Judging music

Making music means criticizing, means asking the question: good or bad? Musicians criticize themselves, their teachers, their own students, other performers, recordings, etc. Connoisseurs criticize. Connoisseurs criticize, but enthusiasts criticize even more. How do musicologists, representatives of "the subject" (five times in the foreword on p. 5), comment on "judgment and value judgment in music"? "Judgments of taste" are frowned upon at this level; instead, "qualified listeners" should make relevant "factual judgments". Carl Dahlhaus (died 1989) still held the view that such judgments should be based on musical analysis. We are a long way from that today. One could almost say: the more competent a judgment is, the more it reflects its own time; because value judgments in the context of the arts are neither only in the subject matter itself nor in the people judging it, but are always culturally based and thus subject to changing influences and fashions.

Most of the contributions to a Hamburg conference in fall 2013 came to this conclusion, regardless of whether Gounod's Bach arrangement Hail MaryJohann Mattheson or the music of Erik Satie, whether the reception of Friedrich Witt's pseudo-Beethovenian Jena Symphony or Hans Rott's E major symphony are chosen as examples. It becomes more complicated when humor plays a role, when the music itself is based on a distinction between good and bad and the listener should notice this. The fact that the music publisher's judgment has prophetic traits, or at least financial consequences, is another form of implicit criticism. If today, in a commercialized world, art easily stands alongside non-art, any judgement becomes difficult. This is why Manfred Stahnke comes to the conclusion: "Ultimately, only that which can reach our souls has 'value' for us. And that is free of commerce" (p. 188). Is this a plea for the resurrection of the pure "judgment of taste"?

I read the volume with interest, not because it contains anything fundamentally new, but because the writers' trains of thought, their arguments, sources and illustrations allow us to discover the unknown. But why do musicologists, literary scholars and composers keep to themselves? Do they have more to say than those music critics and reviewers whose day-to-day business revolves around "judgment and value judgment in music", i.e. the question: "Good or bad?"?

Good or bad? Urteil und Werturteil in der Musik, (=Hamburger Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft, Vol. 30), ed. by Claudia Maurer Zenck and Ivana Rentsch, 188 p., Fr. 37.00, Peter Lang, Bern et al. 2015, ISBN 978-3-631-659997-7