Because critics can only fuck up.

In the Sunday New York Times Anthony Tommasini wails:

   "Would people have come? Maybe not as many.  But I doubt that those
   who showed up would have been drifting off.  And over time, maybe
   newcomers would arrive to fill the empty seats.  Besides, what good
   is it doing to placate the snoozers? This field is in trouble.  A
   radical wake-up call is needed."

First we need to kill all the critics.

I hate to clutter discussions of art with facts - doing so is apt to draw
criticism that one is mentally unbalanced - but the fact is that people
like Anthony have been running classical music, and determining what is and
is not written about it, for years.  He's written the same editorial for
ages, and before him another critic did the same.  When he isn't doing it,
other New York Times critics are doing it.

Tommasini has been a critic for a long time, he has been in and around
the artistic establishment for a long time, an intimate of a prize winning
composer and influential critic.  His call to arms sounds rather much like
a 25 year veteran of congress running against Washington - false, fake and
a continuous attempt to evade the obvious conclusion that, if classical
music is in trouble, then it is people such as himself who are to blame.
It hasn't, I assure you, been people like me, because people like me have
only one decision - do we cut the check for people like him and kiss his
ass, or do we just cut the check, or do we do something else.

He complains about snoozers during a NYP performance.  Well of course,
their conductor, while he is a disciplined orchestra builder and engaging
speaker - is a dull conductor.  Dull is bad, for those who aren't
following.

- - -

But back to the culpability of Tommasini.  Consider his review of a Martino
disc:

   "In the New York Times, music critic Anthony Tommasini listed this
   CD among the five best recordings of music written since World War
   II."

Martino, for those who don't follow such things - which is most sane people
- is a prize winning composer who hates people who don't like avant-garde
music.  He has repeatedly commented that their should be bouncers at the
doors of concerts to keep out undesirables.

OK - so first he supports composers who want to shrink classical music
down, and then he wonders where everyone is - and sounds a call to arms.
To pursue a goal, and then complain because you have attained it is called
either insanity - or marriage.

- - -

I know I really shouldn't write yet another post on how stupid, greedy,
contradictory and unpleasant the New York Times critical staff is - as a
target for invective they rate slightly easier than college cafeteria food
- but they do keep repeating themselves, and *somebody* keeps cutting them
checks.

And that is the ulitmate reality - the world of classical music sucks
because, well, people want it to suck.  Or rather, they would rather have
a world of schmoozing, sucking people off - literaly and figuratively -
and then write an article in the morning "well it isn't my fault".

Well, actually, yes it is his fault, and the fault of which every group of
geniuses were *so* afraid that some post 1950 music might find its way on
to the NYPO's programs that they were willing to appoint the most boring
celebrity conductor this side of "read it through once and the collectors
will lap it up" Jaarvi.  And the people who sit around saying "if the
establishment rewards it, it must be good."

And the fault of lots of other people for putting up with it.

- - -

Paradoxically, I am also going to say that Tommasini is dead wrong about
the state of classical music.  It isn't that classical music is unhealthy
- it is that our realm of discourse is unhealthy.  Discussion of art and
what used to be called "the humanities" is, simply put, at a stage of
laughable degeneracy.  It is incapable of being anything other than
ammunition for various political infights, and continues to be so, because
it is largely irrelevant except as propoganda fodder for one side or
another in our political wars.  Art and artists have a long relationship
with prostitution, but it is important that art, and artists, realise which
bodily parts should be involved in it, and when.

- - -

The only thing that matters is the music making.  In the last 12 months I
have heard concerts on four continents, in front of audiences as varied as
one might find.  Classical music appeals, consistently, to a broader range
of individuals, and allows a greater cross fertilization of generations
than most of its competitors.  It allows 90 year olds to talk to 12 year
olds.  A classical concert will have a much broader range of ages and
backgrounds than a rock or rap concert - which will be inhabitted largely
by people in a relatively narrow band of ages and backgrounds.  It exists
despite the incompetence of the people who run it, it exists despite the
outright racism of many of its institutions - past and present - it exists
because it gives rather than takes.

what do I mean by this? If people ripped off Metallica the way they
rip off Brahms and Beethoven and Mahler - and yes Schoenberg and Webern
and Stockhausen - their would be hell, and several law firms, to pay.
Classical music is, like all things that truly belong to the public, a
money losing proposition - because it is mined for its material.  In a
sense classical music is instantly in the public domain, and instantly is
turned into new material.  Like Shakespeare, it is a constant font for new
creation.

All that it asks is that it have returned to it some level of care and
attention.  Will it supplant music to get drunk, hope to pray for luck and
pray for a fuck as you jump up and down in noisy, crowded, lonely dance
club? No.  But then, it shouldn't want to.

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