Matthew Guerrieri: January 2010 Archives

Jonathan asked:

[G]iven your desire for each audience member to have an authentic, individual experience, who are you writing for when you review concerts, and what do you hope your readers' relationship to your writing is?

Being a critic is weird. All you can really do is write what your own individual reaction is, and hope it has a little bit of resonance with a reader or two. I think if you try to anticipate the reader's response--by either deliberately going with the flow, or going against it--you turn into either the worst kind of shill, or the worst kind of scold. So I guess I'm writing for people who are interested in expanding their own listening technique by eavesdropping on how someone else does it. I don't think my ears are any better than anyone else's, but they've at least had more practice than most, so I try and articulate exactly what it is I listen for, what I notice, how much historical information I think is worth bringing to the table. I think one learns to listen the same way someone learns to compose--you start off with a vague sense of what you like, then you try a bunch of different things in order to hone in on it. And those things can and do include flat-out imitation. I tried on a lot of other people's ears via criticism when I was working out my own relationship with music.

I think that gets back to that tension between inherent specialness and manufactured specialness. One of the things that's inherently special about classical music is that it has a lot of history, and that a lot of that history never becomes obsolescent. It's the sort of thing that often gets rather fuzzily incorporated into the the term "timeless," or pejoratively incorporated into the term "old." But I think that aspect of classical music is one of the most radical things about it, the fact that it puts you into such a wild and far-reaching continuum--that a lot of those ears I can try on so effortlessly are listening from vantage points decades or centuries away from mine. Frankly, I like being plugged into that much possibility every time I go to a concert. (Whenever I hear Beethoven, for example, I always remember that Friedrich Engels liked Beethoven. Take that, Che-t-shirted hippies!) Jonathan, you were using the term "vessel," which I think hints at that aspect, but give yourself credit: it's more active than that. Performers are like the bioengineers in Jurassic Park. Classical music might be a dinosaur, but bring that dinosaur back to life and let it run amok in present-day culture? I'd say that's a special concert.

Amanda asked

about reviewing a concert of an artist [I've] met or heard significant buzz about versus reviewing a concert of an artist whom [I know] nothing about

This is the risk of "special" concerts--the more hype there is, the more the review is going to be about whether or not the concert lives up to the hype. The risk can pay off--Dudamel, e.g.--but can also distract. (Lang Lang and his sneakers, &c.) There are composers and performers I keep my eye out for because of buzz, but there are also those I keep my eye out for because I happened to hear them and wanted to hear them again. And I'm more likely to take or create the opportunity for promotion in the second category. The trick then, maybe, is generating enough specialness to get people in the door but not so much that it gets in the way of making fans within the concert, because that does more in the long term. Personality can certainly get people in the door, but if you can't channel that personality into a memorable musical experience, it'll only get them in the door once.

Incidentally--Moe is the actual dog. "Soho the Dog" was lifted from Sir Michael Tippett--not so incidentally, a musician who really knew how to let his personality shine through in his work. (And be careful asking for a conversation on Boccanegra--I can blather on for hours.)

The critic side of me wonders if I'm part of the problem or the solution here--probably a little of both. But since I started off as a musician, and still try to keep at least a couple of toes in that pond, my starting point is the same as Jonathan's: classical music in performance is special in and of itself.

The marketing worry, of course, is that one runs out of ways to say that. But I sometimes think that presenters and marketers underestimate the power of using institutional clout to simply assert specialness. The Boston Symphony Orchestra did a very nice job of this last fall, for a Beethoven symphony cycle--there's not much in the classical repertoire more run-of-the-mill than Beethoven symphonies, but the BSO lumped them together, highlighted it in their season announcement, plugged it as an event, and got some attention. It was interesting to compare it to a series of concerts James Levine did here a few seasons ago, pairing Beethoven with Schoenberg--that got buzz aplenty, what with the daring juxtaposition, the combination of the familiar and the unfamiliar, and a profusion of possible angles. This latest Beethoven project might have been far less adventurous, far less "special," but still managed a fair amount of buzz of its own--just by the BSO presenting it as worthy of buzz.

On the other hand, I personally find assertions of specialness within the concert presentation itself--spoken explanations, multimedia elements, &c.--to be often more annoying and distracting than anything. I've seen it done well, but only rarely; it's harder than it looks, and it takes just as much (if not more) preparation as the music. If there's absolute commitment on the part of the performer(s), if they really believe in whatever high concept they've come up with, I can happily go along for the ride, even if, in the end, I don't quite buy it. But I think one can sense when alternative presentations are the result less of conviction than of insecurity that the music alone just isn't special enough; for me, anyway, such presentations can feel like they're trying to tell me how to feel about the music, and, stubborn fool that I am, I really don't like that. This is a real problem for classical music presentation, though: many, many people don't seem to be comfortable with the relationship between the music and them as an individual listener without some sort of immediate validation of their judgment. Nothing makes me more sanguine about the future of classical music than when I get an Internet commenter telling me that my good review is full of crap; nothing makes me despair more than when a commenter tells me that my bad review is trumped by the fact that the concert got a standing ovation. And honestly, the latter far outnumber the former. What would be most healthy is some form of special presentation that makes the listener feel secure in their own reaction without implanting it. I'm not sure what that would be--and I'm not sure it's really classical music's problem; that insecurity is probably something that listeners bring into the concert hall with them. But it's something musicians have to deal with.

One more thing: As a critic, I make no bones about the fact that my own taste is highly idiosyncratic, and that I will never, ever be all things to all people. The fact that my own sense of specialness is driven more by repertoire than performer puts me, I know, in the minority, as does the nature of some of that repertoire. Berlioz, Stockhausen, Poulenc, Verdi at his most political, Cage at his most far-out--these are all automatically special concerts in my book. At the same time, you're going to have a hard time convincing me that, say, the Tchaikovsky violin concerto is a more-special-than-usual event, no matter who's playing it. (Nothing really against that particular piece, but I've heard it a lot.) But again, that's just me--and here's where we should lament the downsizing of newspapers and recognize the Internet as the not-actually-the-same-Chinese-character crisis and opportunity that it is. Because of the Internet, the chances are good that there are critics out there who will think your concert is special without you having to convince them of it, and who will promote it, review it, talk it up, &c. But with arts coverage shrinking in daily papers--and nearly nonexistent on, say, local television news--the media landscape is consequently noisier and harder to differentiate. Right now, I think the best thing musicians and/or their promoters can do is to do their homework, and pinpoint those people who are going to find what you do special already--there's an opportunity for leverage there. But mostly, don't be shy about saying that any classical performance is special. Because it is.