Renato Vinicius, about critics and criticism:
>Most critics on work, today, criticizes CDs, not musics. Performers, not
>composers. New releases, not historical performances. Singles CDs, not
>compared performances. And most critics just comments few lines on the big
>Labels new releases, feeding the American's consumerism instead improving
>Art comprehension.
Many critics are journalists, and many others are not but that. This
custom described by Renato belongs to a defined and strict editorial
policy: that of newspapers and "musical reviews" supported by great
labels. Here lies the cause of a sad confusion between this two kinds
of critics.
>I believe we don't find, now adays, writers like Shaw, Adorno, Mann,
>Mencken, etc., because that kind of text requires a deep subjective
>experience to which there is not "comproovable" by reason, logic or
>historical data. Most would have all conditions to do that, but with the
>almost-wild competition between critics, that would turn one too "exposed"
>to critics. It's a self-protective attitude a critic must assume.
True. There's another fact about this: nowadays there are very few
periodical publications open to that kind of writing about music. Whether
this is the cause of this want or viceversa, is a problem like that of
the hen and the egg. The last enterprise of such kind that I remember in
Buenos Aires was the "Lulu" magazine. It had a very short life (1991-92),
but all its issues are worth of collection. The magazine was devoted
mainly to contemporary music, but it wasn't musicological "stricto sensu"
(with all the good that this implies). As the publisher said in the first
editorial: it wasn't devoted "to any particular kind of readers".It had a
very good starting, but some self-imposed standards (design, paper quality
etc.) made it very expensive for publishing after a year.
Pablo Massa
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