of them quite prominent) and quite unrecognizable from my original work. I have never had a critic notice what has happened.
This is why it is essential for a critic both to be able to read a score, and to have listened to the work at least once with a score. This could be at a rehearsal so the writer could listen again to the work — this time without score — at the concert. Without this no accurate judgment of the worth of a new work is possible.
While this requires more time and effort than merely coming to a concert and giving his or her reactions, it is what separates a professional critic from an ordinary music-lover with writing skills. And, since every part of the presentation of music has professional standards, from composers to performers and conductors, it is reasonable to suggest that the judgment of such professionals is done by their peers — that is, other professionals who are at least as competent as they are.
The second problem deals with the perception and interpretation of the language, or vocabulary, of the creator.
Unless one accepts the mid-1950s Boulezian doctrine of the evolution of music from tonal to non-tonal (and many critics do accept this), one must deal in this 21st century with a complex compositional climate quite unlike the earlier Baroque or Classical periods in which a common set of techniques ruled all composers of the time. Today's composers feel free to utilize all kinds of techniques: tonal, non-tonal, microtonal and more.
However, some critics have a strong ideology that causes them to see the various tools available to the composer as stances of his or her ideology rather than merely techniques. Thus the use of twelve-tone and tonal writing in the same work might be seen as a stylistic conflict that must be "interpreted" by the critic. The simple contrast between tension and release, dissonance and consonance, becomes a political statement rather than a musical one.
Critics with an agenda — a view as to where new music should go — review a work as to whether or not it fits in with the political/philosophical goals of that agenda. Actually, it is more important to air the political or philosophical goals of the composer — the person who created the work — than vice versa.
It has always been interesting to me to see the immediate re-evaluation of a
composer and his or her work after that composer's death. For then, at that
moment, the critical stances that so influenced the evaluation of his work
become meaningless. And so a composer like Shostakovich — who during his
lifetime was reviled by the press as reactionary — is revisited by the very same
people that condemned him, and is now hailed as a master. The fact that Bach and
Mozart's music was basically conservative, while Berlioz and Beethoven's was
radical, is of little importance now. What is important is the quality of
these giants' work. What a shame that it often takes death to remove these
narrow prejudices of politics. For quality — that most elusive and
difficult thing to find and define — is what the final goal of
criticism should be. And the responsible writer on music looks for that in
whatever he hears, no matter what vocabulary the composer chooses to use.
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From: Justin Davidson
To: John Corigliano
Dear John,
Your words sting, especially since my favorite part of the job is to hear and react to new music — even new music I don't particularly like. There's something about the freshness of hearing a piece for the first time, the knowledge that there are no specialists in this work (well, maybe one: the composer) and that therefore every listener stands on the same ground. I see that as an exciting position for a critic to be in, and my hope is that I can relay something of that experience to readers who couldn't be at the performance.
Now you tell me that such an experience is invalid: my first time through a
piece should be nothing more than a dry run. I should withhold judgment until I
really know what I am listening to. Whatever emotions — delight,
revulsion or indifference — I may experience on first contact with a
composition I should consider merely provisional. The real question, if I read
you correctly, is: Am I getting it right? (Incidentally, it's not true that
critics can never tell the difference between the performance and the piece:
When the New York Philharmonic gave the world premiere of a work by Thomas Adès
two years ago, I wrote that the desperate performance made it impossible to
judge the work.)
Granted, in an ideal world, all critics would read music fluently, just as all new pieces would receive as much rehearsal as they require. Actually, while the second will never happen, the first mostly has. I haven't taken a scientific poll, but the critics I know mostly do read music — to the scorn of many professional musicians, the field is strewn with recovering pianists, musicologists and tuba players. (For the record, as you know, I was trained as a composer.) How well they read music, though — that's another question. You're not asking whether we critics have the chops to stumble through Für Elise, but whether we can make sense of, say, a 30-stave page of a transposed orchestral score in which pianissimo contrabassoons are meant to emerge from a wash of rippling, unmetered violin harmonics.
Is that a fair demand? I recall visiting Emanuel Ax when he had already been practicing for three weeks Christopher Rouse's Piano Concerto, Seeing, and he was still trying to figure out how the thing was supposed to go when you put it all together. You and I both know that reading a complex orchestral score is time-consuming and difficult. As with composers and conductors, some of us do it pretty well; others can figure out where to turn the page.
Also in your ideal world, a critic would, before daring to type a discouraging word, have heard a new piece more than once. Have a word with your conductor pals, most of whom abhor the idea that a critic would sit in on the rough-and-tumble preparation of a new work, rather than be confronted first with the glistening perfection of a world premiere. A New York critic might take a trip up to Boston to hear the BSO play a new symphony before it comes to Carnegie Hall — except that this would require travel budgets available only in fantasyland. We could attend both the Thursday and Friday performances of the New York Philharmonic — and get a review in on Monday instead of Saturday, but that's too late to satisfy the imperative of timeliness that a daily paper must obey.
So we make do. For myself, I sometimes obtain a score ahead of time. I react to a premiere as best I can, listening as alertly as I know how. I make an effort to return to a work that has intrigued me and sometimes get the chance to write about it again. In those instances, I try to forget what my first impression was, and listen, as it were, from scratch. I try to keep an open mind.
That brings me to your philosophical question, which is, as I understand you: Can a critic listen to a piece of music on its own terms, rather than through an ideological prism? The answer, of course, is that depends on the critic. I agree, prejudice and narrow-mindedness are bad, but music critics hardly have a monopoly in that department. Here's another question — or a polemic, actually: Is it desirable for critics to put aside their own predilections, and write generous, understanding reviews of pieces written in styles they can't abide? Why should we put aside ideology? In the late 19th century, musical Germany divided into two hostile camps over the issue of whether Brahms or Wagner was the more forward-looking composer, not just because of a handful of bad-tempered reviewers, but because the two styles embodied very different understandings of German cultural identity. That was a legitimate disagreement. And if Shostakovich is more respectable now than he once was, it's because the postmodernist ideology helps us understand his music. In an age of freewheeling borrowings and stylistic irony, he simply makes more sense now. Why did Mendelssohn rediscover Bach? Thank you, Mr. Ideology.
I think, too, that you overestimate the power of critics to shape the terms of musical discourse. Does the Chicago Symphony Orchestra play a lot of Boulez to please John von Rhein of the Chicago Tribune, or because Daniel Barenboim has a profound connection to that music? Virgil Thomson once led the cavalcade against Shostakovich, but that hardly kept Shostakovich's music out of the concert halls. And Thomson's hostility had little effect on Sibelius' reputation in the United States.
Here are a few more questions for you: You ask that critics be held to professional standards of competency. What should they be? How should critics reconcile the demands of accuracy with the realities of deadline and the music business? Given the constraints, would it be better for critics to refrain from reviewing the music of their own time, and limit themselves to the minutiae of assessing performances? Perhaps, come to think of it, movie reviewers should stop passing judgment on movies they have never seen before and instead comment on restored prints of Casablanca.
For part two of this exchange, click here.
If you would like to respond to this debate, please write to letters@andante.com.
