This fall at Juilliard

For a while now, I've been claiming that I do my research at the borders between aesthetics and metaphysics, and it's only in the last year or so that I've started figuring out how to do this.

What I find so interesting in the idea of teaching how to write and read criticism to people who presumably already know quite a bit about music is that it becomes, it seems to me, a question of explaining how when we think we are doing a real activity that is both physical, sensuous and productive, that doesn't just describe but does something. So that, as you point out here, even people who have spent their whole lives in a certain discipline actually perceive both the world and their field of study differently.

For the last year or so, I've been reading books like Alex Ross's The Rest is Noise and blogs like this ones and Jeremy Denk's alongside books in the sciences like The Origin of Species and Schrodinger's What is Life or (crossing-over) Oliver Sacks's musicophilia --- and what I think I'm starting to understand is how, on some basic conceptual level, whether we are writing in a qualititative or technical way, we are thinking not in representations (which lay over something without doing anything) but in metaphors --- and metaphors literally do something (metaphor in Greek means literally "carry-over").

Kant called this "common-sense." Rimbaud called it rather more provocatively "the systematic derangement of the senses," but in both cases the idea is that those of us who are thinking and writing, whether we're thinking or writing about the sciences or the arts are literally re-making the world.

Realizing that, through criticism, we are not consigned to the tastes we happen to have been born with or inculturated to can be quite liberating.

So thank you for sharing your thinking about criticism and music reception with us.

I think metaphor -- or, more broadly, poetry -- is in the end where criticism has to go. To evoke what we hear in music, our verbal language has to be non-literal. The descriptions we've all seen, in which people use words to describe the actual notes ("the first theme emerges, with the violins playing an eighth-note rhythm, followed by the winds playing accented open fifths on every second beat"") tend to be unreadable.

I think it might also be interesting to spend a little time on criticism written for the internet--it's a different animal but it's also the future. I know, for instance, that I'm a lot more informal when I'm writing for sequenza21 than I would be if I were writing for a newspaper--but that doesn't mean I'm being lazy, I'm just going for a different aesthetic.

Which Tom Johnson reviews are you assigning?

The course sounds fascinating--like something I would get a lot out of myself.

You can find links to the Tom Johnson reviews, on the course website. I picked "Yoko Ono's Snow" and a review about "The Unanswered Question" in a Brooklyn Philharmonia (as it was called then) performance. The "Snow" review deals with sound for sound's sake, and with concepts about sound, far from the (by comparison) petty details most reviews (including mine) trade in. The Ives review is interesting as a narrative of a concert experience, in which the music, as it unfolds, is described along with audience reaction and Tom's own thoughts.

The different between blog and print criticism -- not only in content, but in standards (are conflict of interest or libel restrictions less serious online?) -- has been talked about a lot. I wonder if print reviews will get more informal, pulled that way by online writing. I'd bet they do.

Galen's point is excellent. I personally find the less informal (?) writing about music on blogs MORE informed than what I read in the NY Times or Time Out.

As a composer, I've tried to step up my game when it comes to the (little bit of) writing I do on my own blog in part because of my frustration with the print media I name above. I was also inspired by Matana Roberts' blog and fanzine Fat Ragged (I have interviewed her as part of a "triptych" of interviews I did this past summer for my blog) as well as John Zorn's ongoing Arcana project.

It's incredibly empowering when musicians write about their own work or the work of their peers. It's also a way of documenting work that might fall into obscurity otherwise.

Your class might also want to check out Greg Tate, Robert Palmer, Nick Kent, Lester Bangs, and Mark Kemp.

I've used Bangs reviews both in the criticism class, and in my spring semester course on the future of classical music. There's a huge range of good to terrific people to choose from.

It is very difficult for most people, particularly young people, particularly young people who have spent their high school years developing their sense of what "good" is from direct influence of this adult or that adult, from this attractive peer, or that attractive peer, to be honest about what they hear or what they think they hear. It is also difficult for musicians who spent most of their time in high school practicing (and not working on writing papers) to be able to put sentences together in a way that actually conveys what they instinctively feel about a musical performance (or about anything, really). I understand that the academics at Juilliard have improved during the past 30 years, but the demands that they put on the students support the goal of the school, which is to produce capable musicians and not necessarily excellent writers.

I imagine that the papers you will get from this class will be amusing to read.

The act of writing music criticism, I believe, is similar to the act of translating poetry. It is not the fluency you may have in the original language of the poetry, but the ability to use the language you are translating to that makes a translation truly successful.

I don't find the papers amusing at all. I like them a lot. You'll see in the course overview (which I linked to in my post) that this isn't a course in writing. Nobody is judged on writing ability. Instead, I'm interested in what the students think, which in fact they're wonderfully articulate about both in class and on paper. I'm always wary of generalizations about what people are like, culturally, or how they supposedly got that way. Most of my students turn out to defy these generalizations, especially after a little encouragement. What I've found -- not only in this class, but in other settings when I've taught criticism, or taught about talking about music -- is that everyone has something in their heart, mind, and ear when they hear music. They notice things about the music, and they notice things about their reaction. With a little encouragement -- often very little -- they talk about what they've noticed, often wonderfully.

I wouldn't expect musicians to be good writers, whatever requirements a school might want to impose. (Juilliard is very tough, academically, at the DMA level.) Musicians should be musicians. If they also learn how to write, terrific, but I wouldn't try to force what might be an alien skill on them. Though the reverse might be worthwhile -- force aspiring writers to learn music. (Or knitting, or pottery, or architecture.) Too many writers have not much to say, and anything that opened their horizons would be a big plus.

Wonderful post and comments. One of the main reasons I follow various music blogs is to learn new ways of verbalizing about music making. For me there's often an interplay between the two in that learning a new way to talk about music will sometimes open up insights into how to go about making it.

The first lesson is to say the most obvious, most basic things. It's surprising how often the students at first don't do this.

Most reviewers don't, either. They write and review as if everyone who will be reading the review has heard the piece a dozen times. They assume an enormous amount of pre-existing knowledge, so they dive right into the esoterica. This shuts out people who aren't familiar with classical music and gives the impression that it's just for the cognoscenti.

Reminds me of an article (maybe I read about it here?) about a performance of "La Tosca" that mentioned an audience member being shocked when Floria stabbed Scarpia. The person gasped something like, "I knew she was angry, but I didn't think she'd kill him!" A lot of people would see that as a chuckle-worthy bumpkin who didn't go into the hall already knowing the story, but that describes a lot of people. And yet how many reviewers of opera go over the plot and characterization? (This may be because characterization in a lot of operas leaves something to be desired.)

Sure, the reviewers have seen a dozen version of Lucia di Lammermoor and can spend a few column-inches comparing them all to the one they just saw, but that won't reel in newbies. Too much of the classical world, including the reviewers, is just a bunch of people talking to themselves. Music criticism is another flavor of music outreach -- but it's hard to do outreach to newbies and write a review that will leave the connoisseur happy, too.