Critics' conference

The critics' conference Jen Graves writes about -- in a story linked on ArtsJournal today -- was pretty interesting. It was held in New York in October, and involved critics from all over the country, plus some from abroad.

Graves talks about one important thread in the discussion, a fear that critics write too timidly, and that this, as Graves says, is partly due to "the same intimidation that keeps people out of concert halls and art galleries." She goes on to say that

Like orchestras, classical critics allow themselves to be suffocated by false burdens of “greatness” and posterity. This music is important, nearly sacred, stuff, the wisdom goes, so don’t go stomping around or you might break something. But music is not an object in an archive. It happens in time, in the present. Vigorous human contact is the only thing keeping it alive.

Then, after a flattering quote from me, about my willingness to make my own judgments, and take the chance of being wrong, she says

Any mistake is better than the fatal one of sucking the life out of music with an overly deferential, reverential attitude. By responding to music with fearless honesty, we encourage readers to do the same. Music is not great because it was written in the past, it is great if the performance is truly present.

To which I can only say "bravo" (though, quite honestly, my own memory of what she quotes is somewhat different). She's nailed an important issue, I think, and I can only encourage her to keep on writing what she thinks.

(Joan Tower, incidentally, tries to encourage people who hear her music to respond honestly to hit. She does this -- in pre-concert lectures -- by telling her audience things she herself doesn't like in her work. She figures that if she doesn't like things in her music, and is willing to say so, that then the people in the audience will give themselves the same freedom.)

Something else fascinating about this critics' conference -- how radical some of it was. Right at the start, for instance, two composers spoke on a panel, Meredith Monk and Osvaldo Golijov. Neither is exactly a mainstream classical figure, despite Golijov's success; neither writes mainstream concert music. Meredith has always taken a completely personal approach to composition, using the sounds that she and people in her ensemble know how to make, and Golijov mixes classical and popular idioms, drawing on cultures from around the world. Fascinating that these two should, at the conference, be taken as emblems of where composers are right now -- and that the critics took for granted that this represented the true state of contemporary classical music.