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Criticism, I: General issues
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Criticism, I: General issues

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 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 PHILOSOPHY 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,

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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

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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 discussions of 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 essays 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 of
phonography created as recorded 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.

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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

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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.

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Fred Everett Maus

Copyright Oxford University Press 2007 2017.

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