Head-Scratcher

A 4 November piece written for The New York Times by Times classical music critic Bernard Holland seems to have set a number of people’s teeth on edge. It begins and ends innocently enough with Mr. Holland discussing how, as a professional critic, he prepares for the premiere of a new work:

I read about the people and the circumstances, where the piece came from and what the composer eats for breakfast. If I have a score, I look at the orchestration. It’s nice to know how many crayons are in the composer’s coloring box. I don’t listen to anything. Surprise me.

A perfectly sensible way to go about the thing, actually (remember, as a professional critic Mr. Holland has to write not only about the new work, but about the work within its total context which might very well have to take note of “what the composer eats for breakfast”), and certainly no cause for setting anyone’s teeth on edge. Unless, of course, one disregards the context of what Mr. Holland wrote, and, as absurd as the conclusion is, concludes from his words, as it seems did at least one blogger, that Mr. Holland makes his judgment on the new work without listening to it or to any other work the new work’s composer has written previously when it was perfectly clear that what Mr. Holland meant was simply that he doesn’t listen to the new work via any source before hearing it at its premiere.

In that same piece, however, Mr. Holland also addressed the matter of who owes whom what in the understanding and acceptance of a new work: the composer the audience, or the audience the composer?

[P]reparation signals a critic’s work ethic, an obligation to reach out (or up) to a composer, to speak his or her language, to enter someone else’s territory and ask for directions.

The more I follow this line of thought, the more irritated I get, for haven’t we got things backward? Shouldn’t composers be preparing for me rather than me for them? By “me,” I mean not me the critic but me the audience member in general.

[...]

No one can deny the oceans of irrelevance that have always resulted from giving the public what it wants. But any music intended for public consumption must ask on every page: “How can I make them respond? What common denominator between their sensibility and mine can I discover?” Otherwise it bears irrelevance of a different kind. Haydn and Mozart — purveyors of the most profound and original music ever written — asked these questions every day, or they would have had nothing to eat.

[...]

I hope it is not unreasonable to suggest that composers, not listeners, are the servants here, and that every new opera or orchestral piece they write should be brought in on a tray with hopes that it has something substantial to say that we can like.

Unlike Mr. Holland’s reasoning for his method of preparation for a new work as a professional critic, his reasoning here is more than a little problematic, or at least badly set forth. Is he really saying, as it seems he is, that composers ought to pander to the tastes of their audience in order for their work to be understood, accepted, and loved by them? Sounds unreasonable to us — wrongheaded, even — and Mr. Holland only loads the dice by putting forward the example of a transcendent genius such as Mozart who consciously and seemingly effortlessly wrote his music in such a way that, in part or in whole and at some level or other — from the most superficial to the most profound — it could be understood, accepted, and loved by any listener excepting those he (Mozart) called the “long ears” (i.e., asses). As a composer, Mozart could eat his cake and have it too. No other composer in history was (or is) capable of that.

Our respect for Mr. Holland as a critic is well-known to regular readers of Sounds & Fury. But this piece seems to us confused and poorly, even perversely, argued, and we confess to some not inconsiderable bafflement as to what point(s), exactly, Mr. Holland was attempting to get across by writing it.