Veteran classical music critic for The New York Times, Bernard Holland, is not happy with verbal explications of new music:
On the way to listening to a CD of music by Marc-André Dalbavie, I was hijacked by a set of program notes. All I really wanted was to hear pieces like Color or the Ciaccona on my stereo, but Mr. Dalbavie and his “spectral music” colleagues have taken me to a dark place where I have been beaten mercilessly with brilliant ideas.[...]
So breathless were the revelations contained in [the program notes], called “Space, Line, Color,” it seemed for a moment the music could wait.
[...]
Some cultures believe that a word exists for everything, and that language has the capacity to explain all. As someone who writes about music for a living, I know what folly this is.
[...]
Hearing Color, the Violin Concerto and the Ciaccona on this recording is more interesting than reading about them.
[Few things are] more unseemly — or tedious and annoying — it strikes [us], than composers who "talk about what's musically important to them, how they write pieces, their relation to the culture they came from, [and] why they ended up writing music the way they do." Nothing, and I do mean nothing, more surely telegraphs in advance that a piece of music is not worth one's time listening to than its composer going on endlessly (or so it seems) about matters technical and cultural involved in the music's composition, and what influenced or motivated his (her) writing of it.It makes no bloody difference how and why the music was composed, and no-one but a fellow composer, a specialist, or an intellectual poseur looking to add to his store of esoteric or inside information, gives a rat's ass about any of that of-no-consequence tripe. All that matters — the only thing that matters — is the music itself. If the music doesn't itself, by itself, say what needs to be said about it, it's ipso facto crap, and no amount of verbiage by its composer will serve to make it anything other.
On The Road To Prohibition
