Volume 24 Issue 7 - April 2019

to digital articles spectacularly fail to understand. It’s not just the
artistic world that the critic investigates – it’s the whole world. And
that’s because music is such a deeply social, deeply communal
activity. The move from a discussion of music to a discussion of
society is impossible to avoid. That’s what a music critic does when
they’re at their best – intercut and interweave musical and cultural
perspectives so that the discussion of one becomes the discussion of
the other. Arts reviews can then be places where a society questions
and interrogates the things it believes in, the things it values. That’s
why reviews are for everyone, because they illuminate issues in
which everyone has a stake.
Or at least they should. That’s what I was trying to tell the young
critics I was mentoring in the Emerging Arts Critics program. In
the end, once they’ve mastered the elusive language with which we
describe music, once they’ve figured out the structure and pacing of
an 800-word review, once they’ve learned to navigate the boundaries
between personal and impersonal judgments, they’re left with the
task of creating a draft set of values for their readers to absorb, debate,
reject, or accept. Should a performer like Barbara Hannigan be more
important than the music she performs or the other way around?
What can a Brahms concerto teach us about the relative value of the
individual and society in our lives? What happens when a cynical,
cold composer (like Dmitri Shostakovich) is performed by a radiantly
intensely human performer (like Alisa Weilerstein)? Whose character
should prevail? (A life issue as well as a musical issue)
Those are the kinds of questions muscial reviewers should
tackle, I believe – questions that begin with notes and phrases and
dynamics and expand to fill the longing space we all have for value
in our personal lives.
It seems that the venues for addressing these kinds of critical
questions are shrinking today. We are instead inundated, drowning,
gasping for breath in a Twitterverse full of the other form of
criticism – disparaging, negative, demoralizing. But we can’t and
won’t stay there forever. I’m sitting here, hoping against hope, that
the talents and skills that our Emerging Arts Critics are learning will
once again, someday, be useful to us all.
Robert Harris is a writer and broadcaster on music in all its
forms. He is the former classical music critic of the Globe and
Mail and the author of the Stratford Lectures and Song of a Nation:
The Untold Story of O Canada.
thewholenote.com April 2019