D. Stephen Heersink takes apart Alex Ross's recent music column in the New Yorker: >"Recordings, in short, are fetish objects, sublimations of a solitary, >most male desire. But they have a crucial role to play in musical life. >They supply snapshots of young artists, open up the neglected areas of >the repertory, preserve the great voices of the past." His adumbrative >ruminations are left to stand on their own. How ever he concocted such a >profile of the collector of classical recordings remains a mystery -- even >though his disingenuous assertions seem to cry for a foundation. Oh, I don't know. I'm perfectly willing to accept that I'm a fetishist. >In an example of how not to embark on criticism of classical recordings, >he denounces in turn Barenboim, extols Gieseking and Wand's Bruckner >(mentioning the merits of the budget label Naxos' recordings for its >excellence and price) but not explaining, or justifying, his views. and, later: >What evidence does Ross cite to justify his generous and benevolent >accolade of Kent Negano recording of Busoni's "Doktor Faust?" "Busoni's >art needs no special pleading; it casts an immediate and lasting spell." >Neither I nor most readers requested a special pleading, just an >explanation. Yet, none is forthcoming. > >The article continues along these lines. It's quite a bore, but beyond >that, it is an example of how *not to write a review of classical music, >the folly of making pontifical and pompous statements, and the >vacuity when one fails to justify something without reason. ... At the risk of living in a glass house, I nevertheless find nothing to disagree with here. The great strength of the New Yorker magazine has always been its editing. But editing requires editors. In his "Preface to London Music in 1888-1889," George Bernard Shaw, way back when, made similar complaints about musical journalism and traced the cause to the following: I purposely vulgarized musical criticism, which was then refined and academic to the point of being unreadable and often nonsensical. Editors, being mostly ignorant of music, would submit to anything from their musical critics, not pretending to understand it. If I occasionally carried to the verge of ribaldry by reaction against the pretentious twaddle and sometimes spiteful cliquishness they tolerated in their ignorance, think of me as heading one of the pioner columns of what was then called The New Journalism; and you will wonder at my politeness. ... I cannot help chuckling at the tricks they (music critics) play on their innocent editors. An editor never does know anything about music, though his professions to that effect invariably belie his secret mind. I have before me a journal in which the musical critic has induced the editor to allow him to launch into music type in order to give a suggestion of a certain "fanciful and suggestive orchestral design" in Caval- leria Rusticana. The quotation consists of a simple figuration of the common chord of G sharp minor, with "etc." after it. If a literary critic had offered this editor such a sample of the style of Shakespear as "Now is the," etc. he would have probably have remonstrated. But he is perfectly happy with his chord of G sharp minor, which is ten times more absurd. In short, if the editor knows little about music or what constitutes good music criticism, it's extremely unlikely that the music criticism will be strong in that department. Porter was an exception, as was Winthrop Sargent. It's going to take the magazine a while to find someone that good. Steve Schwartz