Volume 24 Issue 7 - April 2019

Nineteenth-century
music critic and Brahms
champion, Eduard
Hanslick, offering incense
to the bust of Brahms
[Viennese Figaro, 1890].
REAR VIEW
MIRROR
Arts critics
emerging,
we dare hope!
ROBERT HARRIS
For the past month or so, I’ve been involved in a
wonderful and fascinating writing endeavour, the
results of which have been published online by The
WholeNote as well as other arts publications (The Dance
Current and Opera Canada magazine). The Emerging Arts
Critics project, begun by the National Ballet of Canada,
now expanded to include the Toronto Symphony and the
Canadian Opera Company, selects eight promising arts
critics, all people in their 20s, and provides them with
reviewing assignments, professional mentoring. and
guaranteed publication in major journals. The WholeNote
is the venue of choice for TSO reviews, which have already
appeared online. I was asked, and was delighted, to be the
mentoring individual for the symphony reviewers.
What was stunning about this project was not only that someone
recognized that arts reviewing was a discipline that needed
mentoring, expertise and development, but that such support would
be given to an enterprise which has virtually disappeared from the
day-to-day lives of most North Americans. I don’t have definitive
figures, but I’m guessing there were more than 100 classical music
reviewers employed by Canadian and American newspapers 20
years ago. Today there are probably no more than a dozen left,
and it seems half of them work for The New York Times. Here in
Toronto, as I know well, having worked as the classical reviewer for
The Globe and Mail until just a couple of years ago, the National
Post has done away with all classical reviews, The Star employs
the redoubtable JohnTerauds on a freelance basis, and The Globe’s
musical offerings are almost exclusively devoted to opera. That
leaves in the city publications like WholeNote, the website Ludwig
Van Toronto and assorted (and very fine) individual bloggers and
websites such as OperaRamblings, Schmopera and Barcza’s Blog.
But individual bloggers are no substitute for reviews in a major
metropolitan daily, for reasons that are not immediately obvious.
It’s not about the quality of the writing. There’s probably more
good writing about classical music today in the world than ever
before. And it has nothing, or less than you might think, to do with
maintaining the health of the the classical performing scene in the
city and region, which seems to me to be exploding with vitality
these days, reviews or no reviews. I remember, with great pleasure,
actually, one Canadian Opera Company publicist sheepishly
admitting to me that my reviews of her company’s productions had
no impact on her box office at all, positive or negative.
She was embarrassed to tell me, but I wasn’t the least bit surprised.
Because my feeling always has been that my reviews aren’t and
shouldn’t be for the people already going to the classical events.
Just do the math. A sold-out run of a seven-performance COC
production results in about 14,000 patrons in the Four Seasons
Centre. About 7500 for three sold-out Roy Thomson Hall TSO
concerts. The Globe and Mail’s daily circulation is about 300,000; the
Greater Toronto Area has a population of 6.4 million. A remarkably
small percentage of Torontonians in general, and Globe readers in
particular, are interested in attending classical music events.
So why devote precious space to a review of them? Because
reviews of art events are not just for the people who go to them.
They are for everyone. They are for all the citizens of a healthy
society concerned about their communal life. They are for everyone
because they offer an opportunity for a society to train a critical lens
on itself. Going to a concert is not just another hobby, like joining a
bridge club or a ballroom dancing class. It is a public expression of
fundamental values, central to a society, even if hidden beneath a
polished and slightly off-putting surface of formally attired men and
women playing music written, mostly, centuries ago.
The key to discovering the real purpose of a “critical” review is
tied up in the history of the word itself. Our word critical comes
from the Greek kritikos and the Latin criticus, meaning one who
judges, one who discerns. Not one who constantly finds fault, by
the way, as the word has degenerated to mean, but one who looks
inside, evaluates, reveals. And we’ve kept a vestige of that original
classical meaning of the word to this day when we talk about
something being a critical feature of an enterprise or situation,
meaning a component that is uniquely and vitally significant (as
in the analogous medical term “critical condition”). This is the real
source of the critic as reviewer – someone who analyzes the critical
components of a work or a performance – the essence, the tipping
point, the hidden heart of the work and the world.
The work and the world. That’s the other secret of arts, and
especially music, reviewing, that newspaper editors counting clicks
April 2019 thewholenote.com