Sounds & Fury

The Arts Critic In A Non-Elitist World

There's lately been a remarkable amount of breast-beating going around the MSM critical community provoked by the recent rash of forced "retiring" of MSM arts critics nationwide from the MSM print pubs they served for many years — a few, for several decades. Their letting go was justified almost invariably by the suits at these pubs as having largely to do with the present and growing hard economic pressures threatening ink-on-paper publications, most particularly in the face of what is seen as a rapidly growing trend for ordinary folk to get their daily dose of critical arts commentary on the Web via writings to be found on an uncountable number of blogs by non-elitist bloggers writing non-elitist reviews in non-elitist language and in non-elitist terms ("A solid two thumbs up!") that a non-elitist public can (you should pardon the expression) relate to.

Well, it's a non-elitist culture we inhabit today, and we suppose the development of such a trend was only to be expected. It's now a prole's world out there, after all, and in a prole's world the first casualty is always and inevitably the arts. Not that the arts have ever been a high-priority item in America at any time in its history, and perhaps a thumbs-up (or -down) judgment is all The People need to satisfy their requirements. But while a count of thumbs judgment is perfectly adequate, even precisely what's called for, when reviewing the performance of, say, different brands of air conditioners, it tells us very little — almost nothing, really — about anything in the world of the arts. Are bloggers up to providing much more than that?

Why the hell not? Bloggers simply write in a different medium, and, pace Dr. McLuhan, the medium ain't necessarily the message. Problem is, very few if any bloggers are well enough informed and richly enough gifted to write like this:

When Mozart placed a loud, dark, bone-chilling chord of D minor in the first bars of Don Giovanni, he set a new precedent for operatic curtain-raisers: instead of charming his listeners into paying attention, he would stun them into submission, with intimations of the awakening of the dead and the opening of the gates of Hell. Modern scholarship suggests that Mozart may have derived aspects of his famous gesture from none other than Antonio Salieri, that most unfairly abused of composers, whose opera La Grotta di Trofonio, premièred two years before Don Giovanni, contains some strikingly similar demonic noises. Ever since, composers have tried to outdo each other with carefully engineered hammer blows of fate. Verdi’s Otello begins with a rumbling six-note dissonance; Strauss’s Elektra with a souped-up D-minor detonation; Alban Berg’s Lulu with a sharply stabbing figure that foreshadows the heroine’s fate.

Bernd Alois Zimmermann’s 1965 opera Die Soldaten, the story of a woman’s degradation at the hands of a series of heartless soldiers, has a prelude of such stupefying intensity that it stands for the moment as the ne plus ultra. The full orchestra sustains an enormous dissonance spread out over many octaves. Beneath it, the timpani pound out, "in iron rhythm," the note D — perhaps a nod backward to Don Giovanni. The onslaught returns several times as the prelude unfolds, though it periodically gives way to a frenzy of competing voices: the trumpets tangle in independent rhythms, violins buzz around maniacally in their upper registers, the timpani repeatedly fall out of synch with the principal one-two pulse. The music is at once hyper-organized and deranged, a death machine that leaves chaos in its wake.*

So what?, you'll say. Suppose critical writing like that disappeared from the face of the Earth forever and was replaced by a multitude of thumbs-upers and -downers? The wisdom of crowds, and all that, you know. Would the world come to an end?

We suppose not. But, then, at that point we wouldn't much care one way or the other.

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* From, "Infernal Opera: Zimmermann’s Die Soldaten at the Park Avenue Armory", Alex Ross, The New Yorker, issue dated 21 July 2008. RTWT here.

Rush To Judgment

[Note: This post has been updated (2) as of 11:58 AM Eastern on 7 Jul. See below.]

In a piece for the Financial Times titled, "Critics In A Hostile World", veteran Pulitzer Prize winning classical music critic, Martin Bernheimer, bemoans what looks to him like the imminent extinction of the professional arts critic.

These are hard times for journalism in America. Newspapers are at best shrinking, at worst folding. Fewer than 10 cities still support more than a single daily. Writers face buy-outs, lay-offs or firing. The papers that survive are making do with fewer employees, fewer pages, fewer articles and fewer opinion pieces. Critics are looking more and more like dodos.

And the proximate cause of this distressing trend?

A primary cause of our imminent extinction must be the Internet. An impatient generation is succumbing to the free and easy lure of computer enlightenment. Sure, not all those who cover the arts in old-fashioned print are paragons — still, most do have sufficient education and/or experience to justify their views. On the Web, anyone can impersonate an expert. Anyone can blog. Credentials don’t count. All views are equal. Some sort of criticism may survive the American media revolution, but professional criticism may not.

Essentially, our civilisation is tilting towards anti-authoritarian contests. Audiences, not judges, select winners. Call it the American Idolisation of culture. On TV, contestants get voted off without explanation. Quality is measured by thumbs, up or down. Scholarly analyses have turned into irrelevant extravagances for snobs.

As constant readers of Sounds & Fury are aware, Mr. Bernheimer is one of a handful of professional classical music critics whose writings we regularly single out for praise, and we find ourself in full agreement with much of what he has to say above. But his intemperate assessment that, "On the Web, anyone can impersonate an expert. Anyone can blog. Credentials don’t count. All views are equal," is overblown even as rhetoric.

There can be no argument with Mr. Bernheimer's assertion that anyone can blog. Indeed, anyone can. Almost no one, however, can "impersonate an expert" successfully in the arts blogosphere for very long without in some measure actually being one, the blogger's lack of "credentials" notwithstanding. In fact, the imposture will be sniffed out far more quickly, and punished far more decisively in the blogosphere than in the print world.

So much for "All views are equal."

We share Mr. Bernheimer's concern with and his dismay at the seemingly unstoppable rise of the rabid equalitarianism and populism that today so malignantly infects our American cultural life. It's manifest everywhere, and most perniciously in the high arts, a domain in which classical music arguably occupies the highest station. Mr. Bernheimer, however, has misidentified the culprit. The cause of that seemingly unstoppable and alarming rise lies elsewhere and deeper than blogs, bloggers, and the Internet which are merely the most widespread and visible instances of its expression. Where and what that elsewhere may be we, as a non-expert, are incompetent to identify adequately, and so leave its full exposure and suggestions for a means to defeat it to those best qualified to accomplish those urgent tasks.

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Update (5:24 PM Eastern on 5 Jul): Lisa Hirsch of Iron Tongue of Midnight has a response of her own to Mr. Bernheimer's article.

Update 2 (11:58 AM Eastern on 7 Jul): James Reel, professional arts journalist and critic for Arizona Public Media, adds his thoughts on the matter on his blog, Cue Sheet.

Of Interest To Classical Music Newbies

If you're a classical music newbie looking for a blog addressed specifically to your needs and concerns for introductory information on the field, then you should look in on The Horn, a newly opened blog written by former French horn player Robert Berger. Mr. Berger's passionate devotion to classical music, and to introducing classical music to those who've had limited or no experience of it, is evidenced in all his posts, and they make informative and engaging reading.

So, for all you classical music newbies out there, do stop over and give Mr. Berger's new blog a read.

Alan Rich's New Blog, So I've Heard, Is Now Online

The new blog of venerable classical music critic Alan Rich, So I've Heard, is now online and logging reports direct from the Ojai Festival. Time for everyone to update their blogrolls, then click over to So I've Heard to read what Mr. Rich has written, and to welcome him to the classical music blogosphere.

About Time

It's about time. The redoubtable Molly Sheridan of NewMusicBox and "Friday Informer" fame (she's managing editor of the former, and writer of the latter) now has a blog of her own: Mind The Gap.

Time for classical music bloggers everywhere to update their blogrolls.

We have.

Pick And Choose

In a fit of mild pique over our refusal to use the URL of his website instead of the URL of his blog in our compiling of the S&F Top 50 classical music blog rankings, Ben of Classical Convert has retaliated by compiling his own four ranked lists of the Top 50 classical music blogs, each ranked list compiled using the same list of blogs (which list of blogs is NOT the same as the S&F Top 50), but each utilizing a different statistical data set to determine the rankings. The four data sets used are:

1: Google Backward Links (the same data set used for the S&F Top 50)
2: Technorati Authority rating
3: Google Reader (RSS aggregator) subscriptions
4: Bloglines (RSS aggregator) subscriptions

Kinda cool, actually, as long as one keeps in mind that two quite different and not-comparable things are being measured by these four data sets. Within the universe of classical music blogs, RSS aggregator subscriptions (Google Reader and Bloglines) are a measure of relative popularity while Google's Backward Links and Technorati's Authority rating are measures of relative importance. Without making comment here concerning the statistical soundness of any of these four methodologies for the purpose intended (concerning which we've commented in some detail and at some length on Google's Backward Links count and on Technorati's Authority rating in our S&F Top 50 Eligibility and Methodology), it's your choice as to which measure is most meaningful to you, and thanks are due Ben for giving us the choice irrespective of his reason for doing so.

Issues Raised Concerning The S&F Top 50

A couple issues have been raised on two blogs concerning the S&F Top 50, and so we thought we'd note them here and give our answers to keep them in one place.

Lisa Hirsch of Iron Tongue Of Midnight thinks that the number of incoming links is not the proper criterion to use to rank the importance of a blog, and suggests that the number of blog hits is the way to go. Ms. Hirsch has a point of sorts. Problem is, there's no practical way to accomplish a ranking of blogs by number of blog hits. The decisive difficulty in such a procedure is that the one compiling the rankings would need access to a recognized and reliable objective statistics provider's tally of blog hits for each blog examined, and that statistics provider would have to be the same for the entire universe of examined blogs (different providers calculate counts differently and they rarely match), a requirement clearly not met in the universe of classical music blogs some of which, we suspect, have no statistics provider at all. There are other difficulties with this method of ranking as well, but they're moot as the decisive difficulty is, well, decisive.

Scott Spiegelberg of Musical Perceptions wants to know why we exclude institutional and group blogs from the S&F Top 50 rankings. The answer is institutional blogs are excluded because such blogs are subject to institutional oversight and subtle institutional pressures and are therefore instantly suspect as regards content and the completely free personal expression and philosophic viewpoint of the individual writing the blog no matter that the individual swears on the life of his children that no institutional restraints or pressures exist for him. Group blogs are excluded because they do not represent the personal expression and philosophic viewpoint of a single individual which in our view is what blogs are — and ought to be — all about. In the case of blogs written by the same duo of writers, we view that case as if the duo were a perfectly matched married couple. Their opinions may at times differ, but it's been our experience of such duo-written blogs that the underlying philosophy of life and art of both writers is essentially a unity and their blog is therefore treated by us for this purpose (but for this purpose only) as one written by a single individual.

That's it so far. As other issues concerning the S&F Top 50 are raised (if such in fact are) we'll add them and our answers as updates to this post.

Sounds & Fury Top 50 Classical Music Blogs: 1st Quarter 2008

Below is Sounds & Fury’s quarterly ranked list of the Top 50 classical music blogs for the quarter ending 31 March. Eligibility for consideration for listing and a detailed explanation of the methodology used in compiling the ranked list as well as a key to reading the list’s entries can be found here. An alphabetical listing of all the classical music blogs considered eligible for inclusion in the S&F Top 50 for this quarter can be found here. If you know of any classical music blog(s) not listed there but that should be, please leave the name and link of that blog(s) in the comments section of that alphabetical listing, NOT the comments section of this post. The comments section of this post will remain open for the current quarter for your comments, corrections, questions, and suggestions. We trust you’ll find the S&F Top 50 an informative and useful resource.

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Blogs Eligible For Inclusion In The S&F Top 50 — 1st Qtr 2008

A View from the Podium
Adaptistration
An Unamplified Voice
Aworks
Classical Convert
Classical Music
Daily Observations
Deceptively Simple
Dial “M” for Musicology
Fandango: Homo Camp
Felsenmusick
Holde Kunst
Intermezzo
Ionarts
Jason Heath's Double Bass Blog
Jessica Duchen’s Classical Music Blog
Letter V
Listen
Mad Musings of Me
Mahler Owes Me Ten Bucks
Most Of The Shebang
Mostly Music in the Midlands
Mostly Opera
Musical Assumptions
Musical Perceptions
My Favorite Intermissions
Mysteries Abysmal
Night after Night
NY Opera Fanatic
Oboeinsight
On a Pacific Aisle
On an Overgrown Path
On The Record
Opera Chic
Out West Arts
Parterre Box
PostClassic
Prima La Musica poi le parole
Renewable Music
Sandow
Sieglinde’s Diaries
Slipped Disc
Soho the Dog
Sounds & Fury
Sounds Like Now
The Concert
The Iron Tongue of Midnight
The Omniscient Mussel
The Penitent Wagnerite
The Rambler
The Rest is Noise
The Short Road to Nirvana
The Standing Room
The Well-Tempered Blog
Think Denk
Twang Twang Twang
Vilaine fille
WagnerBlog
Wellsung

An Announcement Of Interest To Some

We received an eMail the other day that, among other matters, informed us that the sender had found Sounds & Fury by seeing its name on a ranked listing of classical music blogs. This piece of intelligence provoked an interesting correspondence between the sender and us as to the value of such ranked lists, our good self taking the position that such lists are largely nonsense as, if nothing else, the Technorati database on which the rankings are based is ill-constructed and subject to all sorts of statistical distortions which, all things considered, was fairly surly and curmudgeonly of us to point out as Sounds & Fury has consistently placed in either the Top 10 or Top 20 of such ranked lists, the only blog written by a “civilian” (i.e., not a professional musician, MSM journalist or critic, or academic) to do so.

My correspondent, however, had some good points to make in favor of such ranked lists the, for us, decisive one being that such lists are often the only reliable guide a newbie or “outsider” has available to him to sort out the wheat from the chaff initially without his having to slog though dozens upon dozens of blogs himself, most of which turn out to be ultimately valueless reading.

This set us to thinking as to whether there actually existed a reliable and well-constructed statistical database on which to base such rankings. After a careful search, we found one even though it was not intended to serve the purpose of creating a ranked listing of blogs: Google’s “Backward Links” (Google’s name for a site’s incoming links) function. Unlike the incoming links count that determines Technorati’s so-called “Authority” number for a blog which link count is entirely indiscriminate as to source, the list of incoming links to a blog that Google produces is in fact a “filtered” list that takes into consideration the worth and importance of the sources of those incoming links, and therefore omitted from that list are all incoming links the sources of which fall below a minimum threshold level of PageRank, Google’s intricately computed rating of a webpage’s importance within the entire universe of webpages. What was of significance to us for our purpose was that the number of incoming links qualifying for that list is expressed by Google as a single number right at the top of the list’s pages, and that single number is in fact a statistically “clean” expression of both the quantity and quality of the incoming links to whatever blog is under examination, and a perfect number to use in constructing a statistically distortionless (relatively speaking) ranked list of classical music blogs.

Consequently, subsequent to the end of this year’s first quarter (31 March), Sounds & Fury will publish its first installment of a new quarterly updated ranked listing of classical music blogs, the Sounds & Fury Top 50 Classical Music Blogs, on 2 April (we forbore to publish it on 1 April for reasons obvious).

Look for it then.

Late To The Party, We Know

Due our current involvement in things neither classical music- nor opera-related, we're rather late to this first-rate piece by blogger and New Yorker classical music critic, Alex Ross.

Writes Alex:

Like many people, I started blogging out of an urgent need to procrastinate. Yet a nagging sense of possibility also drew me in. Classical music, my subject, was thriving on the Internet in unexpected ways. Not all blogs, I discovered, were devoted to cataloguing continuity errors in the films of George Lucas; a smattering of musicians, composers, and listeners were writing on music with intelligence and verve, reveling in the chance to express ideas that had no other immediate outlet. Between 1980 and 2000, classical music more or less disappeared from American network television, magazines, and other mainstream media, its products deemed too élitist, effete, or esoteric for the world of pop. On the Internet, no demographically driven executive could suppress, say, a musicology student’s ruminations on György Ligeti’s Requiem on the ground that it had no appeal for twenty-seven-year-old males, even if the blogger in question — Tim Rutherford-Johnson, of The Rambler — was himself twenty-seven.

RTWT here.

It's The Annual Month Of Hell On Earth, So...

It's the annual Month Of Hell On Earth, and so just for brief respite we override our normal indifference to such things, and respond to a blogospheric quiz, this one set up by blogger Matthew Guerrieri of Soho the Dog.

1. What's the best quotation of a piece of music within another piece of music?

The quotes from the Ring and Parsifal in Bruckner's No. 9.

2. Name the best classical crossover album ever made.

There is no such thing as "best" of this egregious mongrel breed.

3. Great piece with a terrible title.

Goldberg Variations.

4. If you had to choose: Benjamin Britten or Michael Tippett?

That's like asking, "If you had to choose: James Joyce or Mickey Spillane?"

Britten, of course.

5. Who's your favorite spouse of a composer/performer?

Cosima Wagner. (That's a joke ... I say, just a joke, son!)

6. Terrible piece with a great title.

Enigma Variations

7. What's the best use of a classical warhorse in a Hollywood movie?

Also Sprach Zarathustra in 2001: A Space Odyssey (technically not a Hollywood movie, but what the hell). Also, An der schönen blauen Donau (Blue Danube Waltz) in the same film.

8. Name the worst classical crossover album ever made.

See answer to No. 2 above, mutatis mutandis.

9. If you had to choose: Sam Cooke or Marvin Gaye?

Who?

10. Name a creative type in a non-musical medium who would have been a great composer.

Orson Welles.

EXTRA CREDIT:

For opera nerds: If you had to choose:

a) Lawrence Tibbett or Robert Merrill?

Merrill.

b) Amelita Galli-Curci or Lily Pons?

Not a clue.

For early-music nerds: Name a completely and hopelessly historically uninformed recording that you nevertheless love.

Beecham's recording of the Goossens orchestration of Messiah (we bet everyone names that one).

An Apparently Necessary Clarification

We thought it entirely unnecessary, but apparently we were wrong. Our diatribes against the iPod (and by extension, MP3 players generally) as a means of experiencing classical music (here, here, and peripherally here) seem to have struck more than a few (e.g., here, here, here, and here) as an argument against experiencing classical music via recordings generally. What seems to have set folks off on the wrong track was our categorical declaration that,

[A] live performance is quite literally an irreproducible benchmark, and the only true and fully acceptable means of experiencing classical music. [emphasis added]

We stand by that categorical declaration unreservedly, but would point out that at the same time we also declared the following which seems to have been missed entirely, and which declaration we also stand by unreservedly:

[I] assure you I'm hardly one to pooh-pooh or sell short recorded performances. I love them. Nay, I cherish them, and couldn't imagine life without them. Lots of them.

The two declarations are by no means mutually incompatible, and can coexist side by side in perfect comfort. The point we were making (or thought we were making) was simply that the experiencing of classical music via each of the two means results in a markedly different musical experience for each, and that the experiencing of a recorded performance should never be mistaken for nor can it ever replace satisfactorily the experiencing of the Real Deal: a performance heard live. As we further explained,

[E]xperiencing a recorded performance is a musical experience quite different from the musical experience of a live concert. And by that, I don't mean merely that playing back a recorded performance in a home environment can't equal the acoustic experience of a performance in a concert hall, even given a superbly recorded performance, superb reproduction equipment, and the most elaborately and carefully prepared listening environment. I mean the two experiences are two different musical experiences, exclusive even of the shared communal experience of a live concert which I here disregard entirely for purposes of simplicity, and to maintain focus on a more central aspect of the question. One hears music differently in a live performance, and that hearing simply cannot be experienced via a reproduction no matter how good the reproduction may be in both recording and playback.

We trust the above will lay to rest any lingering notions that in our diatribes against the iPod we were somehow dismissing recorded performances generally as a valid — and valuable — means of experiencing classical music. We most decidedly were not, for, as we thought we had made perfectly clear, we couldn't imagine life without them.

iPoders' Ire

[Note: This post has been updated (2) as of 8:41 AM Eastern on 14 Aug. See below.]

Our uniformly negative post on the use of the iPod as a means of listening to recordings of classical music has predictably brought a number of equally negative responses, both public and private, from iPod aficionados. Among the public responses, Alex Ross of The Rest Is Noise thinks what we had to say "amusing." Sidney Chen of The Standing Room, in his blog's The Reading Room sidebar, thinks us a troll (apparently generally, not just for our post in question, as he's never listed Sounds & Fury in his extensive blogroll that seemingly includes just about every arts and culture site in the blogosphere), and admonishes Mr. Ross for even acknowledging our post ("don't feed the trolls"). Patricia Mitchell of Oboeinsight thinks we "hate a lot of stuff," but says that's OK, and then goes on to defend her use of the iPod. And Ben of Classical Convert imagines we frown on bloggers posting their current playlists of music being listened to (we don't and never did; we merely censured playlists that are iPod playlists and so identified).

Of the fair number of negative private responses, the main theme seemed to be setting us straight on the technicalities of the various digital audio formats, and why the iPod is not so terrible a thing as we imagine.

For us, the most interesting thing about all these negative responses is that they all seemed to miss our principal objection to the iPod as a means of experiencing classical music. And that was simply that it's one of the most incompetent and distorting of incompetent and distorting means; means which include even the most accurate and expensive playback system imaginable, a point our post made abundantly and at-length clear, our stated argument being that a live performance is quite literally an irreproducible benchmark, and the only true and fully acceptable means of experiencing classical music.

We don't at all have a problem with negative responses to our posts here on Sounds & Fury. We in fact welcome them as much as we welcome positive responses. What we have a most decided problem with, however, are responses responding to what their authors imagine we wrote (or failed to write) rather than to what we actually did write. That, we confess, drives us right up the wall, and makes us surly as hell.

So, please, dear readers, before sounding off one way or the other, read the damn piece carefully — all of it — before responding, and abjure your own knee-jerk reactions to trigger words, phrases, or ideas even though we freely admit to occasionally (OK, more than occasionally) including such in our posts to tweak the deserving.

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Update (11:11 PM Eastern on 10 Aug): Ben of Classical Convert now gets it.

Update 2 (8:41 AM Eastern on 14 Aug): For what appears to be a necessary clarification of this post, see this post.

About Those Earbuds...

[Note: This post has been updated (2) as of 8:41 AM Eastern on 14 Aug. See below.]

Apropos this San Francisco Chronicle article which concerns itself mostly with digitally recorded pop (rock, C&W, etc.) music, my instant thought was, "How much the worse for classical music!"

The article begins,

Whether you know it or not, that compact disc you just copied to your MP3 player is only partially there.

With the CD on its way out and computer files taking over as the primary means of hearing recorded music, the artificial audio of MP3s is quickly becoming the primary way people listen to music. Apple already has sold 100 million iPods, and more than a billion MP3 files are traded every month through the Internet.

But the music contained in these computer files represents less than 10 percent of the original music on the CDs. In its journey from CD to MP3 player, the music has been compressed by eliminating data that computer analysis deems redundant, squeezed down until it fits through the Internet pipeline.

When even the full files on the CDs contain less than half the information stored to studio hard drives during recording, these compressed MP3s represent a minuscule fraction of the actual recording. For purists, it's the dark ages of recorded sound.

"You can get used to awful," says record producer Phil Ramone. "You can appreciate nothing. We've done it with fast food."

Just so.

And the man was talking about popular music where — let's be honest here — it doesn't make a whole lot of difference to the understanding or appreciation of the music whether it's heard in severely compressed MP3 format or in all its minimally compressed, standard CD format glory. I mean, it's only pop (rock, C&W, etc.) music after all.

Not the case when it comes to classical music. In that case, dynamic nuance, nuance of timbre, and acoustic accuracy, among other such matters, are sine qua non, and even the very best existing CD format is incompetent to capture all that needs to be captured.

And then there's the problem of playback. Even given the very best existing CD format, hearing the playback of classical music so recorded through the earbuds of, say, the ubiquitous iPod is simply a joke. An insidious joke. A most insidious joke indeed. And the joke is on us — all of us. It's no mere bon mot to say, "You can get used to awful" P.D.Q., most especially when one has no point of live reference as is the unhappy case today overwhelmingly where classical music is concerned.

And with classical music the problem goes even deeper than that.

As I wrote in an August 2004 post on Sounds & Fury:

I'm old enough to have been present at the birth of hi-fi in the '50s, and its subsequent development into stereo in the '60s. I immediately became what's (politely) known in the trade as an audiophile, and at one point in my life invested more than $30,000 (1980 dollars, the equivalent of approximately $75,000 2004 dollars) in an audio system which comprised the most accurate electronics and loudspeakers available at the time, all of it installed in a room acoustically designed (more mega $$$) to permit it to operate at its utmost potential.

I provide this information not to wow you, but to assure you I'm hardly one to pooh-pooh or sell short recorded performances. I love them. Nay, I cherish them, and couldn't imagine life without them. Lots of them.

But experiencing a recorded performance is a musical experience quite different from the musical experience of a live concert. And by that, I don't mean merely that playing back a recorded performance in a home environment can't equal the acoustic experience of a performance in a concert hall, even given a superbly recorded performance, superb reproduction equipment, and the most elaborately and carefully prepared listening environment. I mean the two experiences are two different musical experiences, exclusive even of the shared communal experience of a live concert which I here disregard entirely for purposes of simplicity, and to maintain focus on a more central aspect of the question. One hears music differently in a live performance, and that hearing simply cannot be experienced via a reproduction no matter how good the reproduction may be in both recording and playback.

Many audiophiles who are also experienced concertgoers will dispute that claim (I, for instance, used to be one of them), but there's a largely unrecognized (or willfully unacknowledged) psycho-acoustic phenomenon at work in this business. Experienced, long-time concertgoers unconsciously "graft" the experience of a live hearing of the music onto the experience of the hearing of it via a reproduction, and imagine they're hearing and experiencing the music via the reproduction just as they hear and experience it in live performance.

But imagine is the operative word here. It's but a psycho-acoustic illusion; one that requires a long-time experience of live performance to create and maintain, consciously or unconsciously.

Is it any wonder, then, that I cringe, even get royally pissed, whenever I read on the blogs of those who should know better and who ought to be setting an example for the Great Unwashed of the iPod Generation, the iPod People, their proud trumpeting of their iPod playlists of the day (or week, or whatever). Such iPod playlists don't make the compilers of those playlists non-elitists, one with The People, and eclectic way-cool guys as some may imagine they do, but serve merely to mark their compilers as a very real part of the problem when what those compilers ought to be working toward being is a very real part of the solution.

But perhaps that's just me being supercilious and tilting at windmills again.

In a pig's eye it is.

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Update (5:49 PM Eastern on 10 Aug): On responses to the above, see this post.

Update 2 (8:41 AM Eastern on 14 Aug): For what appears to be a necessary clarification of this post, see this post.

A Confession And Apologia Of Sorts

On the evidence of several pieces of mine published in several obscure print quarterlies, I was once asked by the editor of a non-trivial print media daily whether I would consider joining the staff of his publication's arts desk as a classical music reviewer. Flattering as the invitation was, I turned it down — most graciously, of course — on the inarguably disqualifying ground that my interests in and knowledge of the field were far too narrow to qualify me for such a position.

While an entirely honest, sufficient, and noble-sounding demur, there were other, less noble-sounding and unspoken reasons for my declining the invitation, not the least of which is my neurotic objection to anyone changing even so much as a comma of my copy without my express permission, and my peculiar method of preparing copy for print publication; a method I've tried an uncounted number of times to alter, and each time failed — abjectly.

For a typical 1000-word piece, the method goes like this:

1: Bang out a first draft using a word processor.
2: Print out a hardcopy copy, and correct obvious errors and missteps which nevertheless escaped my notice on-screen.
3: Print out a hardcopy copy of the edited ms, and place in a desk drawer to stew unseen and unthought of for a full day.
4: Remove the ms from the desk drawer, reread, and correct and refine further.
5: Repeat steps 2-4 as many times as necessary until a finished, fully polished ms finally emerges; a point not always immediately recognized and requiring enormous discipline to accept once recognized, that point being the point at which any further tweaking of the ms will result in diminishment rather than otherwise.

The inescapable consequence of the above process is that a simple 1000-word piece, fully polished and ready for print publication, requires an absolute minimum of one full week (usually longer) to emerge to my satisfaction — needless to say, hardly a process that fulfills the needs and requirements of a print media daily.

Or of a blog that pretends to anything more than a mere diary-type journal as does Sounds & Fury. I've, of course, been forced to abandon this process in writing entries for Sounds & Fury with the result that there's not a single entry on this blog — be it 100 words or 1000 words in length — that has not been edited, typically several times, subsequent to its posting. Such edits are never noted unless they change matters of substance or correct factual errors, but they've been done nevertheless.

And so, if you read a newly posted entry on Sounds & Fury and discover questionable syntax, lame or infelicitous language or phrasing, or clear typos, read the entry again some 48 hours later. Chances are that the clear typos will all have been corrected, and what you found questionable or lame or infelicitous first time round is questionable or lame or infelicitous no longer.

And that goes for this entry as well.

New Addition (Administrative Note)

We've just discovered a fairly new (and to us, totally new) opera and classical music blog that's first-rate even though, astonishingly and most dismayingly, it declares itself to be a "Mozart-free zone": Mostly Opera, written by "a woman in [her] 30s living in Copenhagen," but not otherwise identified. Mostly Opera will be added to our exclusive Culture Blogs listing instanter. Click on over, and give this blog a read. Worth your time.

Huffington Classical

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 6:59 PM Eastern on 5 Jun. See below.]

With today's confirmation ("A ‘New York’ Run Ends") of the firing of New York Magazine's long-time and first-rate classical music critic, Peter G. Davis, first learned about on 1 June on Henry Fogel's ArtsJournal blog, On The Record, and the retirement of the position he held, along with a number of recent similar firings and position retirings at other major publications across the country, things really do seem to fast be approaching epidemic proportions on this particular front nationwide. If proof were needed not of the seemingly ubiquitous prognostications of "the death of classical music," but of the marginalization of classical music in our postmodern culture, this epidemic-in-the-making is certainly right up there near the top of the evidence schedule for the prosecution.

So, is the dastardly culprit in these firings and position retirings the big, bad, greedy, and philistine Mainstream Media? Easy to find them guilty of the crime, we know, but we think such a verdict would be a too-facile rush to judgment, you should pardon the expression. The MSM is as much victim of the current Zeitgeist as are those fired classical music critics and their retired positions.

What to do? Is there a viable answer — an economically viable answer — to that question, or is it just a matter of, And so it goes, and Qué será, será, and that's that?

We think there is an economically viable answer, and its key is the Internet (surprise!). And, no, we do not mean the Blogosphere, although it, too, will have its own important if supporting role to play. We're thinking along the lines of a daily digital publication such as The Huffington Post, but a digital publication devoted exclusively to the coverage of the classical music and opera world nationwide, the initial roster of contributors to which — paid contributors who would be given the freedom to write what they wished, how they wished, and at whatever length they wished — would be every MSM classical music critic and reviewer in the country: present, former, and soon-to-be former.

Pie-in-the-sky pipe dream you say? We don't think so. It would require initially a non-trivial investment of seed money by an enlightened, forward-looking, and wealthy White Knight to launch and maintain until the ad revenue proved sufficient to the job of keeping the publication afloat, and would require as well a managing editor well respected enough by the nationwide pool of prospective professional contributors to sell them on the idea, but the concept is not only doable, but in our considered opinion the way of the future, and the very near future at that.

White Knights, please forward notice of your intention.

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Update (6:59 PM Eastern on 5 Jun): More on the Peter G. Davis firing here. The way New York Magazine is reported to have handled this business is bloody disgraceful. Our thanks to classical music critic Martin Bernheimer for the heads-up.

He's Right, You Know III

Film critic, Richard Schickel, in an opinion piece for the Los Angeles Times concerning what's required of a qualified and competent critic or reviewer, writes:

Let me put this bluntly, in language even a busy blogger can understand: Criticism — and its humble cousin, reviewing — is not a democratic activity. It is, or should be, an elite enterprise, ideally undertaken by individuals who bring something to the party beyond their hasty, instinctive opinions of a book (or any other cultural object). It is work that requires disciplined taste, historical and theoretical knowledge and a fairly deep sense of the author's (or filmmaker's or painter's) entire body of work, among other qualities.

He's right, you know, as is most of the rest of the piece — except for this bit of arrant rubbish:

And we have to find in the work of reviewers something more than idle opinion-mongering. We need to see something other than flash, egotism and self-importance. We need to see their credentials. And they need to prove, not merely assert, their right to an opinion.

And just what sort of credentials might those be? A university degree(s)? Published, peer-reviewed articles in all the "right" professional journals? Moving in and connections with the "right" professional and social circles?

A critic's or reviewer's only proper "credentials" are his written commentaries themselves which "credentials" are put on open display with the publication of every piece he writes whether that piece sees publication in print or in digital form on the Web. Over time, such pieces, and they alone, will determine unequivocally and absolutely whether that critic or reviewer has the "credentials" necessary to have what he writes read and taken seriously. The rest is silence.

Bigot Alert!

[Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 4:58 PM Eastern on 30 Mar. See below.]

Sonofagun! How could we have missed it? Blogger Pliable of On an Overgrown Path is a bigot! A "soft bigot," to be sure, according to that ever vigilant sniffer-outer of bigots and bigotry, professional leftist Stirling Newberry of The Agonist, but a bigot nonetheless. After all, a bigot is a bigot is a bigot.

And what crime has that "soft bigot" Pliable perpetrated; a crime so heinous that we're exhorted to remove On An Overgrown Path from our blogrolls as due and proper punishment? Why, he — gasp! — had the unmitigated and egregious effrontery to link — actually link! — an article written by one of those "hard bigots" over at that bigot publication, The American Spectator; an article that spewed the vile sexist and racist notion that hiring quotas are counterproductive and out of place in elite organizations such as symphony orchestras where musical and technical excellence ought to be the central and foremost criterion in hiring decisions, and gender and/or race and/or ethnicity no criterion at all.

Heavens! Sound the alarm! Alert the authorities! It's the Nazis all over again!

Idiot.

(Our thanks to blogger Steve Hicken of Listen for the link to the post on The Agonist.)

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Update (4:58 PM Eastern on 30 Mar): The Rest Is Noise guest blogger, Justin Davidson, takes a second (and more rational) run at it (we commented on his first run here).