Criticism or quota

Here the time pressure, there the work, finally the editors, who sometimes have a say when it comes to publication: music criticism seems to be a game of vabanque. This is made more difficult by the current constraints that music editor Christian Berzins pointedly expresses in his comment: "If a review is not written in a popular way - i.e. in a way that everyone can understand - it has no place in the future daily newspaper" (p. 173/174).

Who "all" are or what "comprehensible" means remains an open question. It must remain open in an anthology that cannot do everything, but can broaden the view of a complex phenomenon that has changed considerably since the beginnings of music criticism in the late 18th century. The volume, edited by musicologists Fritz Trümpi and Simon Obert, looks back, but also to the present day. In her essay in English, Katherine Baber reports on the reception of Leonard Bernstein in America and Austria (p. 33 f.). She shows that Music criticism does not only reflect works or interpretations. It is also always a reflection of various themes that go far beyond the artistic. The Cold War, anti-Semitism and the construction of national identities also played a major role in the reception of Bernstein, whose popularity increased as a result of the fact that he could be staged as something like a second Gustav Mahler in the 1960s.

The diversity of the volume is impressive. Pop criticism is included, as are thoughts on journalistic practice and journalistic approaches to new music. Unfortunately, Cornelia Bartsch's interpretative reflections on music criticism and gender seem forced. The topic is "a desideratum" (p. 59) because women - analogous to their role in the 19th century - simply had no place in criticism. Since female critics do not appear, Bartsch tries to come up with adventurous theses. She blithely mixes gender-specific evaluations of music in the sense of female versus male with those phenomena that the marketing industry and the unspeakable quota thinking bring into "criticism": "evaluation" of music according to pure outward appearances such as the stardom or sex appeal of respective performers or interpreters.

Not only are traces of the past and present visible, but also the perspectives of music critics. The days of the "great critic" seem to be numbered - the species that follows the concert reading and later gets angry about the inadequate design of the Eroica-Reprise. That doesn't have to be a bad thing, Berzins rightly observes. But what does give food for thought is the flattening, indeed the disappearance of content. It would be nice if criticism could take a stand against this - in what form is ultimately also a question of the level of musical education. Incidentally, colleagues have replaced "score" with "musical notation" in the editorial department. That's the last straw.

Music Criticism. Historische Zugänge und systematische Perspektiven, edited by Fritz Trümpi and Simon Obert, (=Anklänge, Wiener Jahrbuch für Musikwissenschaft 2015), 204 p., € 33.00, Mille Tre Verlag, Vienna 2015, ISBN 978-3-900198-42-8