Criticism

 Fred Everett Maus,

 Glenn Stanley,
 Katharine Ellis,
 Leanne Langley,
 Nigel Scaife,
 Marcello Conati,
 Marco Capra,
 Stuart Campbell,
 Mark N. Grant
 and Edward Rothstein
 https://doi.org/10.1093/gmo/9781561592630.article.40589
 Published in print: 20 January 2001
 Published online: 2001


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
 Fred Everett Maus

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 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 ( seePhilosophy 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.