I the first part of the essay I stated that a person writing about music
should:

Establish the presence of the music before the listener.  Stereo recordings
used to be labelled "living presence".  It is the powerful sense of being
there which makes classical music what it is.

Engage the presence of the music, by describing its features and its
coherence, by looking first at its technique - does the artist know what
he is doing? And then at its artistry - does the reviewer think that it
is worth doing.

And only then attempt to draw some essential connection between the music
and its context, its artistic moment and stimmung.

This is a radical departure from the resume and impression school of
reviewing which is currently in fashion.  It is in direct opposition to the
idea that music for some particular end, or the progress consists of some
particular direction.  Progress in Art is the Red Queen's Race we run to
catch up to the present - because we are all travellers from the past.
Rather than inflict that past on others, we should be reaching for that
present.

But the basis for the argument was that individuals feel helpless about the
world and that helplessness is not confined to any particular group, nor
even to classical music particularly.  This larger problem must be faced.

- - -

During the Second World War, Edward R Murrow broadcast from London.  He did
so, not over television, but over radio.  There was no picture and beyond
indistinct background noise, there was little audio.  And yet "This Is
London" became a catch phrase because Murrow could present to his audience
a description which pressed the key images forward.

A music reviewer is presented with much the same task.  The musical
sound is not accessible to the reader, and yet the reviewer, with a
minimum of words, must conjure it for his reader, so that they can
visualise themselves before a pair of speakers, or better still, in a
concert hall - feeling the vibrations of sound wash over them.  I say a
minimum of words, because that is all the space a reviewer will have.

But as with all things, there are tactics.  Wasting a word on how you
feel about the music is one less word about the music.  The reviewer's
personality will show through, and his or her opinions will be impossible
to hide - they need to be forced forward.  Richard Strauss quipped "don't
even look at the brass, it only encourages them" The same might be said for
our reactions, they will be there, there is no need to voice them forward.

Consider a composer like Webern in his mature output.  While it is
tempting to talk about serialism one more time, or about ones feelings
about serialism - what evokes the presence of the music? The emphasis on
the timbre of individual notes.  Notes, not phrases or melodies, but notes
themselves, as they shift and move forward - as the press against each
other.  The dissonance and suspension being essential, for that is how a
note with a particular tone colour establishes itself - by pressing back
upon others.

Or consider a current composer that most people do not know - which says
more - condemning it for its "slavish accessiblity and obviousness" or -
"<blank> seems to be writing music for a group of bubblegum divas - smooth
slinging up and down scales and chords we hear on teeny bopper radio." Both
are insulting, but only one pins down the works sound world.

Once this presence is firmly in the reader's mind, then, and only then can
the reader participate in the review, and do more than nod agreement at the
reviewers stance.

- - -

And this is the fundemental engine of changing the pervasive sense
of hopelessness.  Currently, we are offered the choice between being
non-entities or being statistics.  To push out on the world is to be told
to join some group or other, and be counted.  To be a person in this world
comes from having others willing to be your statistics.  It is by having a
rah-rah crowd that an individual gains access to the level of credibility
required to be listened to at all.  Which is why press releases read the
way they do, they aren't about music, or even about the artist, but an
attempt to establish that the person has statistics behind them, and to
chum the water looking for more.  One becomes a public individual, only by
robbing individuality from others.

Only it isn't robbing, it is bartering.  The person who gives up their
sense of self does so because they hope the person they are being as
statistic for will smite their enemies.  The outrage at being a non-person
becomes transfered into outrage at the non-people who are on the other
side.  For all of his being a critic for the New York Times, Tommasini is
basically pleaing for people to be statistics for a particular viewpoint,
just as he is a stastic for it.  What ever he, personally, has to say, is
lost underneath the need to drag himself out of bed and chant the cant one
more time.

This is the deep bedrock behind not talking about the music, because
talking about the music does not produce effect in this scheme of things.
Only convincing people that there is a crowd does, or attacking a crowd
that exists.  To be human is to have an urge to change ones environment.
When music is no longer the tool for this, they turn to other things.

- - -

What is essential is for the reader to reject, and state that he is
rejecting, this world view.  The resume and bandwagon crowd are very public
about putting down anyone who is not "in", and reinforce, yet one more
time, the oppression of nobodiness that makes most discourse about
classical music so arid and empty.

Of course, for this to work, it would require a reviewers willing to put in
the discipline of avoiding the travelog school of reviews: "When I first
encountered this song cycle it was in the summer of '54", the resume school
of reviews: "When writing about a composer whose works have been performed
hundreds of times by major orchestras", the social school of reviews: "it
is the moral duty of musicians to play important works such as these..."

But the advantage is that it is writing in a manner that will not become
obsolete so long as the music that is written about is not forgotten.
Where as long tracts about the social mileu we live in are fishwrap ready
almost as soon as they are typeset.  After all, while there are many people
now who are upset at their own suffering at the hands of serialist
professors, there will be a new generation who will be resentful of the
post-modernist accessibility oriented professors they had - and then
another wave after that.  Address the music, not the present social
problem, music reviews are not policy white papers on motions pending
before the house of commons.

Stirling Newberry
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http://www.mp3.com/ssn