Criticism

Criticism.
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Criticism.
Music criticism may be defined broadly or narrowly. Understood narrowly, it is a
genre of professional writing, typically created for prompt publication, evaluating
aspects of music and musical life. Musical commentary in newspapers and other
periodical publications is criticism in this sense. More broadly, it is a kind of
thought that can occur in professional critical writing but also appears in many
other settings. In this broader sense, music criticism is a type of thought that
evaluates music and formulates descriptions that are relevant to evaluation; such
thought figures in music teaching, conversation about music, private reflection,
and various genres of writing including music history, music theory and biography.
I. General issues
II. History to 1945
III. Since 1945
FRED EVERETT MAUS (I), GLENN STANLEY (II, 1), KATHARINE ELLIS (II, 2),
LEANNE LANGLEY (II, 3 (i)), NIGEL SCAIFE (II, 3 (ii)), MARCELLO CONATI (II,
4 (i)), MARCO CAPRA (II, 4 (ii)), STUART CAMPBELL (II, 5), MARK N. GRANT
(II, 6), EDWARD ROTHSTEIN (III)
Criticism
I. General issues
1. Definition.
2. Subjectivity and objectivity.
3. Critical language.
4. Objects.
5. The historical phenomenon.
6. Limits and the future.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Criticism, §I: General issues
1. Definition.
Although many references to music criticism imply the narrow definition, it is
important to understand criticism broadly in order to see the continuity among
various activities of musical interpretation and evaluation. Professional journalistic
criticism is a specialized, if highly visible, instance of a more widespread
phenomenon. Members of an audience discussing a classical performance during
an interval, piano teachers persuading their students to favour certain styles of
performance and composition teachers responding to student projects all engage
in music-critical discourse, just as fully as the paid critic whose words will appear
in a newspaper or magazine. Again, a composer working on a score, a performer
preparing a performance or a listener at a concert will typically engage in critical
thought, even though they may not speak their thoughts or even formulate their
critical ideas linguistically.
Music criticism does not include every kind of evaluation of music. Music serves
many different purposes, such as worship, advertising, therapy, social dancing,
enhancement of public and commercial spaces and technical development of
performance students. Judgments of the usefulness of music for those purposes
fall outside music criticism, as normally conceived. But the concept is flexible and
it would be rash to delimit it rigidly. And some purposes, uses or functions of
music are relevant to criticism; purposes such as representation and emotional
expression have often figured in music criticism.
European traditions of music criticism centring on concert music and opera
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typically treat music as an art, as do critical traditions worldwide that derive from
European models. In such discourse, music is one of several art forms along with
literature, visual art, architecture, theatre and dance; this assumption reflects a
conceptual formation that is historically and geographically specific. Often, in
music criticism, the central goal is to evaluate and describe music as art, or as an
object of aesthetic experience. Thus the concept of music criticism links with
concepts of art and the aesthetic that are important in European and European-
derived cultures but which have been persistently controversial and difficult within
those cultures. Much complex debate in philosophical discussions of art concerns
appropriate definitions of art and aesthetic experience, and these discussions bear
directly on the nature of criticism (see Philosphy of music).
2. Subjectivity and objectivity.
Music criticism presupposes cultural competence, or what one can call an ‘insider’
role. Someone who makes critical judgments about music, whether as a
professional critic or not, must think about music as a member of some community
to which the music ‘belongs’, a community in which the music is important.
Membership in a musical community is a criterion of the validity of critical thought
about the music of that community. This criterion, although essential, is vague,
leaving room for dispute about whether, for instance, someone with extensive
literary experience may be qualified to evaluate music by virtue of generalizable
expertise in the arts, or whether a more specifically musical background is crucial.
But, however construed in detail, the fact that critical thought originates in the
sensibility of members of a musical or artistic community distinguishes it sharply
from objective or scientific approaches to music, which should be open to practice
by anyone, regardless of musical sensibility. Further, the primary audience of
critical discourse is also delimited by membership in an appropriate community.
Critics write about the music of their own group, for other members of that group.
Critical judgments of music originate in experiences. They depend on experience
of the object of criticism, whether a composition, a performance, or some broader
phenomenon such as a style. Enlightenment thought, which remains influential for
current conceptions of criticism (especially in philosophical aesthetics), tended to
emphasize the separateness and autonomy of individuals. Enlightenment thinkers,
not surprisingly, emphasized the origin of artistic or aesthetic judgments in the
experiences of distinct individuals and then found puzzles in the relationship
between individual subjectivity and the normative character of the judgment: it is
not easy to see how one individual's personal experience can lead to a claim that
is valid for others, a claim that has something like the authority of a statement of
fact. If the critical authority is legitimate, it seems there must be something special
about the critic, or about the experience, that explains the authority.
Some accounts of critical authority, from the Enlightenment on, focus on the
disinterested quality of aesthetic experience: aesthetic experiences can lead to
normative judgments because no personal, contingent, variable traits of the critic
have affected the judgment. Someone who makes a critical judgment can act as a
good representative of a larger audience, able to articulate judgments for them by
eliminating the distinctive feelings that separate the critic from others. Immanuel
Kant, in the best-regarded account of this type, stressed the absence of desire in
aesthetic contemplation as a way of explaining how aesthetic judgments could be
universal. Kant emphasized the contrast between a mere report of personal
pleasure and a judgment of beauty, the latter being free from desire and therefore
deriving from shared, non-contingent human nature. Although experiences of
pleasure and beauty are both subjective, only the judgment of beauty, because of
its freedom from individual idiosyncrasy, carries the implication that others should
reach the same conclusion. Eduard Hanslick followed this tradition in his
arguments that emotional and bodily responses to music, since they vary with
different individuals, cannot contribute to musical beauty.
Another approach focusses on the special knowledge and training that support a
critical judgment, as when knowledge of music theory and music history are said
to be essential qualifications, for a professional music critic. The music critic, so
conceived, becomes a representative of experienced or cultivated musicians, and
can act as an educator in relation to a larger, diverse audience. A tension arises
between these two approaches, one grounding critical authority in the absence of
individualization, the other grounding critical authority in special knowledge and
training that distinguish the critic from many other people. Issues about critical
authority are not just issues about the proper philosophical account of the practice.
Such issues are internal to musical culture, creating a characteristic ambivalence
about music criticism, not least in its professional forms. Audience members may
wonder why one listener has the authority to make public judgments, and
musicians may wonder why someone who is not a distinguished practising
musician has the authority to judge musicians' work. Ambivalence about the
adequacy of linguistic communication about music casts further doubt on the
authority of criticism.
Music criticism in its professional, public forms emphasizes and perhaps
exaggerates the individualistic aspect of critical thought, separating one person
from the rest of the community, giving a voice to that person and, temporarily at
least, silencing others. Like Enlightenment aesthetics, professional criticism
creates an on-going drama of the isolation of an individual thinker from the rest of
the musical audience and draws attention to puzzles about their relationship. This
extreme individualism is probably misleading as a basis for general reflections on
critical thought; attention to the on-going evaluative and descriptive practices that
pervade other parts of musical life might provide a useful balance. In many
aspects of music education, for instance, teachers communicate critical judgments
as established, communally shared views rather than as products of individual
thought. And critical interpretation and judgment often take place in informal
conversations, through shared development and adjustment of thought rather than
isolated reflection. However, the individualistic conception of criticism matches
some other aspects of European and European-derived musical culture. Critics
resemble composers, solo performers and conductors in their presentation of
articulated, individualized products to a larger community. All these practices
create and sustain shared conceptions of individualized subjectivity. While critical
thought need not be as individualistic and isolating as Enlightenment theory or
professional criticism suggest, the most individualized kinds of criticism are
ideologically congruent with other components of classical music culture.
3. Critical language.
Critical thought can shape experience, performance or composition without
reaching explicit verbal formulation, and can find direct expression in performance,
composition or purchase of concert tickets or recordings. But professional music
criticism usually appears in writing, and other kinds of criticism find linguistic
expression as well.
Music criticism may balance evaluation and description, or it may emphasize one
over the other. Journalistic criticism will almost certainly include clear evaluative
judgments, along with variable amounts of description. Academic discourse, which
often values impersonality, may describe and interpret aspects of music while
withholding explicit evaluation; nonetheless the implicit evaluations are often
obvious, and the interpretative goals of, for instance, analytical writing often qualify
it as a genre of music criticism.

Interpretative and evaluative language about music are variable and can become
topics of debate. Terms of praise and disparagement change, and choices reflect
historical contingencies of evaluation. Enlightenment writers' discussions of
‘beauty’ and ‘sublimity’, or Hanslick's theoretical focus on ‘beauty’, give their
treatments a specific character, raising certain issues at the cost of others, as do
Donald Tovey's discussions of ‘infinity’ or Schoenberg's ‘idea’. The same is true of
the range of evaluative terms in any critic's practice.
Descriptive and interpretative language in criticism ranges from technical analysis,
to attributions of affect or expression, to the many diverse possibilities of figurative
language. Beyond issues of vocabulary there are broader literary options, such as
Schumann's critical essay in the form of conversations among fictional characters,
or the attribution of programmatic content beyond a composer's authorization.
Critical language used in interpretation of music can itself become a topic for
interpretation; the interpretative issues include, on one hand, the relation of the
critical language to the music and to listeners' experiences, and on the other hand,
the relation of the language to other discourses of arts criticism, literature,
philosophy and so on.
4. Objects.
Music criticism often describes and evaluates musical works, compositions. But
there are ambiguities and complexities in criticism of musical works, and often
criticism concerns itself with other objects. Musical works are not identical with
performances or scores; they are, perhaps, abstract entities that can be
apprehended through performance and that have their identity fixed through
scores. Some music criticism, possibly in imitation of literary criticism, treats
musical works as the basic units for critical evaluation and interpretation; this was
true, for instance, of scholarly criticism as pursued by some North American
musicologists in the 1980s. However, the central role of performance in musical
life does not match any aspect of prose fiction or poetry, and criticism that centres
on musical works often neglects the contribution of performance.
Music criticism has often shown a particularly intense concern with a canon of
musical works, evaluating new compositions in light of their potential contribution
to the existing canon (see Canon (iii)). On one hand, since the musical canon is
commonly understood to be a collection of musical works, this approach may
reinforce the emphasis on works as the primary objects of criticism. But on the
other hand, as performances of old, critically accepted compositions have become
the norm in 20th-century concerts, criticism of performance has often been the
dominant kind of professional critical discourse.
Thus, paradoxically, the complete domination of concert life by an established
canon can direct attention away from the individual works in the canon and
towards the performances of them; or, in a further twist, attention may turn to the
developing careers and characteristics of individual performers, who themselves
take on the aesthetic qualities of a work of art, inviting study, appreciation and
interpretation on their own. Thus, rather than writing an appreciation of a particular
composition, a critic may write primarily about Horowitz or Callas. Within
professional criticism, such a focus on performers and performances has been
much more characteristic of journalistic writers than of academic ones; in the last
years of the 20th century, however, musical performance also became a
significant topic within scholarly musicology.
Music criticism can also take musical styles, encompassing many individual
works, as a central topic. In fact, changes of style have historically been a basic
concern of professional criticism, as the historical portions of this article show

clearly. The tradition continues to the present, though journalists' persistent
declarations of the death of serialism may lack the currency and intensity of earlier
stylistic debates.
Finally, new technology has introduced recordings as a distinct object of critical
consideration. For some types of music, including much popular music and almost
all electronic music, recordings are obviously the appropriate object of judgment,
not only because they are the marketed objects about which musical consumers
make decisions but because the musical work is itself a work created in sound: in
such cases, recordings do not document performances but, instead, present the
work directly. But for more traditional classical music – that is, music where scores
determine the identity of works and performers offer live and recorded
performances – recordings also threaten to eclipse other, more traditional objects
of critical attention.
5. The historical phenomenon.
The historical sections of this article that follow are concerned with European and
North American music criticism, and for the most part they begin their chronicles in
the 18th or 19th centuries. This focus may seem limiting, but more probably it
reveals that music criticism as a distinct form of thought is geographically and
historically specific.
Plausibly, the existence of criticism requires particular conceptions, institutions
and practices. This interdependence of criticism with other contingent aspects of
musical life is clear for professional music criticism (which, for example, depends
on the existence of public concerts and, more recently, the circulation of
recordings) but may extend, more broadly, to critical judgment as a whole.
Perhaps music criticism, as a distinct form of thought, depends on many of the
historically specific phenomena already mentioned, such as the conception of a
system of art forms; the high value placed on individual experience, along with
ambivalence about the authority of public critics; the complex dialectic between
common humanity and a special, exclusive musical training; the interactions
among scores, performances and works; the development of a musical canon;
and the notion of music history as a succession of stylistic transformations (see
Reception). Perhaps one can imagine a music criticism that lacks most of these
historical attributes, perhaps not; it would be different from criticism as musicians
and audiences in European traditions have come to know it.
6. Limits and the future.
Like any specific type of thought, music criticism is suited for certain goals and
unhelpful for others. As a form of thought shared among members of a musical
community, criticism promises to intensify an awareness of shared musical
experience, circulate influential models for musical listening and creating, and
also, through the formulation of discrepant evaluations and interpretations,
enhance awareness of diversity within a musical community. Because of its
emphasis on individual experience as the source of insight, and on membership in
a musical community as a criterion of critical validity, music criticism is less suited
to gaining knowledge of remote cultures. It may seem irrelevant or even offensive
for an ethnomusicologist to evaluate the music of a foreign culture in critical terms.
However, some recent approaches to ethnography and ethnomusicology
decrease the starkness of the contrast with criticism. The traditional notion of the
ethnomusicologist as an outsider to a culture, and the related notion of
ethnographic objectivity, may need revision. If ethnography is conceived as an
individual person coming, through a continuing series of interactions, to share the

lives and musical experiences of other people, ethnomusicology may come closer
to music criticism than one might have expected. Still, even if one writes
ethnomusicological texts by weaving together cultural description with one's own
experiences, including musical experiences, the results will lack many of the
distinctive traits of traditional music criticism. In particular, an ethnomusicologist's
personal descriptions of musical experiences in the field will lack the critic's
authoritative tone; instead, the ethnomusicologist will present one perspective, a
distinctly finite one, on musical phenomena for which other perspectives, based on
more extensive experience, are also possible.
Such a refusal of critical authority is also possible within one's own culture. Some
recent ethnographic studies have mapped attitudes of ordinary people or musical
fans, in a democratic spirit that grants the writer no special critical standing.
More radically, some writers have challenged the validity and self-understanding
of criticism quite generally; Theodor Adorno and Pierre Bourdieu have offered
especially sustained, troubling accounts. Adorno argued that the lack of individual
freedom in modern life, along with the commodification of music, left no-one in a
position to make the kind of free, individual aesthetic judgment that Enlightenment
thinkers described. The Enlightenment conception of aesthetic evaluation persists,
according to Adorno, only as an ideology that covers the reality of commercial
exploitation of musical consumers. Bourdieu argued that musical and other artistic
tastes served primarily as a medium of social signification, specifically a means of
locating oneself within hierarchies of economic class, employment and education.
Philosophical accounts that ground taste in a special artistic sensitivity are,
according to Bourdieu, an ideology that hides the more mundane operations of
taste as a marker of social location. The claims of these influential writers might
suggest that one cannot, in honesty, continue to practise traditional musical
criticism. Readers who find their diagnoses insightful but exaggerated are left with
the task of assessing how one might, in light of Adorno's or Bourdieu's best ideas,
continue to pursue some kind of critical discourse.
Some recent writing has explored more specific conceptions of subjectivity,
creating a discourse that resembles criticism without aspiring to general validity.
Arguably, criticism that claims to represent the shared experiences of a musical
community is more likely, in fact, to represent the subjectivity of some privileged
group within that community. Feminist critics have suggested that the privileged
perspective of critical discourse is masculine; gay and lesbian critics have
suggested that mainstream critical discourse assumes a heterosexual orientation.
Feminist, gay and lesbian writers have often shown sensitivity in negotiating the
relation between individual and collective experiences: while suggesting that
dominant discourses have excluded some voices, they offer alternative
perspectives poised between individual statements and more general
representation of the minorities for which they hope to speak (see Feminism and
Gay and lesbian music).
Criticism of Popular music has been one of the most accomplished and productive
areas of recent professional criticism. Several writers, notably Simon Frith and
Greil Marcus, have moved between journalistic criticism and sustained scholarly
writing with remarkable ease and success. Frith has argued that evaluation of
popular music draws on a range of different criteria, including the individualistic
artistic standards of art music, the more collectively orientated standards of folk
music and the commercially inflected standards of pop itself. In its blend of
contrasting criteria, such discourse may exemplify valuable extensions beyond
traditional music criticism. Marcus has produced several bold studies that shift
provocatively among personal description, critical judgment and imaginative
historical narrative.
The figure of the isolated, prestigious professional music critic, while congruent
with the individualistic aspects of some musical cultures, is also, to some extent, a
product of limited technologies. As new technologies reduce the importance of
print communication, notions of music criticism may shift as well. Electronic
communication, through sites on the World Wide Web, electronic mail distribution
lists and newsgroups have already permitted an enormous increase in
communication among people with shared musical interests; the effects are
particularly striking for popular music fans, who have accepted the new media
avidly. Online, they can share information and opinions rapidly and can quote and
discuss print reviews as soon as they appear. Electronic communication allows
many people to circulate critical thought to an interested audience, an opportunity
previously available only to select professional critics. It also allows for fast-paced
exchange, and for the formation of opinion and perception through the interactions
of conversation, always a possibility in face-to-face interactions but now occurring
on a much larger scale.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
S. Cavell: Must we Mean what we Say? a Book of Essays (New York, 1969) [incl.
‘Music Discomposed’, 180–212; ‘A Matter of Meaning it’]
T. Adorno: ‘Über den Fetischcharakter in der Musik und die Regression des
Hörens’, Zeitschrift für SozialForschung, vii (1938), 321–56; Eng. trans. in
The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, ed. A. Arato and E. Gerhardt (New
York, 1978), 270–99
P. Bourdieu: La distinction: critique sociale du jugement (Paris, 1979; Eng. trans.,
Cambridge, MA, 1984)
J. Burkholder: ‘Museum Pieces: the Historicism Mainstream in Music of the Last
Hundred Years’, JM, ii (1983), 115–34
E. Eisenberg: The Recording Angel: Explorations in Phonography (New York,
1987)
E.T. Cone: ‘The Authority of Music Criticism’, Music: a View from Delft (Chicago
and London, 1989), 95–112
G. Marcus: Lipstick Traces: a Secret History of the Twentieth Century
(Cambridge, MA, and London, 1989)
L. Treitler: Music and the Historical Imagination (Cambridge, MA, and London,
1989)
S. McClary: Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis, 1991)
L. Goehr: The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: an Essay in the Philosophy
of Music (New York and Oxford, 1992)
S.D. Crafts, D. Cavicchi and C. Keil, eds.: My Music (Hanover, NH, 1993)
P. Brett, E. Wood and G.C. Thomas, eds.: Queering the Pitch: the New Gay and
Lesbian Musicology (London and New York, 1994)
J. Kerman: Write all these down: Essays on Music (Berkeley and Los Angeles,
1994)
R. Taruskin: Text and Act: Essays on Music and Performance (New York and
Oxford, 1995)
G.F. Barz and T.J. Cooley, eds.: Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for
Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology (New York and Oxford, 1996)
S. Frith: Performing Rites: On the Value of Popular Music (Cambridge, MA, and
London, 1996)
G. Marcus: Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan's Basement Tapes (New York, 1997)
D. Cavicchi: Tramps like us: Music and Meaning among Springsteen Fans (New
York and Oxford, 1998)
M. Kisliuk: Seize the Dance! BaAka Musical Life and the Ethnography of
Performance (New York and Oxford, 1998)
Criticism
II. History to 1945
1. Germany and Austria.
2. France and Belgium.
3. Britain.
4. Italy.
5. Russia.
6. USA and Canada.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Criticism, §II: History to 1945
1. Germany and Austria.
(i) 18th century.
(ii) 19th century.
(iii) 1900–1945.
Criticism, §II, 1: History to 1945: Germany and Austria
(i) 18th century.
Johann Mattheson inaugurated the German critical tradition, publishing several
periodicals in Hamburg between 1713 and 1740. The prologue to the most
important of them, Critica musica (1722–5), defines criticism as ‘the precise
examination and evaluation of … opinions and arguments in old and new literature
about music … for the elimination of all possible primitive [grob] errors and to
promote greater growth in the science of pure harmony’. Mattheson published
annotated translations of English and French authors, and wrote lengthy reviews
of foreign and German writings on music as well as essays on theoretical,
compositional and aesthetic problems. His criticism includes neither performance
reviews nor critiques of entire compositions as integral works of art, though
specific works are occasionally criticized in order to demonstrate technical errors
(principally in part-writing) and stylistic weaknesses.
Mattheson's emphasis on rhetorical principles for formal organization and for a
unity of affect and figure motivated his inflammatory criticism of word repetitions in
J.S. Bach's cantata Ich hatte viel Bekümmernis (Des poetischen Vorhofes, ii, pt 8,
p.368). This and other equally polemical attacks, for example on Handel's St John
Passion, established a model for the disputatious tone of much subsequent
German criticism. Mattheson argued for dramatic church music; advocated a new
melodic style – practised by himself, Telemann and Handel – as opposed to strict
‘German’ polyphony; and, although wary of the ‘unnatural patchworks’ in Italian
instrumental music, called for a ‘mixed taste’ incorporating aspects of both French
and Italian music. The question of national styles and tastes dominated critical
discourse for much of the 18th century.
Mattheson's approach, expressed in a turgid literary style, was essentially
scientific, and it was soon challenged by new critical perspectives. Leading the
way was Der critische Musikus (Hamburg, 1737–40), a ‘moral weekly’ that was
somewhat less scholarly than Mattheson's journals and directed towards a
broader public. Its editor, Johann Adolph Scheibe, a disciple of Johann Christian
Gottsched, prescribed a critical view informed ‘only’ by ‘good taste’ (preface to
vol.ii), that was predicated on French classical-rhetorical ideals of rationalism and
simplicity, the imitation of nature and truth of expression. Although Scheibe's
(acknowledged) debts to Gottsched are deep, he and later critics with similar
values did not support Gottsched's denial (based on a reading of Batteux's Les
beaux arts reduits) of the legitimacy of instrumental music. Criticizing the ‘blind
imitators of the Italians’, Scheibe distinguished between ‘taste’ and ‘style’ and
advocated a ‘purity of national [i.e. German] style’ that preserved the principles of
French good taste (Cowart, 1981, p.135). This led him to deplore the ‘unnatural’
qualities in Bach's music, which he admired in many other respects. In
emphasizing expression and good taste, rather than imitation and affect,
Scheibe's writings marked a distinct break with Baroque musical thought.
By 1750 Berlin had replaced Hamburg as the leading centre for criticism. (Only in
the 19th century did music journalism and criticism become permanently
established in southern Germany and Austria.) Topical essays and reviews of
scholarly publications retained their importance, and criticism continued to be
preoccupied with the relative merits of the French and Italian styles, and with the
broader questions of musical taste, unity and meaning. The francophile Friedrich
Wilhelm Marpurg (Der kritischer Musikus an der Spree, 1750) and Johann
Friedrich Agricola, who championed Italy, engaged in bitter polemic. Quantz
pleaded in his essay on flute playing (1752) for a ‘mixed taste’, but most Berlin
critics were conservative, anti-Italian and wary of the emerging Classical styles,
with their increased emphases on contrasts and virtuosity. In the last decades of
the century, critics such as Johann Nikolaus Forkel and Johann Friedrich
Reichardt approached the music of Haydn and Mozart (and even sometimes the
exemplary C.P.E. Bach) with caution, acknowledging its virtues but warning
against the dangers of the style in the hands of less accomplished or more radical
composers. Beethoven's early works confirmed their fears. Although these critics
shared many views with their mid-18th-century counterparts, they did not
consistently invoke such concepts as taste and national style; however, they did
maintain an emphasis on such traditional categories as naturalness, unity and
expressiveness. In the 1770s and 80s Gluck's operas became the subject of a
major debate. Conservatives (especially those connected with the Berlin court)
decried Gluck's lack of invention and expression, and compared him unfavourably
with Graun and J.A. Hasse; other Berlin critics (such as Carl Friedrich Zelter and
Reichardt) championed his reforms. Forkel devoted 150 pages of the first volume
of his Musikalisch-kritische Bibliothek (1776) to polemics against Gluck by various
authors. The attacks on the claims made by Gluck's supporters that his music was
(or should become) a model for the German nation anticipated arguments contra
Wagner a century later.
In part because critical writing in the 18th century focussed on style rather than on
individual works, criticism regularly appeared in non-journalistic publications such
as treatises on performance, counterpoint (Fux, Gradus ad Parnassum, 1725) and
thorough bass (Heinichen, Der General-Bass, 1728), and later in encyclopaedias
(Sulzer, Allgemeine Theorie, 1775), aesthetic writings and compositional treatises
(Koch, Versuch einer Anleitung zur Composition, 1782). After about 1750 critical
writing by non-musicians such as K.W. Ramler, Nicolai and Lessing appeared in
publications of a general scholarly and aesthetic nature; their work, together with
the minimal but slowly increasing coverage of music and musical life in daily
newspapers in major northern cities, introduced the critical discussion of music to
the non-professional reader in Germany.
Johann Adam Hiller's Wöchentliche Nachrichten und Anmerkungen, die Musik
betreffend (Leipzig, 1766) laid the groundwork for future music journalism and
criticism by introducing non-critical information about new books and printed
music, musicians, public concerts, and musical activities at courts and churches;
performance critiques (usually sympathetic); and brief evaluative commentary
(usually positive) on new compositions, as well as occasional long reviews of
operas or instrumental works. In later criticism such commentary often fell under
the rubric Rezension, a term earlier critics had used for reviews of scholarly
literature. Hiller relied on reports by correspondents in German and foreign cities;

he focussed on newsworthiness as well as scholarship, and even in the more
learned articles a concern for intelligibility and popularity is evident. Forkel and
Reichardt (Musikalisches Kunstmagazin, Berlin, 1782 and 1791, and later
publications) placed even more emphasis on detailed work critiques that included
musical examples, and which were often harshly judgmental. Nonetheless, their
reviews rarely delved deeply into the music, eschewing analysis and relying
instead on vague aesthetic argumentation of a general nature. One notable
exception is Forkel's review of Benda's Ariadne auf Naxos (Musikalisch-kritische
Bibliothek, iii, 250–85), in which he made minor revisions to selected passages in
the opera and compared them to Benda's originals in order to demonstrate their
shortcomings. Operas, church music, keyboard music and song collections were
the preferred genres for criticism.
(ii) 19th century.
(a) Music journals and books.
The Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung of Leipzig, often considered the first modern
music journal and the first organ for modern music criticism, was neither. Friedrich
Rochlitz, its founder (1798) and long-time editor, consolidated the innovations
begun by Hiller, adding more work and performance criticism by drawing on
primarily amateur correspondents in many cities (particularly for concert reviews)
across German-Austrian territories and abroad. The journal's success and
influence derived in part from its ability to meet the needs of a growing musically
literate public (both amateur and professional) in a time of rapid expansion of
published music and public concerts. It became a model for the music journals
that proliferated in German-speaking Europe and contributed significantly to the
development of a modern musical culture.
The Rezension continued to be the major forum for work criticism in the 19th
century. Such criticism had three distinct emphases: explication of a work's
structure and style – the forerunner of modern analysis; evaluation of a work's
artistic success, with or without an explanation of the critic's own aesthetics and
stylistic preferences; and interpretation of a work's content (Inhalt), ideas (Idee) or
spirit (Geist) – a type of inquiry described today as hermeneutic. Early in the
century criticism in the last category often relied on generally descriptive
language, later, and continuing into the 20th century, poetic allusions and
programmes were common.
The challenges posed by Beethoven's music provided a major stimulus to the
development of German music criticism. E.T.A Hoffmann's celebrated review of
the Fifth Symphony (AMZ, 1810) began a tradition of serious Beethoven criticism
in Germany and elsewhere. As the century progressed, Beethoven interprtation
drove a wedge between the practitioners of ‘absolute’ criticism focussing on form
and style and those favouring biographical and programmatic modes of
explanation. It was the ‘newness’ of Beethoven’s music, its often startling
departures from stylistic conventions, that required explanation and interpretation.
At the same time, explanations were required for the music of J.S. Bach and other
Baroque and Renaissance composers, who had in the 18th century attracted the
attention of historically orientated critics (Forkel on Bach, Herder on Palestrina).
This music, which gradually became more widely known through occasional
performance and publication, was for contemporary listener also startlingly new in
its historical distance, its very oldness. Marx's discussion of the St Matthew
Passion in the Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung in the weeks leading up
to its revival under Mendelssohn in March 1829 was a critical milestone. Rochlitz
also made a significant contribution to historical criticism with his book Für
Freunde der Tonkunst (1824); it contained essays on Bach (notably the St John
Passion), Handel and other composers, some of which first appeared in the AMZ.
Rochlitz's discussion of Bach's style – notably his appreciation for Bach's
counterpoint in the AMZ essay Vom Geschmack an Sebastian Bachs
Compositionen besonders für das Clavier – displays remarkable insights clearly
expressed and free from Romantic gushing. Schumann, Wagner, Eduard Hanslick
and many other critics also republished their music journalism in book form.
Collections of essays, biographies and work-orientated monographs became
important vehicles for criticism in the 19th century.
(b) Newspaper criticism and feuilletons.
In the late 18th century the Vossische Zeitung, a political newspaper in Berlin,
began regular coverage of music with an emphasis on performance. Its first
distinguished critic was J.C.F. Rellstab; his son, Ludwig, became the paper's
music editor in 1826. The rapid growth of music journalism, especially after the
relaxation of censorship laws in the mid-1800s, gave rise to a new critical genre,
the feuilleton, derived from French journalistic practice (see 2(i), below). The writer
of the feuilleton could exercise great power. Wagner, a master feuilletonist and
opponent of most criticism, wrote: ‘It is the feuilleton that creates music’.
Newspaper criticism was largely non-technical, focussing on stylistic and aesthetic
questions and emphasizing pithy evaluation rather than elucidation. Hugo Wolf's
remark, in a review of Liszt's symphonic poems, that there was ‘more intelligence
and sensibility in a single cymbal crash in a work of Liszt than in all of Brahms's
three symphonies’ (Wiener Salonblatt, 27 April 1884) illustrates the sarcastic and
often cutting tone adopted by many feuilletonists. Wolf's broadside was aimed as
much at Eduard Hanslick, opponent of Liszt and Brahm's leading critical advocate,
as at the composer himself.
A new critical approach that considered musical works in relation to social
institutions, socially determined cultural values and political trends developed in
the feuilleton and in journals devoted to general culture (e.g. Zeitung für die
elegante Welt), as well as in popular and scholarly music journals. Heinrich
Heine's essays on Mendelssohn and Liszt for the Augsburg Allgemeine Zeitung in
the 1830s are among the first and best of their kind. Wagner attracted particular
attention from such critics as early as the 1840s: themes of nationalism, religion
and philosophy, and anti-Semitism (in the operas and the essays) in all prbability
more interesting to readers of the general press than questions of musical style,
structure and aesthetics. As early as the 1820s, and increasingly in the years
leading up to the revolutions of 1848, cultural and national destiny were viewed by
critics such as A.B. Marx and Franz Brendel as a symbiosis. In the decade after
World War I the controversy between the Weimar liberal Paul Bekker and the
reactionary nationalist Hans Pfitzner about the future of German music reflected a
wider debate about the future of German society. The feuilletonistic tradition was
the wellspring for the music criticism of Theodor Adorno, who combined social
theory (and journalistic wit) with detailed discussion of immanent music content.
However, the scholarly complexity of Adorno's writing was worlds apart from the
feuilleton.
(c) Critiques of criticism.
Until the advent of fascism, German music criticism had two continuing
preoccupations: criticism itself, and the concept and problem of progress
(Fortschritt) (see §(d), below). The legitimacy of criticism per se was closely linked
to the question of criteria and standards. As early as 1752 Quantz in the Versuch
einer Anweisung die Flöte traversiere zu spielen described the arbitrary way
criticism was usually practised. In 1802 H.G. Nägeli published a long essay in the
AMZ, addressed to reviewers for the journal, in which he attempted to determine
norms for sound and fair criticism. Others discussed difficult questions of the
legitimacy of anonymous reviews, of reviews of works published by the firms that
also published the journals in which the review appeared, and of achieving a
balance of subjectivity and objective standards (if, in light of Kant's critical writings,
any notion of objective standards could be maintained). Under the influence of
Kant, Reichardt printed numerous music examples in his work critiques so that
musically literate readers could assess the basis of his judgments and form their
own. He also published excerpts from Kant's Kritik der reiner Vernunft on the
problem of a theory of artistic taste (Musikalisches Kunstmagazin, ii, 1791, p.65).
The Hegelians Marx and Brendel solved the problem of subjectivity by appealing
to the objectivity of historical progress. In the first issue of the Berliner allgemeine
musikalische Zeitung Marx justified a new music journal by arguing that the
Kantian perspective of the AMZ had outlived its usefulness. Nevertheless, Marx
acknowledged the essential subjectivity of criticism by publishing several reviews
of the same work, a practice also adopted in the important journal Caecilia (1824–
48).
The Neue Zeitschrift für Musik was conceived in part as a critique of criticism:
Schumann founded the journal in 1834 to combat the conservatism and low
critical standards of his personal antagonist Heinrich Fink, Rochlitz's successor at
the AMZ. Under the rubric ‘Journalschau’, the first ten issues of the Neue
Zeitschrift reviewed the work of its competitors. In his announcement of the new
journal (Der Planet, 21 March 1834) Schumann issued a summary judgment:
What, then, are the few present musical journals? Nothing but
playgrounds for ossified systems, from which, even with the best of
will, hardly a drop of the sap of life can be pressed, nothing but relics
of aged doctrines to which adherence is more and more openly
denied, nothing but one-sidedness and rigidity … individual,
eccentric opinions, prejudices, fruitless personal bickering and
partisanship so loathsome to the better young artists. None of this
number, with the possible exception of the Caecilia, is capable of
promoting the true interests of music.
Schumann's emphasis on professionalism – that is, on musicians rather than
dilettantes as critics – influenced the increasing trend in this direction after 1850. It
was further bolstered by the development of academic positions in music, with
professors such as Hanslick doubling as critics. In the late 1800s Hanslick and
other professional critics wielded far more power than writers for music trade
journals in shaping public opinion and influencing the establishment of permanent
repertories. Notwithstanding the literary qualities and the musical acumen of
Schumann's criticism, both his originality and his contributions to the development
of music criticism have been overemphasized; his literary conceits belonged more
to the past than to the future of criticism.
As the influence of critics increased, composers and performers grew ever more
sensitive to the real or imagined impact criticism could have on their careers. The
Gazette musicale de Paris (which reported on and was read in Germany) was
founded in 1834 by the publisher Maurice Schlesinger to give composers a
chance to write criticism; in the first number Liszt attacked critics as shallow and
ignorant and suggested they be subjected to knowledge and ability tests. In the
late 1840s a commission was formed by the Berlin Tonkünstler-Verein to consider
appeals from musicians who felt that they had been treated unfairly by critics; its
judgments were printed in the Neue Berliner Musikzeitung (Kirchmeyer, 1965,
p.237).
(d) The question of progress.
The concern with progress is closely associated with the critical agendas of
Wagner and Brendel, Schumann's successor at the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik,
champion of Wagner and Liszt, proponent of New German music drama and
programme music, enemy of Brahms and Hanslick. Wagner's criticism constitutes
not only a defence of his own music and theory but also a critique of contemporary
German musical culture – musical style and values, notably with respect to opera,
performing practice, and musical and theatrical institutions – with unequivocal
recommendations for their reform. (Marx and other liberal mid-century writers also
called for a reform of musical institutions.) Brendel utilized the historical style-
critical essay, rather than the work Rezension, to make Hegelian arguments about
the exhaustion of tradition and the historical necessity of the genres and styles
that he and his colleagues advocated. Brendel's influence was great; he did much
to polarize German musical thought, yet also helped to identify the primary
aesthetic and stylistic problems in the decades after 1850.
The debate about progress began in the 1820s and 30s with the praise for Weber
and attacks on Spontini, as well as a less polemical discussion calling for reform
of operatic institutions and the creation of a truly German opera. Marx, like
Brendel and Wagner, posited Beethoven as a model for a future German music
that had to adjust to new social conditions and recognize the stylistic and aesthetic
advances he had achieved. Even Marx's criticism of earlier music was informed by
a view of history and progress: he declared Graun's Der Tod Jesu (which had
never disappeared from the concert repertory) inappropriate for a new musical
and social period, in contrast to Handel's oratorios and Bach's Passions which had
retained their value. Schumann's campaign against the empty virtuosity of
contemporary pianists (and the lack of a serious critical voice opposing them) was
driven by a concern for the future of German music in the wake of Beethoven's
and Schubert's deaths, and the consciousness that a period in German music had
come to an end. Yet Schumann, too, viewed Beethoven as the primary source
from which music could continue to rejuvenate itself. The dominance of the idea of
progress at mid-century can be measured by two examples: in 1846 Otto Lange, a
lead writer for the Neue Berliner Musikzeitung, proclaimed progress as the
standard for criticism (although a year later he attacked Rienzi for being too
radical), while the young Hanslick, invoking Fortschritt, praised Tannhäuser and
proclaimed Wagner ‘the greatest dramatic talent among the living
composers' (Wiener allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, vi, 1846, p.590), words he
no doubt later regretted.
For Lange, and for conservative critics such as the mature Hanslick and his
student Robert Hirschfeld, who was more sympathetic to Wagner, stylistic
innovation that disregarded the preservation of supra-historical structural
principles and aesthetic values, embodied principally in the music of Beethoven
and Mozart, did not constitute progress. The historical relativism of this view,
especially evident in Hanslick's dislike for most pre-Classical music, either did not
occur to the conservatives or did not disturb them.
(iii) 1900–1945.
The problem of progress assumed increased urgency towards the turn of the
century, when the mature works of Strauss and Mahler began to appear, and
intensified after Zemlinsky and other radical innovators emerged. General
newspapers were the most significant arena for the often bitter debate about new
music, in which composers themselves sometimes joined (e.g. Schoenberg's
essay on ‘Brahms the progressive’). In larger cities, notably Berlin and Vienna,
critics engaged in intra-city polemics with political dimensions: those writing for
liberal and leftist newspapers (many of them Jews) generally sympathized with
new styles (although the atonal and 12-note music of the Schoenberg group
presented problems for such writers as Guido Adler, Bekker and Alfred Einstein),
while critics of right-leaning newspapers opposed the musical avant garde and not
infrequently supported their attacks with nationalistic arguments and anti-Semitic
invective (see Botstein, 1985, p.1298 on Mahler criticism in Vienna). In ‘Arnold
Schönberg, der musikalische Reaktionär’ (1924), Hans Eisler opposed the
formalism and bourgeois character of the music of his former teacher; the essay
inaugurated the German Marxist critique of the musical avant garde, which after
World War II found its principal home in the German Democratic Republic. Ernst
Bloch (who also lived in the east after his return from exile) and Adorno (who
returned to West Germany) were the principal practitioners of an idiosyncratically
Marxist music criticism and philosophy associated with the ‘Frankfurt School’ of
social research.
Because of their immediacy, performance reviews of new works in general
newspapers were at least as important as Rezensionen; the latter appeared more
commonly in specialist publications. Yet even scholarly journals did not ignore the
controversies, and new publications such as Melos and Musikblätter des Anbruch
advanced the modernist cause. Melos was founded in 1920 by Hermann
Scherchen, who wrote a thunderous denunciation of Pfitzner in the first volume,
yet encouraged dissenting views as long as they remained within a general
philosophical consensus; the journal became a forum for the Schoenberg-
Stravinsky debate that occasioned Adorno's first published venture into music
criticism (‘Über die gesellschaftliche Lage der Musik’, Zeitschrift für soziale
Forschung, 1932), in which he argued that the cultural critique inherent in
Schoenberg's music constituted a progressive element (contrasting with the
reactionary character of Stravinsky's music) independent of the composer's
personal political convictions or his professional associations with mainstream
cultural institutions.
In the years following the Nazis' seizure of power in 1933, leftist, liberal and
Jewish music critics and academicians lost their jobs at newspapers and
universities; many of the most prominent liberal and Marxist critics (Adorno, Bloch,
Bekker, Einstein, Eisler, Stuckenschmidt, Weill) went into forced or voluntary exile
(see Nazism). Non-Fascist German music criticism survived principally in the USA
in the form of the scholarly critical essay. Thomas Mann's essay ‘Leiden und
Grösse Richard Wagners’, first given as a lecture in Munich in February 1933 and
published in Germany in April of that year, which precipitated a storm of protest
leading to Mann's exile, was one of the few public expressions of opposition to the
regime. Melos, which like other music journals and newspapers adopted an
increasingly conservative standpoint, was renamed Neues Musikblatt in 1925;
despite its support for Hindemith in the early 1930s, it succumbed to
Gleichschaltung, the centralization of every aspect of cultural life in the Third
Reich. To facilitate control by the Party, and also to save money, other
musicological journals were merged.
For the most part, active intervention by the regime in journalism and criticism was
not necessary; the academic backgrounds of many non-Nazi music critics inclined
them to musical conservatism, from which perspective many found sufficient
common ground with the reactionary nature of Nazi cultural politics to cooperate
(Lovisa, 1993, p.21). Despite the departure of the great majority of critics
intolerable to the Nazis, in 1936 Joseph Goebbels issued his Kritikverbot requiring
a positive discussion of German music and musical life. National Socialist critics
had no business condemning the efforts of National Socialist musicians;
constructive criticism was permissible, but divisiveness was inimical to the unity of
purpose that should motivate every cultural activity, and was therefore
embarrassing to the regime. On the other hand, critical vigilance against the
decadence of modernism and Jewish, Bolshevik, African-American and all other
non-Aryan musics was to be maintained as a bulwark against influences that had

formerly undermined the purity of German music. All writing about music, popular
and scholarly, was (or was supposed to be) critical; it was (or was supposed to be)
informed by an evaluative racial theory, a belief in Aryan cultural superiority and a
commitment to a National Socialist revolution. With its mission of educating the
population (Volksbildung) in light of this commitment, music criticism in the Nazi
period perverted – but in its perversion continued – a 200-year tradition.
2. France and Belgium.
(i) General.
(ii) National identities and styles.
(iii) Beethoven and Wagner.
(iv) 1900–1945.
Criticism, §II, 2: History to 1945: France and Belgium
(i) General.
Tinctoris's evaluations of his predecessors and contemporaries, as presented in
his 15th-century treatises, mark the start of a rich tradition of criticism in France
and Belgium. Nevertheless, music criticism per se was sporadiz before about
1700; thereafter the dominant media for comment were the polemic pamphlet,
encyclopaedia and newspaper articles, and music histories. In the 19th century
the polemic pamphlet was absorbed into the increasingly popular genre of the
newspaper feuilleton, an often witty essay on a topical subject which filled the
lowest part of one or more pages. The sudden proliferation of the specialist
musical press immediately before and during the July Monarchy (1830–48) served
to define most of the parameters and functions of music criticism up to 1945.
Periodicals devoted to piano music, church music, the orphéon repertory,
composition, children's musical education and the café-concert appeared between
1833 and 1870.
Detailed comments on performed interpretations became common only in the
1850s, and were often intimately linked with questions regarding the upholding of
the performance traditions of works in the canon. Journals such as Le ménestrel,
La revue et gazette musicale and, in Belgium, Le guide musical blurred the
boundaries between music criticism, aesthetics, concert reviewing, music theory
and analysis, and provided a forum for a discipline which gained autonomy in the
early 20th century: historical musicology. Jules Combarieu's Revue d'histoire et de
critique musicales, begun in 1901, marks a transitional stage in the separation of
criticism and musicology within the periodical literature. The first musicological
journal, in the modern sense, was L'année musicale (1911–13).
Until 1820 the concept of the professonal music critic hardly existed. Littérateurs
and philosophers such as Diderot and Raguenet routinely included music in their
purview, as did the musically illiterate Geoffroy, the ‘inventor’ of the newspaper
feuilleton who wrote for the Journal des débats between 1800 and 1812. It was
Castil-Blaze, critic of the Journal des débats from 1820, who proclaimed it
necessary that a critic possess specialist musical credentials, an issue later taken
up by François-Joseph Fétis. The phenomenon of the composer-critic, which
stretched from Berlioz to Poulenc and beyond, reinforced the professional status
of music criticism in the early 19th century. However, Romanticism's emphasis on
the interpenetration of the arts ensured the survival of the amateur or artist-critic,
and professional and non-professional streams in music criticism co-existed until
the advent of strictly musicological journals.
The roots of modern French music criticism in debates dominated by littérateurs
encouraged a literary mode of presentation which continued through the 19th
century in the criticism of Baudelaire and Champfleury, and into the 20th. The title
of Raguenet's Parallèle des Italiens et des Français (1702) was modelled on that
of a famous work in the 17th-century literary battle of the ancients and the
moderns: Charles Perrault's Parallèle des anciens et des modernes (1692). The
dialogue form of Le Cerf's anonymous response (see below) was rooted in a
French literary tradition also used by Claude Perrault in his De la musique des
anciens (1680), and which later reappeared in pieces as diverse as Diderot's Le
neveu de Rameau (c1760) and Wagner's Une soirée heureuse (1841). The use of
rhetorical and poetic prose characterized not only elaborate polemic outbursts but
also daily opera and concert reviews. In particular, towards the end of the 18th
century a rhetoric had to be devised for absolute music in a country in which
texted music had long prevailed. Writers in the early 19th century dramatized the
symphonies of Haydn in prose laden with metaphorical images intended to
stimulate an appreciation of the expressive content of the music, and
Hoffmannesque tales became a medium for music criticism in the early 1830s. By
contrast, early professional critics such as Fétis cultivated a selfconsciously arid
style in which displays of rhetorical prowess were subordinated to detailed
technical description. A fusion of both approaches may be seen in the work of
Berlioz, which served as a model still detectable in the criticism of Florent Schmitt
in the 1920s.
(ii) National identities and styles.
The importance of critical debate as a part of the assimilation process was aptly
expressed by Jean Chantavoine in the aftermath of Stravinsky's Le sacre du
printemps: ‘In France, music has often been less an object of immediate pleasure,
as in Italy or Germany, than a subject of controversy. It is often by means of their
influence on people's minds, the ideas which they have suggested and the
debates which they have aroused, that particular works have become
established’ (L'année musicale, 1913, p.287). Important debates concerned the
aesthetics of composition, the relationship of music and technology, and the use
of jazz in art music. From the reign of Louis XIV, however, most major debates
related in some way to the upholding of French tradition in contradistinction to
those of first Italy and then Germany. After Belgium's independence in 1830, such
isolationist attitudes were most pronounced in work published in Flemish.
Francophone critics such as Fétis and Paul Collaer, who divided their time
between Belgium and France, represented a more internationalist viewpoint.
Fétis's short-lived Gazette musicale de la Belgique (1833–4) contained a news
section on musical life in Belgium but was otherwise almost indistinguishable from
the French Revue musicale. It was succeeded by journals that emphasized
Belgium's national musics, though a strong injection of Wagnerism characterized
Maurice Kufferath's directorship of Le guide musical from 1890, and by the
outbreak of World War II Belgian journals were leading the way in the production
of multilingual, internationalist criticism.
The polemic on the relative merits of French and Italian operatic styles, which
began in the late 17th century with the writings of Perrin and De Callières,
dominated the 18th century and spilled over into the 19th. Raguenet's pro-Italian
Parallèle praised the French use of the bass voice and dramatic recitative, and the
elegance of their ballets, while somewhat inconsistently apologizing for the
dramatic, harmonic and orchestral boldness of the Italian style, the supremacy of
the castrato voice and the superiority of Italian staging. Le Cerf responded by
defending the classic qualities of Lullian opera, allying himself with the literary
‘ancients’. Nationalist factionalism based on similar arguments returned with the
Querelle des Bouffons of 1752–4. Traditionally ascribed to the catalyzing effect of
performances of Pergolesi's La serva padrona in 1752, the debate exploded only

the following year, after the première of Mondonville's Titon et l'Aurore. Pro-
Italians included Grimm, Rousseau and Diderot; the pro-French camp counted
Jourdan, Fréron, Laugier and – tardily but decisively – Rameau. The third major
critical quarrel with Italy, centring on Gluck's final visit to Paris in 1777, was
foreshadowed by an exchange between Du Roullet and Gluck in the Mercure de
France in 1772. Du Roullet presented Gluck as a staunch francophile in matters of
operatic aesthetics, while Gluck denied any partisan allegiance. Nevertheless, in
the late 1770s Gluck cast himself as the upholder of French standards of dramatic
realism which the Piccinnistes, among them Marmontel and La Harpe, decried as
entailing the sacrifice of the highest ideals of symmetrical periodicity and pleasing
melody.
New genres of absolute music reached France from Germanic lands in the late
18th century. Early criticism such as that in Garcin's Traité du mélo-drame (1772)
focussed on an issue that characterized writings on German music throughout the
19th and early 20th centuries: its harmonic complexity. Haydn and Mozart, among
the first composers after Lully to retain their place in the French repertory after
their deaths, became test-cases in the critical formulation of a canon of
masterworks whose conditions of entry were hotly debated thereafter. General
acceptance from 1759 of Haydn as a symphonist and composer of chamber music
did not extend, later in the century, to Mozart. During and after the Revolution,
Republican critics on the far left argued for the abolition of all music which had
flourished under monarchical absolutism. Conservatives and pro-Italians such as
Geoffroy found Mozart's operas too symphonic, too complex, and over-charged
with melodic ideas that were not truly lyrical; yet Geoffroy recognized the fusion of
Italian and German principles that Mozart's operatic style represented. German-
Italian polarization was revealed again in Stendhal's writings and in Joseph
d'Ortigue's critique of Rossini (1829), which pitted Italian superficiality against the
German profundity epitomized by Beethoven. Such squabbles did little to mask
critical unease regarding the value of Franco-Belgian music, particularly opera,
where the perception of national styles of opéra comique and grand opera which
sat squarely between the Italian and the German, avoiding the excesses of each,
gained a strong philosophical underpinning only during the eclectic period of the
July Monarchy.
(iii) Beethoven and Wagner.
The mixed early critical response to Beethoven was encapsulated in a comment of
1811 in the rabidly pro-Italian journal Les tablettes de Polymnie that his music
‘harboured doves and crocodiles together’. Intense and protracted debate was
sparked only in 1828, with the re-institution of regular concerts at the Paris
Conservatoire. Fétis (Revue musicale), Castil-Blaze (Journal des débats) and,
later, Berlioz (Gazette musicale) were instrumental in moulding public opinion
regarding Beethoven's orchestral music; concentrated discussion of the late
chamber music, promoted by the Pierre Maurin quartet, did not appear until the
1850s.
Fétis was the central figure in Franco-Belgian music criticism from 1827 to well
after the Franco-Prussian War. A Belgian who divided his career between Paris
and Brussels, he had a decisive influence on the discipline in both countries. His
eclectic aesthetic, which resulted in support for Meyerbeer, Mendelssohn and
Halévy, was antipathetic to the Romantic view of his main critical rival, Berlioz,
though he is remembered chiefly for his writings on music of which he
disapproved (Berlioz, Wagner) or about which he was ambivalent (Beethoven,
Liszt). Fétis's work on Wagner illustrates how his writing could shape an entire
controversy. He opened the Wagner debate in 1852 with an assessment of the

composer's writings rather than his music, much of which he had not heard. His
view that Tannhäuser and Lohengrin were the product of Wagner's theories as
stated in Oper und Drama fundamentally affected the terms in which both
adversaries and supporters of Wagner couched their reviews of the Paris
Tannhäuser.
The various stages of the Wagner debate, which took on a particularly nationalist
allure after 1870, 1914 and 1939, were notable for their tendency to concentrate
on an idea of Wagner, rather than on the operas and music dramas themselves.
Linguistic limitations meant that Dujardin's Revue wagnérienne, which brought
together symbolist poets including Mallarmé, could engage only tentatively or at
second hand with Wagner's writings and librettos, few of which were available in
translation. The result was a highly idiosyncratic view of Wagner which was almost
inevitably disappointed with the reality of the French première of Lohengrin in
1887. Fin-de-siècle Wagnerism was better served in Belgium by the writings of
Kufferath.
In France, critical reaction against Wagner at the end of the 19th century and the
beginning of the 20th involved two disparate groups: conservatives and followers
of the Saint-Saëns school, including Arthur Pougin and Camille Bellaigue, who
argued the pernicious nature of Wagner's influence on French and Belgian music
and the resultant degeneracy of national culture; and those who believed they had
found Wagner's antithesis in Debussy, particularly after Pelléas et Mélisande
(1902), which found an immediate and improbable supporter in Vincent d'Indy and
became a symbol of national solidarity during both world wars. The nationalist
poetics of Debussy's own criticism, particularly his article on Frenchness in
Rameau, undoubtedly helped cement such attitudes. Debussy's music prompted
new critical questions concerned primarily with perceived national character traits
(restraint and clarity) and a new emphasis on colour. With Debussy, ‘matière
sonore’ first became a parameter of composition worthy of critical attention. Yet
his status as a saviour of the French from Wagner was never safe from attack,
and it was not only members of the old guard who labelled him a decadent threat
to French composition.
(iv) 1900–1945.
The most widely acclaimed foreign music to reach France in the first decade of the
20th century was that of the Russian ‘Five’ and their successors. Here, as Emile
Vuillermoz explained in 1905, was a vibrant music untouched by the ‘mal du
siècle’ which dogged other composers, Debussy included. By the 1920s critics
such as Schmitt were apt to view both Debussy and The Five as killers of the
Bayreuth giant. The presence in Paris of the Ballets Russes from 1909 onwards
ensured regular attention to new Russian music in the period up to 1914,
climaxing with what Le ménestrel dubbed ‘Le massacre du printemps’ in June
1913. Other foreign composers attracting attention before 1914 included Strauss,
Mahler and composers of verismo opera, who drew nearly universal
condemnation. Strauss was particularly problematic to French critics, who
oscillated, often in a single article, between revulsion from the banality and
tastelessness of his primary material, and admiration for the opulent originality of
its presentation. In times of heightened nationalism, Strauss, as Wagner's
successor and the incarnation of German artistic values, was among the first
whose ‘quarantine’, to use Gaston Carraud's term, was demanded. Nationalist
concerns were pre-eminent during and after World War I, with critics such as
Carraud preaching isolationism even from the music of France's allies. Among
music journals, La musique pendant la guerre (1915–17), headed by Francis
Casadesus, most closely approached propaganda.

Among the new topics of criticism that surfaced in the interwar years was the
relationship of music and technology in the forms of cinema and the gramophone.
As early as 1903 Jules Combarieu welcomed the gramophone and lamented its
invention after the deaths of Falcon, Mario and Rubini; record reviews date only
from the late 1920s. Cinema music was more contentious, provoking aesthetic
debates concerning the problem of adapting pre-existing music to moving images,
and prompting critics, among them Gabriel Bernard in Le courrier musical and
Jean d'Udine in Le ménestrel, to call for dedicated film music composed in the
tradition of the symphonic poem. A second new strand of criticism dating from
around 1920 reflected an interest in the socio-political contexts of new music; it
focussed initially on Bolshevik Russia and broadened in the 1930s to take in
Germany, Italy and democratic nation-states. While editors such as Henry
Prunières prided themselves on an apolitical stance, journals such as Le courrier
musical in France and La revue internationale de musique in Belgium, provided a
forum for socio-political criticism of music and its institutional bases.
A third brand of criticism, dating from the 1920s, concerned jazz, whose reception
was characterized by a sectarianism among critics which was unknown in other
areas of music criticism. Specialist jazz magazines with a strong American flavour
and sometimes bilingual format appeared from 1930, their critics jealously
defending their specialist status in contradistinction to writers in mainstream art
music periodicals such as the Revue musicale, which printed several positive
articles on jazz from 1927, of which one was written by the acknowledged leader
of jazz criticism in France-Hugues Panassié, whose style of writing could hardly
have been further removed from that of his jazz-magazine supporters. For
Panassié, defining ‘swing’ adequately and defending the status of the jazz
musician as a creative and technically sophisticated artist were necessary
preconditions for the legitimation of jazz, which, until the first concert of ‘hot’ jazz
at the Paris Hot-Club in 1933, the French art music world had experienced only
through dance bands and the music of Krenek, Weill and Gershwin. In the later
1930s, attention focussed on the increase of white influence (a row catalysed by
the perceived status of Benny Goodman in comparison with that of black
clarinettists) and its attendant slick commercialism, which writers such as Joost
van Praag (Le jazz-hot) saw as portentous of a loss of the ‘authenticity’ of the
black style.
In the 1920s Jean Cocteau's aesthetic as promulgated by ‘Les Six’ received a
warm welcome from critics such as J.-M. Lizotte, who detected in it a return to the
simplicity of line and texture, health and clarity of quintessentially French music –
features that were also attributed to Ravel in contrast to Debussy. Among the
international musical styles presented to critics in the interwar years, that of the
Second Viennese School caused the most heated debate. Conservative journals
such as Le ménestrel poured scorn upon Schoenberg, the ‘integral cubism’ of
whose music was, even by supportive modernist journals such as Prunières' La
revue musicale and La revue internationale de musique, compared unfavourably
to that of Berg. Only Schmitt proved a consistent champion of Schoenberg and
Webern, calling Pierrot lunaire ‘compressed beauty’. The increasingly virulent
criticism of Modernist styles caused concern among composers. A sense of
cultural crisis is apparent in the opening numbers of Musica viva (1936), a
multilingual modernist journal published in Brussels which attracted articles from
Krenek, Martin, Busoni, Markevitch and Closson. In France more pressing
nationalist concerns came to the fore after the outbreak of World War II, prompting
Collaer and others to delve deep into French cultural history and highlight
elements of French civilization that demanded protection and renewal. The
German occupation caused more complex difficulties. According to Robert
Bernard, La revue musicale closed down in 1940 because it was no longer free to
support composers such as Milhaud, Hindemith and Schoenberg. Le ménestrel
and La revue internationale de musique also suspended publication, the former
permanently. In 1940 Bernard set up L'information musicale, his aims (as revealed
in the first post-war issue of the Revue Musicale) being to devote most of his
space to French composers and to ensure as frequent mention of prohibited
figures as was consistent with retaining permission to print. Despite its subversive
content, it was the only specialist music periodical published during the
occupation.
3. Britain.
(i) To 1890.
(ii) 1890–1945.
Criticism, §II, 3: History to 1945: Britain
(i) To 1890.
Among the earliest British writers who consciously sought to persuade readers of
a musical point of view are the philosopher John Case and the composer-editor
Thomas Morley. In Apologia musices (1588) Case was concerned to establish
music's utility in every aspect of life, as well as to analyse its categories and
conventional modes. He defended music in the theatre and instrumental music in
religious practice, and praised contemporary English composers including Byrd,
Morley and Dowland. Morley himself stands out as a propagandist for Italian styles
in his Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practicall Musicke (1597), which became a
standard textbook of modern composition.
Throughout most of the 17th century, however, the correct uses of music
remained a matter for debate. Henry Peacham appealed to moderation in The
Compleat Gentleman (1622), advocating music in both church and home on
grounds of historical precedent and efficacy, but also warning against too serious
a devotion to it. Charles Butler's Principles of Musik (1636) likewise pleaded the
cause in both sacred and secular contexts, while sermon and pamphlet writers
weighed in on the Puritan side, firmly rejecting any music but congregational
psalm singing. The issue continued to exercise polemicists after the Restoration,
linked with a newer threat to national identity – music on the stage, especially
Italian opera. Meanwhile conservatism of a different kind surfaced in the treatise
by Thomas Mace, Musick's Monument (1676), which, among other things, pointed
out the decline in performance standards at churches and cathedrals, and
criticized the new French instrumental style that was displacing traditional English
forms. (John Evelyn's diary expressed similar thoughts.) Despite their critical
intent, however, none of these writers deserves the name of music critic as fully as
Roger North, whose range of interests, musical perception and literary approach
were unrivalled. In Memoires of Musick and The Musicall Grammarian (written
c1695–1728; both unpublished at his death) he treated musical life from the
Commonwealth to Purcell and Corelli, as well as musical aesthetics, the nature of
harmony, and musical styles appropriate to church, chamber and theatre. North
filled a comprehensive gap in criticism, though he lacked a contemporary
readership.
Some writers felt antipathy toward theatre music in particular. Arthur Bedford's
The Great Abuse of Musick (1711) is a notorious example, although his argument
for the renovation of music, and hence morals, hinged on a revival of earlier
religious styles and composers: at heart what he distrusted was modern music.
Among commentators better placed to treat the genuine artistic problems of
English opera, Davenant, Motteux, and especially Dryden and Addison had
important things to say, based on neo-classical doctrine and practical experience.

These are found not only in prefaces to their librettos (1656–1708), discussing
conflicting claims of music and poetry, and language in speech, song and
recitative, but also, for the first time, in public journals. Both Motteux's
Gentleman's Journal (1692–4) and Addison's Spectator (1711–12; 1714) contain
critical opinion on opera as a genre. (The Spectator's shrewd mix of social
observation and criticism touched popular and religious music as well, and, as a
new approach to public discussion, influenced Johann Mattheson in his founding
of Critica musica.) In this context Addison is best known for his satirical treatment
of the extravagances of Italian opera – new to London in 1705 – yet he was by no
means insensitive to the possibilities for an eloquent accommodation between
music and poetry, for a rational opera in English. By comparison his friend Richard
Steele was reactionary and xenophobic; in his plays and verse, and his essays in
The Tatler (1709–11), Steele ridiculed every association of opera, from castratos
and the supposed effeminacy of the form to imagined threats against English
spoken drama and the Anglican Church. Despite its early detractors, Italian opera
established itself and found articulate support throughout the 18th century; John
Brown's Letters upon the Poetry and Music of the Italian Opera (1789) made
convincing reading well into the 19th century.
Apart from moral, political and practical concerns about music-making, various
18th-century writers addressed music philosophically, as an agent of meaning and
emotion in human experience (see also Philosophy of music, §III, 1). Following in
the wake of John Locke but also echoing the theory of the affects, these critics
sought to explain music's position in relation to painting and poetry, to investigate
its closeness to nature, and to account for its ability both to give pleasure and to
represent or stir emotions. James Harris, Charles Avison, James Beattie, Daniel
Webb, Archibald Alison and Adam Smith all contributed to the discussion (some
would say confusion) about these points, usually under the headings ‘imitation’
and ‘expression’ (see Expression, §I, 1). Despite differences of position,
terminology and example, however, none actually moved very far beyond the
concept of mimesis: that is, at the end of the 18th century music still had to
mediate to the listener some kind of precisely defined content. Smith (1795)
allowed, fleetingly, that instrumental music could activate memory and produce
‘considerable effects’ without imitation, but even he placed such music beneath
vocal music in its powers over the heart. Theoretically, at least, the idea of music
as an autonomous art was still some way off.
Avison's Essay on Musical Expression (1753) made a greater mark in its attempt
at systematic description of the musical factors ordinary listeners should consider
when assessing a style or composition. His aim was educative, and his goal good
taste; the book attracted attention. Not everyone agreed with his exemplars – he
appeared to favour Marcello and Geminiani over Handel – but the resulting
controversy increased Avison's celebrity and the circulation of his ideas, among
them that harmony and counterpoint were more vital to good music than the
currently fashionable emphasis on melody. Like Pepusch and later Hawkins,
Avison sided with the ‘ancients’, or Renaissance-Baroque polyphonists, in the
larger 18th-century debate over musical style. While Charles Burney thought
Avison's judgment ‘warped’ in this regard, he later praised him as a kind of
founding practitioner of English music criticism. Burney himself was the ultimate
spokesman for the glories of modern Italian opera and the new instrumental and
symphonic style, especially Haydn's. In his published tours about contemporary
European music (1771, 1773) as well as in his General History of Music (1776–
89) – all undertaken to put music on a firm, progressive historical footing precisely
in order that its criticism could be well informed – he wrote frankly of the principles
behind his own taste; these he also invoked as a professional music-book
reviewer for London journals in the 1780s and 90s. Hawkins, too, aimed at a solid
basis for criticism with his more scientific approach to the facts of music history,
but he wanted to remove the element of ‘capricious’ personal taste that Burney
advocated. In the end it was Burney, much more than any other writer, who raised
the subject of music in British public estimation, giving it intellectual respectability
and literary elegance.
The burgeoning commercial market for music in the 18th century was bound to be
reflected in the periodical press. Philosophical discussions about style and taste
were one thing, the purchase of musical goods quite another. The musician John
Potter wrote theatre and oratorio reviews in the Public Ledger as early as the
1760s. Between the early 1780s and 1795 several London newspapers catered
for the fashionable ‘rage for music’ by publishing headed concert reviews.
Anonymous and frequently susceptible to influence, however, these are a less
reliable guide to public taste than careful analysis of other musical data in the
papers, such as advertisements. More relevant as criticism are the pioneering
music review sections in the monthly magazines, notably the European Magazine
(where Samuel Arnold wrote on new music publications from May 1784 to June
1785), the Analytical Review (to which Mary Wollstonecraft contributed music-
book reviews from 1789 to 1792), the Monthly Magazine (where Thomas Busby
reviewed new printed music from 1796 to 1816) and the British Critic (for which
John Wall Callcott covered music from 1800 to 1805). The earliest English music
periodical with a dedicated critical section was Musical Miscellanies (September–
December 1784), whose monthly ‘Review of New Musical Publications’ covered
printed music and some books. Conducted by J.C. Heck, this journal had special
praise for C.P.E. Bach and Haydn.
In the 19th century consumers and other interested readers increasingly turned to
the press for guidance about what to see and hear, what to sing and play, what to
think: the gap between public access to hearing great music and the ability to read
about it now became huge. This was because, for economic and social reasons,
the British press grew and diversified sooner than musical culture did. Indeed it
was largely the need for copy in this new journalizing age that created musical
writers in the first place; some were genuinely able as critics, others completely
inept. In the 1820s, for the first time, serious music journals had enough buyers to
keep going for more than a few months, and by the 1830s and 40s general news-
and arts papers had to have a music column to keep pace with competitors. The
occupation of music critic varied in status with the repute of the journal, but at
least it offered a viable professional outlet for a skilled writer with musical
knowledge, or a would-be musician unable to pursue performance or composition.
Many critics worked peripatetically, some contributing to more than one paper at a
time. Critical responses were often coloured by private motives; opinions could,
and did, change over time. A continual flux and variety of views was characteristic
of the age. Broadly speaking, reviews of music publications migrated in two
directions – book coverage to the new quarterly literary reviews and printed music
to specialized music journals. Reviews of performances dominated the music
columns in weekly and daily newspapers, and also appeared selectively in the
music press. Extended essays on aesthetic issues or ‘advocacy’ topics, such as
the increased emotional power of music or calls for an English national opera,
appeared first in the magazines and literary reviews, then increasingly in the
music press. Style-critical discussions were rare until after about 1850.
The audience for all this material was naturally mixed in social level and musical
sophistication. In Britain articulate critical opinion on music was never the preserve
of music specialists; still less did the nation have a leading composer-critic as
representative spokesman, or even a continuing creative tradition that could
validate critical authority. Yet any charge of backwardness in 19th-century British
music criticism is surely naive, and stems from overemphasis on the two most
selfconscious ‘taste-makers’ working in London at mid-century, Henry Chorley and
J.W. Davison. Although neither had much musical training, they managed through
literary connections to get and keep long attachments to major papers (though
both the Athenaeum and The Times were outstripped in circulation figures by
other publications, notably the Daily Telegraph). Their clear authorial identities (in
an environment that was predominantly freelance and anonymous), strong
prejudices and trenchant language (confirmed and repeated in their published
memoirs) simply made them easy targets for a later generation. It is true that their
classical inclinations left them resistant to much new music; their purview was
anyway often limited to performance commentary. The degree to which Chorley
and Davison actually directed popular taste is another question, however: their
strictures on Verdi, for example, seem to have had little impact on the vitality of his
operas in London.
Throughout the century a number of less visible but highly skilled journalists
worked as music critics. Of those who could be called true musical amateurs with
a literary sensibility, Leigh Hunt, Richard Mackenzie Bacon and Thomas Love
Peacock were especially perceptive about English and Italian vocal music. In
Norwich, Bacon founded and edited the first English journal devoted entirely to
music literature and criticism, the Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review (1818–
30), and also wrote on music for two London monthlies. T.M. Alsager brought a
keen mind and open ear to his early crusade for Beethoven in The Times, while
George Hogarth contributed criticism to more than a dozen journals with diverse
readerships. Later, G.B. Shaw, passionate about Mozart and Wagner, equipped
with a biting wit and intent on social reform, aimed above all to provoke; no other
critic approached him in assurance, though his failure to detect real musical merit
(notably in Brahms) was a limitation.
Still more numerous were the music professionals – performers, teachers and
administrators – who, if rather earnest and overly concerned with educating,
nevertheless made substantial contributions to the diffusion of musical ideas in
Britain. William Ayrton on the Italian opera and Edward Taylor on the English
madrigal, Henry Gauntlett on Beethoven and Bach, Joseph Bennett on choral
music, Edward Dannreuther and Francis Hueffer on Wagner, F.G. Edwards on
Mendelssohn and J.A. Fuller Maitland on early music are only a few examples.
Remarkable by virtue of his intellectual qualities, elegant style and wide
sympathies – from Palestrina to Berlioz – was Edward Holmes, who wrote for
seven journals, including the Atlas and Musical Times, besides producing a
landmark book on Mozart. Holmes combined rare musical penetration with
humanistic feeling. On the ever-burning question of whether the English were a
musical people, he argued convincingly that, at least by the 1850s, the nation still
could not claim to love music for its own sake.
After a lull in the 1860s and 70s, the British musical press exploded in the 80s and
90s. Regional criticism bloomed and concert life underwent a transformation. In
the field of aesthetics, there was a world of difference between the early 19th-
century categorizing of a music academic like William Crotch (whose sublime,
beautiful and ornamental styles corresponded roughly to Baroque, Classical and
Romantic music, in descending order of greatness) and newer speculative
thinking about the origin and evolution of music. The latter topic occupied not only
the philosopher Herbert Spencer from the late 1850s but Edmund Gurney, whose
collected essays in The Power of Sound (1880) comprise the most substantial
English musical treatise of the century. Gurney offered remarkable insights into
the structure of melody and the psychology of musical perception. The writer
James Sully took Spencer's ideas further, trying to account for the rising emotional
power of music after Beethoven and Wagner. The dichotomy underlying this
debate, between form and content, structure and expression, was addressed with
insight by John Stainer in his Oxford professorial lecture (1892); it continued to
challenge musical thinkers in Britain and elsewhere for decades.
Criticism, §II, 3: History to 1945: Britain
(ii) 1890–1945.
In the early 20th century the quantity and diversity of outlets for criticism in Britain
rose dramatically. While almost every other department of musical life became
increasingly professionalized, criticism remained largely the domain of semi-
amateurs and the part-time pursuit of composers, academics and teachers. The
established broadsheet newspapers, The Times, the Sunday Times, The
Observer, the Daily Telegraph and the Morning Post (amalgamated with the Daily
Telegraph in 1937), continued to provide substantial coverage of musical events
and associated issues while the newer tabloids favoured brief opera and concert
notices. Among provincial newspapers the Birmingham Post and the Manchester
Guardian were most significant, containing contributions from Ernest Newman,
Eric Blom and Neville Cardus.
Shaw relinquished his position as music critic in 1894, a year that marked a
watershed in British music criticism. A performance of the St Matthew Passion
conducted by Stanford in March of that year was severely criticized by Vernon
Blackburn in the Pall Mall Gazette. Five members of the musical establishment
(Mackenzie, Grove, Goldschmidt, Parratt and Parry) responded with a
controversial letter to the press that attacked Blackburn's ‘sheer inepitude’ and
initiated a debate on the function of criticism. John Runciman of the Saturday
Review (1894–1916) supported Blackburn and became the self-appointed leader
of the ‘New Criticism’, which extended Shavian lines of argument. It was also in
1894 that Ernest Newman's first articles were published in the New Quarterly
Musical Review.
The numerous music journals that sprang up from the 1890s reflected the move
towards greater plurality throughout British society. Few, however, could compete
with those supported by publishing businesses (the Musical Times, the Musical
Standard, the Monthly Musical Record) and advertising revenue (Musical Opinion
and Music Trade Review). Music criticism also continued to feature prominently in
literary reviews and political journals, including the English Review, The Academy,
the Nation and the Athenaeum and the New Statesman. From the 1920s the
broadcasting and recording industries provided further outlets, including the Radio
Times and The Listener. The cultivated minority audience of the 19th century that
read the old-style reviews, such as the Edinburgh or the Fortnightly, gave way to a
new and diverse ‘mass’ readership.
The market for music books also expanded, owing in part to the increase of music
education at all levels, the popularity of domestic music-making and amateur
groups, the widening of audiences, the declining cost of books and the
establishment of public libraries. Short histories, composer studies published in
series such as Dent's Master Musicians, and collections of analytical programme
notes, notably Donald Tovey's Essays in Musical Analysis (1935–9), held
widespread appeal. The volume of collected journalistic essays, such as
Newman's A Musical Motley (1919) or Blom's A Musical Postbag (1941), gave the
critic's work a greater permanence and also became the standard posthumous
tribute.
Before 1914 a pro-German stronghold was maintained by a group of critics with
Oxford connections, including Hubert Parry, W.H. Hadow, Tovey, Ernest Walker
and H.C. Colles, who dominated the production of reference and didactic works,
particularly Grove's Dictionary and the Oxford History of Music. Their shared
articles of critical faith included the view that the laws of evolution accounted for
the development of musical style; that absolute music represented the greatest
contribution to the art; that sonata form was the highest structural ideal; and that
the German masters from Bach to Brahms represented the true classic tradition.
They maintained that criticism must rely on the formal description of music in order
to present an evaluation of aesthetic merit and consequently emphasized its style
and structure. These critics laid the foundation for the rise of musicology in Britain;
in the next generation Dent, Westrup and others turned away from journalism
towards academia.
Two new trends emerged after World War I. The first, a reaction against the
German repertory, focussed on Stravinsky and the composers associated with
Diaghilev's Ballets Russes. In line with an aesthetic view which set France against
Germany, Classicism against Romanticism and Paris against Vienna, Edwin
Evans, the most prominent literary advocate of contemporary music in the interwar
period, set the virtues of Stravinskian neo-classicism against the atonality and
serialism of Schoenberg. Leigh Henry represented a younger generation and
aligned himself with the aesthetic of Jean Cocteau's Le coq et l'arlequin in his
journal Fanfare and elsewhere. A second and more conservative tendency was
represented in the 1920s by two composer-critics associated with Philip
Heseltine's (Peter Warlock's) journal The Sackbut: Cecil Gray and K.S. Sorabji.
Like the poet-critic W.J. Turner, they found the notion of ‘popularizing’ classical
music distasteful and shared the hostility towards mass culture that was common
among the British intelligentsia during the inter-war years. For them, music was
the romantic art par excellence. They rejected Stravinsky and made provocative
claims for composers seen to be outside the mainstream, including Busoni,
Mahler, Sibelius and Delius. Many elements of their thought were expressed by
Constant Lambert in Music, Ho! (1934), the most important British critique of
contemporary music written between the wars.
The most influential and arguably the most widely read critic of the period was
Ernest Newman. As a rationalist he came under the influence of J.M. Robertson,
whose Essays Towards a Critical Method (1889, 1897) argued for a scientific
approach to critical theory. Robertson's work also informed Michel-Dimitri
Calvocoressi's The Principles and Methods of Musical Criticism (1923), which
marked an important advance over earlier discussions. While Calvocoressi took a
relativist position, Newman's absolutism demanded that aesthetic judgments be
argued from a basis of objective fact and not from personal taste. His
disillusionment with the apparent chaos of criticism in its response to
contemporary music led to a study of the critical process in A Musical Critic's
Holiday (1925), and to a series of articles expounding a ‘physiology’ of criticism.
The polemical criticism which sought to come to terms with Modernist aesthetics
mirrored the transitional stage through which European music was passing. The
Oxford critics maintained a pro-German stance after 1918, when Franco-Russian
Modernism was in the ascendant, and gave little consideration to new music from
countries other than Britain, providing one source of the friction that was
characteristic of the period. The rise of Modernism inevitably brought with it a
factional music press. While most contemporary composers found some degree of
support, the serial music of the Second Viennese School proved a particular
stumbling-block for British critics. It was left to Edward Clark at the BBC, and to
émigré composers and critics such as Egon Wellesz, Mosco Carner and Erwin
Stein, to counteract the widespread critical suspicion that tended to greet new
developments in Britain.
By the 1940s arguments that had dominated the early decades of the century –
concerning the evaluation of programme music, the nature of national musical
identity and the relevance of folksong, the validity of returning to Classical models,
the nature of objectivity in criticism and the causes of divergent opinion – ceased
to invite further consideration. A younger generation of critics, including Martin
Cooper, Wilfrid Mellers and Peter Heyworth, and somewhat later Hans Keller and
Donald Mitchell, developed new lines of argument in journals of an international
perspective such as Tempo, the Music Review, The Score and Music Survey. A
strain of conservatism remained – Newman continued to write for the Sunday
Times until 1958 and Blom for The Observer until 1959 – but after 1945 the way
was open for a reassessment of values.
4. Italy.
(i) To 1890.
(ii) 1890–1945.
Criticism, §II, 4: History to 1945: Italy
(i) To 1890.
In the first quarter of the 19th century, especially in the Napoleonic period, music
criticism in Italy was a sporadic phenomenon, the work of journalists, theatre
chroniclers and occasional commentators who contributed to official gazettes and,
less frequently, literary periodicals. Because the level of literacy was low,
periodicals had limited distribution and, being heavily censored, consisted largely
of news reports and encomia; contributors were rarely allowed to sign their
articles. It was the rapid rise of Rossini, which sparked a more widespread and
lively interest in music (particularly opera), that marked the birth of music criticism
in Italy. The attention the composer received bordered on fanaticism, going far
beyond the limited circle of specialists or opera lovers. Yet it was still writers rather
than musicians who took up their pens to praise or criticize Rossini's art,
beginning with Michele Leoni in the columns of the Florentine Antologia; Stendhal,
whose biography of the composer (1824) aroused controversy when it was
immediately translated into Italian; and Giuseppe Carpani, whose study of Haydn
(1812) was followed by Le rossiniane, ossia Lettere musico-teatrali (1824).
Literature on Rossini ranged from questions of interpretation to gossip, from satire
to essays, and from polemics to moralism. In this context Giuseppe Baini's work
on liturgical music, on the life and works of Palestrina in particular, was
exceptional in its emphasis on scholarship rather than critical judgments.
Rossini's success, the establishment of an operatic repertory, and the construction
of opera houses in both large and small cities formed the basis for the rapid
growth of opera consumption (which an acute observer, Carlo Cattaneo, termed
the ‘industrialization of opera’). The same factors gave rise to the creation of the
first periodicals devoted to opera in Bologna, Venice and Naples. Almost all were
short-lived expressions of a journalistic specialization which had not yet been
consolidated. Peter Lichtenthal, who believed that ‘true musical criticism assumes
great, profound knowledge of the art and exquisite taste’, lamented that ‘most of
our modern-day Aristarchuses do not even know what a chord is, or at most
possess very superficial knowledge of the art upon which they write’.
Polemical or ‘militant’ criticism, associated principally with the ‘artistic’ journals,
began to increase in the 1820s in conjunction with the growth of the publishing
industry. This was concentrated in Milan, the former capital of the Napoleonic
Italian kingdom, which gradually replaced Venice, the cradle of theatre criticism,
and Bologna, traditionally the centre of the theatrical marketplace. Technological
advances and the restructuring of publishing allowed Milan to consolidate its
leading position in the evolutionary process which during the 19th century
transformed Italian journalism from a trade into a profession. At the same time
musical and theatrical commerce began to merge as music publishers, led by

Giovanni Ricordi and Francesco Lucca, arrived on the scene as both journalists
and impresarios. The periodical I teatri, which Giacinto Battaglia and Gaetano
Barbieri founded in 1827, served as a model for numerous theatre and music
journals which flourished during the 1830s. Censore universale dei teatri, Fama,
Figaro, Pirata and others were soon associated with theatrical agencies.
The almost complete dominance of opera meant that journalistic criticism was still
considered a literary exercise; its earliest practitioners were writers such as Enrico
Montazio and Geremia Vitali, and poet-librettists such as Luigi Previdali, Antonio
Piazza, Felice Romani, Antonio Ghislanzoni and M.M. Marcello. All the most
influential Italian journalists in the mid-19th century were literary figures, among
them Giuseppe Rovani of the Gazzetta di Milano, a Rossinian and defender of the
unity of the arts, and Tommaso Locatelli of the Gazzetta di Venezia. From the
1840s however, music publishers began to bring out journals of their own, in
Milan, Florence and Naples. After collaboration with the Milanese periodical
Glissons, n'appuyons pas, Ricordi published the Gazzetta musicale di Milano from
1842 until the beginning of the 20th century. Lucca followed with L'Italia musicale,
Guidi with the Gazzetta musicale di Firenze (later Armonia) and the Stabilimento
Musicale Partenopeo with the Gazzetta di Napoli. These specialist periodicals
invited contributions from musicians, who expanded the scope of criticism to
include analysis and historical research. Several figures came to the fore: Alberto
Mazzucato and Raimondo Boucheron (and later, for a short period, Arrigo Boito)
in Milan; Pasquale Trisolini and Michele Ruta in Naples; and, most importantly,
musicians working in Florence, the capital of a grand duchy where instrumental
and chamber music were cultivated assiduously despite the predominance of
opera: Abramo Basevi, L.F. Casamorata, G.A. Biaggi, Ermanno Picchi and Luigi
Picchianti. It was they who laid the methodological foundations for criticism
increasingly predicated on technical knowledge – Basevi's Studio sulle opere di
Giuseppe Verdi (1859) is fundamental in this regard – and gave a decisive thrust
in the direction of theoretical debate and scholarly research. Among writers on
music whose approach was primarily philosophical or theoretical, the leading
figures were Giuseppe Mazzini (La filosofia della musica, 1836), Nicola Marselli
(Ragione della musica moderna, 1859), Antonio Tari (Saggi di estetica e
metafisica, 1911) and, more marginally, Giovanni Bovio.
When Italy attained political unity (1860–61), and with it freedom of publication,
theatre periodicals were more or less transformed into house organs of various
theatrical and artistic agencies. With a few exceptions such as Boccherini in
Florence, Il mondo artistico and Il teatro illustrato in Milan, Paganini in Genoa and
Napoli musicale, as well as periodicals of mainly musical interest, their function
was limited in large part to providing information and advertising. Music criticism
moved to journals of opinion, and thus began the age of the great commentators
such as Filippo Filippi, Francesco D'Arcais, Amintore Galli and Cesare Dall'Olio.
They were joined by theatre critics and literary figures (some of whom were also
active in the theatre as librettists or impresarios) such as Enrico Panzacchi in
Bologna, Leone Fortis, Aldo Noseda, Carlo d'Ormeville and Alessandro Fano in
Milan, Giulio Piccini (Jarro) in Florence, Giuseppe Depanis, L.A. Villanis and
Ippolito Valetta in Turin, and Eugenio Checchi and Gino Monaldi in Rome.
In the second half of the 19th century there was increasingly lively debate
prompted by the crisis in Italian opera (which only Verdi seemed able to
overcome), the ideas of the new generation (from Boito and Gomes to the young
Puccini), the growing presence of French opera (Meyerbeer, Gounod, Massenet)
and above all the appearance of Wagner, who had in Filippi, Depanis and
Panzacchi his first supporters in Italy. The ensuing controversies over the ‘opera
of the future’, Italian versus German music, and vocal versus instrumental music
coincided with the growth of non-operatic music, in particular the work of the
Società del Quartetto and the various orchestral societies, and with the debate on
sacred music reform. In this environment, critics, whether ‘progressives’ (Filippi,
Panzacchi, Galli, Valetta), moderates (d'Arcais, Villanis), pragmatists (Fortis) or
defenders of the so-called Italian tradition (Checchi, Monaldi), became a driving
force behind the modernization of the repertory particularly in instrumental music.
Specialist critics exerted a growing influence on the development of new music
even as the field of historical research broadened. Outstanding musicologist-critics
like Francesco Florimo, Alberto Cametti, Alfredo Soffredini, Giovanni Tebaldini,
Giuseppe Gallignani and Oscar Chilesotti, whose work appeared regularly in the
Gazzetta musicale di Milano, found new outlets, however short-lived, in
periodicals such as Paganini, La musica popolare, Musica sacra and above all
Archivio musicale, which accepted contributions from authoritative foreign critics
and can be considered the first Italian musicological journal.
Criticism, §II, 4: History to 1945: Italy
(ii) 1890–1945.
Daily newspapers catering for large national readerships and characterized by a
simple, concise prose style began to appear in Italy in the 1860s. This
phenomenon went hand in hand with the development in universal education
which, in the last decades of the century, increased the readership of both
newspapers and magazines. From being a tool of the élite, periodicals quickly
evolved into forms that led towards progressive ‘democratization’; they used new
techniques for reproducing illustrations and exploited less complex, more
attractive means of communication. At the same time music criticism split into
cultivated, sophisticated writing intended purely for specialists, and more popular
material aimed at the mass of enthusiasts. As the function and importance of
periodicals changed, the most well-established critics gradually abandoned them
in favour of the daily press; among these were Arrigo Boito, Eugenio Checchi
(who wrote under the pseudonym ‘Tom’), Achille De Marzi, Giuseppe Depanis,
Amintore Galli, Gino Monaldi, Aldo Noseda (who wrote under the pseudonym ‘Il
misovulgo’, ‘against the herd’), Primo Levi, Giovanni Battista Nappi, Enrico
Panzacchi, Lorenzo Parodi, Alfredo Soffredini, Michele Uda and Ippolito Valetta
(the pseudonym of Ippolito Franchi Verney).
Partly as a result of these journalistic developments, criticism of everyday events
was increasingly separated from musicological and historical commentary; the
latter found a home at the end of the century in Italy's first musicological journals:
Archivio musicale (1882–4) in Naples, Rivista musicale italiana (1894–1955) in
Turin and later Milan, and Cronaca musicale (1896–1917) in Pesaro. A new
critical attitude to the current state of Italian music began to take root: the increase
in historical studies, as well as the influence of music and musical thinking from
abroad, stimulated a reappraisal of the Italian music of the previous 100 years. A
reaction against the monopoly of Italian opera had been developing since the mid-
1800s; by the end of the century French and German operas were regularly
performed in Italian theatres, musicological studies on pre-18th-century Italian
music were progressing, and instrumental music was widely heard. This new
sensibility translated into a fierce condemnation by some critics of contemporary
Italian opera, which was seen as having degenerated into ‘commercialism’ and
capitulated to ‘popular’ taste. This was the atmosphere in which Fausto
Torrefranca's famous pamphlet Giacomo Puccini e l'opera internazionale (1912),
attacking contemporary Italian opera and its leading exponent, appeared. Italian
critics were divided between those who welcomed these ‘popular’ tendencies in
the operatic and instrumental repertories, and those who championed a fairly
radical renovation of Italian music, taking a generally élite view of culture. The
former gravitated towards daily papers and magazines with high circulations, while
the latter tended to express themselves within the limits of the specialist review.
This critical debate was echoed in the pages of the Rivista musicale italiana. The
pro-Wagner, anti-verismo viewpoint of the journal's first editor Luigi Torchi (author
of the first Italian monograph on Wagner, in 1890) gave way, under the editorship
of Torrefranca, to a nationalistic view of Italian music which accorded with
Torrefranca's musicological research on instrumental music in Italy and the Italian
origins of Romanticism in music. This critical reorientation reflected a partial
change in the ideology of the Rivista; while its outlook remained essentially
positivist, it was not unaffected by idealistic influences. Italian music criticism of
the first half of the 20th century was sustained by these tensions between
opposing philosophies, as well as by the growing political and cultural nationalism
of the period.
La voce, a literary review of fundamental importance for Italian culture was
founded in Florence in 1908. An anti-positivist journal close to the idealism of the
philosopher Benedetto Croce, it published regular contributions from such
distinguished musicologists and musicians as Torrefranca, Giannotto Bastianelli
and Ildebrando Pizzetti. All were united against verismo opera and in favour of
reviving the pre-19th-century Italian musical tradition and reappraising
instrumental music. The themes explored and developed in this and other
Florentine literary journals influenced the new music journals that proliferated in
the second decade of the century, notably Ars nova, the journal of the Società
Italiana di Musica Moderna, founded in Rome in 1916 by Alfredo Casella, Ippolito
Pizzetti, Gian Francesco Malipiero, Carlo Perinello, Vittorio Gui and Vincenzo
Tommasini. The leading role played by these and other professional musicians in
20th-century Italian music criticism was a striking departure from 19th-century
tradition, which assigned the exercise of music criticism principally to
commentators with literary backgrounds and varying levels of musical knowledge.
Militant criticism almost inevitably complemented the creative output of such
composers as Pizzetti, Casella, Malipiero, Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco, and later
Luigi Dallapiccola and Gianandrea Gavazzeni.
In the early 20th century as well, Milan was overtaken by Turin as the centre of
music periodical publication, and so of criticism. The Rivista musicale italiana and
La riforma musicale, founded in Turin in 1913, were joined in 1920 by Il pianoforte,
which later (under the title Rassegna musicale) became the most important Italian
music journal of the first half of the 20th century. Edited by Guido Maggiorino
Gatti, it initially concentrated exclusively on the piano but soon embraced a wide
range of theoretical, historical and aesthetic topics, providing considerable
information on international musical life and trends. Il pianoforte was anti-
nationalist, having many authoritative foreign correspondents, and close to
Croce's idealism. One of its contributors was Giuseppe Radiciotti, who published
his impressive monograph on Rossini in 1927–9. When the journal changed its
name to Rassegna musicale in 1928, the editorial standpoint was further refined,
showing an openness both to idealist influences and to Modernist, European
tendencies, while remaining unattracted by nationalism. In the 1930s and 40s,
under the leadership of Guido M. Gatti, the Rassegna was the most culturally
advanced and inquiring Italian music journal. The cream of Italian critics were
among its contributors, including Ferdinando Ballo, Casella, Attilio Cimbro, Andrea
Della Corte, Gavazzeni, Malipiero, Alberto Mantelli, Guido Pannain, Alfredo
Parente, Gino Roncaglia, Luigi Ronga and Gastone Rossi-Doria, as well as
Massimo Mila and Fedele D'Amico, the leading figures in Italian music criticism
after World War II.
The Fascist regime that came to power in 1921 had little influence on the stances
taken by composers, despite the official approval bestowed on some music

(generally post-verismo in origin) and composers whose nationalism was
gradually sinking into pure provincialism. Nor did fascism impinge to any great
extent on critics' freedom of expression. Allegiance to the regime was all that was
expected; the price for failing to conform was paid mostly in curbs on space and
resources. This situation sanctified the traditional political and civil disengagement
of the Italian intellectual; it also demonstrated that the roots of Italian musical
culture, even at its most Modernist, lay in the petit-bourgeois idealism which also
gave birth to fascism. Although the regime drew on the vital strength of Futurism
and initially supported Casella's avant-garde ventures, in the 1930s it embarked
on a programme of censorship and cultural centralization whose aim was to
contain the various trends within the straitjacket of extreme reactionary rhetoric
and demagogy.
Nevertheless, less orthodox ventures and ideas continued to find outlets for
expression – for example the wave of anti-idealist internationalism which Luigi
Rognoni brought to the Rivista musicale italiana in 1936 when it took avant-garde
music and jazz on board. (As a result of this extreme polemical impulse Rognoni
was forced to resign as editor of the journal.) During the same period the
Rassegna musicale also published notably forward-looking criticism by Ballo,
D'Amico, Dallapiccola, Mantelli and Mila in particular. Generally speaking, by the
late 1930s music criticism which was not strictly idealist or which contained
sociological or political observations was to be read only ‘between the lines’ in
such periodicals as the journal Corrente and such daily papers as L'ambrosiano.
Yet anomalies persisted even at the height of the war: in 1942, when the music of
Alban Berg had long been banned in Germany as ‘degenerate art’, Wozzeck
received its first performance in Italy, in Rome of all places, to great acclaim from
audiences and critics of all political persuasions.
5. Russia.
Distinctions between the educational, chronicling, propagandistic and evaluative
functions of writing about music are not easily drawn when examining Russian
music criticism. Beginning at a time when Russian musical life was itself as yet on
a small scale, criticism started at a correspondingly low level. In the late 18th
century and the first half of the 19th much of the music performed in Russia was
imported, so that critics bent their efforts to assessing the relative merits of
different masters (as was the case with the debate about Mozart and Rossini as
composers of opera that was conducted in Moscow in the early 1820s). In the
absence of controversy about the worth of the compositions of foreign masters
(whose quality was felt to be guaranteed by their provenance and foreign
successes), attention was focussed on comparing the strengths and weaknesses
of particular executants, who again were often international virtuosos visiting
Russia for more or less short periods. In this context the books of A.D. Ulïbïshev,
Nouvelle biographie de Mozart (Moscow, 1843) and Beethoven, ses critiques et
ses glossateurs (Leipzig and Paris, 1857), stand out, the former especially, as
attempts to interpret and assess the compositions of their subjects.
As indigenous composers emerged and won a degree of renown, however, their
champions took to the columns of the newspapers to laud their achievements. A
major issue considered by Russia's 19th-century critics, then, was the right of
repertories composed by Russians to exist alongside the imports, chiefly theatre
music from Italy and France and instrumental music from Germany. At least in the
earlier part of the century, this was considered more important than determining
the virtues and defects of new Russian compositions. Although debate on this
issue developed momentum with the appearance of Glinka's A Life for the Tsar in
1836, it had already arisen with Verstovsky's ventures in opera in the 1820s.
The first people to write about music in Russia tended to be those who wrote on
other subjects and thus had access to the press. This is the case with Ya.M.
Neverov, O.I. Senkovsky, N.A. Mel'gunov, V.F. Odoyevsky and other contributors
to the discussion about Glinka's opera. In many cases their reactions display
insight and commitment, but also an inability to describe the music on a technical
level; there were also venal journalists who wrote with ignorant malevolence about
music, as about other subjects. The newspaper article was the principal medium
for music criticism, whether in the form of the feuilleton (see §2(i) above) or of the
report. The lengthy discursive article in a ‘thick journal’ (tolstïy zhurnal) was also a
significant vehicle for music criticism. Even contributions to newspapers could
extend over several issues and thus assume substantial proportions (as is the
case with F.M. Tolstoy's ‘analysis’ of Dargomïzhsky's Rusalka which spread over
four numbers of the Northern Bee in the summer of 1856, or Hermann Laroche's
Glinka i yego znacheniye v istorii muzïki (‘Glinka and his significance in the history
of music’) which came out in four issues of the Russkiy vestnik in 1867–8.
The great length at which Russian critics wrote about music in the 19th century is
explained by several factors. First, the question of what marked Russian national
identity was at the centre of many people's thinking, not only in music. Secondly,
as Russian music consisted disproportionately of operas, many on Russian
subjects, its consideration brought into play questions about the interpretation of
history and its personages which often (in conditions of censorship) touched
implicitly on present-day matters; authenticity of behaviour, costume and scenery
were also examined. Thirdly, many critics took their role to be to outline and reflect
upon in great detail not only a composition's wider context but also its particular
content, as in Rimsky-Korsakov's review of Cui's William Ratcliff (1869). A fourth
element, evident with special virulence in the case of Aleksandr Serov, is the
pedantic exposing of every error allegedly committed by previous venturers into
the field; V.V. Stasov's article ‘“A Life for the Tsar” and “Ruslan and
Lyudmila”’ (1860) illustrates the heavy sarcasm with which such criticism was
often laced. Press controversy about music in the 1860s was, if not a matter of life
and death, at least something which affected careers, as critics (sometimes
doubling as composers) sought performances of the works they favoured.
The extent to which critics wrote in a parti pris manner varied, as did their level of
technical attainment. Stasov and Cui served on the whole as spokesmen for the
Balakirev circle of composers, and Stasov later for those of the Belyayev circle;
from 1858 Serov combined his championship of Wagner with continuing support in
principle for Russian music, though not for all its manifestations. Laroche was the
critic best equipped with musical knowledge; he showed most sympathy with the
compositions of Tchaikovsky, much less for those of Rimsky-Korsakov and
especially Musorgsky, and followed some of Eduard Hanslick's thinking, notably in
his questioning of the basis of programme music and in his opposition to Wagner's
ideas of the relationship between music and drama in opera. N.K. Kashkin wrote
about musical events in Moscow from 1862 until the next century. Like A.S.
Famintsïn, who served as a critic in St Petersburg from 1868, he found his main
employment in the conservatory; these institutions founded in the 1860s enhanced
musical life through the development of musical scholarship and in many other
respects.
Specialist music journals in the 19th century often had brief or undistinguished
lives, as was the case with Serov's Muzïka i teatr (1867–8). The professionalism
encouraged by the development of Russian society in general, and in music by
the expansion of the conservatories, made possible the publication in St
Petersburg from 1894 to 1918 of the Russkaya muzïkal'naya gazeta edited by
N.F. Findeyzen, among whose contributors was A.V. Ossovsky; this healthy
process continued with Muzïka, edited in Moscow by V.V. Derzhanovsky from
1910 to 1916; and Muzïkal'nïy sovremennik (‘Musical contemporary’) in Petrograd
from 1915 to 1917 under the editorship of A.N. Rimsky-Korsakov. Indeed, the
Silver Age of Russian poetry, the World of Art movement and the efflorescence of
the theatre arts around the turn of the century were combined with developments
in Russian art music which drew it into the mainstream of the Western tradition for
the first time. Neither Skryabin nor Stravinsky wrote criticism (the latter at least not
in his Russian years), but their compositions elicited sympathetic criticism from
L.L. Sabaneyev, Yu.D. Engel' and V.G. Karatïgin. The last, a leading protagonist
of musical Modernism and of Musorgsky, died young in 1925. Nikolai Myaskovsky
and Boris Asaf'yev had made their débuts as critics before 1917; both were also
active as composers. Asaf'yev went on to become the most influential figure in
musicology in the USSR until his death in 1949, writing and speaking prolifically
on an immense variety of musical subjects. A critic who exerted a strong influence
on his friend Shostakovich was Ivan Sollertinsky, a prodigiously gifted linguist and
theatre specialist who was a central figure in Leningrad from the 1920s until his
untimely death in 1944.
The cultural vitality of the early 20th century extended into the Soviet era, albeit in
straitened economic conditions and a new political framework. New publications
sought to give voice to the aspirations of, and to speak to, the newly enfranchised
segments of society. As time went on political considerations became increasingly
burdensome, making the expression of ideas outside the conceptual framework of
Marxism-Leninism difficult if not impossible (see Marxism). Attention was directed
towards the ‘classics’ of Russian music, contemporary Soviet compositions in a
conservative idiom, and such other music as was not held to be ‘formalist’ or in
some other way unhelpful to the building of socialist society (see Socialist
realism). All existing arts organizations were shut down in the first half of the
1930s and replaced by state-run artistic unions, including a Composers' Union
(which also admitted musicologists). The union's official organ Sovetskaya muzïka
was published, generally monthly, from 1933. The constraints of a narrowed
repertory, the severing of international links, the enforcement of received opinion
and the denial of expression to nonconformist views resulted in a climate in which
it was exceptionally difficult to practise criticism. Much Russian writing about
music in the decade or so up to 1945 (and beyond) is significant, but it demands
alert reading between the lines.
6. USA and Canada.
Newspaper coverage of performances of classical music dates back to colonial
times in the USA: Oscar Sonneck cited as the earliest known example a notice in
the South Carolina Gazette of 21–8 October 1732. Before about 1820, most such
journalism was confined to brief news stories in ornate language rather than
critical reviewing. Even Washington Irving, who frequently reviewed concerts for
New York newspapers between 1800 and 1810, wrote desultory ‘fan’ observations
rather than criticism.
Until the early 19th century, most Americans assumed that classical music meant
church music; the critic W.S.B. Mathews observed that the public understood ‘the
broadest function of music to be that of exemplifying gospel teachings’. Thomas
Hastings, the author of the first American text on music criticism (Dissertation on
Musical Taste, 1822), found even oratorio too vulgar to be artistic. But in the
1820s, as professional opera companies began to perform regularly in New York
and other large cities, weekly newspapers such as the Albion in New York started
printing unsigned reviews that treated music as art. At first these commentaries
said more about the toilette and social prominence of the audience than about the
quality of the music. Most of the anonymous writers artfully concealed their lack of
musical understanding in florid but empty verbal encomia. But with the founding of
such daily penny papers as the New York Herald and New York Sun in the early
1830s, music reviews gradually became more professional. The Herald's founder,
James Gordon Bennett, was himself a music lover who had previously written
criticism for the New-York Enquirer. The penny papers' circulations were many
times greater than those of the weeklies that had preceded them, and their
reviews brought music coverage for the first time to a large, socially diverse
audience.
William Henry Fry, a political journalist who was also a talented composer, wrote
perceptive and musically knowledgeable reviews of performances of Beethoven
and other then-advanced composers in the daily Philadelphia National Gazette
(1836–41) and the New York Tribune (1852–64). In the 1840s the British-born
Henry C. Watson began to write reviews for several daily and weekly newspapers
in New York. Watson, a former boy soprano and a well-trained musician, was
probably the first person to make a full-time living as a music critic in America (Fry
had independent wealth) and was one of the first newspaper critics to eschew
vacuous verbiage and write analytically. Watson's tone was constructive but
occasionally severe; he too continued his career into the 1860s. Other competent
critics whose writings first appeared before 1850 include Richard Grant White and
Nathaniel Parker Willis in New York and George Peck in Boston. All these writers
attest the shoddy quality of much orchestra playing in the USA before about 1875,
even in some large cities. Before 1850, neither Mozart nor Beethoven was
regarded as canonical, and Verdi was received less enthusiastically than Bellini
and Rossini. Professional collegiality and civility among critics of rival papers did
not exist; libel lawsuits and even physical threats were not uncommon. The
practice of distributing complimentary tickets to a press list began in the 1840s;
nevertheless, graft was widespread. Not only was the concert presenter's
purchase of newspaper advertising considered a precondition for review
coverage, but critics accepted bribes for puff pieces.
Although the earliest known American musical magazine dates from the late
1700s, the first prominent such publications appeared in Boston in the 1830s (and
were free from graft). General magazines such as the Dial and the Harbinger,
published by the New England transcendentalists in the 1840s, ran copious
articles about music by Emerson, Margaret Fuller, George William Curtis, Charles
Anderson Dana and other intellectuals who were not music critics. It was common
throughout the 19th century for American writers and intellectuals to promote
classical music appreciation either through writing about it or by hosting small
concerts in their homes. Walt Whitman wrote extensive opera criticism for the
Brooklyn Eagle newspaper in the 1840s and 50s, and such writers as Irving,
Longfellow, Sidney Lanier, Owen Wister and William Dean Howells wrote articles
about classical music or held musicales.
The most influential critic to emerge from magazines was John Sullivan Dwight, a
Boston-born Harvard graduate, lapsed minister (like Emerson) and amateur
musician who had difficulty following an orchestral score. In his writings the
transcendentalist-influenced Dwight became the first American cleric fully to affirm
appreciation of art music as separate from religion (he dubbed music critics
‘missionaries of art’), though he tended to fall back into religious metaphor in
writing about Beethoven (‘not formal prayer, I grant, but earnest deep
unspeakable aspiration’). After writing for the Dial and the Harbinger, Dwight
published his own magazine from 1852 to 1881. Dwight's Journal of Music carried
reviews of concerts from all over the USA by Dwight and his correspondents.
Notwithstanding his worship of Beethoven, Dwight was a discerning and objective
critic, more open-minded than some commentators have credited.

After the Civil War, musical activity in Chicago and Cincinnati caught up with that
in the eastern cities and was covered by such critics as George Upton (Chicago)
and W.S.B. Mathews (Chicago and elsewhere). Literary magazines such as
Century Illustrated, Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, and Scribner's, emulating the
transcendentalist magazines of the 1840s, published many articles and essays
about music, by both literary figures and newspaper critics.
The leading New York newspapers sent correspondents to cover the first
Bayreuth Festival in 1876. By the last quarter of the 19th century the writings of
music critics began to have a demonstrable effect on public policies. Dwight's
advocacy of university chairs in music was followed by the first such appointment
in the USA, that of John Knowles Paine at Harvard; Upton's championship led city
fathers to found the Chicago SO under the baton of Theodore Thomas. The
founding of the Boston SO in 1881 and the Metropolitan Opera in 1883 roughly
coincided with the emergence of a new generation of critics who remained
influential into the 1930s. In New York the big four were Henry E. Krehbiel at the
New York Tribune (1884–1923), William J. Henderson at the New York Times
(1887–1902) and New York Sun (1902–37), Henry T. Finck at the New York Post
(1881–1924; many of Finck's reviews were ghost-written by his wife, Abbie
Cushman) and James Gibbons Huneker, a well-trained pianist who wrote about
music, theatre, literature and painting for many newspapers and magazines from
the 1880s to 1921. In Boston the leaders were William F. Apthorp, who wrote
primarily for the Boston Evening Transcript (1881–1903), Philip Hale of the Boston
Herald (1903–33), Louis Elson of the Boston Daily Advertiser (1886–1920) and
H.T. Parker of the Evening Transcript (1905–34). Krehbiel, a brilliant autodidact
who never attended college, was a physically imposing man noted for his
humourless pontificality; he believed that not only intonation but correctness of
phrasing and balance of tone in an orchestra were ‘matters of fact’. Henderson,
also brilliant though an especially caustic reviewer, was considered the ultimate
authority in the USA on operatic singing. In contrast to Krehbiel and Henderson,
Finck was amiable and rarely destructive. All three were militant Wagner
enthusiasts who helped establish the composer's success in the USA. Of the
Boston critics, Apthorp was closest to Finck in relaxed prose style and lack of
dogmatism, while Elson's reviews were like witty critiques of bad grammar. Hale
became best known for his mammoth programme notes for the Boston SO, and
Parker's musically untutored impressionism was somewhat akin to Huneker's
style. The writings of these New York and Boston critics did much to consolidate a
consensus on the canon of great composers.
From around the 1880s to World War I, the ‘Gilded Age’, when opera reached its
peak of popularity and prima donnas were viewed like movie stars, critics attained
a celebrity they never again enjoyed in the USA. The opera-going public followed
their reviews as if they were reading sports scores; Krehbiel even appeared in
billboard advertising for the New York Tribune. At critics’ funerals tributes poured
in even from the conductors and singers they had reviewed. Although the Gilded
Age critics sometimes fraternized with musicians, they stopped taking graft as
many of their predecessors had done. Poorly paid, almost all had to supplement
their incomes by writing music appreciation books, giving lectures and teaching.
Huneker differed substantially from his colleagues in his forward-looking attitudes
toward such avant-garde composers as Debussy, Strauss and even Schoenberg,
in his polymathic grasp of other art forms, and in his highly literary, poetic prose.
The mantle of Huneker's iconoclasm was inherited by the journalist H.L. Mencken,
who wrote opinionated and verbally vibrant criticism for the Baltimore Sun and the
American Mercury, as well as programme notes for the Baltimore SO. The heirs to
Huneker's avant-garde sympathies were Carl Van Vechten and Paul Rosenfeld,
who wrote for various newspapers and magazines from the 1910s. Both were
influenced by Huneker's rich prose style, as were Hale and Lawrence Gilman of
the New York Herald Tribune (1923–39). However, the new cultural magazines
that appeared in the 1910s and 20s were less committed to classical music
appreciation than their predecessors, and as a result classical music began to
fade from general cultural discourse in American magazines.
After World War I, the Gilded Age critics were gradually replaced by such leaner
prose stylists as Olin Downes (New York Times, 1924–55) and the composers
Deems Taylor (New York World, 1921–5 and New York American, 1931–2) and
Virgil Thomson (New York Herald Tribune, 1940–54). The down-to-earth Downes,
a champion of Sibelius, helped convince many American men that a love of
classical music was not effete. The outspoken Thomson demolished received
opinion and sacred cows in almost every review. Taylor, a brilliant explicator,
achieved his greatest impact through his radio broadcasts, reaching a greater
audience than any classical music critic before or since. Alfred Frankenstein in
San Francisco and Claudia Cassidy in Chicago also achieved national
reputations. The first important woman critic on a major metropolitan paper to
write under her own name was the pianist Olga Samaroff (New York Post, 1926–
8). African-Americans began contributing classical music criticism in black-owned
magazines and newspapers around 1900. One black music critic, Cleveland Allen,
also wrote for the mainstream press Musical America in the 1920s. A late 20th-
century trend in American criticism was presaged when Gilbert Seldes, classical
music critic at the Philadelphia Evening Ledger in 1914–5, bestowed classical
music's intellectual cachet on certain forms of popular music in his book The
Seven Lively Arts (1924). In the 1930s such established newspaper critics as
Irving Kolodin and Bernard Haggin began to review phonograph recordings.
Meanwhile, American avant-garde composers published their own music criticism
in the quarterly magazine Modern Music (1924–46), which was assiduously read
by the New York and Boston critics.
In Canada classical music criticism has been written in both English and French.
The first highly competent Canadian critic, the composer and church musician
Guillaume Couture, wrote in both languages in the late 19th century, chiefly for
Montreal newspapers. English-language newspapers in Montreal, Toronto,
Winnipeg, Vancouver and Victoria all had classical music critics in the first half of
the 20th century. The outstanding Canadian critic immediately before World War II
was the pianist-composer Léo-Pol Morin, who wrote in French, primarily in
Quebec City.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
a: germany, austria
b: france, belgium
c: britain to 1890
d: 1890–1945
e: italy
f: russia
g: usa, canada
Criticism, §II: History to 1945: Bibliograph
a: germany, austria
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E.D. Mackerness: The English Musical Sensibility: Studies in Representative
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H.M. Schueller: ‘The Use and Decorum of Music as Described in British
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H.M. Schueller: ‘Correspondences between Music and the Sister Arts, According
to 18th-Century Aesthetic Theory’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, xi
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F.H. Teahan: The Literary Criticism of Music in England, 1660–1789 (diss., Trinity
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J. Wilson, ed.: Roger North on Music (London, 1959)
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R. Lonsdale: Dr. Charles Burney: a Literary Biography (Oxford, 1965/R)
C. Grabo: ‘The Practical Aesthetics of Thomas Busby's Music Reviews’, Journal
of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, xxv (1966), 37–45
W.E. Houghton and J.H. Slingerland, eds.: The Wellesley Index to Victorian
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L. Lipking: The Ordering of the Arts in Eighteenth-Century England (Princeton,
NJ, 1970)
L.M. Ruff: ‘The Social Significance of the 17th Century English Music Treatises’,
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K.G. Ruttkay: ‘The Critical Reception of Italian Opera in England in the Early
Eighteenth Century’, Angol és amerikai filológiai tanulmányok [Studies in
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T. Fenner: Leigh Hunt and Opera Criticism: the ‘Examiner’ Years, 1801–1821
(Lawrence, KS, 1972)
J.W. Binns: ‘John Case and The Praise of Musicke’, ML, lv (1974), 444–53
J.C. Kassler: The Science of Music in Britain, 1714–1830: a Catalogue of
Writings, Lectures and Inventions (New York, 1979)
P. Lovell: ‘“Ancient” Music in Eighteenth-Century England’, ML, lx (1979), 401–15
C. Kent: ‘Periodical Critics of Drama, Music & Art, 1830–1914: a Preliminary List’,
Victorian Periodicals Review, xiii (1980), 31–55
R.B. Larsson: The Beautiful, the Sublime and the Picturesque in Eighteenth-
Century Musical Thought in Britain (diss., SUNY, Buffalo, 1980)
S. Banfield: ‘Aesthetics and Criticism’, Music in Britain: the Romantic Age, 1800–
1914, ed. N. Temperley (London, 1981/R), 455–73
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MQ, lxxxiv (2000), 84–122
d: 1890–1945
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M.M. Paget: ‘Some Curiosities of Musical Criticism’, PMA, xlii (1915–16), 69–88
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1923, rev. and enlarged 2/1931/R)
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977–81, 1076–9
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6), 44–5, 151–2
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(London, 1928)
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1938, rev. 10/1970 by J.O. Ward, enlarged 1983 by D. Arnold as The New
Oxford Companion to Music)
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G. Sampson: ‘Notes on Criticism’, ML, xxiii (1942), 311–18
S. Fishman: ‘The Aesthetics of Sir Donald Tovey’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art
Criticism, vi (1947), 60–67
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(London, 1947/R)
J. Culshaw: ‘The Objective Fallacy’, MMR, lxxix (1949), 37–42
W.B. Dean: ‘Music – and Letters? an Impertinent Enquiry’, ML, xxx (1949), 376–
80
W.B. Dean: ‘Further Thoughts on Operatic Criticism’, Opera, iii (1952), 655–9
W. Godley: ‘Some Notes on Criticism’, The Score, no.7 (1952), 51–64
E.D. Mackerness: The English Musical Sensibility: Studies in Representative
Literary Discussions and Periodical Criticism from Thomas Morley to W.J.
Turner (diss., Manchester U., 1952)
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S. Banfield: ‘Aesthetics and Criticism’, Music in Britain: the Romantic Age, 1800–
1914, ed. N. Temperley (London, 1981/R), 455–73
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Gurney and his Contemporaries’, ML, lxiii (1982), 17–30
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N.C. Scaife: British Music Criticism in a New Era: Studies in Critical Thought
1894–1945 (diss., U. of Oxford, 1994)
e: italy
G. Monaldi: Il melodramma in Italia nella critica del secolo XIX (Campobasso,
1927)
A. Parente: ‘Critica e storiografia musicale, premesse metodologiche’, RaM, iii
(1930), 372–96
G. del Valle de Paz: ‘La critica musicale in Italia, vita e cultura musicale intorno al
1870’, RMI, xxxix (1932), 493–512
G. Pannain: ‘La critica musicale come critica d'arte’, La vita del linguaggio
musicale (Milan, 1947), 131–40
M. Mila: L'esperienza musicale e l'estetica (Turin, 1950, 2/1965)
A. Della Corte: ‘Le critiche musicali di Filippo Filippi’, RMI, lvi (1954), 45–60, 141–
59 [also, liv (1952), 45–54]
A. Della Corte: La critica musicale e i critici (Turin, 1961)
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P. Rattalino: ‘Le riviste musicali italiane del Novecento I: dal 1900 al 1918’,
Rassegna musicale Curci, xx/2 (1967), 66–80; ‘II: dal 1918 al 1936’, xx/3
(1967), 142–57; ‘III: dal 1936 al 1967’, xx/4 (1967), 214–30
M. De Angelis: La musica del Granduca: vita musicale e correnti critiche a
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M. Conati: ‘I periodici teatrali e musicali italiani a metà Ottocento’, Periodica
Musica, vii (1989), 13–18; repr. in La Musica come linguaggio universale:
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F. Nicolodi and P. Trovato: ‘Il lessico della critica musicale italiana (LCMI),
1600–1960’, Le fonti musicali in Italia: studi e ricerche, v (1991), 227–35
M. Capra: ‘La Casa Editrice Sonzogno tra giornalismo e impresariato’, Casa
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f: russia
(i) Primary sources
C. Cui: La musique en Russie (Paris, 1880/R)
A.N. Serov: Kriticheskiye stat'i [Critical articles], ed. N. Stoyanovsky and others
(St Petersburg, 1892–5)

G.A. Larosh: Muzïkal'no-kriticheskiye stat'i [Articles of music criticism] (St
Petersburg, 1894)
V.V. Stasov: Sobraniye sochineniy 1847–1906 [Collection of works 1847–1906]
(St Petersburg, 1894–1906)
P.I. Chaykovsky: Muzïkal'nïye fel'yetonï i zametki [Musical feuilletons and notes]
(Moscow, 1898)
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collection of articles about operas and ballets] (Moscow, 1911)
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Yakovlev, i (Moscow, 1913) [on Glinka]; ii (Moscow, 1922–4) [on
Tchaikovsky]
Ts.A. Kyui: Muzïkal'no-kriticheskiye stat'i [Critical articles on music] (Petrograd,
1918)
V.G. Karatïgin: Zhizn', deyatel'nost, stat'i, materialï [Life, career, articles,
materials] (Leningrad, 1927)
I.I. Sollertinsky: Izbrannïye stat'i o muzïke [Selected articles about music], ed. M.
Druskin (Leningrad and Moscow, 1946)
A.N. Serov: Izbrannïye stat'i [Selected articles], ed. G.N. Khubov (Moscow, 1950–
57)
B.V. Asaf'yev: Izbrannïye stat'i o russkoy muzïke [Selected articles about Russian
music], i, ed. N. Braudo (Moscow, 1952)
Ts.A. Kyui: Izbrannïye stat'i [Selected articles], ed. Yu.A. Kremlyov (Leningrad,
1952) [incl. nearly complete list of pubd articles on music]
V.V. Stasov: Izbrannïye sochineniya: zhivopis', skul'ptura, muzïka [Selected
works on art, sculpture and music], ed. Ye.D. Stasova and others (Moscow,
1952)
B.V. Asaf'yev: Izbrannïye trudï [Selected works], ed. T.N. Livanova and others
(Moscow, 1952–7) [incl. complete list of works, v, 295–380]
N.D. Kashkin: Stat'i o russkoy muzïke i muzïkantakh [Articles on Russian music
and musicians] (Moscow, 1953)
N.D. Kashkin: Izbrannïye stat'i o P.I. Chaykovskom [Selected articles on P.I.
Tchaikovsky] (Moscow, 1954)
V.F. Odoyevsky: Muzïkal'no-literaturnoye naslediye [Musical literary heritage], ed.
G.B. Bernandt (Moscow, 1956) [incl. complete list of writings]
I. Sollertinsky: Muzïkal'no-istoricheskiye ėtyudï [Studies in music history], ed. M.
Druskin (Leningrad, 1956)
N.D. Kashkin: Izbrannïye stat'i o M.I. Glinke [Selected articles on M.I. Glinka]
(Moscow, 1958)
A.V. Ossovsky: Izbrannïye stat'i, vospominaniya [Selected articles,
reminiscences], ed. Ye. Bronfin (Leningrad, 1961)
I.I. Sollertinsky: Istoricheskiye ėtyudï [Historical studies], ed. M. Druskin
(Leningrad, 1963)
I.I. Sollertinsky: Kriticheskiye stat'i [Critical articles], ed. M. Druskin (Leningrad,
1963)
N.Ya. Myaskovsky: Sobraniye materialov v dvukh tomakh [Collection of materials
in two volumes], ii: Literaturnoye naslediye [Literary heritage], ed. S.I.
Shlifshteyn (Moscow, 2/1964)
B.V. Asaf'yev: Izbrannïye stat'i o muzïkal'nom obrazovanii i prosveshchenii
[Selected articles about musical training and education], ed. Ye.M. Orlova
(Leningrad, 1965)
V.G. Karatïgin: Izbrannïye stat'i [Selected articles] (Moscow, 1965)
B.V. Asaf'yev: Kriticheskiye stat'i, ocherki i retsenzii [Critical articles, essays and
reviews], ed. I.V. Beletsky (Moscow, 1967)
F. Jonas, ed. and trans.: Vladimir Vasilevich Stasov: Selected Essays on Music
(London, 1968)
Yu.D. Ėngel': Glazami sovremennika. Izbrannïye stat'i o russkoy muzïke 1898–
1918 [Through the eyes of a contemporary. Selected articles about Russian
music 1898–1918] (Moscow, 1971)
A.V. Ossovsky: Muzïkal'no-kritcheskiye stat'i [Critical articles on music]
(Leningrad, 1971)
I.I. Sollertinsky: Stat'i o balete [Articles about ballet], ed. M. Druskin (Leningrad,
1973)
B.V. Asaf'yev: O balete: stat'i – retsenzii – vospominaniya [Ballet: articles –
reviews – memoirs] (Leningrad, 1974)
G.A. Larosh: Izbrannïye stat'i v pyati vïpuskakh [Selected articles in five volumes],
ed. G.B. Bernandt and A.A. Gozenpud (Leningrad, 1974–8)
V.V. Stasov: Stat'i o muzïke [Articles on music], ed. V.V. Protopopov (Moscow,
1974–80)
V.M. Bogdanov-Berezovsky: Stat'i, vospominaniya, pis'ma [Articles,
reminiscences, letters], ed. L.M. Kutateladze and M.A. Bochaver (Leningrad
and Moscow, 1978)
B.V. Asaf'yev: O khorovom iskusstve [The choral art] (Leningrad, 1980)
B.V. Asaf'yev: O simfonicheskoy i kamernoy muzïke [About symphonic and
chamber music] (Leningrad, 1981)
Ė.K. Rozenov: Stat'i o muzïke [Articles about music], ed. N.N. Sokolov (Moscow,
1982)
A.N. Serov: Stat'i o muzïke [Articles about music], ed. V.V. Protopopov (Moscow,
1984–90)
B.V. Asaf'yev: Ob opere: izbrannïye stat'i [About opera: selected articles]
(Leningrad, 1985)
P.I. Chaykovsky: Muzïkal'no-kriticheskiye stat'i [Critical articles on music]
(Leningrad, 1986)
S. Campbell, ed.: Russians on Russian Music 1830–1880 (Cambridge, 1994)
(ii) Other literature
Yu.A. Kremlyov: Russkaya mïsl' o muzïke [Russian thinking on music]
(Leningrad, 1954–60)
T.N. Livanova and O. Vinogradova: Muzïkal'naya bibliografiya russkoy
periodicheskoy pechati XIX veka [A musical bibliography of the Russian
periodical press in the nineteenth century] (Moscow, 1960–79)
T.N. Livanova: Opernaya kritika v Rossii [Opera criticism in Russia] (Moscow,
1966–73)
G.B. Bernandt and I.M. Yampol'sky: Kto pisal o muzïke: bio-bibliograficheskiy
slovar' muzïkal'nïkh kritikov i lits, pisavshikh o muzïke v dorevolyutsionnoy
Rossii i SSSR [Writers on music: a bio-bibliographical dictionary of music
critics and persons who have written about music in pre-revolutionary Russia
and the USSR] (Moscow, 1971–89)
A.M. Stupel': Russkaya mïsl' o muzïke 1895–1917: ocherk istorii russkoy
musïkal'noy kritiki [Russian thinking on music 1895–1917: an outline history
of Russian music criticism] (Leningrad, 1980)
g: usa, canada
GroveA
H. Krehbiel: Review of the New York Musical Season 1885–1890 (New York and
London, 1886–1890)
W.S.B. Mathews: A Hundred Years of Music in America (Chicago, 1889/R)
W.F. Apthorp: Musicians and Music-Lovers and other Essays (New York, 1894/R,
5/1908)
H. Krehbiel: How to Listen to Music (New York, 1896/R)

W.J. Henderson: What is Good Music? Suggestions to Persons Desiring to
Cultivate a Taste in Musical Art (London, 1898/R)
L. Karr: ‘Musical Critics of the New York Daily Press’, Musical Leader and
Concert-Goer, ix/10 (1905), 16
O. Sonneck: Early Concert Life in America (1731–1800) (Leipzig, 1907/R)
G. Seldes: The Seven Lively Arts (New York, 1924/R)
MM [League of Composers's Review to April 1925] (1924–46) [see also M.
Lederman (1983) and R.M. Meckna (1984)]
H.T. Finck: My Adventures in the Golden Age of Music (New York, 1926/R)
J. Huneker: Essays, ed. H.L. Mencken (New York, 1929/R)
O. Thompson: Practical Musical Criticism (New York, 1934/R)
P. Rosenfeld: Discoveries of a Music Critic (New York, 1936/R)
D. Taylor: Of Men and Music (New York, 1937)
O. Thompson: ‘An American School of Criticism: the Legacy Left by W.J.
Henderson, Richard Aldrich, and their Colleagues of the Old Guard’, MQ, xxiii
(1937), 428–39
R. Sabin: ‘Early American Composers and Critics’, MQ, xxiv (1938), 210–18
P. Hale: Great Concert Music: Philip Hale's Boston Symphony Programme Notes,
ed. J.N. Burk (New York, 1939/R)
V. Thomson: The State of Music (New York, 1939/R, rev. 2/1962)
R. Aldrich: Concert Life in New York, 1902–1923 (New York, 1941/R)
York, 1946/R)
V. Thomson: The Art of Judging Music (New York, 1948/R)
R. Faner: Walt Whitman and Opera (Philadelphia, 1951/R)
W.T. Upton: William Henry Fry: American Journalist and Composer-Critic (New
York, 1954/R) [see also review by C. Hatch, MQ, xl (1954), 606]
R.F. Goldman: ‘Music Criticism in the United States’, The Score, no.12 (1955), 85
H. Pleasants: The Agony of Modern Music (New York, 1955)
C.R. Reis: Composers, Conductors, and Critics (New York, 1955)
L. Cheslock, ed.: H.L. Mencken on Music: a Selection of his Writings on Music
together with an Account of H.L. Mencken's Musical Life and a History of the
Saturday Night Club, ed. L. Cheslock (New York, 1961/R)
A.T. Schwab: James Gibbons Huneker: Critic of the Seven Arts (Stanford, CA,
1963)
I. Lowens: Music and Musicians in Early America (New York, 1964)
V. Thomson: Music Reviewed, 1940–1954 (New York, 1967)
J.A. Mussulman: Music in the Cultured Generation: a Social History of Music in
America, 1870–1900 (Evanston, IL, 1971)
L. Engel: The Critics (New York, 1976)
H.C. Schonberg: ‘What Happens when Music Critics Get Together’, New York
Times (28 Aug 1977)
M. Lederman: The Life and Death of a Small Magazine (‘Modern Music’, 1924–
1946) (Brooklyn, NY, 1983)
I. Sablosky: What they Heard: Music in America, 1852–1881, from the Pages of
Dwight's Journal of Music (Baton Rouge, LA, 1986)
V.B. Lawrence: Strong on Music: the New York Music Scene in the Days of
George Templeton Strong (New York, 1987)
R. Kitson, ed.: Dwight's Journal of Music 1852–81 (Ann Arbor, 1991)
J. Horowitz: Understanding Toscanini: a Social History of American Concert Life
(Berkeley, 1993)
G.D. Goss: Jean Sibelius and Olin Downes: Music, Friendship, Criticism (Boston,
1995)
O.F. Saloman: Beethoven's Symphonies and J.S. Dwight (Boston, 1995)
M. Kammen: The Lively Arts: Gilbert Seldes and the Transformation of Cultural
Criticism in the United States (New York, 1996)
M.N. Grant: Maestros of the Pen: a History of Classical Music Criticism in America
(Boston, 1998)
Criticism
III. Since 1945
1. Introduction.
2. 1945–65.
3. 1965–80.
4. Since 1980.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Criticism, §III: Since 1945
1. Introduction.
Superficially, music criticism during the second half of the 20th century conformed
to models developed 100 years earlier. Critics for newspapers and magazines
were expected to inform readers about a composition or performance by using
appropriate metaphors, images and adjectives, with only occasional reference to
analytical detail. The dominant critical method was comparison: juxtaposing a
particular performance with others by the same artist or with performances of the
same composition by different artists, or juxtaposing a new work with others by the
same composer or in a similar style. Criticism thus continued to be preoccupied
with issues of tradition.
On a deeper level, however, criticism changed dramatically during this period
because the world around it changed. Immediately after World War II the
European Classical tradition was the unchallenged focus of high musical
aspiration; the Romantic performing tradition remained vital, with some of its most
eminent avatars still active. By the end of the century, the main critical
controversies no longer concerned new music or performance styles, but whether
classical music had a greater claim on any culture's attention than other forms of
music and entertainment. This shift in circumstances and attitudes affected critics’
reactions to music and redefined their relationships with other segments of the
music world.
The critic's relationship with the music audience changed because readers could
no longer be assumed to share a similar background of musical experience. Pop
music and world music became more dominant, challenging the boundaries and
claims of classical-music criticism.
The critic's relationship with composers changed because the notion of musical
progress had become obsolete. The avant garde no longer had the power to
shock, indeed its rebellious gestures had become familiar mannerisms. A genial
eclecticism ruled the international scene. Critics were no longer presumed to
articulate ‘advanced’ tastes, and neither composers not critics issued manifestos
of the sort once associated with musical Modernism.
The critic's relationship with performers changed because the bulk of the concert-
hall repertory had long since solidified into a slowly mutating canon of basic works.
Every new performance competed with almost a century of recorded repertory.
Novelty often meant not unfamiliar music but theatrical concert lighting or
‘crossover’ programming in which pop selections were interwoven with art music
pieces.
The critic's relationship with the music business changed because there were
fewer virtuoso performers whose high fees were justified by their ability
consistently to fill large concert halls. Most classical recording companies were
taken over by large corporations that were ever more concerned about bottom-line
earnings and the disparity between classical and popular recording sales. As
marketing pressures increased on both artists and record labels, the music
business and its impact on performance and composition became a larger part of
the critic's brief.
Critics were also influenced by trends in music scholarship, in particular the
growing emphasis on the political and cultural contexts of music and music-
making. These in turn related to such far-reaching cultural transformations as the
spread of the classical tradition in Asia, the increasing importance of the USA as
the centre of the music business, diminishing state support for classical music and
opera in Europe, and political changes that altered the institutions and cultural
orientation of the former Soviet bloc countries. In reshaping the traditions that
formed the critic's touchstones, these developments affected the critic's role in and
perspective on the music world.
2. 1945–65.
During the years after the Second World War, the vigour of the musical scene
included an unquestioned commitment to music criticism by newspapers and
magazines, along with an active readership. Criticism, both in the United States
and in Europe, was often energetic and contentious, indicating a sense that
something important was at stake in the music being heard. But there were also
fault lines in the musical scene that hinted at larger problems. By the 1950s, what
Virgil Thomson called ‘the “modern music” war’ led to an almost complete
disengagement, in both Europe and the USA, between mainstream concert
audiences and the major strands of contemporary composition. Symphony
orchestras, led for the most part by conductors trained in pre-war Europe, tended
to focus on 19th-century masterworks. In Darmstadt, Cologne and other centres of
the modernist avant garde, new institutions and audiences evolved out of those
associated with Modernist composers after World War I. American
experimentalists such as John Cage, Harry Partch and Conlon Nancarrow
attracted their own groups of players, supporters and listeners. The mainstream
audiences tended to resist the lures of what was called ‘modern music’, preferring
19th century repertory, or 20th century works by such composers as Britten,
Rachmaninoff and Menotti, whose musical language was rooted in late Romantic
tonality.
Critics responded variously to these developments. Some blamed performers for
failing to introduce listeners to new music; others argued that ‘middlebrow’
audience taste was the nub of the problem. Some criticized composers who
asserted that musical composition was neither dependent on nor answerable to
audience acclaim; others faulted composers (and fellow critics) for championing
music that intentionally shocked the very listeners that were supposedly being
courted. Defenders of Modernism pointed out that rejection of contemporary music
by audiences and critics was nothing new. In his Lexicon of Musical Invective
(1953), Nicholas Slonimsky adduced examples from history in support of his view
that ‘unfamiliar’ music typically took 40 years to win acceptance.
The pro-modernist position came under attack by populist critics, notably Henry
Pleasants, who in The Agony of Modern Music (1955) dismissed the classical-
music critic as an ‘effete descendant of a warrior clan decimated in battle and
discredited by history’ (p.59). Pleasants predicted the ‘end of the European
musical tradition’ and the ascendancy of pop music and jazz. Indeed, a
romanticism of the ‘folk’ developed alongside and in opposition to Modernism; it
was characterized by expressions of admiration for the supposedly more natural,
less rational musical idioms of non-Western cultures and jazz. The impulse had
been strong even earlier in the century among art music composers like
Stravinsky and Bartók. Now it became associated with pop music and rock 'n roll
which found large and enthusiastic audiences who were either suspicious of or
uninterested in the intellectual complexities of ‘highbrow’ music. By the 1980s folk
romanticism, with its slightly condescending gaze at what Olin Downes called ‘the
genius of the simple people’, blossomed into fully fledged multiculturalism, which
rejected any claim of superiority, and questioned any claim of uniqueness, for the
Western classical tradition.
Despite these growing tensions, the music world in the immediate postwar
decades appeared to be in the flush of health. Critics wrote at length and to an
interested public about the débuts of new artists; orchestras expanded their
schedules; touring soloists sold out concert halls. Horowitz and Heifetz, Reiner
and Szell, Casals and Rubinstein possessed unquestioned prestige as masters of
their respective arts; they became cultural icons, appearing on the covers of news
magazines without appearing to be mere entertainers courting popular acclaim.
This vigorous performing culture, with its multiple performances of a limited
repertory had an impact on the style of criticism: reviews tended to focus more on
the event and on the details of performance style rather than on the music and its
construction. But there were also critics, who came to their maturity in the 1950s,
and combined advocacy for favoured new styles with close attention to scores.
The musicologist Paul Henry Lang, who wrote for the New York Herald-Tribune,
served as editor of the journal, Musical Quarterly and was known for his catholic
tastes and refined assessments. In Germany, Hans Heinz Stuckenschmidt
continued his long career as an enthusiastic analyst of new music. In Switzerland,
Willi Schuh, writing for the Neue Züricher Zeitung wrote broadly on 20th century
music. In England, Neville Cardus, at the Manchester Guardian, wrote polemical
dissents, arguing that criticism had become sterile in its advocacy for atonal and
serial musical styles. But composers also became active as critics, sometimes
writing polemically, sometimes analytically, explaining their tastes and styles.
Boulez, Carter, Stockhausen, Rorem and others were active during this period;
Stravinsky appeared as an acerbic and mordant critic in the books of
conversations written by Robert Craft.
There were also many distinguished critics who approached the contemporary
musical scene with a scholar’s temperament and specialized knowledge who were
important figures for several decades. In England, Ernest Newman, the most
celebrated British critic of the century and author of a magisterial biography of
Wagner, finished his career in 1958, retiring from the Sunday Times. Martin
Cooper, as critic for the Daily Telegraph and editor of the Musical Times,
combined expertise in French and Russian repertory with an urbane style; Winton
Dean helped shape modern understanding of Handel, but was also known for his
writing on French and Italian opera. Stanley Sadie, who was just beginning his
career at the time, later extended the tradition of the critic-scholar on an unusual
scale, by editing the various editions of this dictionary. Other critics of the period
included Guido Pannain in Italy, who wrote for the Rassegna musicale, and Stefan
Kisielewski in Poland, editor of the musical weekly, Ruch muzyczny.
But as the canonical repertory congealed and recordings proliferated, some critics
also began to question whether music could be treated as an autonomous art form
that could be discussed in relative isolation from surrounding political and cultural
forces. The musicologist Joseph Kerman, in his influential book Opera as Drama
(1956), argued that opera should be treated as unity of disparate arts, none of
which could be split off from the whole. Beginning in the 1960s, the Marxist critic
Theodor Adorno began to have a greater influence on other scholars with his
densely packed social and political analyses of music that rebelled against the
notion of musical autonomy. Later, under the influence of literary theory, which
was starting to examine the nature of texts and their interpretation, critics began to
describe music in a different way. The French literary critic, Roland Barthes, wrote
about the challenge of separating music criticism from its reliance on the
‘adjective’ and attempted to evoke the musical experience by examining such
notions as the ‘grain’ of a voice, or contemplating the difference between playing
music and listening to it. Other literary approaches were used in such journals as
Musique en jeu. By the 1980s, French literary theory had influenced the
vocabulary and style of much musical scholarship.
Among journalistic critics, Virgil Thomson stood out for relating music to its
economic, social and political surroundings. His writing combined graceful prose,
supple and often startling musical descriptions, and an insider's awareness of the
music world. In the 1962 edition of The State of Music (first published in 1939),
Thomson wrote that ‘What music needs right now is the sociological treatment, a
documented study of its place in business, in policy and culture’.
3. 1965–80.
In the mid-1960s, with the advent of an international counterculture foreshadowed
by Chuck Berry's song Roll over Beethoven, sociology did become more important
to musical culture, criticism and scholarship. Not only Beethoven had to roll over,
but high art and culture as conceived by the majority of classical composers and
critics. Folk romanticism, populist, egalitarian politics and an increasing focus on
youth culture all played a part in this revolution. In the USA such critics as Robert
Christgau, Greil Marcus, John Rockwell, Whitney Balliett and Nat Hentoff wrote
about rock music and jazz with the same seriousness as their classical
colleagues. In addition, new currents were transforming the classical tradition from
within. Composers like Philip Glass and Steve Reich were influenced by non-
Western cultures in which a composition was viewed not as a narrative drama,
complete with thematic characters and a picaresque tale of transformations, but
as a meditative experience involving slow-paced evolution or quirky rhythmic
variations. In the theatrical events known as ‘happenings’, the point was not the
sound itself but the deliberately dadaist or shocking uses to which it was put. Hans
Werner Henze, Cornelius Cardew and others wrote music of an explicitly political
nature which could not be judged by exclusively musical criteria.
These developments posed a challenge to journalistic criticism, which for the most
part remained focussed on the debates about audiences and modernist music.
Some critics, such as William Mann, Andrew Porter and Desmond Shawe-Taylor
in England, chronicled the evolution of various avant gardes and their musical
techniques. In the USA Leighton Kerner, Tom Johnson and Kyle Gann devoted
sympathetic attention to new music, while Michael Steinberg, Martin Bernheimer
and a few others wrote lengthy and serious appraisals of the changing musical
scene, mixing scholarly acuteness with passionate assessments. A prominent
conservative voice was that of Harold C. Schonberg, chief critic of the New York
Times from 1960 to 1981. An expert in the history of piano performance, he
favoured strong virtuoso personalities and became a thoroughly schooled
representative of mainstream audience tastes.
In England, where musicology and music journalism were less strictly segregated
than in the USA, the tradition of the critic-scholar included such figures as Ernest
Newman, Martin Cooper, Winton Dean and Stanley Sadie, all of whom regularly
took note of musicological news and discoveries. Among their counterparts in the
USA were the pianist Charles Rosen, the musicologist Joseph Kerman and
Andrew Porter, a South African long resident in England who in 1972 became
music critic of the New Yorker magazine. Unlike most American critics, Porter saw
himself as an active participant in the musical project rather than a detached
observer. He treated each event as part of an elaborately evolving tradition of

composition and interpretation. In his leisurely feuilleton-like essays, Porter
stressed place and tradition in music at a time in American culture when both had
become subsidiary to impact and effect.
4. Since 1980.
By the 1980s Modernism and serialism were increasingly under attack from
composers as well as critics. In the USA, the dismantlement of school orchestras
and music education produced a generation of younger listeners who found the
entire debate about modern music irrelevant because the classical tradition itself
was becoming alien. This decline in centrality anticipated by about a decade signs
of shifting emphasis in Europe as well. With the weakening of public support for
the arts in Europe, the development of a worldwide pop industry and the
burgeoning of multi-cultural communities throughout the West, many of the
problems first defined in American criticism began to be raised elsewhere.
Ironically, the only countries where the European classical tradition retained its
prestige were those in which it had become important after World War II: Japan
and South Korea, which by the 1980s had also become the world’s largest
manufacturers of the quintessentially Western instrument, the piano.
Much criticism often examined the unusual condition of art music, its relationship
to the public, and the dominance of recordings over live concerts. In
Czechoslovakia, the musicologist and critic Ivan Vojtěch continued Adorno's
project in discussions of the political meanings of music. Joachim Kaiser, writing
for the Suddeutsche Zeitung in Germany, and Gérard Condé writing for Le monde
in France were highly respected critics with a wide range. While in the Eastern
bloc, until the fall of Communism, the classical art music tradition was preserved
as if in amber from the forces of commercial and pop culture, elsewhere changes
were unmistakable, particularly in the USA. In the 1980s and 90s, many of the
American Music magazines that had regularly run essays on music and record
reviews, including High Fidelity, Ovation, Keynote, Opus, Musical America and Fi,
ceased publication, and journalistic coverage of classical music was greatly
diminshed – symptomatic of the weakening of the art music traditions in all
Western countries. Many British magazines like Gramophone and HiFi News and
Record Review continued to thrive, their number even increasing with the
introduction of the BBC Music Magazine, but this was more a reflection of the
different economics of English magazine distribution and advertising than a
reflection of a British Renaissance in art music culture. Specialist magazines
dealing with particular instruments or performance styles also continued
publication, benefiting from a dedicated, if small, readership. But at many
American newspapers, music criticism fell on particularly hard times. The
expectation at some was that concerts would be written about only if they were
repeated, so the review could serve explicitly as a consumer guide. The declining
importance of classical-music criticism became a regular subject of anxious
conversation among critics. This decline, though, also signaled a shift in cultural
interests which for some, were not entirely unwelcome. John Rockwell, who wrote
sympathetically about almost all genres of music, argued that ‘a “music critic” had
no business excluding entire traditions that most of the world thought of as “music”
just because they didn't conform to his own cultural prejudices’. He celebrated
eclecticism, refusing to draw clearcut aesthetic distinctions among performance
artists like Laurie Anderson, rock groups like the Rolling Stones and composers
like Philip Glass. At the opposite end of the spectrum, Samuel Lipman, a fiercely
polemical critic whose tastes were a mixture of conservative populism and
intellectual elitism, attacked critics for lacking conviction, audiences for embracing
‘easy listening’ music and government patronage for turning ‘art into
entertainment’. Another viewpoint was articulated by Edward Rothstein, who
suggested that the chasm between audiences and composers resulted from the
kinds of meaning music created and the different social and cultural purposes it
served. He argued that critics could assess different kinds of music on their own
terms, while also comparing them and making aesthetic judgments.
Controversies over musical meaning, politics and élite culture also became more
central to the academic study of music. Kerman (1985) argued that musicologists'
preoccupation with ‘analysis’ had ‘produced relatively little of intellectual interest’
because it completely ignored the question of ‘artistic value’; he urged them to
adopt the wider stance of ‘criticism’. Over the next decade musical scholarship did
undergo a major change; however, the emphasis was not on artistic value but on
the sociology of music, its political meanings and its cultural contexts.
Musicologists followed literary theorists in asking questions about the kinds of
ideas music promotes and why they succeed. Some scholars rejected aesthetic
distinctions altogether and treated music as a coded tract concerning sexuality
and politics; scholarly papers on the iconography of the pop star Madonna
became as common as studies of the Classical style. In the 1990s it sometimes
seemed that criticism in the broadest sense had become a goal of musicology,
while journalistic criticism often retreated to the comfort of ‘reviewing’. One major
exception to this trend was in the former USSR, where such critics as Lev
Lebedinsky, Leo Mazel' and Aleksander Ivashkin defined a new role for
themselves in the post-Communist era, reinterpreting the history of Soviet music
and evaluating the effects of freedom on art.
Two other major issues that engaged critics at the end of the 20th century arose
from the early music movement and the proliferation of digital recordings on
compact disc. In the long-running debate over historical ‘authenticity’, some critics
found period-instrument performances on the whole dry, distorted and reductive,
while others held that they cleansed the accumulated manners of Romanticism
from pre-Classical music. In many ways the arguments echoed the long debate
over taste begun by advocates of various avant gardes objecting to mainstream
Romantic tastes. For much of the 1980s and 90s this was an important issue of
contention in discussions of musical performance in general, particularly when
claims of authenticity were pressed too far (the more cautious term ‘historically
informed’ came to be preferred). In the digital era that began in the late 1970s, a
number of music and audio critics devoted special attention to the impact of
electronics on music and subtly analysed the nuances of digital sound and fine
audio equipment like oenophiles discussing the effect of grape fungus. Much of
this criticism focused on the limitations of digital recording, ultimately spurring
engineers to develop refinements in the technology.
Technology was also having a profound effect on the ways in which criticism and
ideas about music were communicated. With the popularization of the Internet in
the late 1990s, many of the companies providing Internet access, like America
Online, which had 23 million subscribers by 2000, included numerous ‘discussion
groups’, ‘bulletin boards’ or ‘forums’ devoted to music. Messages were posted by
anybody who joined the forum – ordinary listeners, fans, performers and even
professional critics – reacting to recordings, concerts, reviews, or news from the
music business. At best, these forums made criticism a social activity in which
alternate reactions to a musical event could be shared and discussed with ease.
More professional musical organizations, like the American Musicological Society,
also encouraged the establishment of ‘mailing lists’ of specialists in different
musical fields ranging from musical to ethnomusicology. Any scholar sending an
e-mail message automatically reached several hundred colleagues with similar
interests; research queries were posted and answered, often within a day by
scholars, unhampered by geographical limitations. The discussions could turn

banal and petty, but more often they took on the character of criticism in progress,
as posted responses expanded upon earlier comments and led to ‘threads’ of
continuing discussion. In addition, the availability of international newspapers on
the Internet made it possible to read reviews from Germany, England, France, the
United States, or Japan, at the same time as the readers of the local newspapers.
This, along with international scholarly discussions, increased the sense that a
world music culture was taking shape, as similar issues and debates took place
without reference to national borders.
Despite these changes, though, at the beginning of the 21st century the future of
traditional music criticism was more uncertain than it had ever been. The
profession of music critic no longer implied an intense devotion to and
understanding of the Western classical tradition. The power of critics to influence
acceptance of new composition or the careers of performers also seemed much
weaker than before, particularly in comparison with the forces of mass marketing.
Few critics believed that vast portions of the repertory would ever be of interest to
a wide public. Younger critics, like Alex Ross at The New Yorker, who were trying
to restore critical vigour by loosening the boundaries isolating the classical
tradition from the world of politics and popular culture, resisted pessimism. But
many critics felt that the state of criticism would not improve until new relationships
developed between composers and audiences, listeners and critics; no one knew,
though, how such a change might occur. Peculiarly enough, as music criticism
became less central, musicology – with its attentiveness to political influence,
musical meanings and reputations – took on some of the broader ambitions that
once were the province of music criticism. As the 21st century began, it was
increasingly clear that the future nature of music criticism was increasingly
unclear, leaving feelings of dismay along with hope for as yet unforeseen
possibilities.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
V. Thomson: The State of Music (New York, 1939, 2/1962)
York, 1945)
W. Schuh: Kritiken und Essays (Zurich, 1947–55)
T.W. Adorno: Philosophie der neuen Musik (Tübingen, 1949, 3/1967; Eng. trans.,
1973/R)
P. Mies: Vom Sinn und Praxis der musikalischen Kritik (Kevelaer, 1949)
M. Mila: L'esperienza musicale e l'estetica (Turin, 1950)
A.N. Serov: Izbrannïye stat’i [Selected Articles], ed. G.N. Khubov (Moscow and
Leningrad, 1950–57)
B.V. Asaf'yev: Izbrannïye stat'i o russkoy muzike [Selected articles on Russian
music], ed. N. Braudo (Moscow, 1952)
B.V. Asaf'yev: Izbrannïye trudii [Selected works], ed. T.N. Livanova and others
(Moscow, 1952–7) [vol. v incl. complete list of writings]
C. Cui: Izbrannïye stat'i [Selected articles] ed. Yu A. Kremlyov (Leningrad, 1952)
N. Slonimsky: Lexicon of Musical Invective: Critical Assaults upon Composers
since Beethoven's Time (New York, 1953/R)
H. Pleasants: The Agony of Modern Music (New York, 1955)
J. Kerman: Opera as Drama (New York, 1956/R)
O. Downes: Olin Downes on Music, ed. I. Downes (New York, 1957)
H.H. Stuckenschmidt: Glanz und Elend der Musikkritik (Berlin, 1957)
A. Della Corte: La critica musicale e i critici (Turin, 1961)
T.W. Adorno: Einleitung in die Musiksoziologie (Frankfurt, 1962, 2/1968; Eng.
trans., 1976)
A. Walker: An Anatomy of Musical Criticism (London, 1966)
B.V. Asaf'yev: Kritischeskiye stat'i, ocherki i retsenzii [Critical aticles, essays and
reviews], ed. I.V. Beletsky (Moscow, 1967)
G. Schuller: Early Jazz (New York, 1968)
F. Jonas, trans.: Vladimir Vasilyevich Stasov: Selected Essays on Music
(London, 1968)
H.H. Stuckenschmidt: Twentieth Century Music, trans. R. Deveson (New York,
1969)
B. Schwarz: Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia: 1917–1970 (London, 1972)
G. Marcus: Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock and Roll Music (New York,
1975)
R. Barthes: Image, Music, Text, ed. and trans. S. Heath (New York, 1977/R)
H.C. Schonberg: Facing the Music (New York, 1981)
V. Thomson: A Virgil Thomson Reader (New York, 1981)
B.V. Asaf'yev: A Book about Stravinsky, trans. Richard French (Ann Arbor, 1982)
J. Rockwell: All American Music: Composition in the Late Twentieth Century
(New York, 1983)
J. Kerman: Musicology (London, 1985; repr. Cambridge, MA, 1985 as
Contemplating Music)
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1988)
M. Cooper: Judgements of Value (New York, 1988)
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York, 1995)
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Crticism from 1919 to Now (New York, 1996)
H. Haskell, ed.: The Attentive Listener: Three Centuries of Music Criticism (New
Haven, CT, 1996)
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P. Lebrecht: Who Killed Classical Music? (New Jersey, 1997)
A. Tommasini: Virgil Thomson: Composer on the Aisle (New York, 1997)
M.N. Grant: Maestros of the Pen: a History of Classical Music Criticism in America
(Boston, 1998)

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it as a genre of music criticism.

concern of professional criticism, as the historical portions of this article show

individual person coming, through a continuing series of interactions, to share the

literature. Hiller relied on reports by correspondents in German and foreign cities;

non-Aryan musics was to be maintained as a bulwark against influences that had

performances of Pergolesi's La serva padrona in 1752, the debate exploded only

controversy. He opened the Wagner debate in 1852 with an assessment of the

Casadesus, most closely approached propaganda.

important things to say, based on neo-classical doctrine and practical experience.

musical and theatrical commerce began to merge as music publishers, led by

taken by composers, despite the official approval bestowed on some music

critic, more open-minded than some commentators have credited.

E. Refardt: Verzeichnis der Aufsätze zur Musik in den nichtmusikalischen

W. Bailey: ‘Composer Versus Critic: the Schoenberg-Schmidt Polemic’, Journal of

M. Barthélemy: ‘Essai sur la position de d'Alembert dans la Querelle des

Press’, Music and the French Revolution: Cardiff 1989, 302–14

Century’, MQ, xxxiv (1948), 544–66

(St Petersburg, 1892–5)

H. Krehbiel: How to Listen to Music (New York, 1896/R)

observer. He treated each event as part of an elaborately evolving tradition of

scholars, unhampered by geographical limitations. The discussions could turn

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