Sound Familiar?

Well, perhaps it won't unless you're a longtime constant reader of this blog.

Compare, if you will, this:

People have pointed out evidences of personal feeling in my notices [i.e., reviews] as if they were accusing me of a misdemeanor, not knowing that a criticism written without personal feeling is not worth reading. It is the capacity for making good or bad art a personal matter that makes a man a critic. The artist who accounts for my disparagement by alleging personal animosity on my part is quite right: when people do less than their best, and do that less at once badly and self-complacently, I hate them, loathe them, detest them, long to tear them limb from limb and strew them in gobbets about the stage or platform....

In the same way, really fine artists inspire me with the warmest personal regard, which I gratify in writing my notices without the smallest reference to such monstrous conceits as justice, impartiality, and the rest of the ideals. When my critical mood is at its height, personal feeling is not the word: it is passion: the passion for artistic perfection – for the noblest beauty of sound, sight, and action – that rages in me. Let all young artists look to it, and pay no heed to the idiots who declare that criticism should be free from personal feeling. The true critic, I repeat, is the man who becomes your personal enemy on the sole provocation of a bad performance, and will only be appeased by good performances.

with this:

The generally debased, PC-contaminated, ultra-"civilized" crowd which today constitutes the mainstream classical music critical fraternity relishes nothing so much as engaging in discussion of classical music in ways more appropriate to genteel luncheon and dinner parties where it's considered the height of gauche to argue in any manner that might upset the digestion of those seated at table. Arguing in that "civilized," genteel way makes members of this critical crowd feel they've been winning, intellectually probing, stimulating, and "with it," when all they've managed to be is glib; nattering on about nothing of real substance or pertinence while at the same time keeping hands clean, hair un-mussed, and digestion undisturbed — theirs and their readers'.

Well, I've a bit of news for this critically "civilized" bunch: Your brother mainstream classical music critics of prior eras would have none of such "civilized," genteel pap, even in proper and oh-so-civilized Victorian England. When they discussed or wrote on matters musical they were not in the least afraid of dirtying hands, mussing hair, and disturbing digestion. They carried on their dialogues red in tooth and claw if need be, as in those culturally more concerned eras we had in the mainstream media that healthy and vital mass of informed classical music critical ferment [lacking today], and at the heart of which was a critical fraternity made up of courageous and erudite classical music critics who felt that anything in music or music related worth arguing about was worth getting bloodied for.

The first is by no less a stellar classical music critical light than the great G. B. Shaw himself, the second, by the somewhat less stellar A.C. Douglas from a July 2003 post on a previous incarnation of this blog, and republished here in July 2005.

And, no, I've never before read that Shaw quote for the text of which I'm grateful to classical music writer and critic for The Orange County Register and new blogger Timothy Mangan of Classical Life (link via Alex Ross). Welcome to the cultural blogosphere, Mr. Mangan!