Classical Music Criticism Today

Concomitant with the ubiquitous and pernicious ascendance of pop-cultural and populist thinking in our culture that began in the mid- to late-Sixties and today is in full sway is the appalling decline in the quality and character of critical writing in the arts in the English language mainstream media (we omit from consideration all academic and specialist publications as they constitute a separate realm altogether; one which we're incompetent to consider). It's always been taken as a given by us that worthwhile critical writing in the arts follows the precepts neatly and succinctly put forward by the great John Dewey in this remarkable paragraph from his 1934 treatise, Art as Experience (our thanks to The Reading Experience for jogging our latent memory of the paragraph):

The function of criticism is the reeducation of perception of works of art; it is an auxiliary in the process, a difficult process, of learning to see and hear. The conception that its business is to appraise, to judge in the legal and moral sense, arrests the perception of those who are influenced by the criticism that assumes this task. The moral office of criticism is performed indirectly. The individual who has an enlarged and quickened experience is one who should make for himself his own appraisal. The way to help him is through the expansion of his own experience by the work of art to which criticism is subsidiary. The moral function of art itself is to remove prejudice, do away with the scales that keep the eye from seeing, tear away the veils due to wont and custom, perfect the power to perceive. The critic's office is to further this work, performed by the object of art. Obtrusion of his own approvals and condemnations, appraisals and ratings, is sign of failure to apprehend and perform the function of becoming a factor in the development of sincere personal experience. We lay hold of the full import of a work of art only as we go through in our own vital processes the processes the artist went through in producing the work. It is the critic's privilege to share in the promotion of this active process. His condemnation is that he so often arrests it.

Think now of the classical music critics writing today in the English language mainstream media worldwide (and on blogs and other online publications, too, for that matter) who meet these criteria (and by the term classical music we mean to include opera as well).

Have you managed to come up with more names than can be counted on the fingers of one hand?

Bet not. We surely can't, and woe to us and the future of classical music as an artform in our culture for the deficit. Part of the problem, of course, is that most classical music critics today aren't given enough column inches per review to do the job properly. But that's a symptom of the same disorder, not a cause.