Something set me to thinking recently about music criticism -- mainly classical, but jazz and pop as well. Have you noticed that very often music criticism doesn't really talk about music, but about something else? For example, pop criticism seems to concentrate on sociology and the Deep Meaning of lyrics; jazz criticism on the critic's "impressions" as the music plays; classical criticism on the history of a work, its composer, and its times. I don't hold a grudge against any of these concentrations, except that ultimately I do want to learn something about the music itself *as music*. In other words, sure Louis Armstrong is great, but what musically makes him so? In over forty years of reading and listening, I've encountered only two critics who've provided answers: Gunther Schuller and jazz pianist and historian James Dapogny. I've kvetched before about Joan Peyser's "studies" of Bernstein and Boulez -- essentially bargain-basement Freud, rather than anything musically insightful. Ultimately, I want to know the music better, not necessarily the people who wrote it, except for their habits of composing. The thought that occurred to me was that we get so little about music because most writers about music, despite their enthusiasm, their acquaintance with a wide range of material, and their other talents, don't seem to know much about music itself. It's a long-standing dirty secret that at least one music editor of Time magazine, back in the day when it regularly talked about classical music, couldn't read music. At least one author of well-known studies of Louis Armstrong and Duke Ellington couldn't read music, I think to the detriment of both books, since the writer had no handle on or habit of thought for music as a composer thinks of it. I wonder whether that sort of literacy is necessary. If we were to take literary criticism as an example, it undoubtedly helps that a literary critic concerned with an evaluative judgment be able to check a text, to be able to read words. Does this hold true for a music critic? I'm not talking about reviewers -- a thumbs-up / thumbs down or x-number-of-stars affair reflecting how high one's hormonal levels have risen -- but an evaluative judgment based on an artifact (in this case, a score), an ability to analyze and to synthesize parts and thus form a judgment. If you can't verify with the score or the text of a literary work, how sound can the judgment be? On the other hand, Robert Shaw once said that the only things you really need to understand music is the ability to recognize patterns and a good memory. I've certainly read wonderful books on music by people who didn't read it, mostly in the pop field. On the other hand, lacking that skill seems to me to seriously limit the kinds of questions a writer can hope to answer. I throw it out to the group at large. What do you think? Steve Schwartz