The - Cambridge - History - of - Music Criticism PDF

THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF
MUSIC CRITICISM
Music criticism has played a fundamental and influential role throughout

music history, with numerous composers such as Berlioz, Schumann and
Wagner, as well as many contemporary musicians, also maintaining careers
as writers and critics. The Cambridge History of Music Criticism goes beyond
these better-known accounts, reaching back to medieval times, expanding
the geographical reach both within and beyond Europe and including key
issues such as women and criticism, recordings and the story of criticism in
jazz, popular music and world music. Drawing on a blend of established and
talented young scholars, this is the first substantial historical survey of
music criticism and critics, bringing unprecedented scope to a rapidly
expanding area of musicological research. An indispensable point of refer-
ence, The Cambridge History of Music Criticism provides a broad historical
overview of the field while also addressing specific issues and events.
CHRISTOPHER D I N G L E is Professor of Music at Royal Birmingham

Conservatoire. In addition to research on music criticism, he has
authored/edited five books on Messiaen, including the acclaimed The Life
of Messiaen (Cambridge, 2007). His realisation of the orchestration of
Messiaen’s Un oiseau des arbres de Vie (Oiseau Tui) was premiered at the
2015 BBC Proms, and a critical edition of the score will be published in
2019. A book of conversations with the composer Julian Anderson is in
preparation, and Dingle has also written for BBC Music Magazine for twenty-
five years.
THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF
MUSIC
The Cambridge History of Music comprises a group of reference works

concerned with significant strands of musical scholarship. The individual
volumes are self-contained and include histories of music examined by
century as well as the history of opera, music theory and American music.
Each volume is written by a team of experts under a specialist editor and
represents the latest musicological research.
The Cambridge History of American Music

Edited by David Nicholls
The Cambridge History of Music Criticism

Edited by Christopher Dingle
The Cambridge History of Musical Performance
Edited by Colin Lawson and Robin Stowell
The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory
Edited by Thomas Christensen
The Cambridge History of World Music

Edited by Philip V. Bohlman
The Cambridge History of Medieval Music

Edited by Mark Everist and Thomas Forrest Kelly
The Cambridge History of Fifteenth-Century Music
Edited by Anna Maria Busse Berger and Jesse Rodin
The Cambridge History of Sixteenth-Century Music

Edited by Iain Fenlon and Richard Wistreich
The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Music

Edited by Tim Carter and John Butt
The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Music
Edited by Simon P. Keefe
The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music

Edited by Jim Samson
The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music

Edited by Nicholas Cook and Anthony Pople
THE CAMBRIDGE
HISTORY OF
MUSIC CRITICISM
*
EDITED BY
CHRISTOPHER DINGLE
Royal Birmingham Conservatoire
University Printing House, Cambridge C B 2 8B S , United Kingdom
One Liberty Plaza, 20th Floor, New York, N Y 10006, USA
477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, V I C 3207, Australia
314–321, 3rd Floor, Plot 3, Splendor Forum, Jasola District Centre,
New Delhi – 110025, India
79 Anson Road, #06–04/06, Singapore 079906
Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning and research at the highest international levels of excellence.
www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781107037892
D O I : 10.1017/9781139795425
© Cambridge University Press 2019

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception
and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2019
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
N A M E S : Dingle, Christopher Philip.
T I T L E : The Cambridge history of music criticism / edited by Christopher Dingle.
D E S C R I P T I O N : Cambridge, United Kingdom : Cambridge University Press, [2019] |
Series: The Cambridge history of music | Includes bibliographical references.
I D E N T I F I E R S : L C C N 2019001094 | I S B N 9781107037892
S U B J E C T S : L C S H : Musical criticism – History.
C L A S S I F I C A T I O N : L C C M L 3880 .C 26 2019 | D D C 781.1/709–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019001094
ISBN 978-1-107-03789-2 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of
URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
Contents
List of Music Examples, Figures and Tables page ix

Notes on Contributors x
Acknowledgements xv
Introduction 1
CHRISTOPHER DINGLE
PART I THE EARLY HISTORY OF MUSIC CRITICISM 7
1 . Speaking of Plainsong in the Middle Ages 9

CHRISTOPHER PAGE
2 . Music Criticism in the Late-Medieval and Renaissance Era 25

STEFANO MENGOZZI
3 . Musical Discourse in Italy, 1500–1800 42

CARRIE CHURNSIDE
4 . Music Criticism in France before the Revolution 62

CHARLES DILL
5 . Music Criticism in Britain up to Burney 81

REBECCA HERISSONE
6 . German-Language Music Criticism before 1800 104

STEPHEN ROSE
[v]
vi Contents
PART II THE RISE OF THE PRESS 125
7 . French Music Criticism in the Nineteenth Century, 1789–1870 127

MARK A. POTTINGER
8 . Gatekeeping, Advocacy, Reflection: Overlapping Voices in

Nineteenth-Century British Music Criticism 147
LEANNE LANGLEY
9 . Constructing a Musical Nation: German-Language Criticism in the

Nineteenth Century 170
LAURA TUNBRIDGE
10 . Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Century Italy 190

ALEXANDRA WILSON
11 . Music Criticism in Imperial Russia 208

EMILY FREY
PART III CRITICAL INFLUENCE AND INFLUENCES 229
12 . Critiquing the Canon: The Role of Criticism in

Canon Formation 231
LAURA HAMER
13 . Comparing Notes: Recording and Criticism 249

CHRISTOPHER DINGLE
14 . The Gender Paradox: Criticism of Women and

Women as Critics 272
LAURA HAMER
PART IV ENTERING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 291
15 . Music Criticism in the United States and Canada up to the Second

World War 293
MARK MCKNIGHT
16 . Music Criticism in Portugal: Towards an Overview 317

PAULO F. DE CASTRO
Contents vii
17 . Spanish Music Criticism in the Twentieth Century: Writing Music

History in Real Time 331
EVA MOREDA RODRÍGUEZ
18 . Critical Battlegrounds in the French Third Republic 344

DELPHINE MORDEY
19 . British Music Criticism, 1890–1945 371

PAUL WATT
20 . Music Criticism in Norway 392

PER DAHL
21 . Aesthetic Conservatism and Politics in German-Language Music

Criticism, 1900–1945 408
KAREN PAINTER
22 . Music Criticism in Hungary until the Second World War 424

LYNN M. HOOKER
23 . The ‘People’ in Czech and Slovak Music Criticism 440

KELLY ST PIERRE
PART V NEW AREAS 457
24 . Jazz Criticism in America 459

MARK RACZ
25 . Catalysing Latin American Identities: Alejo Carpentier’s Music

Criticism as a Cuban Case Study 484
CAROLINE RAE
26 . Writing about Popular Music 502

SIMON FRITH
27 . Working in the Cool Capitalism Complex: The Role of Critics in the

World Music Field 527
TIMOTHY D. TAYLOR
viii Contents
28 . Cultural Anxieties, Aspirational Cosmopolitanism and Capacity

Building: Music Criticism in Singapore 542
SHZR EE TAN
PART VI DEVELOPMENTS SINCE THE SECOND WORLD

WAR 569
29 . Music Criticism in the USSR from Asafyev to Cherednichenko 571

PETER J. SCHMELZ
30 . The Feuilleton and Beyond: Criticism in the Federal Republic of

Germany and Austria after the Second World War 590
MARK BERRY
31 . Music Criticism in Italy in the Twentieth Century 609

RAFFAELE POZZI
32 . Wider Still and Wider: British Music Criticism since the Second
World War 629
CHRISTOPHER DINGLE
33 . Music Criticism in France since the Second World War 648

CHRISTOPHER BRENT MURRAY
34 . Old Divisions and New Debates: Music Criticism in Post-War

America 671
SOPHIE REDFERN
POSTLUDE 693
35 . Stop the Press? The Changing Media of Music Criticism 695

CHRISTOPHER DINGLE AND DOMINIC MCHUGH
Bibliography 707
Index 789
Music Examples, Figures and Tables
Music Examples
2.1 Dissonances rendered acceptable by underlying consonances in
Johannes Boen’s Musica. page 31
Figures
7.1 J. J. Grandville, ‘Les Romains échevelés à la 1re représentation
d’Hernani’, 1830 lithograph, 250 x 180 mm, Maison de Victor Hugo,
Paris. page 134
33.1 Duelling critics Antoine Goléa (left) and Bernard Gavoty (right)
in an uncredited photomontage for Musica magazine,
December 1956. 665
Tables
13.1 Key traits of concert and record reviewing. page 251
32.1 Samples of music content in The Times. 639
[ix]
Notes on Contributors
MARK BERRY is Reader in Music History at Royal Holloway, University of

London. The author of Treacherous Bonds and Laughing Fire: Politics and Religion in
Wagner’s ‘Ring’, After Wagner: Histories of Modernist Music Drama from ‘Parsifal’ to
Nono and Arnold Schoenberg, he also regularly writes musical criticism.
PAULO F. DE CASTRO (PhD, Royal Holloway, University of London) is Associate

Professor at Universidade NOVA de Lisboa (Portugal) and a researcher with
a focus on intertextuality and the philosophy of music. He has written extensively
on the cultural significance of twentieth-century music in France, Russia and the
Iberian Peninsula.
CARRIE CHURNSIDE is Senior Lecturer and Director of the Forum for Seventeenth-
and Eighteenth-Century Music at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire. She works on
Italian Baroque vocal music and has published on cantatas, oratorios and music
printing in the period. Carrie is also on the council of the Handel Institute.
PER DAHL studied musicology, philosophy and psychology at the University of

Trondheim and has been employed at the Music Conservatory in Stavanger since
1979. He has worked as a music critic (1989–2001), written programme notes
(1992–2002) and is the author of books in Norwegian on aesthetics and analysis, as
well as Music and Knowledge: A Performer’s Perspective (2017).
C H A R L E S D I L L is the author of Monstrous Opera: Rameau and the Tragic Tradition

(1998) and editor of Opera Remade, 1700–1750 (2010). He has contributed to
Oxford Bibliographies Online, Studies in Music History, Cambridge Opera Journal, the
Journal of the Royal Musical Association and the Journal of the American Musicological
Society.
CHRISTOPHER DINGLE is Professor of Music at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire.

In addition to research on music criticism, he has authored/edited five books on
Messiaen, and a substantial book of conversations with Julian Anderson is in
preparation. He has also written for BBC Music Magazine for over twenty-five
years.
[x]
Notes on Contributors xi
E M I L Y F R E Y is Assistant Professor of Music at Brandeis University. Her articles

have appeared in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, 19th-Century Music
and Rimsky-Korsakov and His World, and she is currently finishing her first book,
Russian Opera in the Age of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.
S I M O N F R I T H , FBA is Emeritus Professor of Music at the University of Edinburgh,

where he held the Tovey Chair from 2005 to 2017. He had a long career as a music
journalist and was the Sunday Times’s first rock critic. He chaired the judges of the
Mercury Music Prize from 1993 to 2017.
LAURA HAMER works for the Open University. Her primary research interest is
women in music. She is the author of Female Composers, Conductors, Performers:
Musiciennes of Interwar France, 1919–1939 (2018) and the editor of The Cambridge
Companion to Women in Music since 1900 (Cambridge, forthcoming).
REBECCA HERISSONE is Professor of Musicology at the University of Manchester

and co-editor of Music & Letters. She works primarily on the creativity, material
culture and reception of early modern English music, has published three mono-
graphs, most recently Musical Creativity in Restoration England, and was awarded the
Diana McVeagh Prize for Best Book on British Music (2015) and the Westrup
Prize (2007).
L Y N N M . H O O K E R , Associate Professor of Music at Purdue University, is the

author of Redefining Hungarian Music from Liszt to Bartók (2013). She has published
on music and modernism, nationalism, and popular and folk culture. Her current
project addresses the role of Romani musicians in twentieth-century Hungarian
music.
LEANNE LANGLEY is Lifetime Fellow at the University of London. Her work

includes revisionist studies of the (Royal) Philharmonic Society, George Grove’s
Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Henry J. Wood and the Proms, Thomas Beecham,
the artist John Singer Sargent, the British reception of Berlioz and Schubert, and
English music publishing.
D O M I N I C M C H U G H is Senior Lecturer in Musicology at the University of Sheffield.

He founded the website MusicalCriticism.com and is the author or editor of six
books on the Broadway musical, including The Wizard of Oz: From Baum to MGM
and Beyond (2018) and The Complete Lyrics of Alan Jay Lerner (2018).
M A R K M C K N I G H T is Head of the University of North Texas Music Library and also

teaches courses on music research and American music for the University of North
Texas College of Music. His research interests include nineteenth-century
xii Notes on Contributors
American music criticism, early American sheet music and the music of Louisiana
and New Orleans.
S T E F A N O M E N G O Z Z I (University of Michigan) specialises in the music and music

theory of the Renaissance. His chapter in this collection is part of a larger project
exploring the contribution of late-medieval religious culture to the emergence of
affective and text-centred musical styles in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
DELPHINE MORDEY is an Affiliated Lecturer in Music at the University of

Cambridge, and Fellow and Director of Studies in Music at Newnham College,
Cambridge. Her work on late nineteenth-century French music has appeared in
19th-Century Music, Cambridge Opera Journal and Music & Letters.
EVA MOREDA RODRÍGUEZ is Lecturer in Music at the University of Glasgow and

the author of Music and Exile in Francoist Spain (2015) and Music Criticism and Music
Critics in Early Francoist Spain (2016).
C H R I S T O P H E R B R E N T M U R R A Y is a Maître de conférences in the musicology

department of the Université libre de Bruxelles. A specialist on twentieth-
century French and Belgian musical life, Murray co-authored Le Modèle et l’inven-
tion: Olivier Messiaen et la technique de l’emprunt (2017) with Yves Balmer and
Thomas Lacôte.
C H R I S T O P H E R P A G E is Professor of Medieval Music and Literature in the

University of Cambridge, a Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the
Society of Antiquaries and a member of the Academia Europaea. Until
October 2018 he was Gresham Professor of Music at Gresham College, London
(founded 1597).
K A R E N P A I N T E R , Professor at the University of Minnesota, is researching music

for fallen soldiers in Germany, 1914–45. A recipient of the Humboldt Fellowship
and the Berlin Prize, she was visiting scholar at Harvard’s Center for European
Studies (2015–16) and the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (2010).
M A R K A . P O T T I N G E R is Associate Professor of Music in the Visual and Performing

Arts Department at Manhattan College. A recipient of the prestigious Berlin Prize
in 2017, he is the author of a number of publications on the music and cultural life
of nineteenth-century Europe.
R A F F A E L E P O Z Z I is Full Professor of Musicology at the Università di Roma Tre

(Italy). His research focuses on the history and aesthetics of twentieth-century
music. He contributed to the Enciclopedia della Musica (2001) and has published
Notes on Contributors xiii
a book on Olivier Messiaen (2002) and several articles on Italian contemporary

music.
MARK RACZ is a pianist and music educator who studied at Rutgers University
and the Manhattan School of Music. Resident in the UK since 1980, he was
responsible for setting up the BMus (Jazz) Programme at Royal Birmingham
Conservatoire. He is currently Deputy Principal and Dean of the Royal
Academy of Music.
C A R O L I N E R A E is Reader in Music at Cardiff University and a pianist. She has

published widely on twentieth-century French music as well as on the musical
writings of Alejo Carpentier, and is contributing editor of the first book on Jolivet
in English, André Jolivet, Music Art and Literature (Routledge, 2019). She was made a
Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 2018.
S O P H I E R E D F E R N has held teaching and research positions at Liverpool Hope

University, Royal Birmingham Conservatoire and the University of Sheffield.
A specialist in twentieth-century American music and dance, she is the author of
the forthcoming Bernstein and Robbins: The Early Ballets.
STEPHEN ROSE is Professor of Music at Royal Holloway, University of London.

He specialises in German music 1500–1800, and his books include The Musician in
Literature in the Age of Bach (Cambridge, 2011) and Musical Authorship from Schütz to
Bach (Cambridge, 2019). He is co-editor of the journal Early Music.
PETER J . S C H M E L Z is Associate Professor of Musicology at Arizona State

University, Tempe. He is completing Alfred Schnittke’s Concerto Grosso No. 1 (forth-
coming, 2019) and Sonic Overload: Polystylism as Cultural Practice in the Late USSR.
He has begun writing a book on experimental music in the 1980s USSR.
K E L L Y S T P I E R R E works as an Associate Professor of Musicology at Wichita State

University. Her first book, Bedřich Smetana: Myth, Music, and Propaganda, was
published in March 2017. Her research has also appeared in 19th-Century Music
and Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online.
SHZR EE TAN is Senior Lecturer and ethnomusicologist at the Music Department

of Royal Holloway, University of London. A specialist in soundscapes of
Sinophone worlds, she also researches music and migration, gender and inequal-
ity. She is currently co-editor of the journal Ethnomusicology Forum.
TIMOTHY D. TAYLOR is a Professor in the Department of Ethnomusicology at the

University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of numerous articles and
xiv Notes on Contributors
books, most recently Music and Capitalism: A History of the Present (2016) and Music
in the World: Selected Essays (2017).
L A U R A T U N B R I D G E is Professor of Music at the University of Oxford. Her pub-

lications include Schumann’s Late Style (2007), The Song Cycle (2010) and Singing in
the Age of Anxiety: Lieder Performances in New York and London between the World Wars
(2018). She was editor of the Journal of the Royal Musical Association from 2013 to
2018.
PAUL WATT is an Associate Professor of Musicology at Monash University. His

research interests include musical criticism, historiography and aesthetics, popu-
lar music and biography. He is the author of The Regulation and Reform of Music
Criticism in Nineteenth-Century England (2018) and Ernest Newman: A Critical
Biography (2017).
ALEXANDRA WILSON is Professor of Music and Cultural History at Oxford

Brookes University. She is the author of three books: The Puccini Problem: Opera,
Nationalism, and Modernity (2007), Opera: A Beginner’s Guide (2010), and Opera in the
Jazz Age: Cultural Politics in 1920s Britain (2019).
Acknowledgements
It is unsurprising that the gestation of this volume, a large book with an

extensive number of contributors covering an exceptionally broad range of
areas, has been lengthy. I should like to thank, first and foremost, the wonder-
ful contributors, not just for their marvellous chapters, which have taught me
so much in such an engaging manner, but also for their immense patience and
understanding. Secondly, I should like to thank all at Cambridge University
Press, notably Vicki Cooper, who first suggested the book, Kate Brett, her
successor as Music Editor, Eilidh Burrett, her Editorial Assistant, Lisa
Sinclair, Podhumai Anban and Lesley Hay, as well as various others who
have assisted at different points in the book’s gestation. I should also like to
thank my colleagues at Royal Birmingham Conservatoire and Birmingham
City University for their friendship and enthusiasm, and my institution for
financial assistance with aspects of the project. Particular thanks should go to
Sophie Redfern for her extensive ferreting, eagle eyes and insightful com-
ments. Finally, nothing that I do would be possible without the love and
support of my wife, Liz, and my sons, Wilfred and Nathaniel, who collectively
enable me to remember what is truly important.
[xv]
Introduction
CHRISTOPHER DINGLE
All histories are partial. All histories are simplifications. Anyone professing to
write about history, to write a history, never mind writing or compiling the
history of anything should be aware of these twin a priori limitations. Even
before considering the prejudices, philosophy or political intent of the author,
history is written from a particular perspective, at a particular time, with
access to particular evidence. While such basic observations are readily appar-
ent with any area of historical investigation, two factors make them especially
pertinent for the study of music criticism. First, although music criticism has
long been an integral aspect of musical life, and is an obvious source material
for musicological areas such as reception studies, it is only relatively recently
that it has been regarded as a field of study in its own right. Second, although
this translates to a paucity of secondary sources compared to other subjects of
musicological enquiry, there is a vast amount of primary source material.
It is true there have been many collections of writings by individual critics
as well as compilations with a broader scope. Nonetheless, actual studies of
criticism have been much scarcer, books such as those by Katherine Ellis and
Sandra McColl providing notable landmarks in a largely barren landscape in
the 1990s,1 while the most extensive historical overview of music criticism
was the article in the second edition of The New Grove Dictionary.2 The past two
decades have seen a flourishing of interest, not just with bespoke conferences
on areas of music criticism, and numerous monographs and articles (many by
contributors to the present volume), but also initiatives such as the
Francophone Music Criticism project3 and, more recently, the Music
1
Katharine Ellis, Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Century France: La Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris,
1834–1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); Sandra McColl, Music Criticism in Vienna
1896–1897: Critically Moving Forms (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996).
2
Fred Everett Maus, Glenn Stanley, Katharine Ellis, Leanne Langley, Nigel Scaife, Marcello Conati,
Marco Capra, Stuart Campbell, Mark N. Grant and Edward Rothstein, ‘Criticism’, Grove Music Online,
Oxford Music Online, available at www.oxfordmusiconline (accessed 4 September 2018).
3
See music.sas.ac.uk/fmc.html.
[1]
2 CHRISTOPHER DINGLE
Criticism Network,4 the latter also hosting the Journal of Music Criticism.
Nevertheless, even with this recent proliferation of research on music criti-
cism, the secondary literature remains modest. This is reflected in the fact that
several of the chapters in the present volume have no precedent. Even in areas
that are reasonably well trodden, such as nineteenth-century British, French
or German criticism, the primary sources are overwhelming in number and,
even with ever-increasing amounts of material made available on digital
archives, they are widely dispersed and often challenging to collate reliably.
As elsewhere, digitisation has transformed the possibilities for drawing
on this vast wealth of material. In previous periods, scholars understandably
tended to consult music-oriented journals rather than newspapers to seek
contemporary views of musical events and developments. Such sources are
invaluable, but it is also important to remember that, for at least two
centuries, most people have received the majority of their knowledge
about practical music-making, performers, current trends, new develop-
ments and significant new works not from the long-considered arguments
posited in books and scholarly articles, but from the almost instantaneous
response of music critics in newspapers, from the columns of The Times
rather than The Musical Times. For this reason, what might be termed
‘higher’ criticism, the exploration of musical philosophy, aesthetics and
analysis, gradually retreats from the story told in the later chapters. It is
not that it is irrelevant, for such things form an essential part of the critical
hinterland, but the focus tends to be on the evolution of the everyday
discourse.
Critics make easy targets for scorn; their raison d’être is to have opinions, to
raise their heads above the parapet and state what they think, within a very
limited number of words. Indeed, the speed of reaction, allied to the need for
some kind of value judgement, has meant that critics and their writings have
often been dismissed as worthless ephemera. Like any evidence, the writings
of critics are flawed and should not be taken as representative of the general
thoughts of the age. There are good, bad and indifferent critics, though
whether such assessments apply equally to their own time and our own
perspective is often debatable. Regardless, music criticism essentially supplies
a continuous contemporaneous record of what was happening in music, and
how it was viewed by some. Far from a fatal flaw, its generally unguarded lack
of consideration is often the prime value of music criticism. Moreover, music
criticism frequently provides the only record of what actually happened and
even how it sounded.
4
See www.music-criticism.com.
Introduction 3
As a consequence, a history of music criticism itself becomes an alternate

history of music, considering those who do the observing, chronicling and
critiquing rather than the object of their musings. For recent centuries,
such a history is generally concerned with those writing in newspapers,
magazines and journals. It would have been easy in the present volume to
start with the rise of the press in northern Europe, broadly coinciding with
the Industrial Revolution, and concentrate on the principal centres of
Western art music. This period and these areas are, naturally, central to
this volume. However, they could only be countenanced as the exclusive
focus if music criticism were to be defined purely by the media in which it
appears and a closed perspective adopted on the genres or territory worthy
of discussion. If instead music criticism is understood as the chronicle and
discourse of music, then the potential scope of its history expands markedly
in terms of period, geography and musical genre to cover all music, of all
times, all places and all types where there is evidence of discussion and
reflection upon it. While that inclusive view of music criticism underpins
the approach of the following chapters, a full realisation of such a project is
sadly beyond the confines of this volume and, for that matter, the state of
the discipline at this time. Rather, while covering what is (currently) central
to our understanding of music criticism, various chapters go beyond that,
not in pretence of comprehensiveness, but drawing attention to the inevi-
table partialities and omissions.
Christopher Page’s opening chapter on the discourse around plainsong in
the Middle Ages starts the history several centuries earlier than might have
been expected, but it would certainly have been conceivable to start with
a much earlier period and in other parts of the world. For instance, it is
clear that there was extensive discussion and debate about music in ancient
cultures, with evidence of the outcomes, at least, in numerous theoretical
writings from both China and Greece. If we might regard these as music
criticism, it is important also to note that the purpose of and framework for
debate were fundamentally different from discussion of music as an art
form. Both cultures viewed music as embodying universal principles that
were intrinsic to the well-being of society as a whole. In China, Confucius
(551–479 B C E ) ‘promoted music as a means of governance and self-
cultivation and denounced the use of music as entertainment’.5 The result-
ing proliferation of influence of Confucian texts (c. third and second
5
Joseph S. C. Lam, ‘China: I I . History and Theory: 2. Antiquity to the Warring States Period (to 221
Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, available at www.oxfordmusiconline.com (accessed
B C E )’,
4 March 2018).
centuries B C E ), including extensive theories of musical philosophy and

practice, led to music being regarded as key to maintaining norms of
behaviour and integral to government administration as part of the cosmo-
logical order.6 While the ancient Greeks were certainly not averse to
mousikē being used for entertainment, it was also regarded as both an art
and a means of scientific enquiry, an integral element of fundamental laws
of nature as well as a catalyst for higher understanding and intrinsic to
society. It also went beyond sound, incorporating aspects such as text and
dancing.7 Indeed, the importance of music to the entire workings of society
is one of the recurrent themes of Plato’s Republic, with various passages
reading, superficially at least, as a form of music criticism. It would be
fascinating to see whether an examination of musical thought in these and
other ancient cultures seen through the lens of music criticism would
provide a distinctive perspective from that of music philosophy or theory.
Sadly, such a venture was beyond the bounds of the present volume.
At the other end of the historical span, the chapters respectively explor-
ing music criticism in Singapore and Alejo Carpentier’s straddling of Cuba
and France are not intended to stand in lieu of chapters on other coun-
tries and linguistic areas in Asia or Latin America. Rather, they show that
there are distinctive histories to be explored. Similarly, it is likely that
a significant number of Anglophone readers would not have noticed if
there were no chapter on Norway, but its inclusion rightly raises the
question of what the history of music criticism comprises in Sweden,
Denmark or Iceland, or, for that matter, each of the Baltic states. There
are chapters on music criticism in genres such as popular music, jazz and
world music, but the absence of, for instance, folk music, musicals, film
music or TV music is apparent. Less obvious, though noted by various
authors, is that the chapters covering what might be viewed as the
standard history concentrate primarily on dominant cities, such as Paris,
London and New York, yet other provinces and regions also have their
own distinctive histories that, for a variety of reasons, it was not possible
to incorporate adequately here. Then there is the simple fact that the
following chapters are each indicative of at least one, if not several, book-
length studies. This litany does not indicate a lack of editorial confidence
in what follows; the chapters are informative and remarkably diverse in
6
Alan R. Thrasher, ‘China, People’s Republic of: §I . Introduction: Historical, Regional and Study
Perspectives; 3. Sources and Perspectives: i) The Imperial Period’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music
Online, available at www.oxfordmusiconline.com (accessed 4 March 2018).
7
Thomas J. Mathiesen, Dimitri Conomos, George Leotsakos, Sotirios Chianis and Rudolph
M. Brandl, ‘Greece: 1. Introduction’; ‘3. Scope’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, available
at www.oxfordmusiconline.com (accessed 4 March 2018).
Introduction 5
content and approach, as well as being thoroughly absorbing. Rather, it is

to emphasise that, from its conception, the intention has been that, in
going far beyond any previous overview, The Cambridge History of Music
Criticism will make apparent the partialities and simplifications of current
understanding. The hope is that the thirty-five chapters not only provide
a substantial foundation for exploring music criticism, but will also act as
a catalyst for a whole range of much-needed further study.
· PART I ·
THE EARLY HISTORY OF MUSIC CRITICISM

.1.
Speaking of Plainsong in the Middle Ages

CHRISTOPHER PAGE
Apparently the Middle Ages did not produce much music criticism. It could
scarcely be otherwise if, as has been claimed, criticism as an institution, mean-
ing ‘a specific discursive medium characterized by the controlled exercise of
authority and judgment’ has ‘a history reaching back to the eighteenth century’
and seemingly no further.1 Consider the substantial repertoire of Gregorian
chant, once employed throughout much of the Latin West, and the plainsong
that is principally evoked in the title of this chapter.2 The monks, friars, nuns
and clerics who sang this music in the liturgy were not required to perform in
any sense of the word recognisable from many later periods of musical history,
even when they were cantors assigned solo chants. Those standing near them in
the choirstalls heard them sing, but we may suppose that they did not exactly
listen for much of the time; plainsong was not designed to promote concentra-
tion upon an art of autonomous musical sound. Even if the music of a particular
chant drew the ear of someone present, it was surely difficult to bring a varied
discernment to bear upon material for which a pope, inspired by the Holy
Spirit, was believed to be responsible. What could one do but receive and
approve a canonical repertoire believed to have been variously edited and
composed by a Father of the Church? Medieval commentators were often
prepared to admire musical effects in chant, even to wonder at them, yet they
often stopped short of offering a reasoned evaluation. The music theorist John
of Afflighem, one of the most articulate and engaging of the twelfth-century
writers, sometimes praises chants for being beautiful (pulchrum), for giving
pleasure (jocunditatem) or for being most comely (decentissimus) without sub-
stantiating his judgements.3
1
Dana Gooley, ‘Hanslick and the Institution of Criticism’, The Journal of Musicology, 28/3 (2011), 290.
2
Specialists commonly prefer the term ‘Frankish-Roman’ to ‘Gregorian’, but not when writing for
a broader audience. It is of little account in this context that Gregory I (d. 604) was almost certainly
not the fountainhead of the chant that is still popularly associated with his name. For valuable introduc-
tions to the Gregorian repertory see Richard L. Crocker, An Introduction to Gregorian Chant (New Haven
and London: Yale University Press, 2000); and David Hiley, Gregorian Chant (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2009).
3
Joseph Smits van Waesberghe (ed.), Johannis Affligemensis De Musica cu Tonario, Corpus Scriptorum de
Musica 1 (Rome: American Institute of Musicology, 1950). Translation by Warren Babb in Claude
[9]
10 CHRISTOPHER PAGE
Should we therefore suppose that Gregorian chant was generally per-

ceived as a form of life by those who experienced it day after day, rather
than as a separable concern which might invite judgements of value, or
indeed of taste? There is some reason to take that view. Even after the
dissemination of notational systems using a form of staff, which took
place from the eleventh century onwards, plainsong melodies principally
existed for many singers as an embodied practice, not a written deposit.
A chant was a feeling in the throat, a sensation in the ear and a penumbra
of associations created by years of repetition, by the lengthening and
shortening of days and by the arrival and disappearance of seasonal fruits
at the common table. Many could add associations that reached to the
deepest layers of their childhood memory when joys and injustices were
felt with an especial keenness: memories of teachers and the praise or
blame that they apportioned, reminiscences of the stone spaces where
they passed their boyhood learning the chants, receiving a beating when
they were negligent. In the first half of the ninth century, when the
repertory of Gregorian chant for the Mass was being consolidated and
much still remained to be done for the Office, churchmen began to
register the great amount of time required to stock the memory of
a novice. In 838, Agobard of Lyons observed that ‘too many singers
study from earliest youth until the hoariness of old age’ to learn their
chants.4 A similar point is made in the Dialogus de Musica, probably
compiled in the region of Milan around 1000; singers ‘devote fifty years
of their lives in vain to the practice and study of singing’.5 A process of
ear training, indeed saturation, with a profound psychological dimension,
began early and long continued.
Those who lived that life often reflected upon musical effect. They were all
singers in the sense that they were required to participate in some form of
choral liturgy. Many were also literate in the modern acceptation of the term
(‘able to read and write’) or even in the medieval sense (‘well read in Latin
letters’). Some possessed the ‘innate skill in singing’ mentioned and perhaps
V. Palisca (ed.), Hucbald, Guido, and John on Music: Three Medieval Treatises (New Haven and London: Yale
4
L. van Acker (ed.), Agobardi Lugdunensis Opera Omnia, Corpus Christianorum Continuatio Medievalis 52
(Turnhout: Brepols, 1981), p. 350. See Michel Huglo, ‘Les remaniements de l’antiphonaire grégorien au
I X e siècle: Hélisachar, Agobard, Amalaire’, in Culto Cristiano: Politica Imperiale Carolingia, Convegni del
centro di studi sulla spiritualità medievale, Università degli studi di Perugia, X V I I I (Todi, 1979), pp.
102–13.
5
Martin Gerbert (ed.), Scriptores Ecclesiastici de Musica Sacra Potissimum ex Variis Codicibus Manuscriptis
Collecti, 3 vols. (St Blasien, 1784; repr. Milan: Bollettino Bibliografico Musicale, 1931), vol. I , p. 251. On
this text see Michel Huglo, ‘Der Prolog des Odo zugeschriebenen Dialogus de Musica’, Archiv für
Musikwissenschaft, 28 (1971), 134–46.
Speaking of Plainsong in the Middle Ages 11
even admired by the twelfth-century theorist Theinred of Dover,6 but had

no theoretical knowledge of their art; others developed an aptitude for
musical enquiry and scholarship. Their legacy is the extensive literature of
musical teaching and codification that emerged in the ninth century and
flourished throughout the medieval period. Some of their many treatises de
musica are little more than abbreviated notices; others, such as the De musica
cum tonario of c. 1100 by John of Afflighem, succeeded in accommodating
the technicalities of musical art, decidedly prosaic, to the essentially literary
tone of monastic learning.7 The technicalities in question were broached
with sophisticated tools for discussing local and structural aspects of plain-
song, painstakingly developed from a late-antique legacy, notably the De
Institutione Musica of Boethius (d. 524) and then refined, from the
Carolingian period onwards, by analytic listening and sheer pedagogical
ingenuity.
The Latin manuals of plainsong are relatively well known, but there is
another corpus of medieval commentary which has received less attention.
This comprises letters, chronicles, Lives of saints, catalogues of ‘illustrious
men’ and other literary documents composed from the tenth century
onwards. The authors of this material found many opportunities to assess
the qualities of plainsongs that lie, for the most part, in a significantly later
chronological layer than the Gregorian music. They may praise the chant
composed by some monk or cleric who was known to them, perhaps
a member of their own house who became a bishop or abbot. We also
find them addressing their superior or a colleague in urbane letters that
introduce their own compositions in honour of a saint. The language of
commendation that they employ is often frankly sensual, abounding in
words like dulcissimus, suavis and mellifluus.8 There is often something lei-
surely about this material, especially when it takes epistolary form, and it
may seem exaggerated to claim (should anyone be tempted to do so) that
the Middle Ages produced absolutely no counterpart to the essay and
review, genres associated with the rise of music criticism ‘as a specific
discursive medium’ in a later age. The freshness of response these writers
often bring to their task also provides a welcome corrective to the notion,
6
John L. Snyder (ed.), Theinred of Dover’s De legitimis ordinibus pentachordorum et tetrachordorum: A Critical
Text and Translation with an Introduction, Annotations, and Indices (Ottawa: Institute of Medieval Music,
2006), p. 140.
7
For an edition and translation of this treatise, see note 3. The outstanding guide to the theorists,
showing exemplary sensitivity to their literary characteristics, is still Lawrence Gushee, ‘Questions of
Genre in Medieval Treatises on Music’, in Wulf Arlt, Ernst Lichtenhahn and Hans Oesch (eds.), Gattungen
der Musik in Einzeldarstellungen: Gedenkschrift Leo Schrade (Munich: Francke, 1973).
8
For such terms and concepts see Mary Carruthers, ‘Sweetness’, Speculum, 81 (2006), 999–1013.
12 CHRISTOPHER PAGE
perhaps widespread, that medieval musicians commonly ignored whatever

a forensic method of enquiry could not elucidate.9
No apology is needed for making Gregorian plainsong the focus of this
chapter. This large body of monophonic chant, developed between approxi-
mately 760 and 860 between the Seine and the Rhine, then supplemented
with many later additions, was disseminated along lines of kindred and
monastic alliance within the Frankish world, extended by conquest and (as
in Spain and parts of Italy) by papal exhortation. By 1300 it formed the
groundwork of compositional art throughout the greater part of Latin
Christendom. How wide should the compass of a vocal melody be before it
ceases to lie comfortably in the voice? How long should a musical phrase last
before there is a pause for breath, and how should the arrival of that moment
be signalled according to the weight of the pause? How should a melody set
the balance between stepwise movement and leaps? Gregorian plainsong
offered persuasive answers to these questions that anyone in the choirstalls
might hear framed with conviction by proficient cantors. The ideal of choral
blend was of some importance, for it could carry a measure of theological
weight as an expression of Christian obedience, yet there was ample scope for
such cantors to display a fine voice.
Neither Gregorian plainsong nor its many accretions can be viewed as
straightforward examples of the anonymous creation sometimes uncritically
associated with the Middle Ages. This music has by far the largest body of
ancillary commentary and anecdote of any Latin chant repertoire, and it
shows medieval writers distinguishing ‘ancients’ and ‘moderns’ in relation
either to themselves or to chant-makers whose name they knew. This termi-
nology, which one might readily suppose to be the invention of theorists from
the fourteenth century onwards concerned with polyphony and measured
notation, was in fact known to plainchant theorists and chant-makers at
a much earlier date.10 Musicians of the period 950–1350 believed they had
identified the principal features of the ancients’ manner and that they knew
how to move forward in a confident fashion. The greatest of all the ancients
was believed to be a named individual of great eminence, Pope Gregory I, and
literary sources reveal that many chants composed for the liturgy of saints
were associated with the names of their makers. They were not always
correctly remembered, as far as we may now discern, and a celebrated name
9
For a conspectus of such texts, with illustrative quotations, see Christopher Page, The Christian West and
Its Singers: The First Thousand Years, 2nd corrected ed. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press,
2012), pp. 429–41.
10
There are notable instances in the treatise of William of Hirsau (d. 1091). See Denis Harbinson (ed.),
Willehelmi Hirsaugensis Musica, Corpus Scriptorum de Musica 23 (Rome: American Institute of
Musicology, 1975).
could attract false attributions in a manner familiar from later periods of

musical history, yet the effect was the same: the field of plainsong composition
was crowded with identified persons. Some were of purely local fame, such as
Balther of Säckingen, Gerard of Corbie or Eberwin of Trier, but others were
important or even great names of the universal church, such as Sigebert of
Gembloux and Bruno of Toul, later Pope Leo IX (d. 1054).11 Far from being
anonymous, therefore, some layers of Latin plainsong were assumed to con-
tain material that would reveal, to the discerning enquirer, the felicitous
effects that its named creators had willed into it. The results inspired a rich
and diverse affective vocabulary. They might be ‘sweet sounding’ (dulcisonas)
or ‘most beautiful’ (pulcherrimos), composed with ‘correct music’ (regulari
melodia) or with ‘choice invention’ (elegans ingenium).
At the beginning of the twelfth century one of these chant-makers, Sigebert
of Gembloux, compiled a brief epistle to introduce his revised version of an
old Life of St Malo. The letter is addressed to Thietmar, the abbot of Sigebert’s
house. Capitalising upon the literary sensibility he shared with his superior,
Sigebert ventures an extended metaphor. He says that he worked on the poor
and antiquated text of the Life ‘like a country blacksmith’, pumping away at
the bellows of his forge; he filed the corroded Latin until it all seemed new.12
In one of his later writings, this time a catalogue of ‘illustrious men’ that ends
with a fulsome account of himself, Sigebert relates how he also composed
antiphons and responsories for St Malo to be chanted on his feast day; this
time, however, he made his material like a bee ‘producing honey’.13 There is
a marked contrast between the imagery he employs, for while text is like metal
(solid, durable and malleable), the music resembles honey (fluid, evanescent
and intractable).
Yet it would be easy to mistake what these metaphors imply. The allusion to
making honey is designed to invoke a common figure of speech in monastic
writings, namely the figure of the monk as an ingenious bee, apis ingeniosus,
flitting between the flowers of the Bible and the writings of the Church
Fathers to gather nectar for the good of the ecclesiastical hive. By using this
image to speak of his chants, Sigebert is certainly claiming that they delight
the ear as honey enraptures the palate, but he also implies they have been
11
For these and other figures, see Page, The Christian West, pp. 429–41. For the music of Balther of
Säckingen, there is now the immaculate edition by Mechthild Pörnbacher and David Hiley (eds.), Balther
von Säckingen, Bischof von Speyer, Historia sancti Fridolini (ca. 970), Musicological Studies L X V /26 (Lions Bay,
Canada: Institute of Mediaeval Music, 2016).
12
Vita Sancti Maclovii, in Jacques Paul Migne, Patrologiae Cursus Completus Series Latina, 217 vols. (Paris,
1844–5), with 4 vols. of indices (Paris, 1862–4), 160, pp. 730–1. Hereafter abbreviated PL.
13
Robert Witte (ed.), Catalogus Sigeberti Gemblacensis Monachi De Viris Illustribus (Berne: Lang, 1974), p.
104: ‘Arte autem musica antiphonas et responsoria de sanctis Maclovo et Guiberto melificavi.’
14 CHRISTOPHER PAGE
gathered from an extensive and abundant garden where many have laboured
before him. To lift the veil of metaphor: his plainsongs draw upon a rich and
self-conscious tradition of compositional practice and reflection.
A letter by Letald, monk of Saint-Mesmin de Micy, gives a sharper turn of
phrase to what that sense of tradition means. Letald composed a Life of Saint
Julian and dispatched it to Avesgaud, bishop of Le Mans (d. 1036) with a set of
responsories and antiphons, as he had requested:
We have indeed divided the sequence of responsories and antiphons as you

asked, in which, for the sake of avoiding prolixity, we have made each set from
a single mode, nor in general did we wish to distance ourselves from the
likeness of the old chant, lest we should produce barbarous or inexpert
melody. The newfangled work of some musicians does not please me for
they so abandon that guise they seem to be entirely contemptuous of follow-
ing the old auctores. Those who are free to make marriages wish to produce
children that resemble human beings, rather than to produce the form of some
previously unseen monster.14
With its self-satisfied use of first-person forms in the plural, this passage shows
a chant-maker discussing his craft with pride. Letald claims a place in
a compositional tradition, for he speaks with assurance of the ‘old chant’,
the Gregorian repertoire for Mass and Office. He does not wish to distance
himself from that music in every respect lest he should commit the musical
equivalent of a grammatical barbarism. His reference to ‘barbarous . . . mel-
ody’ (barbaram . . . melodiam) involves a transferred use of the term barbarismus
denoting a fault in Latin grammar, orthography or metrics.15 The known
composers of chant in the Middle Ages were erudite individuals whose under-
standing of what was correct in plainsong resembled (and was closely related
to) their discrimination in matters of Latinity and prosody.16 That is why they
were often inspired to compose chants for a saint: they judged the existing Life
of that same saint to be unsatisfactory on literary grounds or even absurd.
14
Vita Sancti Juliani (PL 137, p. 784), reprinting the text in Acta Sanctorum, 68 vols. (Brussels and Antwerp,
1643–1940), I I Januarius, 1152: ‘Sane responsoriorum et antiphonarum, ut petistis, digessimus ordinem;
in quibus pro vitando fastidio de unoquoque modo singula compegimus corpora: neque omnino alienari
volumus a similitudine veteris cantus, ne barbaram aut inexpertam, uti perhibetur, melodiam fingeremus.
Non enim mihi placet quorumdam musicorum novitas, qui tanta dissimilitudine utuntur, ut veteres sequi
omnino dedignentur auctores: nam hi qui conjugiis vacant malunt liberos hominibus similes gignere
quam alicujus invisi monstri effigiem procreare.’ Compare David Hiley, ‘The Historia of St Julian of Le
Mans by Létald of Micy: Some Comments and Questions about a North French Office of the Early
Eleventh Century’, in Margot E. Fassler and Rebecca A. Baltzer (eds.), The Divine Office in the Latin
Middle Ages (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
15
Wallace Martin Lindsay (ed.), Isidori Hispalensis Episcopi Etymologiarum sive Originum, 2 vols. (Oxford,
1911), vol. I , p. 32.
16
See Calvin M. Bower, ‘The Grammatical Model of Musical Understanding in the Middle Ages’, in
Patrick J. Gallacher and Helen Damico (eds.), Hermeneutics and Medieval Culture (Albany: State University
of New York Press, 1989).
Gerard of Sauve-Majeure (d. 1095), for example, made plainsongs for Saint
Adelhard when he found that his Life, written by a distinguished predecessor
of Gerard’s at Corbie, was ‘so full of prolix lamentation, so lovesick with the
language of the Song of Songs, it seemed more like an epithalamium than the
text for a rhymed Office’.17 This quality of prolixity, perceived in essentially
literary terms, is precisely what Letald seeks to avoid in his compositions; he
wishes to avoid fastidium, often used for the weariness and distaste a reader
may feel when a writer is unduly prolix or enters into an excessive degree of
detail.18 Finally, Letald’s somewhat disturbing comparison of poorly con-
structed chants to marriages that produce ‘some previously unseen monster’,
or invisi monstri effigiem, clothes a technical and critical judgement in the
material of an allusive metaphor. The source is the ‘snake-tressed form of
monster’, or anguicomam monstri effigiem, of Statius’ Thebaid (6.495) and it
refers here to chants that begin in one plainsong mode and end in another,
producing a musical chimera.
The plainsong modes offered a system of musical grammar designed to
show whether a chant was an intelligible, rational and defensible
composition.19 Each one of the eight modes defined a particular pattern of
tones and semitones while identifying a core pitch in the set and its principal
satellite pitches. A mode could guide the composer in the matter of how much
(and how often) his melody should rise or fall below the core pitch, and it
commended certain ways to begin, register an internal pause and close. In
addition to the obvious mnemonic value of classifying chants into families on
the basis of their most salient resemblances (an extraordinary feat of memory
and analytic listening), the modes offered what the ninth-century theorist
Aurelian calls the ‘glue’ which held composed plainsongs and chanted recita-
tion formulas together in a harmonious whole.20 Here were grounds for
17
Alia Vita S. Adelardi, in Acta Sanctorum, I Januarius, 111.
18
R. E. Latham, David R. Howlett and Richard Ashdowne (eds.), Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British
Sources (British Academy, London: Oxford University Press, 1975–2013), s.v. fastidium, sense 2; Johanne
W. Fuchs and Olga Weijers (eds.), Lexicon Latinitatis Nederlandicae Medii Aevi (Leiden: Brill, 1977–2005), s.
v. fastidium, sense 1.
19
For the modes and their history see Peter Jeffery, ‘The Earliest Oktōēchoi: The Role of Jerusalem and
Palestine in the Beginnings of Modal Ordering’, in Peter Jeffery (ed.), The Study of Medieval Chant: Paths and
Bridges, East and West. In Honour of Kenneth Levy (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001); and Keith Falconer, ‘The
Modes before the Modes: Antiphon and Differentia in Western Chant’, in ibid. The practice of distin-
guishing eight categories of modes, divided into four pairs and associated with Greek precedent, is by no
means distinctively Frankish. What is more, relatively systematic and notated sources of the Gregorian
music do not appear before c. 900, by which time the repertory they contain has probably undergone
successive layers of independent redaction, in many points of detail, to make the chants accord better with
modal doctrines that were the gateway to systematic classification, listening and memorisation. This
further obscures the relation between theory and practice at the formative stage of the repertory.
20
Lawrence Gushee (ed.), Aureliani Reomensis Musica Disciplina, Corpus Scriptorum de Musica 21 (Rome:
American Institute of Musicology, 1975), p. 78.
16 CHRISTOPHER PAGE
correcting what was false, for constraining what was capricious and for con-
demning any mischievous attempt to create music that did not seek to make
a ritual text reach a greater depth in the listener than the spoken voice could
do alone.
There were many ways in which this system for analysing melody could
become a preoccupation or be invoked. In addition to providing a technical
language, the modes performed a fundamentally moral purpose which even
those of modest musical gifts or interests might come to understand. The
Latin manuals of plainchant reveal an acute interest in the subtleties of the
human voice as a vehicle for melody but also for spoken prose and poetry,
a legacy of Classical civilisation but one which could not be judged entirely
benign. Its objects, like its appetites, called for scrutiny, not least because the
ministers of the Christian religion were in the curious position of having to
concede that the most eloquent homily might do less to induce piety than
a melody. In the Etymologies, one of the foundational texts of the medieval
experience, bishop Isidore of Seville (d. 636) observes that liturgical readers
may ‘announce’ the teachings of Scripture when they declaim the lessons,
whereas singers sometimes excite their hearers to compunction – the sharp
reminder of sinfulness that softened the heart and was often accompanied by
tears. In such cases the power of music was well and good, but viewed in
general terms it was a potentially dangerous force. Isidore, alarmed by the
possibility that he might be awarding the palm to music, quickly adds that
some readers deliver their texts ‘so lamentingly’ that those present are
overwhelmed.21
The question of whether a melody might kindle an especially ardent flame
of piety in the listener precisely because it was irregular, and unusually arrest-
ing to the ear, was therefore a delicate one with considerable pastoral and even
theological implications. The music theorists were prepared to recognise the
principle, but it would undo their core project to commend it. John of
Afflighem blames the moderns (novi modulatores) for jumbling different
modal signals together in a single melody, cultivating what he calls a pruritus
aurium. This is translated in the standard English version of John’s treatise as
an attempt to ‘tickle the ears’, implying a pleasant sensation that might make
one smile or laugh, but that may not be quite the sense that John intends.22
The term pruritus, ‘an itch’, has a long history in Christian Latin, with prurio
bearing the metaphorical sense ‘to long for a thing, to be wanton’. John is
21
Lindsay (ed.), Etymologiarum sive Originum, bk V I I , p. 12.
22
Smits van Waesberghe, Johannis Affligemensis De Musica, p. 96; Palisca (ed.), Hucbald, Guido and John on
Music, p. 125.
making precisely the objection to improper and even perhaps mischievous use
of musical resources that modal theory was in part designed to curb. His
reference to composers in the new fashion who mix modes to satisfy the
wanton longing of the ears for gratification probably alludes to the dire
prophecy in 2 Timothy 4.3–4: ‘For the time will come when they will not
endure sound doctrine, but after their own lusts shall they heap to themselves
teachers, having itching ears (prurientes auribus), and they shall turn away their
ears from the truth and shall be turned unto fables.’ A wrong or irresponsibly
placed note could evidently be a serious matter.
The process of preparing for a choral liturgy of Gregorian or indeed any
other form of chant, then carrying it through with a complex interplay
between choir and soloists, might involve singers in some process of adjudica-
tion about the relative merits of competing versions, sometimes descending to
the minor (or not so minor) variations of melodic detail that are richly attested
in the manuscript sources. Such discussions were liable to be a fraught com-
bination of modal reasoning (more or less correctly applied), personal pre-
ference and pure prejudice. The Italian ascetic Guido of Arezzo, who famously
developed a form of staff notation in the 1020s, had observed the dissent that
could arise among singers who had learned different versions of a chant and
were prepared to defend their own with some tenacity, both as a mark of
respect for their teachers and as a sonorous distillation, so to speak, of their
monastic or clerical upbringing. Guido judged such arguments to be a ‘grave
mistake’ and liable to promote a ‘perilous discord’.23 John of Afflighem had
also seen these quarrels taking place. ‘If, as sometimes happens, a musician
takes singers to task about a chant which they perform either inaccurately or
crudely’, he says, ‘they become angry and make a shameless uproar and are
unwilling to admit the truth, but defend their error with the greatest effort.’24
Here the singer who makes the objection to what he hears is called a musicus,
meaning one who is trained in the modal pedagogy and other aspects of
plainchant theory. He criticises what is ‘not correct’ (non recte) or ‘poorly
put together’ (incomposite), all terms implying unjustifiable departures from
correct and enabling modality. John even ventriloquises three singers who are
literally comparing notes in the midst of such personal and musical
disharmony:
23
Joseph Smits van Waesberghe (ed.), Tres Tractatuli Guidonis Aretini, Divitiae Musicae Artis, iii (Buren:
Knuf, 1975), p. 62; and Dolores Pesce (ed. and trans.), Guido d’Arezzo’s Regule Rithmice, Prologus in
Antiphonarium and Epistola ad Michahelem: A Critical Text and Translation, Musicological Studies 73
(Ottawa: Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1999), pp. 410–11.
24
Music, p. 110.
18 CHRISTOPHER PAGE
One says, ‘Master Trudo taught me this way’. Another rejoins: ‘But I learned it
like this from master Albinus’; and to this a third remarks, ‘Master Salomon
certainly sings differently’ . . . rarely, therefore, do three men agree about one
chant. Since each man prefers his own teacher, there arise as many variations in
chanting as there are teachers in the world.25
Around 1100 the abbey of Afflighem was a new Benedictine house located on
plains of northern Europe that had once been the heartland of the Carolingian
dynastic power. It would not be unusual for such a monastery, in such a place,
to receive new members from time to time who had studied with different
choirmasters, for many things could impel a monk to wander. He might be
searching for a community where the Rule was observed with a strictness that
satisfied his aspirations, or wandering in exile after some contretemps (col-
legiate living easily gives rise to such conflicts). The creation of new monas-
teries as colonies from a mother house – common in this great age of monastic
foundation – could also give rise to situations like the one described by John.
Arguments such as these may often have required each singer to defend,
‘with the greatest effort’, what he or she actually preferred on the grounds that
it was demonstrably the best practice judged in modal terms. The disputes were
conducted at the point where the ideal of regulated melody, so dear to the
music theorists of the period because it was so enabling, met the creative
profligacy of the actual music to which it was being applied and the sheer
vagaries of taste. To judge by the manuscript sources, matters in contention
might include the starting pitch and the initial musical gesture of any chant
(the disputes could perhaps be especially fraught in this regard, given the
especially mnemonic force of beginnings), the placement of a semitone step
that could not be defended in terms of the traditional gamut, the number of
notes in a melisma or perhaps its general curve, the melodic gesture used to
precede a pause, the presence or absence of an ornamental neume at a certain
point and the assignment of the melodic elements to the syllables of the text.
That list by no means exhausts the range of variants that may appear in
competing manuscript witnesses to the ‘same’ chant, and which might involve
singers in a wrangle about what was dulcissima, honestissima or melliflua in the
melody at issue between them.
John was an early champion of the notation using inked and dry-point lines
that Guido of Arezzo developed from an existing bundle of graphic techni-
ques, probably in the 1020s. Between the eleventh and the fourteenth cen-
turies many centres faced the task of filtering their chant repertory, for the
25
Music, p. 147.
first time, through the mesh of such notation. This could also promote
disputes about local details and larger structures since the system required
clear decisions to be made about the steps each melody makes. That always
had to be someone’s decision, preferably a reasoned one and in that sense
critical. Should the version known to the younger members of the commu-
nity, some perhaps newly arrived from other houses, be preferred to the
versions sung by the aged whose tradition was in some respects demonstrably
idiosyncratic or ungrammatical because it could not be notated on a stave?
Which was best? Beyond that, the choice of what to record, like the arrange-
ment of the liturgical calendar, represented a particular relationship between
the entrenched localism of the house and its wider connections with the
authority of a bishop that the monks might wish to affirm or contest by
following or not following the usage of the cathedral or metropolitan church.
Some scribes may have regretted the days when the older neumatic notations,
without lines, did not compel them to record the melodies in a manner so
legible and therefore so vulnerable to a contentious challenge in matters both
large and small.
Despite its undoubted invitation to pedantry, modal theory could be used
to express, and even in some measure to explain, the gratification that
a particular plainsong could give when it was grammatically made.
A particularly eloquent text in this regard is the work of the twelfth-century
theorist commonly known as the Seay anonymous. In a short treatise on chant
and polyphony this author observes that a well-composed chant in mode
I should frequently rise to the fifth degree (D–a) above its home pitch in
a ‘joyful’ manner (hilariter).26 This proves to be a term of which the author is
fond. He maintains that all the authentic modes (1, 3, 5 and 7) should linger on
the fifth degree and ‘often ascend to it’ hilariter, while a chant in mode three
should ascend hilariter to the sixth degree (E–c). There is not much doubt
about the range of meaning hilariter may command in this passage. The
Classical senses of ‘cheerfully, joyfully, merrily’ were retained in medieval
Christian Latin. When the plainsong theorists step outside their standard
technical vocabulary in this way the results are often arresting; in this instance
the author appears to be identifying aspects of melodic motion in chant that
the listener perceives as enlivened, and perhaps spiritually uplifting, because
they give the ear the delight of having its educated expectations of the correct
modal grammar artfully met. Although the author is referring to what may
often happen in the course of a chant, the characteristic gestures of a mode are
often already revealed by the beginnings of chants commonly cited as
26
Albert Seay, ‘An Anonymous Treatise from St Martial’, Annales musicologiques, 5 (1957), 28.
20 CHRISTOPHER PAGE
diagnostic of its class; as a result, these openings offer not only a melodic
‘incipit’ but also a distillation of a chant’s wider properties, and one with
a strong mnemonic force since the beginning is the leading edge, so to speak,
of what is to be memorised.
In his consideration of polyphony, where a chant is decorated with a second
voice, the Seay anonymous places the same emphasis on striking effects and
sheer pleasure. The music should proceed with ‘a wondrous flexibility’, going
forward ‘melodizing or in a pleasure-seeking way’ (modulando vel lasciviendo)
where lasciviendo does not fail to acknowledge the moral ambiguity present in
the Modern English expression ‘a seductive appeal’.27 The author recom-
mends that a section of note-against-note counterpoint may have more
notes in the added part, at the end of a phrase, than there are in the chant,
so that it seems ‘more beautiful and facetior’, which could imply an ‘elegant’ or
‘witty’ effect, but also an urbane and even a ‘courtly’ one to judge by texts
which associate facetus with the schooled demeanour appropriate to the courts
of spiritual and temporal magnates.28 A chant-maker should cultivate such
effects at cadences so that the result will be ‘more willingly heard by those
who are listening’: a recommendation that recognises what a later age will call
an ‘aesthetic’ purpose with the same candour as it identifies a constituency of
persons listening and reacting to what they hear: the ‘listeners’ or
auscultantes.29
Some musicians responded to the moral and even pastoral need for gram-
matical chant by composing plainsongs which combined a more emphatic
modality with new forms of musical and textual patterning. Their highly
controlled and lucid techniques represent the art of the moderns in its most
concentrated form. An example is provided by the Magnificat antiphon in
mode II, Ecce leti, by bishop Radbod of Utrecht (d. 918).30 Neither the general
course and compass of this melody, with its adjacent falling fourths at gloria
Martini, nor the way the tessitura allows the singer to seat the melody securely
in the voice and negotiate from there, would cause any real surprise in
a Gregorian plainsong. A moment of luxuriance at Christe magnifies the prayer
for Christ’s intercession in a manner quite within the familiar Gregorian
means of expression. Yet in other ways Radbod has already moved on some
distance from the Gregorian repertory. The text is in accentual (or in medieval
terms, rhythmic) verse; the lines have four beats each and eight syllables; their
27
Seay, ‘An Anonymous Treatise’, 35.
28
As in Lanfranc of Canterbury, De corpore et sanguine domini, PL 150, p. 414: ‘esse rusticus et idiota
catholicus quam tecum existere curialis atque facetus haereticus’.
29
Seay, ‘An Anonymous Treatise’, 33.
30
Transcription from an antiphoner copied for St Mary’s Church, Utrecht, and facsimile of the original,
in Page, The Christian West, pp. 416–17.
cadences, all save one with a terminal -a assonance, alternate between the
cadential rhythm /x (as in dígna) and /x\ (as in gáudià). This harmony of verbal
sound is by no means native to the older chant, for Gregorian texts often recall
the best rhetorical periods of Roman legal prose. The lucid modality of the
melody also marks this as an example of a modernus at work. The music extends
along the trellis of its mode in a highly controlled manner, virtually never
failing to articulate the ends of poetic lines, and the caesuras within them
when they occur, by pausing on either the final of the mode (D) or on the fifth
degree above (a). This is presumably one kind of style – widespread in the
ninth and tenth centuries – that composers regarded as a musical equivalent of
what they accomplished when, often as part of the same project, they took the
existing Life of a saint and made it ‘more schooled’, cultius, and ‘more urbane’,
urbanius.31
There were other ways of broaching the effects of musical sound in plainch-
ant which take the modern reader into much less familiar territory. To explore
their sensations in writing, medieval authors possessed, in the tradition of
Latin theology, a vast body of work which explored how a life of love and
contrition could best be lived within the bounds of a body prey to temptation
or suffering. The notion of ‘compunction’ proved especially potent in this
context.32 The literal meaning of the word, as mentioned above, is a pricking
sensation felt by the physical body; in metaphorical terms it meant a sharp and
sudden realisation of sinfulness arising from a fallen nature that was mostly
concealed from view by worldly preoccupations and hardness of heart. It is no
surprise, therefore, that compunction was often associated with weeping, as
when a sudden wound to the physical body induces a sense of trauma and
compassion for self that may be accompanied by tears. Thus the Frankish
monastic writer Grimlaic who flourished in the early 800s, gives this assurance
to those intending to adopt an especially strict life of monastic seclusion:
Childish games and laughter do not delight us but holy readings and the
spiritual music of melody instead. However hard-hearted we are, and unable
31
See Fabian Lochner, ‘Un évêque musicien au Xe siècle: Radbod d’Utrecht (+ 917)’, Tijdschrift van der
Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiednis, xxxviii (1988), 3–35; facsimile of the source in Ike de Loos,
Charles Downey and Ruth Steiner (eds.), Utrecht Bibliotheek der Rijksuniversiteit MS 406 (3.J.7), Publications
of Musical Manuscripts 21 (Ottawa: Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1997).
32
P. G. W. Glare (ed.), Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), s.
v. ‘compungō’. See also ‘pungō’, whose senses include ‘to break the equanimity of’. Compare Latham,
Howlett and Ashdowne (eds.), Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, Fascicule 1, A–B (British
Academy, London: Oxford University Press, 1975), s.v. ‘compungere’, sense (c), ‘to inspire
w. compunction’; and Otto Prinz, et al. (eds.), Mittellateinisches Wörterbuch, Band I I , C (Munich:
Bayerische Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1999), s.v. ‘compungo’, I I . b. 2. For forms of compunction,
see Sandra J. McEntire, ‘The Doctrine of Compunction in the West: Theology and Literary Implications’,
unpublished PhD dissertation, Cornell University (1987); more recently McEntire, The Doctrine of
Compunction in Medieval England: Holy Tears (Lewisham: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990).
22 CHRISTOPHER PAGE
to produce tears, our hearts are turned to compunction when we hear the
sweetness of psalmody. There are many who are moved by the sweetness of
chant to bewail their sins, and readily brought to tears, by the sweet sounds of
a singer.33
Grimlaic is referring to chants that achieved their effects because of their

musical appeal, not in spite of it. He is not concerned here with any psalmody
but only that which sounds the ‘sweetness of psalms’ (psalmorum dulcedo
insonuerit), which strikes the listener with the ‘sweetness of its chant’ (cantus
suavitate) and with the ‘pleasantness of its sweetness’ (dulcedo suavitatis). Those
who reacted to such plainsong with tears enhanced their connections with
others and found that their importance to the common project of worship was
magnified. They would also know that they had experienced a reaction with
a name, which was compunctio, and that a means existed to turn this experience
of music into a form of spiritual nourishment and growth.
How was this tearfulness identified in the substance of the music? One
answer can be sought in the inherently expressive properties granted to the
plainsong modes from at last the twelfth century onwards. Mode VI, for
example, was consistently admired for sounding with a ‘lachrymose note’
(lacrimosa vox) by which listeners could be softened (mulcentur). The implied
context is certainly a softening of the heart which, in its most extreme form,
brings tears of penance and a desire for a reconciliation. A late but especially
explicit comment, by the Carthusian theorist Heinrich Eger von Kalkar (d.
1408), records that mode VI inspires minds to ‘sweetness and piety as in the
Gregorian responsory Videns Jacob’.34 It is a luxury to have a specific chant
cited in such a context. The text is derived from the episode in Genesis 36
where Jacob sees the clothes of his son Joseph that his brothers have stained
with blood:
Videns Jacob vestimenta Joseph scindit vestimenta sua cum fletu et dixit fera
pessima devoravit filium meum Joseph.
Jacob, seeing the clothes of Joseph, rent his garments with lamentation and
said: ‘A wild beast has devoured my son Joseph.’
33
PL 103, p. 619: ‘Quapropter non nos oblectet puerilis jocus ac risus, sed lectiones sacrae et spiritualis
melodiae cantus. Quamvis enim dura sint corda nostra ad lacrymas producendas, mox tamen ut psal-
morum dulcedo insonuerit, ad compunctionem cordis animum nostrum inflectit. Multi enim reperiuntur
qui cantus suavitate commoti sua crimina plangunt, atque ex ea parte magis flectuntur ad lacrymas, ex qua
psallentis insonuerit dulcedo suavitatis.’
34
Heinrich Hüschen, Das Cantuagium des Heinrich Eger von Kalkar, Beiträge zur rheinischen
Musikgeschichte, vol. 2 (Cologne: Staufen-Verlag, 1952), p. 48: ‘Sextus lacrimosus est et pius, omnium
tonorum dulcissimus, animos ad pietatem et lacrimas provocans sicut in responsorio gregoriano Videns
Jacob.’
The theorists’ assessments of mode VI especially invite comment, for

this ‘lachrymose’ mode, considered merely as a ladder of tones and semi-
tones, and without the discretionary flat that was sometimes required, is
actually an extended form of what a later age will call the major scale:
CDEFGAB\cdef. In modal theory, however, the foundational tone of this
mode is F, emphatically established in the opening gestures of Videns Jacob,
so the ladder is actually structured as CDE–F–GAB\cdef. This often gives
chants sung with a B\ natural the pervasive sense of an F–B\ tritone. The
extent to which this was an element in the tearful effect of Videns Jacob
remains an open question, since there are some sources which impose a flat
at certain points in this melody and others which do not. By the standards
of a later age, the maker of Videns Jacob shows no interest in any conven-
tionalised code whereby a particular musical effect may be heard as the
sonorous correlate of an emotional state; the word fletu (‘weeping’) elicits
no special response or ornamental neume, although the potently symbolic
gesture of tenting garments (scidit vestimenta) is lifted high in the voice and
textual repetition is answered with an answering melodic restatement: the
name of Joseph, which appears twice, is set to essentially the same music
each time. We may suspect that the lachrymose quality of Videns Jacob was
perceived in terms that fluently compounded the subject of its text (a
grieving patriarch), its modal properties, certain particularities of its word-
setting, and the penitential Lenten liturgical context in which it was
appointed to be sung.
Lives of the saints and chronicles contain many brief narratives in which
a chant precipitates a supernatural event, such as a miraculous cure, or where
a plainsong is sung by celestial voices that someone is privileged to hear. These
stories reveal a medieval discourse about music that is as yet little known,
and yet they represent a substantial body of literary material where specific
plainsongs are embedded in a discursive context. These narratives invariably
identify a chant by its textual incipit, sometimes noting its type (introit,
gradual or whatever it may be), but the authors almost always take care to
mention that the chant was sung, often in a ravishing manner, and not simply
recited as a prayer or invocation.
What kind of criticism may such stories be said to offer? Since they take
care to specify the plainsong at issue there is no reason to suppose that any
chant would have served as well as the one actually specified in the story;
there is choice and therefore there is a measure of discernment. Sometimes it
seems that only the text can be confidently invoked to explain the selection
made, as when St Vivian performed a miraculous cure when he heard his
devotees sing the words Homo iste fecit mirabilia: ‘this man has performed
24 CHRISTOPHER PAGE
wonders’.35 Yet there are instances where it seems the music is also invoked,
albeit at the level of the chant’s modal class rather than of specific melodic or
structural details in its own manufacture. Soon after 900, for example,
a female recluse near the abbey of Saint Gall saw the abbey’s patron saint
singing the Introit Ne timeas Zacharia for the Nativity of John the Baptist.
When he had done this ‘with sweet music’, the saint revealed that some
members of the monastic household would soon be drowned in a shipwreck
on Lake Constance.36 Saint Gall presumably selected a chant from the
liturgy of John the Baptist to interpret this imminent drowning as a form
of baptismal cleansing (quite apart from the fact that the recluse would have
heard the saint begin the chant with the welcome words Ne timeas, ‘do not be
afraid’). The melody is cast in mode VII, whose general tessitura is the
highest of any in the modal set, issuing an implicit summons that a choir
should sing the chant as high as they can sing it well. The story seems to
translate a moment of supernatural epiphany into an almost synesthetic
apprehension of high pitch and ‘great brilliance of light’ as Ne timeas
Zacharia rises high in Romanesque arches of melody, the saint’s radiance
spreading through the solitary’s cell. Yet there is not just pitch and lumines-
cence; there is also movement and delight. The music theorists often char-
acterise chants of mode VII in terms of their tendency to spring or bound
(saltus), invoking a metaphor of bodily movement often associated with an
exultant emotional state. They declare that the effect is heard ‘joyfully’
(gratanter) or ‘with pleasure’ (libenter) because it is itself inherently pleasur-
able and jocund, lascivus atque jucundus. This was a lived perception acquired
by circling through the liturgical seasons year by year; it was not the
response of an enquiring mind hovering over its materials and then moving
on to more.
35
Anon., ‘Translatio Sancti Viviani Episcopi’, Analecta Bollandiana, 8 (1889), 263. Such stories are almost
never found in the Latin writings of the first millennium, for they reflect the rise of ‘properised’ chant
repertoires where the texts appointed for the rite on any given day were not simply sung to music of the
right kind, as in an extempore tradition, but were sung to the right music: to a fixed and indeed canonical
melody.
36
Walter Berschin (ed. and trans.), Ekkehard I : Vita Sanctae Wiboradae (St Gallen: Historischer Verein des
Kantons St Gallen, 1983), p. 56.
.2.
Music Criticism in the Late-Medieval

and Renaissance Era
STEFANO MENGOZZI
In one form or another, a critical discourse on the merit, the emotional/moral

impact and the structural coherence of the art of sounds in its manifold
manifestations and modes of fruition (individual works, genres and their
social affiliations, performance, musical taste, the act of listening, etc.) has
existed in Western culture since the origins of Western music. As Fred Everett
Maus points out, the very act of assembling tones to create a melody implies a
conscious act of self-criticism on the part of the musician.1 In this broad sense,
music criticism is closely aligned to music theory: as early as in ancient Greek
culture, the awareness of the affective power of organised sound upon listen-
ers led to forms of musical ‘science’ that offered meticulous quantifications of
the structures of musical pitch (such as scales, intervals, proportions, tempera-
ment, etc.) in conjunction with a consideration of the psychological and social
effects of those same structures.
Normative, or prescriptive, forms of music criticism were not uncommon
in the European Middle Ages. They were predicated on the widely shared
argument that the meaningful ordering of sounds has a ‘grammar’ regulating
its well-formedness, the harmonious disposition of its components.2
Augustine’s famous definition of music as scientia bene modulandi, stated at
the very beginning of his De musica, signals a grammatical approach to the art
of sounds that remained widely influential throughout the pre-modern world.
An harmonious disposition of parts, in turn, was regarded as the precondition
for the unique forms of intellectual and sensorial delight that music delivers to
1
Fred Everett Maus, ‘Criticism, §I : General Issues’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, available at:
www.oxfordmusiconline.com (accessed 27 May 2017).
2
For an overview of the significance of the grammatical approach to music in medieval musical treatises,
surely a topic in need of further investigation, see Calvin Bower, ‘The Grammatical Model of Musical
Understanding in the Middle Ages’, in Patrick J. Gallagher and Helen Damico (eds.), Hermeneutics and
Medieval Culture (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989). Engelbert, abbot of Admont (d.
1331) offers insightful ‘grammatical’ analyses of chant melodies in his De musica; see Sarah Fuller,
‘“Delectabatur in hoc auris”: Some Fourteenth-Century Perspectives on Aural Perception’, Musical
Quarterly, 82/3–4 (1998), 466–81 (esp. 467–69).
[25]
26 STEFANO MENGOZZI
its listeners and students. The quadrivial discipline of musica (music theory,
from Boethius to the Renaissance and beyond) was dedicated to demonstrating
the rational origin of those components (intervals, consonances, genera) by
highlighting their direct derivation from the arithmetical proportions. Such
overwhelming emphasis on the rational study of music in the pre-modern era is
not per se evidence of a corresponding lack of interest in the ‘art’ of music as a
sensorial experience, as Frank Hentschel has compellingly argued.3 Rather,
throughout the medieval and Renaissance eras, musical experience played a
marginal role in scholarly discourse simply because it was not deemed amenable
to rational investigation. Yet, practical concerns are often just around the
corner, as the following pages will demonstrate: after the quadrivial approach
to music led to the formulation of grammatical rules of well-formedness (which
most notably came to the fore on the subject of the diatonic modes), it was a
short step to the emergence of a critical, music-analytic mindset that would
single out either the occasional breaking of those rules (inevitably carrying
moral as much as ‘aesthetic’ connotations) or their successful application (trig-
gering pleasurable musical experiences). Inevitably, prescription calls for
descriptive feedback to ensure its enforcement.
Two general observations apply to the critical discourse on music surveyed in
this chapter. The first one has to do with the direct links that tie such discourse
to the traditions of literary and rhetorical criticism dating back to Classical
antiquity. As the following pages will show, the musical writers of the Middle
Ages and the Renaissance mediated their terminological and conceptual tools
(such as the oppositions lascivia/iucunditas and dulcedo/duritia) directly from the
auctores of the ‘science of discourse’, such as Quintilian. Because they rely on
fundamental categories of experience and moral judgement, such binary oppo-
sitions have naturally remained in place for centuries to come.
The second observation pertains to the specific object of criticism that is the
exclusive focus of this chapter, namely sacred music. It seems that the ques-
tion of how to articulate the sacred successfully through musical sound
became increasingly urgent in the late Middle Ages. It was addressed not
only through the new alliance of music and text pursued in new devotional
genres such as the Italian lauda and the English carol, but also in musical
writings that sought to protect the sacred from the intrusions of secular
lascivia of various kinds. In this sense, music criticism of the late Middle
3
Frank Hentschel, ‘The Sensuous Music Aesthetics of the Middle Ages: The Case of Augustine, Jacques
de Liège and Guido of Arezzo’, Plainsong and Medieval Music, 20 (2011), 1–29. The argument is fully
developed in Frank Hentschel, Sinnlichkeit und Vernunft in der mittelalterlichen Musiktheorie: Strategien der
Konsonanzwertung und der Gegenstand der Musica Sonora um 1300, Beihefte zum Archiv für
Musikwissenschaft 47 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2000).
Music Criticism in the Late-Medieval and Renaissance Era 27
Ages prolonged a debate on the role of music within the Christian church that
was as old as Christianity itself. This is not to imply that there is no such thing
as an incipient strand of criticism of secular music in the period under con-
sideration, but only to alert readers that it will not be discussed in the present
essay.
The Coming of Age of Musica Humana

The growing interest in the phenomenology and physical aspects of sound in
the late Middle Ages – fostered, for instance, by Pietro d’Abano’s commentary
on the pseudo-Aristotelian Problems – coincided with an increased focus on
the effects of musical sounds on human minds and bodies, and with an interest
in describing or representing musical sound from the perspective of its bodily
experience – trends that have remained part of the tradition of music criticism
ever since, in one form or another.4 As Bruce Holsinger has demonstrated in a
groundbreaking exploration of music and corporeality in medieval culture,
the intellectual primacy accorded to the Platonic-Pythagorean musical cos-
mology in the pre-modern era could not eradicate, or even marginalise,
alternative epistemologies that highlighted the extent to which sound was
ultimately irreducible to number.5 Indeed, the very proponents of
Pythagorean rationalism ‘often return to the very flesh they purportedly
transcend’ so that, according to Holsinger,
[a] useful way of imagining the relationship between classical music theory
and medieval musical culture might be to envision their interaction as a kind
of intellectual and theological plate tectonics, by which a dualist platonism
hostile to the material world collides with an incarnational theology forced to
account for the musical behaviours, pleasures, and desires of all-too-human
bodies.6
Those ‘intellectual plate tectonics’ openly clashed in Augustine of Hippo, who

at the same time embraced a Neoplatonic view of music as rooted in number
while also experiencing the full force of musical delight on his body, as he
4
On Pietro d’Abano’s musical commentaries, see Claude V. Palisca, Humanism in Italian Renaissance
Musical Thought (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 51–66; and Letterio Mauro, ‘La musica
nei commenti ai “Problemi”: Pietro d’Abano e Évrart de Conty’, in Mauro (ed.), La musica nel pensiero
medievale (Ravenna: Longo Editore, 1999), pp. 31–69.
5
Bruce W. Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to Chaucer (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2001).
6
Ibid., p. 7. Along the same lines, Umberto Eco showed in his classic study on medieval aesthetics that
authors such as Bernard of Clairvaux and Suger of Saint-Denis responded vividly to the refined beauty of
the material objects around them, even as they wished to denounce its corrupting import. See Umberto
Eco, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, trans. Hugh Bredin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), pp.
4–16.
28 STEFANO MENGOZZI
famously described in his Confessions.7 Yet, at times they engendered rather

playful metaphors: for instance, a passage in several treatises of the Ad organum
faciendum tradition anthropomorphise the relationship between the vox prin-
cipalis and the vox organalis by describing their relative motions as the physical
interaction between two friends (ending with a musical ‘kiss’, in the form of a
cadential unison).8
It was left to the later movement of the devotio moderna – the affective
religious practices of the late-medieval era, promoted by the mendicant orders
and other reformist sections of the Church – to provide a theological justifica-
tion of sensuous musical pleasure as a vivid sign of the human body redeemed
by Christ’s resurrection. The late-medieval genres of the lauda, the carol and
other popular religious songs were designed to impress their listeners with
the gentle contours of their melodic lines and with the suppleness and sweet-
ness of their harmonies – the musical equivalents of the deeper and more
meaningful dulcedo ushered in by the Christian message of salvation. To the
musical commentators of the time, such as Johannes Gallicus, the dulcedo of
those devotional genres was evocative of the song of the angels, which
centuries earlier had inspired the sacred chants of the primitive Church.
Dulcedo implies simplicitas – also a key sign of humbleness – but also purity,
as well as a form of musical pleasure that, albeit clearly rooted in a bodily
experience, thoroughly pervades the mind, generating in the listener a desire
for heavenly things and the Almighty (dulcedo Dei).9 St Bernard of Clairvaux
gave perhaps the clearest formulation of sweetness as a powerful gateway for a
new theology that exalts the human body as the perfect venue for encounter-
ing the divine (‘Jesus is honey in the mouth, melody in the ear, a jubilee in the
heart’).10 Bernard’s theology of sweetness rests on the double meaning of the
7
Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire, pp. 69–78. The author aptly observes that Augustine’s account is
‘ripe with the imagery of liquefaction’ (p. 71). On this topic, see also Christopher Page’s ‘Speaking of
Plainsong in the Middle Ages’, Chapter 1 in this volume.
8
‘ Let us unite two friends conversing leisurely, for so great is their bond, so great their affection, that
one conducts the other out of kindness, giving it the fourth and fifth in turn; and suddenly they are
together at the octave or the unison’, Ad organum faciendum et Item de organo, edited with introduction,
translation, and notes, by Jay. A. Huff (Brooklyn: Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1970), p. 48; for the
original Latin text (Milan treatise), see Hans Heinrich Eggebrecht and Frieder Zaminer, ‘Ad organum
faciendum’: Lehrschriften der Mehrstimmigkeit in nachguidonischer Zeit (Mainz: B. Schott’s Söhne, 1970), p.
111. The full excerpt is discussed in Holsinger, Music, Body, and Desire, pp. 161–2.
9
Mary Carruthers, The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013),
pp. 89–99.
10
Cited in Carruthers, The Experience of Beauty, p. 91. Bernard’s contemporary, Hugo of Foulloy, flatly
dismisses the sweetness of the senses as fruitless, when it does not come from the heart, in his passionate
condemnation of the musical abuses in the church. ‘What good is the sweetness of the voice – he
wonders – without the sweetness of the heart?’ (‘Quid prodest dulcedo vocis sine dulcedine cordis?’), in
De claustro animae, bk 2, ch. 21, ‘De dissolution in choro’; see Jacques Paul Migne, Patrologiae Cursus
Completus, vol. 176 (Paris, 1880), col. 1081. Here and elsewhere in this essay, all translations are mine
unless otherwise indicated.
Latin verb sapio, sapere, meaning both ‘to know’ and ‘to taste’, which the
Cistercian father highlights in his landmark commentaries on the Song of
Songs. If dulcedo regulated the personal experience of both God and material
reality, firmly relating them to each other, its synonym – suavis, from (per)
suadeo – had an unmistakable link with rhetoric: sweetness of expression has
long been recognised as a highly per-suasive rhetorical tool. In a sense, the texts
of these devotional genres themselves may be read as a form of music criticism
conceived as a guide to listening. With their frequent references to the
sweetness of the message of salvation, so unequivocally embodied in sound,
they draw attention to the affective correspondences between text and
music.11
On the other hand, sweetness for its own sake, severed from the sweetness
of the heart, may easily degenerate into lascivia, a licentious and effeminate
form of pleasure that aims at titillating the audience rather than educating it.
The Classical theory of rhetoric already deployed the term – perhaps from the
Sanskrit lásati (‘desire’) – in distinctively derogative fashion, the charge of
lasciviousness being possibly the most damaging weapon in the literary
critic’s arsenal well into the Renaissance. Quintilian famously found the
modern rhetorical style to be lascivus, meaning effeminate, unnatural and
overdone, singling out Ovid’s poetry for its lightness and sensuality – two
essential attributes of lascivia. Later authors such as Giovanni Boccaccio,
Ermolao Barbaro the Elder, and Battista Spagnoli Mantuanus continued to
wield the term in their stinging critiques of either particular kinds of poetry
and specific poetic works (such as Ovid’s Metamorphoses) or (in Barbaro’s case)
of poetry tout court.12
Quintilian had also compared a poorly conceived oratio to the ‘most lasci-
vious rhythms of castanets’,13 a significant parallel in the light of the fact that
in medieval times the term lascivia was also frequently invoked in connection
with aspects of rhythm (see below). Thus, the Carthusian monk Johannes
Gallicus, a key figure in mid-fifteenth-century music theory and criticism,
rejected mensural music not only on account of its contrived rhythm figures,
but also, more significantly, because it does not conform to the modal norms
11
See, for instance, the lauda texts by Florentine poet Feo Belcari (1410–84), surveyed in Blake Wilson,
Singing Poetry in Renaissance Florence: The Cantasi Come Tradition (1375–1550) (Florence: Olschki, 2009),
pp. 55–143. By the same token, the pain of Christ’s suffering on the cross was usually set to appropriately
sombre laude.
12
The observations on lascivia presented here are based on Cédric Vanhems, ‘La Preface de Josse Bade à
son édition des œuvres de Paulin de Nole (Paris, 1516)’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 73 (2011),
607–22 (esp. 609–13).
13
Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, Institutio oratoria, 9.4.142. I have consulted the edition by Harold
Edgeworth Butler in the Perseus Digital Library, available at www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/collections
(accessed 31 May 2017).
30 STEFANO MENGOZZI
of plainsong. His lengthy discussion of this point highlights the use of lascivia
as a failure to adhere to the natural law of the musical constitutiones (i.e. the
species of the diapason underlying the modes that, contrariwise, manifest
themselves fully in plainsong). In Gallicus’s words:
I will demonstrate that the secular and lascivious songs, which the moderns
call figured and measured discant, are not subject to the laws of church music,
and cannot be known through them. These songs are not bound to begin or
end in none of the appropriate notes, neither do they highlight the certain and
pre-established species of fourths and fifths, since they rather unfold accord-
ing to the whim and caprice of those who compose them.14
In other words, ‘angelic’ plainsong was to the pre-existent ‘cantus seculares et

lascivi’ as the Christian faith was to the older pagan religions. Inspired by the
Holy Spirit, Christianity introduced a new style of singing, ‘dignified, simple
and plain’ (graviter, simpliciter et plane) by strictly adhering to the modal laws.
A song can be lasciva, then, not only because of its unnatural rhythms but also
because it does not conform to the diatonic species that constitute the modes
(the ‘ecclesiastical laws’). It is not so much that such a song elicits an immoral
kind of sensuous pleasure, but rather that it is not amenable to rational inves-
tigation, thus preventing the mind from experiencing intellectual dulcedo. By
arguing along these lines, Gallicus is also implicitly stating that the ecclesiastical
modes are natural laws by which to judge the well-formedness of musical works,
and to discriminate between what is aesthetically and morally acceptable from
what it is not. By contrast, he appears to suggest that plainsong approximates
the cantus angelicus not only because of its moving simplicitas, but also because it
is rationally conceived in accordance with criteria of beauty as well as truth.
A key characteristic of sweetness is softness (mollicies or mollicia), which
medieval theorists often describe in opposition to hardness (duricies/duricia or
asperitas) as an objective property of particular diatonic intervals: the tritone is
consistently regarded as the ultimate durus interval, the semitone as mollis.
Johannes Boen, a fourteenth-century Dutch cleric educated at the University
of Oxford, applied this principle to construct a rudimentary grammar of
accidentals by which flats and sharps may be used in counterpoint to temper
the duricies and mollicies of the intervals, though not to enhance them beyond
acceptable limits (thus, the G–c fourth cannot be turned into Gb–c because
the ditonus G–b included in it is already durus).15 Yet, Boen also realises
14
For the original Latin, see Johannes Gallicus, Ritus canendi vetustissimus et novus, ed. Albert Seay
(Colorado Springs: Colorado College Music Press, 1981), vol. I I , p. 41.
15
Wolf Frobenius, Johannes Boens Musica und seine Konsonanzenlehre (Stuttgart: Musikwissenschaftliche
Verlags-Gesellschaft, 1971), pp. 63–4.
Example 2.1 Dissonances rendered acceptable by underlying consonances in

Johannes Boen’s Musica.
that hardness and softness are a function of musical perception. Although they
may be associated with particular intervals, they are not inherent in them, as
suggested in this excerpt (see also Example 2.1):16
The tritone, stated by itself, will greatly irritate the ears with its hardness; for that
reason the ancients disliked the said tritone, and introduced a conjunct tetra-
chord in our diatonic system, also called diatonic, in which a fourth spans
through two tones and a semitone. The hardness [of the tritone] is nevertheless
tolerated when the interval occurs over a minor third, as here.17
The citation is of interest for its acknowledgement that the diatonic system
was the product not only of materialist or mathematical considerations, but
also of an aesthetic judgement rooted in musical perception.18
Sacred Music Defended Against Its (Poor) Practitioners

The often unsatisfactory quality of church singing appears to have been a
major concern across Christendom in the Middle Ages, as reflected by the
number of influential authors who exposed the many flaws in the singing
practices of their time, foremost among them Guido of Arezzo. These writers,
briefly discussed below, berate the singers’ faulty execution in painstaking
detail, occasionally with the help of musical examples comparing right and
wrong performances. Their commentaries constitute a key chapter in the
history of music criticism, not only for the subtlety of their analytic remarks
but also for implicitly underscoring the broader musical and cultural values
that gave rise to those remarks to begin with. As one of these illustrious critics,
St Bernard of Clairvaux, points out, ‘music is the accurate knowledge of
singing’ (musica recta canendi scientia), a knowledge that the musicus acquires
through a careful study and observation of the ‘natural’ foundations of musi-
cal sound – such as the diatonic series of tones and semitones that gives rise to
16
After Frobenius, Johannes Boens Musica, second example p. 74. Only the first vertical sonority pertains to
the textual excerpt cited above; the second one duplicates the earlier example in the passage on the
diminished fourth.
17
Emphasis mine. For the original Latin, see Frobenius, Johannes Boens Musica, p. 74.
18
On listening experience in Boen as a ‘faculty’ for evaluating musical phenomena (such as consonance
and dissonance), see Fuller, ‘“Delectabatur in hoc auris”’, 473–7.
32 STEFANO MENGOZZI
the ecclesiastical modes.19 Thus, Bernard upbraids those church singers who
contravene the modal norms with their licentious behaviour (for instance, by
beginning a melody on the wrong note, by improperly mixing modal ranges
or, worse yet, by starting in one mode and finishing in another), thus intro-
ducing ‘falsity and filth’ (falsitas, spurcitia) that distort the natural order and
the very notion of music:
By the same token, antiphons such as ‘Benedicta tu’, and other similar ones
which can end on A, belong without a doubt to the first modal maneria, so
that they must be ascribed to the second mode, not to the fourth. In fact, that
antiphon in certain places is performed naturally with B\, i.e., with the tone
above the final followed by the semitone; elsewhere, however, the semitone
comes before the whole tone, via B[. I wonder: by which discernment
[perspicacitas] do we judge the mode of that song [ad judicandum de cantu illo
cuius sit maneriae], when accident is preferred to nature, and when while
belonging to the first maneria by nature, it is regarded of the second one by
accident?20
St Bernard’s critique of the plainsong practices of his time echoes other

treatises from that period (such as the highly influential De musica by
Johannes Cotto) which similarly expose the many ‘depravities’ singers intro-
duce in chant performances through negligence, ignorance and deliberate
misbehaviour: for example, by altering the modal profile of a melody or by
unduly mixing plagal and authentic ranges.21
As amply suggested by this group of treatises, then, by the late Middle Ages
the octenary modal system carried connotations that far exceeded the mun-
dane goals of classifying chant melodies and providing guidelines for compos-
ing and performing them. As a paradigm of melodic well-formedness virtually
as old as Christianity itself – or at least regarded as such – the modal system
was the litmus test for conferring the authority of ‘nature’ or ‘the law’ onto
church musical practice or, alternatively, for withholding such authority
whenever that practice deviated from it. Music criticism requires a set of
musical and cultural values, more or less explicitly set forth, in order to
exist as a meaningful social practice. Arguably, the medieval modal system
provided just such a set of paradigmatic values – in other words, it was
deployed as a de facto musical grammar, at times explicitly compared with
19
See Galliano Ciliberti, ‘Rigor and Spirituality in the De revisione cantus of St Bernard of Clairvaux’,
Benedictina, 39 (1992), 199–213.
20
For the original Latin, see Francis J. Guentner (ed.), Epistola S. Bernardi De revisione cantus cisterciensis, et
Tractatus Cantum quem cisterciensis ordinis ecclesiae cantare ([n.p.]: American Institute of Musicology, 1974),
p. 29.
21
On Johannes Cotto, see the introductory notes to Claude V. Palisca (ed.), Hucbald, Guido, and John on
Music: Three Medieval Treatises, trans. Warren Babb (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978).
the linguistic grammar – in that the incipient forms of what may be regarded
as music criticism in the pre-modern era for the most part originated out of a
sustained confrontation with it.
For its part, the short tract De modo bene cantandi (‘On how to sing well’),
by music theorist, priest and theologian Conrad of Zabern (died before
1481) provides a rare glimpse into the performance of liturgical chant in the
pre-modern era. This influential text, which came out in several printed
editions in Latin and German between 1474 and 1509, offers a vivid picture
of the status of chant performance in mid-fifteenth-century Germany and
offers practical steps for improving the quality of singing during sacred
rituals, and for best integrating music within the devotional activities of the
time.22
In his tract, Conrad comes close to formulating a rhetoric of performance
centred on the premise that plainsong is a critically important medium for
communicating a spiritual message to the congregation. As such, it is impera-
tive that the sacred melodies be projected to their listeners not only in a
musically correct way, as the Bernards and the John Cottons of earlier times
had demanded, but also with the affect and overall decorum that are com-
mensurate to the underlying sacred texts and to the liturgical occasion. Thus,
Conrad expects (1) that church singers perform like angels, in perfect unison
and with the utmost rhythmic precision (concordaliter and mensuraliter cantare);
(2) that the speed and the quality of declamation reflect the degree of solem-
nity of the religious feast (differentialiter cantare); (3) that sacred texts not be set
to secular tunes; and (4) that singers choose correct pronunciation and keep
appropriate bodily postures (satis urbaniter cantare). Conrad’s occasional refer-
ences to traditional liturgical chants as the ‘melodies of the church fathers’ are
also worthy of notice. It seems that by the fifteenth century the venerable
antiquity of chant (i.e. the realisation, or belief, that some melodies were as
old as the Church itself) increased its devotional aura, at least among the most
educated corners of Christendom.23
By Conrad’s time, however, sacred polyphony was receiving far more
critical attention than chant. The bull Docta sanctorum patrum by Pope John
22
For a partial translation of Conrad’s treatise, see Joseph Dyer, ‘Singing with Proper Refinement from
“De modo bene cantandi” (1474)’, Early Music, 6 (1978), 207–27. A century after Conrad, the singers of the
most prestigious musical chapel of Christendom often fell short of expectations, as shown in Richard
Sherr, ‘Competence and Incompetence in the Papal Choir in the Age of Palestrina’, Early Music, 22 (1994),
607–29.
23
Thus, Barbara Haggh has argued that Johannes Ciconia in his Paduan years sought to obtain some of
the oldest chant melodies of Christendom from Portugal. See Barbara Haggh, ‘Ciconia Nova musica: A
Work for Singers in Renaissance Padua’, in João Pedro d’Alvarenga and Manuel Pedro Ferreira (eds.), New
Music 1400–1600: Papers from an International Colloquium on the Theory, Authorship and Transmission of Music
in the Age of the Renaissance (Lisbon-Évora, 27–29 May 2003) (Lisbon and Évora: Editora Casa do Sul, 2009).
34 STEFANO MENGOZZI
XXII (1324–5) set the tone for the debate on polyphonic sacred music of the
next two centuries. This remarkable and much discussed document fully
belongs to the history of music criticism by virtue of combining observations
on the moral effects of music with unusually technical recommendations on
polyphonic sacred music.24 Pope John wished to ban from sacred polyphony
the rhythmic ‘abuses’ of the ‘new school’ (the ars nova) – namely semibreves,
minims, hockets and intricate discants – which make mincemeat of the old
melodies, obscure the texts and ‘intoxicate the ear’ rather than moving the
listeners to devotion. Nevertheless, the bull encouraged the use of simple
polyphony on solemn feasts, provided it followed the rules of the church
modes, and provided it enhanced, rather than obscured, the character of the
original chant melodies and their texts as a way of arousing the congregations
to devotion.
A few years after Docta sanctorum, Jacques de Liège mounted his famous
attack against the music of the moderni in the seventh book of his Speculum
musicae (completed c. 1330), using language reminiscent of the papal bull.
Arguing that more subtlety and difficulty do not necessarily lead to a more
perfect art, Jacques lambasts the rhythmic complexities of the moderni, parti-
cularly the recent practice of imperfecting breves, semibreves and, if that was
not enough, rhythmic values that are already imperfect. At the root of
Jacques’s critique is the idea that music is not to be evaluated by its degree
of difficulty, but rather by the extent to which it promotes ‘what is good and
useful, since it is a virtue perfecting the soul through the medium of the
intellect’.25
Thus, the positions articulated by authors such as John XXII and
Jacques de Liège hinged around the basic question of the nature and
purpose of musical pleasure, which was addressed, predictably, from
within the boundaries of Christian ethics: the innovations of the moderni
appeared to them as morally suspect because they sought to generate
sensuous pleasure for its own sake, to the point of crowding out the
underlying text with rhythmic and harmonic intricacies. Worse yet, the
attitude itself behind the quest for ever more sophisticated forms of
24
On the impact of the papal bull on the subsequent history of sacred music, see Franz Körndle, ‘Die
Bulle “Docta sanctorum partum”. Überlieferung, Textgestalt und Wirkung’, Die Musikforschung, 63
(2010), 147–65. According to the author, the document provided the basis for the debate on sacred
music that took place at the Council of Trent in the early 1560s (158). See also Craig A. Monson, ‘The
Council of Trent Revisited’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 55 (2002), 1–37.
25
Roger Bragard (ed.), Jacobi Leodiensis Speculum musicae, bk 7 (Rome: American Institute of Musicology,
1973), p. 428; trans. Oliver Strunk, revised John McKinnon, in Oliver Strunk (ed.), Strunk’s Source Readings
in Music History, ed. Leo Treitler, revised ed. (New York: Norton, 1998), pp. 272–3. On the broader
intellectual context of Jacques’s scathing attack against the ‘discantores’ of his time, see Holsinger, Music,
Body, and Desire, ch. 4.
musical delight was as reprehensible as the creative outcomes of the quest

(i.e. the rhythmic subtleties of the ars nova). The lasciviousness of the
modern polyphonic style was the direct consequence of the proud motiva-
tions of its creators, who considered themselves superior to the ancients
by venturing into uncharted musical territories.
As Rob Wegman has shown in a thought-provoking monograph, the cluster
of aesthetic and moral issues triggered by ars nova polyphony intensified in the
fifteenth century in direct connection with the growth of various religious
reform movements.26 One of the salient points emerging from Wegman’s
study is not so much the uncompromising position against polyphony
adopted by many religious reformers in the second half of the century, but
rather the very fact that polyphony could be easily dismissed as inspiring
lascivia and empty pleasure after gaining a solid foothold in the Christian
liturgy during the previous centuries (a foothold which may thus have been
not so solid, after all). The debate for and against polyphony appears to have
reached even peripheral areas; witness the heated dispute that in the late 1480s
pitted a parish priest of the town of Görlitz against the city elders and his own
parishioners. To the latter, who eventually won the dispute, the polyphony
performed during Mass was hoferey (‘vain’ or ‘vainglorious’, though the ety-
mology from ‘hof’ also points to ‘courtly’ or, at any rate, ‘secular’).27 The
headwind of opposition to sacred polyphony in the fifteenth century was
strong enough to lead others, such as Egidius Carlerius (d. 1472), to offer
apologies for it.28
Wegman has plausibly argued that such discriminating views about
polyphony – critical of recent developments, yet favourable to moderate
versions of it – is a constant feature of musical texts until around 1470.
For instance, Carthusian authors such as Heinrich Eger von Kalkar, Denis
Ryckel and the already mentioned Johannes Gallicus, active from the mid-
fourteenth to the mid-fifteenth century, rejected the intricacies of fractio
vocis (short and complex rhythmic values) while recognising that the
simple forms of discantus described by John XXII could inspire the
congregation to contemplation and devotion.29 After around 1470, reli-
gious reformers rejected polyphony altogether, a position embraced by
Calvinist reformers in later decades.30
26
Rob C. Wegman, The Crisis of Music in Early Modern Europe, 1470–1530 (New York: Routledge, 2005).
27
Ibid., pp. 1–15.
28
See Reinhard Strohm and J. Donald Cullington (eds.), On the Dignity and the Effects of Music. Egidius
Carlerius, Johannes Tinctoris: Two Fifteenth-Century Treatises, trans. J. Donald Cullington (London: Institute
of Advanced Musical Studies, King’s College London, 1996), pp. 5–16, 23–38. See also, ‘The Defense of
Music’, in Wegman, The Crisis of Music in Early Modern Europe.
29 30
Wegman, The Crisis of Music, pp. 17–32. Ibid., pp. 32–48.
36 STEFANO MENGOZZI
The ‘Judgement of the Ears’:

Johannes Tinctoris and Henricus Glareanus
The rise of humanist culture in the fifteenth century did not lead ipso facto to
new forms of music criticism. Evidently, the sophisticated methods of textual
exegesis that the humanists deployed in their study of the Classics did not
transfer to the musical domain as a matter of fact, at least not before the age of
printing. In hindsight, the early humanist generations sound rather conven-
tional and amateurish in their reports of their occasional exposure to poly-
phony.31 As Giovanni Zanovello has rightly pointed out, a deeper
understanding of the musical art of their time would have required a level of
familiarity with terminology and conceptual systems that were largely scho-
lastic in origin, and thus rooted in anti- or non-humanistic modes of
thought.32
Thus, modern scholars have paid much attention to the few stanzas dedi-
cated to music in Martin Le Franc’s Le Champion de dames (written in the
1440s), which exceptionally deliver to us the reflections of a contemporaneous
listener on the momentous stylistic change ushered in by John Dunstable and
his followers (the contenance angloise), along with other passing and tantalis-
ingly cryptic remarks on the musical characteristic and affective connotations
of the new style, marked by good muance and frisque concordance.33
In many ways, Johannes Tinctoris (c. 1453–1511) and Heinrich Loriti
Glareanus (1488–1563) represent different facets of Renaissance musical cul-
ture. The former was a legal scholar affiliated with a princely court (that of the
Aragonese dynasty in Naples) who produced what is often recognised as the
most comprehensive synthesis of medieval musical thought, touching vir-
tually all aspects of musica speculativa (proportions) and musica practica (the
Hand, notation, mensuration, the modes and counterpoint). The latter epi-
tomised humanist culture through a lifetime dedicated both to Classical texts,
which he edited and printed with new commentaries, and to instructing
scores of pre-university students in a number of quadrivial and literary
31
See Giovanni Zanovello, ‘Les humanistes florentins et la polyphonie liturgique’, in Perrine Galand-
Hallyn and Fernand Hallyn (eds.), Poétiques de la Renaissance: Le Modèle italien, le monde franco-bourguignon
et leur héritage en France au XVIe siècle (Geneva: Droz, 2001), pp. 625–38.
32
Ibid., pp. 633–6. To be sure, the musical writings by non-musical authors of the humanist era are in
need of further study. Some of these texts are gathered in Carlo Vecce, Gli umanisti e la musica: un’antologia
di testi umanistici sulla musica (Milan: Università Cattolica, 1985).
33
See the extended discussion on these passages in David Fallows, ‘The “Contenance Angloise”: English
Influence on Continental Composers of the Fifteenth Century’, Renaissance Studies, 1 (1987), 189–208
(esp. 195–205); Christopher Page, ‘Reading and Reminiscence: Tinctoris on the Beauty of Music’, Journal
of the American Musicological Society, 49 (1996), 1–31 (esp. 2–4); and Rob C. Wegman, ‘New Music for a
World Grown Old: Martin Le Franc and the “Contenance Angloise”’, Acta musicologica, 75/2 (2003),
201–41.
disciplines, particularly music and geography. Yet, despite their different

intellectual orientations and activities, somewhat amplified by the genera-
tional gap, the two authors developed forms of musical understanding that
shared a key epistemological trait: they were both amenable to questioning
the prescriptive rules that regulated the musical practice of their time (speci-
fically those pertaining to counterpoint and the modes) as a result of their
inductively informed assessment of common compositional behaviours in
musical practice. It is as if, after learning from the Classical auctores, writers
such as Tinctoris and Glareanus came to extend the weight of authority to the
celebrated composers of their time, praising them for their extraordinary
accomplishments in the art of sounds, despite recognising that their accom-
plishments may occasionally rub against the accepted norms of modal and
contrapuntal well-formedness.
Tinctoris gave his readers an exemplary demonstration of this attitude in
the late chapters of his Liber de arte contrapuncti, completed in October 1477
and dedicated to King Ferrante (he had earlier dedicated his treatise on the
modes to Johannes Ockeghem and Antoine Busnoys, whom he publicly
regarded as two of the most accomplished composers of his age).34 The
famous Eight Rules of Counterpoint that Tinctoris lists at the end of his
treatise are now regarded as broadly representative of the polyphonic practice
of the time. The last rule in particular, which is a sort of gold standard that
singles out the role of contrapuntal inventiveness (varietas) in the art of
composition, points to a rhetorical understanding of the musical art that
was deeply rooted in Renaissance culture.35
The greater part of the treatise lays out the building blocks of counterpoint,
namely the vertical intervals, their octave duplications and the notions of
‘concords’, ‘discords’ and ‘false concords’ (such as tritones and augmented
octaves), all illustrated through musical examples. Up until the later chapters
of book 2, Tinctoris regards discords and false concords as inadmissible in
counterpoint, following a long-established theoretical precept. However, a
decisive change of attitude pervades the subsequent section of the treatise
(chapters 24–32), where the author seeks to formulate more nuanced rules of
contrapuntal behaviour, allowing the moderate use of discords in florid
34
The treatise will soon be accessible online, along with a new English translation, as part of The Complete
Theoretical Works of Johannes Tinctoris: A New Digital Edition, ed. Ronald Woodley for the Early Music
Theory website, available at earlymusictheory.org/Tinctoris (accessed 29 May 2017). The editions used for
this essay are Johannes Tinctoris, Liber de arte contrapuncti, in Johannis Tinctoris opera theoretica, ed. Albert
Seay, CSM 22 (American Institute of Musicology, 1975–78), vol. II, pp. 11–157; Johannes Tinctoris, The
Art of Counterpoint, trans. Albert Seay ([n.p.]: American Institute of Musicology, 1961).
35
On this topic see, among others, Alexis Luko, ‘Tinctoris on Varietas’, Early Music History, 27 (2008), 99–
136, and Sean Gallagher, Johannes Regis (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010), pp. 190–3.
38 STEFANO MENGOZZI
counterpoint under certain conditions (for instance, 7–6 and 4–3 suspensions
at cadences).36 The result may be the earliest known formulation of the
principle of dissonance preparation, strike and resolution that will remain a
staple of musical grammar throughout the modern era.37 As other scholars
have pointed out, in this section of his treatise Tinctoris does not hesitate to
critique even the most respected composers of the time (such as Faugues,
Caron and Busnoys) for the forbidden dissonances (including false concords)
that occasionally punctuate their counterpoint.38
The chapters from the counterpoint treatise discussed here feature an
unusually high number of long sections of polyphonic works. These
examples not only illustrate the nuances of dissonance treatment pre-
sented in the text, but also acquire a normative agency of their own by
reminding their readers that the musical practice of the time tends to be
more ‘liberal’ than the musical auctores of the time, such as Tinctoris
himself, would seem ready to endorse.39 Thus, these pages fully belong
to the history of music criticism in that they highlight a familiar tension
in the history of Western music (witness, for instance, the Artusi–
Monteverdi controversy from about a century later): on the one hand,
the written codifications of musical sound are dedicated to fostering the
creative exploration of new and legitimate (if tightly prescribed) forms of
musical dulcedo; on the other hand, the occasional examples from con-
temporaneous polyphonic practice draw attention to what actually hits
the listeners’ ears, whether to sanction or censor it.
The key interface between listening and theorising (in other words,
between ‘outward’ and ‘inward listening’) is the judicium aurium, the
‘judgement of the ears’, which Tinctoris explicitly invokes at a critical
junction in his treatise when he invites the listeners (id audientibus
judicandum reliquo) to form their own opinion on two passing dissonances
in Ockeghem’s Missa La belle se siet.40 It is noteworthy that Tinctoris
evaluates Ockeghem not against some absolute and universal musical
laws, but, more modestly and self-consciously, against his understanding
of those laws, thus leaving the door open for alternative rationalisations
of dissonance practice that may absolve Ockeghem from the charge of
36
Tinctoris, The Art of Counterpoint, pp. 115–29.
37
Tinctoris, however, does not deal with the topic of dissonance resolution in these pages.
38
For instance, in Tinctoris, The Art of Counterpoint, pp. 130–1. For an extended discussion of this point,
see Margaret Bent, ‘On False Concords in Late Fifteenth-Century Music: Yet Another Look at Tinctoris’,
in Anne-Emmanuelle Ceulemans and Bonnie J. Blackburn (eds.), Music Theory and Analysis, 1450–1600
(Louvain-la-Neuve: Départment d’histoire de l’art et d’archéologie, 2001), pp. 65–118.
39
I develop this point at length in my ‘Dalhaus’s Principles and Tinctoris’s Ears: Music Theory as
Rhetoric, forthcoming in a collection of essays on Tinctoris edited by Ronald Woodley.
40
Tinctoris, Opera theoretica, vol. I I , p. 143; trans. Albert Seay, p. 129.
committing contrapuntal improprieties.41 It has been pointed out that

Tinctoris’s music criticism, by relying on the musical ear as the ultimate
arbiter of value judgement, no longer aimed at strengthening the author-
ity of the church, but rather intended to institutionalise the figure of the
musical expert who enforces the standards of the educated (read: courtly)
elite.42
One generation later, the key faculty of aural judgement takes centre stage
in the music theoretical project of Heinrich Glarean’s Dodecachordon (Basel,
1547), together with what we might called the combinatorial principle for
generating the modes. By consistently relying on his judicium aurium in his
assessment of the modal practice of his time, Glarean seeks to emphasise the
‘reality’ of his modal theory, presented as indisputable: the twelve modal
categories differ from one another in both sound characteristics and affective
import. In addition, Glarean argues not only that the new Aeolian and Ionian
modes have been there all along for centuries, but also that the ear recognises
them as modal categories in their own right: the D–d octave with B[ (which
Glarean considers a transposition of the Aeolian mode, A–E–a) has a different
colour, or phrasis, from the Dorian (D–d with B\). This experience-based
reasoning lends support to the argument that Glarean puts forward to make
the case for the logical necessity of his system: he forcefully contends that the
principle of the double division of the octave (harmonic and arithmetic),
inconsistently applied in the old eight-mode system, must be logically
extended to all seven octave species, generating fourteen theoretically possi-
ble modal categories. Two of those categories are ill-formed (namely the
‘Hyperaeolian’ (B–f–b) and ‘Hyperphrygius’ (F–b–f), leaving twelve well-
formed types.43
41
‘However, Johannes Ockeghem dissents a great deal from our arrangement of discords in a small
section of one of his compositions’ (‘Ab hac tamen nostra discordantiarum ordinatione Johannes
Ockeghem in parva cantus particula, hoc est in principio ‘Patrem’ Missae la belle se siet, plurimum
dissentit, ut hic’: [example follows]; Tinctoris, The Art of Counterpoint, p. 129.
42
Kurt von Fischer, ‘Zu einigen Wertkriterien in der Musik des 14. und 15. Jahrhunderts’, Die
Musikforschung, 30 (1977), 289–92.
43
The scholarly literature on Glarean is predictably vast, considering the immense contribution of the
author to the culture of his time. The recent volume by Iain Fenlon and Inga Mai Groote (eds.), Heinrich
Glarean’s Books: The Intellectual World of a Sixteenth Century Musical Humanist (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2013), brings together the main research paths pursued in the last few decades. On
Glarean’s landmark treatise, see Sarah Fuller, ‘Defending the Dodecachordon: Ideological Currents in
Glarean’s Modal Theory’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 49 (1996), 191–224; and the many
contributions on this topic by scholars such as Bernhard Meier and Harold Powers. On the music criticism
of Glarean and other contemporaneous authors, see James Haar, ‘Value Judgments in Music of the
Renaissance’, in Tess Knighton and David Fallows (eds.), Companion to Medieval and Renaissance Music
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987). A facsimile edition of Dodecachordon is available from
Broude Brothers (New York, 1967) and via the Petrucci Music Library, available at imslp.org (accessed 31
May 2017); for an English translation, see Heinrich Glarean, Dodecachordon, trans. and ed. Clement A.
Miller, 2 vols. ([n.p.]: American Institute of Musicology, 1965).
40 STEFANO MENGOZZI
Yet, Glarean’s musical ear is not merely instrumental to the need of bolster-
ing support for the reform of the modal system. Rather, it fulfils the far more
significant role of assessing the affective and rhetorical import of a musical
work, making abundantly clear that mode, in the end, is a structural means to
a music-semiotic end. When encountering the remarkable commentaries of
book 3, on polyphony, the modern reader marvels at the author’s ability to
capture the salient aspects of a musical work or composer. At times, the
emotional intensity of the flow of sound seems comparable to that of dramatic
representation: witness, for example, these remarks on Michele Pesenti’s
motet Tulerunt dominum meum:
[The piece is] truly a very beautiful and learned example of the elegies of
Magdalene at the tomb of the Lord, possessing great emotion and innate
sweetness and tremendous power, so that one really believes he hears the
weeping of a woman and her following.44
Even more subtly, Glarean interprets the apparent textural unevenness in

Josquin’s Planxit autem David as a deliberate compositional choice aimed at
conveying the psychology of a mourner:
Concerning the beginning of this song, I have no doubt that some are going to
exclaim: ‘Mountains are in labour, but a funny little mouse is born.’ But they
do not consider carefully that throughout this entire song there has been
preserved the mood appropriate to the mourner, who at first is wont to cry out
frequently, and then, turning gradually to melancholy complaints, to murmur
subduedly and presently to subside, and sometimes, when emotion breaks
forth anew, to raise his voice again and to emit a cry.45
One might think that Glarean is describing a seconda prattica madrigal from c.
1600; his strand of music criticism, however, did not need exposure to the
late-Renaissance achievements in musical expression by, say, a Wert or a
Monteverdi in order to bear fruit. We may see it, rather, as the mature product
of religious musical culture of (at least) the last two centuries, which had
consistently recognised musical sound as an effective means for dramatising
sacred texts and for drawing religious communities to devotional practices.
Equally significant to Glarean’s music criticism was of course the robust
humanist tradition of textual exegesis, which he had mastered by producing
a long series of commentaries on Classical texts, and which was finally being
imported into the domain of musical studies (significantly, Dodecachordon
virtually spurred the long-lasting tradition of musica poetica in Germany).
44
Glareanus, Dodecachordon, p. 312; trans. Miller, vol. I I , p. 259.
45
Glareanus, Dodecachordon, p. 367; trans. Miller, vol. I I , pp. 269–70.
Glarean was no doubt familiar with the rhetorical figure of ekphrasis, a verbal
description of a work of art that enables readers to visualise the described
object with their ‘inner eye’.46 Ekphrastic rhetoric is the most prominent, but
not the only aspect of Glarean’s multimedial approach to music criticism; he
will also invite readers to ‘taste’ a melodic line, as when he observes, in his
remarks on Josquin’s Victimae paschali laudes, that ‘cantus sapit antiquitatem’
(‘the Cantus line savors of antiquity’).47
Yet, at the root of Glarean’s music criticism is the notion of phrasis, which
he invokes time and again in his modal analyses to capture the distinctive
musical ‘flavour’ of a particular mode, work or composer. The term, mediated
from the ‘sciences of language’ (philology and rhetoric), is the clearest indi-
cator that in his landmark treatise Glarean no longer regards the modes as
fixed categories meant for classifying melodies in liturgical practice, but
rather as the starting point for deeper inquiries into the structural relation-
ships of musical works and their rhetorical and communicative import.
Tinctoris famously ‘smelled’ musical sound.48 Glarean visualised it, tasted it
and articulated it into meaningful phrases, as if parsing a literary text. Modern
music criticism may have been taking its initial, feeble steps during the
Renaissance, but it was already adept at catering to the bodily senses,
synaesthetically, in its passionate attempt to come to terms with the ever-
elusive target of musical meaning. It grew by capitalising on the rich inter-
pretive tradition of the rhetorical arts, no doubt with considerable help from
the composers themselves.
46
On the significance of ekphrastic criticism in the Renaissance, see David Rosand, ‘Ekphrasis and the
Generation of Images’, Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics, 1 (1990), 61–105; and Norman E.
Land, The Viewer as Poet: The Renaissance Response to Art (University Park: Pennsylvania State University
Press, 1994).
47
Glareanus, Dodecachordon, p. 364; trans. Miller, vol. I I , pp. 266.
48
See the insightful account of Tinctoris’s ‘olfactory’ criticism, likely mediated from Ciceronian and
Augustinian models, in Page, ‘Reading and Reminiscence’, 21–8.
.3.
Musical Discourse in Italy, 1500–1800

CARRIE CHURNSIDE
Music criticism, in the form we think of it today, did not exist for most of the
period under discussion here; it was only in the final decades of the eighteenth
century that concert reviews began to appear in the press, and even then they
were not always unbiased critical appraisals. However, over the course of
these three centuries musical discourse abounded in other forms – literary
dialogues, travel journals, vehement polemics and personal letters – as musi-
cians and music-lovers discussed what was a period of remarkable artistic
fecundity via both printed and unpublished means. Through an overview of
some of these discussions it is clear that, even over such a wide time period and
geographical range, a number of clear trends emerge as to what was consid-
ered praiseworthy both in composition and performance. Prior to its unifica-
tion in 1861 Italy constituted a varied group of smaller states, each with
a distinctive musical tradition and outlook. Yet contemporary critical assess-
ments of performances and music produced across the peninsular often high-
light the same preoccupations: with the need for performers not to confuse
mere technical display with musicality, and for composers to combine tech-
nical craft with a certain originality (although the extent to which critics
allowed composers licence to break the rules in pursuit of innovation varied
greatly, and led to some of the most heated debates of the period).1
Sixteenth-Century Writings
It is difficult to find anything approaching systematic or detailed music criti-
cism in sixteenth-century Italian texts. Instead there are brief glimpses into
1
Writings are considered here that express a value judgement, rather than simply documenting the
performance of music. Whilst, in the field of composition, this could include the numerous theoretical
works published, particularly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, these have been excluded due to
the limits of space. Readers are instead advised to consult Thomas Christensen (ed.), The Cambridge History
of Western Music Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
[42]
Musical Discourse in Italy, 1500–1800 43
what was considered good music or performance, often in the middle of

discussion of something else. One such example is Baldassare Castiglione’s Il
cortegiano (1528), a work that went on to be influential in many fields through-
out the century.2 Castiglione’s is a literary account of discussions that took
place over four nights at the Urbino court over the qualities a courtier ought
to possess. James Haar states that the occasional references to music give us
a ‘convincingly real picture of how music, and talk about music, figured in the
lives of Castiglione’s peers’.3 The discussion tends to remain general, rather
than critiquing individual works. On only one occasion is a specific composer
named, and then not in particularly complimentary terms. When discussing
the power of others’ opinions, Federico4 recounts the story of a motet that
found little favour when it was first performed, until it was revealed to be by
the famous Josquin.5 But remarks are frequently less detailed, such as
Federico’s definition of a good performance:
Truly beautiful music . . . consists, in my opinion, in fine singing, in reading

accurately from the score and in an attractive personal style, and still more in
singing to the accompaniment of the viola.6
Unsurprisingly, accuracy plays an important part; he goes on to explain that

this is why solo singing is better than an ensemble, as in the latter singers can
cover one another’s mistakes. The performance must also be stylish (‘con bella
maniera’). Elsewhere Castiglione highlights the importance of sprezzatura and
grazia, as it is a ‘universal rule . . . to practise in all things a certain nonchalance
[sprezzatura] which conceals all artistry and makes whatever one says or does
seem uncontrived, and effortless. I am sure that grace springs especially from
this’.7 These two terms were famously used by Caccini to describe a kind of
rubato in solo singing at the turn of the seventeenth century (whether
Castiglione intended the same here is unclear). However, it is ‘cantare alla
viola per recitare’ that is singled out for the highest praise. Haar defines this as
‘improvised song or declamatory speech-song over instrumental
2
Although only published in 1528, it had been a work in progress for some time beforehand: see
George Bull, ‘Introduction’ to Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans. George Bull
(London: Penguin, 1976).
3
James Haar, ‘The Courtier as Musician’, in Paul Corneilson (ed.), The Science and Art of Renaissance Music
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), p. 20.
4
Federico Fregoso, a courtier and close friend of Castiglione: Castiglione, Book of the Courtier, p. 25.
5
Ibid., p. 145.
6
Ibid., pp. 120–1. For a discussion of this passage see Walter H. Kemp, ‘Some Notes on Music in
Castiglione’s Il libro del cortegiano’, in Cecil H. Clough (ed.), Cultural Aspects of the Italian Renaissance:
Essays in Honour of Paul Oskar Kristeller (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1976), pp. 357–60.
7
Castiglione, Book of the Courtier, p. 67. Bull translates ‘sprezzatura’ as ‘nonchalance’; elsewhere it is
rendered as ‘negligence’ (see Nigel Fortune, ‘Sprezzatura’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online,
available at www.oxfordmusiconline.com (accessed 15 May 2018). Caccini uses the term in his prefaces to
Euridice (1600) and Le nuove musiche (1602).
44 CARRIE CHURNSIDE
accompaniment’.8 The reason for its success is that ‘the instrument gives the
words a really marvellous charm and effectiveness’.9 There is thus a preference
for the individual over ensemble, and for music that foregrounds performative
aspects, rather than the composition itself. In another passage Count
Ludovico10 compares the individual styles of two named singers: Antonio
Bidon, who ‘moves and inflames’ the spirits of all who hear him with his
‘skilful, quick, vehement and passionate’ singing, and Marchetto Cara, whose
‘softer . . . plaintive sweetness . . . gently touches and penetrates our souls’.11
Whilst each clearly takes a very different approach, both are equally prized
because of their ability to evoke feeling in the listener.
Cosimo Bartoli’s Ragionamenti accademici (1567) is another work that pro-
vides a snapshot of the discussions that took place between music-loving
amateurs.12 Whilst a large number of contemporary performers and compo-
sers are referenced in this dialogue between three friends, frustratingly little
detail is given about why they are being singled out for praise. Two exceptions
are the composers Verdelot and Gombert. We learn that the former’s compo-
sitions are the marvel of ‘the most judicious composers’ because:
They have light passages, those that are serious, tender, pitiful, fast, slow,
gracious, enraged, fugato, according to the propriety of the words upon which
he set to compose.13
This is certainly not an unbiased assessment, as Verdelot had settled in

Bartoli’s hometown of Florence and is here described as ‘my most dear friend’
(mio amicissimo).14 Nevertheless, this is an interesting appraisal, based entirely
on Verdelot’s ability to set music in a wide range of styles to reflect the
meaning of the text. As Michael Fend notes, this is a descriptive, largely non-
technical account that tells us how his music was heard: ‘what Bartoli says
about a musician cannot be verified or denied by looking at a score, but is the
8
Haar, ‘Courtier as Musician’, p. 26; he also discusses to which instrument the term ‘viola’ may refer.
9
Castiglione, Book of the Courtier, p. 120.
10
Lodovico Canossa, ‘a man of great culture and ability’: ibid., p. 24.
11
Ibid., p. 82. Haar points out that in the second edition Bidon’s name was substituted with that of
Alexander Agricola, which ‘bespeaks a certain insensitivity about the personal maniera of musicians’:
‘Courtier as Musician’, p. 28.
12
Cosimo Bartoli, Ragionamenti accademici sopra alcuni luoghi difficili di Dante (Venice: Francesco de’
Franceschini, 1567). Although published in 1567, references to music and musicians appear to date
from 1525 to 1560: Haar, ‘Cosimo Bartoli on Music’, in Corneilson (ed.), Science and Art, p. 45. For
a discussion of the volume as a whole, see Judith Bryce, Cosimo Bartoli (1503–1572): The Career of
a Florentine Polymath (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 1983), pp. 253–80.
13
‘Perche elle hanno del facile, del grave, del gentile, del compassionevole, del presto, del tardo, del
benigno, dello adirato, del fugato, seconda la proprieta della parole sopra delle quali egli si metteva
a comporre’: Haar, ‘Bartoli on Music’, p. 49. Haar transcribes all of the third dialogue on pp. 45–61.
14
See H. Colin Slim and Stefano La Via, ‘Verdelot, Philippe’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online,
available at www.oxfordmusiconline.com (accessed 15 May 2018).
result of musical experience’.15 On the other hand, Gombert is praised for his
handling of contrapuntal lines, ‘united with a harmony that gives you
a marvellous delight’, which Haar describes as ‘an aesthetic judgement of
some pertinacity’.16 There is a sense, then, that whilst these are not detailed
technical descriptions of compositional approach, when he chooses, Bartoli is
able to give us an effective description of how music was heard by the well-
informed listener.
Luigi Dentice’s Duo dialoghi della musica (1552) is important because it
contains an early concert review.17 At the beginning of the second dialogue
between Paolo Soardo and Giovanni Antonio Serone the former describes to
the latter a concert that he has just attended at the house of the noblewoman
Giovanna d’Aragona and her daughter Vittoria Colonna. Whether this concert
actually took place, or is a literary invention,18 it is important because seven of
the eight musicians who took part are named (Soardo refuses to identify the
soprano, as he did not enjoy his performance).19 He records the reaction of the
audience, as the two ladies ‘transported by such sweet harmony, were so
intent on the music, that they appeared almost to be transformed, in fact
they themselves were in harmony’.20 Disappointingly, though, the music that
was performed was not named (although this has not prevented musicologists
from trying to surmise what it might have been),21 and we only get general
praise of the musicians: the instrumentalists are ‘first class’ and the singers
‘most perfect musicians and sing miraculously’.22 The discussion swiftly
moves onto Soardo’s complaints about bad singers (those who make errors
in intonation, pronunciation, passaggi and shaping the line) and renowned
sopranos of the past. Thus, whilst this is of interest as an early review, we
might wish for more a detailed critique.
15
Michael Fend, ‘Cosimo Bartoli and the Language of Musical Experience in Sixteenth-Century Italy’, in
Francesco Paolo Fiore and Daniela Lamberini (eds.), Cosimo Bartoli (1503–1572): Atti del convegno inter-
nazionale Mantova, 18–19 novembre, Firenze, 20 novembre 2009 (Florence: Olschki, 2011), p. 135.
16
‘congiunta con una armonia che ti dà un diletto maraviglioso’: Haar, ‘Bartoli on Music’, pp. 49, 53.
17
A modern facsimile of the second edition is available: Luigi Dentice, Duo dialoghi della musica (Rome:
Vincenzo Lucrino, 1553; repr. Luca: LIM, 1998).
18
Richard Wistreich points out that whilst it may have been real, it also might have been a carefully
calculated fabrication constructed for political reasons when Dentice was in exile in Rome: Warrior,
Courtier, Singer: Giulio Cesare Brancaccio and the Performance of Identity in the Late Renaissance (Farnham:
Ashgate, 2007), p. 138.
19
As Dentice was a soprano himself, this may either have been a rival, or a tongue-in-cheek reference to
himself: see ibid., p. 139. The four instrumentalists are Giovanlonardo dell’Harpa Napoletano, Perino da
Firenze, Battista Siciliano and Giaches da Ferrara; the three named singers are Giulo Cesare Branzazzo
[Brancaccio], Francesco Bisballe and Scipione del Palla.
20
‘Tratte da si dolce Harmonia, furono si intente alla Musica, che quasi pareano trasformate, anzi
eranoessi concenti’: Dentice, Duo dialoghi, H.I I I r.
21
For a summary of the arguments see Wistreich, Warrior, Courtier, Singer, p. 140.
22
‘Ottiene il primo luogo’; ‘son perfettissimi Musici, & cantano miracolosamente’: Dentice, Duo dialoghi,
H.I I I r–v.
46 CARRIE CHURNSIDE
Perhaps the most illuminating insight into how sixteenth-century musi-

cians heard the music of their contemporaries comes from a work issued in the
seventeenth century: Lodovico Zacconi’s Prattica di musica (1622). The theor-
ist begins by describing the seven different aspects of musica armoniale: arte,
modulatione, diletto, tessitura, contraponto, inventione and buona dispositione. He
then goes on to depict a conversation of 1584 where the theorist Gioseffo
Zarlino discussed the compositional style of seven composers (himself, Porta,
Striggio, Willaert, Morales, Lasso and Palestrina), pointing out that the dis-
position of these seven different aspects allows the listener to instantly recog-
nise the music of a particular composer. Whilst this is the most detailed
sixteenth-century critique considered so far, it depends on our understanding
exactly what Zacconi/Zarlino meant by these rather vague terms. Through
reference to contemporary sources, Haar has attempted to reconstruct
Zacconi’s meaning.23 Following his definitions we can surmise that Zarlino
and Porta are skilled in contrapuntal planning and the execution of these
contrapuntal designs (‘regular tessitura and arte’); Striggio is praised for his
‘talent and gift for charming melodies’ (modulatione), whilst Willaert
was excellent at contrapuntal planning and creating well-ordered pieces
(grand’arte and judicious dispositione).24 Morales excels in contrapuntal plan-
ning (arte), writing counterpoint over a cantus firmus (contrappunto) and
beautiful melodies (buona modulazione). The two greatest names of the period,
Lasso and Palestrina, come last in the list ‘as if a comparison between the two
greatest masters of the age was intended’.25 Lasso is praised not only for his
contrapuntal planning (arte) and melody (modulatione) but his ‘bonissima inven-
tione’, his novelty and range of musical ideas. Palestrina, on the other hand,
receives the greatest amount of praise: he has arte, contrapunto, a flowing
modulatione (melody) and ottima dispositione, excellent ordering of proportions.
Zacconi’s passage gives us a fleeting glimpse, then, of true musical criticism,
but – as always – we could wish for more.
Turn-of-the-Century Debates
The musical experiments at the turn of the seventeenth century launched an
avalanche of writing about music, as theorists and composers debated how
ancient Greek music might have sounded and how this might be recreated,
explained new compositional approaches, and described new styles of
23
Haar, ‘A Sixteenth-Century Attempt at Music Criticism’, in Corneilson (ed.), Science and Art.
24
Haar reads this as meaning ‘careful ordering of melodic and contrapuntal materials’: ibid., p. 12.
25
Ibid.
performance. Among these publications are passages of music criticism. One

example is the letter written by Giovanni Bardi (host of the famous camerata) to
the singer and composer Giulio Caccini (a key exponent of the new style)
entitled ‘Discourse Addressed to Giulio Caccini, Called the Roman, on
Ancient Music and Good Singing’.26 Of interest here are not Bardi’s thoughts
on ancient music, but those on good singing. He contrasts two performances:
one of an unnamed celebrated bass singer he heard in Rome in 1567, and ‘those
never sufficiently praised ladies of Ferrara’.27 The bass singer is naturally gifted,
with a large range, but spoils his delivery of the text by placing his passaggi in
the wrong place, resulting in ‘a massacre of the unfortunate poetry’. Bardi
speaks here as a connoisseur, able to see beyond the ‘adulation . . . [of] the
ignorant public’.28 In contrast are Duke Alfonso d’Este’s celebrated concerto
delle donne, whom Bardi heard perform in Ferrara, and who are able to perform
more than 330 madrigals ‘by heart . . . without ever spoiling even one syllable’.29
Bardi was not the only person to praise the concerto delle donne. The group
was Alfonso’s musica secreta, performing only for his close circle and invited
guests. As a result, those visitors privileged with an invitation tended to report
back what they had heard, with imitations quickly springing up across the
country.30 Witnesses noted their musicianship in being able to sing at sight
‘however difficult [the] pieces may be’ and the astonishment that they pro-
voked in the listeners.31 But it was for their judicious use of passaggi and
sensitivity towards the text that they won the highest praise. Whilst this is
commented upon in contemporary reports, it is Vincenzo Giustiniani’s retro-
spective account of 1628 that gives the most detailed, and rhapsodic, praise:
They moderated or increased their voices, loud or soft, heavy or light, accord-
ing to the demands of the piece they were singing; now slow; breaking off with
sometimes a gentle sigh, now singing long passages legato or detached, now
groups, now leaps, now with long trills, now with short, and again with sweet
running passages sung softly, to which sometimes one heard an echo answer
unexpectedly . . . They made the words clear in such a way that one could hear
even the last syllable of every word, which was never interrupted or sup-
pressed by passages and other embellishments.32
26
Transcribed and translated in Claude V. Palisca, The Florentine Camerata: Documentary Studies and
Translations (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), pp. 78–131. The author is not explicitly stated in
the source but it seems clear that it was Bardi: see ibid., pp. 81–4.
27 28 29
Ibid., p. 121. Ibid., p. 123. Ibid., p. 121.
30
See Anthony Newcombe, The Madrigal at Ferrara 1579–1597 (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1980).
31
Letter from Alessandro Striggio to Francesco de’ Medici (29 July 1584) and Leonardo Conosciuti
(28 July 1584); quoted in Newcombe, Madrigal at Ferrara, pp. 55, 68.
32
Vincenzo Giustiniani, Discorso sopra la musica, trans. Carol MacClintock, Musicological Studies and
Documents 9 ([n.p.]: American Institute of Musicology, 1962), p. 69.
48 CARRIE CHURNSIDE
Yet as early as 1586 there were complaints that they were past their best, as
they ‘are accumulating bellies and other such accessories, and seem . . . some-
what hoarser than usual’.33
The most noteworthy outcome of the discussions of Bardi and the
others was, of course, the birth of opera. Yet, reactions to the premiere
of Jacopo Peri’s Euridice show that contemporary audiences were not
necessarily impressed. The work was first performed in front of a select
audience in Florence on 6 October 1600 to celebrate the marriage of King
Henri IV of France and Maria de’ Medici.34 Ambassadors from Modena
and Venice praised it, if not in particularly glowing terms: the former said
that ‘it turned out very well’, whilst the latter described ‘a comedy recited
entirely by musicians on very sweet melodies’.35 However, whilst the
musical director Emilio de’ Cavalieri is by no means a disinterested obser-
ver, the comments he reports are far more damning.36 The main objection
is that recitative is boring: he says that ‘many people of all ranks’ (parti-
cularly the Marchese de Piano) have told him that ‘the music was tedious,
that it seemed like the chanting of the passion’.37 Furthermore, foreigners
saw it as ‘commonplace and [it] struck people as tedious. Everyone says it
lasted more than five hours, but it did not even reach three’.38 Not
without bias, Cavalieri compares the Florentine entertainments to his
own Rappresentatione d’Anima e di Corpo (performed in Rome that year),
stating that those who had seen both ‘say that they found [the
Rappresentatione] much more to their taste, because the music moved
them to tears and laughter and pleased them greatly, unlike this music
of Florence, which did not move them at all, unless to boredom and
irritation’.39 Whilst Cavalieri may have had his own reasons for high-
lighting negative aspects of the work, the accusation of boredom also
came from other sources: the Papal Legate, Cardinal Pietro
Aldrobrandino, described Euridice as deserving ‘much praise for its scenery
and its intermedi, but the manner of singing easily became boring’.40
Interestingly, whilst it only took a couple of years for people to look
33
Alfonso Fontanelli (24 August 1586); in Newcombe, Madrigal at Ferrara, p. 106.
34
Claude V. Palisca, ‘The First Performance of Euridice’, in Studies in the History of Italian Music and Music
Theory (Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), p. 436.
35
Ibid., p. 439.
36
In a letter assumed to be addressed to Marcello Accolti, secretary to the Grand Duke, and probably
dating from November 1600, translated in Claude V. Palisca, ‘Musical Asides in the Diplomatic
Correspondence of Emilio de’ Cavalieri’, in Studies, pp. 403–4. Cavalieri was aware that the wedding
celebrations under his direction had not been entirely successful, which he blamed on difficult characters
not following his advice. He also knew that he was losing favour at court, with Caccini’s star in the
ascendancy: ibid., pp. 401–2.
37
Ibid. 38
Ibid., p. 404. 39
Ibid. 40
Palisca, ‘First Performance’, in Studies, p. 434.
back upon Euridice as an important landmark,41 the complaint about the

‘tedious’ nature of recitative remained a refrain for years to come.42
Arguments between advocates of the old and new styles were plentiful,
with the most famous being that between the theorist Artusi and the compo-
ser Monteverdi.43 Such debates went on for years: as late as 1640 Pietro della
Valle was defending the modern style against Lelio Giudiccioni’s criticisms in
his Della musica dell’età nostra che non è punto inferiore, anzi è migliore di quella
dell’età passata (‘On the music of our age which is not in an inferior state,
rather it is better than that of the past age’).44 In the course of this defence he
provides an interesting critique of the music and musicians of his day. Della
Valle advocated popularity as a means of judging music; in Robert Holzer’s
words, he believed that ‘music can be praised or criticized based on . . . how
fashionable it is’.45 Thus Palestrina’s works should be admired, but ‘preserved
and kept out of the way in a museum as beautiful curiosities’.46 In the realm of
performance, della Valle cites the example of Frescobaldi, who adopted a new
style of playing in order to appeal to the public, which is seen as the ultimate
aim of the performer:
And if today he employs a different manner with more galanterie in the

modern style, which Your Lordship does not like very much, he must do so
because he will have learned through experience that in order to please all
kinds of people this manner is more galante, if less learned. And if they succeed
in truly giving delight, sound and performer need ask no more.47
41
See Marco da Gagliano’s preface ‘Ai lettori’ to Dafne (1608); transcribed in Angelo Solerti, Le origini del
melodramma (Turin: Fratelli Bocca, 1903), p. 81.
42
See Carolyn Gianturco, ‘Nuove considerazioni su il tedio del recitativo delle prime opere romane’, Rivista
italiana di musicologia, 18 (1982), 212–39, where she argues that Domenico Mazzocchi’s reference to the
‘tedium of recitative’ is not necessarily a criticism of the style itself, but of its being used almost
exclusively, rather than being broken up by the appearance of arias. As late as 1734, the literary theorist
Francesco Saverio Quadrio advised poets that they might omit the opening recitative in chamber cantatas,
partly due to the public’s distaste for them, as ‘[the practice of] beginning a cantata with an aria originates
from the maestri di cappella, who loathe the trouble of setting lots of things to music, and likewise from the
common herd who, delighting little in recitatives, moved composers to reduce them’ (Bisogna trattanto in
primo luogo avvertire, che il cominciar le Cantate da un Arietta è provenuto da’ Maestri di Cappella, che la
fatica hanno abborrito di mettere molta roba in musica, e dal Volgo altresì, che poco gustando de’
Recitativi, ha mossi i compositori a scemarli). Francesco Saverio Quadrio, Della poesia italiana libri due di
Giuseppe Maria Andrucci (Venice: Cristoforo Zane, 1734), p. 396.
43
The key text on the exchange is Claude V. Palisca, ‘The Artusi–Monteverdi Controversy’, in Studies.
44
Transcribed in Solerti, Le origini del melodramma, pp. 148–79. Giudiccioni’s Discorso sopra la musica is
translated in Andrew dell’Antonio, Listening as Spiritual Practice in Early Modern Italy (Berkley: University
of California Press, 2011), pp. 135–55. In 1640 della Valle also entered into another dispute with Nicolò
Farfaro over the question of the supremacy of modern music: see Agostino Ziino, ‘“Contese letterarie” tra
Pietro della Valle e Nicolò Farfaro sulla musica antica e moderna’, Nuova rivista musicale italiana, 3 (1969),
101–20.
45
Robert Rau Holzer, ‘“Sono d’altro garbo . . . le canzonette che si cantano oggi”: Pietro della Valle on
Music and Modernity in the Seventeenth Century’, Studi musicali, 21 (1992), 256.
46
Della Valle, quoted and translated by Holzer, ‘“Sono d’altro garbo”’, 256.
47
Translated in ibid., 257–8.
50 CARRIE CHURNSIDE
This is radically different to Bardi’s idea of the learned critic, able to see what
the ordinary public cannot. Della Valle also makes a vigorous defence of
modern composers.48 Of particular interest is his description of
a performance he heard of Virgilio Mazzochi’s music in the Collegio Romano:
And if by chance you had found yourself the other day in the Collegio Romano
at that most noble music for six choirs composed by the younger Mazzocchi,
you would have heard in it both the madrigal style with beauty and grace and
lightness, and the motet style with gravity and well-written imitations, var-
ious airs both ancient and modern, and spirited recitatives of pleasing taste,
and bizzarrie of trumpets, drums, mortars, battles, battle marches, so that in
my opinion one could not wish for more variety and elegance.49
This exemplifies della Valle’s approach: it is not that the moderns do not know
how to write in the old, contrapuntal style, but that they only choose to do so
when they wish, otherwise employing a wide variety of styles, as Mazzocchi
does here. The term bizzarrie denotes the fashionable and the original, thus
encompassing all of the novelty that della Valle prizes.50
In terms of performers, della Valle dismisses Giudiccioni’s assertion that the
earlier Luzzaschi (?1545–1607) was a great solo performer. He agrees that he
was able to improvise complex counterpoint, but says that he performed this
‘rustically’, without grace, and ‘did not know how to perform [even] a trill’.
Using a culinary simile, della Valle states that ‘I call this flavourless playing
because it is exactly like a meal of delicious food, garnished with the best
ingredients, but without salt.’51 Later on, when praising modern performers
such as Kapsperger, Orazio Michi and Michelangelo del violino,52 he specifies
exactly what he desires as ‘salt’:
Some of the most excellent modern performers have learnt to add to the
fineness of their counterpoint a thousand graces in their playing, such as trills,
48
For a detailed analysis of his comments on the chamber songs of Luigi Rossi and Orazio Michi, see ibid.
49
‘E se a caso V. S. si ritrovò l’altro giorno nel Collegio Romano a quella nobilissima musica a sei cori
composta dal più giovane Mazzocchi, averà inteso in essa e stile madrigalesco con vaghezze e leggiadrie,
e stile da mottetti con gravità, e imitazioni ben fatte di arie diverse antiche e moderne, e recitativi spiritosi
di buon garbo, e bizzarrie di trombe, di tamburi, di bombarde, di battaglie, di serra serra, che io per me
non so che si possa desiderare di più varietà e di più galante’, in Solerti, Le origini del melodramma, p. 172.
50
See Holzer, ‘“Sono d’altro garbo”’, 268–72, 287.
51
‘Non sapeva fare un trillo . . . chiamo io questo un sonare sciapito; perchè è appunto come una vivanda
di cibo delicato, condita con ottimi ingredienti, ma senza sale’, in Solerti, Le origini del melodramma, p. 157.
Luzzaschi was evidently prized as a performer in his own time: see Edmond Strainchamps, ‘Luzzaschi,
Luzzasco’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, available at www.oxfordmusiconline.com (accessed
15 May 2018).
52
Possibly Michelangelo Rossi, although several performers went under that name: see Catherine Moore,
‘Rossi, Michelangelo’ Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, available at www.oxfordmusiconline.com
downward runs,53 syncopation, tremolos, feints of piano and forte and other
such niceties little used by those of the previous age.54
A similar set of ‘niceties’ are also used by singers, who use crescendos and
diminuendos, and rubato in order to reflect ‘with good judgement’ the sense
of the text.55 Thus della Valle expects performers to bring the music alive
through shading and graces, in a lightness of manner that he claims was not
found in earlier times.
An Early Eighteenth-Century Correspondence

Bitter polemics, of the kind that Artusi launched against Monteverdi, were
not confined to the early Seicento, but continued throughout the century.
Bologna seems to have been a hotbed, particularly in the arguments between
Maurizio Cazzati and Giulio Cesare Arresti that lasted from 1659 to 1664
and included the latter republishing one of the former’s masses with annota-
tions highlighting the mistakes,56 and the row between Giovanni Paolo
Colonna and Arcangelo Corelli over a passage of parallel fifths in the latter’s
Op. 2.57 But musical discourse did not always take the form of fierce personal
attacks based on the finer points of compositional theory that, even if they
did not make it into print (as in the case of Colonna and Corelli), became
public through their wider circulation. Just as today, musicians corre-
sponded privately with one another, often in a more informal manner that
perhaps reflects more accurately their initial reactions to what they heard.58
Like many Italian musicians in the early eighteenth century, the Bolognese
singer and composer Francesco Antonio Pistocchi travelled widely, and his
letters home to the composer Giacomo Antonio Perti provide a vivid insight
into such private musical conversations, revealing him as ‘an astute critic of
53
‘Strascichi’ literally means ‘trailing’ or ‘dragging’.
54
‘Alcuni de’ più eccellenti moderni che alle sottigliezze de’ contrappunti hanno saputo aggiunger ne’
loro suoni mille grazie di trilli, di strascichi, di sincope, di tremoli, di finte di piano e di forte e di simili
altre galanterie da quelli dell’età passata poco praticate’, in Solerti, Le origine del melodramma, p. 159.
55
Ibid., p. 161.
56
See in particular Ursula Brett, Music and Ideas in Seventeenth-Century Italy: The Cazzati–Arresti Polemic, 2
vols. (New York and London: Garland, 1989). See also ‘La polemica Arresti–Cazzati: alcuni documenti
inediti’, in Paolo Giorgi (ed.), Maurizio Cazzati (1616–1678) Musico Guastallese: Nuovi studi e prospettive
metodologiche (Guastalla: Associazione ‘Giuseppe Serassi’, 2009).
57
A detailed summary is provided in Peter Allsop, Arcangelo Corelli: New Orpheus of Our Times (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 35–40. A more recent contribution can be found in Alberto Sanna,
‘Between Composition and Performance: Generic Norms and Poetic Choices in the Work of
Arcangelo Corelli’, in Arcomelo 2013: atti del settimo congresso internazionale di studi, Fusignano 28–30
novembre 2013 (Lucca: Libreria Musicale Italiana, 2015).
58
A good example from the sixteenth century can be found in Bonnie J. Blackburn, Edward E. Lowinsky
and Clement A. Miller (eds.), A Correspondence of Renaissance Musicians (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
1991).
52 CARRIE CHURNSIDE
music’.59 Pistocchi’s viewpoint is very much that of the performer, as is clear

from his complaint about difficult operatic writing: ‘on Saturday we go on
the stage without fail and I do not know a single word of the third act, which
is very long, with most infamous, unworthy and cruel recitatives by Pollaroli
[Carlo Francesco Pollarolo]’.60 His letters are full of appraisals of his fellow
singers, such as that written from Piacenza on 4 April 1701 on the cast of
Ziani and Aldrovandini’s I rivali generosi:
La Tilla is most precious; la Contrallora excellent, both spirited and of good

voice; Nicola Paris, really I find has his former beautiful voice; Valeriano sings
with really good taste; Bucceleni! let us speak no more of him because I call
him the parasite of music since he devours it.61
Pistocchi prizes both good voices and taste in performance, which is

clearly lacking in the case of the ‘parasite’ Bucceleni. Further insight
into precisely what Pistocchi considers to be bad taste is found in his
description of la Margherita (Margherita Salicola Suini) in Venice in
59
Anne Schnoebelen, ‘Pistocchi, Francesco Antonio’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, available
at www.oxfordmusiconline.com (accessed 15 May 2018); similarly, Francesco Lora notes how his letters
demonstrate his authority as a musician and critic: ‘Pistocchi, Francesco Antonio Mamiliano’, Dizionario
biografico degli italiani, available at www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/ (accessed 14 August 2018). The letters
are now held in the Museo Internazionale e Biblioteca della Musica, Bologna (I -Bc). Leonardo Busi draws
on Pistocchi’s letters to Perti in his biography of the singer, in Il padre G. B. Martini: musicista-letterato del
secolo 18 (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1891), pp. 142–86. Four of the letters written while Pistocchi was in
Tuscany are transcribed in Francesco Vatielli, Lettere di musicisti brevemente illustrate (Pesaro: Federici,
1917). While the present chapter was in press, another study discussing some of the same letters was
published: Alejandra Béjar Bartolo and Fabrizio Ammetto, ‘Documentos inéditos de un cantante
y compositor de ópera de finales del siglo X V I I ’, in Fabrizio Ammetto (ed.), La ‘ópera’ como punto de
cohésion entre las artes (Guanajuato: Universidad de Guanajuato, 2015).
60
‘Sabato si va in scena senza fallo ed io non sò una parola del 3:o Atto che è longhissimo con recitativi del
Poll:i infamissimi indegnissimi e sceleratissimi’: I -Bc, P.146.2, Milan (1 February 1702). The opera must be
Pollarolo’s Ascanio, performed in Milan’s Teatro Regio. Pistocchi’s involvement is not recorded in
Sartori’s catalogue: see Claudio Sartori, I libretti italiani a stampa dale origini al 1800, 7 vols. (Cuneo:
Bertola and Locatelli, 1990), vol. I , p. 338.
61
‘La Tilla preziosissima, la contralora brava è spiritosa è bella voce, Nicola Paris, pure lo trovo con la sua
bella voce di prima, Valeriano canta assai di bon gusto, Bucceleni! poi non se ne parla perche io lo chiamo il
parasito della musica già che lui la divora’: I -Bc, P.146.154. The opera is not mentioned by name by
Pistocchi: see Sartori, I libretti italiani, vol. V , p. 57. All of the singers listed here were celebrities of
their day. La Tilla is Maria Domenica Pini, who was in the service of Prince Ferdinando de’ Medici and for
whom parts of Alessandro Scarlatti’s Il gran Tamerlano were written; see Colin Timms, ‘Pini, Maria
Domenica’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, available at www.oxfordmusiconline.com (accessed
15 May 2018). La contralora is Maria Maddalena Manfredi, described in the libretto as in the service of the
Duke of Savoy. Nicola Paris was known as ‘the famous swan’ and must have been fairly advanced in years
at this stage: he is first recorded in 1645; see Paola Besutti, ‘Nicola, Paris’, Grove Music Online, Oxford
Music Online, available at www.oxfordmusiconline.com (accessed 15 May 2018). Valeriano Pellegrini
went on to work with Handel; Winton Dean and John Rosselli describe him as ‘a technically proficient
rather than a glamorous singer’; see ‘ Pellegrini, Valeriano’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online,
available at www.oxfordmusiconline.com (accessed 15 May 2018). The tenor Giovanni Bucceleni (also
known as Buzzoleni) had been in the service of the Duke of Mantua; see Paola Besutti, ‘Buzzoleni,
Giovanni’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, available at www.oxfordmusiconline.com (accessed
15 May 2018); and Lorenzo Bianconi and Thomas Walker, ‘Production, Consumption and Political
Function of Seventeenth-Century Opera’, Early Music History, 4 (1984), 277–9.
1703.62 On 10 November he states that ‘Up until now our opera entirely
pleases, although they say very bad things about the drama, on the other
hand la Margherita is acquitting herself with great distinction’.63 This good
opinion of the singer does not last long. A week later he writes that the
opera is attracting crowds and ‘if la Margherita were restrained, as she was in
the rehearsals and the first performances, it would do wonders’.64 However,
she appears to no longer be singing with good taste:
the infinite caricatures that she does when singing, and singing contralto, and
endless bad trills and grimaces, with the most vile off-the-cuff buffoonery on
the stage, her character being a heroine . . . And by the middle of the opera her
voice diminishes and remains a little dark and harsh. Let this be between
ourselves. But the rabble like her ladyship.65
Thus Pistocchi complains about her performance on musical grounds: her

overuse of trills is tasteless, and her employment of her lower register means
she is unable to sustain her voice throughout the entire opera. But it is also her
appearance on stage that is at fault, as she grimaces and incorporates comedic
elements into opera seria.66 It sounds as if she is playing to the crowd (the
popolaccio, to use Pistocchi’s derogatory term) and is very much the caricature
of the operatic diva famously satirised in Benedetto Marcello’s Il teatro alla
moda.67
Pistocchi also comments on church music. In summer 1703 he was working
for the Medici, and he describes a motet by Melani that was performed on
Prince Ferdinando’s birthday.68 In typically effusive fashion, he declares that
62
The opera must have been Il miglior d’ogni amore per il peggiore d’ogni odio, performed in Venice’s
S. Casciano in 1703; the libretto states that Suini is in the service of the Duke of Modena: Sartori, I libretti
italiani, vol. I V , p. 147.
63
‘La nostr’opera sino ad hora solo piace ma dicono molto male del Dram[m]a p[er] altro la Margherita si
porta egregiamente bene’: I -Bc, P144.161.
64
‘Se la Margherita si fosse contenuta come alle prove e prime sere, farebbe miracoli’: I -Bc, P146.1, Venice
(17 November 1703).
65
‘Le infinite caricature ch’ella fà in cantare, e far il contralto, e trillacci infiniti, e smorfie, di lazzi vilissimi
in scena, essendo il suo Carattere un eroina . . . E la voce a mezz’opera se gli scema e resta oscuretta e rauca,
questo stia tra noi la Mad[onn]a al popolaccio piace’: I -Bc, P146.1.
66
‘Lazzi’ are improvised jokes and buffoonery in the Commedia dell’arte tradition.
67
Benedetto Marcello, Il teatro alla moda (Venice: Aldiviva Licante, 1720). An English translation is given
in Reinhard G. Pauly, ‘Il teatro alla moda’, 2 parts, Musical Quarterly, 34 (1948), 371–403; 35 (1949),
85–105.
68
I -Bc, P 146.186 (11 August 1703). This letter is transcribed in Vatielli, Lettere, pp. 16–18; and Francesco
Lora, ‘I drammi per musica di Giacomo Antonio Perti per il teatro della Villa Medicea di Pratolino
(1700–01; 1707–10)’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Bologna (2012), 299–300; partially in
Warren Kirkendale, The Court Musicians in Florence During The Principate of The Medici (Florence: Olschki,
1993), p. 433; and Mario Fabbri, Alessandro Scarlatti e il Principe Ferdinando de’ Medici (Florence: Olschki,
1961), p. 46. Vatielli misreads the date as 21 August, an error that is corrected by Kirkendale. Pistocchi is
presumably referring to a work by Alessandro Melani, who was described in 1695 as being under the
protection of Ferdinando: Robert Lamar Weaver, ‘Melani (3): Alessandro Melani’, Grove Music Online,
Oxford Music Online, available at www.oxfordmusiconline.com (accessed 15 May 2018).
54 CARRIE CHURNSIDE
‘in all my days I have never heard anything more wretched’.69 His main
criticism is the lack of variety:
All note against note, without ever an attacco, a fugue, a slur, a move to
dissonance; nothing, but absolutely nothing: a confusion of fast notes that
made a racket like the devil, with an abundance of semiquaver scales that
clashed, in short it could not have been worse, neither have I ever heard
anything more shocking . . . May God watch over every faithful Christian,
because there is no modulation,70 neither basslines worth tuppence, always
from bad to worse.71
The one moment of relief is a solo aria written by ‘Martinetto’ (Martino

Bitti), which serves as ‘much sugar in the middle of that atrocity’, yet
even this is not an unqualified success: Pistocchi accuses him of aping
Scarlatti’s style ‘without, however, his talent, which not everyone has’.72
Pistocchi is similarly unimpressed by the motet by Pagliardi that they are
rehearsing for the Grand Duke’s birthday, which is ‘antique’ and in
‘wretched taste’, as well as the incompetence of the conductor.73 The
following week’s letter explains that Pagliardi’s motet was replaced by
another, by ‘Bassetto di Roma’, which ‘disgusts [him] less’.74 He
acknowledges that there was some contrast between the two choirs and
praises the cantilena, but finds fault with the lack of concerti in the solos.
An added solo recitative and aria by Bitti come in for criticism for being
relentless (‘you never find a single bar of peace and repose’) whilst a finale
by the same author is ‘always . . . note against note’.75 Here his fellow
performers come in for ridicule: the bad conductor is joined by an
organist who got lost when accompanying Pistocchi in the recitative;
Matteo76 taps his feet in his solo; Vincenzino77 twisted his shoulders in
69
‘De’ miei giorni non ho sentito cosa più sciagurata’: I -Bc, P 146.186.
70
‘Modulazione’ may either be taken in its modern sense of ‘modulation’, or the earlier meaning of
‘melody’: see Haar, ‘A Sixteenth-Century Attempt at Music Criticism’, p. 9.
71
‘Tutto nota contra nota, senza mai un attacco, una fuga, una legatura, un contrasto di parti; niente ma
niente a fatto una confusione di note veloci che faceva un businamento del Diavolo, con quantità di scale di
semicrome che s’incontravano, in fine non si può far peggio, nè mai ho sentito cosa più ladra . . . Dio ne
guardi ogni fedel cristiano, p[er]che non v’è modulazione, nè bassi che vagliano un corno, sempre di
cattiva in cattiva’: I -Bc, P.146.186.
72
‘Tanto zucchero in mezzo a quella sceleraggine’; ‘senza però quel ben genio, che non tutti l’han[n]o’:
ibid.
73
‘Anticaglia’ . . . ‘sciagurato gusto’: ibid. The conductor was Padre Ferdinando Paolucci, a bass singer at
court: Vatielli, Lettere, p. 17.
74
‘Mi disgustò meno dell’altro’: I -Bc, P.146.5: Pratolino (18 August 1703), transcribed in Vatielli, Lettere,
pp. 14–16. Lora suggests ‘Bassetto di Roma’ may have been Giovanni Lorenzo Lulier: ‘Introduction’ to
Giuseppe Antonio Perti, Integrale della musica sacra per Ferdinando de’ Medici, principe di Toscana, ed.
Francesco Lora, 2 vols. (Bologna: Ut Orpheus, 2010–11), vol. I , v.
75
‘Mai vi si trova una battuta di pace e riposo’; ‘sempre . . . nota contra nota’: P.146.5.
76
Matteo Sassani: see Vatielli, Lettere, p. 12.
77
Vincenzo Olivicciani: see Lora, ‘I drammi per musica’, p. 299.
his, whilst Canevese78 got his words muddled up (singing ‘et Mariam
advocatus’ instead of ‘et Mariam advocemus’). It seems, then, that in
a composition Pistocchi prizes contrast and good melodies, having little
time for constant counterpoint, whilst he criticises both mistakes and
awkward appearance in performance.
Travellers’ Diaries
Some of the most vivid insights into the music of the period come from travellers’
reports, with many music-lovers visiting Italy, often as part of the Grand Tour.
The diaries of the German Johann Friedrich Armand von Uffenbach review
a number of performances he heard, including Vivaldi performing so high up
on the violin that he was ‘within a straw’s breadth of the bridge’.79 In March 1715
he attended the performance of an oratorio by Caldara at Prince Ruspoli’s palace
in Rome. After describing the lavish surroundings and the audience’s rapt atten-
tion he goes on to compare two of the singers: ‘Mariotgi’ (Anna Maria di Piedz)80
and Caldara’s wife.81 The former is ‘wholly extraordinary and uncommonly
pleasing in her singing’ but the latter, whilst very accomplished in her art (‘very
finished in music and sang flawlessly the most difficult things with great skill’),
does not please Uffenbach as much because of the ‘weakness of her voice’.82 He
also records his dismay at the bad performances he hears at San Apollinare, the
church of the German College, where a singer performed ‘shockingly long color-
aturas’: Uffenbach records him spending thirteen minutes on a single vowel.83
Thus the German is impressed by technical display, such as Vivaldi’s stratospheric
range, but not when it is excessive or in place of natural talent.
One of the most detailed and important of the travellers’ accounts of the
period is Charles Burney’s The Present State of Music in France and Italy (1771).84
78
The tenor Giuseppe Canavesi is described as ‘musico favorito’ of Ferdinando in a performance of the
oratorio La costanza trionfante nel martirio di Santa Lucia in Florence, 1705: Kirkendale, Court Musicians,
p. 490.
79
Eberhard Presussner, Die musikalischen Reisen des Herrn von Uffenbach (Kassel and Basel: Bärenreiter,
1949), pp. 64, 67. Translation by Michael Tilmouth, ‘Uffenbach, Johann Friedrich Armand von’, Grove
Music Online, Oxford Music Online, available at www.oxfordmusiconline.com (accessed 15 May 2018).
80
See Ursula Kirkendale, ‘Antonio Caldara: La Vita’, Chigiana, 26–7, ns. 6–7 (1971), 284.
81
She is not named in Uffenbach’s account, but in 1711 Caldara had married Caterina Petrolli:
see Brian W. Pritchard, ‘Caldara, Antonio’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, available at
82
Translated in David Poultney, ‘Alessandro Scarlatti and the Transformation of Oratorio’, Musical
Quarterly, 59 (1973), 589. Pritchard states that Petrolli was a contralto, but Uffenbach describes her as
a soprano, which may explain why he finds her voice weak.
83
‘erschröcklich lange Kolloraturen’; quoted in Presussner, Die musikalischen Reisen, p. 82. My thanks to
Matthew Gardener for his translation of this passage.
84
Charles Burney, The Present State of Music in France and Italy: Or, The Journal of a Tour through Those
Countries, Undertaken to Collect Materials for A General History of Music (London: T. Becket, 1771). A second,
56 CARRIE CHURNSIDE
As a musician writing with the express aim of describing the music he

encountered to a general readership, this is perhaps one of the first works of
music criticism explicitly intended to be understood as such.85 Burney com-
mented on a wide range of music that he heard on his travels, from the street
to the church, the opera house to the chamber. A key passage that reveals
Burney’s criteria for judging compositions is his conversation with the com-
poser Baldassare Galuppi. The latter shares his ‘definition of good music’,
which Burney finds ‘admirable, and though short, very comprehensive’; it
should have ‘vaghezza, chiarezza, e buona modulazione’ (translated by Burney as
‘beauty, clearness, and good modulation’).86 Only once does Burney judge
a piece of music explicitly by these criteria: at the church of San Bartolomeo in
Bologna he dismisses the music as having ‘not one of Buranello’s three
requisites, vaghezza, chiarezza, e buona modulazione to recommend it’.87
However, he refers indirectly to all three aspects throughout his discussion.
In relation to the first, the (rather vague) adjective ‘pretty’ is used frequently.
Chiarezza refers to the relationship between the different parts; according to
Grant, ‘in its most primitive form chiarezza is embodied in a beautiful and
effective melody and the simplest of non-melodic bass lines’.88 But it could
also refer to contrapuntal music, ensuring that each part is clearly heard, and it
is in this sense that Burney describes ‘a clearness and, if it may so be called,
a transparency which is wonderful’ in the ritornellos of Piccinni’s opera.89
Galuppi’s third requirement, ‘buona modulazione’, is frequently commented
upon. In the more conservative field of church music, ‘sound harmony, and
regular modulation’ is something to be praised.90 Elsewhere, however, experi-
mental harmony is noted approvingly; a scene from Jommelli’s Olimpiade is
‘justly admired for the boldness and learning of the modulation, which is
recherchée, but expressive and pleading’.91 This is linked to Burney’s apprecia-
tion of originality and novelty. For Burney ‘new’, ‘original’, ‘ingenious con-
trivances’ are to be cherished: his most frequent complaint is of ‘old’, ‘dull’ or
corrected edition was published in 1773. The volume was based on Burney’s manuscript diary from his
travels in 1770; the print excludes a significant amount of material found in the original diary, including
details of travelling and some remarks that were likely to cause offence. This earlier version is found in
H. Edmund Poole, Music, Men, and Manners in France and Italy 1770 (London: Eulenburg, 1974). Reference
is made here to the first printed edition of 1771.
85
According to Burney, the job of a critic was ‘to instruct the ignorant lovers of Music how to listen, or to
judge for themselves’: A General History of Music; quoted in Kerry S. Grant, Dr Burney as Critic and Historian
of Music (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983), p. 18.
86 87 88
Burney, Present State, p. 177. Ibid., p. 197. Grant, Burney as Critic and Historian, p. 35.
89
Burney, Present State, p. 314. See Burney’s own definition of clarity in contrapuntal music: ‘a favourite
excellence with musicians in speaking of counterpoint: and in compositions of many different parts
carrying out different designs, that clearness in their texture and arrangement, which enables the hearer
to disentangle them . . . we think might with some degree of propriety be termed transparency’; quoted in
Grant, Burney as Critic and Historian, p. 36.
90 91
Burney, Present State, p. 226. Ibid., p. 101.
‘trite’ material. Indeed, the violinist Emanuele Barbella is even praised for
having ‘a tincture of not disagreeable madness’ in his compositions.92
Burney has even more to say about performance. He describes a Venetian
street singer as having ‘several essentials belonging to that of a good singer,
such as compass, shake, and volubility’, and proceeds to look for these quali-
ties in the others he hears.93 A young castrato in Brescia has all three:
a compass of two octaves from middle C, he ‘executes swift passages with
facility’, has a ‘good’ shake and ‘promises to be a great singer’.94 His assess-
ment of the performance is not entirely complimentary, though: he notes that
he has a tendency to overuse ornamentation and is not always in tune, but
with these three key aspects in place ‘there seems to be good stuff for a master
to work upon’.95 He frequently comments on a singer’s good shake, and its
absence is a source of criticism: the ‘excellent tenor’ Abate Fibbietti ‘left
nothing to wish, but a shake a little more open’, whilst Burney is dismayed
that ‘nothing like a shake could be mustered out of the whole band of singers’
when he hears the boys of the Neapolitan conservatorio of the Pietà.96
‘Volubility’, the third of Burney’s criteria, relates to fluency of delivery and
is linked to the ability to ornament and execute passaggi.97 Volubility is
certainly on display in the Venetian ospedali. At the Incurabili he hears the
girls performing ‘difficult divisions’ in a manner he compares to birds, doing
such things ‘as I do not remember to have heard attempted before’, and
singling their cadenzas out for praise.98 At the Pietà ‘the girls played
a thousand tricks in singing, particularly in the duets, where there was
a trial of skill and of natural powers, as to who could go highest, lowest,
swell a note the longest, or run divisions with the greatest rapidity’, whilst
a second visit to the Incurabili praises their ‘rapidity of execution’ in cadenzas
‘such as would have merited and received great applause in the first operas of
Europe’.99 The naturalness of these performers is in stark contrast to the boys
of the Neapolitan conservatorios, who attempt similar feats, but are too
studied (‘scholar-like’) and ‘stiff’, with the soprano forcing the high
notes.100 Instead of the girls’ charming and natural playfulness, here ‘the
divisions were so rough and so strongly marked, that they became quite
grotesque and ridiculous’.101
Burney’s disgust at such a performance leads to one of his most memorable
put-downs, describing a bass singer ‘as rough as a mastiff, whose barking he
92 93 94 95 96
Ibid., p. 322. Ibid., p. 138. Ibid., p. 112. Ibid., p. 112. Ibid., pp. 237, 304.
97
The second definition of ‘volubility’ in Johnson’s Dictionary is ‘activity of tongue; fluency of speech’:
Samuel Johnson, A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols. (London: W. Strahan, 1755), vol. I I , p. 2220,
available at johnsonsdictionaryonline.com (accessed 27 August 2014).
98 99 100 101
Burney, Present State, p. 149. Ibid., pp. 161, 168. Ibid., p. 304. Ibid., p. 307.
58 CARRIE CHURNSIDE
seemed to imitate’.102 Yet sheer volubility is not enough: the performer also
needs taste in knowing when to add embellishment. Burney is harsh in his
criticism of those who add too much, and finds the tendency for long cadenzas
in both Rome and Naples ‘always tiresome, and often disgusting’, with even
the best singers needing to be curtailed. Instead, he believes that they should
comprise ‘a few select notes . . . as it should consist of something superior to
what has been heard in the air, or it becomes impertinent’.103 Burney docu-
ments a wide range of musical activity in this work, with his vivid descriptions
allowing us a clear insight into the viewpoint of such an informed and knowl-
edgeable (if not entirely unbiased) observer.
Newspapers
Printed newspapers sprang into existence across Italy in the seventeenth
century; the first appeared in Genoa in 1639, followed by Rome in 1640,
Bologna and Milan in 1642, Turin in 1645, Modena in 1658 and Naples in
1681.104 These early newssheets contained brief notices of military victories,
diplomatic manoeuvring and various official state events relating not only to
the city in which they were issued, but more broadly across the Italian
peninsular and beyond. Like their manuscript counterparts – the various avvisi
and diaries that kept particular noblemen informed of events in a certain city –
they recorded the fact that music had been performed (usually as part of civic
or religious ceremonies), but it is often assessed in the vaguest terms (fre-
quently described as squisita or eccellente).105 Only in the final decades of the
102
Ibid., p. 305.
103
Ibid., p. 364. Taste is defined by Burney as ‘the adding, diminishing, or changing a melody, or passage,
with judgement and propriety, and in such a manner as to improve it’: p. vii.
104
Valerio Castronovo, ‘I primi sviluppi della stampa perioda fra cinque e seicento’, in Carlo Capra,
Valerio Castronovo and Giuseppe Ricuperati (eds.), La stampa italiana dal cinquecento all’ottocento (Rome:
Laterza, 1986), p. 20.
105
See, for example, Gloria Staffieri, Colligite Fragmentata: la vita musicale romana negli ‘Avvisi Marescotti’
(1683–1707) (Lucca: Libreria Musicale Italiana, 1990); Luca della Libera and José Maria Dominguez,
‘Nuove fonti per la vita musicale romana di fine Seicento: il Giornale e il Diario di Roma del Fondo
Bolognetti all’Archivio Segreto Vaticano’; and Alexandra Nigito, ‘Le lettere di Filippo Silva al principe
Giovanni Andrea III Doria Landi (1684–1723)’, in Caroline Giron-Panel and Anne-Madeleine Goulet
(eds.), La musique à Rome au XVIIe siècle (Rome: École française de Rome, 2012). An unusual exception is
the Venetian publication Pallade veneta, where the descriptions are far more effusive: a vespers service is ‘a
banquet of delights for the ear’ (‘un banchetto di delitie all’orecchio’) and Lucrezia, a singer at the
Ospedale della Pietà, has a voice ‘amongst the whirlwinds of sighs in a storm of tears singing and . . .
calming again the air with the melody, almost like a little charming goldfinch amongst the greenest
branches of vivacity’ (‘fra i turbini de’ sospiri in una tempesta di lagrime cantando e . . . rabbonacciando
l’aria con la melodia, quasi vezzosetto cardellino fra i più verdi ramuscelli del brio’): Eleanor Selfridge-
Field, Pallade Veneta: Writings on Music in Venetian Society 1650–1750 (Venice: Fondazione Levi, 1985), p.
48. However, although the language is more vivid, virtually every account is laudatory because ‘to the
seventeenth-century journalist in France or Italy, music was one evidence of the glory of the existing social
order, one star in the diadem of power, and it was the duty of the journalist to reaffirm that truth’: ibid., p.
eighteenth century do true concert reviews begin to appear, and a typical

example of this later type is provided by the reviews of five accademie held by
the accademici armonici in Florence between 8 March and 5 April 1789, printed
in the Gazzetta toscana.106 Each successive account is increasingly effusive,
praising both the occasion (which was ‘magnificent, brilliant, and well
thought out’) and the quality and number of the audience (‘it was very
numerous with the top-ranking nobility, and choice citizens of both
sexes’).107 That of 29 March is the most detailed:
The fourth accademia given by the Signori Armonici . . . managed just like the
others to be astonishing and superb. Also this time the numerous and choice
number of spectators, the beautiful illuminations and the excellent pieces of
instrumental and vocal music united to make it prestigious. Signora Anna
Andreozzi sang various arias very well, and the renowned Signore Andrea
Martini, called il Senesino, astonished the audience with his sweet voice, and
with his well-known mastery of music. We will refrain from giving him
a eulogy here, because the audience testified to him as, by universal request,
they wanted him to repeat the aria that had been sung by him with such
distinction. Signora Rachele d’Orta and Signori Magnelli, Amici and Tamagni
also all distinguished themselves. The first part of the entertainment was
broken up by a violin concerto by Signore Pietro Nardini, known by now
for his sweet, and not easily imitated manner of playing, and the Signore
Pelleschi also performed a harpsichord concerto on pianoforte that pleased
both for the precision and for the bravura and talent of this young performer.
In the second part the previously praised Signore Pietro Nardini performed
another solo sonata, and rekindled the most sincere applause and acclaim.108
56. It is therefore of a different nature to the reasoned critical assessment of performances that we would
consider today to be music criticism.
106
Mary Sue Morrow states that the Gazzetta toscana was ‘the most assiduous in reporting concerts’ of the
twenty-three gazzette and literary and scholarly journals she surveyed from 1760 to 1800: ‘Late
Eighteenth-Century Instrumental Music from the Perspective of the Italian Press’, in Patrizia Radicchi
and Michael Burden (eds.), Florilegium musicae: studi in onore di Carolyn Gianturco, 2 vols. (Pisa: ETS, 2004),
vol. I , p. 717.
107
‘Magnifico, brillante, e bene ideato’; ‘fu numerosissima della primaria Nobiltà, e scelta Cittadinanza
d’ambedue i sessi’, Gazzette toscane uscite settimana per settimana nell’anno 1789 (Florence: Pagani, 1789),
pp. 48–9.
108
‘La quarta Accademia data dai Sigg. Armonici nella sera del dì 29 dello scorso riescì in egual modo
dell’altre sorprendente, e superba. Anche in questa si riunirono a renderla decorosa il numeroso, e scelto
concorso degli spettatori, la vaga illuminazione, ed i ben intesi pezzi di Musica Istrumentale, e Vocale.
Cantò bravamente diverse Arie la Sig. Anna Andreozzi, ed il rinomato Sig. Andrea Martini, detto il
Senesino, sorprese l’udienza con la dolce sua voce, e con il cognito suo possesso nella Musica.
Tralasceremo di farli qualunque elogio, poichè glielo testificarono gli ascoltanti, i quali con universal
richiesta vollero, che ripetesse l’aria dal medesimo egregiamente cantata. Si distinsero ancora la Sig.
Rachele d’Orta, ed i Sigg. Magnelli, Amici, e Tamagni. La prima parte della Festa fu tramezzata da un
Concerto di Violino del Sig. Pietro Nardini, noto oramai per la sua dolce, e difficilmente imitabil maniera
di suonare, ed il Sig. Pelleschi eseguì altro Concerto di Cembalo a piano-forte che incontrò sì per la
precisione, che per la bravura, e genio di questo giovine Professore. Nella seconda parte il prelodato Sig.
Pietro Nardini fece altra suonata a solo, e riscosse i più sinceri applausi, ed acclamazioni’, Gazzette toscane
uscite settimana per settimana nell’anno 1789 (Florence: Pagani, 1789), p. 53.
60 CARRIE CHURNSIDE
Like the majority of such reviews, this is entirely positive, although some
performers are praised more loudly than others (d’Orta, Magnelli, Amici and
Tamagni are dismissed rather summarily). Whilst Martini’s sweetness and
‘mastery’ are acknowledged, rather than a critical discussion of his perfor-
mance, the reader is referred to his reception; it must be remembered that the
encore was requested by the cream of society. Reviews of previous accademie
have simply reported that Nardini ‘astonished’, but here there is a reference to
his sweetness and inimitable style. The violinist was an important presence in
the musical life of the city and a source of some pride.109 This is a relatively
long and detailed review (although the names of the compositions performed
are noticeably absent), but it must also be seen in the context of a desire to
publicise the artistic life of the city and compliment the prominent figures
involved.
Conclusion
Such a survey of Italian musical discourse over the course of three cen-
turies reveals the sheer diversity of forms in which it can take, from
Castiglione’s courtesy book to vehement polemics, from private corre-
spondence to published travel diaries. Outside the realm of theoretical
writings, a discourse that took place within a relatively small circle and
required a particular level of education, sixteenth-century discussion of
music tends towards the general and often appears as a fleeting reference
in the midst of conversation on another topic. With the emergence of la
nuova musica around the turn of the seventeenth century came a rise in
much more detailed criticism, as partisans of both the old and new styles
sought to explain exactly what it was they looked for, both in composi-
tion and performance. This more detailed approach is also found in
travellers’ reports, which have a tendency to be more systematic, as they
seek to describe the music they encounter to those for whom it is entirely
new. By the end of the period a recognisable form of music criticism
emerges through regular newspaper reports, even if local pride prevents
them from being truly objective. What emerges is that critics generally
appreciated the same things as modern audiences do: in performance they
looked for accuracy, technical virtuosity employed with taste (rather than
simply showing off the performer’s ability), and in singers a sensitivity
towards the text. Regardless of arguments over the correct handling of
109
Maria Teresa Dellaborra, ‘Nardini, Pietro’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, available at
dissonance or contrapuntal rules, composers are universally praised for

variety and an ability to write music appropriate for a particular occasion
or text. Whilst writers in this period continue to search for meaningful
ways of talking about music in terms that can be widely understood, the
picture that emerges has a striking resonance today.
.4.
Music Criticism in France before the Revolution

CHARLES DILL
While music criticism in early modern France shared its history with journals
such as the Mercure galant, it neither emerged from a journalistic tradition nor
depended on journals for its themes. This means that as journalistic criticism
grew in importance over the eighteenth century, it drew on topics established
elsewhere – often in salons and private publications – that had less to do with
particular performances than with defining the proper role of music in society.
The composer, work or performer mattered, but usually within some larger
social context. If the resulting criticism at times bears little resemblance to
modern counterparts, it nevertheless offers something equally valuable: oppor-
tunities to observe a nation publicly weighing the roles it wished music to adopt.
French music criticism emerged from a confluence of factors:
(1) the establishment of musical events as public entertainment (e.g. Lully’s

Académie royale de la musique, 1672)
(2) the similar institutionalisation of other aspects of French culture (e.g.
language in the Académie française, 1635)
(3) the association of public entertainment with the monarchy
(4) a robust salon culture that valued personal observation, at times over and
against monarchical power
(5) a flourishing publishing industry that produced not only journals, but
novels, plays, poetry, satires, allegories, correspondence, music and
manuals explaining social skills (e.g. decorum, conversation, letter-
writing).
Louis XIV’s absolutist monarchy was a defining feature of this terrain, ensur-
ing that music had a public role in the nation’s life and that criticism would
contain nationalistic elements, but also that it could take place in the periph-
eries, away from the regulated world of the court.1 Against this backdrop,
1
Georgia J. Cowart, The Triumph of Pleasure: Louis XIV and the Politics of Spectacle (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2008); Robert M. Isherwood, Music in the Service of the King: France in the Seventeenth Century
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1973).
[62]
Music Criticism in France before the Revolution 63
salons, public entertainments and the publishing industry provided occasions

for criticism of all kinds – cultural, social, literary, musical – across private and
public venues. Music fared well because it framed cultural issues that com-
mentators, readers and audiences deemed significant, offering a means to
comment on the monarchy, religious controversies and even current gossip.
The results can be observed in the famed controversies of the eighteenth
century. Whether discussing the relative values of French and Italian music, the
propriety of genres (e.g. opéra-ballet, opera buffa), the merits of new composers
(Campra, Destouches, Rameau, Gluck), changing performance practices or audi-
ence behaviours, criticism concerned itself with fundamental questions. How did
music exist as a public event? What did popular music say about France? What
was the relationship of music to right behaviour? When commentators moved
beyond reporting dates, performers’ names and features of staging, these were
the topics that mattered. This gave music criticism of the pre-Revolutionary
period a reactionary cast. The impetus for critical writing came from attachment
to an imaginary past in which music was always better suited to public needs,
more popular than at present, more acute morally in its offerings. So strong was
this tendency that even with the appearance of progressive composers, like
Rameau, and progressive commentators, such as the encyclopédistes, discussions
rarely focused on how composers addressed existing musical practices in inno-
vative ways; rather, composers were a pretext for discussing the direction in
which the nation was headed. Apologists couched their arguments in tradition-
ally framed conservative terms (e.g. nation, language, morality) and routinely
conceded conservative points (that Rameau’s music, say, was contrary to dra-
matic values). Only with the approach of the Revolution, with the proliferation of
theatres and periodicals, did the situation come to resemble modern criticism.
Class structure helps us understand these developments. The settings in
which criticism first transpired were private, among the most elite in the king-
dom. Early in the seventeenth century, for example, the poet Malherbe culti-
vated a newly refined language within the circles of the queen and in the famous
Rambouillet salon. Conversations in the novels of Madeleine de Scudéry
echoed this mannered style, stressing etiquette, poise and conversation skills.
Salon discussions were recorded, publicised and popularised principally by the
bourgeois writers who participated.2 Quinault and Voltaire were bourgeoises
whose careers originated in these settings, and major literary critics of the
seventeenth century, like Boileau, came from bourgeois backgrounds as well.
This mixture illustrates a gradual shift: bourgeois critics wrote partly for an
aristocratic culture eager for new themes, but also for a bourgeois public eager
2
Alain Viala, Naissance de l’écrivain. Sociologie de la littérature à l’âge classique (Paris: Minuit, 1985), p. 244.
64 CHARLES DILL
to understand the mechanisms of social advancement. With the death of Louis

XIV, the core culture moved from its court setting at Versailles to eighteenth-
century Paris, bringing with it the values of earlier generations, which contin-
ued to have a place alongside emerging bourgeois values.3 Matters of propriety
and decorum were never far from the surface.
Music criticism before the Revolution can be usefully divided into three
periods, each with its distinctive themes. The first begins in the 1660s and
continues to the end of the century. A response to the creation of the
Académie royale de la musique, it coincides with the earliest attempts by
Perrin and Cambert to create an opera theatre, continues through Lully’s
successful attempts, and concludes with the introduction of a new genre,
opéra-ballet, in Campra and La Motte’s L’Europe galante (1697). Criticism of
this period concerned itself principally with music’s role in society – as
exemplar of court life, theatrical practice, moral life, public enjoyment – and
in the life of the individual. The second period begins with Louis XIV’s
declining interest in public life, during the early years of the eighteenth
century, and continues to the querelle des bouffons (1752–4). During the final
decade of Louis XIV’s reign and the regency of Philippe d’Orléans, the centre
of musical life drifted from court to the Académie’s theatre at the Palais royal.
(The Palais royal, both royal residence and site for public promenades, drew
attention to the Opéra as a liminal space with political and public associa-
tions.) While issues continued from the earlier period, new ones emerged.
Tastes and styles changed with the appearance of new composers like Campra,
Destouches and Rameau, who drew more attention to musical content than
Lully had done. This was also the period when major public debates about
musical entertainment emerged. The third period is bounded by the querelle
des bouffons and the Revolution. The former accompanies a shift from earlier
repertory, notably the tragédie en musique, towards comedy, the emergence of
the Opéra-comique as a major theatrical establishment and a trend towards
more modern critical language. The musical terrain shifted drastically, marked
by new theatres and journals, and major transformations in repertory.
The Seventeenth Century

If, as Cowart notes, this period witnessed the beginnings of modern music
criticism, it was because society fostered perspectives fundamental to critical
3
Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois
Society, trans. Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence, paperback ed. (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1991), pp. 27–56.
thinking.4 First among these was a shift towards the viewpoint of the indivi-
dual. We observe evidence of this already in Montaigne’s account of his life,
but it found its lasting model in Descartes’s portrait of a discrete, cognising
beholder reflecting on his environment.5 The Cartesian subject was the ideal
model for salon participants, who emphasised point of view, vernacular
expression, the privileging of thought over sensory experience and fascination
with recounting personal experiences.6 Salon culture also represented new
forms of socialisation, wherein groups contemplated personal experiences
together. DeJean notes that the publication of Lafayette’s La Princesse de
Clèves (1678), during the period when the Mercure galant first appeared, led
to the formation of book clubs that reported their deliberations to the
journal’s editor.7 The Académie royale, established during the same period,
witnessed a similar desire among audience members not only to form opi-
nions about music but also to express them to the wider community, some-
times during performances.8 (The parterre of the Palais royal theatre was an
especially fertile location for demonstrative behaviours.) Finally, we should
acknowledge the role of language in the development of criticism. The seven-
teenth century, beginning with Malherbe, rediscovered the French language,
savouring it as an expression of culture: Descartes published in the vernacular,
writers as diverse as Vaugelas, Arnauld and Bouhours cultivated clear and
elegantly spoken language, and institutions like the Académie française pub-
lished dictionaries. If to modern readers these efforts seem academic, we
should recall that academic writing was composed in Latin and adhered to
Scholastic tradition; these new resources, by comparison, were modern,
addressed contemporary concerns and were aimed at a reading public of
aristocrats and bourgeoises.9 Writers like Le Cerf modelled their discussions
4
See Georgia J. Cowart, The Origins of Modern Musical Criticism: French and Italian Music, 1600–1750 (Ann
Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1981).
5
See, for example, Evert van Leeuwen, ‘Method, Discourse, and the Act of Knowing’, in Stephen Voss
(ed.), Essays on the Philosophy and Science of René Descartes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993). On
Montaigne, see Erich Auerbach, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans. Willard
R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953), pp. 285–311.
6
On the popularisation of Descartes’s ideas, see Erica Harth, Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of
Rational Discourse in the Old Regime (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992); on the imagining of past
experiences as applied to music, see Jairo Moreno, Musical Representations, Subjects, and Objects: The
Construction of Musical Thought in Zarlino, Descartes, Rameau, and Weber (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2004), pp. 50–84.
7
Joan DeJean, Ancients against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Siècle (Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1997), pp. 58–64.
8
Jeffrey S. Ravel, The Contested Parterre: Public Theatre and French Political Culture, 1680–1791 (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1999); Jérôme de La Gorce, L’Opéra à Paris au temps de Louis XIV (Paris:
Desjonquères, 1992).
9
Richard Scholar, The Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi in Early Modern Europe: Encounters with a Certain Something (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 45, 183; Viala, Naissance de l’écrivain, pp. 147–51; Georges Matoré,
Histoire des dictionnaires français (Paris: Larousse, 1968), p. 87.
66 CHARLES DILL
of music on established treatments of language like Vaugelas’s and imitated

the comparisons of French and Italian culture found in language treatises.
Appreciation for language influenced how music was criticised. Discussions
privileged vocal music, treating instrumental music as secondary because it
contained no language and no information, appealing only to the sense of
hearing. Similarly, dancing was a pleasurable pastime, not to mention a social
practice of considerable importance, but there was nothing there, at least
initially, to contemplate. Thus instrumental music appeared in criticism, but
rarely drove it. (Surprisingly, this remained the case even in the progressive
writings of the encyclopédistes.) Earlier French critics treated Italian operas and
cantatas as glorified instrumental music, similarly devoid of content despite
their texts. In this context, comparative explorations of national styles in
chamber music, such as one finds in François Couperin’s Les Goûts réunis
(1724), provide useful musical commentaries, revealing how the French
viewed foreign musical styles.10
Recent research by Victoria Johnson has demonstrated that Louis XIV and
his ministers intervened in the creation of Perrin’s Académie d’opéra (1669).
Perrin had desired to establish a humanistic academy like the Académie
française, but royal preference was for opulent theatre reflecting the glories
of the monarchy. Through the vicissitudes of the next century and beyond,
this expectation of a grand and lavish national music theatre remained con-
stant, even in Revolutionary governments.11 It was a high standard, however,
and met with challenges. Perrin’s productions, with their simple, artless
music, were popular, and the usurpation of his patent by Lully, in 1672, led
to important critical themes. First among these was illegitimacy, the impres-
sion that, however popular it was, the Académie royale had gone astray. Even
the normally staid Mercure galant joined in, staging a conversation among
anonymous speakers who questioned the monarch’s and Lully’s
intentions.12 Pamphlets published in Lully’s lifetime and after characterised
the composer as a greedy interloper more interested in profit than serious
theatre. One finds traces of this same theme in later writers like Dacier,
Plûche, André, and Bollioud-Mermet. A related theme, emerging in pamph-
lets from Lully’s lifetime, refers to charges of homosexuality he had escaped
early in his career. Because music – and Lully’s in particular – appealed to the
senses, it cast moral doubt on the appropriateness of a national operatic
10
Don Fader, ‘Philippe II d’Orléans’s “Chanteurs italiens”, the Italian Cantata and the goûts-réunis under
Louis XIV’, Early Music, 35/2 (2007), 237–49; Cowart, Origins of Modern Musical Criticism, pp. 87–113.
11
Victoria Johnson, Backstage at the Revolution: How the Royal Paris Opera Survived the End of the Old Regime
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
12
Jérôme de La Gorce, Jean-Baptiste Lully (Paris: Fayard, 2002), pp. 180–3.
theatre. The composer’s private life was attached metonymically to opera as

a symbol of its decadence. With his death, condemnation focused on the
theatre’s female singers and dancers, the so-called filles de l’Opéra, who were
still discussed in these terms during the nineteenth century.13 These kinds of
commentary extended a criticism already directed at all French theatres of the
seventeenth century: that they placed too much emphasis on love and gallan-
try rather than edification. Whatever the validity of the charge when levelled
at the tragedies of Corneille and Racine, it was one to which Quinault’s
tragédies lyriques, with their galant plots, were vulnerable, and Boileau’s
tenth satire provided one of the best-known critiques in these terms.
Another model for criticism was a broad-ranging re-examination of
French culture, the querelle des anciens et modernes, which peaked in the
1680s and continued into the early decades of the eighteenth century. For
much of Louis XIV’s reign, France had compared itself to the great
empires of antiquity. Anciens like Boileau, who translated Longinus’ trea-
tise on the sublime, favoured the inspiring literary monuments of Greece
and Rome. Ladvocat longed to recreate the tragedies of ancient Greece in
modern opera livrets, an idea that resonated with later reform critics like
Mably and Rémond de Saint-Mard in the 1740s.14 In this controversy,
then, we encounter variations on the theme of an ideal, but lost, state of
grandeur, but with this distinction: the modernes generally admired opera
and were among its earliest supporters. Charles Perrault and Fontenelle
imagined a kingdom unlike any that preceded it, favouring the scientific
advances of the post-Cartesian period, modern manners and morals, and
properties attributed to the French language – clarity of thought, lack of
equivocation and simplicity. They regarded the creation of opera as one
more stage in this history.15 In his Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes
(1686), Fontenelle compared the workings of the universe to the machin-
ery of a vast opera theatre, while Perrault, in his Critique de l’Opéra (1674),
treated Quinault’s livrets as exemplars of modern manners. This tension,
between the ideal entertainment opera could be and the practical
13
See the anonymous ‘ Description de la vie et moeurs, de l’exercice et l’état des filles de l’Opéra’,
reprinted in Louis Ladvocat, Lettres sur l’Opéra à l’abbé Dubos, suivies de Description de la vie et moeurs, de
l’exercice et l’état des filles de l’Opéra, ed. Jérôme de La Gorce ([n.p.]: Cicero, 1993). More generally, see
Gina Rivera, ‘Les filles de l’Opéra in the Early Eighteenth Century’, unpublished PhD dissertation,
Harvard University (2013).
14
Gabriel Bonnot, Abbé de Mably, Lettres a madame la marquise de P. . . sur l’opéra (Paris: Didot, 1741;
facsimile ed., New York: AMS Press, 1978); Toussaint Rémond de Saint-Mard, Réflexions sur l’Opéra (The
Hague: Jean Neaulme, 1741; facsimile ed., Geneva: Minkoff, 1972). See David Charlton, Opera in the Age of
Rousseau: Music, Confrontation, Realism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 162–8.
15
See Larry F. Norman, The Shock of the Ancient: Literature and History in Early Modern France (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2011); DeJean, Ancients against Moderns.
68 CHARLES DILL
entertainment it was, framed the famous controversies of the eighteenth

century.
The culminating event in seventeenth-century criticism was an exchange
between Raguenet, who published Paralèle des italiens et des françois, en ce qui
regarde la musique et les opéra (1702), and Le Cerf de la Viéville, who responded
with the most extensive music criticism yet published, his Comparaison de la
musique italienne et de la musique françoise (1704–6). Both men were well
educated, both familiar with opera. (Raguenet had encountered Italian
music during a 1697 visit to Rome, while acting as tutor to the nephews of
Cardinal de Bouillon.) They both wrote in a period when comparisons
between French and Italian cultures were common, stimulated by the ban-
ishment of the Comédie-italienne (1697), the influx of Italian musicians
following the treaties of Turin (1696) and Ryswick (1697), and the publication
of popular Italian songs by the royal printer Ballard, beginning in 1699.16
Raguenet’s pamphlet hardly seems controversial. He took pains to praise the
most admired features of French opera, but confessed that he enjoyed Italian
opera even more. Le Cerf’s response was thus out of proportion – three
volumes seething with invective, tendentious reasoning and nationalistic
fervour. Despite its zealousness, the Comparaison is a valuable source, rich in
fanciful anecdotes about Lully and Quinault, descriptions of theatrical prac-
tices and audience behaviours, comparisons of music and poetry from identi-
fiable works, reflections on religious music and detailed explanations of
current critical positions. This was a defining moment in French criticism.
Expressing personal opinions about music and musical events became
a thoroughly public event, subject to comment and debate.
1700–1750
Le Cerf’s commentary identified important developments in the first half of
the eighteenth century, demonstrating just how quickly conservative atti-
tudes were evolving. First, opera was now acceptable entertainment even
for anciens; one no longer needed to justify enthusiasm for it, though its lack
of didactic content remained a cause for concern. Second, Lully’s reputation
underwent rehabilitation. He now became the touchstone for French opera,
its creator and ideal practitioner, another example of its lost grandeur. In
16
Paul-Marie Masson, ‘La Musique italienne en France pendant le premier tiers du XVIIIe siècle’, in
Henri Hauvette, Mélanges de philologie d’histoire et de littérature offerts à Henri Hauvette (Paris: Les presses
français, 1934; facsimile ed., Geneva: Slatkine, 1972); Masson, ‘Musique italienne et musique française, la
première querelle’, Rivista musicale italiana, 19 (1912), 519–45. See also Fader, ‘Philippe II d’Orléans’s
“Chanteurs italiens”’.
a period when public taste favoured the thrilling music of Campra,

Destouches and Rameau, the continued presence of Lully, both musically
and as a critical ideal, reminded audiences that French opera was steeped in
a tradition of poetry, dramatic situations and heroic figures. His operas were
performed continually up to 1779, typically brought in to shore up profits
when the attendance of newer works declined. (Ironically, his operas were
repeatedly adapted to current tastes, so that he was representing the past with
works made to sound modern.)17 In 1708, when Titon du Tillet proposed
a monument commemorating French cultural achievements, he included
Lully and Quinault alongside the likes of Corneille, Racine, Molière and
Boileau, and in 1725, François Couperin dedicated an instrumental apotheosis
to him.18
Finally, Le Cerf summarised a binary opposition in opera criticism that
remained constant for the remainder of the century. He distinguished
between, on the one hand, a French music rooted in sentiment, simplicity,
the natural superiority of the French language, and strong theatrical princi-
ples and social values, and on the other, Italian music that ignored language,
emphasising virtuosity, instrumental styles, sensuality and light entertain-
ment. Although the divide between French and Italian music remained the
most popular manifestation of this pairing – a constant right up to the
Revolution – the broader distinction it implies could take many forms: native
music versus foreign, civilised versus uncivilised, traditional genres versus
new, traditional performance practices versus new, edification versus enter-
tainment, simplicity versus pedantry, serious works (or composers or perfor-
mers) versus gallantry. Thus, for example, during the 1720s, audiences
identified the singer Lemaure with a traditional style of dramatic performance
and her competitor, the singer Pélissier, with a newer, more mannered style.19
The point, ultimately, was not about which singer should reign supreme –
both had good voices and praiseworthy acting skills – but what kind of music
and what kind of performance practice should be valued. The singers stood in
for a greater set of concerns.
Divisions deepened with Rameau’s first official opera, Hippolyte et Aricie
(1733). The Mercure de France, which reported on performances at the
17
Herbert Schneider, Die Rezeption der Opern Lullys im Frankreich des Ancien régime (Tutzing: Hans
Schneider, 1982); Lois Rosow, ‘Lully’s Armide at the Paris Opéra: A Performance History, 1686–1766’,
unpublished PhD dissertation, Brandeis University (1981).
18
Julie Anne Sadie, ‘Parnassus Revisited: The Musical Vantage Point of Titon du Tillet’, in John Hajdu
Heyer (ed.), Jean-Baptiste Lully and the Music of the French Baroque: Essays in Honor of James R. Anthony
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
19
Charlotte-Élisabeth Aïssé, Lettres de Mademoiselle Aïssé à Madame Calandrini, ed. Jules Ravenel, 5th ed.
(Paris: Gerdès, 1846), pp. 91–2, 107.
70 CHARLES DILL
Académie royale and generally adopted a neutral outlook, immediately recog-

nised Hippolyte as extraordinary, devoting an unheard-of fifteen pages to
describing it. Equally revealing, however, was a review the Mercure published
six months later, a ‘Lettre de M. *** à Mlle *** sur l’origine de la musique’.20
Because, as an official journal, the Mercure avoided personal attacks, the piece
was written as an allegory, but it was aimed at Rameau. A young woman, the
letter’s ostensible recipient, had avoided learning about music because opi-
nions varied so widely. The author assumes a moralising tone. Learning about
music is like learning about lovers: some are corrupt, others dissimulate, still
others flatter; true love, by comparison, is simple and unaffected. It was the
same with music’s origins. Psyche invented a pure music to celebrate virtuous
love, which was perverted by Venus to induce lust. At some point, just about
every charge later levelled at Rameau appears – lubricity, noise, pedantry,
arrogance – and he would remain a controversial, if popular, figure for the
remainder of his career. In a 1737 letter, Voltaire notes that lullistes referred to
Rameau’s enthusiasts as ramoneurs (‘chimney sweeps’).21
The dispute was about more than the efforts of one composer; French music
was indeed changing, had been changing for a long time, and this was not lost
on audiences. Opéra-ballets were more popular than hoary, expensive
tragédies en musique. Plots grew weaker and livret poetry simpler to make
room for more music. Recitative, the heart of Lullian opera, grew shorter
and was performed more quickly, while ornamental ariettes and dance scenes
grew in length and number. The resulting anxieties were older than Le Cerf,
and in this sense Rameau was no more than a proximate cause. The two most
thoughtful critics of the 1740s, Mably and Rémond de Saint-Mard, published
‘poetics’ of opera, in the manner of Aristotle, as calls for reform. Both admired
opera, but acknowledged that it was changing. Obviously, livret poetry could
not replicate the language of spoken tragedy, but it could benefit from better,
more didactic poetry and clearer plot expositions. Both Rémond and Mably
acknowledged opera’s gallantry, arguing that the terrors of Greek tragedy
were poorly suited to modern mores. And yet, though they imagined new,
improved, serious operas, they still regarded Lully and Quinault as coming
closest to achieving their ideal. Rameau, though never mentioned by name,
remained a presence throughout.
Rémond and Mably also mention a theme that gained prominence during
the 1740s, that of degeneracy or decadence. This resonates with an earlier
20
Anon., ‘Lettre de M. *** à Mlle *** sur l’origine de la musique’, Mercure de France (May 1734),
861–70, 864.
21
Theodore Besterman (ed.), Voltaire’s Correspondence, 135 vols. (Geneva: Institute et musée Voltaire,
1953–77), vol. V I , 285.
contribution to the querelle des anciens et modernes, Anne Dacier’s Des causes de
la corruption du goust (1714). Responding to La Motte’s translation of Homer,
Dacier argued that operas and novels were ruining French taste. (Throughout,
she made much of La Motte’s activities as livretiste.) During the 1740s, this
sense that modern music was corrupting society found expression in a series
of strongly worded treatises: André’s lectures on beauty, published as Essai sur
le beau (1741); an anonymous Lettre de M. de . . . a Madame de . . . sur les opera de
Phaeton et Hippolyte et d’Aricie (c. 1742); the seventh volume of Plûche’s Le
Spectacle de la nature (1746); and Bollioud-Mermet’s De la corruption du goust
dans la musique françoise (1746). The usual suspects were blamed: arrogant
composers, egotistical performers, fashion, Italian music, neglect for rules,
failure to imitate nature, sophistry, ambition. Bollioud-Mermet complained
that the problem extended even to the music of religious institutions.
(Especially interesting were his appeals for ‘wholesome harmony’ [saine
harmonie]).22 The cure was to re-establish taste for the music of Lully and
Lalande, with the composers from the intervening years apparently vanishing
altogether. Little wonder, then, that Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s opera, Le Devin
du village (1752) proved successful. With its simple melodies, harmonies and
sentiments, it offered up features that a significant portion of the audience
longed to hear, a trend reflected elsewhere in works like Gay’s The Beggar’s
Opera (1728).
1750–1789
At mid-century, aesthetic attitudes began showing evidence of further
change. Earlier generations had adopted a dualistic view of art consistent
with Descartes, stressing the gap between observed object and observing
subject. Criticism emphasised both the rules necessary for creating good art
and the taste requisite for judging its adequacy, while the senses were
regarded as a source of temptation which introduced an unseemly element
of enjoyment. The situation began changing with the Traité du beau (1715), by
the Swiss philosopher Crousaz, and accelerated with the popular Réflexions
critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture (1719) of Dubos; not coincidentally, these
were also among the first works to treat music as a serious, compelling sister
art comparable to literature, theatre and painting. Crousaz and Dubos were
influenced by Locke to imagine an elevated role for the senses. Henceforth,
there was validity in considering elements of experience that depended on
22
[Louis Bollioud-Mermet], De la corruption du goust dans la musique françoise (Lyon: Aimé Delaroche,
1746), pp. 23, 52.
72 CHARLES DILL
them – creativity, inspiration, sensibilité and the effect of artworks on the

beholder. This found further support in the 1720s, when Montesquieu and
Voltaire returned from Great Britain influenced by Locke and Shakespeare,
and again with Batteux’s Les Beaux arts réduits à un même principe (1747).
Batteux, like Dubos, located the sensory experience of art in mimesis: nature
provided the model, the artist imitated nature and the beholder found in this
imitation the semblance of emotions experienced in the natural world. (By
drawing on this principle, Dubos and Batteux were also able to theorise
a serious role for instrumental music as an imitation of natural events, such
as storms.) The new sensibility had the ironic effect of validating the earlier
critical position of the conservative anciens, who had argued for the instinctive
inspirations of the Longinian sublime over and against the rational principles
of the modernes. It would be an important influence on the philosophes involved
with Diderot’s Encyclopédie ou dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et
des métiers (1751–72), who became the principal spokesmen for sensibility at
mid-century.23
If the 1740s had been formative for the encyclopédistes, the 1750s were
decisive. Though the interests of Rousseau, Diderot, d’Alembert and
Grimm ranged widely, they found themselves increasingly involved in public
discussions of music. Rousseau wrote articles on it for the Encyclopédie, and
both Diderot and d’Alembert became involved with making Rameau’s music
theories accessible to the reading public. (Rousseau aside, the philosophes
initially were enthusiastic supporters of the composer, whom they regarded
as offering something more than traditional French fare.) The encyclopédistes
were largely in agreement with the view espoused by Dubos and later writers,
that the individuals, rather than gens du monde, determined responses to
musical events for themselves and relied on their sensory perceptions to do
so. Focus shifted onto the experiences of individual audience members, and in
this period French theatre audiences grew more silent and attentive.24
The philosophes, eager to broadcast their opinions, constituted one set of
actors effecting change, and observers identified them with it, but the philo-
sophes were also symptomatic of larger instabilities in music and society. As
previously noted, they emerged in a period that feared music was contributing
to cultural degeneracy, and their philosophical and political views further
stoked such anxieties. The repertory itself was changing. Despite frequent,
mandated revivals, the venerable tragédie en musique of Lully and Rameau was
23
Norman, The Shock of the Ancient, pp. 213–26. See also Georgia J. Cowart, ‘Sense and Sensibility in
Eighteenth-Century Musical Thought’, Acta musicologica, 56 (1984), 251–66.
24
James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995);
but see also Charlton, Opera in the Age of Rousseau, pp. 187–98.
dying out, with the theatre performing fewer and fewer new ones by other
composers. Lighter and less literary opéra-ballets of various kinds displaced
the tragedy. The Académie’s perennial financial woes, which had wreaked
havoc on a series of private financial syndicates, left the court eager to divest
itself of financial risk, and so the king transferred control of the Académie to
Paris’s prévôt des marchands. This was an act of symbolic importance. It was one
thing to invest in a royal institution, quite another to turn it into a financially
responsible business.25 And in addition to everything else, mounting dissa-
tisfaction with French music in general spilt over into public life in ways that
could no longer be ignored.
Grimm’s pamphlet Lettre sur Omphale (1752) – a critique of Destouches’s
recently revived opera – initiated a new phase in music criticism.26 Appearing
in February, it ostensibly supported traditional French beliefs: opera should
value language and emphasise drama over entertainment, vocal music over
instrumental. But the Lettre denied French opera those very attributes.
Though enthusiastic in his praise for Rameau, Grimm maintained that
Italian opera, long the scourge of French good taste, was the superior genre.
He referred to it as ‘musique européene’, reminding readers that it was the
pre-eminent musical entertainment everywhere but in France.27 Grimm dis-
missed Omphale’s poetry as unworthy of its author, La Motte, and claimed its
music lacked taste, naturalness, expressiveness and clarity of thought, values
long associated with French music. (This was a particularly vicious blow for
the conservative critics of the previous decade, who were arguing to reinstate
those very qualities in newer French repertory.) That spring, Grimm’s views
were seconded by his fellow philosophes in an unsigned letter to the Mercure by
Raynal and in a pamphlet by Rousseau entitled Lettre à M. Grimm.
The Lettre sur Omphale helped foment the querelle des bouffons.28 In
August 1752, the prévôt allowed the itinerant comic troupe of Bambini to
perform on the stage of the Académie royale. Whereas only a few years earlier,
critics had hoped to reintroduce dignity and didactic content into the tragédie
en musique, they now encountered, on that same stage, Italian musicians
producing fungible sex comedies like Pergolesi’s La serva padrona. For con-
servative audience members, this really could be regarded as degeneracy,
25
Elisabeth A. Cook, ‘Challenging the Ancien Régime: The Hidden Politics of the “Querelle des
Bouffons”’, in Andrea Fabiano (ed.), La Querelle des bouffons dans la vie culturelle française du xviiie siècle
(Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2005), pp. 141–60; William Weber, ‘La musique ancienne in the Waning of the
Ancien Régime’, Journal of Modern History, 56/1 (1984), 58–88, especially 75–7.
26
Friedrich Melchior Grimm, Lettre de M. Grimm sur Omphale ([n.p.]: 1752).
27
Grimm, Lettre de M. Grimm sur Omphale, 2.
28
See Charlton, Opera in the Age of Rousseau, pp. 179–86, 198–208; Weber, ‘La musique ancienne’, 77–80;
Denise Launay, ‘Introduction’ to Launay (ed.), La Querelle des bouffons, 3 vols. (Geneva: Minkoff, 1973),
vol. I .
74 CHARLES DILL
because the musics they had purportedly despised – Italian music, entertain-
ing music, modern music, immoral music – were now achieving success.
Matters intensified with the premiere of Mondonville’s Titon et l’Aurore in
January 1753, because audiences treated it as an exemplar for traditional
French values. A full-scale pamphlet war then erupted with Grimm’s Le Petit
prophète de Boehmischbroda, a biting satire couched in quasi-prophetic lan-
guage. Nearly sixty pamphlets followed, some responding to Grimm, some
to Rousseau’s Lettre sur la musique française (1753). Both made the same
extraordinary claims: the French language was poorly suited to opera, and
its music was weak, boring and unintelligible.29 While it all sounds a bit silly
to modern readers, the participants behaved as though something serious was
at stake, and it is important to recall the nationalistic ideology France had
invested in music to this point: it was not simply that the philosophes criticised
French music, but rather that they questioned the very foundations on which
beliefs about French music rested. The departure of the Bambini troupe in
March 1754 was no rout: the Académie celebrated French music with the
revival of a seventeen-year-old work, Rameau’s Castor et Pollux, a magnificent
composition in a moribund genre. More telling was the success of
Dauvergne’s Les Troqueurs, written in the manner of opera buffa, which was
performed at the Foire Saint Laurent in November 1753; it signalled the
growing importance of the comédie mêlée d’ariettes, or opéra-comique, then
being performed at the Comédie-italienne and at the yearly fairs held near the
abbeys of Saint-Germain-des-Prés and Saint-Lazare.
The philosophes continued to influence music discourse after the querelle.30
Successive volumes of the Encyclopédie argued for new music and new musical
experiences. And though Rousseau’s Lettre sur la musique françoise had
appeared in the thick of the querelle, its attack on French music was general
in nature, in the manner of the Lettre sur Omphale, detailing the failures of
Lully’s famed monologue, ‘Enfin, il est en ma puissance’ from Armide. This
marked the beginning of the philosophes’s split with Rameau. A professed
admirer of Lully, despite what his critics believed, Rameau now defended
the traditional composer in his Observations sur notre instinct pour la musique
(1753). Of still greater concern to Rameau were Rousseau’s articles on music
theory for the Encyclopédie; while the exchange has often been treated as
a simple disagreement – Rameau located expression in harmony, Rousseau
in melody – recent research shows that Rousseau’s articles were openly critical
29
These materials have been collected in facsimile in Launay (ed.), La Querelle des bouffons.
30
Alfred Richard Oliver, The Encyclopedists as Critics of Music (New York: Columbia University Press,
1947).
of Rameau’s theories.31 The composer responded with his Erreurs sur la

musique dans l’Encyclopédie (1755), leading the philosophes to defend Rousseau
in the preface to the sixth volume of the Encyclopédie (1756). This exchange
marks an important moment in French music criticism, which writers like
Kintzler have regarded as epochal.32 And there is something to this. From this
point, critical language begins to focus more on the musical work, and
Italianisms become more common. The repertory was changing as well. The
Académie produced scarcely any operas by Lully in the early 1750s, and
productions of new operas by Rameau also slowed. After a brief resurgence,
Lully’s works again dwindled after 1767 and disappeared in 1779; Rameau fell
from the repertory in 1784.33
The opinions of the philosophes contributed to the next great pamphlet war,
the querelle des gluckistes et piccinnistes.34 The philosophes had adopted a strategy
of upholding traditional-sounding values for French music, but locating the
exemplars for those values in the music of foreigners. So it was that the ideal
composers of the next generation were German and Italian, each in turn
divining the true nature of French opera. Having visited Paris in 1767,
Gluck understood the situation in France long before returning in 1774.
A 1772 letter of support, from the French diplomat du Roullet, indicates
that the composer had been considering a Parisian visit for some time, that he
possessed a thorough knowledge of French opera (including, as it turned out,
opéra-comique), and that he was well versed in the issues of French music
criticism. (The letter was published in the Mercure later that year.)35 A letter
from Gluck himself followed, published by the Mercure in 1773, in which he
freely admitted the influence of Rousseau’s thoughts on music.36 He returned
to Paris in 1774 for the first of two more visits with a suitably tragic subject in
hand, Iphigénie en Aulide, a story Diderot had recommended in Entretien sur le
fils naturel (1757). Over the next five years the Académie staged six more of his
works, written or adapted to suit French tastes. They featured tragic plots
31
Nathan Martin, ‘Rameau and Rousseau: Harmony and History in the Age of Reason’, unpublished
PhD dissertation, McGill University (2008).
32
Catherine Kintzler, Jean-Philippe Rameau: Splendeur et naufrage de l’esthétique du plaisir à l’âge classique,
3rd ed. (Paris: Minerve, 2011); Belinda Cannone, Philosophies de la musique (1752–1780) (Paris: Klinckseick,
1990).
33
Weber, ‘La musique ancienne’, 81.
34
Daniel Heartz, Music in European Capitals: The Galant Style, 1720–1780 (London: W. W. Norton, 2003),
pp. 801–81; François Lesure, ‘Introduction’ to Lesure (ed.), Querelle des gluckistes et piccinnistes, 2 vols.
(Geneva: Minkoff, 1984), vol. I ; Julian Rushton, ‘The Theory and Practice of Piccinnisme’, Proceedings of
the Royal Musical Association, 98 (1971–72), 31–46.
35
[François-Louis Gand Le Bland du Roullet], ‘Lettre à M. D., un des directeurs de l’Opéra de Paris.
A Vienne en Autriche, le 1r Août 1772’, Mercure de France (October 1772), 169–74.
36
Christoph Willibald Gluck, ‘Lettre de M. le Chevalier Gluck, sur la Musique’, Mercure de
France (February 1773), 182–4.
76 CHARLES DILL
often drawn from Greek tragedy; strong, unadorned declamation; clearly

expressed emotional content; and dramatically motivated dance. A young
generation of journalists and would-be philosophers, eager to emulate their
predecessors, soon joined battle.37 Arnaud provided a sensitive and surpris-
ingly musical account of Iphigénie in Aulide in the Gazette de littérature.38 The
journalist La Harpe, on the other hand, criticised it in his Journal de politique et
de littérature, levelling charges that had already been applied to earlier French
composers: the declamation was unmelodious, and the composer had allowed
two performers to sing at the same time.39
What was required, yet again, was for a good Italian composer to act as
counterbalance. The Neapolitan ambassador recommended Piccinni in 1774,
and the composer arrived in Paris in 1776. Gluck and Piccinni made for odd
adversaries: they were swept up in disputes they had not foreseen, they were
mostly reluctant to engage each other in dispute and they each arguably
learned something from the other’s compositions. Both composed operas
on themes previously associated with Lully – Gluck set Alceste and Armide,
Piccinni set Roland and Atys – and both employed techniques like tempête
scenes, long associated with French opera. Thanks to some backstage skul-
duggery, both wound up setting versions of Iphigénie en Tauride. Taken
together, the two composers signalled a general trend towards Italianisation
in French music, an acknowledgement that the older repertories could no
longer sustain French musical culture. For the most part, the philosophes of old
remained aloof from the controversy. The exceptions were Marmontel, who
supported Piccinni by updating Quinault’s verses, and Rousseau, who
acknowledged Gluck’s homage and praised his operas as worthy examples of
French opera. The inclination again is to regard it all as silly, a watered-down
version of the bouffonistes’ quarrel, but the stakes remained high. The question
was how to modernise a theatre of great tradition and cultural standing, how
to determine what kind of opera counted as French and what kind represented
France, both to itself and abroad. Given the continued interest in Italian
music, this was no small matter. The actual quarrel may have lasted only
a few years, but the issues it raised remained commonplace past the
Revolution and into the new century. Lesure notes that Choron and Fayolle
were still discussing its influence as late as 1810.40
37
Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
1982), pp. 1–40.
38
[François Arnaud], ‘Lettre de M. l’A. A**. a Madame d’***’; reprinted in Lesure (ed.), Querelle des
gluckistes et des piccinnistes, vol. I , pp. 29–39.
39
Reprinted in Lesure (ed.), Querelle des gluckistes et des piccinnistes, vol. I , pp. 113–14.
40
Lesure (ed.), Querelle des gluckistes et piccinnistes, vol. I , p. xv.
The trends from this period defined French music criticism up to the
Revolution, aided by a profusion of new journals and writers eager to address
the evolving music scene. The critics of the 1780s had been formed by the
events of the 1770s. Notable among these writers were Chabanon, Lacépède
and Framery, who, unusually for observers of musical culture, all had experi-
ence with music composition. Chabanon, best known for his elegy on
Rameau’s death,41 further developed notions of musical expression rooted
in the encyclopédistes’ thought, arguing in De la musique considérée en elle-même
(1780) that music was remote from language and provided a discrete, even
autonomous form of emotional experience. Similarly, Lacépède, who was
working on his own setting of Armide when Gluck’s was completed, offered
in his Poétique de la musique (1785) perhaps the most detailed argument on
behalf of instrumental music that France had yet witnessed. Framery, writing
for the Journal de musique historique, théorique, et pratique and the Mercure de
France in the 1770s and 80s, exemplifies the emergence of critics dedicated to
reviewing current performances, covering concerts at the Opéra, the Concert
spirituel, and, after the Revolution, the Théâtre Feydeau.
Long-standing trends were thus losing their hold on the French imagina-
tion. Framery was an especially zealous partisan for Italian opera, which
completed its conquest of Paris in the 1780s with works by Sacchini and
Salieri. During this period, the Académie ceased to exert the kind of control
over competing Parisian music theatres which it had so long enjoyed. In 1762,
its competitors, the Comédie-italienne and the fair theatres, had united to
form a single Opéra-comique company, known variously as the Comédie-
italienne or the Théâtre italienne; inspired by the success of composers like
Grétry, the troupe opened its own theatre in 1783, the Salle Favart, which
later became known as the Opéra-comique. These developments describe
a music world that would have been unrecognisable even at mid-century,
and here, in the years just prior to the Revolution, French music discourse
shifts away from the themes that had for so long defined it.
The Opéra continued to possess a cachet unique among available musical
experiences, and it is remarkable that performances there continued to matter
in the post-Revolutionary period. If this were simply a matter of royal pres-
tige, as it had been when the Académie was founded, then such performances
surely would not have mattered so much. That they did can be attributed, at
least in part, to a critical impulse, the desire of the individual to assess not just
performances, but beliefs about music. It speaks to the fact that possession of
French music had moved beyond its royal origins to become a set of beliefs
41
Michel Paul Guy de Chabanon, Éloge de M. Rameau (Paris: M. Lambert, 1764).
78 CHARLES DILL
held by the nation itself, apart from political developments. The weighing of
value in public, as a matter of culture, meant that most people – even those
who did not attend performances – could have opinions about music, and this
was so because they were already familiar with the actual process of attribut-
ing value to it. They could not have escaped doing so: a practical kind of
critical activity formed part of every performance, every social gathering,
every account of a life well lived and, most importantly, a thriving publication
industry.
Sources for Music Criticism in the Ancien Régime

Publishing was heavily regulated in ancien régime France, with ramifications
for music criticism.42 As the preceding discussion suggests, what was said
about music mattered, but where it was said and how it was said mattered just
as well. Music received the same kind of attention devoted to philosophical
and political writings because it was subject to public enthusiasm generally,
and so regulatory agencies and the police watched over it. And just as police
informants kept an eye on opera singers, so too they kept one on publications,
private discussions and even street songs related to the music industry.
There was a hierarchy among journals, and the most reputable journals
were limited in what they could discuss. Consider the career of a standard,
politically unexceptionable work on music, such as a Rameau treatise.
Reputable printers possessing royal privilèges published such works with
a notice of permission on the title page and a censors’ approbation tucked
away in back. The same held for journals. Official periodicals like the Mercure
de France and the Journal des savants appeared with permission and approbation.
These kinds of journals avoided personal commentary in their reporting: one
reads about the singing of te deums, premieres of new works, scenery and
costumes and reviews of new publications, but very little about what audience
members believed regarding musical works. To understand the subtleties of
music reception, scholars must broaden their search.
Fortunately, there were other kinds of publications as well. Well-connected
authors, journalists and printers received various forms of permission tacite,
lacking the official approval (if not scrutiny) of censors; this allowed journals
like Fréron’s L’Année littéraire and Clément’s Lettres sur quelques écrits de ce
temps to publish more thoughtful discussions and reviews while still largely
42
On publication practices and journalism in pre-Revolutionary France, see Jack R. Censer, The French
Press in the Age of Enlightenment (London: Routledge, 1994); Jean Sgard, Bibliographie de la presse classique,
1600–1789 (Geneva: Slatkine, 1984); Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime.
avoiding controversy. Other books, treatises and journals were published

either illegally in France or else beyond its borders, to be smuggled into the
country. This was true of Le Cerf’s opinionated Comparaison, which was
printed in Brussels, and it was true of treatises published during the querelle
des bouffons. Grimm’s Lettre sur Omphale and Rousseau’s Lettre sur la musique
françoise listed neither publisher nor location on their title pages, while other
pamphlets carried the names of fanciful printers and locales (‘sur le Mont
Parnasse, de l’Imprimérie divine’, ‘en France, chez Philantrope, à l’humanité’,
‘à Septimaniopolis’). These sources were more likely to contain unbridled
opinions about particular works, particular performers and the state of music.
The most opinionated and scandal-ridden sources of all were handwritten
nouvelles à la main, often couched as chatty letters from Parisians to provincial
friends. Here one encounters the unvarnished opinions of audiences. Nouvelles
of this kind proved invaluable, for example, in Masson’s study of the lulliste-
ramiste controversy.43
The important point is that, however regulated it was, French culture was
deeply fascinated by opinion and rumour. Readers wanted to know the kind
of gossip avoided in the Mercure, and as a result, valuable commentaries exist
outside of conventional publications. Letters are one source of information.
Public figures like Voltaire, who wrote thousands of letters over the course of
his life, intended some to be read aloud and circulated among friends in the
manner of nouvelles à la main, while others wrote newsletters for small groups
of subscribers, as with Grimm’s Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et cri-
tique. The letters of de Brosses, and of lesser-known figures like Aïssé, and the
personal memoirs by knowledgeable figures like Collé and d’Argenson con-
tain valuable information about attitudes towards music. At the lowest levels
of society, two locations in Paris were devoted to rumour-mongering, the
public gardens of the Palais royal and Pont neuf. The former was an ideal
location for selling the kind of illegal pamphlets published during the querelle
des bouffons, because the seller could not be arrested on royal ground. The
latter, a centrally located bridge, was a popular location for street songs
commenting on current events, so much so that the songs heard there or
purchased there in broadsheet form were called ‘pont neufs’.44 The music of
the elite theatres circulated at all levels of society. Street songs sometimes
took operatic tunes for their melodies – there are stories of Lully stopping his
43
Paul-Marie Masson, ‘Les Deux versions du “Dardanus” de Rameau’, Acta musicologica, 26 (1954), 36–48.
More generally, see Paul d’Estrée, ‘Les Origines du Chansonnier de Maurepas’, Révue d’histoire littéraire de
la France, 3 (1896), 332–45.
44
Robert M. Isherwood, Farce and Fantasy: Popular Entertainment in Eighteenth-Century Paris (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 3–21, 216–49.
80 CHARLES DILL
coach to correct a melody overheard in passing – and they often commented

on current events in the musical world. Because they were associated with
nouvelles à la main, these songs received police scrutiny, and many have been
preserved in sources like the Chansonnier de Maurepas and the Chansonnier
de Clairambault, which may have had ties to police informants.45 And finally
the theatres themselves provide another valuable resource. The Comédie-
française and fair theatres routinely performed satirical parodies of operas
current at the Académie royale, and there one finds observations about con-
ventions, reception and the perceived weaknesses of popular works.46 Strange
though it may seem, music was a presence in the ancien régime at all levels of
society, and even those who could not afford to attend performances had some
form of investment in knowing about the music scene.
45
Rivera, ‘Les filles de l’Opéra’; d’Estrée, ‘Les Origines du Chansonnier de Maurepas’.
46
Heartz, Music in European Capitals, pp. 702–3; Michel Noiray, ‘Hippolyte et Castor travestis: Rameau à
l’opéra-comique’, in Jérôme de La Gorce, Jean-Philippe Rameau. Colloque international organisé par la Société
Rameau, Dijon, 21–24 septembre 1983 (Paris: Champion, 1987).
.5.
Music Criticism in Britain up to Burney

REBECCA HERISSONE
‘[M]usical criticism has been so little cultivated in our country, that its first
elements are hardly known. In justice to the late Mr. Avison, it must be owned,
that he was the first, and almost the only writer, who attempted it.’
Charles Burney, ‘Essay on Musical Criticism’ (1789)1
Burney’s claim that Charles Avison’s Essay on Musical Expression (1752) was
virtually the only piece of British music criticism that had been produced by
the closing years of the eighteenth century was obviously something of an
exaggeration – one designed in this case to help establish Burney’s own critical
authority in his General History of Music. Nevertheless, music criticism in
Britain did develop more slowly than in some other European centres, parti-
cularly France and Germany, and it was only in the nineteenth century that
dedicated music periodicals and magazines, equivalent to those that had been
established in Germany in the 1720s, such as Mattheson’s Critica musica,2
began to be produced. For virtually the whole of the period considered within
this chapter – which broadly covers from the sixteenth century to the end of
the eighteenth – music criticism was a sporadic and unsystematic activity in
Britain, in which only a small number of individuals participated, and it was
found in a diverse range of publications, relatively few of them dedicated
polemics.
It is, indeed, remarkable how few of the major musical topics that were
debated elsewhere in Europe stimulated English writers in the late
Renaissance.3 At least to an extent, this slow pace can be explained by two
factors: first, although playing and singing art music did, as elsewhere, start to
1
Charles Burney, ‘Essay on Musical Criticism’, in A General History of Music, from the Earliest Ages to the
Present Period, 4 vols. (London, 1776–89), vol. I I I , p. vi.
2
See Stephen Rose, ‘The Musical Map of Europe, c. 1700’, in Simon Keefe (ed.), The Cambridge History of
Eighteenth-Century Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014), pp. 10–11.
3
In this chapter the terms ‘Britain’ and ‘British’ are reserved for references that include eighteenth-
century writings and events following the Treaty of Union in 1707; ‘England/English’ or ‘Scotland/
Scottish’ are used when reference is made only to the earlier periods.
[81]
82 REBECCA HERISSONE
grow as an amateur pastime during the sixteenth century, music publishing in

England had hesitant beginnings, so music continued to have a very limited
reach within society as a whole.4 Writings on music, as well as printed music
collections, began to be published only in the last quarter of the sixteenth
century, and remained infrequent until the 1650s. Secondly, as has often been
stated,5 English music theorists concentrated to a much greater extent than
their continental counterparts on rudimentary practical theories designed for
beginners. They did promote particular critical viewpoints on theoretical
issues (often arguing in favour of simplifying outdated theories to cater for
their intended market, the most famous example of which was the Locke–
Salmon controversy of 1672–73), but broader speculative and polemical topics
were explored infrequently. Indeed, critical opinion was more often
expressed in private writings not intended for the public domain – most
colourfully in the diary of Samuel Pepys in the 1660s, and in the perceptive
and detailed observations of Roger North between the 1690s and the late
1720s. Since the present volume is restricted primarily to issues that formed
part of public debate, such personal reflections are necessarily excluded from
this chapter.
Engagement with music criticism thus remained an isolated pursuit in
English writing until towards the end of the seventeenth century, but at
this point major changes began to occur both to the nature of the music
profession and to the way in which non-professionals experienced music as
a recreational pastime, and these changes resulted in an explosion of critical
activity that ultimately laid the foundations for the more widespread music
criticism that developed during the eighteenth century. In broad terms, the
life of the professional musician began to move away from traditional employ-
ment by patrons such as the royal court and the church towards freelance
entrepreneurial activities, which included providing music for the commercial
London theatre companies and mounting public concerts.6 Although it is easy
4
On the difficult early history of music printing in England, see Rebecca Herissone, ‘Playford, Purcell,
and the Functions of Music Publishing in Restoration England’, Journal of the American Musicological
Society, 63 (2010), 246–63. Although evidence is sparse, recent studies have begun to reveal something
of the range of people who bought and used this music. See David Greer, Manuscript Inscriptions in English
Printed Music. Music and Material Culture (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015); Stephanie Carter, ‘“Yong Beginners,
who live in the Countrey”: John Playford and the Printed Music Market in Seventeenth-Century
England’, Early Music History, 35 (2016), 95–129; and Bryan White, ‘Music and Merchants in
Restoration London’, in Linda Phyllis Austern, Candace Bailey and Amanda Eubanks Winkler (eds.),
Beyond Boundaries: Rethinking Music Circulation in Early Modern England (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2017).
5
For example, in Rosamund McGuinness, ‘Writings about Music’, in Ian Spink (ed.), The Seventeenth
Century. The Blackwell History of Music in Britain, vol. I I I (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), p. 406.
6
The broader context for the rise of the entrepreneur in the arts is traced in, among others, Michael Foss,
Man of Wit to Man of Business: The Arts and Changing Patronage, 1660–1750 (Bristol: Bristol Classic Press,
1988); first published as The Age of Patronage (London: Hamish Hamilton, 1971).
Music Criticism in Britain up to Burney 83
to exaggerate the speed and extent of this transformation, it did result in

musicians having a greater personal stake in their incomes than had previously
been the case, and in the development of a newly competitive environment,
especially because of the rapid influx of foreign musicians seeking to make
their living in this thriving culture; it also exposed art music to a much larger
public than had previously been able to experience it.
From the latter half of the seventeenth century these practical, cultural and
societal changes provoked new forms of musical debate, which appeared in
a range of publications not previously associated with music criticism. These
included the prefatory material to printed collections of music, playbooks and
opera libretti (and even sometimes their prologues and epilogues), which were
used by composers and literary figures to make statements about their own
and others’ works, as were published collections of poetry and satire. With the
advent of daily newspapers, together with an expanding range of periodical
magazines, journalism also became an important outlet for music criticism,
although it was only in the 1780s that dedicated music reviews began to be
published, and even these concentrated on printed music and music books
rather than performances.
By the turn of the eighteenth century dedicated publications on music-
critical subjects had begun to be produced, and they continued to be pub-
lished at regular intervals, reflecting the topics that preoccupied critics at
particular points during the century. In addition, music was brought into
discourse in several other areas of criticism from the mid-eighteenth century,
particularly philosophical and aesthetic tracts in which the different arts were
compared. Finally, as interest in writing about the history of music began to
develop, its authors established clear links to music criticism, meaning that
the music histories published in the eighteenth century often reveal as much
about contemporary critical views as they do about the music of the past. All
these forms of writing are therefore rich resources for understanding British
music criticism in the later part of the period covered by this chapter.
The diversity of the types of source that preserve music criticism in Britain
up to the end of the eighteenth century, and of the backgrounds of the authors
responsible for creating it, makes it difficult to generalise about their
approaches and opinions. Nevertheless, broadly speaking, the musical topics
that provoked debate in British writings in this period can be divided into
four areas. The earliest and most persistent controversy concerned the role of
music in religious worship, as well as the potential of music to cause moral
corruption. The second topic, opera, became a matter for discussion from the
earliest English attempts at the genre in the 1650s, owing to disagreements
about appropriate ways of setting the English language to music; however,
debate continued for over a century, the focus shifting to national influences
on opera because of the successful importation of Italian opera at the turn of
the century. A more specifically aesthetic topic developed in the mid-
eighteenth century, concentrating on music’s ability to move the passions.
Finally, the increasingly historical perspectives on music that grew up during
the eighteenth century provoked arguments about the value of ‘ancient’
music as compared with ‘modern’, a debate that also reflected many of the
fundamental changes in approaches to artistic creation that were key to
Enlightenment thinking. The remainder of this chapter seeks to investigate
each of these topics in turn and to situate them within the broader cultural
and social contexts that helped to determine the ways in which the contro-
versies were played out in British music criticism.
The Role of Music in Christian Worship and Moral Life

The significant religious upheavals that occurred in England during the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries stimulated a wide range of published
debate on music, much of it strongly felt. There was a widespread cautious-
ness about the potential power that music was generally acknowledged in this
period to possess – it was a force that could be used for moral and religious
good but that was equally capable of inciting corrupt practices.7 These issues
were debated in more than a hundred books, dedicated pamphlets and ser-
mons printed in Britain from the 1570s to the 1790s, often at great length,
making this by far the most frequently discussed area of music criticism in the
period; yet the essence of the arguments changed little during this time, and
writers largely drew on evidence from the same Biblical, early Christian and
Classical sources.
Within the context of religious practice, those who felt most dubious about
music’s inclusion in Christian services argued that divine authority for its use
derived only from Old Testament references, and that it was lacking in the
gospels.8 In more immediate practical terms, they voiced three additional
objections: they were concerned that it distracted from the most important
parts of the service (prayer and preaching); some saw it as an example of
worldly vanity and human indulgence; and they also complained that singing
(particularly choral singing) made it difficult for worshippers to understand
7
On early modern depictions of the physical and moral power of music see Christopher Marsh, Music and
Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), pp. 32–70; see also pp.
391–4, 445–53.
8
See, for example, Isaac Marlow, A Brief Discourse Concerning Singing in the Publick Worship of God in the
Gospel-Church (London, 1690), p. 15.
the words. Shortly after the Restoration, Solomon Eccles, a trained musician
who famously converted to Quakerism, expressed the view of his new sect
that music was a corrupting force that should be banned from church services
altogether, ‘for such Musick and Singing was never set up of God, but of
men’.9 However, this was an extreme view, and most Puritans agreed with the
prevailing view that music could be used as an aid to worship, provided that it
was kept as simple as possible, with a strong focus on the intelligibility of the
words and on the participation of ordinary congregation members.
In the light of the publications arguing for music to be banned from church
services, a number of tracts were published in its defence. The earliest was The
Praise of Musicke (1586), at one time attributed to John Case, which sum-
marised the fundamental belief of those who were sympathetic to music’s role
in church services: ‘Musick is rather to bee used in the church than not,
because it is the excellent invention and gift of God himselfe . . . [It] doth as
it were knit & joyne us unto God, putting us in mind of our maker.’10
Significantly, the author argued not only for the inclusion of monophonic
congregational singing but also for the retention of choral music;11 this,
together with the reference made by the book’s printer to reinstating ‘that
studie which laie, as dead, for a time’,12 implies that one incentive for publish-
ing the book was to revive choral training: the implications of its post-
Reformation decline were much lamented by those with sympathies for
choral music.13 English music education remained in a poor state throughout
the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and those with high-church sym-
pathies or professional musical interests continued periodically to voice
essentially the same arguments in favour of choral singing, including
Charles Butler and Arthur Bedford (both ordained ministers), the music
publisher John Playford and Thomas Mace, a Cambridge singing man.14
While few authors specifically promoted choral music, there was wide-
spread support across a broad religious spectrum for congregational psalm
singing, and its use in public worship was frequently endorsed in published
9
Solomon Eccles, A Musick-Lector: or, The Art of Musick (that is so much vindicated in Christendome) (London,
1667), pp. 13–14.
10
Anon., The Praise of Musicke (Oxford, 1586), pp. 150–1. On the authorship of the book, see J. W. Binns,
‘John Case and “The Praise of Musicke”’, Music & Letters, 55 (1974), 444–53.
11 12
Anon., The Praise of Musicke, pp. 139–43. Ibid., sig. ii.
13
See Morrison Comegys Boyd, Elizabethan Music and Musical Criticism, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: University
of Pennsylvania Press, 1962), pp. 18–21; Peter le Huray, Music and the Reformation in England (London:
Jenkins, 1967), pp. 13–18; and Nicholas Temperley, The Music of the English Parish Church. Cambridge
Studies in Music, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), vol. I , pp. 10–19.
14
Charles Butler, The Principles of Musik in Singing and Setting (London, 1636), pp. 98–119;
Arthur Bedford, The Temple Musick (London, 1706), pp. 200, 217–33; John Playford, A Brief Introduction
to the Skill of Musick . . . The Fourth Edition (London, 1664), sig. A2–A8; Thomas Mace, Musicks Monument, or,
a Remembrancer of the Best Practical Musick (London, 1676), pp. 1–31.
sermons and dedicated pamphlets, mainly produced from the 1650s onwards.
For the most part, these emphasised the theological justifications for the
practice and its positive effects on church attendance and congregational
piety. However, they did not overlook objections from members of the
educated classes, who frequently criticised the quality of the metrical verse
of the Sternhold and Hopkins psalter.15 Musically trained commentators such
as Butler and Playford more commonly bemoaned the poor standards of psalm
singing in parish churches,16 an issue that remained a source of concern to the
psalmody teacher William Riley in 1762 and to the Doncaster organist
Edward Miller in 1791.17
A related issue that entered religious debate about music at the time of the
Civil War was the question of whether organs should be allowed in church.
Most Puritans disapproved of them, and they gradually went out of use in
parish churches from the latter half of the sixteenth century; the 1644 ordi-
nance that they should be ‘taken away, and utterly defaced’ resulted in the
destruction of most of the remaining instruments.18 Polemics arguing for or
against the use of the organ in worship began to be published from the late
1630s,19 and they continued to appear periodically thereafter; many were
sermons that had been preached at the installation of new instruments, along-
side responses produced by those arguing against their use.20 Those in the
negative camp believed that organs were ‘superstitious and idolatrous
Monuments’,21 associated with all that was profane, heathen and, worst of
all, papist.22 As in the case of choral singing, the lack of reference to instru-
ments in the gospels was regarded as a problem, since Christ ‘left no Order at
all for the Use of Instrumental Musick’.23 The counterargument was that instru-
mental music, including the organ, was permissible precisely because there
was evidence of God’s approval of it in the Bible – not only in the Old
15
See Beth Quitslund, The Reformation in Rhyme: Sternhold, Hopkins and the English Metrical Psalter,
1547–1603 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 1–19.
16
See Nicholas Temperley, ‘John Playford and the Metrical Psalms’, Journal of the American Musicological
Society, 25 (1972), 331–78.
17
William Riley, Parochial Music Corrected. Containing Remarks on the Performance of Psalmody in Country
Churches (London, 1762); Edward Miller, Thoughts on the Present Performance of Psalmody in the Established
Church of England (London, 1791).
18
See Marsh, Music and Society, pp. 394–400.
19
The earliest of which I am aware is Humphrey Sydenham’s The Wel-tuned Cymball; or, a Vindication of the
Modern Harmony and Ornaments in our Churches (London, 1637).
20
For example, John Newte’s The Lawfulness and Use of Organs in the Christian Church (London, 1696)
provoked a series of positive and negative responses.
21
The Holy Harmony: Or, A Plea for the Abolishing of Organs (London, 1643).
22
See, for example, The Holy Harmony, sig. A2; [James Owen], Church-Pageantry Display’d: or, Organ-
Worship Arraign’d and Condemn’d (London, 1700), p. 10.
23
Anon., A Letter to a Friend in the Country, Concerning the Use of Instrumental Musick in the Worship of God
(London, 1698), p. 13.
Testament but also in the New, according to some authors24 – and that it was
therefore ‘one of Gods gifts’,25 and had a long history of being practised within
the church.
In the mid-eighteenth century a new topic for debate arose when Handel
began performing his sacred oratorios in the public theatres during Lent,
opera being banned throughout this period. The controversy here focused on
whether oratorio was genuinely devotional or just a thinly disguised theatrical
entertainment.26 Those who spoke in Handel’s defence found oratorio per-
formances to be spiritually uplifting. An anonymous letter-writer in The
London Daily Post on 1 April 1740, for example, referred to Israel in Egypt,
which he had attended the previous night, as ‘a truly-spiritual Entertainment’,
remarking that ‘It is the Action that is done in [the theatre] . . . that hallows the
Place, and not the Place the Action.’27 Such people generally agreed with Rev.
William Hughes that oratorio was ‘a strong Species of Church-Musick’,28 but
there was a weighty counterargument, voiced by ‘Musicus Antiquarius’ in The
Westminster Magazine in 1776, that the music of oratorio ‘too much resembles
that of the Opera; simplicity, majesty, and devout expression are sacrificed to
the Composer’s vanity, or ill-directed art’,29 particularly since it was per-
formed by stage singers, whose reputation remained extremely poor through-
out the eighteenth century.30
The strength of feeling expressed about oratorio is put into context by the
fear that a handful of particularly devout Christians expressed about the
potential power of both music and drama to corrupt, even outside the context
of worship. There were two main properties of music that writers on this
topic criticised. First, it had come to be associated with lewdness and lasci-
viousness. Phillip Stubbes, for example, referred in The Anatomie of Abuses to
‘pyping, fluting, [and] drumming’ as ‘inticements to wantonnesse and sin’,
and to travelling minstrels as ‘drunken sockets, and bawdye parasits, . . .
24
See, for example, Joseph Brookbank, The Well-Tuned Organ, or, an Exercitation (London, 1660), pp.
37–42.
25
Brookbank, The Well-Tuned Organ, p. 5.
26
See, for example, An Examination of the Oratorios which have been Performed this Season at Covent-Garden
Theatre (London, 1763), pp. 3–4.
27
R. W., [untitled letter], The London Daily Post, and General Advertiser (1 April 1740), 1–2; also quoted in
Thomas McGeary, ‘Music Literature’, in Harry Diack Johnstone (ed.), The Eighteenth Century, The
Blackwell History of Music in Britain, vol. I V (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), p. 402 (with incorrect citation).
28
William Hughes, Remarks upon Church Musick. To which are added Several Observations upon some of
Handel’s Oratorio’s [sic], 2nd ed. (Worcester, 1763), p. 39.
29
‘Musicus Antiquarius’, ‘On the Origin of Oratorios’, The Westminster Magazine, or the Pantheon of Taste
(February 1776), 76. The author derived his material from John Brown’s A Dissertation on the Rise, Union,
and Power, the Progressions, Separations and Corruptions of Poetry and Music (London, 1763).
30
See also Robert Manson Myers, Handel’s Messiah: A Touchstone of Taste (New York: Macmillan, 1948),
pp. 113–34; Winton Dean, Handel’s Dramatic Oratorios and Masques (London: Oxford University Press,
1959), pp. 132–43.
ryming and singing of uncleane, corrupt, and filthie songs’.31 Secondly, they
believed music had the potential to cause sexual immorality by acting as
a means of seduction. William Prynne cited St Basil in exclaiming ‘What
a miserable Spectacle is it to chaste and wel-mannered eyes, to see a woman,
not to follow her needle or distaff, but to be often veiwed [sic] by others as
a publicke whore: not to modulate or sing a Psalme of confession, but to sing
songs inticing unto lust: not to supplicate to God, but willingly to hasten unto
Hell.’32 Such condemnation was directed only towards women, but men
nevertheless had to negotiate a complex path as far as musical performance
was concerned; while on the one hand it was regarded as a valued pastime for
the privileged classes, on the other it was seen as having the potential to
‘wommanishe their minds’.33 Corresponding emphasis was placed on homo-
social musical activities, and the repertory created for performance in such
environments – including catches, rounds and drinking songs for the tavern or
alehouse, but also art songs often sung in the home – was often remarkably
sexually explicit, at least to modern sensibilities.34 It is also important to be
aware of the widespread association between music and more positive
potency, as both a form of pleasurable and wholesome recreation and as
a means of restoring mental and physical health, as the author of The Praise
of Musicke summarised: ‘the effects of musicke generally are these. To make
hast to incite and stirre up mens courages, to allay & pacifie anger, to move
pittie and compassion, and to make pleasant and delightsome: Nay yet I will
go farther: & doubt not but to prove by good authority, that musick hath
brought madde men into their perfect wits & senses, that it hath cured
diseases, driven away evil spirits, yea and also abandoned the pestilence
from men & cities.’35
31
Phillip Stubbes, The Anatomie of Abuses (London, 1583), sig. ¶6v, sig. D5.
32
William Prynne, Histrio-Mastix: The Players Scourge, or, Actors Tragaedie (London, 1633), p. 277, italics
reversed. See also Linda Phyllis Austern, ‘“Sing Againe Syren”: The Female Musician and Sexual
Enchantment in Elizabethan Life and Literature’, Renaissance Quarterly, 42 (1989), 420–48.
33
Baldessar Castiglione, The Courtyer, trans. Thomas Hoby (London, 1561), sigs. Jiiir–v; quoted in
Linda Phyllis Austern, ‘Domestic Song and the Circulation of Masculine Social Energy in Early Modern
England’, in Leslie C. Dunn and Katherine R. Larson (eds.), Gender and Song in Early Modern England.
Women and Gender in the Early Modern World (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014), p. 124. Austern considers
discourse on male music-making and its core associations in ibid., pp. 123–31, while Kirsten Gibson
investigates the ways in which music and melancholy were figured as effeminising agents for educated
men in discourses from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in ‘Music, Melancholy and Masculinity in
Early Modern England’, in Ian D. Biddle and Kirsten Gibson (eds.), Masculinity and Western Musical Practice
(Farnham: Ashgate, 2009).
34
See Linda Phyllis Austern, ‘“Lo Here I Burn”: Musical Figurations and Fantasies of Male Desire in
Early Modern England’, in Bonnie J. Blackburn and Laurie Stras (eds.), Eroticism in Early Modern Music
(Farnham: Ashgate, 2015); and Kirsten Gibson, ‘Age, Masculinity and Music in Early Modern England’, in
Catherine Haworth and Lisa Colton (eds.), Gender, Age and Musical Creativity (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015).
35
The Praise of Musicke, pp. 56–7. On early modern links between music and medicine, see Penelope Gouk,
‘Music, Melancholy and Medical Spirits in Early Modern Thought’, in Peregrine Horden (ed.), Music as
Opera
Beyond the subject of religion, the longest-running strand of music criticism
in Britain reflected tensions relating to opera. It began in the 1650s with
debates about the suitability of the English language for recitative, but
expanded in the first decade of the eighteenth century when all-sung opera
in Italian was successfully imported to the London stage, posing a substantial
threat to those involved in producing homegrown theatrical entertainment.36
Some writers reacted to this threat by mounting a campaign to promote all-
sung opera in English; others concentrated their efforts on criticising the
Italian productions themselves, which in turn provoked tracts defending
Italian opera, although these remained very small in number.
The majority of the criticism published on English recitative came, unsur-
prisingly, from the pens of literary figures, although musicians also contrib-
uted to the debate, and in substance both poets and composers agreed:
whereas the Italian language was ideal for recitative, English was ill-suited
to this sort of musical setting because of its short words, masculine endings
and excess of consonants. John Dryden summarised the problem in the well-
known preface to his all-sung opera Albion and Albanius in 1685:
All, who are conversant in the Italian, cannot but observe, that it is the softest,
the sweetest, the most harmonious, not only of any modern Tongue, but even
beyond any of the Learned . . . The English has yet more natural disadvantage
than the French; our original Teutonique consisting most in Monosyllables, and
those incumber’d with Consonants cannot possibly be freed from those
Inconveniences.37
From the first examples of full-scale English opera in the 1650s, playwrights
offered two mutually exclusive solutions to this problem. Those in favour of
all-sung opera described a range of ways in which their verse could be adapted
to make it appropriate for an English form of recitative. Richard Fleckno was
possibly the earliest to offer this solution, in the preface to the printed text of
his Ariadne of 1654, where he explained that he had ‘endevour’d short periods,
and frequent rithmes, with words smooth and facile, such as most easily might
enter into the mind, and be digested by the understanding’.38 Dryden’s
Medicine: The History of Music Therapy since Antiquity (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000); Marsh, Music and Society,
pp. 64–70; Austern, ‘Domestic Song’, pp. 131–2.
36
An overview of this criticism is given in McGuinness, ‘Writings about Music’, pp. 418–20; and
McGeary, ‘Music Literature’, pp. 398–402; comprehensive analysis is given in Thomas N. McGeary,
‘English Opera Criticism and Aesthetics, 1685–1747’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of
Illinois at Urbana-Champagne (1985).
37
John Dryden, Albion and Albanius: An Opera (London, 1685), sig. b1r.
38
Richard Fleckno, Ariadne Deserted by Theseus, and Found and Courted by Bacchus (London, 1654), sig. A7v.
Unfortunately, the work was never performed, and the music does not survive.
preface to the second edition of Albion and Albanius subsequently included

a much more comprehensive account of the ‘Rules which I have given to my
self in writing of an Opera’.39
The alternative solution was described by the composer Matthew Locke in
the preface to the score of his music from his 1675 opera Psyche, to which he
gave the provocative and defining title ‘The English Opera’. Drawing a parallel
between the ‘Grand Design’ and ‘splendid Scenes and Machines’ of Italian
opera and his own opera’s content, he argued that Psyche ‘may justly wear the
Title [of opera], though all the Tragedy be not in Musick: for the Author
prudently consider’d, that though Italy was, and is the great Academy of the
World for that Science and way of Entertainment, England is not: and there-
fore mixt it with interlocutions, as more proper to our Genius’.40 Thus Locke
explained that the nature of the English language made it unsuited to the all-
sung form, so in ‘English opera’ the drama was delivered primarily through
spoken text, with musical scenes contributing only to the adornment of the
work rather than to its dramatic substance. By the 1690s this had become the
preferred form of opera in England, so the playwright Peter Motteux was able
to explain in The Gentleman’s Journal in 1692: ‘Other Nations bestow the name
of Opera only on such Plays whereof every word is sung. But experience hath
taught us that our English genius will not relish that perpetual Singing.’41 As
well as addressing the issue of the English language, this type of opera
followed the basic dramatic principle that singing was irrational, and so
should be reserved principally for non-human characters. This was
a problem raised by several playwrights, including Dryden, who explained
in Albion and Albanius that, because ‘The suppos’d Persons of this musical
Drama, are generally supernatural, as Gods and Goddesses . . . The Subject
therefore being extended beyond the Limits of Humane Nature, admits of
that sort of marvellous and surprizing [sic] conduct, which is rejected in other
Plays.’42
Nevertheless, after all-sung Italian opera had been introduced to the
London stage in 1705, the part-sung, part-spoken form described by Locke
began to be criticised because it lacked dramatic continuity. In the late 1720s
the musical commentator Roger North famously referred in his manuscript
memoires to English operas as ‘ambigue enterteinements’, claiming ‘Some
39
John Dryden, Albion and Albanius: An Opera (London, 1691), sig. a4r–a4v.
40
Matthew Locke, The English Opera; or the Vocal Musick in Psyche (London, 1675), sig. a1r–a1v; italics
reversed. As explained in Herissone, ‘Playford, Purcell, and the Functions of Music Publishing’, 267–77,
Locke’s title was clearly intended as a counterattack to a perceived threat from a group of French
musicians trying to establish an opera company in England at this time.
41
Peter Motteux, The Gentleman’s Journal (January 1692), 5.
42
Dryden, Albion and Albanius (1685), sig. a1r.
come for the play and hate the musick, others come onely for the musick, and
the drama is pennance to them, and scarce any are well reconciled to both. Mr
Betterton (whose talent was speaking and not singing) was pleased to say, that
2 good dishes were better than one, which is a fond mistake, for few care to see
2 at a time of equall choice.’43 In 1718 Charles Gildon was still defending the
form in his Complete Art of Poetry: setting up one character against another, he
commented ‘But then I think nothing can be more absurd, than his preferring
the ridiculous Qualities of an Opera after the Italian, to that after the Way of
Harry Purcel [in which] . . . what was proper for Musick, was sung, and the
Drama performed as all other Drama’s [sic] were.’44 However, Italian opera was
by then highly popular on the London stage, and converts like Motteux – who
set English text to several pre-existing Italian all-sung operas in the first
decade of the eighteenth century – began to defend all-sung opera: in the
dedication of Love’s Triumph (1708), for example, he claimed that ‘since, in
vocal Melody, both Poetry and Music, like Body and Soul, are join’d and
subsist together, sure they will rather support than destroy one another’.45
As Italian opera began to take hold, English literary figures mounted a series
of defences, published at intervals during the first half of the century. A matter
of weeks after the 1705 London premiere of the first Italian opera, Gli amori
d’Ergasto, John Steele had already set out three of the main arguments in the
Epilogue to his play The Tender Husband: English writers felt it was ridiculous
that audiences could not understand the words of these operas; they were
suspicious of the Italian performers’ Catholicism; and they disliked the use of
castrati, alongside other ‘effeminate’ characteristics of Italian opera.46 In his
Essay on the Opera’s [sic] after the Italian Manner (1706), John Dennis added to
this by voicing his concern that the sensual allure of Italian opera threatened
the survival of serious drama in English, since ‘Audiences will hardly suffer
a Play, that is not interlarded with Singing and Dancing, whereas these are
become Theatrical Entertainments, without any thing of the Drama.’47
The series of commentaries published by Steele in The Tatler from 1709 to
1711 and then by his colleague Joseph Addison in The Spectator from 1711 to
1712 were similarly critical of the sensationalist side of Italian opera, which
43
Roger North, ‘The Musicall Gramarian, or A practick Essay upon Harmony’, London, British Library
Add. MS 32533, c. 1726; cited in John Wilson (ed.), Roger North on Music (London: Novello, 1959), p. 307.
44
Charles Gildon, The Complete Art of Poetry. In Six Parts, 2 vols. (London, 1718), vol. I , pp. 104–5.
45
Peter Motteux, Love’s Triumph. An Opera (London, 1708), sig. A3r. On the whole, however, Motteux
was somewhat apologetic about the new form in both this dedication and his preface to Thomyris in 1707.
46
Richard Steele, The Tender Husband; or, the Accomplish’d Fools. A Comedy (London, 1705), ‘Epilogue,
Spoken by Mr. Eastcourt’, sig. A3r. The relevant extracts are quoted in McGeary, ‘Music Literature’,
p. 399.
47
John Dennis, An Essay on the Opera’s [sic] after the Italian Manner, Which Are About to Be Establish’d on the
English Stage (London, 1706), p. 4.
Steele complained was ‘given up to the shallow satisfaction of the eyes and
ears only’.48 However, Addison in particular did not condemn Italian opera
outright; indeed, he clearly appreciated the inherent advantages of the
Italian language for musical setting and positively preferred Italian recita-
tive over English part-spoken opera, ‘The Transition from an Air to
Recitative Musick being more natural than the passing from a Song to
plain and ordinary Speaking, which was the common Method in Purcell’s
Operas.’49 He had three principal concerns: he felt that translations of
Italian opera into English were often of poor quality; he regarded the
bilingual productions in which Italian and English singers each performed
in their native tongues as ridiculous, but worried that, now opera was
entirely performed in Italian, ‘We no longer understand the Language of
our own Stage’;50 and he regretted the fact that Italian opera had subsumed
national theatre music, so that ‘In short, our English Musick is quite rooted
out, and nothing yet planted in its stead.’51
Like Fleckno and Dryden, Addison was keen to stress the importance
of developing an appropriate form of recitative, noting that ‘an English
Composer should not follow the Italian Recitative too servilely, but make
use of many gentle Deviations from it, in Compliance with his own
Native Language’.52 Thus Addison effectively appealed for the develop-
ment of an English form of all-sung opera, a call that was taken up by the
playwright John Hughes in Calypso and Telemachus in 1712, described by
Hughes in his preface as ‘an Essay for the Improvement of Theatrical
Musick in the English Language, after the Model of the Italians’.53
Unfortunately, the production, with music by John Ernest Galliard, ran
for only a handful of performances in May that year, and it was the
Italian form that continued to dominate the English stage in the mid-
eighteenth century.54
Italian opera continued to cause controversy, particularly at flashpoints in
the history of the London stage. During the critical season of 1727–8, for
example, the dominance of Italian star singers was criticised in A Letter from
48
The Tatler, 4 (18 April 1709). Steele’s and Addison’s contributions to the debate are traced in
Siegmund Betz, ‘The Operatic Criticism of the Tatler and Spectator’, Musical Quarterly, 31/3 (1945),
318–30; McGeary, ‘English Opera Criticism’, pp. 107–8, 165–88.
49 50 51
The Spectator, 29 (3 April 1711). The Spectator, 18 (21 March 1711). Ibid.
52
The Spectator, 29 (3 April 1711).
53
John Hughes, Calypso and Telemachus. An Opera (London, 1712), sig. A3r; italics reversed. See
J. Merrill Knapp, ‘A Forgotten Chapter in English Eighteenth-Century Opera’, Music & Letters, 42
(1961), 4–16; Malcolm Boyd, ‘John Hughes on Opera’, Music & Letters, 52 (1971), 383–6; McGeary,
‘English Opera Criticism’, pp. 194–208.
54
McGeary (‘English Opera Criticism’, p. 197) notes that the five Italian operas at the Haymarket that
season ran for forty-five performances in total, so they had much greater longevity than Calypso and
Telemachus.
a Gentleman in the Town to a Friend in the Country (1727), but the anonymous
author of The Touch-Stone (1728) subsequently mounted a considered defence
of the genre, apparently because of the threat being posed by The Beggar’s
Opera, which had been so successfully mounted at Lincoln’s Inn Fields for the
first time that year.55 He addressed four principal criticisms of the form: he
defended performance in Italian by appealing to the oft-cited view that Italian
was the best language to set in recitative; he addressed the unnaturalness of
all-sung productions by describing recitative as nothing more than
a ‘refinement’ of normal speech; he defended the use of Italian singers by
stating that there were no English singers of equally high calibre; and he
answered the criticism that opera contravenes Aristotelian and Rapinian rules
of drama by arguing that the genre lay outside those rules for tragedy and
comedy.56 Most significantly, he attacked the quality of performances at
Lincoln’s Inn Fields, saving his ire principally for the ‘execrable’ Beggar’s
Opera itself, which, he claimed, consisted of ‘Rags of Poetry and Scraps of
Musick’.57 Later, John Lockman inserted a long and wide-ranging essay at the
beginning of his libretto to his English opera Rosalinda, which had music by
John Christopher Smith and was performed in 1740. It largely followed
Addison’s criticisms of Italian opera, but added a regret that the English-
language operas for which Addison had called ‘had not the wish’d for
Success’58 – a fate he no doubt hoped would not befall Rosalinda itself. By
the end of the eighteenth century criticism of opera was more frequently
directed towards the comic operas and related entertainments that often
accompanied spoken plays in this period, for example in The Theatrical
Review of 1772.59 However, the posthumously published Letters upon the
Poetry and Music of the Italian Opera (Edinburgh, 1789) by the Scottish painter
John Brown explained the character and content of ‘serious’ Italian opera,
which, he regretted, was in decline, because of ‘the admiration bestowed in
Britain on difficulty and novelty, in preference to beauty and simplicity’,
which, he wrote, ‘is the effect . . . of the total want of taste’.60
55
This is McGeary’s view; see ‘English Opera Criticism’, pp. 218–19.
56
Anon., The Touch-Stone: or, Historical, Critical, Political, Moral, Philosophical and Theological Essays upon the
Reigning Diversions of the Town (London, 1728), pp. 12–40. See McGeary, ‘English Opera Criticism’, pp.
216–37.
57
The Touch-Stone, pp. 15–16.
58
John Lockman, Rosalinda, A Musical Drama. As It Is performed at Hickford’s Great Room, in Brewer’s Street
(London, 1740), p. iii. See also McGeary, ‘English Opera Criticism’, pp. 254–69.
59
On these entertainments, and their emphasis on novelty, see Michael Burden, ‘The Lure of Aria,
Procession and Spectacle: Opera in Eighteenth-Century London’, in Keefe (ed.), Cambridge History of
Eighteenth-Century Music.
60
John Brown, Letters upon the Poetry and Music of the Italian Opera (Edinburgh, 1789), pp. 115–16; similar
comments are made in McGeary, ‘Music Literature’, p. 401.
Imitation and Expression

The concerns expressed about appropriate text setting in British music criti-
cism on opera occurred within the context of a broader aesthetic debate on
imitation in art and literature, which had its roots in Renaissance humanism
and, ultimately, in Aristotelian doctrines on mimesis. Although these philoso-
phies were not addressed directly by English music theorists of the sixteenth
century, they had a strong practical influence on approaches to text setting, as is
reflected in technical compositional instructions in Morley’s Plaine and Easie
Introduction of 1597,61 and in Christopher Simpson’s Compendium of 1667. Here
Simpson advised: ‘When you compose Musick to Words, your chief endevour
must be, that your Notes do aptly express the sense and humour of them. If they
be grave and serious, let your Musick be such also: If Light, Pleasant, or Lively,
your Musick likewise must be suitable to them.’62
It was in the mid-eighteenth century that musical mimesis became a topic
for critical debate. At issue was the growing dissatisfaction with the naivety of
the type of imitation that sought to recreate texts, or in instrumental music
the sounds of nature, literally, as a form of musical ‘description’. Indeed, as
early as 1715 Roger North had already commented in his private writings on
the ‘rediculous absurditys’ that could result from such imitation: ‘as when any
thing is sayd to rise, the musick must needs advance in the scale, which
commonly proves too short to reach the skyes, tho’ a voice is made almost
to crack, and the air is wounded almost to death, yet it will come short; and on
the other side going downe into gloomy vaults, wee begin to grumble, and
double DD is not deep enough to reach the pitt of Hell’.63 The same criticism
was also levelled at mimesis in instrumental music when it involved literal
depiction of sounds like thunder or bird song. The difficulty was outlined by
James Harris in his ‘Discourse on Music, Painting, and Poetry’ in 1744. ‘In
Music’, he wrote, ‘the fittest subjects of imitation are all such things and
incidents, as are most eminently characterised by Motion and Sound’; however,
since music ‘pretends at most to no more, than the raising of Ideas similar, . . .
Musical Imitation is greatly below that of Painting, and . . . at best it is but an
imperfect thing’.64 Music’s ability to raise the passions was felt to be more
effective when the composer attempted to depict mood in a more general
61
See Thomas Morley, A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practical Musicke (London, 1597), pp. 177–8.
62
Christopher Simpson, A Compendium of Practical Musick in Five Parts (London, 1667), p. 140.
63
Quoted in Wilson (ed.), Roger North on Music, pp. 112–13, from ‘An Essay of Musicall Ayre’, London,
British Library Add. MS 32536, c. 1715–20.
64
James Harris, ‘A Discourse on Music, Painting, and Poetry’, in Three Treatises, 2nd ed. (London, 1765;
first published 1744), pp. 65–6, 68–9. See also Herbert M. Schueller, ‘“Imitation” and “Expression” in
British Music Criticism in the Eighteenth Century’, Musical Quarterly, 34/4 (1948), 549–50; and McGeary,
‘Music Literature’, p. 418.
sense, so as to translate the ‘spirit’ of a text or mood into music, thus imitating
not the actual sounds of nature, but the passions they aroused; hence, wrote
Harris, music’s power ‘consists not in Imitations, and the raising Ideas; but in
the raising Affections, to which Ideas may correspond’.65 Again, this notion had
been anticipated by North when he wrote that ‘the sounds are not to repre-
sent the things comonly signifyed by words, but the thoughts of the person
that useth them’.66 It was Thomas Twining who pointed out in his 1789
translation of Aristotle’s Poetics that this was in fact what the ancients had
meant by imitation in the first place: ‘When they speak of Music as imitation,
they appear to have solely, or chiefly, in view, its power over the affections. By
imitation, they mean, in short, what we commonly distinguish from imitation,
and oppose to it, under the general term of expression.’67
Primary interest in the topic of imitation came from literary scholars and
philosophers rather than musicians, occurring in the context of their preoc-
cupation with making comparisons between the arts, specifically painting,
poetry and music; they included Daniel Webb, James Beattie, Sir William
Jones and Adam Smith.68 However, by far the most significant publication on
musical imitation and expression was the work of a professional musician –
the Newcastle organist Charles Avison – whose Essay on Musical Expression
(1752; revised edition 1753) was the first dedicated publication on music
criticism. Avison took Harris’s ‘Discourse’ as his point of departure, agreeing
with him that ‘Music as an imitative Art has very confined Powers’, limited to
imitation of sound and motion, stating that music ‘obtains its End by raising
correspondent Affections in the Soul’;69 he was equally scornful of attempts at
literal representation.70 But Avison was the first to make a clear distinction
65
Harris, ‘A Discourse in Music, Painting and Poetry’, p. 99.
66
Wilson (ed.), Roger North on Music, pp. 112–13, from ‘An Essay of Musicall Ayre’.
67
Thomas Twining, ‘On the Different Senses of the Word, Imitative, as Applied to Music by the Antients,
and by the Moderns’, in Aristotle’s Treatise on Poetry, Translated: with Notes on the Translation, and on the
Original (London, 1789), p. 46. This passage is quoted in McGeary, ‘Music Literature’, p. 418.
68
Respectively, in Observations on the Correspondence between Poetry and Music (London, 1769); Essays on
Poetry and Music as They Affect the Mind (Edinburgh, 1776); ‘ On the Arts, Commonly Called Imitative’, in
Poems, Consisting Chiefly of Translation from the Asiatick Languages (London, 1772); and ‘Of the Imitative
Arts’, in Essays on Philosophical Subjects (London, 1795). The comparative basis of aesthetic discussions on
music is outlined briefly in Barnaby Ralph, ‘Comparative Aesthetic Thought in Early Eighteenth-Century
England’, in Elizabeth Mackinlay, Denis Collins and Samantha Owens (eds.), Aesthetics and Experience in
Musical Performance (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2005).
69
Charles Avison, An Essay on Musical Expression . . . Second Edition, with Alterations and Large Additions
(London, 1753), pp. 60–1. See also Pierre Dubois’s ‘Introduction’ to Charles Avison’s Essay on Musical
Expression, with Related Writings by William Hayes and Charles Avison (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), pp. xxiii–
xxv; and, for broader contextualisation of the moral and social basis of Avison’s aesthetic views,
Pierre Dubois, ‘“Music . . . Is Like a Conversation among Friends, Where the Few Are of One Mind”:
Charles Avison’s Moral Philosophy’, in Roz Southey and Eric Cross (eds.), Charles Avison in Context: National
and International Musical Links in Eighteenth-Century North-East England (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018).
70
Avison, An Essay on Musical Expression . . . Second Edition, p. 59.
between imitation and expression, explaining that the latter portrayed ‘the
Poet’s general Drift or Intention’ rather than ‘dwell[ing] on particular Words
in the Way of Imitation’.71 Moreover, he believed that expression was
achieved through a process of association through which music could call up
the passions: ‘Thus Music, either by imitating . . . Sounds in due
Subordination to the Laws of Air and Harmony, or by any other Method of
Association, bringing the Objects of our Passions before us, . . . does naturally
raise a Variety of Passions in the human Breast.’72
Avison went further still in seeking to classify the passions that music was
able to evoke: at the end of the second edition of his Essay he advertised
a proposal to publish by subscription ‘Specimens of the various Stiles in
Musical Expression’, as illustrated in the psalms of Benedetto Marcello.
They comprised ‘The Grand’, ‘The Beautiful’ and ‘The Pathetic’, each divided
into three subcategories;73 the psalms belonging to each category were sub-
sequently identified in the Preface to the edition in 1757.74 While not quite
adhering to Edmund Burke’s later contrast between the ‘beautiful’ and ‘sub-
lime’ – the latter was just a subset of ‘The Grand’ for Avison – his categories
belonged firmly within an aesthetic tradition that was established via Nicolas
Boileau’s 1674 translation of Longinus’s first-century account of the sublime
in rhetoric, which became highly influential in England in the early eighteenth
century.75 Avison’s own categorisations were subsequently used by later
musical writers, including both Burney and Hawkins.76
From the perspective of music criticism, what was particularly important
about the categorisations was that they were founded on the basis of music’s
effect on the senses and on the listener’s personal response, and so were not
reliant on adherence to compositional ‘rules’, accessible only to those with
technical knowledge.77 This, indeed, was one of the objections to Avison’s
Essay expressed by the Oxford Professor of Music, William Hayes,78 but
Avison, significantly, saw it as positively beneficial that his approach was
71 72
Ibid., p. 69. Ibid., pp. 3–4.
73
Ibid., sig. H3v. See also Dubois (ed.), Charles Avison’s Essay, pp. xxxix–lx; Schueller, ‘“Imitation” and
“Expression”’, 562.
74
Charles Avison, ‘Remarks on the Psalms of Marcello’, in The First Fifty Psalms Set to Music, by Benedetto
Marcello (London, 1757); the remarks are assessed in Roger B. Larsson, ‘Charles Avison’s “Stiles in Musical
Expression”’, Music & Letters, 63 (1982), 266–7.
75
See Larsson, ‘Charles Avison’s “Stiles in Musical Expression”’, 262–4. Burke’s treatise, A Philosophical
Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful, was published in 1757.
76
Larsson, ‘Charles Avison’s “Stiles in Musical Expression”’, 270–3.
77
As noted in Alan Lessem, ‘Imitation and Expression: Opposing French and British Views in the
Eighteenth Century’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 27 (1974), 329.
78
[William Hayes], Remarks on Mr. Avison’s Essay on Musical Expression (London, 1753), as reprinted in
Dubois (ed.), Charles Avison’s Essay, p. 103; as Dubois notes in ibid., pp. xxxiii–xxxiv, Hayes also sought to
denigrate Avison’s musical skills on the basis of lack of technical ability.
able to appeal to the ‘ordinary man’ rather than only to the musically initiated.
His aim, he wrote, ‘had nothing to do with theoretic Principles, and the mere
Mechanism of the Science’; rather, it was ‘Intended . . . as a critical, but yet as
a liberal, Examen of this pleasing Art; according to Rules, not drawn from the
formal Schools of systematical Professors, but from the School of Nature and
Good Sense’.79 In this respect, he was firmly in the camp of the ‘moderns’, as
described below.
The other important effect of Avison’s approach was to raise the status of
instrumental music, which had long been considered much less significant
than vocal because its lack of text made it incapable of the same level of
expression. This barrier was removed now that expression was equated with
emotional stimulus and music had been granted an autonomous status apart
from poetry. Thus Daniel Webb wrote in 1769: ‘On hearing an overture by
Jommelli, or a concerto by Geminiani, we are, in turn, transported, exalted,
delighted; the impetuous, the sublime, the tender, take possession of the sense
at the will of the composer.’80
Historical Perspectives and the Notion of ‘Good Taste’

In the 1690s music was brought into the British response to the French
Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns, which gave rise to what became
known as the Battle of the Books, after the satire of that name published by
Jonathan Swift in his A Tale of a Tub in 1704.81 In essence, the argument was
between those who believed that the achievements of the Ancients – that is,
Classical Greek and Roman authors – could not be bettered, so that the aim of
modern creators should be to emulate them, and those who felt that the
Ancients’ accomplishments had been superseded in modern times, meaning
that greater authority should be given to contemporary creativity. Sir William
Temple’s 1690 ‘Essay upon the Ancient and Modern Learning’ took the side
of the Ancients, arguing that the strong effects music was reported to have had
in ancient times had been lost, so that it had become ‘little more but . . .
Fiddling’.82 In his 1694 response, William Wotton pointedly distinguished
between untrained and trained listeners: whereas ancient music could
79
Charles Avison, A Reply to the Author of Remarks on His Essay on Musical Expression (London, 1753), p. 4.
See also Dubois (ed.), Charles Avison’s Essay, p. xxxvi.
80
Webb, Observations on the Correspondence between Poetry and Music, p. 11; quoted in Lessem, ‘Imitation
and Expression’, 329.
81
On the French Quarrel see Georgia Cowart, The Origins of Modern Musical Criticism: French and Italian
Music, 1600–1750, Studies in Musicology (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1981).
82
William Temple, ‘Upon Ancient and Modern Learning’, in Miscellanea. The Second Part. In Four Essays . . .
The Second Edition (London, 1690), pp. 45–6.
probably move the emotions of unskilled listeners as powerfully as modern

music, the musically educated found modern music superior because it used
harmony rather than remaining monophonic, making it more complex.83 To
the untrained listener – such as Temple, Wotton implied – ‘what is intricate,
appears confused; and therefore he can make no Judgment of the true
Excellency of those Things, which seem fiddling to him only, for want of
Skill in Musick’.84
Several later writers up to the middle of the eighteenth century fell on one
side or the other of this argument, but they did not add to its substance.85
However, around the turn of the eighteenth century, the term ‘Ancients’ took
on a new meaning, referring not to the musicians of Classical Greek and
Roman times, but rather to the polyphonic composers of the sixteenth
century. This decisive turn positioned debates about the relative value of
‘old’ and ‘new’ music within the context both of practical music-making,
and of several important changes that were developing in underlying attitudes
to the arts, bringing them to the forefront of critical debate in music.
Weber notes that the earliest applications of this new usage of the term
‘Ancients’ in music occurred in the 1690s, but it was in 1731 that it gained
a precise definition for a group of musicians who met to perform this ‘old’
repertory, when they changed their title from the Academy of Vocal Music to
the Academy of Ancient Music.86 As John Hawkins was later to remark, the
Academy’s members ‘appl[ied] the epithet ancient to the compositions of the
sixteenth century’, and sought out ‘such . . . as are capable of distinguishing
between the feeble efforts of simple melody, and the irresistible charms of
elegant modulation and well-studied harmony’, a style that they felt was
embodied not only by the music of ‘such men as Palestrina, Tallis, Byrd, [and]
Carissimi ’, but also to ‘Purcell, . . . Buononcini, Pergolesi, [and] Handel ’.87 At root,
then, their interest lay not in sixteenth-century music per se, but in its
‘learned’ style, which they appreciated equally in the works of more recent
composers. The Concert of Antient Music – a later and much more public
83
William Wotton, ‘Of Ancient and Modern Musick’, in Reflections upon Ancient and Modern Learning
(London, 1694), pp. 285–7.
84
Ibid., p. 287. See also Herbert M. Schueller, ‘The Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns’, Music & Letters,
41/4 (1960), 316–18; McGeary, ‘Music Literature’, p. 403.
85
As McGeary states (in ‘Music Literature’, p. 403), they included Lord Shaftesbury, the Earl of
Chesterfield and James Grassineau, who were on the side of the Ancients, and Hildebrand Jacob,
Alexander Malcolm and Richard Brocklesby, who took the Moderns’ perspective. Malcolm’s contribution
is outlined in Cowart, The Origins of Modern Musical Criticism, pp. 115–16.
86
William Weber, The Rise of Musical Classics in Eighteenth-Century England: A Study in Canon, Ritual and
Ideology (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), p. 29. On the historical concerts, see ibid., pp. 56–73, 143–97;
Percy Lovell, ‘“Ancient” Music in Eighteenth-Century England’, Music & Letters, 60 (1979), 401–15.
87
John Hawkins, An Account of the Institution and Progress of the Academy of Ancient Music (London, 1770),
pp. 18–19, 12, 22.
concert series, founded in 1776 – concentrated primarily on eighteenth-

century repertory, mainly Handel, Geminiani and Corelli, but shared the
same ideological basis in ‘serious’ music. The battle lines were thus drawn
between the ‘ancients’ – who preferred older music’s foundation in harmonic
rules and contrapuntal rigour and regarded modern repertory as frivolous and
superficial – and the ‘moderns’ – who saw this attitude as backward-looking,
favouring the melodic Italianate style of their own time.
On the surface this was a straightforward conflict about musical styles.
Indeed, in the early 1750s it drew the British into another French stylistic
controversy, the querelle des bouffons, in which Jean-Philippe Rameau claimed
that harmony was the basis of all music, while Jean-Jacques Rousseau argued
that melody had superior claims because of its close links to speech.88
However, beneath this stylistic facade lay more substantial underlying differ-
ences between the two camps. Whereas the ‘ancients’ were predominantly
members of the musical elite, often professional musicians,89 many of the
‘moderns’ lacked formal musical education; the fact that they did not consider
this a disadvantage reflects their new approach to evaluating music, which – as
Avison’s ‘Stiles in Musical Expression’, discussed above, illustrates – relied on
personal responses rather than technical understanding. Philosophically, the
‘ancients’ retained the humanistic belief that creativity should come about
through emulating ancient authorities, whereas the ‘moderns’ – who
belonged firmly in the Enlightenment in terms of their belief in the concept
of progress – came to advocate originality as a creative principle; imitation
thus came to be regarded as plagiarism.90
Perhaps surprisingly, music criticism dealing explicitly with the ‘ancients’
and ‘moderns’ only began to be published in Britain in the last quarter of the
eighteenth century, and the majority did not appear until the 1790s.91 Yet the
conflicts underlying the differences between the ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ camps
outlined above emerged gradually throughout the century in a range of
88
See Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘Essai sur l’origine des langues’ (1753) and Jean-Philippe Rameau,
‘Observations sur notre instinct pour la musique, et sur son principe’ (1754) as translated in Edward
A. Lippman (ed.), Musical Aesthetics: A Historical Reader, Vol. I : From Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century.
Aesthetics in Music 4 (New York: Pendragon, 1986), p. 333.
89
For example, the original members of the Academy of Ancient Music included William Croft, Maurice
Greene, Bernard Gates and, later, John Christopher Pepusch.
90
On the rise of originality as a creative principle, see Rebecca Herissone, Musical Creativity in Restoration
England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 41–59. The reviews of printed music pub-
lished by Thomas Busby in the 1780s, described below, included frequent accusations of plagiarism.
91
Those who wrote in favour of the ‘ancients’ included William Jones of Nayland and William Jackson;
the side of the ‘moderns’ was taken by Benjamin Stillingfleet, William Mason and, largely, John Marsh.
Their contributions are analysed in Howard Irving, Ancients and Moderns: William Crotch and the
Development of Classical Music (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999); see also Howard Irving, ‘John Marsh and the
Ancient–Modern Polemic’, Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 31 (2002), 215–36.
publications that demonstrate a growing interest in the history of music.

None of these was intended primarily as a work of music criticism, but
judgement of composers and their music ran as a common thread throughout
them, and they engaged with contemporary debates as much as historical
comparisons. In the prefatory essay to his 1740 playbook for Rosalinda, for
example, Lockman used his exploration of the foundations of opera to criti-
cise Italian opera on the English stage in his own day; similarly, William
Mason began his 1782 Copious Collection of musical psalm settings with an
essay tracing the stylistic changes in cathedral music following the
Reformation, which allowed him to exhort modern cathedral musicians to
avoid lapsing into overly elaborate styles themselves. It was in this manner,
then, that the respective values of ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ music entered the
realm of music criticism in British publications from the mid-eighteenth
century.
Nowhere is this more clearly illustrated than in the two books that
form the first major monuments of music history: John Hawkins’s
A General History of the Science and Practice of Music, published complete
in five volumes in 1776, and Charles Burney’s A General History of Music
from the Earliest Ages to the Present Period, which appeared in four volumes
between 1776 and 1789. While it is an oversimplification to view
Hawkins’s approach as representative of the ‘ancients’ and Burney’s as
encompassing that of the ‘moderns’, there is some truth in this interpre-
tation. Hawkins was fundamentally an antiquarian and scholar whose
research was restricted to libraries and archives. His book made few
concessions to the reader, being arranged in almost two hundred chapters
without titles, and was difficult to access for the musically uninformed.
He was firmly on Rameau’s side of the querelle,92 and, most significantly,
although he did believe in the concept of progress,93 his History ends not
with the music of his own time, but some twenty-five years earlier. He
explained in his Conclusion that this was because he felt that the compo-
sitions of his own present, which ‘abound in noise and clamour’, were
valued by their ‘vulgar admirers’ only because of ‘mere novelty’; his own
view was that, whereas music by Corelli, Handel and Geminiani had an
effect that ‘was deep and is lasting[,] . . . who now remembers, or rather
does not affect to forget the music that pleased him last year?’94
92
As stated in an annotation to his 1760 edition of The Compleat Angler, quoted in Roger Lonsdale,
Dr Charles Burney: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), p. 190.
93
See, for example, John Hawkins, A General History of the Science and Practice of Music, 5 vols. (London,
1776), vol. V , p. 429.
94
Ibid., pp. 429–31.
The contrasts with Burney could not be stronger. His research was based on
lengthy trips to Europe, where he had experienced its music at first hand.95
He was a prominent and popular figure in London society, and took pains to
make his book attractive to his fashionable readership. Although (as described
below) he stressed the importance of measured judgement in criticism, his
own bias towards the present permeates his writing: he began his account of
sixteenth-century Italian music, for example, by lamenting that ‘Melody, itself
the child of Fancy, was still held in Gothic chains’,96 a viewpoint that implies
his preference for the Italianate melodic style of his own day, thus placing him
on Rousseau’s side in the querelle.97 His preference for the music of his own
time influences the very structure of the History, given that its final volume is
almost entirely devoted to Italian opera.
It is easy, therefore, to regard Burney as an archetypical representative
of the ‘moderns’. Yet, as Howard Irving has demonstrated, there are
important contradictions in Burney’s writings that demonstrate a much
more complex approach to the past.98 In his ‘Essay on Musical Criticism’
Burney was keen to emphasise how important it was for the critic to
judge his materials even-handedly, claiming that ‘A critic should have
none of the contractions and narrow partialities of such as can see but
a small angle of the art . . . A chorus of Handel and a graceful opera song
should not preclude each other: each has its peculiar merit; and no one
musical production can comprise the beauties of every species of
composition.’99 It is difficult to imagine a statement that more clearly
accommodated both ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’ viewpoints, but Burney’s bias
towards the moderns pervades throughout much of his criticism. By
setting himself up as the arbiter of musical ‘good taste’ in the History,
Burney exerted considerable influence on the views of ordinary music-
lovers in the latter part of the eighteenth century. This was a role he
subsequently extended through his journalistic publications as a critic of
writings on music, and through his influence on other reviewers such as
William Bewley, who was largely responsible for the public condemnation
95
See his two travel journals: The Present State of Music in France and Italy (London, 1771), and The Present
State of Music in Germany, The Netherlands, and United Provinces (London, 1773).
96
Burney, A General History of Music, vol. I I I , p. 150. His belief in progress is summarised in ibid., vol. I V ,
p. 685.
97
Indeed, he criticised Avison for following Rameau in Burney, A General History of Music, vol. I V , p. vi. On
the influence of Rousseau on Burney, see Edward Green, ‘The Impact of Rousseau on the Histories of
Burney and Hawkins: A Study in the Ethics of Musicology’, in Zdravko Blažeković and Barbara Dobbs
Mackenzie (eds.), Music’s Intellectual History. RILM Perspectives 1 (New York: Répertoire International de
la Littérature Musicale, 2009).
98
Irving, Ancients and Moderns, especially pp. 20–1, 90–145.
99
Burney, A General History of Music, vol. I I I , p. vi.
Hawkins’s History eventually suffered, because of the ‘devastating’ account

he gave of the book in The Monthly Review in 1777.100
The reviews in this journal, and later The Critical Review, were the earliest
dedicated specifically to writings on music. For a short time in the 1780s
reviews of published music also appeared in The European Magazine and The
Analytical Review, and they are now known to have been the work of Thomas
Busby, a minor composer, singer and organist.101 Although they were
described from the outset as ‘Impartial and Critical’,102 Busby used his
reviews in the same way as Burney, to disseminate his notions of good musical
taste. They placed him clearly in the camp of the moderns in the emphasis he
placed on originality,103 although he was more in line with the ancients in
stressing the importance of good musical grammar.104 He was also relatively
old-fashioned in continuing to regard instrumental music as of less value
aesthetically than vocal because it lacked the affective powers of vocal
music.105 Nevertheless, he was clearly influenced in his approach by the
needs of his amateur readers, particularly in his concentration on the effec-
tiveness of the arrangements for piano of his chosen repertory.106 His reviews
both reflected and helped to determine the popular repertory of the 1780s,
setting the stage for the establishment of music reviewing as a regular feature
of the journalism of the following century.
Conclusions
The three centuries of comment and debate considered in this chapter reflect
the gradual emergence of music criticism as an organised activity in England,
from its heterogeneous beginnings in a wide variety of writings that were
contributed by a diverse range of individuals: literary figures, moralists,
philosophers and aestheticians, as well as professional musicians. Many of
these authors had vested interests in promoting particular viewpoints. While
these sometimes had little to do with music, they nevertheless highlight the
contribution that core underlying debates made to the performance and
100
See Roger Lonsdale, ‘Dr Burney and the Monthly Review’, Review of English Studies, New Series, 14
(1963), 346–58; 15 (1964), 27–37.
101
See Carrol Grabo, ‘The Practical Aesthetics of Thomas Busby’s Music Reviews’, Journal of Aesthetics
and Art Criticism, 25/1 (1966), 37–8.
102
The European Magazine, and London Review, 6 (July 1784), title page.
103
See, for example, his review of James Hook’s ‘Labour in vain’, in The European Magazine, and London
Review, 6 (July 1784), 8 [recte, 6]. See also Grabo, ‘The Practical Aesthetics’, 39–40.
104
For instance in his criticisms of parallels in The Beauties of Music and Poetry in The European Magazine, 5
(May 1784), 368.
105
See Grabo, ‘The Practical Aesthetics’, 41–2; and also the section ‘Imitation and Expression’ above.
106
Grabo, ‘The Practical Aesthetics’, 38.
reception of the main musical genres of this period. They include moral
arguments about the role music should play in religious and civil life that
reflect the strength of division between Puritan and high-church factions;
responses to Italian opera’s presence on the London stage that illustrate how
its domination was seen both as a threat to playwrights’ livelihood and as
a challenge to national identity; and discussions about the expressive qualities
of music that drew into question the authority of musical models and placed
new emphasis on the importance of creative originality. Above all, those
debates that focused on musical content demonstrate an increasing diver-
gence between, on the one hand, the professional musician – whose rigorous
technical training led him to value traditional contrapuntally complex and
serious ‘ancient’ music – and, on the other, the interested amateur – for whom
successful expression was judged more on the basis of personal response than
technical correctness, leading to a preference for the ‘modern’ Italianate
melodic style. Writing about music was thus opened up to an increasingly
broad range of would-be critics, setting the context for what was to become
a remarkable proliferation of critical activities in the nineteenth century.
.6.
German-Language Music Criticism before 1800

STEPHEN ROSE
In May 1722 Johann Mattheson published the inaugural issue of Critica musica,
the first known periodical devoted to music criticism. Focusing on the
appraisal of music theory, this journal defined the purpose of criticism as
‘for the most feasible uprooting of all coarse errors and the promotion of
a better growth of the pure harmonic science’.1 Mattheson used the metaphor
of an overgrown garden to convey his belief that critics should weed out
musical faults: ‘I have become somewhat severe about the beautiful musical
garden, and will not fail to uproot the old, deep-rooted, stiff, prickly, wild,
barbaric briars.’2 He explained that the regular rhythm of periodical publica-
tion suited his critical mission to shape wider opinion: ‘In today’s lifestyle
only rarely will people read a whole book, but they will more readily read
through a few pages every month. In this format the [critical] onslaught is
always new, and, like a steady drip of water, is able finally to make holes here
and there in the rock.’3 Critica musica ceased publication after three years, but
it pioneered many distinctive features of German-language music criticism in
the eighteenth century.
In subsequent decades, approximately thirty further German periodicals of
music criticism appeared, before the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung was
founded in 1798.4 Influenced by journals in other fields such as literary
criticism, these periodicals sought to create networks of readers debating
how to make informed judgements on music. Some of these journals were
published monthly or weekly; others appeared at less regular intervals. Most
were short-lived, folding after a few years owing to a lack of contributors or
subscribers; several, however, were republished in book format, and these
1
Critica musica, 1 (1722), title page. Translations from primary sources are my own; the original German
can be found in digitised versions of these periodicals.
2 3
Ibid., sig. A2r. Ibid.
4
For an index of articles on music in eighteenth-century journals, see Laurenz Lütteken (ed.), Die Musik in
den Zeitschriften des 18. Jahrhunderts: eine Bibliographie mit Datenbank auf CD-ROM (Kassel: Bärenreiter,
2004).
[104]
German-Language Music Criticism before 1800 105
multiple editions can create confusion in bibliographies and citations. Some

periodicals were aimed primarily at experts (Kenner), typically defined in the
period as connoisseurs who understood music from its fundaments.5 Others
addressed music-lovers (Liebhaber), whose listening was stereotyped as intui-
tive and attuned to the sensual aspects of music.6
The proliferation of music periodicals reflected a unique set of circum-
stances in German-speaking lands. Following Jürgen Habermas, scholars
have shown that the development of a public sphere in eighteenth-century
Europe required institutions and social spaces where private individuals could
share and develop their opinions.7 In Teutonic regions, as in other parts of
Europe, there were clubs, salons, coffee houses, reading groups and so forth
where individuals could meet;8 yet the political fragmentation of German
territories gave print a greater role than elsewhere. James Sheehan has
described the emergence in German-speaking lands of a ‘literary culture’,
the ‘culture of readers and writers for whom print had become the essential
means of communication and printed matter the primary source and subject
of cultural activity’.9 Books and journals allowed the educated elite to voice
intellectual, spiritual and cultural identities that bridged political frontiers. In
musical life, although cities such as Hamburg and Leipzig had a growing
public market for concerts and sheet music, periodicals allowed debates
about such questions as musical taste to reach Kenner and Liebhaber dispersed
in courts and towns across German-speaking lands.
A further reason for the growth of criticism in German territories lay in the
contested status of music. Advocates and detractors of music discussed
whether it was morally uplifting, necessary for religious worship, or mere
sensual entertainment. Around 1700 there were debates about whether music
was regulated by intellectual rules that could be the basis for learned discus-
sion. From the 1730s, shaped by French neoclassical ideals of mimesis, critics
debated whether music should imitate nature or the emotions, or should have
meanings intrinsic to itself.10 Dispute also raged about how music should be
5
Matthew Riley, ‘Johann Nikolaus Forkel on the Listening Practices of “Kenner” and “Liebhaber”’,
Music & Letters, 84 (2003), 414–33.
6
On the dialectical relationship of Kenner and Liebhaber, see Yonatan Bar-Yoshafat, ‘Kenner und
Liebhaber – Yet Another Look’, International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, 44 (2013), 19–47.
7
Society, trans. Thomas Burger with the assistance of Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989);
Charles W. J. Withers, Placing the Enlightenment: Thinking Geographically about the Age of Reason (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2007), pp. 62–83.
8
Emanuel Peter, Geselligkeiten: Literatur, Gruppenbildung und kultureller Wandel im 18. Jahrhundert
(Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1999).
9
James Sheehan, German History, 1770–1866 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 153.
10
Bellamy Hosler, Changing Aesthetic Views of Instrumental Music in Eighteenth-Century Germany (Ann Arbor:
UMI, 1978).
106 STEPHEN ROSE
judged, with regard to differing notions of taste and the contrasting behaviour
of Kenner and Liebhaber at concerts.11 Such debates stimulated the contribu-
tions to the journals discussed in this chapter.
For reasons of space, this chapter focuses on music periodicals and related
writings in isolation from broader debates about music as found in composi-
tional manuals, theological writings and treatises on aesthetics. The chapter
identifies three broad phases in the development of music criticism within
German print culture. A first phase involved the discussion of music in
vernacular literature (including satirical novels) in the last decades of the
seventeenth century. A second period from the 1720s to 1750s saw the
establishment of the first periodicals discussing music; often strongly polem-
ical in tone, these early publications were modelled on scholarly journals or
moral weeklies. A third phase was shaped by the rapid growth in music
publishing from the 1760s onwards, as critics tried to guide consumers
through the profusion of sheet music now available. The chapter also dis-
cusses two issues that pervaded music criticism in the period: first, the ques-
tion of how to form judgements on specific compositions; and second, the
patriotic search for attributes of German music.
Music Criticism and Vernacular Literature

Although the Lutheran Reformation had introduced the vernacular into the
liturgy from the 1520s onwards, Latin remained the usual language for
scholarly debate until the closing decades of the seventeenth century.
Around this time several German scholars sought to reach a wider audience
by contributing to the emerging literary culture in the vernacular. In 1687 the
jurist and philosopher Christian Thomasius chose to lecture at Leipzig
University in German instead of Latin; the following year he founded the
journal Monats-Gespräche, which contained book reviews and philosophical
debate in the guise of conversations among passengers on a coach journey.
Musicians likewise entered vernacular literature to boost awareness of debates
involving their profession. Already from the start of the seventeenth century,
music theorists increasingly favoured publication in German, to make their
treatises accessible to musicians lacking Latin.12 From the late 1670s musi-
cians used satire and narrative to bring musical topics to the attention of the
wider public.
11
On concert-going behaviour, see Peter Schleuning, Das 18. Jahrhundert: der Bürger erhebt sich (Reinbek
bei Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1984), pp. 169–97.
12
Michael Praetorius commented on his use of German in his Syntagmatis Musici . . . Tomus Secundus De
Organographia (Wolfenbüttel, 1619), sig.):(5r.
One pioneer was the Mühlhausen organist Johann Georg Ahle, who used the
format of a fictional dialogue to make musical discussion entertaining to non-
specialists. His Unstruhtinne oder musikalische Gartenlust (1687) portrays a group
of male citizens discussing musical topics, interspersed with continuo songs.
His four volumes of ‘seasonal dialogues’, Musikalisches Frühlings-Gespräche
(1695), Sommer-Gespräche (1697), Herbst-Gespräche (1699) and Winter-Gespräche
(1701), evoked in their titles not only Thomasius’s journal, but also earlier
works depicting conversations, such as Georg Philipp Harsdörffer’s
Frauenzimmer Gesprechspiele (1643–57). Ahle’s characters have allegorical
names such as Deutschold, Muselieb and Wonnemund, and they discuss
music in locations including a garden hut and under a walnut tree. They debate
technical topics such as the choice of cadences and the characteristics of good
text setting, and they criticise a fictitious song by ‘the schoolteacher in Gänsau’
(printed in full by Ahle).13 Ahle’s dialogues thus modelled a social setting where
enquiring burghers could form opinions on music.
In his Phrynis Mitilenaeus (1676/77, revised 1696), Wolfgang Caspar Printz
used the format of a travel narrative to enliven his exposition of compositional
theory. The treatise is written in the first person as the account of the trainee
musician Phrynis who wanders through Mediterranean lands, studying with
instrumentalists in various towns. Although the places and characters have
Greek names, the culture described is that of central German lands. Printz
adopted a satirical tone, aiming to teach through laughter; targets of his satire
included Phrynis’s early naivety as a composer, and three fictitious examples of
inept compositions, which are given in score. Through the medium of satire,
Printz published some of the first detailed critiques of individual compositions.
Printz and other musicians, such as Johann Beer and Daniel Speer, also
wrote novels to address questions about the social status of their profession.
Published anonymously or under pseudonyms, these narratives tapped the
public curiosity about musicians as adventurers on the edges of society. In
Beer’s Der simplicianische Welt-Kucker (1677–79) the protagonist’s musical
career leads him into the libidinous lifestyle of noblewomen in Germany
and Venice. In Speer’s Dacianischer Simplicissimus (1683) the life story of an
army trumpeter is combined with topographical description of the border-
lands between Hungary and the Ottoman Empire. The three novels by Printz,
by contrast, portray the lives of municipal instrumentalists in an effort to
prove they are honourable members of society.14
13
Johann Georg Ahle, Musikalisches Frühlings-Gespräche (Mühlhausen 1695), pp. 12–42; Musikalisches
Sommer-Gespräche (Mühlhausen 1697), pp. 1–39.
14
Stephen Rose, The Musician in Literature in the Age of Bach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2011), pp. 43–112.
108 STEPHEN ROSE
The most significant of the novels about music was Johann Kuhnau’s
Der musicalische Quack-Salber (1700), which showed how to distinguish incom-
petent from skilled musicians. Kuhnau explained the book was ‘not just for
well-informed music-lovers, but also for all those who have no particular
knowledge of this art’;15 ‘however, nobody should seek here the special
matters that can be indicated only in musical notation’.16 The book narrates
the adventures of Caraffa, a German musician who disguises himself as an
Italian in order to exploit the Teutonic love of foreign music and to hide his
own deficiencies. The first half of the novel is set in a collegium musicum,
a group of amateur and professional musicians who (as in Ahle’s dialogues)
voice their opinions on an array of musical topics. The members expose
Caraffa’s incompetence by testing him in various ways, for instance giving
him a poem to set to music. The novel ends with a list of sixty-four attributes
of virtuous musicians, showing the public how to evaluate the talents of
performers and composers.17
These satirical writings about music were read widely in subsequent dec-
ades and were quoted by later critics such as Mattheson and Friedrich
Wilhelm Marpurg.18 The novels fed the public’s appetite to read about the
lives of musicians, an appetite that led to the inclusion of biographical reports
and anecdotes in music periodicals throughout the eighteenth century. By
describing social settings where individuals formed their opinions on music,
Kuhnau and Ahle helped music criticism enter the spaces that constituted the
public sphere.
Periodicals as Polemics
Between the 1720s and 1750s, a series of short-lived periodicals advanced
contentious arguments about the status and nature of music. These journals
were shaped by the Protestant urban environments where they developed,
including the trading city of Hamburg with its liberal attitude to the press,
Leipzig with its community of scholars and booksellers, and the Prussian
capital of Berlin. They were aimed partly at professional musicians with
scholarly aspirations, partly at a wider public. Each of these periodicals was
closely associated with the individual voice of its editor, who used it as
a mouthpiece for his views on music.
15 16
Johann Kuhnau, Der musicalische Quack-Salber (Dresden, 1700), title page. Ibid., p. 53.
17
Rose, The Musician in Literature, pp. 113–50.
18
Ibid., pp. 9, 23–8, 143. Marpurg included excerpts from Ahle’s dialogues in Kritische Briefe über die
Tonkunst, 91 (19 December 1761), 210–14; 92 (9 January 1762), 215–22; 93 (17 January 1762), 223–30; 94
(23 January 1762), 231–8.
There were two principal models for these early journals about music. One
model was provided by scholarly periodicals such as the Acta eruditorum, issued
in Leipzig under the editorship of Otto Mencke from 1682 onwards, or the
Monatliche Unterredungen, published also in Leipzig and edited by Wilhelm
Ernst Tentzel from 1689 to 1698. The Acta eruditorum, published monthly in
Latin, developed from the correspondence networks used by scholars to share
discoveries and ideas. It contained articles on the natural sciences, medicine
and mathematics, and it reviewed treatises on a wide range of topics. With
a likely print run of 800 to 1,000 copies, the journal reached an international
audience of scholars.19 An alternative model was provided by moral weeklies,
which themselves emulated English journals such as The Tatler and The
Spectator. A pioneer in this genre was Mattheson, whose Vernünfftler
(1713–14) contained articles translated from English;20 subsequent moral
weeklies included Der Patriot (Hamburg, 1724–6) and Der Biedermann
(Leipzig, 1727–9). Providing models of behaviour for the urban bourgeoisie,
moral weeklies discussed topics such as the avoidance of greed and hypocrisy,
the choice of spouse, the education of girls and the development of taste.
Influenced by English models, the contributors to moral weeklies cultivated
witty and urbane prose, avoiding the convoluted syntax of scholarly writing.21
Their articles were mildly satirical, often using pseudonyms and fictitious
characters; they thereby combined instruction with entertainment in a similar
way to Printz’s and Kuhnau’s narratives about music.
Scholarly journals such as the Acta eruditorum provided the model for the
first periodical devoted to music criticism, Mattheson’s Critica musica.
Introducing the inaugural issue, Mattheson explained
The chief aim is to report on all kinds of musical writings and things, old and
new, printed and manuscript, native and foreign, German, French, Italian,
Latin, English etc., in such a way as is done in the Acta eruditorum . . . and for
each treatise (some rare) not only to give such a full report and review so that
anyone is able to know its essence without buying the book, but also to praise
good things within it, to reject evil confusions and instead to promote healthy
teachings.22
19
Augustinus H. Laeven, The Acta eruditorum under the Editorship of Otto Mencke (1644–1707): The History
of an International Learned Journal between 1682 and 1707, trans. Lynne Richards (Amsterdam: APA-
Holland University Press, 1990).
20
Dirk Hempel, ‘Der Vernünfftler – Johann Mattheson und der british-deutsche Kulturtransfer in der
Frühaufklärung’, in Wolfgang Hirschmann and Bernhard Jahn (eds.), Johann Mattheson als Vermittler und
Initiator. Wissenstransfer und die Etablierung neuer Diskurse in der ersten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts
(Hildesheim: Olms, 2010).
21
Eric A. Blackall, The Emergence of German as a Literary Language, 1700–1775 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1959), pp. 60–9.
22
Critica musica, 1 (1722), sig. A2v.
110 STEPHEN ROSE
Mattheson thereby distanced himself from his earlier work translating moral
weeklies for Hamburg, instead aiming to provide a scholarly forum for
a scattered audience of erudite musicians. He emulated the international fla-
vour of a learned journal, including news from locations such as London and
Paris, and providing German translations of topical polemics such as François
Raguenet’s comparison of French and Italian styles.23 Like a scholarly period-
ical, Critica musica was partly based on an epistolary network – in this case,
Mattheson’s own correspondents – and it printed letters praising his writings
and extracts from his correspondence with Heinrich Bokemeyer about the
value of canonic writing.
Compared to the sober tone of the Acta eruditorum, Mattheson struck
a polemical pose in Critica musica. The first three instalments of Critica musica
attacked the Academia musico-poetica bipartita (1721) by the Munich organist
Franz Xaver Murschhauser, a conservative exposition of music theory that
outlined techniques of solmisation and the twelve ecclesiastical modes.
Mattheson had scorned such matters in his previous books, and he took
exception to Murschhauser’s claim ‘to shed a little more light on the excellent
Mattheson’.24 He rebutted his adversary sentence by sentence, snidely titling
his review ‘the compositional light-snuffer’.25 Mattheson similarly inter-
rupted the excerpts from Bokemeyer’s letters with digressions and caustic
comments.26 Rather than offering a ‘full report’ on other treatises as he had
initially promised, Mattheson used Critica musica as a sounding board for his
own opinions.27
The model of the scholarly journal was again followed by Lorenz Christoph
Mizler’s Musikalische Bibliothek, which appeared sporadically between 1736
and 1754. Primarily a theorist rather than a practical musician, Mizler began
lecturing in music at Leipzig University in 1737; the following year he
founded a learned society, the Korrespondierende Sozietät der
Musicalischen Wissenschaften. The journal acted as an organ for Mizler’s
society, evaluating works of music theory from his viewpoint that music
was a science. It reviewed treatises by current authors such as Mattheson
and by musicians of previous generations such as Printz and Andreas
Werckmeister. The journal also contained letters from members on specific
23 24
Ibid., 91–166. Murschhauser’s comment as reported by Mattheson in ibid., 1.
25
‘Die melopoetische Licht-Scheere’, ibid.
26
David Yearsley, Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002),
pp. 52–8, 72–3.
27
On Mattheson’s antagonistic relationship with professional musicians including Bach, see
Keith Chapin, ‘Bach’s Silence, Mattheson’s Words: Professional and Humanist Ways of Speaking of
Music’, in Keith Chapin and Andrew H. Clark (eds.), Speaking of Music: Addressing the Sonorous (New York:
Fordham University Press, 2013).
theoretical questions; obituaries of deceased members; and lists of

‘Musikalische Neuigkeiten’ reporting on publications and concerts in various
cities. Mizler’s Musikalische Bibliothek is therefore another example of how the
critical discussion of music developed in conjunction with social networks
such as his corresponding society. His periodical was an influential example:
Marpurg declared on launching his Historisch-kritische Beyträge zur Aufnahme
der Musik (1754–60): ‘I want the set-up and purpose of this journal to be the
same as the Musikalische Bibliothek, except that the things considered here
concern more the practical than the theoretical side of the art.’28
An alternative prototype for early periodicals of music criticism was pro-
vided by moral weeklies, whose informal tone, satirical style and fictitious
scenarios allowed music critics to reach a wider audience of Liebhaber.
Mattheson modelled his short-lived Musicalischer Patriot (1728) on the
Hamburg journal Der Patriot (1724–6), the organ of the city’s Patriotische
Gesellschaft. He dedicated his periodical to members of the society, showing
his effort to reach a different readership from the erudite musicians targeted
by Critica musica. Just as Der Patriot promoted the civic virtues upheld by
Hamburg’s merchant elite, Der musicalische Patriot argued for the ethical value
of music and opera in city life.29
Non-specialists were again addressed by another journal modelled on the
moral weeklies: Johann Adolph Scheibe’s Der critische Musicus, published in
Hamburg from 1737 to 1740 (at first fortnightly). According to his 1773
recollections, Scheibe planned the journal in collaboration with Telemann,
whose own sheet music (including the serial Der getreue Music-Meister, 1728–9)
likewise cultivated a middle-class market for music. Telemann reportedly also
read portions of the first fifteen issues prior to publication.30 Der critische
Musicus discussed topics of interest to the musical public, such as taste, the
legitimacy of opera and music as an imitation of nature; Scheibe neither
addressed technical topics such as counterpoint nor included reviews of
sheet music and treatises. The journal aped the tone of the moral weeklies:
instalments were published anonymously, each started (like Der Biedermann)
with a quotation from an ancient or modern philosopher, and several included
satirical letters from fictitious figures.31 The title of Scheibe’s periodical
acknowledged the influence of Johann Christoph Gottsched’s Critische
28
Historisch-kritische Beyträge zur Aufnahme der Musik, 1/i (1754–5), xiv.
29
David Yearsley, ‘The Musical Patriots of the Hamburg Opera: Mattheson, Keiser, and Masaniello
furioso’, in Peter Uwe Hohendahl (ed.), Patriotism, Cosmopolitanism, and National Culture: Public Culture in
Hamburg 1700–1933 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003).
30
Johann Adolph Scheibe, Über die musikalische Composition. Erster Theil (Leipzig, 1773), pp. v–x.
31
For example, Der critische Musicus, 31 (2 April 1739).
112 STEPHEN ROSE
Dichtkunst (1730), which inspired Scheibe’s rationalistic approach to the arts

(discussed below).
Scheibe’s satires readily crossed the line into aggression, notoriously in the
sixth issue of Der critische Musicus (14 May 1737). Here an anonymous letter
from ‘a skilled musician’ (ein geschickter Musicant) described a journey around
central and northern German lands, criticising various anonymous musicians.
Expert readers could identify the individuals satirised in this critique, as
shown by the annotated copy once owned by Johann Gottfried Walther and
rediscovered by Michael Maul.32 Using his notion of musical taste (described
below), Scheibe evaluated the style of several composers. He attacked J. S.
Bach’s music as ‘bombastic’ (schwülstig) and ‘confused’ (verworren), but praised
the melodious writing of Johann Adolf Hasse (one of two musicians he
identified by name). He made gossipy comments on other musicians, disclos-
ing that the Leipzig organist Carl Gotthelf Gerlach relied excessively on
others’ compositions. The attack on Bach provoked rebuttals in Mizler’s
Musikalische Bibliothek and counterblasts from Scheibe;33 these lengthy
exchanges epitomised the waspish nature of early musical criticism.
Aspects of the moral weeklies also shaped two of the journals edited in
Berlin by the musician and civil servant Friedrich Wilhelm Marpurg. Der
critische Musicus an der Spree (1749–50) contained satirical items such as ficti-
tious letters exposing the ignorance of amateur musicians.34 Marpurg’s
Kritische Briefe über die Tonkunst (1759–63) comprised letters from members
of a fictional music society with Greek pseudonyms such as ‘Amisallos’ and
‘Neologos’, often addressed to real-life musicians such as C. P. E. Bach
and Leopold Mozart. The format of the music society recalled Ahle’s and
Kuhnau’s portrayal of similar settings where individuals voiced their opi-
nions. The Kritische Briefe courted controversy, as was typical of the period:
one of the fictitious contributors ‘Paläophil’ attacked Marpurg, while the
journal criticised the compositional practices of Johann Philipp Kirnberger
and publicised the dispute about keyboard temperament between Georg
Andreas Sorge and Christoph Gottlieb Schröter.35
Each of these early periodicals created a network to circulate critically
informed views on music, reaching either the erudite professionals who
32
Michael Maul, ‘Johann Adolph Scheibes Bach-Kritik. Hintergründe und Schauplätze einer musika-
lischen Kontroverse’, Bach-Jahrbuch, 96 (2010), 153–98; English version as ‘Bach versus Scheibe: Hitherto
Unknown Battlegrounds in a Famous Conflict’, Bach Perspectives, 9 (2013), 120–44.
33
English translation of the exchange in The New Bach Reader, ed. Hans T. David, Arthur Mendel and
Christoph Wolff (New York: Norton, 1998), pp. 337–53.
34
Der critische Musicus an der Spree, 1/ii (11 March 1749), 10–12.
35
Kritische Briefe über die Tonkunst, 2 (30 June 1759), 9–15; 23 (24 November 1759), 175–82; 117
(30 October 1762), 417–8; 118 (6 November 1762), 419–26.
viewed music as a science or the groups of amateur musicians in cities such as

Hamburg and Berlin. Though these journals strengthened the place of music
criticism in the literary culture of German-speaking lands, none established
a collective of contributors; each periodical was primarily a vehicle for the
views of its editor, ensuring a strongly polemical streak in this phase of music
criticism.
Criticism and the Commodification of Composition

From the mid-1760s, the function and mechanisms of German literary criti-
cism and music criticism were transformed by a rapid growth in publishing. In
1763 the end of the Seven Years’ War encouraged an upsurge in consumer
culture, with a major expansion of the book market in Prussia and Saxony.36
The quantity of books advertised at the Leipzig fairs increased substantially,
as did the numbers of available journals on all subjects. Between 1766 and
1790, 2,191 new periodicals were founded, compared to the total of 754 per-
iodicals inaugurated between 1741 and 1765.37 Reading patterns also chan-
ged, with the literate increasingly likely to read ‘extensively’, covering a large
number of texts (including novels or books borrowed from libraries), rather
than the old pattern of ‘intensive reading’ of a few sacred texts.38 A similar
expansion occurred in the music trade, thanks to Johann Gottlob Immanuel
Breitkopf’s new movable type, whose symbols were formed, mosaic-like, from
many smaller components. Marpurg noted that Breitkopf’s technique was
cheaper than engraving and promised to make good taste more widespread.39
In the ensuing decades Breitkopf printed large quantities of keyboard music,
songs, and operas in vocal scores; his commercial scriptorium also supplied
manuscript copies of less popular genres such as church music and instru-
mental ensemble works.
The growth of the wider book trade put a new onus on literary criticism to
guide the consumer through the mass of available publications. In 1765 the
Berlin bookseller Friedrich Nicolai inaugurated the Allgemeine deutsche
Bibliothek, which aimed to review all new German publications for the
benefit of
36
Michael North, ‘Material Delight and the Joy of Living’: Cultural Consumption in the Age of Enlightenment in
Germany, trans. Pamela Selwyn (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), pp. 7–10.
37
Joachim Kirchner, Das deutsche Zeitschriftenwesen: seine Geschichte und seine Probleme, 2 vols. (Wiesbaden:
Harrassowitz, 1958–62), vol. I , pp. 72, 115.
38
Reinhard Wittmann, ‘Was There a Reading Revolution at the End of the Eighteenth Century?’, in
Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier (eds.), A History of Reading in the West, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane
(Cambridge: Polity, 1999).
39
Historisch-kritische Beyträge zur Aufnahme der Musik, 1/vi (1755), 508.
114 STEPHEN ROSE
lovers of the most recent literature . . . who are scattered in many towns across
Germany, partly in small towns where no bookshop can be found, and it does
them a great service to receive reports of new books and their true worth, and
it perhaps also is not unpleasant for them annually to see the whole of the
latest literature in overview as in a painting.40
Through his journal, Nicolai aimed to create more discriminating readers who
would uphold standards of literary quality. As he wrote to Johann Gottfried
Herder in 1768: ‘You see how much mediocre trash is issued, yet still reck-
oned by many people to be good.’41 But it soon became impossible for Nicolai
to review all books released within the rapidly expanding market.42 Hence his
journal confronted the tensions arising from the dual role of books as intel-
lectual products and as commodities, tensions that Jochen Schulte-Sasse
argues would eventually undermine the Enlightenment ideal of providing
literary education to the general public.43
The Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek established new modes for literary criti-
cism in German lands. It was universal in coverage, reviewing publications in
fields as diverse as theology, philosophy, history, literature, the fine arts and
music.44 Whereas many previous journals were the work of a sole author,
Nicolai assembled a team that eventually totalled over four hundred contri-
butors; each signed their reviews with initials, according to a cipher for which
only Nicolai held the key.45 Nicolai encouraged an impartial and impersonal
tone in reviews: ‘The assessments must not be general and flattering but
instead well-grounded and candid. However frank your judgements may be,
you should abstain from personal attacks and seek to avoid controversy as far
as possible.’46 Nicolai’s success in cultivating a collective of reviewers con-
tributed to the longevity of his journal.
The collective authorship and constructive tone of the Allgemeine deutsche
Bibliothek were emulated by several music journals from the 1760s onwards,
notably the Wöchentliche Nachrichten und Anmerkungen die Musik betreffend
40
Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek, 1/i (1765), ii.
41
Friedrich Nicolai, Verlegerbriefe, ed. Bernhard Fabian and Marie-Luise Spieckermann (Berlin: Nicolai,
1988), p. 62.
42
Klaus Berghahn, ‘From Classicist to Classical Literary Criticism, 1730–1806’, in Peter Uwe Hohendahl
(ed.), A History of German Literary Criticism, 1730–1980, trans. Franz Blaha (Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1988), pp. 68–9.
43
Jochen Schulte-Sasse, ‘Das Konzept bürgerlich-literarischer Öffentlichkeit und die historischen
Gründe seines Zerfalls’, in Christa Bürger, Peter Bürger and Jochen Schulte-Sasse (eds.), Aufklärung und
literarische Öffentlichkeit (Frankfurt am Main: Edition Suhrkamp, 1980).
44
On the music reviews, see Thomas Bauman, ‘The Music Reviews in the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek’,
Acta Musicologica, 49 (1977), 69–85; Gudula Schütz, Vor dem Richterstuhl der Kritik: die Musik in Friedrich
Nicolais Allgemeiner deutscher Bibliothek, 1765–1806 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2007).
45
Gustav Parthey, Die Mitarbeiter an Friedrich Nicolai’s Allgemeiner Deutscher Bibliothek nach ihren
Namen und Zeichen in zwei Registern geordnet: ein Beitrag zur deutschen Literaturgeschichte (Berlin, 1842).
46
Nicolai, Verlegerbriefe, p. 28.
(1766–70), edited in Leipzig by the conductor and pedagogue Johann Adam

Hiller. Hiller nurtured a team of contributors (although their exact identity is
obscured by the use of anonymity or pseudonyms); he also published letters
from readers, who (despite the use of pseudonyms) do not seem to be ficti-
tious. Following Nicolai, Hiller urged moderation among his reviewers: ‘It is
better to avoid a critical tone that starts a lawsuit against someone, or gives the
appearance of a dictator in music.’47 The Magazin der Musik (1783–6), edited
by the Kiel professor Carl Friedrich Cramer, was modelled on Hiller’s journal,
again using a collective of contributors, and aiming to give ‘prompt, impartial
but never bitter reviews’.48 However, other periodicals of the late eighteenth
century were single-authored works, such as the Musikalisch-kritische Bibliothek
(1778–9) by the Göttingen academic Johann Nicolaus Forkel, or the
Musikalisches Kunstmagazin (1782, 1791) by the Berlin musician Johann
Friedrich Reichardt.
The biggest factor shaping German music criticism from the 1760s onwards
was the increased availability of printed music. Rather than appraise compo-
sers in terms of their style (as in Scheibe’s 1737 account of Bach) or discuss
general issues of music theory, music criticism re-oriented itself to guide
Liebhaber in their choice of sheet music. Already in 1761 Marpurg’s Kritische
Briefe included detailed reviews of compositions available from Breitkopf.49
Hiller’s Wöchentliche Nachrichten often reviewed music supplied by Breitkopf,
and occasionally offered comments on compositions available only in manu-
script. In February and March 1768 the journal printed an extended review,
submitted by ‘Epieikophilus’, of Gottfried August Homilius’s Passion ora-
torio Wir gingen alle in der Irre (Nun, ihr, meiner Augen Lider), explaining that
a handwritten score had been obtained after much effort.50 Such reviews were
intended to guide the amateur consumer: ‘In all our reviews and judgements
we will sit ourselves in the place of the Liebhaber, and say just as much as is
necessary for them to know when they wish to decide whether to acquaint
themselves with it or to enquire no further after it.’51 Evaluating printed
music was also central to Cramer’s Magazin der Musik, which during its four-
year lifespan published several hundred brief reviews of sheet music.
Some music critics echoed the tensions arising in literary criticism from the
dual status of the book as intellectual product and commodity. They sought to
defend their expert notions of musical quality against the commercial
47
Wöchentliche Nachrichten und Anmerkungen die Musik betreffend, 1/i (1 July 1766), 5.
48
Magazin der Musik, 1/i (1783), vii.
49
Kritische Briefe über die Tonkunst, 82 (17 October 1761), 140–2, and often in subsequent issues.
50
Wöchentliche Nachrichten, 2/xxxiv (22 February 1768), 261–8; 2/xxxv (29 February 1768), 269–76; 2/
xxxvi (7 March 1768), 277–80.
51
Wöchentliche Nachrichten, 1/i (1 July 1766), 7.
116 STEPHEN ROSE
pressures of the publishing trade. In 1778 Forkel opened his Musikalisch-

kritische Bibliothek by chastising those composers who wrote in prolific quan-
tities for Liebhaber:
Through the lavish applause of amateurs, who are rarely sufficiently occupied
with the study of this art enough to penetrate its depths, [composers] inun-
date us with new inventions until finally all order, all true nature, all noble and
worthy expression, and in short all that true musicians and connoisseurs can
value (beside the sensual) as intellectual pleasure – all this is driven out, and in
place of notable creation is an unworthy and risible plaything.52
Instead of repertory that ‘merely sounds and tickles the ear’, Forkel argued
that critics should promote compositions where ‘true genius, nature and art
connect correctly to each other’.53
Similarly in 1782 Reichardt began his Musikalisches Kunstmagazin with an
attack on composers who followed the market: ‘The highest goal of today’s so-
called artist is this: to satisfy the greatest quantity of his payer’s follies at
once.’54 Reichardt warned that the market was corrupting the nobility of
‘natural’ music, which he identified as residing in folk songs and in composers’
unmediated outpourings: ‘A handwritten page given to me by many a true
artist from his hidden store during my travels was often infinitely more
valuable than twenty engraved works by the same man, prepared for the
constricted heart of his gracious buyer and the iron-mongering of his
publisher.’55
Regardless of critics’ views on the merits of the music trade, the increasing
availability of printed music allowed them to engage closely with specific
compositions. From around 1760, music examples were used regularly for
reviews in music journals and also non-specialist periodicals such as the
Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek and Das Neueste aus der anmuthigen
Gelehrsamkeit. Such notated examples were facilitated by Breitkopf’s new
movable type, whereas previous periodicals had struggled to include music
notation within a letterpress book (occasionally resorting to short engraved
extracts, as in Mattheson’s Critica musica). Sometimes these music examples
were included as promotional material. Hiller’s Wöchentliche Nachrichten
explained: ‘It is insufficient for the curiosity of music-lovers when we merely
introduce to them an unknown composer, with a packet of his works under
his arm, by name only . . . They say to us: Hey, could we not hear something as
52 53
Musikalisch-kritische Bibliothek, 1 (1778), xiii–xiv. Ibid., xvi, xvii.
54
Musikalisches Kunstmagazin, 1 (1782), 5.
55
Ibid., 6. See also David Gramit, ‘Selling the Serious: The Commodification of Music and Resistance to
It in Germany, circa 1800’, in William Weber (ed.), The Musician as Entrepreneur, 1700–1914: Managers,
Charlatans, and Idealists (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004).
a sample?’56 Critics also used music examples to illustrate detailed discussions

of musical grammar, as with Marpurg’s complaints about voice-leading and
harmony in keyboard sonatas by Josef Antonín Štĕpán.57 Some reviewers even
accused composers of plagiarism, detecting similarities with previous pub-
lished works.58 As Estelle Joubert has argued, the use of notated examples led
to the ‘emergence of music analysis’ in criticism in this period.59
Music criticism of the 1760s to 1790s continued to include some
features characteristic of earlier periods, such as lists of recent perfor-
mances, and anecdotes and life-stories about musicians. Its focus shifted
away from polemics in music theory, instead seeking to give guidance to
the growing market of Liebhaber for printed sheet music. Crucial to this
new task was the question of how individual compositions should be
judged.
The Formation of Musical Judgement

In his Musicalische Discurse (written in 1690), Johann Beer explained that
whether music was judged more by rules or by the ear was one of the greatest
questions aired among musicians: ‘In general one calls those who follow rules
fundamentalists, but those who seek to content the listener are ear-ticklers.’60
Such a debate persisted until the 1730s, when new notions of musical taste
offered a way to reconcile the demands of rules and the ear. From the 1760s, as
music critics sought to shape a discerning attitude among consumers of
printed music, they recognised that the varying levels of knowledge in
Liebhaber and Kenner might lead to different judgements. To help non-
specialists refine their opinions, Hiller and Reichardt recommended the
study of a canon of approved works.
In the late seventeenth century, many musicians argued that compositions
should be judged according to acoustic or contrapuntal rules. The emphasis
on rules was partly motivated by a desire to show that music was a science, in
the Aristotelian sense of being based on infallible knowledge. The Hanover
court musician Agostino Steffani argued in his Quanta certezza (1695; German
translation 1699) that music’s harmonic proportions gave it an immutable
56
Wöchentliche Nachrichten, 1/i (1 July 1766), 6.
57
Kritische Briefe über die Tonkunst, 83 (25 October 1761), 144–5.
58
See Daniel Gottlob Türk’s review of Karl Hanke’s Singspiel Robert und Hannchen, in Allgemeine deutsche
Bibliothek, 86 (Anhang 53) (1790), 1893.
59
Estelle Joubert, ‘Maria Antonia of Saxony and the Emergence of Music Analysis in Opera Criticism’,
Cambridge Opera Journal, 25 (2013), 37–73.
60
Johann Beer, Musicalische Discurse (Nuremberg, 1719), pp. 32–3. This work was written in
November 1690, according to Beer’s autobiography; see Johann Beer, Sein Leben, von ihm selbst erzählt,
ed. Adolf Schmiedecke (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1965), p. 31.
118 STEPHEN ROSE
emotional power.61 Werckmeister claimed that the ratios underpinning con-

sonant intervals and triads corresponded to the harmonies of the heavens.62
For Werckmeister and Printz, contrapuntal rules were the yardstick by which
to judge compositions, as shown by their critiques of faulty voice-leading in
fictitious compositions.63
In the mid-eighteenth century, Mizler upheld rules based on the mathema-
tical certainties of harmonic ratios. His Musikalische Bibliothek reviewed
approvingly the writings of Werckmeister and Printz (praising the latter as
‘one of the best-grounded musical scholars of his time’),64 and publicised the
music-mathematical writings of Leonhard Euler and Christoph Gottlieb
Schröter. Mizler criticised musicians such as Mattheson who ‘contrary to all
reason, deny that all pleasures in music have their basis in mathematics’.65
Such an emphasis on rules suited Mizler’s effort to prove that music was
a learned discipline.
Mattheson, by contrast, favoured a relativistic view of music, where judge-
ment rested primarily in the senses. His earliest treatise, Das neu-eröffnete
Orchestre (1713), mocked those who promulgated ‘learned delusions’ (gelehrte
Grillen) about music as mathematics, and instead aimed to make music intel-
ligible to non-experts such as the galant homme. He elaborated this viewpoint
in Das forschende Orchestre (1721), which invoked empiricist philosophers such
as John Locke in an effort to prove that the interval of the fourth should be
regarded as dissonant (in contrast to the Pythagorean view of it as
a consonance). Here he declared: ‘My ultimate aim for music is and remains
for eternity the stirring of the sense embedded in the soul, namely of hearing
as the best judge in these matters.’66 Mattheson’s empiricist viewpoint per-
vaded Critica musica, where he dismissed rules inherited from past musicians.
When attacking Murschhauser, he declared: ‘I am an eclectic musician and
I submit to no authority contrary to the senses or reason.’67 Instead he
emphasised that taste (sapere) should shape judgement and, in conjunction
with natural talent, should triumph over rules.68 Only in 1744, however, did
61
Stephen Rose, ‘The Contest of Reason versus the Senses: Steffani’s Quanta certezza and German
Musical Thought’, in Claudia Kaufold, Nicole K. Strohmann and Colin Timms (eds.), Agostino Steffani:
Europäischer Komponist, hannoverscher Diplomat und Bischof der Leibniz-Zeit (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 2017).
62
Andreas Werckmeister, Musicalische Paradoxal-Discourse (Quedlinburg, 1707).
63
Andreas Werckmeister, Cribrum musicum (Quedlinburg, 1700), pp. 1–27; Wolfgang Caspar Printz,
Phrynis Mitilenaeus (Quedlinburg, 1676–77; revised ed., Dresden, 1696).
64 65
Musikalische Bibliothek, 1/iv (April 1738), 5. Musikalische Bibliothek, 3/ii (1746), 317.
66
Johann Mattheson, Das forschende Orchestre (Hamburg, 1721), pp. 449–50.
67
Critica musica, 1 (1722), 48. See Wolfgang Hirschmann, ‘“Musicus ecclecticus”. Überlegungen zu
Nachahmung, Norm und Individualisierung um 1700’, in Rainer Bayreuther (ed.), Musicalische Norm um
1700 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010).
68
Critica musica, 1 (1722), 250–1.
Mattheson publish a definition of taste (Geschmack) as ‘that inner sensibility,

selection and judgement through which our intellect makes itself felt in the
domain of the senses’.69
In 1745 Scheibe offered a detailed essay on taste, reconciling the sensory
and rule-bound aspects of music: ‘[Taste is] a faculty of understanding that can
judge what the senses feel.’70 Showing the influence of French classicism and
Gottsched’s rationalist poetics, he argued that music follows good taste when
it is orderly (regelmäßig) and illuminates the senses (scharfsinnig).71 For
Scheibe, however, ‘rules’ denoted not contrapuntal or harmonic conventions
but aesthetic qualities derived from the imitation of nature, such as simplicity
and clarity.72 He believed that such qualities, epitomised in the melodious
style of Hasse and Carl Heinrich Graun, could transport the listener to
unprecedented heights. These ideals of clarity and naturalness informed his
critique of Bach’s music as bombastic and confused (see above).
By the 1760s, as critics increasingly focused on the appraisal of printed
music, they aimed to teach Liebhaber the rules with which Kenner might judge
music. Describing the ideal reader of its reviews, Hiller’s Wöchentliche
Nachrichten indicated an aspiration to merge the categories of Liebhaber and
Kenner: ‘We put ourselves always in the place of someone captured by a love of
music, who has a certain taste, a well-made ear and much knowledge of the
rules, so he can say: This pleases or displeases me, because it has a good or bad
effect on me.’73 Many reviews of the 1760s judged sheet music for how far it
conformed to compositional rules, complaining at consecutive consonances
or weak modulations, and criticising the inclusion of features not usually
associated with the genre.74
Forkel aimed to move Liebhaber beyond sensual pleasure to an awareness of
the inner logic of musical materials. Taste, in Forkel’s definition, involved ‘the
discovery in feelings of the fundamentals of the art, through which one arrives
in the state, without long study, of knowing whether an artwork is beautiful
or hateful’.75 Expert listeners should understand those rhetorical elements in
music – such as the choice of style, the ordering of ideas and the individual
69
Johann Mattheson, Die neueste Untersuchung der Singspiele, nebst beygefügter musikalischen
Geschmacksprobe (Hamburg, 1744), p. 123.
70
Johann Adolph Scheibens . . . Critischer Musikus. Neue, vermehrte und verbesserte Auflage (Leipzig, 1745),
p. 767.
71
On Scheibe’s relationship with French classicism, see Keith Chapin, ‘Scheibe’s Mistake: Sublime
Simplicity and the Criteria of Classicism’, Eighteenth-Century Music, 5 (2008), 165–77.
72
Johann Adolph Scheibens . . . Critischer Musikus, p. 771.
73
Wöchentliche Nachrichten, 1/xxxii (3 February 1767), 251.
74
Mary Sue Morrow, German Music Criticism in the Late Eighteenth Century: Aesthetic Issues in Instrumental
Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 79–89.
75
Johann Nicolaus Forkel, Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik. Erster Band (Leipzig, 1788), p. 65
120 STEPHEN ROSE
melodic gestures – that had emotional power. Forkel’s detailed reviews of

printed music highlighted and sometimes sought to improve aspects of this
rhetoric. Appraising a keyboard arrangement of Georg Benda’s melodrama
Ariadne auf Naxos, Forkel showed how sections could be rewritten to express
the drama more effectively and to make better use of melody and harmony.76
Examining Gluck’s Iphigénie en Aulide, he criticised the lack of musical ges-
tures to reinforce the emotions of the text, explaining how Agamemnon’s
arioso ‘Peuvent-ils ordonner?’ could be enhanced by such additions as chro-
matic progressions or the lamenting sound of horns.77 For Forkel, the noble
simplicity sought by Gluck prevented the music adding its own power to the
drama. Such reviews show that Forkel, far from merely hunting for harmonic
errors and violations of arbitrary rules (as his detractors claimed),78 tried in his
own way to reconcile the differing demands of reason and the senses.
To guide the formation of taste, critics advised music-lovers to study the
works of particular composers or theorists. Recommendations for a music
library were already offered by Marpurg,79 and were developed further in
Hiller’s Wöchentliche Nachrichten. Here a series of articles recommended the-
oretical works on music, then extolled composers in different genres such as
opera and chamber, keyboard and orchestral music. Hiller justified his lengthy
listings by voicing his mission to educate the Liebhaber: ‘We well know that
one rarely has more diverse opinions than with music; but we are little
inclined to praise beauty that contradicts the rules of healthy reason, nature
and good taste, nor to underestimate its merit when it has an effect.’80
Reichardt likewise identified a canon of music worthy of study. His
Musikalisches Kunstmagazin included vocal scores of ‘noteworthy pieces by
great masters of various times and nations’,81 particularly composers from
the first half of the eighteenth century. His commentary highlighted such
features as ‘the unity of natural harmony’ in an aria by Reinhard Keiser, the
expressive qualities of an aria by Leonardo Leo, the ‘varied yet always smooth
modulations’ in a duo by Francesco Durante or the ‘noble simplicity’ of
a Handel duet (‘He shall feed his flock’, Messiah).82 In printing these illustrious
compositions, Reichardt hoped to educate composers (most of whom, he
complained, ‘are so one-sided in their taste, procedures and opinion’) and
76
Musikalisch-kritische Bibliothek, 3 (1779), 250–85 (esp. 266).
77
Musikalisch-kritische Bibliothek, 1 (1778), 141–8. For further examples of Forkel’s criticism, see
Matthew Riley, Musical Listening in the German Enlightenment: Attention, Wonder and Astonishment
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004), chapter 5.
78
Magazin der Musik, 1/ii (1783), 1080.
79
Kritische Briefe über die Tonkunst, 7 (4 August 1759), 49–56.
80
Wöchentliche Nachrichten, 3/xiv (3 October 1768), 108.
81 82
Musikalisches Kunstmagazin, 1 (1782), 34. Ibid., 38, 41, 135, 193.
also the public (whose ‘taste and love of art is a shaky pipe that judders with
every distant wind or nearby flood’).83 Although Reichardt acknowledged the
importance of studying the music of other nations, he argued his canon served
a patriotic purpose: ‘This shall illuminate for us a new image of music history,
and perhaps clarify the path that German artists must follow, if they want to
be great and influential.’84 Indeed by the 1780s musical judgement was
increasingly based on nationalist criteria rather than considerations of rules
or the senses.
Defining German Music

Patriotism was a driving force behind the literary culture that connected the
educated elite of eighteenth-century German lands. Johann Gottfried Herder
argued that a sense of national community could be achieved by revitalising
Teutonic cultural traditions.85 Literary critics sought to inculcate a distinctly
German sensibility: the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek reviewed only works
written in German, regularly invoked the ‘honour of the fatherland’ and
started each issue with a portrait of a famed German cultural figure. Music
critics absorbed these patriotic tendencies, often speaking of ‘us Germans’ and
‘the dear fatherland’, and identifying idealised features of German music. As
Bernd Sponheuer argues, these ideal types either comprised features suppo-
sedly exclusive to German music (such as qualities of hard work and depth) or
involved the synthesis of other national traditions to create something uni-
versal and superior.86
From the late seventeenth century onwards, German musicians interjected
patriotically in the debates about national styles of music. Sometimes they
dispelled fears that German music was inferior to that of other nations.
Kuhnau’s Der musicalische Quack-Salber satirised Germans who uncritically
admired Italian musicians, showing how the discriminating members of the
collegium musicum saw through Caraffa’s claims to be an Italian virtuoso.
Elsewhere Kuhnau asserted that ‘one can find equally good musical fruits in
Germany as those that grow in an Italian climate’.87 In 1745 Scheibe likewise
declared that German musicians were equal to the best Italians in their
achievements.88 In his discussion of national styles, Scheibe characterised
German music as borrowing heavily from foreigners, yet he identified features
83 84 85
Ibid., 34. Ibid. Sheehan, German History, pp. 165–6.
86
Bernd Sponheuer, ‘Reconstructing Ideal Types of the “German” in Music’, in Celia Applegate and
Pamela Potter (eds.), Music and German National Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002),
p. 40.
87
Johann Kuhnau, Frische Clavier-Früchte (Leipzig, 1696), preface.
88
Johann Adolph Scheibens . . . Critischer Musikus, sig. C2r.
122 STEPHEN ROSE
that would become stereotypes of Teutonic musical identity: ‘depth of har-

mony’, ‘regular phrasing’, ‘diligent work’ and a ‘more thorough approach’.89
Such diligence could lead to the ‘dark’ and ‘bombastic’, yet also enabled
Germans to improve foreign styles and write pieces more beautiful than
those of Italian composers.90 Somewhat similarly, Johann Joachim Quantz
spoke of the Germans developing a mixed style from the best of Italian and
French music, creating a synthesis that had universal appeal.91
From the 1760s onwards, critics increasingly used ideals of the German in
music to shape their judgements on individual pieces. Mary Sue Morrow has
shown how reviews of instrumental music in the 1760s and early 1770s
decried Italian compositions or Italianate style as an Other, lacking the
depth and intellectual labour expected by German audiences.92 A 1766 review
of keyboard sonatas by Vincenzo Manfredini (then employed in St Petersburg)
began: ‘Hey, an Italian, a Russian imperial Capellmeister, who makes no
better sonatas – this is lamentable! Your poor grasp of order, symmetry,
rhythm, modulation, correct and pure harmonies!’93 Reviewers scorned sona-
tas such as Manfredini’s for excessive melodic repetition, sudden dynamic
contrasts, faulty voice-leading and left-hand parts with an Alberti bass or
drumming repeated notes. Such attacks partly reflected the critics’ struggle
to explain the thematic variety and comic playfulness found in Italian instru-
mental music.94 However, German composers who avoided such Italianisms
were praised for the diligence and harmonic richness of their works, and
increasingly for the originality of their ideas and the display of genius.95
Although not discussed by Morrow, there was an analogous nationalist
strand in reviews of vocal music. Building on Scheibe’s attacks on Italian
opera as immoral and unnatural,96 this strand of criticism attacked coloratura
or showy vocal writing. German composers were instead praised for showing
stereotypically masculine qualities such as mastery and strength, as in a 1766
review of C. P. E. Bach’s cantata ‘Thirsis, willst du mir gefallen’ (Phillis und
Thirsis, H697/Wq232):
We Germans have always had our ears so full of Italian coloraturas, that a good
German song rarely has its intended effect on us . . . Here we have
89
Collated from Scheibe’s 1737 and 1745 accounts which differ slightly: Der critische Musicus, 15
(17 September 1737), 118; Johann Adolph Scheibens . . . Critischer Musikus, p. 147.
90
Ibid., p. 148.
91
Johann Joachim Quantz, On Playing the Flute, trans. Edward R. Reilly (London: Faber, 1966), p. 342.
92
Morrow, German Music Criticism, pp. 45–65.
93
Wöchentliche Nachrichten, 1/xvi (21 October 1766), 127.
94
Hosler, Changing Aesthetic Views of Instrumental Music, pp. 1–30.
95
Morrow, German Music Criticism, pp. 50–1, 99–133.
96
Der critische Musicus, 7 (28 May 1737), 49–54; 23 (7 January 1738), 177–84.
a noteworthy example: a poem full of expression, and a musical setting full of

masterly beauty, strength and expression, without any glimpse of great
crowds of wallowing semiquavers.97
The multifarious connotations of the German in music are evident in

Reichardt’s writings, which are suffused with such loaded terms as Volk and
Natur. Arguing that musicians should follow nature, Reichardt elevated folk
songs (taken by Herder as symbolising a people’s or nation’s identity) as the
most genuine form of art: ‘You will often find in a true folksong, which
outlives the centuries, more true sense of art than in many great operas.’98
His insistence on simplicity led him to praise the Singspiel as suiting the
German language and character, as opposed to fully sung operas for the
stereotypically impassioned Italians.99 Yet alongside his appreciation of
noble simplicity, Reichardt praised J. S. Bach as ‘our greatest harmonist’.
Quoting Goethe’s account of Strasbourg cathedral – an account which
detected an underlying unity behind the decorative detail of the facade, and
which claimed Gothic architecture to be inherently German – Reichardt
found a similar feeling in the fugues of Handel and Bach: ‘My soul was filled
with one great impression, which, since it consisted of a thousand harmonic
details, I could readily taste and enjoy, but by no means understand or
explain.’100 Reichardt singled out the F Minor Fugue from Book 2 of Bach’s
Das Wohltemperierte Clavier (BWV881/ii) as having a beauty and expressivity
otherwise found only in Handel’s fugues. With its three-part texture and
melodious lines, this fugue is relatively simple by Bach’s standards.
Nonetheless Reichardt was moving towards a patriotic appreciation of com-
plexity that would ultimately usurp Scheibe’s view of Bach’s music as bom-
bastic and confused. Such a shift reflected the complex constellation of
cultural and political forces shaping notions of German music.
Conclusion
‘It is not possible for me to hear a piece of music,’ declared Reichardt in 1776,
‘without making comments on it, and I cannot keep these to myself.’101 For
Reichardt and the other critics who shared this urge, the many periodicals
founded in the eighteenth century provided the means to reach networks of
Kenner and Liebhaber and to shape public opinion on music. Yet across the
century, it proved impossible to sustain a music periodical for more than a few
97
Wöchentliche Nachrichten, 1/xxviii (6 January 1767), 218.
98 99 100
Musikalisches Kunstmagazin, 1 (1782), 3. Ibid., 161–2. Goethe quoted in ibid., 196.
101
Johann Friedrich Reichardt, Briefe eines aufmerksamen Reisenden die Musik betreffend . . . Zweyter Theil
(Frankfurt and Breslau, 1776), pp. 98–9.
124 STEPHEN ROSE
years. After the collapse of another of his ventures into music journalism,
Reichardt lamented that ‘our musical public seems to be too poor either in
enthusiasm for art or in money to support the publication of the Musikalische
Monathschrift that took the place of the Musikalisches Wochenblatt’.102 Only
from 1798 onwards did Friedrich Rochlitz’s Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung
show that a music periodical could reach a wide audience and prove commer-
cially sustainable (see Chapter 9, Laura Tunbridge’s contribution to this
volume). Consequently, German-language music criticism in the eighteenth
century was varied and localised, based primarily on networks extending from
Protestant cities such as Hamburg, Leipzig and Berlin. The music journals of
this period preserve the contending voices of individual critics, whose views
were shaped by their activities as performers, composers or theorists; their
criticism must therefore be understood both within their local contexts as
well as contributing to broader debates.
102
Friedrich Ludwig Aemilius Kunzen and Johann Friedrich Reichardt (eds.), Studien für Tonkünstler und
Musikfreunde (Berlin, 1793), unpaginated preface.
· PART II ·
THE RISE OF THE PRESS

.7.
French Music Criticism in the Nineteenth Century,

1789–1870
MARK A. POTTINGER
The period between the outbreak of revolution in 1789 and the establishment
of the Third Republic in 1871 is an age filled with the rise and fall of various
political groups and philosophical definitions in France, from absolutism to
communism, from classicism to romanticism. The economic and cultural
importance of France increased well beyond its borders during this time,
aided much by the will of its political leaders (e.g. Napoleon I and Napoleon
III) and the industrial strength of its resources. In short, the period can be
classified as an ‘age of becoming’ when nearly every aspect of French society
was in development.
The great inheritors of the age were ‘the public’ or le peuple, a mixture of
a growing administrative or educated class and a burgeoning working class, all
primarily defined by the forces of urbanism and suddenly entrusted with the
creation of a new political definition for the country. The French historian
Jules Michelet (1798–1874) was a well-known supporter of this concept of
‘the public’ as evidenced by his widely read publication Le Peuple (Paris, 1846).
Although Michelet saw a great divide growing among the social classes due to
modernisation and industrialisation in French society, the book highlights his
faith in the ‘innate goodness of the masses’ as espoused in the love of one’s
country and its past. Equally so, Claude Henri de Rouvroy, comte de Saint-
Simon (1760–1825) was another writer who embraced this new era of change
by denouncing aristocratic privilege and arguing for a collective society uni-
fied by its desire for industry (e.g. Le Nouveau christianisme, 1825). His views
eventually came to define a pseudo-religious movement known as Saint-
Simonianism, which counted Berlioz, David and Liszt as members of the
organisation.1 What these two authors demonstrate in their writings is that
this new era afforded certain sections of the urban public a critical voice in
I am grateful to Julian Rushton, Katharine Ellis and David Charlton for reading this chapter in draft and
providing wonderful insights and advice.
1
For information on the Saint-Simon movement and its connection to the musical world, see Ralph
P. Locke, Music, Musicians, and the Saint-Simonians (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986).
[127]
128 MARK A. POTTINGER
how culture was produced, seen, read and heard in society.2 As a result,
reading clubs and literary societies began to sprout up throughout France.
By the middle of the century, there were well over 400 public reading rooms
in Paris, where an individual could pay an entrance fee to a cabinet de lecture
and read the latest publication. All of this activity encouraged a wider range of
citizens than hitherto to discuss the cultural and political ideas of the day as
well as take possession of their new inheritance.3
With the rise in literacy in France came an increase in the public consumption
of ideas. For our purposes, this went hand in hand with public concerts and
musical performances in the open air (e.g. gardens, boulevards, outdoor arenas),
as well as cafés, salons and music halls. In addition, the rise of private instru-
mental lessons, orchestral societies and formal concert series, the building of
music halls to accommodate larger orchestras and larger audiences4 and the
establishment of formal music education for both men and women with the
founding of the Paris Conservatoire in 1795 were all an outgrowth of the public’s
desire for a musical culture in which every individual could participate. In this
context, music was not seen as separate from nation-building, but as involved in
the very project of the people of France outgrowing the limitations of the past:5
The need to know stirs the entire world; civilization is advancing in giant steps
and is overturning everything that gets in its way. Having arrived at its present
level, it inspires in everyone the desire to be knowledgeable about everything
that concerns him, be it his right, his duties, or his pleasures. There is no well-
educated man, who, in our time, remains voluntarily removed from questions
2
Although it is emphasised here that the urban population in France was setting the pace for ideas to be
expressed and acted upon throughout the nineteenth century (see, for example, Anselm Gerhard, The
Urbanization of Opera: Music Theater in Paris in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1998)), the rural population did have some influence on the political and cultural life in France. For information
on the emergence of public opinion throughout France and the voix publique, see James R. Lehning, Peasant and
French: Cultural Contact in Rural France during the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1995); James H. Johnson, ‘Musical Experience and the Formation of a French Musical Public’, Journal of Modern
History, 64/2 (January 1992), 191–226; and Barbara L. Kelly (ed.), French Music, Culture, and National Identity,
1870–1939 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2008), pp. 197–250.
3
For general information about the rate of literacy in France and its social and cultural implications in the
nineteenth century, see Martyn Lyons, Readers and Society in Nineteenth-Century France: Workers, Women,
Peasants (New York: Palgrave, 2001); and James Smith Allen, In the Public Eye: A History of Reading in Modern
France, 1800–1940 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991).
4
Although there were nearly fifty Parisian concert halls active between 1828 and 1871, many were too
small or contained poor acoustics to accommodate an orchestra of eighty-plus persons. Two of the largest
concert venues in Paris that were built during this time include the 3,000-seat Salle Barthélemy in 1851
and the Cirque Napoléon (later the Cirque d’Hiver), a 5,000-seat auditorium built in 1852; see
Jeffrey Cooper, The Rise of Instrumental Music and Concert Series in Paris, 1828–1871 (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1983), pp. 16–17.
5
For more information on the emergence of concert societies and the general consumption of music in
France in the nineteenth century, see Jean Mongrédien, La Musique en France, des lumières au romantisme,
1789–1830 (Paris: Flammarion, 1986); English version, French Music from the Enlightenment to Romanticism,
1789–1830, trans. Sylvain Frémaux (Portland: Amadeus, 1996); and Cooper, The Rise of Instrumental Music
and Concert Series in Paris.
French Music Criticism in the Nineteenth Century 129
that are discussed before him. The language of the arts, and even that of the
sciences, becomes every day more popular. The time of secrets is gone for
everything, and he who would speak today of the ‘mysteries of his art’ will
simply be hissed. But even though one wants to learn a great deal, one is forced
to learn quickly. Now, nothing is more suitable for communicating readily the
concepts one needs in the world at large than the journals, be they daily or
periodical.6
François-Joseph Fétis (1784–1871), one of the most profound music writers of

the age, published the above words in the inaugural issue of the Revue musicale,
one of the first specialised music journals in France. As witnessed by these
remarks, there was a great demand and desire for ideas to be expressed and
understood in the public arena. More so than in any preceding age, to converse
with ideas was paramount in being part of a time when one was expected to shape
the destiny of a nation. Music criticism in France, then, was not in isolation from
the public or part of a specialised project by a few writers, but a direct outgrowth
of the nation’s desire to educate the masses in all that is ‘sounding’ around them.
In considering the recent literature on French criticism of the nineteenth
century several narratives emerge. One narrative projects a movement from
musical amateurism to musical professionalism, the so-called literary critic or
homme de lettres who is soon outshone by the critical acumen of the music
specialist;7 another and somewhat related narrative argues that all forms of
music criticism in the early nineteenth century culminate in the writings of
Hector Berlioz, arguably the finest (and most entertaining) music critic of the
age, thus leaving little room for the amateur musician-critic or dilettante who
was writing for the well-read popular press;8 while another posits that with
the arrival of Beethoven’s symphonies in Paris in 1828 French criticism (and
listening) changed for the better.9 My plan here is not to take on such
6
François-Joseph Fétis, Revue musicale, 1 (February 1827), 1–2; quoted and trans. in Peter Bloom,
‘François-Joseph Fétis and the Revue musicale (1827–1835)’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of
Pennsylvania (1972), 26–7.
7
See for example Mongrédien, La Musique en France, des lumières au romantisme; Shelagh Aitken, ‘Music
and the Popular Press: Music Criticism in Paris during the First Empire’, unpublished PhD dissertation,
Northwestern University (1987); Belinda Cannone, La Réception des opéras de Mozart dans la presse
parisienne, 1793–1829 (Paris: Klincksieck, 1991); and the more recent Rémy Campos, François-Joseph
Fétis: Musicographe (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2013), who presents Fétis as the ultra music professional
who dwarfs all writings on music before him. As an alternative to this point of view, see both Katharine
Ellis, ‘A Dilettante at the Opera: Issues in the Criticism of Julien-Louis Geoffroy, 1800–1814’, and
Benjamin Walton, ‘The Professional Dilettante: Ludovic Vitet and Le Globe’, in Roger Parker and
Mary Ann Smart (eds.), Reading Critics Reading: Opera and Ballet Criticism in France from the Revolution to
1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
8
See for example Kerry Murphy, Hector Berlioz and the Development of French Music Criticism (Ann Arbor:
University of Michigan Press, 1988).
9
See for example James H. Johnson, Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1995) and Ora Frishberg Saloman, Listening Well: On Beethoven, Berlioz, and other Music
Criticism in Paris, Boston, and New York, 1764–1890 (New York: Peter Lang, 2009), who both argue that
narratives but to suggest how differing critical modes of music engagement

co-existed and thrived. Although one’s critical stance was not exclusive of
another – nor can one preclude authors changing their perspective over a long
career – three critical positions begin to emerge when examining the writings
of French critics of the nineteenth century: (1) as a self-appointed protector of
the listening public in defending ‘taste’; (2) as a holder and keeper of composi-
tional rules to ensure the viability of music as a profession and to educate the
public; and (3) as a torch bearer for the past and the future of music composi-
tion (i.e. criticism as history and canon formation).10 Thus, by taking such
a perspective on French criticism in the nineteenth century, I hope not to walk
down a purely chronological path nor to argue that the age belongs entirely to
one or two critics, but to present a more neutral approach to the material that
highlights the collectivity of the age and its ability to present co-existing
musical perspectives that stand as the critical record of a people finding
their voice.
Taste as the Arbiter of a ‘Common’ Truth

The most prolific writer of music criticism at the start of this period and one of
the first writers to engage a growing public interest in music was Julien-Louis
Geoffroy (1743–1814). Born in Brittany and later educated in Paris, Geoffroy was
professor of rhetoric at the Collège des Quatre-Nations (Collège Mazarin) of the
University of Paris. A fierce royalist supporter, Geoffroy was forced to leave Paris
around the time of the Terror but returned soon after Napoleon’s coup d’état on
18 Brumaire Year VIII (9 November 1799), whereupon he established himself as
one of the foremost critics in the capital. As a testament to Geoffroy’s fame and
notoriety, his writings were later collected into a five-volume set and published
as the Cours de littérature dramatique (Paris: Blanchard, 1819–20).11
Geoffroy was a literary man – neither a musician nor a composer – who
‘insisted on talking about music for his entire career, despite understanding
hardly a single note of it’.12 He wrote critical reviews of operas and theatrical
with the performance of Beethoven’s symphonies in Paris romanticism took hold of the listening public in
France and moved them to an awe-filled silence, thus bringing about a new critical voice in the musical
press.
10
The tripartite nature of these perspectives is informed by Carl Dahlhaus’s summary of the critical press
in Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989),
pp. 244–62.
11
For detailed information on the life and critical legacy of Geoffroy, see Charles-Marc Des Granges,
Geoffroy et la critique dramatique sous le Consulat et l’Empire, 1800–1814 (Paris: Hachette, 1897).
12
Mongrédien, La Musique en France, des lumières au romantisme; quoted and trans. in Katharine Ellis, Music
Criticism in Nineteenth-Century France: La Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris, 1834–1880 (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 8.
works in a regular column, or feuilleton (literally meaning ‘little page’), from

1800 to 1814 in the Journal des débats.13 Owing much to the fact that Geoffroy
had access to a large readership during a time of strong national support and
his own classical interests in the works of Racine and Corneille, his reviews on
operatic works were primarily drawn along nationalist lines, so that the works
of an Austrian composer such as Mozart suffered greatly under his pen. For
example, when reviewing a performance of the French version of Don Giovanni
in 1805 (i.e. Don Juan), Geoffroy found it ‘a feast or an extreme bounty that
satisfies [all too] quickly’.14
Beyond his devotion to France, Geoffroy’s writings harboured
a commitment to ‘taste’ and the accessibility of the untrained ear to
the music compositions of the day: ‘As much as it was possible, I worked for
the glory of the nation in combating bad taste, endeavouring to uphold the
honour of French literature in one of the principal genres of our glorious
national [tradition]’.15 According to Dahlhaus, ‘judgments of taste have
always been . . . the province of a group, social stratum, class, or nation’.16
This view on ‘taste’ is informed by Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1790), which
argues that there can be no universal perspective of ‘taste’ but only the illusion
of such, and thus ‘good taste’ remains only a personal and subjective judge-
ment that is verified by an appeal to a larger understood ‘truth’ (i.e. common
sense).17 It follows then that when a critic such as Geoffroy proclaimed that
a music composition or performance showed poor or good taste, it was in
reference to the degree that the music presented ideas that were codified in
the repertoire (e.g. French literature) and approved by a listening public (e.g.
the national tradition). The problem of proving taste, then, was at the heart of
the critic’s craft in defining their knowledge of the repertoire and ultimately
his or her critique,18 which was often presented in aesthetic analogies and
13
The Journal des débats, politiques et littéraires (Journal des débats et des décres, 1789–1805; Journal de
l’Empire, 1805–1814) was founded among the volatile days surrounding the Revolution of 1789 as it
published the actual debates of the National Assembly. Owing to its auspicious beginning, the Journal des
débats was one of the most read weekly newspapers in France throughout the nineteenth century, its
popularity superseded only by La Presse, 1836–1935, a conservative daily political paper; Le Siècle,
1836–1932, a daily newspaper that supported the constitutional monarchy of Louis Philippe and opposed
Napoleon III; and Le Petit Journal, 1863–1944, a workers’ daily Parisian newspaper. The Journal des débats
ceased publication in 1944 during the Second World War. The feuilleton usually appeared near the bottom
quarter of the page, which was separated from the political news of the day with a heavy bold black line.
14
Geoffroy, Journal des débats [i.e. Journal de l’Empire] (19 September 1805), 2.
15
Geoffroy, Journal des débats [i.e. Journal de l’Empire] (22 November 1809); quoted in Des Granges,
Geoffroy et la critique dramatique, p. 495.
16
Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, p. 246.
17
For a studied perspective on Kant’s notion of ‘taste’, see Anthony Savile, Kantian Aesthetics Pursued
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993).
18
The number of female music critics in nineteenth-century France was extremely small, in large part
because of the civil codes enacted by Napoleon in 1804, which forbade women from conducting an
independent life outside of the home without the approval or support of the husband or a male
personal truths.19 We see this clearly in the writings of Geoffroy, who – owing
(in part) to his lack of musical knowledge – chose to present a cultural and
literary context when reviewing musical compositions so that the work was
not perceived in isolation but as part of a larger aesthetic community of
intellectual ideas. For example, when Geoffroy reviewed a performance of
Œdipe à Colone in 1804, a three-act tragédie lyrique by Antonio Sacchini
(1730–86) first performed in 1786, the French critic attempted to rise above
the Gluck–Piccinni debate20 of less than a generation before by arguing that
Sacchini’s composition occupied the middle ground:
There came a man of genius superior to that of Gluck and Piccinni: for a long
time he studied the ground; he observed that Gluck was too French, Piccinni
too Italian; that the former was too concerned with the drama at the expense
of the music, and that the latter, giving everything to the music, neglected the
drama. After a few attempts at striking a good balance between the two
genres, Sacchini found the middle way in Œdipe à Colone. He resolved the
problem that consists in allying the dramatic interest with the musical effect;
in reconciling the delights of the spirit and the heart with the pleasure of the
senses. He gave a Europe a new spectacle, in letting her watch a touching
tragedy clothed in delicious melody.21
As can be witnessed from the above words, Geoffroy chose not to discuss the
actual music of the composition (i.e. the notes on the page) but rather how the
operatic work struck a balance between two extremes (this approach is similar
to that of Jean François de La Harpe (1739–1803), a critic who actively
participated in the Gluck–Piccinni debate of the 1780s by denouncing the
music of Gluck in favour of the Italian works of Sacchini).22 In this context,
then, French critics such as Geoffroy were seeking a middle ground for music
that appealed neither to an ardent music professional nor to a neophyte of
counterpart; it was not until 1946, when the French Constitution guaranteed women ‘equal rights to men
in all spheres’, that this law was abandoned. To circumvent such a policy, many female critics wrote under
male pseudonyms, the most famous being ‘George Sand’ or Amantine Lucille-Aurore Dupin, Marquise de
Dudevant (1804–76), who, apart from being an acclaimed novelist, wrote articles for the main music
journal in France, La Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris. For more information on the political and cultural
situation for female critics in nineteenth-century France, see Wendelin Guentner (ed.), Women Art Critics
in Nineteenth-Century France: Vanishing Acts (Lanham: University of Delaware Press, 2013); and
Muriel Andrin, Laurence Brogniez et al. (eds.), Femmes et critique(s): lettres, arts, cinéma (Namur: Presses
Universitaires de Namur, 2009).
19
See Katherine Kolb Reeve, ‘Rhetoric and Reason in French Music Criticism of the 1830s’, in
Peter Bloom (ed.), Music in Paris in the Eighteen-Thirties/La Musique à Paris dans les années mil huit cent trente
(Stuyvesant: Pendragon, 1987).
20
For a thorough discussion of the debate, see François Lesure (ed.), Querelle des Gluckistes et des
Piccinnistes: Texte des pamphlets avec introduction, commentaires et index (Geneva: Minkoff Reprint, 1984).
21
Geoffroy, Journal des débats (10 brumaire an 13/1 November 1804), 3; quoted and trans. in Ellis, Music
Criticism in Nineteenth-Century France, p. 11.
22
See Julian Rushton and Manuel Couvreur, ‘La Harpe, Jean François de’, in Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell
(eds.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., vol. 10 (London: Macmillan, 2001), p. 363.
musical aesthetics, but to one whose mind was seasoned with concern for
artistic balance in beauty and form.
Although one might argue that the predilection for the dictates of taste as
described here was an element that occurred only in the early part of the century,
when musical amateurism reigned in the press, such a critical stance persisted
well beyond the Napoleonic era in France. Théophile Gautier (1811–72), a well-
known poet and a strong defender of liberalism and the tenets of romanticism,
was a theatre and dance critic for La Presse from 1837 to 1855,23 Le Moniteur
universel from 1855 to 1871,24 and then briefly with the specialised music journal
the Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris (more on this journal later) before his death
a year later. Gautier was no more a trained musician that Geoffroy, so his critical
writings on music were often filled with comparisons to both the literary and
visual worlds, but references to musical terms and ideas remain, as in his review
of the 1838 premiere of Berlioz’s Benvenuto Cellini at the Paris Opéra:
The waiting for the premiere of this piece by the musical world excited the
same anxious curiosity that awoke in the literary world during the most
turbulent eras of Romantic reform . . . [for the Romantics] their first
thought . . . was to free themselves from the old classical rhythm with its
unending drone, its obligatory cadences and its predetermined pauses; just
as Victor Hugo displaces caesuras, uses enjambments and varies, by all kinds of
devices, the monotony of the poetic phrase, Hector Berlioz changes time,
deceives the ear, which was expecting a symmetrical recurrence, and punctu-
ates as he sees fit the musical phrase . . . [Berlioz] makes the instruments sing
much more than had hitherto been the case, and, by the abundance and variety
of his patterns, he has amply compensated for the lack of rhythm of certain
sections . . . With both [Berlioz and Hugo] there is the same enthusiasm for
the dreamy, complicated art of Germany and England, and the same disdain
for the too bare, too simple line of classical art; there is the same search for
great and violent effects, the same inclination to proceed synthetically and to
develop several thoughts simultaneously, there is also the same exact transla-
tion of natural effects.25
23
Founded by the novelist and politician Émile de Girardin (1802–81) in 1836, La Presse is considered one of
the first of the so-called ‘penny press’ newspapers in France, owing to its inexpensive cost of production and
purchase, with its surface ideas and a tabloid-style of writing for a working- and middle-class consumer. The
paper was purchased directly from street vendors or by subscription. For more information on the indus-
trialised press in France, see Dean de la Motte and Jeannene M. Przyblyski (eds.), Making the News: Modernity
and the Mass Press in Nineteenth-Century France (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999).
24
Le Moniteur universal (originally Gazette national ou le moniteur universal until 1811) was founded during the
1789 Revolution as one of the main newspapers chronicling the political debates of the National Assembly.
Although the paper published articles on science, literature and art, it eventually became the official journal of
the French government during Napoleon’s reign and remains today an important voice for the French
government under the auspices of the Ministry of Interior as the Journal officiel de la République Française.
25
Théophile Gautier, ‘Feuilleton de La Presse’, La Presse (17 September 1838), 1; quoted and trans. in
Michael Spencer, ‘Théophile Gautier: Music Critic’, Music & Letters, 49 (January 1968), 8–9.
Figure 7.1 J. J. Grandville, ‘Les Romains échevelés à la 1re représentation

d’Hernani’, 1830 lithograph, 250 x 180 mm, Maison de Victor Hugo, Paris.
Photograph by Culture Club/Getty Images.
As seen in the above words, Gautier was a great champion of the

Romantics26 and prized above all else originality in performance and in
composition with a flair for the eclectic, witnessed not only here but in his
celebrated obituary of Berlioz.27 In opposition to the status of music earlier in
26
Gautier’s affiliation with the French Romantic school was auspiciously defined with his participation
in the opening performance of Victor Hugo’s Hernani at the Comédie Française on 25 February 1830 (see
Figure 7.1). Dressed in green trousers and a pink waistcoat, Gautier rallied with other young ‘Bohemians’
(e.g. Gérard de Nerval, Pétrus Borel, Théophile Dondey, Célestin Nanteuil) to challenge the old guard of
classic French theatre in order to embrace a new freedom of verse and human action for the French stage.
27
Gautier, Journal officiel de la République Française (16 March 1869); the obituary is reprinted with minor
changes in Gautier’s Histoire du romantisme (Paris: Charpentier, 1874), pp. 259–70. Berlioz was a great
the century under the critical eye of Geoffroy, Gautier reveals in his critical
writings a glimpse into the inner world of music that sought comparison with
other forms of artistic production during a time when art was applauded for
going beyond the immediate in order to touch upon the infinite.28 However,
to adhere to such a desire for the music, similar to Geoffroy, Gautier showed
an affinity for the dictates of the listening public who were well versed in other
forms of cultural production, seeking to listen and to contemplate one’s time
and not necessarily the rules of composition or a definition of the composer’s
craft. Such writings were found in the critical reviews of the musician-critic,
who sought a more focused discussion on the music itself.
The ‘Rule’ Approach to Criticism

Although throughout the nineteenth century compositional rules were
becoming less valuable as an ‘aesthetic guarantee for the claims of music to
rank as art’,29 musical rules presented a hope to the composer and the
musician-critic alike to lessen failure and to invite comprehension by
the listening public. The musician-critic would often be concerned with the
formal properties of the music (e.g. melodic phrase, harmony, instrumenta-
tion, tempo), thus affording music an autonomous place in the arts and an
elevated form of journalism. In this vein, when a composer is deemed to have
violated a rule, then the critic’s position is to punish the lawbreaker and to
convey to the reader a commitment to keep the discussion squarely on the
music, thereby maintaining the standards of the profession. One of the first
French critics of the nineteenth century who was both a musician and a critic
and whose journalistic writings became a model for a ‘rule’ approach to
criticism is François-Henri Joseph Blaze (1784–1857) or Castil-Blaze.30
Castil-Blaze started his journalistic career by writing a weekly column in
the Journal des débats from 1820 to 1832. He was the first musician to hold
a post at an established newspaper in France, thus highlighting the place
music criticism or music listening had for the general public and indeed for
admirer of Gautier’s own published work as evidenced by his setting of Gautier’s poems for the song cycle
Les Nuits d’été (1841).
28
For example, in ‘Bodies at the Opéra: Art and the Hermaphrodite in the Dance Criticism of Théophile
Gautier’, in Parker and Smart (eds.), Reading Critics Reading, the author Maribeth Clark points out that
Gautier’s critical writings on dance continually compare the dancers to ‘classical figures in paintings,
cameos, frescoes, and ancient Greek sculpture’ (p. 237).
29
Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, p. 245.
30
According to David Cairns, François-Henri Joseph Blaze used the pseudonym of Castil-Blaze to
differentiate between himself and his father, Henri-Sébastian Blaze (1763–1833), who was both
a composer and music critic for several periodicals in France; see Hector Berlioz, The Memoirs of Hector
Berlioz, ed. and trans. David Cairns (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), p. 586.
the owners of the journal itself.31 Although born and raised in the Provinces,
and thus stigmatised as an individual lacking culture and refinement, the
reputation of Castil-Blaze as a knowledgeable musician-critic was made
surer in the public’s eye not only by the fact that he was one of the first
generation of students at the Paris Conservatoire, but also through the
successful publication of De l’opéra en France (Paris, 1820) and the widely
read Dictionnaire de musique moderne (Paris, 1821).32 Owing to his musical
training and his lawyer’s mind (Castil-Blaze first came to Paris in 1799 to
study law and then later served in an administrative position in Vaucluse
before returning once again to Paris in 1820 to begin a career in music),33
he sought a form of criticism that was instructional for the musician and the
music-lover alike. Suffused throughout his reviews are words such as transpo-
sitions, la tonique and basses continues, which appear with such regularity that it
prompted some of his colleagues at the Journal des débats to complain of their
overuse.34 Thus, Castil-Blaze took care to utilise terminology that highlighted
his allegiance to the craft of composition but also to educate the French public
in how to understand and hear musical works. He even went so far, for
example, as to write arrangements of Italian and German works for the
French public, where he was often accused of taking extreme liberties with
the musical settings of his so-called ‘castilblazades’, a term defined by Berlioz
as he campaigned to preserve the composer’s original composition against
such ‘hackwork’.35 In his defence, Castil-Blaze sought only to ensure the
success of foreign or even older works by adapting them to the current
sensibilities of the French, whereupon he would critique the faults of such
works in order to highlight current compositional practice and thus defend
his adaptations.36
No area of the musical world was absent from the critical view of Castil-
Blaze, including purely instrumental music, which was often ignored by the
non-musician critic owing to the lack of a dramatic text. To be sure, the
31
The Bertin family were the most prominent owners of the periodical; Louis-François Bertin
(1766–1841), who Ingres immortalised in 1832 with a famous portrait, was the principal family
member who acquired the publication in 1799. The family were great patrons of music, serving as
the principal supporter of Berlioz, who eventually replaced Castil-Blaze as chief music contributor to
the Journal des débats from 1834 until 1863.
32
For in-depth analysis of the journalistic career of Castil-Blaze, see Donald G. Gíslason, ‘Castil-Blaze, De
l’opéra en France and the Feuilletons of the Journal des Débats (1820–1832)’, unpublished PhD dissertation,
University of British Columbia (1992).
33
See Gíslason, ‘Castil-Blaze’, 42–3. 34
Ibid., 71–2.
35
For a discussion of how such a pragmatic approach to the recitatives and vocal writing in Gluck’s
operas drew the ire of Berlioz, see Mark Everist, ‘Gluck, Berlioz, and Castil-Blaze: The Poetics and
Reception of French Opera’, in Parker and Smart (eds.), Reading Critics Reading.
36
For a detailed discussion of the reception in France of Weber’s works via Castil-Blaze’s arrangements,
see Frank Heidlberger, Carl Maria von Weber und Hector Berlioz: Studien zur französischen Weber-Rezeption
(Tützing: Hans Schneider, 1994).
formation in Paris of several music and concert societies in the 1820s and 1830s
helped to support the critical project of Castil-Blaze. In addition, the musical
activity of the famed conductor François-Antoine Habeneck (1781–1849) was
also fundamental in this regard owing to his unrivalled music direction of the
Paris Opéra from 1831 to 1846 as well as being the founder and director of
the Société des Concerts du Conservatoire, which became (from 1828 on) one of the
most revered orchestras in Europe.37 In the end, Castil-Blaze’s intention was to
enlarge the public’s definition of serious music so that all musical activity was
given the same critical weight. This is clearly seen in how he approached opera,
which he assigned its own musical category in order to redefine the genre from
the earlier notion espoused by Geoffroy as a literary work accompanied by
music. To Castil-Blaze, the goal of dramatic music was to represent the very
beauty of music itself; to do so, it must adhere to the inner rules of music, which
can only be gleaned by studying the musical score, not the libretto:
If some critics propose that the first motive of the overture of [La Mort du Tasse
by] M[anuel] Garcia is the same as that found in the overture to Gulnare [by
Dalayrac in 1798], I respond that this particular phrase is formed by the notes
of the triad perfectly apparent to anyone, however it is more fortunately
placed in this opera. M. Garcia accompanies the second motive of his overture
with a phrase in the second violin, which creates a good effect. Although this
phrase would be heard with greater pleasure if it did not appear when the first
said motive was heard for the second time, the melody and its accompaniment
appear two more times toward the end of the overture.38
When he began writing for the Journal des débats in 1820, no other
individual in the popular press rivalled Castil-Blaze in his musical acumen
and his ability to speak directly about the music itself on practical matters of
concern for the musician and the listening public. Although his writings
lacked communion with larger aesthetic ideas of the musical world (e.g.
notions of musical meaning and transcendent philosophy in art), Castil-
Blaze’s critical approach helped to demystify the craft of composition and
performance and upheld established compositional rules in order to create
a set of expected norms for the French public. In the end, as music-making
became invariably linked to academic pursuits within the halls of the uni-
versity, the ‘rule approach’ to French music criticism championed by Castil-
37
For a detailed biographical study of François Habeneck’s life and career, see the recent work of
François Bronner, François Antoine Habeneck (1781–1849): Biographie (Paris: Hermann Editions, 2014).
38
Castil-Blaze, Journal des débats (19 February 1821), 2; quoted in Gíslason, ‘Castil-Blaze’, 69. As noted by
Gíslason, one of the unique aspects of Castil-Blaze’s approach to music criticism was to study the actual
score before passing judgement on the composition, a practice that he encouraged his readers to follow;
see ibid., 66–70.
Blaze in the mid-nineteenth century became the main stylistic voice of the
French specialised press.
Criticism as History and Canon Formation

As Ellis remarks, ‘Castil-Blaze was less a bringer of overnight change than
a transitional figure’ to a more progressive form of criticism that highlighted
the future of music composition and performance in France and established
a canon for years to come.39 This was primarily the realm of the specialised
musical press that went beyond the general interest of the French public and
wrote directly to the amateur and professional musician.
We first see a glimpse of this critical approach in one of the early specialised
music journals in nineteenth-century France, La Correspondance des amateurs
musiciens (1802–05). This twice-weekly publication was edited by ‘Cocatrix,
Amateur’,40 a mysterious individual who focused his or her attention on
orchestral concerts, performance styles, aesthetic rules of taste, organology
and music for the amateur to perform in the home.41 The critical reviews
centred primarily on the three main concert societies in Paris: the exercices
publics d’élèves at the Conservatoire (a concert series from winter to early
summer made up of students, teachers and alumni at the Paris
Conservatoire; the concert series began in 1800 and ceased in 1824),42 the
Concerts de la rue Cléry (a subscription-based concert series made up of about
eighty players; it was founded in 1798 and disbanded in 1805)43 and the
Concerts de la rue Grenelle (the series was primarily dedicated to the music of
young composers as well as aspiring amateur and professional musicians; the
concert series began in 1803 and ended in 1806).44 By focusing on concert
series almost exclusively rather than on theatrical works, the publication
accepted instrumental music on its own terms as the main source of engage-
ment and not simply as an accompaniment to the dramatic ideas of a libretto.
39
Ellis, Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Century France, p. 27.
40
According to Ellis, Cocatrix was an amateur musician from western France (La Rochelle), who arrived
in Paris in 1797, staying for about seven years before moving on; see Ellis, Music Criticism in Nineteenth-
Century France, p. 256.
41
Ibid., pp. 14–15.
42
For more information on the series, see Jean Mongrédien, ‘Les Premiers exercices publics d’élèves
(1800–1815) d’après la presse contemporaine’, in Anne Bongrain, Yves Gérard, and Marie-
Hélène Coudroy-Saghai (eds.), Le Conservatoire de Paris: des Menus-Plaisirs à la Cité de la Musique,
1795–1995 (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1996); and David Charlton, John Trevitt and Guy Gosselin, ‘Paris’,
in Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (eds.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., vol. 19
(London: Macmillan, 2001), pp. 107–9.
43
See Boris Schwarz, French Instrumental Music between the Revolutions, 1789–1830 (New York: Da Capo
Press, 1987), pp. 21–6.
44
Ibid., p. 23.
Haydn’s symphonies were seen as the prime example of such music with their
formal construction of rhetorical gestures and immediate accessibility to
linguistic narratives, as the following review of Haydn’s Symphony No. 100
at the Concerts de la rue Grenelle attests:
The Haydn symphony, called military or Turkish, . . . needs to be heard,

listened to, meditated upon several times before one can present an accurate
response. He is a profound teacher, this Haydn, with him stones become
diamonds. Take care; his motifs at first seem common, well known, worn
maybe. This is false; the engineering designer who creates them, and the pure
taste that directs them will soon prove to you that you are hearing these
motives for the first time. He is a Proteus, a true magician. The andante of
the symphony offers to the imagination wonderment, a vast tableau that
appears to represent all the richness, all the brilliant glory of a pompe orientale.
It is a magnificent Sultan sitting on his throne of glory, surrounded by all
pleasures, intoxicated by all delights; it is, in a word, ideal beauty that belongs
only to genius, whose definition is in any language.45
Although the review displays a naivety to the inner workings of music com-
position, it aspires nonetheless to create a narrative that apprehends the
mystery of instrumental music for a novice listener who was often not familiar
with listening to music without a story but who was still in awe of the
medium. Unlike the critical approach of writers on taste, here the author is
seeking not to relate music to other areas of the arts, but to use descriptive
language that captures the ability of the music to say something about itself.
Yet, at the same time, the author’s use of the term ‘genius’ also points the
reader to a larger universal, which sees the creators of music as part of some-
thing greater than themselves, whereby a canon of musical genius is formed.
The concept of ‘genius’ in music was well articulated in France in the late
eighteenth century by writers such as Rousseau, who saw it as an internal fire
that forces an individual to submit ‘the whole universe to his art . . .
continually . . . burning but . . . never consumed’.46 It was not until the late
1820s via the lectures and writings of the French philosopher Victor Cousin
(1792–1867) that the following definition of genius found its way in the
critical press in France: ‘instruments of destiny who realized that their greatness
lay not in their individuality but in their knowledge that they were vehicles for
the expression of widely felt ideas which lesser men were unable to
45
Unsigned, Correspondance des amateurs musiciens, 2/2 (13 nivôse an 12/4 January 1804), 12–13. As
pointed out to me by Julian Rushton, the possible author of this review is the Belgian composer Jérôme-
Joseph de Momigny (1762–1842), who wrote of Haydn symphonies in a similar fashion.
46
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, ‘Génie’, Dictionnaire de musique (Paris, 1768); English trans. William Waring,
The Complete Dictionary of Music (London, 1779), p. 182.
articulate’.47 In this context, then, the desire is for music to be an eternal art
form that does not appeal to fashion or to the ‘common’ sense of the listening
public but to an overarching creative spirit that propels the work.
Although the French novelist Honoré de Balzac (in Part Two of his novel
Illusions perdues, 1839–44) argued against the objectivity of this all too perva-
sive critical perspective in France, stating that ‘one of the perfidies of Parisian
journalists was to mask personal spite as critique from the vantage point of the
World Spirit’,48 the desire to preserve in the concert repertoire works of
genius invites nonetheless a critical approach that appeals to history, for one
must use knowledge of the past to justify the elevation of the work but also an
awareness of its ability to speak to future generations. The music critic thus
becomes the upholder of an eternal truth, a priest of a sacred text that will be
judged by future generations. It is no wonder then that it is a music historian
that begins a new wave of specialised music journals in the late 1820s by
upholding ‘an unhappy middle between a long-lost “classic” period and
a “romantic” future whose day has not yet arrived’.49
Following the closure of Correspondence in 1805 and the all too brief run
of the Tablettes des polymnie from January 1810 to October 1811,50 the Revue
musicale (1827–35), a weekly publication, was the next major specialist
music journal to appear in France. The Revue musicale was founded by one
of the first graduates of the Paris Conservatoire, François-Joseph Fétis
(1784–1871), who nearly single-handedly ran the entire publication until
1833, when he handed over the reins of the periodical to his eldest son
Edouard (1812–1909) in order to take over the directorship at the Brussels
Conservatory of Music.51 Similar to previous specialised music periodicals,
Fétis’s publication sought to present a detailed assessment of current
performance practice, theory, composition, organography, biographical
research and critical reviews on the orchestral and vocal music of the day.
The periodical was acquired in 1835 by the German music publisher
Maurice Schlesinger (1798–1871) and became La Revue et Gazette musicale
47
Cousin, Cours de philosophie (1828); Ellis, Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Century France, p. 41. Incidentally,
this definition of ‘genius’ corresponds quite well with the grands hommes project of the Panthéon in Paris,
which began to inter ‘the great men’ of ‘the grateful homeland’ in 1791.
48 49
Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, p. 249. Ibid., p. 247.
50
The Tablettes des polymnie: Journal consacré à tout ce qui intéresse l’art musical was founded by the French
vocal pedagogue and composer Alexis de Garaudé (1779–1852) and his former Italian composition
instructor Giuseppe Maria Cambini (1746–1825). Although the journal published only thirty-three issues
during its brief tenure, it does offer to the reader a glimpse into the musical thinking of the French public
during the final years of Napoleon’s reign, albeit somewhat skewed towards Italian models of composi-
tion. For more information about the journal and its contents, see Ellis, Music Criticism in Nineteenth-
Century France, pp. 14, 21–7.
51
For detailed information about Fétis’s career and musical outlook, see Bloom, ‘François-Joseph Fétis
and the Revue musicale’; and Campos, François-Joseph Fétis.
de Paris, a formidable publication that courted all the major music writers
in Europe.52
Fétis believed in and espoused the ideas of history within the Revue
musicale, so much so that Cousin, who published and lectured on ideas
such as eclecticism and relativism in understanding the meaning of the
past,53 made a great impression on Fétis’s music historical thinking as
found in his publication.54 To Cousin, history had two levels of inquiry,
the ‘real’ and the ‘true’. The real represented external events for the
historian, while the philosopher of history analysed the external events in
order to understand the overall meaning or a larger truth. In this perspec-
tive, all art culminates into an overarching ‘truth’ that is substantiated by
the ‘real’. While ‘rule’-defining critics such as Castil-Blaze searched for the
‘real’ in their music criticism (i.e. the rules that define music composition
and performance), Fétis sought to understand the ‘truth’ of such ‘real’
observations, as evidenced in his opening three-page article on the period-
ical’s mission that appeared in the first issue:
As civilization advances, one’s needs become more specialized and demand

new organs of the press. Political newspapers, designed to elucidate society
about its dearest concerns, can give only a small amount of space to items that
for them are of only secondary importance, such as the discoveries and inven-
tions that are made every day in science, art, and industry. Their rapid reviews
52
La Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris is considered by many to be the most important specialised music
periodical of the nineteenth century. Founded by Maurice Schlesinger, the weekly periodical was
originally titled the Gazette musicale de Paris, which began its serial publication on 5 January 1834. After
Schlesinger acquired the Revue musicale from Fétis, the periodical was titled La Revue et Gazette musicale de
Paris, which ran from 1 November 1835 to 31 December 1880. Schlesinger sold the periodical in 1846 to
the French music publisher Louis Brandus, who continued the success of the publication. La Revue et
Gazette musicale de Paris was the main voice for Austro-German music in France, including the works of
Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Weber. The periodical also championed the music of Meyerbeer and
Berlioz (among others), whose compositions were published by Schlesinger and later Brandus. Important
contributors include (among many) Berlioz, Castil-Blaze, Balzac, George Sand, Fétis, d’Indy, Liszt,
d’Ortigue, Robert Schumann and Wagner. The most comprehensive study of the periodical is Ellis,
Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Century France, which includes a complete list of the writers and an in-
depth discussion of the overall aesthetic content of the publication.
53
Victor Cousin was highly influential during the July Monarchy (1830–48), an important political era in
France’s history that was often characterised as a juste milieu (i.e. a middle ground) between the extremes of
royalism and republicanism. Cousin’s philosophy of history essentially argued for a synthesis of past
truths in order to represent an ‘eclectic’ mix for the present. Certain points in time were not to be rejected
simply because they were superseded by later developments, but all moments in the past contain levels of
‘truth’ that provide substance and meaning that can be meticulously observed and explained. The present
is simply a culmination of past ‘truths’. For a more detailed study of Cousin and his influence in mid-
nineteenth-century France, see Claude Bernard, Victor Cousin, ou, La religion de la philosophie (Toulouse:
Presses universitaires du Mirail, 1991); and Alan Spitzer, The French Generation of 1820 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1987), pp. 71–96.
54
For a brief time, Fétis also wrote review articles for Le National: Feuille politique et littéraire (Paris, 1830–
51) and Le Temps: Journal des progrès politiques, scientifiques, littéraires et industriels (Paris, 1829–42), two
liberal dailies that appeared around the time of the 1830 Revolution; see Bloom, ‘François-Joseph Fétis
and the Revue musicale’, 52–7.
and superficial analysis can therefore only be considered as a sort of invitation

to examine further the facts they present or the opinions they venture.55
We see Fétis taking up this ‘invitation to examine’ in later review articles, as in

the following discussion of Chopin’s debut performance in Paris,
27 February 1832:
To speak these days of a pianist who has a good deal of talent, or, if you
will, a great talent, is simply to indicate that he is a competitor or a rival of
several artists of the first order whose names everyone knows quite well . . .
But here is a young man, who surrendering himself to his natural impres-
sions and taking no model, has found, if not a complete renewal of piano
music, at least a part of that which we have long sought in vain, namely, an
abundance of original ideas of a kind to be found nowhere else. This is not
at all to say that M. Chopin is gifted with an imagination so powerful as
Beethoven’s, nor that his music features the remarkably bold conceptions
found in the music of that great man: Beethoven wrote music for the piano;
but here I am speaking of music by pianists, and it is in this regard that
I find in M. Chopin his inspirations the symptoms of a renewal of forms
which may henceforth exercise a great deal of influence upon this branch of
the art.56
As seen in the above examples, the Revue musicale (and its later manifesta-
tion, La Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris) helped to establish the authoritative
voice of the critic as a philosopher of music history, which was furthered even
more by the many short stories on music and composer biographies published
within its pages.57 Thus, the status of the critic as espoused by the journal
stemmed from the short stories, serious essays and acute observation of its
writers, who were defined in a similar fashion to that of the music and artists
reviewed: ‘as [individuals] apart, living on a superior plan to that of the
common herd and often suffering the indignity of incomprehension at the
hands of philistines who disparaged [them] in part for [their] lowly status as
a servant’.58 The reverence afforded the composer and the critic in the specia-
lised music press were not in short supply following Fétis’s departure from
55
Fétis, ‘Utilité d’un journal de musique et plan de celui-ci’, Revue musicale, 1 (February 1827), 2; quoted
and trans. in Bloom, ‘François-Joseph Fétis and the Revue musicale’, 27.
56
Fétis, Revue musicale, 12 (3 March 1832), 38; quoted and trans. in Bloom, ‘François-Joseph Fétis and the
Revue musicale’, 301–2.
57
Short stories, novelettes, editorials, and dialogues on music written by several acclaimed writers (e.g.
Jules Janin, Dumas, Hoffman, Balzac, Liszt, Berlioz) appear in both the Gazette musicale and La Revue et
Gazette musicale de Paris, helping to solidify the heightened perspective on composers of the past (e.g.
Janin, ‘Stradella, ou le poète et la musicien’, 1836) as well as the current and future of music making
(e.g. Berlioz, ‘Euphonia, ou la ville musicale’, 1844); see Ellis, Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Century France,
pp. 262–5, for a list of writings that appeared in the journal from 1834 to 1846.
58
Ibid., p. 50.
Paris;59 in fact it increased substantially through the critical writings of

Hector Berlioz (1803–69), a professional composer-critic.60
Berlioz began his journalistic career as early as 1823 when he wrote the first
of three unsolicited, ‘highly opinionated and flamboyant’ articles for Le
Corsaire, a daily newspaper on all literary and artistic matters of the day.61 In
the three articles, Berlioz took to task what he saw as a pervasive atmosphere
of musical ignorance and dilettantism both in the press as well as the listening
public, even castigating the revered Castil-Blaze for his negative opinions of
Gluck.62 It is no surprise then that Berlioz continued this same combative
stance when he took to the journalistic profession formally in 1833, writing
for L’Europe littéraire and La Rénovateur, two short-run periodicals in Paris,
before landing the prestigious position of head music writer at the Journal des
débats (succeeding Castil-Blaze) in 1834 and also debuting as a regular con-
tributor to Schlesinger’s Gazette musicale de Paris (later La Revue et Gazette
musicale de Paris) that same year.63
Although Berlioz was a recent Prix de Rome winner and achieved some
level of notoriety in the press for his compositions (see for example Fétis’s
articles on Berlioz in the Revue musicale starting in 1828),64 he primarily
59
Fétis continued to write for the Revue musicale (since 1835, La Revue et gazette musical de Paris) while
living in Belgium, writing for the publication well into his eighties. Fétis’s profound interest in history
was also well defined throughout his career, evidenced by the publication of his Biographie universelle des
musiciens et bibliographie générale de la musique (Paris: H. Fournier, 1835–44), an impressive eight-volume
encyclopedia on the life and works of thousands of composers from the past and present, as well as his
sketches of the history of music theory, Esquisse de l’histoire de l’harmnoie (Paris, 1840), and of music in
general, Histoire générale de la musique (Paris, 1869–76).
60
Along with Berlioz, the Hungarian-born French pianist and composer Stephen Heller (1813–88) and
the composer and conductor Edmé Deldevez (1817–97) were also well defined in the French musical
press. I am grateful to Julian Rushton for directing me to the work of these two composer-critics.
61
The articles appeared on 12 August 1823, 11 January 1824, and 19 December 1825, respectively;
Murphy, Hector Berlioz, pp. 39, 229.
62
See Everist, ‘Gluck, Berlioz, and Castil-Blaze’, pp. 88–92.
63
Berlioz wrote for the Journal des débats for nearly thirty years, when despair and disillusionment
with the journalistic profession eventually took its toll and he became ‘morbidly conscious of death’
(Hugh Macdonald, ‘Berlioz’, in Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (eds.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music
and Musicians, 2nd ed., vol. 3 (London: Macmillan, 2001), p. 397). Although he retired from the Journal
in 1863, he continued to serve as an editor of La Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris until 1868 (see Ellis,
Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Century France, p. 249). The critical writings of Hector Berlioz are found
in a multiple-volume set entitled La Critique musicale, 1823–1863, eds. H. Robert Cohen, Yves Gérard,
Anne Bongrain and Marie-Hélène Coudroy-Saghaï (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 1996–). Ten volumes
comprise the entire critical edition; currently eight volumes exist (writings from 1823 to 1855).
For a complete catalogue of his critical writings and musical works, see D. Kern Holoman, Catalogue
of the Works of Hector Berlioz (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1987).
64
Fétis first met Berlioz when he was a prospective student applying for admission to the composition
classes of the Conservatoire; see Fétis’s description of their meeting in Michael Rose, Berlioz Remembered
(London: Faber and Faber, 2001), p. 16. In spite of his initial impression of Berlioz, Fétis was fairly
balanced in his reviews of the then young composer. All things changed, however, when Fétis published
a damaging assessment of the composer and his Symphonie fantastique in the Revue musicale (1 February
1835); see Edward T. Cone (ed.), Berlioz: Fantastic Symphony (New York: W. W. Norton and Company,
1971), pp. 215–20.
turned to music criticism owing to his struggles as a composer. As he fought

against the pragmatic conservatism of the critics of his music (most notably
Castil-Blaze and Fétis), Berlioz attempted to create a platform for his compo-
sitions to be received and admired by highlighting notions of a larger dramatic
truth that can only be defined when compositions (for example, his magnum
opus, Les Troyens) channelled the variety of concepts found in earlier works
and were guided by a desire for a unity of musical expression with poetic
ideas. As noted by musicologist Hugh Macdonald, however, this strategy
ultimately failed, leaving his journalism ‘an independent professional activity,
executed with extreme flair and wit, but in fact making his stature as
a composer all the harder to establish’.65 Perhaps owing to this curious
mixture of self-defeat with an acute awareness of the conservative nature of
his own musical present, Berlioz’s criticism became an ‘idiosyncratic admix-
ture of autobiography, analysis, and true criticism’,66 a point that Katharine
Ellis reiterates:
[Berlioz’s literary technique is characterised by a] sensitivity to rhythm in

prose, often reflecting the overall shape of the music; an ability to suspend
closure and build to a climax, thereby observing what Berlioz calls the . . . ‘law
of crescendo’; a drawing in of the reader through exhortations such as ‘Listen!’
or ‘See how . . . ’; integration of technical explanations relating to harmony,
instrumentation, and phrase structure into poetic prose; reference to the
category of the romantic sublime, expressed either in terms of the listener’s
extreme emotional reaction, or by means of analogies of vastness and natural
tempestuousness applied to the music itself; interpolation of literary quota-
tions, often from Shakespeare or Virgil; and finally, an explicit distinction
between Berlioz’s own view and that of (postulated) uncomprehending phi-
listines – a device that neatly interlocks with the drawing in of the reader by
encouraging a sense of solidarity: critic and reader become fellow initiates.67
His career trajectory notwithstanding, Berlioz reviewed nearly all forms of

music activity in Paris, including ‘most of the concerts of the Société des
Concerts; he wrote of new instruments and musical gadgets, of his own
impressions of music abroad and of important musicians visiting France; he
wrote biographical notices of Gluck, Beethoven, Spontini, Méhul and himself;
he wrote fiction and fantasy, often with a critical purpose; he wrote serialized
treatises on orchestration and conducting’.68
65
Macdonald, ‘Berlioz’, p. 408.
66
D. Kern Holoman, Berlioz (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 362.
67
Katharine Ellis, ‘The Criticism’, in Peter Bloom (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Berlioz (Cambridge:
68
Macdonald, ‘Berlioz’, p. 407.
A true product of the professionalism both composition and music journal-

ism now enjoyed, Berlioz and other composer-critics became entangled by
their apparent interdependence. As noted in the histories of many of the
specialised music journals, the circulation of musical compositions and
the subsequent review articles of their performances were often published
by the same editor or music publishing house; for example, a composition
published by the Heugel publishing firm was also reviewed in Le Ménestrel, the
firm’s own weekly music journal.
Along with La Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris and La France musicale (a
weekly periodical founded by the music publishers Marie-Pierre-Pascal-Yves
Escudier (1819–80) and his brother Léon Escudier (1821–81), which ran from
31 December 1837 to 31 July 1870), Le Ménestrel was one of the chief music
periodicals in Paris throughout the nineteenth century. The periodical was
published weekly from 1 December 1833 to its final issue on 5 April 1940.
Jacques-Léopold Heugel (1815–83) acquired the periodical in 1840. The
Heugel Firm primarily published popular compositions by composers such
as David, Offenbach, Thomas and Delibes, thus making the periodical a voice
piece for the positive reception of light French works. The two most signifi-
cant writers for the journal include Jules Lovy (1801–63), who was with the
publication from the very beginning as a contributing author (1833–6) and as
editor-in-chief (1836–63), and the famous early music enthusiast Joseph
d’Ortigue (1802–66), who before starting his work as chief editor at the
journal in 1863 founded the periodical La Maîtrise (1857–60), which promoted
the reform of church music in France. Thus, the ‘business’ of being a critic in
France became increasingly economically defined, often cheapened by the
motivation for a strong sales forecast of a particular composition. Yet, at the
same time, with the proliferation of the specialised music journals and their
desire to fix or canonise the repertoire with works supported by the same
publishing firm, music criticism became less part of a populist tradition and
more of an engagement for the music-makers themselves, shaping music into
an autonomous art form that no longer reflected the public’s desire for it but
the needs and interests of professionals. This point is illustrated, if not
admitted to, by Berlioz in his published memoirs, which the composer
began in 1848 after fifteen years as a professional critic:
This self-perpetuating task [of music criticism] poisons my life. And yet, quite
apart from the income I get from it, which I cannot do without, I see no
prospect of being able to give it up. To do so would leave me without
weapons, exposed to all the rancour and hatred that I have incurred by it.
For in one sense the Press is a more useful weapon than the spear of Achilles.
Not only can it heal the wounds it has inflicted; it also serves the user as
a shield. Oh, but the manoeuvrings, the abject subterfuges I am obliged to

practise! The circumventions in order to avoid telling the truth, the conces-
sions to society and even to public opinion, the rage repressed, the shame
swallowed! Yet there are those who think me violent, scathing, supercilious in
what I write. Fools! If I really spoke my mind, you would find the nettles you
complain of a bed of roses compared with the gridiron on which I would roast
you.69
The voice of a frustrated composer-critic aside, it would take a more radical

shift in the national politics for this increasing interdependence of composi-
tion and music criticism to change, one centred on the debates concerning
modernity and the music and writings of Wagner – a shift further hardened by
the alliances formed by the Franco-Prussian War of 1870 and the subsequent
Paris Commune of 1871.70
Believing that journalism contained the voice of a new generation coming
of age following revolution and the start of a new century, this chapter set out
to present a set of aesthetic tendencies in music criticism during a time of
great change in France – as a harbinger of taste, a presentation of pragmatic
rules for the profession and as a product of history to fix repertoire. None of
these proved to be exclusive of the other, but co-existed and stood as the
critical record of how the French heard and understood the music around
them. In the end, music criticism in nineteenth-century France was a curious
mixture of public performance and self-service, where rhetorical positions
would often change in order to cast oneself in a kind of ‘verbal caricature’ (e.g.
the enlightened, the ignoramus or even the comedian) for the hope and
benefit of capturing the public’s attention.71 In this context, the music writers
as discussed here were not isolated men of thought and musical understand-
ing, but were shaped by the very medium by which they were engaging,
a verbal public arena where the agency of voice was defined.
69
David Cairns (ed.), The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), pp. 230–1.
70
For detailed study of French music-making and the critical press in relation to the music and writings
of Wagner in France, see André Coeuroy, Wagner et l’esprit romantique: Wagner et la France, le Wagnérisme
littérair (Paris: Gallimard, 1965); Steven Huebner, French Opera at the Fin de Siècle: Wagnerism, Nationalism,
and Style (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Paul du Quenoy, Wagner and the French Muse: Music,
Society, and Nation in Modern France (Bethesda: Academia Press, 2011); and Katharine Ellis, ‘Wagnerism
and Anti-Wagnerism in the Paris Periodical Press, 1852–1870’, in Annegret Fauser and Manuela Schwartz
(eds.), Von Wagner zum Wagnérisme: Musik, Literatur, Kunst, Politik (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag,
1999).
71
See Emmanuel Reibel’s thoughtful study L’Écriture de la critique musicale au temps de Berlioz (Paris:
Honoré Champion, 2005), where he discusses the rhetorical positions, the tone, and the various critical
typologies that French music critics embodied during the nineteenth century. Convincingly, the author
suggests that a courtroom drama existed within the pages of the French critical press, as if a defendant was
entering a plea against a prosecutor’s claims in the court of ‘public opinion’.
.8.
Gatekeeping, Advocacy, Reflection: Overlapping Voices

in Nineteenth-Century British Music Criticism
LEANNE LANGLEY
A basic tool for investigating nineteenth-century British journalism, including

music criticism, has long been The Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and
Periodicals, 1800–1900, issued in 1976. Among the 50,000 entries of its updated
series 2 (2003) are more than 200 music titles.1 Most of those originated in
London and had brief lives. They touch every conceivable topic from church
music to Wagner, madrigals to music hall, string technique to theories of
history. Add the several thousand literary magazines, art and theatre papers,
and daily and weekly newspapers that carried essays, review articles and other
music-evaluative discussion, and the bulk of British music criticism grows
exponentially. This is before one absorbs Waterloo’s prediction that its final
list, series 5, is expected to reach 125,000 entries. Nineteenth-century period-
ical publishing took place on a prodigious scale, more than a hundred times
greater than that of book production, and music was far from trivial in the
content of thousands of titles: the very presence of music discussion helped to
sell many of them. The old cliché about a few backward critics controlling taste
in this environment is as unlikely as it is naive.
The reasons are less to do with number and range of titles, however, or even
the over-stressed visibility of a few critics whose identities are clear – that is,
those who kept long attachments to one or two prominent journals in
a largely anonymous, freelance context and who left vivid memoirs or had
literary careers beyond music. That kind of celebrity has encouraged repeated
secondary reference to the same few writers, often owing to ease of access and
the entertainment value in their barbed judgements, maybe ‘wrong’ in
1
Edited by John S. North (Waterloo: North Waterloo Academic Press), with series 3 reaching a total of
73,000 entries (2013) (available online at www.victorianperiodicals.com/series3). North and his colleagues
cast their music net wide. For a more focused approach, see the list for Great Britain under ‘Periodicals’ in
New Grove 2, vol. 28, App. F, pp. 394–8; and Leanne Langley, ‘The English Musical Journal in the Early
Nineteenth Century’, PhD dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (1983), vol. 2, ‘A
Descriptive Catalogue of English Periodicals Containing Musical Literature, 1665–1845’, 409–638. Echoing
the Waterloo, the present chapter covers both newspapers and periodicals. Music criticism in other formats
(lectures, treatises, programme notes, dictionary articles, books) has not been included.
[147]
148 LEANNE LANGLEY
retrospect, but confident and memorably expressed, and therefore quotable.

Henry Chorley, J. W. Davison and George Bernard Shaw spring to mind as
variously dyspeptic, protectionist or sardonic on their chosen targets. They
are still illuminating to read, pointed and useful in many ways.2 But as
commentators, they were probably neither as damaging at the time nor as
lastingly influential as later readers tend to assume.3 Rather, the fuller argu-
ment against any monolithic power for a particular writer or view is that the
active reach of real music, all kinds of it, was simply too wide and deep in
nineteenth-century Britain. Too many other taste-making influences worked
on the public unmediated: instrument sales and music publishing, opera and
theatre production, concert programming, artist management, the music
examination system, even sound recording. Lesser-known but equally articu-
late writers meanwhile deserve more investigation, not as ‘high profile’
necessarily, but for having had something to say.
A further reason to resist reductionism is still more obvious: time passed
and tastes changed. Music and the public media proliferated hourly in what
was then the liveliest open market in the world for both. Consumers needed
critics, and critics needed platforms; musicians needed all three. The whole
system worked on a dynamic rolling basis, at several levels of literary purpose
and musical sophistication. Ordinary readers played their part in the assimila-
tion process, buying tickets, singing and playing at home, taking lessons,
listening at concerts, annotating programme notes, writing letters ‘to the
editor’. And though keen consumers surely valued the fresh information
and first-hand comment a critic might provide, they were neither ignorant
nor likely lacking their own opinions. Many will have read or consulted more
than one paper at a time, say, a specialist title and a general newspaper within
one home. By comparative reading they will have learned that music experi-
ence counts for authority in a critic but does not always promise insight. If we
ignore this wider potential in criticism’s multi-sidedness, its differing levels of
address in a constantly moving picture, we miss what a more sensitive rela-
tional study could show, including British cultural development through
education and discourse over time.
Among scenarios that invite study are some familiar dilemmas. In all creative
industries it is a truism that ‘nobody knows’ – not even the composer-performer –
2
Chorley and Davison left memoirs, but their views are best studied through the journals they served,
chiefly the Athenaeum (Chorley, 1834–68), Musical World (Davison, 1843–85) and Times (Davison,
1844–78). Shaw’s material has been usefully collected and indexed as Shaw’s Music: The Complete Musical
Criticism of Bernard Shaw, ed. Dan H. Laurence, 3 vols. (London: Bodley Head, 1981; 2nd revised ed., 1989).
3
Meirion Hughes, The English Musical Renaissance and the Press, 1850–1914: Watchmen of Music
(Burlington: Ashgate, 2002), typifies an approach taking ‘power of the press’ and critical ‘influence’ as
givens across the period.
Gatekeeping, Advocacy, Reflection: Overlapping Voices 149
how a new work will go in a given physical setting, whether it will sound well,
hold together and make a good or bad impression, whether it will last, what it
may come to mean.4 Reception study helps make sense of immediate and succes-
sive reactions, especially where performance is so repeatedly crucial. But critics do
not often agree. They may change their minds later or express a veiled, dishonest
or deeply self-interested opinion; one critic’s view may be exclusively his or hers,
reached late in a lifetime of listening or early in ignorance or bias; waves of
opinion rise and fall. Detecting different sides to a critical conversation, finding
reactions to a printed critique, discovering that a critic actually led or perhaps
deliberately aimed to reflect reader opinion: such paths offer a more fruitful
strategy than just freeze-framing a set of press quotations. Through published
opinions, an articulate critic might even have opened up programming or per-
forming style, proposed a fresh poetic or technical angle to a composer, or
documented gradual appreciation of some baffling new work with repeated
hearings.5 Any of these tracks implies real influence. Yet such a level of under-
standing requires more than a quick dip in an online database. It involves re-
entering the period and hearing many voices, reading backwards, forwards, across
wider literature and in private correspondence while also absorbing the
mechanics of Britain’s rapidly changing musical life, including the likelihood of
critical and public taste fluctuation.
Because this material is so vast and unwieldy and even experienced
researchers cannot claim to have read most of it, it makes sense to set
limits here, to compare selected writers and contexts in ways that allow
broad meanings. Three themes will serve: recognised intellectual tempers
across the period 1810–1914; groupings of known writers and their
career patterns; and critical functions, or voices, available to a music
writer. Together these help explain how British music criticism devel-
oped in tandem with the press industry and in response to a flourishing,
even relentless, music industry. Far from ignoring aesthetic or higher
ideals, a threefold overview also allows specific opinions to come forward
without automatically linking them to a presumed national character
(e.g. ‘liberal-minded’), style preference (‘conservative’) or political aim
4
For the significance of ‘nobody knows’ as an economic property of creative activities in the marketplace,
including the need for critics as certifiers, see Richard E. Caves, Creative Industries: Contracts between Art and
Commerce (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).
5
While writing for the Morning Chronicle, C. L. Gruneisen used his influence to help establish an opera
company at Covent Garden Theatre, 1847, rivalling Her Majesty’s and ensuring all performances were in
Italian. Davison’s advice in the late 1850s to focus initial concerts at St James’s Hall on chamber music
instead of miscellaneous programming became one of his signal achievements. From 1901 Ernest
Newman exchanged both public and private opinions with Edward Elgar in productive discussions of
programme versus absolute music; see Michael Allis, ‘Elgar, Lytton, and the Piano Quintet, Op. 84’, Music
& Letters, 85 (2004), 198–238.
150 LEANNE LANGLEY
(‘musical nation-building’). Indeed, if any single trait colours English music

criticism tout court, it is likely to be an ethical concern in the writer towards
music and the public good, not some default preference in an imagined
binary opposition (Rossini versus Beethoven, Mendelssohn versus Wagner,
beauty versus technique) or a particular intellectual path reflecting the
nation’s perceived musical progress. The point is that a critic’s voice
emerges over time from his or her own experiences. And whether its
function is seen as upholding standards, advocating change or registering
a personal journey to help other listeners, that voice reveals most when
respected for its part in a larger, interactive process.
Four Tempers: 1810–1914

Scholars have often chosen the years 1789–1914, the long nineteenth century,
as most relevant for studying British culture in this period. Given musical
press output in those earlier years,6 we can narrow the focus slightly to
1810–1914, a span that subdivides into four tempers or mindsets colouring
intellectual thought, including music criticism. At their most basic, these
embrace the Scottish Enlightenment (with roots to about 1750), romanticism
(1790), evangelicalism (1800) and, infused by the previous three, liberalism
(1835). Traceable to philosophical, economic and political debates of the
eighteenth century, these four tempers have recently been described by the
intellectual historian Mark Bevir as a useful way to understand nineteenth-
century British thinking so as to cut across the usual disruptions familiar from
social histories of the Victorian era (industrialisation, challenges of metropo-
litan life, galloping commerce, class conflict and so on); they can thus reveal
more continuity between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries than tradi-
tional historiography has allowed.7 Warning against overly rigid boundaries,
however – any periodisation obviously selects sections of time according to
the historian’s own purposes – Bevir recommends exploring these divisions as
‘a series of over-lapping beginnings, contents and endings’.8 It is a concept
that nicely reflects both a fluidity of ideas about music and the periodical
format itself. Things move on but continually refer back; a regular cycle of
production goes forward but to no predetermined date; multiple readers and
views overlap simultaneously.
6
A brief survey of periodic writing on music, 1760–1830, appears in Leanne Langley, ‘Musical Press’, in
Iain McCalman (ed.), An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture, 1776–1832 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1989), p. 615.
7
For a full discussion of Bevir’s ideas, see ‘The Long Nineteenth Century in Intellectual History’, Journal
of Victorian Culture, 6 (2001), 313–35.
8
Ibid., 314.
Without suggesting that all music critics in a given decade were in thrall to
one dominant philosophy, it is still possible to harness the analogy and see
broad parallels in how critics valued music and called for aesthetic change. In
all cases the music critics’ work came at a distance of several decades from the
root idea. So, for example, traces of Enlightenment thinking appear to have
strongly influenced British music critics as late as the 1810s and 20s, from
Henry Robertson’s informed opera criticism in Leigh Hunt’s Examiner, agi-
tating for Mozartian reforms and attacking diva culture at the King’s
Theatre,9 to R. M. Bacon’s pleas in the Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review
for a balanced rapprochement between aristocratic music amateurs and mid-
dle-class music professionals; and again, from Bacon’s repeated critique, on
logical grounds, of nonsensical English opera that was half-sung, half-spoken,
to William Ayrton’s calls in the Harmonicon for prosodic clarity in hymn and
song text setting just as for deeper historical information on which to base
critical assessments of music.10 Emerging from a kind of intellectual darkness
into light, indeed, the notion of taking music seriously as technical achieve-
ment and cultural expression can also be seen in writers as diverse as A. F. C.
Kollmann, who dealt systematically with John Wall Callcott’s Musical
Grammar and began to explicate J. S. Bach in the Quarterly Musical Register,11
and John Parry, the Welsh instrumentalist and composer who contributed
enlightening articles on Welsh airs to the Cambro-Briton in this period.12 All
these critics saw a new political power in periodicals: the press offered not just
literary aid to lift a music writer’s social standing (in the Burneyian sense), but
a practical channel for airing views, musical and non-musical, that might
engage more and more readers.
As a reaction in part to Enlightenment thinking, slightly younger writers
influenced by what we call Romanticism were concerned with imagination,
creativity and the life of the mind. Questions of time and evolution began to
challenge those of system and balance. In articulate music criticism by the
1830s, this focus showed itself less in steady delivery of information than in
personal response to artistic stimuli, stressing change in the individual hearer
by reacting to, understanding and loving music. The writer’s own memory
and growth, inspired by distant or earlier models in art, literature or music,
9
See Gillen D’Arcy Wood, ‘Cockney Mozart: The Hunt Circle, the King’s Theatre, and Don Giovanni’,
Studies in Romanticism, 44 (2005), 367–97, esp. 375–81, exploring the social and political critique inherent
in Mozart advocacy.
10
Langley, ‘English Musical Journal’, 194–281 (Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review), and 282–408
(Harmonicon).
11
Discussed in Michael Kassler, A. F. C. Kollmann’s Quarterly Musical Register (1812): An Annotated Edition
with an Introduction to his Life and Works (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).
12
Known as Bardd Alaw, Parry also contributed to the Harmonicon, Musical World, Morning Post and
Sunday Times.
152 LEANNE LANGLEY
formed a solid reference point. It is not difficult to associate well-known, at

times passionate, music critics of the 1820s, 30s and 40s with this intellectual
stance. Leigh Hunt’s warm feeling for Italian culture and sensibility as an
antidote to what he saw as English music mercantilism,13 T. M. Alsager’s
fascination with classical Antiquity and with both the detail and totality of
Beethoven’s musical achievement,14 Thomas Love Peacock’s imaginative yet
incisive critiques of modern opera librettos,15 Edward Holmes’s discovery of
links between past musical models and contemporary music innovations,16
even J. W. Davison (in his young bohemian days) as a keen admirer of Shelley,
much French literature and every note of Mendelssohn:17 such writers were
excited by private aesthetic devotions that fundamentally shaped their
approach to other music experiences. They may have been reluctant later to
see their heroes displaced, but they also remained open to vivid performance
and tended to reject a pedantry they saw increasingly distancing English
‘music professors’ from the general public.
By the 1850s and 60s, a more local (English Protestant) version of
Enlightenment thought, evangelicalism, had come to affect music writers.
Like their earlier counterparts in the 1810s, commentators of this temper
sought broadly to address economic problems wrought by industrial change,
social upheaval and a resurgence of intellectual doubt, though now from
a theological perspective because the calamities could be thought to have
resulted from rejecting God. For music critics, personal faith itself was less
apparent than the core idea of atonement, pursued though self-education,
character development, acceptance of duty and sacrifice, and the spreading of
‘truth’ to novices, the unconvinced or the fallen. High classical models were
programmed at middle-class chamber concerts, for example, and analysed in
print to inspire a widening array of listeners with the ‘best music’.18 Fresh
research was conducted on composers from Byrd and Blow to Handel and
Haydn. Class teaching and mass publishing initiatives, some in tonic sol-fa
notation, gained increasing momentum. Efforts to spread music’s beneficent
powers to the materially or artistically deprived grew in urban communities as
13
In his ‘Theatrical Examiner’ column, Examiner (5 March 1820), Hunt raised doubt about the purpose of
the music shop attached to the Philharmonic Society’s new home, the Argyll Rooms, Regent Street.
14
See David B. Levy, ‘Thomas Massa Alsager, Esq.: A Beethoven Advocate in London’, 19th–Century
Music, 9/2 (Autumn 1985), 119–27.
15
Appearing in the Examiner between about 1832 and 1835; see E. D. Mackerness, ‘Thomas Love
Peacock’s Musical Criticism’, The Wind and the Rain, 4 (1948), 177–87.
16
E. D. Mackerness, ‘Edward Holmes (1797–1859)’, Music & Letters, 45 (1964), 213–27.
17
Samuel Lipman, ‘James William Davison of The (London) Times’, in his Music and More: Essays,
1975–1991 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1992).
18
Beethoven evoked religious metaphors in both Holmes (Atlas) and Davison (Musical World) by the late
1840s; see Christina Bashford, ‘The Late Beethoven Quartets and the London Press, 1836–ca. 1850’,
Musical Quarterly, 84 (2000), 84–122, esp. 111–12.
well as across the Empire. Choirs, choral music and brass banding were widely
promoted as ‘rational recreation’. Music lectures at mechanics’ institutes and
a missional aestheticism in general evidenced the period’s association of music
with moral purpose, whether demonstrating religious faith or displacing it.
While the tone behind such projects could be patronising, sentimental,
even smug – and the ultimate objects were rarely purely charitable – it often
sprang from sincere conviction: experiencing beauty was believed to make
people better. Well-known writers taking part in this discourse included
George Hogarth, immensely skilled at shading his observations, up or
down, to a given journal’s readership (he contributed music reviews to at
least eighteen different titles);19 H. J. Gauntlett, enthusiastic advocate of J. S.
Bach’s music, the German pedal organ and better congregational singing in
churches; Edward Taylor, the Spectator critic who besides lauding Spohr as
a Mendelssohn alternative, also lectured on madrigals and attacked the poor
state of English cathedral music; Joseph Bennett, the Novello associate and
Daily Telegraph critic whose musical anchor remained choir-and-organ, with
his registration preset to ‘beauty’ (he contributed to some sixteen titles);20
John Hullah, the fixed-doh educationist who believed in the musical super-
iority of the working classes and argued for music to become part of a liberal
education; and the Rev. H. R. Haweis, whose very repute rested on his
dynamic preaching, linkage of music with emotional well-being, and
a widely read book of compiled journal essays, Music and Morals (1871). All
this signalled a broad church for music activity in the mid-Victorian period,
widely scoped in outreach if predictably over-reverent in feeling. For many
people, music’s legitimate value was seen to reside in the human or spiritual
effect it produced rather than in the notes themselves.
By the mid- to later nineteenth century, liberal philosophers were widening
the purview and complicating the possibilities. Blending aspects of enlight-
enment, romantic and evangelical thinking, they sought to protect their own
interests while also incorporating the rules of commerce, law, sociability and
a progressive view of history. Utility – defined as the greatest benefit for the
largest number – was deemed the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions, but
it was still grounded in a view of humans as reforming, working to improve
both self and society. Romanticism can be detected in the way some liberal
thinkers, notably in the universities, not only saw racial character in national
histories but also remained sceptical about the benefit of true markets and
preserved a certain elitism through belief in an intellectual clerisy. Gladstone’s
19
See Leanne Langley, ‘Hogarth, George’, New Grove 2, vol. 11, pp. 609–10, and note 47 below.
20
See Bennett’s own Forty Years of Music, 1865–1905 (London: Methuen, 1908).
154 LEANNE LANGLEY
popular Liberalism, itself a mixture of elements, is the most familiar expres-

sion of this temper across the later nineteenth century. In its increasingly
vague programme of non-conformist ideas, however (pure Liberal tenets had
not panned out as predicted for the economy or society), it suggests parallels
with the splintering of music-critical thought into many shades from the
1870s to 1914. High liberal music critics, for example, representing the late-
Victorian cultured elite who were university-educated, professional, well-
connected and reform-minded, included names such as J. A. Fuller Maitland,
Hubert Parry and W. H. Hadow, all sharing a taste for Brahms, early English
music and ‘form over feeling’, as well as intellectual resistance to more
modern music.21
For all their perceived social and institutional eminence, those particular
writers were still a minority compared with the number of slightly ‘lower’
critics working at the coalface, especially from the late 1880s onwards –
writers who had to absorb and interpret a frenetic range of music and musical
activity in the nation’s concert halls, theatres, schools and churches, music
colleges, town halls, music halls, festivals and publishing houses. Whether
occasional essayists, journal editors or regular commentators, writers in this
large heterogeneous group often showed themselves more open than the high
liberals were to technical and stylistic innovation in music – or at least more
closely engaged with new music-making, including debates about its progress.
Perhaps not coincidentally, they were also more dependent on writing for
a living and, for that reason, probably more alert to large numbers of press
readers and paying concert audiences.22
Among such writers with enlightenment tendencies, keen to apply new
knowledge, technical understanding and a rational, ostensibly objective
approach to new or lesser-known music, were Ebenezer Prout, Edward
Dannreuther, J. S. Shedlock, E. A. Baughan (an observant, commonsense con-
tributor to some fifteen journals, occasionally signing ‘E. A. B.’, sometimes ‘R.
Peggio’), C. A. Barry, Robin Legge, Ernest Newman and Alfred Kalisch.
21
Matthew Riley, ‘Liberal Critics and Modern Music in the Post–Victorian Age’, in Matthew Riley (ed.),
British Music and Modernism, 1895–1960 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010). Fuller Maitland’s concoction of
a narrowly defined new school of English composers he called the ‘English Musical Renaissance’
(English Music in the X I X th Century (London: Grant Richards, 1902)) was part of that resistance – and
a construction widely disputed. See John Ling, ‘The Debate in England on the Progress and Regress of
Music, 1888–1907’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Royal Holloway, University of London (2014).
Indeed, calls for a distinctively national music receded in the 1890s, just as the number, quality and
individualism of British composers rose dramatically.
22
Philip Ross Bullock theorises a direct opposition between academic institutions privileging the
classicism of German ‘absolute’ music and modern concert-giving institutions such as Queen’s Hall
preferring the ‘descriptive’ ambitions of Romanticism. See his ‘Tsar’s Hall: Russian Music in London,
1895–1926’, in Rebecca Beasley and Philip Ross Bullock (eds.), Russia in Britain, 1880–1940: From
Melodrama to Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
Closer to the romantic side, drawing on ardent personal responses, perhaps

with literary, poetic or philosophical underpinnings, extra-musical causes or
the joys and pains of performance as springboard, were Francis Hueffer, Shaw,
J. F. Runciman, Herman Klein, Arthur Johnstone and Rosa Newmarch.
Subtle differences among all these writers, though, including distinctions in
background, education, training and degree of literary or music professional
status, show how inadequate the four tempers are for predicting a critic’s
responses by this late period. ‘Diversity’ and ‘plurality’ might sound evasive as
hallmarks, but they are the only fair ones for such a polychromatic
profusion.23
Prout, for example, was as much evangelical didact as enlightened analyst.
Keen to explore aesthetic values in Schubert, Schumann and Wagner, he was
employed on the Monthly Musical Record to help sell the magazine owner’s –
Augener’s – educational editions. With a stress on feeling in English music of
the 1890s, and noting the lack of it, Baughan might with equal force be called
romantic as well as enlightened. Newman and Runciman were both liberal in
their reform-minded goals, like Shaw, but unlike him (the Fabian socialist),
they argued against spending music educational effort on the working classes;
all three writers disdained music academicism – the kind practised by Prout,
who, however, was largely self-taught.24 Shaw and Runciman might seem
alike in their designedly provocative tone – attractive to readers and hence to
press editors – but ‘J. F. R.’ was far more negative, even brutal in print, making
‘G. B .S.’ seem downright genial, a veritable missionary for Wagner, Hans
Richter, Elgar, Puccini, Mascagni and earlier classical music by Gluck,
Haydn and Mozart. Both C. A. Barry (‘C. A. B.’) and Arthur Johnstone, born
a generation apart, were highly educated, musically cultured, respected by
their peers and strong advocates of musical advance, yet their critical
approaches were totally distinct; they wrote at different times for the
Manchester Guardian, by the 1870s a socially liberal daily of national impor-
tance. Examples could be multiplied of apparent contradiction and crossover,
for the truth is that clean philosophical and taste divisions are impossible, so
23
For the complex shifts of culture and authority producing messiness among categories, see
William Lubenow, Liberal Intellectuals and Public Culture in Modern Britain, 1815–1914: Making Words
Flesh (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2010).
24
On the campaign against academicism, with its focus on technical fault-finding, see Runciman’s
‘Musical Criticism and the Critics’, Fortnightly Review, 56, n. s. (1894), 170–83; and ‘The Gentle Art of
Musical Criticism’, New Review, 12 (1895), 612–24. Runciman considered the best of the ‘new’ critics,
Shaw, to be his own mentor, both of them ‘slashing’ ( Suzanne Cole, ‘A Tale of Two Wagnerites: G. W. L.
Marshall-Hall and John F. Runciman’, Context, 39 (2014), 57–67). His binary association of technical and
aesthetic approaches with ‘old’ and ‘new’ criticism respectively, however, was not only coloured by
personal rivalries among critics in the 1890s; it also echoed a long-standing tension, a recurring skirmish,
in English criticism since the mid-eighteenth century.
156 LEANNE LANGLEY
variegated was the spectrum of British music criticism in this later period.
This is to say nothing of the sensitive individual contributions of music-
critical writers who were active mainly as composers or music editors, such
as G. H. Clutsam, George Butterworth, William Denis Browne, Rutland
Boughton, Joseph Holbrooke, A. J. Jaeger and C. V. Stanford; music book
authors, like Henry Davey and Ernest Walker; or writers in other fields,
including H. H. Statham (architecture), Arnold Bennett (novels), Vernon
Lee (aesthetics) and Leonard Rees (newspaper editing). In every case – high
to low, right to left – late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century critics were
participating in the liveliest upturn British music culture had seen since the
1790s.
One Hundred and Seventy Writers: People and Practicalities

A different angle opens up when we look at music critics as a group and the
practical world they inhabited. While many critics remain unidentified owing
to the strong tradition of British press anonymity – until the 1880s, journal-
ists sometimes signed with pseudonyms or initials, but the vast majority never
signed at all25 – it is still possible to construct a tentative list of names by
cross-checking standard bio-bibliographical sources, memoirs and recent
scholarship. Limiting publication to c. 1810–1914, chiefly in London, and
collecting the attributed authors of regular or occasional music-critical pieces
in weekly arts reviews, daily newspapers and monthly or quarterly magazines
(music and general), we can see some 170 names come into view, from
William Harrison Ainsworth, Henry Erskine Allon, Thomas Massa Alsager
and William Ayrton to Ernest Walker, William Wallace, Thomas Attwood
Walmisley, Alfred E. T. Watson, F. Gilbert Webb (‘Lancelot’ in the Referee),
Egerton Webbe, Samuel Wesley and Henry Wylde, to cite only the first and
last alphabetically. Eleven such critical writers were women, including
Constance Bache, Amelia B. Edwards, Annie E. Keeton, Margery Kennedy-
Fraser, Louise Liebich, Florence Marshall, Rosa Newmarch and Violet Paget
(signing as ‘Vernon Lee’). At least eight writers were also part-owners or
editors of major non-musical titles – Ainsworth (New Monthly Magazine),
Alsager (The Times), Bacon (Norfolk Mercury), C. L. Graves (Spectator), Hunt
(Examiner), Haslam Mills (Guardian), Leonard Rees (Sunday Times) and
25
See Oscar Maurer, Jr, ‘Anonymity vs. Signature in Victorian Reviewing’, Studies in English, 27 (1948),
1–28; and Mary Ruth Hiller, ‘The Identification of Authors: The Great Victorian Enigma’, in J. Don Vann
and Rosemary T. VanArsdel (eds.), Victorian Periodicals: A Guide to Research (New York: Modern Language
Association, 1978). The mammoth task of attributing 89,000 articles in forty key periodicals, some
relevant to music, was achieved by Walter E. Houghton and his team on The Wellesley Index to Victorian
Periodicals, 1824–1900, 5 vols. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966–89).
Runciman (Saturday Review) – indicating press involvement far beyond the

typical music critic’s. A few musical writers even took a proprietary share in
a specialist title so as to control direction or maintain distance from the music
trade, including Kollmann (Quarterly Musical Register); Bacon (Quarterly
Musical Magazine and Review); H. J. Gauntlett, Holmes and Egerton Webbe,
Davison, Francis Hueffer and E. F. Jacques (all Musical World, successively);
Hueffer again (Musical Review, 1883); and W. A. Ellis (Meister). Commerce,
personal ambition and social networks all played a part in the spread of serious
music criticism as public discourse.
As for deliberate occupational identity, though, no one set out at the age of
eighteen to be a career music critic in nineteenth-century Britain.26 Not only
did no such profession exist, with a recognised system of training, qualifica-
tion, pay and progression, but the work itself veered from being too casual or
arbitrary, rooted in short opera, concert and festival seasons in the early part
of the century, to being over-intensive, even exhausting by the Edwardian
period.27 Most writers found their way in by chance or necessity, as an
additional income stream to, say, piano teaching, playwriting, translating or
other kinds of journalism.28 For those already professionally active as music
teachers, performers or composers – just over half the total identified group,
51 per cent – critical writing opened the door to enhanced status and a new
intellectual stimulation.29 For those trained or professionally active outside
music, whether in the theatre, literature, law, business, or occasionally the
church or civil service – the remaining 49 per cent – it offered the chance to
develop an artistic interest perhaps not otherwise encouraged by family or
peers.30 This closely balanced ‘pro-am’ split among published critics might
26
At least two music critics did choose a music-literary path, if not criticism, from an early age. Chorley,
whose Quaker family disdained professional connection with music, was inspired by E. T. A. Hoffmann’s
success as a musical fiction writer and started at the Athenaeum as a book reviewer. J. A. Fuller Maitland
discovered a gift for music research through working on George Grove’s Dictionary after leaving
Cambridge; Grove introduced him to John Morley of the Pall Mall Gazette.
27
‘Pianoforte-playing is becoming an accomplishment most hateful to me. Death is better than eighteen
recitals per week’ (G. B. Shaw, The World, 18 June 1890). At least three late-century critics – Henry Davey,
Ernest Newman and H. A. Scott – held a dystopian view of London’s music scene, thinking it to be
a breeding ground for hack journalists; regional centres were considered better for coherent criticism
because they fostered a more assimilable concert life.
28
As a useful introduction to anonymous newspaper critics, albeit using variable sources, see
Christopher Kent, ‘Critics of Drama, Music and Art, 1830–1914: A Preliminary List’, Victorian
Periodicals Review, 13 (1980), 31–55; and, ‘More Critics of Drama, Music and Art’, Victorian Periodicals
Review, 19 (1986), 99–105.
29
For example, Edward Hodges, John Ella, T. A. Walmisley, Henry Smart, Edward Dannreuther and H.
F. Frost were practising instrumentalists; William Horsley, C. A. Barry, Frederick Corder, Nicholas Gatty,
Hubert Parry, Rutland Boughton, Joseph Holbrooke and Arthur Hervey were active composers.
30
Examples include Leigh Hunt, J. A. Heraud, G. B. Shaw, C. L. Graves (literature, poetry, drama); W. H.
Ainsworth, George Hogarth, William Dauney, Henry J. Gauntlett, W. B. Squire (law); R. M. Bacon,
Edward Taylor, F. G. Edwards, Ernest Newman, E. A. Baughan, Edwin Evans (business or finance); H.
158 LEANNE LANGLEY
seem surprising given the pace of professionalisation over the later nineteenth
century, and the common (mis)perception that writing about music necessa-
rily requires specialist expertise. In fact the balance reflects a long-standing
British view of music as a liberal art, open to a range of higher and journalistic
literary treatments by skilled writers from several backgrounds. More practi-
cally it shows the trend for music in all its forms and styles to be covered in
a proliferating commercial press addressed increasingly to mixed readerships,
especially of weekly and daily illustrated papers.31
The reasons for press proliferation, in turn, shine a light on the long-
range development of British music criticism, from a kind of top-down
assertion of taste authority early in the nineteenth century to a more
heterogeneous, but more representative, reflecting of each journal’s reader-
ship back to itself in later years. This gradual widening, with general titles
cultivating ever more mixed readerships, gathered pace from the 1880s.32
New technologies first stimulated the change through efficiencies in music
and letterpress typography, power-driven printing machines and new illus-
tration methods (Illustrated London News offered a path-breaking mix of
news and images from 1842), then telegraphy for news-gathering and
a rapidly expanding rail network.33 Just as important, though, were stepped
reductions, between 1833 and 1861, in the old repressive taxes on news-
papers, advertisements and paper itself, collectively known as the ‘taxes on
knowledge’. Once these duties were repealed just after mid-century, all
periodicals became dramatically cheaper.34 In 1855 the final quashing of
the newspaper tax opened a new era of ‘free trade in newspapers’.
That year, the Daily Telegraph became the first penny daily to succeed
commercially and soon far outweighed The Times in circulation.35 An
unprecedented expansion of journal output in the 1860s and 70s then
culminated in the emergence of a mass press in the last two decades of
the century. The unceasing thirst for copy implied by so much expansion
indisputably helped to create music critics.
R. Haweis, John Edmund Cox, John Curwen (church); T. L. Peacock, R. A. Streatfeild, A. H. Sidgwick,
Charles Maclean (civil service).
31
A second growth trend from the 1860s occurred in regional papers.
32
Mark Hampton, Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850–1950 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004),
makes a compelling case for the press’s changing role from educator (a widely current view, 1850–90) to
representative voice, with a correlative shift from purveying political debate to purveying news.
33
For elements in production and distribution, see Lucy Brown, Victorian News and Newspapers (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1985).
34
Martin Hewitt, The Dawn of the Cheap Press in Victorian Britain: The End of the ‘Taxes on Knowledge’,
1849–1869 (London: Bloomsbury, 2013), explores the repeal campaign in its wider political context.
35
Richard D. Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), App. C, ‘Periodical and Newspaper Circulation’, pp. 394–5,
shows The Times hovering around 60,000 in the 1860s, the Daily Telegraph at 200,000 by c. 1870.
On the reader’s side, such economic changes were accompanied by far-reaching

political and social shifts. The Second Reform Act, the Representation of the
People Act 1867, opened the franchise to a wider segment of society. Forster’s
Education Act of 1870 stimulated literacy through Board schools and a demand
for graduated material on all subjects. Without specifying numbers, the novelist
and historian Walter Besant thought that educative push trebled the number of
UK readers by the 1890s. Including colonial policies over a seventy-year period,
Besant imagined the magnitude of the rise to be even greater – from 50,000
English-speaking readers in 1830 to 120 million by the late 1890s.36 Whatever the
actual numbers, new opportunities promised newspaper and periodical writers
the chance to make a real living. For music critics as for other journalists, though,
a paradox emerged: with increased readerships, more work to do and constant
new titles, ‘journalist’ as an occupational identity dropped in respectability by
1900, somehow hinting at compromise and lack of integrity. All kinds of critics
might be more professionally and even financially secure by the end of the
century, but they lost the higher social status associated with ‘serious writers’.37
A gap opened up between journalism and literature that had not been present in
Dickens’s day.
Solid information on pay is hard to pin down. Obviously a music critic’s
rank and experience, together with a journal’s reputation and the job in hand,
had a bearing. Circumstances varied widely. In 1813–26, through his close
connection to the Philharmonic Society, William Ayrton acted as ‘honorary’
(unpaid) music critic for the Morning Chronicle, contributing occasional con-
cert reviews. By contrast, in 1823–33 he was paid £512 a year to write or
commission, edit and pay for all the music and literary content, including
reviews, in William Clowes’s music monthly, the Harmonicon.38 If Ayrton
retained, say, half that amount as part of his annual earnings, it will have
made a healthy addition to his teaching and other work. In the same period
William Hazlitt, probably the greatest English literary and art critic of the age
(among other things, he mused on opera audiences for the Examiner), got the
generous rate of fifteen guineas a sheet from the monthly London Magazine and
sixteen from the New Monthly Magazine.39 Those same two titles also carried
36
Besant’s views, from The Pen and the Book (1899, with a chapter on journalism as a career), are reported
in Nigel Cross, The Common Writer: Life in Nineteenth-Century Grub Street (Cambridge: Cambridge
37
See Catherine Gallagher’s review of Cross’s Common Writer, in American Historical Review, 92 (1987),
662–4. This devaluation and, from the 1880s, the fast-rising number of titles covering increasingly
complex music, fostered calls to regulate the music-critical profession.
38
Leanne Langley, ‘The Life and Death of The Harmonicon: An Analysis’, RMA Research Chronicle, 22
(1989), 143–4.
39
Jonathan Bate, ‘Hazlitt, William’, in H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds.), Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004) [ODNB].
160 LEANNE LANGLEY
focused music essays by R. M. Bacon, who, if he got anything close to Hazlitt’s

rate, would have done well.40 Such a pay level was unusual, however. More
typical for weekly and daily staff critics was a low starting salary that might
rise gradually. In 1833, when inexperienced, Henry Chorley accepted £50 ‘for
six months of journalistic drudgery’ at the Athenaeum, reviewing assigned
books weekly.41 It was a paltry sum but still higher than a part-time organist’s
job would have paid, and more than twice what Percy Scholes was to earn in
1912 as assistant to J. S. Shedlock for weekly music coverage in the Queen
(forerunner of Harper’s Bazaar) – £40 a year.42 Only three years earlier, in
1909, the composer G. H. Clutsam reportedly received £3 10s. a week for his
regular Sunday Observer column: not high but, again, a useful part-time addi-
tion to a package of earnings.43 Where the responsibility was larger, say,
covering both music and drama on a daily basis, the rate was commensurately
higher. Dickens hired his father-in-law George Hogarth for just such a role at
the Daily News in 1846 at five guineas a week, the same starting salary he
himself had once received to cover parliamentary proceedings for the Morning
Chronicle.
Although a figure is as yet undiscovered, J. W. Davison’s Times salary
deserves mention for a different reason: it continued to be paid to him in
full as a pension from 1878 to his death in 1885 (long after Hueffer had
replaced him), a rare gesture.44 Few if any others were so lucky. Indeed,
even with peripatetic writing for more than one journal and income from
teaching, books and other sources, some music critics could barely survive. At
least ten of them or their dependants applied for subsistence grants to the
Royal Literary Fund, including Morris Barnett, Holmes, Hullah, Gauntlett,
C. L. Gruneisen, C. L. Kenney, W. S. Rockstro and Desmond Ryan.45 The
years 1820 to 1840 were the leanest for all English authors. Yet because the
press industry was expanding too, it potentially offered more scope than
a different career already begun – in Hogarth’s case, his Edinburgh law
practice.46 In 1830 he detected real possibilities in journalism, took successive
posts covering politics in London, Exeter and Halifax besides writing music
40
On music essays in the London and New Monthly, see Langley, ‘English Musical Journal’, 499–505.
41
Robert Bledsoe, ‘Chorley, Henry Fothergill’, in ODNB.
42
J. O. Ward (revised), ‘Scholes, Percy Alfred’, in ODNB.
43
Kent, ‘Critics of Drama, Music and Art’, 32. Sixty years earlier Edward Holmes got a slightly smaller
figure for his weekly Atlas column.
44
Bennett, Forty Years, p. 287.
45
Nigel Cross, The Royal Literary Fund, 1790–1918: An Introduction to the Fund’s History and Archives with an
Index of Applicants (London: World Microfilms Publications, 1984). The RLF Archive is now in the British
Library.
46
On the emerging profession of journal authorship, see Linda H. Peterson, ‘Writing for Periodicals’, in
Andrew King, Alexis Easley and John Morton (eds.), The Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British
Periodicals and Newspapers (London: Routledge, 2016).
reviews, then settled definitively in London as a musical writer in 1834; he

never looked back. At various times he wrote on music regularly for the
Morning Chronicle, Illustrated London News, Daily News and Examiner, also con-
tributing simultaneously to many other papers.47
While the pluralism in this pattern suggests a low-paid, insecure
occupation – with modern implications for weighing press opinion
where, for example, several papers publishing broadly similar views can
be traced to one and the same (anonymous) writer48 – that in itself was
not necessarily sinister or a sign of bad work. Indeed, writing for more
than one publication was ubiquitous across the press industry, not only
for news reporters but for all journalists, including political commenta-
tors and arts reviewers.49 To cite a particularly relevant situation, regular
music columns became a feature of several London weeklies and dailies
from the 1840s, with hikes in coverage shadowing the high social season,
February to June; since more than one reporter was required and music
reviews were seen to help sell a paper, savvy writers at each event could
gain multiple assignments. It was not until the early 1870s that peripa-
tetic work began to be discouraged at some titles in favour of exclusivity
clauses. From 1874 the Daily Telegraph required Joseph Bennett to give
up his Sunday Times, Pall Mall Gazette and Graphic posts to serve the
Telegraph alone; in 1875 Davison ceased writing for the Saturday Review
because that journal wanted its own exclusive music critic.50 In this way
measurable status, not just pay or rumours of bribery – which in any case
could have had little actual effect in such a deep market51 – tended to
raise the individual critic’s profile.
Status aside, private feelings and hidden motives might affect a critic’s
remarks at any time. Money, personal friendship and the hope of association
were obvious culprits where, for instance, Davison lauded music he did not
47
Lillian Nayder, The Other Dickens: A Life of Catherine Hogarth (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2011),
describes Hogarth’s work in the context of rearing a large family. Needing income, he had learned from
the 1820s how to change his political position to suit different papers, a flexibility transferred to music;
whatever his private opinions, he felt he had to ‘earnestly, yet temperately and dispassionately’ advocate
the paper’s views (Hogarth to W. Ayrton, 21 October 1833, British Library Add. MS 52338, f.91v; cited in
Nayder, p. 44).
48
Hogarth’s simultaneous reviews of Verdi’s I Lombardi in mid-May 1846 (Daily News, Illustrated London
News, Examiner) are a case in point; Leanne Langley, ‘Italian Opera and the English Press, 1836–1856’,
Periodica Musica, 6 (1988), 3–10.
49
Brown, Victorian News and Newspapers, pp. 112–15, gives J. A. Spender, T. H. S. Escott and George
Saunders as examples. Davison advised Berlioz that his Times review of a New Philharmonic Society
concert in mid-June 1855 had been displaced by news from the Crimea, but that another one would appear
in the Musical World.
50
Bennett, Forty Years, p. 217; Henry Davison, comp., Music during the Victorian Era: From Mendelssohn to
Wagner, being the Memoirs of J. W. Davison (London: Wm Reeves, 1912), p. 313.
51
Caves, Creative Industries, pp. 192–3. Ayrton and Davison are known to have declined bribes.
162 LEANNE LANGLEY
care for or understand (Chopin’s, because Davison was in debt to that com-
poser’s London publisher; Berlioz’s, for personal camaraderie), or where,
a further example, Chorley promoted Mendelssohn’s music a little too
overtly, as Hueffer did Alexander Mackenzie’s later, each hoping to become
the composer’s future librettist.52 Conversely, Davison’s privileging of
Mendelssohnian style and his marriage to the pianist Arabella Goddard must
have influenced his persistently negative approach to Robert Schumann
(whose music was promoted in London by the formidable taste-making
pianist Clara Schumann, Robert’s wife).53 Conflict of interest more generally
could have touched Hogarth, Henry Hersee (Observer) and Campbell Clarke
(Daily Telegraph, Athenaeum), all of whom mixed music criticism with work as
a concert or artist agent.54 Most blatant, the critic Desmond Ryan went too far
when, in the mid-1860s, he tried to stage a London concert for his own
benefit, expecting participants to perform for free: they pilloried him for
attempting to blackmail their profession.55
Less obvious to modern readers are the guilt-by-association cases in which
grievance about a non-musical issue coloured music critique in print.
Beethoven, for example, became a scapegoat in some of William Horsley’s
more heated reactions of the mid-1820s, after Philharmonic Society expendi-
ture on the composer – including commissioning and rehearsals for the Ninth
Symphony – had exacerbated factionalism within the Society, of which
Horsley was a founding member.56 G. B. Shaw found it impossible to take
the music of Brahms seriously, so wedded was the Irishman to condemning
the academic tones of Stanford and Parry, whose god was Brahms. H. H.
Statham used Schubert’s music as a proxy to attack George Grove, who had
earlier demoted Statham as a contributor to his Dictionary.57 Private resent-
ments may not invalidate the specific critique, of course, and any notion of
52
Robert Terrell Bledsoe, Henry Fothergill Chorley: Victorian Journalist (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998), pp.
96–102; Leanne Langley, ‘Novello’s “Neue Zeitschrift”: 1883, Francis Hueffer and The Musical Review’,
Brio, 45 (2008), 14–27.
53
Davison’s Schumann critique grew from what he saw as the pretentiousness of progressive German
composers after Beethoven when compared with Beethoven himself; see ‘Philharmonic Concerts’, The
Times (31 May 1864), and Davison, Music during the Victorian Era, p. 184.
54
All three were at different times Secretary of the Philharmonic Society, a concert promoter; Clarke also
worked for Vladimir de Pachmann in Paris.
55
Davison, Music during the Victorian Era, pp. 276–8; and Christine Kyprianides, ‘Musical Crimes and
Misdemeanors from the Pages of the Orchestra (1863–81)’, paper delivered at the Annual Meeting of the
American Musicological Society, Vancouver (2016).
56
Arthur Searle, ‘The First British Performances of Beethoven’s “Choral” Symphony: The Philharmonic
Society and Sir George Smart’, Electronic British Library Journal (2010), article 4, 1–30, esp. 19–21, available
at www.bl.uk/eblj/2010articles/article4.html. Horsley’s despairing piece appeared in Quarterly Musical
Magazine and Review, 7 (1825), 80–4.
57
Leanne Langley, ‘Roots of a Tradition: The First Dictionary of Music and Musicians’, in Michael Musgrave
(ed.), George Grove, Music and Victorian Culture (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 188 and notes
106–7.
perfect objectivity was a chimera anyway; music critics are only human like
anyone else, including composers.58 But hobby horses, interpersonal rivalries
and other hidden agendas can often provide much-needed context where
a comment seems illogical, a tone over-exaggerated.
Similarly, insider language, jest and jibe, all classic components in the
critic’s toolkit, can add to a modern reader’s confusion, even misinterpreta-
tion. Fleet Street’s highly politicised bohemian culture in the 1840s, 50s and
60s, for instance, included a clique of music and drama critics around Davison
whom he was presumed to control. His editorial persona as ‘Q’ in the Musical
World (1843–4) silently imitated Douglas Jerrold’s biting ‘Q’ character in
Punch; Davison used it, among other things, to attack the Morning Post’s real
music critic, Gruneisen, as if he were Jerrold’s invented commentator
‘Jenkins’. Together with other parodic devices for straddling multiple papers,
Davison’s tack partook more of comic journalism and overt theatricality than
of serious criticism, a performative ploy not always appreciated later.59 He
was joined or followed in the satirical trend by writers such as Henry
Sutherland Edwards and C. W. Shirley Brooks (sometimes ‘Charles
Brooks’), who often pounced for their own malicious entertainment.60
Whether writing as G. B. S. or ‘Corno di Bassetto’, Shaw too was famous for
his mocking tone, but at least he explained himself. He wanted to write such
readable copy that even ‘deaf stockbrokers’ would follow his columns and be
stimulated to think. Where his underlying purpose was to electioneer for
a cause or argue sociopolitical change through music discussion, he never left
the reader in doubt about his larger point.61
Three Voices: Gatekeeping, Advocacy, Reflection

‘No’, ‘Yes’ and ‘I’m still thinking about it’ sound a bit simplistic as critical
responses to music. Yet together they outline the spectrum of opinion
58
For an illuminating look at one composer’s reactions to press treatment, see Aidan Thomson, ‘Elgar’s
Critical Critics’, in Byron Adams (ed.), Edward Elgar and His World (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2007).
59
Langley, ‘English Musical Journal’, 573–85. Bennett, Forty Years, pp. 222–5, identifies some of
Davison’s invented ‘Muttonian’ voices.
60
On bohemian Fleet Street see Cross, Common Writer, pp. 90–125; on comic journalism and a ‘functional
brotherhood’ under one journalist, see Patrick Leary’s fascinating The Punch Brotherhood: Table Talk and
Print Culture in Mid-Victorian London (London: The British Library Board, 2010). Davison’s shenanigans
and his perceived control of taste indeed fostered a low reputation for much mid-Victorian music
criticism, but practices improved by c. 1910; see Arthur Hervey, ‘Concerning Musical Criticism’,
Musical Times, 52 (1911), 373–5.
61
Stanley Weintraub, ‘Shaw, George Bernard’, in ODNB. For example, his unsigned ‘Music for the
People’, in Musical Review, 1 (1883), 157–8, 173–4, compares four concert-giving initiatives to advance
an argument for separating music from philanthropy (Langley, ‘Novello’s “Neue Zeitschrift”’, 22).
164 LEANNE LANGLEY
available, in turn suggesting parallels with writerly perspective, or voice, as

pointers to the function of a critical piece. In increasing degree of personal
investment, these move from basic gatekeeping to impassioned advocacy and
from both of those to critical reflection. A writer might rarely deploy two
voices in a single critique. More often, critics take time and perhaps more than
one outlet to develop distinct approaches. Voice is offered here as a way to
query and enrich the narrative of British music criticism, so often portrayed
monophonically as if from a single (often naysaying) perspective. Looking for
voice can reveal multiple functions overlapping as well as the impact of
performance culture, repeat listening and public reaction on critics them-
selves. A gatekeeper may not always say ‘no’, but his method still invokes some
kind of test against prior models. He weighs up good and bad to reach
a judgement about whether the subject passes muster or not – say, print
quality in a music edition, vocal delivery in an opera performance or the
coherence of a large instrumental work. The gatekeeper’s vigilance is meant
to inform and protect consumers against shoddy goods. By contrast an advo-
cate’s voice, sometimes polemical, argues for or against a particular music
with some passion, explaining context, opening a fresh attitude, exposing an
issue precisely to stir debate and generate thought, stimulating belief or
resistance. At a further remove, maybe a more mature career stage, the
reflective voice declares its own history, using a review to record a journey,
perhaps ending with altered opinion after deepened experience. Seeking to
understand his or her own reactions, the reflective critic affirms the possibility
of growth.
All these voices weave through early nineteenth-century Beethoven criti-
cism. From the mid-1820s to the 1840s the main divide was less about
Beethoven’s greatness, hardly doubted in England, than the manner and
meaning of his challenge to Classical norms in the late symphonies and
quartets. Since aural expectations had been exploded for all Beethoven listen-
ers, what distinguished each critic was his degree of willingness to work at
understanding such difficult pieces and to suggest meaning for them. William
Ayrton (Harmonicon) and William Horsley (Quarterly Musical Magazine and
Review), both diehard gatekeepers with eighteenth-century sensibilities,
seized on what they heard as excessive length and lack of intelligible design
in the late symphonies, Ayrton blaming the composer’s impetuosity as a chief
weakness.62 With successive hearings and better performances, however,
Ayrton began to reflect. Remarking repeatedly on what from 1824 seemed
62
Harmonicon, 3 (1825), 69–70; Harmonicon, 8 (1830), 216; and Langley, ‘English Musical Journal’, 384–8.
the ‘interminable . . . narcotic’ Sixth Symphony, by 1830 he could observe that

this work had
won amazingly in the affections of the people in this country. At first it was
not in much favour, and we confess ourselves among the number of those who
did not discern some of its merits. We have since discovered many beauties
which, perhaps, inefficient performances concealed; though we remain of
opinion that it would be improved by curtailment, particularly in the
andante.63
Before 1830, Ayrton had also wavered on Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony,

flummoxed by its structure, above all the finale’s relation to the rest of the
work; yet after its first full public performance by the Philharmonic Society in
March 1825, he at least admitted the symphony’s ingenuity and vigour despite
uncertain presentation.64 By comparison, Ayrton’s friends Horsley and
Alsager offered more extreme, opposing views, Horsley writing a prolix con-
demnation after the symphony’s final rehearsal in London (Quarterly Musical
Magazine and Review), and Alsager briefly but consistently maintaining his
open-minded welcome to this latest demonstration of Beethoven’s ‘grandeur
of conception’ and ‘originality of style’ (Times).65 More articulate in general
advocacy eleven years later was H. J. Gauntlett, in a multi-part signed analy-
tical article in the Musical World on Beethoven’s style traits, itself moderating
between extremes by showing how the composer had ‘enlarged the bound-
aries of the art’ to excite feelings.66 Only a year afterwards, Ignaz Moscheles
conducted a revelatory Philharmonic performance of the Ninth Symphony,
enthusiastically welcomed by another Musical World writer with open ears,
probably Edward Holmes.67
Reviews of Beethoven’s late string quartets followed a similar pattern
between 1836 and 1850.68 Sceptical gatekeepers (Chorley, Edward Taylor,
Hogarth) and warm advocates alike (Alsager, John Ella, Holmes, Davison,
Gruneisen) admitted the challenges. Hogarth, an amateur cellist who much
admired the composer, struggled more than most. Frustrated by his own
inability to comprehend the quartets, he eventually gave up, falling back on
Beethoven’s deafness as explanation; in this case, even earnest reflection had
its limits. Complaints mirrored those for the late symphonies, including
63
Harmonicon, 2 (1824), 77; Harmonicon, 8 (1830), 174.
64
Harmonicon, 3 (1825), 69. Ayrton never fully accepted the symphony.
65
Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review, 7 (1825), 80–4; Times (3 February 1825). Horsley’s piece came to
symbolise extreme British resistance to late Beethoven. It was challenged. See also note 56 above.
66
‘Characteristics of Beethoven’, Musical World, 1 (1836), 21–5, 53–8, 117–22, 197–202.
67
‘Philharmonic Society’, Musical World, 5 (1837), 93.
68
Thoroughly discussed in Bashford, ‘Late Beethoven Quartets’.
166 LEANNE LANGLEY
movement length and structural unpredictability, now with abrupt tempo

changes. The most open writers, those of a younger generation, still gained
insight with repeated exposure. Beethoven’s music forced them to stretch
their language and find more positive, dramatic ways of relating what they
heard. By the 1840s most British critics recognised that the difficulties lay
with their own perceptions, not the composer, who was variously seen as
a poet, a god or someone ahead of his time. Higher performing standards
(rehearsals), increasingly adept players, and attentive listening with scores all
aided the assimilation process.69
Similar trajectories might be explored for any number of composers whose
music was new to Britain, especially when it challenged listener expectations,
local performing conditions or the sensitivities of newly self-conscious British
musicians. On early Verdi, for example, critical consensus moved in three stages
between 1845 and 1856: from mixed but open-minded reaction (Ernani, Nabucco,
I Lombardi), to solidly unfavourable opinion (I masnadieri, I due Foscari, Attila), to
a clear division into two camps – interested acceptance and sneering hostility
(Rigoletto, Il trovatore, La traviata).70 The hostility, led by Davison (Musical World
and Times) and Howard Glover (Morning Post), stemmed from jealousy on behalf
of English dramatic composers, laced with the usual histrionics and acid wit.71
More representative were Chorley, Hogarth and Holmes who, if not enthusiastic
still took the Italian composer seriously. For all writers, the basic stumbling
blocks were Verdi’s perceived lack of (conventional) melody, apparently wilful
imbalance in orchestration and part-writing, and sometimes confusing or mor-
bid plots. It was Holmes, again, who exemplified both reflection and advocacy
when, after his recent negative impressions of modern Italian opera, he warmed
to Nabucco for its dramatic conception and musical characterisation:
This is just what our lyric stage wants. So many operas consist of a fuss about
nothing, that when we get a character to excite real interest, it is a matter to be
grateful for . . . Here music and poetry are one and the self-same . . . Never was
a . . . difficult subject more admirably treated in music. Its success in realising
the emotions which the composer desired to create is perfect; and whatever
Verdi may hereafter do, whatever may be his ultimate position, here at least it
must be allowed that he has attained a completeness of effect and an elevation
of style unprecedented in the musical productions of modern Italy.72
A year later, in February 1848, Holmes made another remarkable volte-face,

this time on the whole idea of programme music after being surprised and
delighted by Berlioz’s Harold en Italie. Holmes admitted in his Atlas review
69
Ibid., 108–12. 70
Langley, ‘Italian Opera’, 7–10. 71
Lipman, ‘James William Davison’, p. 208.
72
‘Her Majesty’s Theatre’, Atlas (6 March 1847).
that he had gone to the Drury Lane concert a sceptic (‘we went among the
most mistrusting and infidel of the audience’).73 Won over by Berlioz’s poetic
imagination, he soon became one of the composer’s keenest advocates,
arguing in Fraser’s Magazine for more and better London orchestral
opportunities.74 A salutary parallel lies in the changed minds of critics on
other subjects too, sometimes many years after what had seemed their settled
opinions. Ayrton eventually came round to the beauties of J. S. Bach; Davison
responded deeply to late Beethoven, Schubert, even Tristan, after once dis-
missing them; E. A. Baughan shifted to ‘positive’ his early negative view of
state subsidy for a national opera house; Shaw ultimately admitted value in
both Brahms and Sullivan, as Fuller Maitland did (in his autobiography) for
Strauss and Debussy. A telling hallmark of Ernest Newman’s work, broadly,
was that his views developed.75 Time’s effect worked on many writers.
British Wagner reception exhibits a particularly broad set of overlapping
voices, which remain to be studied in depth sequentially from the early 1850s
to 1914. Far from tracing a clear path (resistance to deification), this material
follows a winding, cross-cut road. It starts with Wagner’s conflicted personal
appearances in London in 1855, in which Davison’s wonderment over the
composer’s inept conducting (not least compared with that of Berlioz, also in
town) fuelled scepticism about his character, intent and ability as a system-
maker.76 A fifteen-year stasis followed: little of Wagner’s music was heard in
London, although press derision continued, provoked by the composer’s
posturing. Only in the early 1870s with Francis Hueffer’s evangelical writing,
and soon Edward Dannreuther’s practical insight (Hueffer was no musician),
did a fuller unfolding of theoretical ideas conjoined to musical means enter
the discourse, notably in literary journals (Fortnightly Review, Nineteenth
Century, Athenaeum, Saturday Review). Despite some distortion from
Hueffer’s misplaced emphases and his desire to be seen as chief UK apologist,
Wagner’s aesthetic project grew clearer.77
73
‘A First Impression of the Genius of Hector Berlioz’, Atlas (12 February 1848). Berlioz was thrilled by
the concert and Holmes’s perceptive review, toppling ‘the edifice of theories . . . constructed here . . . on
the strength of idiotic critics from the continent. Thank God the entire English press has spoken with
extraordinary warmth’ (Berlioz to Joseph d’Ortigue (15 March 1848)).
74
‘Hector Berlioz’, Fraser’s Magazine, 38 (1848), 421–7, a major biographical-critical piece in the best
London monthly of educated liberal opinion. For more on Berlioz reception beyond his lifetime, see
Leanne Langley, ‘Agency and Change: Berlioz in Britain, 1870–1920’, Journal of the Royal Musical
Association, 132 (2007), 306–48.
75
See Paul Watt, Ernest Newman: A Critical Biography (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2017).
76
Kathy Fry, ‘Music and Character in the Victorian Reception of Wagner: Conducting the Philharmonic
ca. 1855’, in Sarah Collins (ed.), Composing the Liberal Subject: Liberalism and Victorian Music Culture
77
Mark S. Asquith gives a careful summary, highlighting the English periodical press as conduit for
a more coherent discussion of Wagner’s theories than the composer’s own writings offered, in ‘Francis
168 LEANNE LANGLEY
By the time of the London Wagner Festival of 1877, and especially from
1879 with Hans Richter’s commanding orchestral performances, a fruitful
understanding of theory and music became possible together. Already in the
mid-1870s two remarkable stagings, though in Italian, had begun to alter
critical minds (Lohengrin, 1875; Tannhäuser, 1876). Surging public and critical
response to Richter’s concerts, together with impressively good opera pro-
ductions in German (1882, 1884) and yet further Wagner orchestral program-
ming in the 1890s, led to a near mania. By the early 1900s Wagner’s music was
not only acceptable in London but, to some listeners, old hat in the wake of
newer musics from Russia and Scandinavia. All along, successive trails of
Wagnerism had pulled the composer’s protean ideas into wider artistic and
ideological debates fostering sectarian rivalry among outspoken Wagnerites
themselves – William Ashton Ellis, Shaw, Dannreuther and Runciman. The
composer’s ability to polarise critical discourse continued long after the
public had embraced his music. Meanwhile in Ireland, Wagner productions
actively helped elevate critical standards.78
The three voices can be easily identified throughout this giant exchange.
Joseph Bennett was at times more gatekeeper than Davison or Chorley, dissect-
ing Hueffer’s argument around Wagner and Schopenhauer to discredit Hueffer
himself. Other gatekeepers included Louis Engel, morally indignant at the Ring’s
incest (a rare view), and Edmund Gurney, unhappy with Wagner’s melodic
theories ‘substituting stream for structure’ (a more common critique).79 Strong
advocates covered a range of positions, too, dependent on readership, aim and
interpretative strategy, from Frederick Corder, Barry, E. F. Jacques and Prout, to
Shaw, Runciman and Newman. Admitting openly their inclination to reassess,
both Davison and Klein reflected on personal discovery of Wagner’s skill as
dramatic poet, hence his music’s deeper beauty and his genuine claim to artistic
integrity: they had at last witnessed coherent productions instead of concert-
room snatches.80 Davison felt his own quiet turning point in 1875:
It seems almost incredible that Wagner the poet should also be Wagner the
composer. Whatever may be said, and from whatever point of view, about the
music of Wagner, and the theory upon which he constructs it, . . . to deny his
high poetical tendency, even in his musical treatment of the subjects he
appropriates, would be absurd. We may question the soundness of his
Hueffer and the Early Reception of Richard Wagner’s Aesthetics in England’, in Jörg W. Rademacher
(ed.), Modernism and the Individual Talent: Re-Canonizing Ford Madox Ford (Hueffer) (Münster: LIT, 2002).
78
Michael Murphy, ‘The Musical Press in Nineteenth-Century Ireland’, in Michael Murphy and
Jan Smaczny (eds.), Music in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2007).
79
Asquith, ‘Francis Hueffer’, p. 142, notes 89 and 95.
80
For the significance of Klein’s public turnaround (Sunday Times) after the 1882 London production of
Tristan und Isolde, see his Musicians and Mummers (London: Cassell & Co., 1925), pp. 177–9.
theories; we have often questioned it . . . But what cannot fail to enlist sym-
pathy is earnestness which carries him with more or less artistic self-
contentment through every task he sets himself.81
As before in English critical writing, ethical underpinning now allowed the

gate to open.
***
The approaches to periodic music criticism suggested here offer a framework
for further study. Surprisingly perhaps, much of the material is more thought-
ful and engaged, the subjects livelier and the views more contested than
previous accounts have indicated. And though few readers would posit lit-
erary greatness for the writing, especially in mid- and late-century dips where
content can be banal and judgements blustering, all of it forms part of the
greater story of how music and musicians gained purchase in the UK public
sphere. Reading and listening audiences, new and discerning alike, increas-
ingly joined the conversation, stimulated by music’s power to create a sense of
community. For scholars, this material’s immediacy is the positive side of its
ephemerality, opening a vanished world of sound, fury and delight; the ideas
are most telling when read in sequence and placed in time and context, like
music itself. Latterly for some high-minded critics, too many voices over-
lapped, disparate and unregulated. Calls were made for gatekeeping the gate-
keepers, with proper training and standards in what by the Edwardian period
had become a solid if still remarkably haphazard profession. Experts needed
sorting from the pundits. ‘Musicology’ and its own discontents could surely
not be far away.
81
‘Lohengrin’, The Times (10 May 1875).
.9.
Constructing a Musical Nation: German-Language

Criticism in the Nineteenth Century
LAURA TUNBRIDGE
In 1799 Friedrich Rochlitz, founding editor of the Leipzig-based Allgemeine

musikalische Zeitung, wrote about the importance of music for the develop-
ment of the German nation.1 It was a political statement at a time when
German-speaking lands were not yet unified but a loose confederations of
states.2 By aligning music with Germanness, and with history, Rochlitz and
subsequent critics also elevated the art form from being considered mere
entertainment to being treated as a meaningful discourse that could stand
alongside literature and philosophy. Importantly, it was the way in which
music was written about, as much as the exceptional achievements of indivi-
dual musicians, which enabled the view that music was ‘the most German of
the arts’.3 During the nineteenth century, German-language music criticism
thus not only proliferated and professionalised; it also played a vital role in
imagining the construction of the nation.4
The ambition of Rochlitz’s Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (AMZ) was mark-
edly different from previous German-language music journals.5 During the
eighteenth century, as literacy rates and printing technologies improved, and
1
Friedrich Rochlitz, ‘Vorschläge zu Betrachtungen über die neueste Geschichte der Musik’, Allgemeine
musikalische Zeitung, 1 (1798/1799); quoted in Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter, ‘Germans as the “People
of Music”: Genealogy of an Identity’, in Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter (eds.), Music and German
National Identity (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002), p. 4.
2
Germany was unified in 1871; Austria remained part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until the First
World War. For a historical overview see John Breuilly (ed.), 19th-Century Germany: Politics, Culture and
Society 1780–1918 (New York and London: Arnold/Oxford University Press, 1997/2001).
3
The phrase is discussed with regard to the twentieth century in Pamela Potter, Most German of the Arts:
Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler’s Reich (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1998).
4
Current writers on music and nationalism are wary of according Germany and Austria too much
privilege or, at least, are intent on demonstrating how notions about the superiority of German music
were contingent on multiple factors, including views from abroad; see, for instance, Peter van der
Merwe’s Roots of the Classical: The Popular Origins of Western Music (Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 2004). An alternative view is offered by Celia Applegate, The Necessity of Music:
Variations on a German Theme (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017).
5
On late eighteenth-century journals see Stephen Rose’s essay, Chapter 6 in this volume; Mary Sue
Morrow, German Music Criticism in the Late Eighteenth Century: Aesthetic Issues in Instrumental Music
[170]
Constructing a Musical Nation: German-Language Criticism 171
as consumption of novels and journalism increased, there had been a surge in

literary criticism designed to educate a new, middle-class readership. The
AMZ, founded in 1798, was, similarly, an Enlightenment project, and would
contribute towards the development of an aesthetics of ‘serious’ music in the
nineteenth century.6 Yet its intended readership was not only aestheticians
but also musicians and music-lovers who were eager to understand as much as
enjoy.7 The journal’s title seems bland but, as historian Celia Applegate
observes, was ‘[a] small masterpiece of marketing’.8 Its claim to generality
(Allgemeine) pointed to a wider readership than previous, connoisseur- and
professional-oriented music publications. It was also significant that it did not
describe itself as a Zeitschrift (journal) but as a Zeitung (newspaper), which
falsely suggested daily editions and an extensive readership. In other words,
the type of music criticism established by the AMZ helped redefine boundaries
between practitioners and audiences, between professionals and amateurs,
between art and entertainment, and between nation states. Moreover, like
many of the journals that followed in its wake, the AMZ was invested to some
degree in explaining the significance of music: its relative worth and – an
always contentious issue in the nineteenth century – its meaning.
When discussing nineteenth-century music aesthetics we tend to rely on
books and treatises: on, say, Eduard Hanslick’s Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (On the
Musically Beautiful, 1854) rather than his hundreds of concert reviews.9
However, philosophical and political ideas about music could filter into
what we might call everyday criticism, and can be a useful way to distinguish
key trends in aesthetic thought.10 One of the challenges of writing about
German-language music criticism in the nineteenth century, though, is the
overwhelming amount of material available.11 It took some time before the
AMZ had a serious competitor, but the number of music journals increased
dramatically through the decades, not to mention the newspapers, more
6
Leon Botstein, ‘Listening through Reading: Musical Literacy and the Concert Audience’, 19th-Century
Music, 16/2 (Autumn 1992), 129–45.
7
On the middle-class readership of the AMZ see Martha Bruckner-Bigenwald, Die Anfänge der Leipziger
Allgemeinen musikalischen Zeitung (Hilversum: Frits A. M. Knuf, 1965); Sanna Pederson, ‘Enlightened and
Romantic German Music Criticism, 1800–1850’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of
Pennsylvania (1995), 63–5.
8
Celia Applegate, Bach in Berlin: Nation and Culture in Mendelssohn’s Revival of the St Matthew Passion
(Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005), p. 88.
9
This is not to say that Vom Musikalisch-Schönen was insignificant: Lee A. Rothfarb describes its publica-
tion as a ‘watershed moment’ in ‘Nineteenth-Century Fortunes of Musical Formalism’, Journal of Music
Theory, 55/2 (2011), 167–220.
10
James Garratt makes a similar point in ‘Values and Judgements’, in Stephen Downes (ed.) Aesthetics of
Music: Musicological Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2014), p. 32.
11
Availability via digital resources remains more limited than for English-language periodicals, however.
The Retrospective Index to Music Periodicals (RIPM) provides helpful introductions to many nineteenth-
century German-language journals, as well as providing a database of articles.
172 LAURA TUNBRIDGE
general magazines and feuilletons that also covered musical topics and events.
Although, as we will see, these publications played an important part in
extending musical networks, as is often evident in their titles (with the
notable exception of the AMZ), most reflected the interests of a particular
place or group.12 Despite the growing interest in expressions of German
identity, even after unification in 1871 there was no named ‘national’ music
journal (similarly, Vienna continued to dominate the musical life of its
empire). Yet there were a few individuals whose influence reached beyond
their immediate place and time, three of whom are considered here: E. T. A.
Hoffmann, Robert Schumann and Eduard Hanslick.
There is a risk, in selecting such case studies, that this chapter might too
closely resemble the ‘great men’ narratives of contemporary biographies that
many recent historians have tried to unsettle in favour of broader contextual
studies.13 In some ways, music critics of the time resisted such grandstanding:
most had other jobs or interests as well, or during the so-called Age of
Metternich wrote under the threat of censorship; all reasons why they did
not always sign their reviews or wrote under pseudonyms. Hoffmann and
Schumann, though, were also composers, and applauded and defended work
in keeping with their aesthetics or by colleagues they admired; Schumann in
particular conceived his purpose as critic to be fighting against those he
termed the Philistines. Such partisanship on the part of critics became still
more pronounced during the second half of the century, as illustrated by
Hanslick, whose views on music aesthetics (and his championship of Johannes
Brahms) made him an adversary of the circles around Franz Liszt, Richard
Wagner and Anton Bruckner. Hoffmann, Schumann and Hanslick, then,
provide a way into thinking about some of the broader themes raised by
German-language music criticism in the nineteenth century: about the ways
journals facilitated networks and polemics, defined ideas of national identity
and dealt with ideas about what music means.14
12
The opus classicus on the role of print culture in consolidating identities is Benedict Anderson’s
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised ed. (London: Verso, 2006).
A critique of Anderson that carefully considers issues of locality alongside imagined nations is Angharad
Closs Stephens’s The Persistence of Nationalism (New York: Routledge, 2013).
13
The exemplar of the ‘Great Man’ music history is Raphael Georg Kiesewetter’s Geschichte der europäisch-
abendländischen oder unsrer heutigen Musik (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1846); for more on him, see
Gundula Kreuzer, ‘Heilige Trias, Stildualismus, Beethoven: On the Limits of Nineteenth-Century
Germanic Music Historiography’, in Nicholas Mathew and Benjamin Walton (eds.), The Invention of
Beethoven and Rossini: Historiography, Analysis, Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013);
more generally Jim Samson, ‘The Great Composer’, in Jim Samson (ed.), The Cambridge History of
Nineteenth-Century Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
14
The potential for music criticism to be discussed in terms of Actor Network Theory, with reference to
Franz Brendel (as presented in Richard Taruskin’s Oxford History of Western Music, vol. I I I (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2005), pp. 411–42), is discussed in Benjamin Piekut, ‘Actor-Networks in Music
History: Clarifications and Critiques’, Twentieth-Century Music, 11/2 (September 2014), 191–215.
One further caveat: I concentrate on symphonic music here because that is

the genre most closely associated with defining Germany musically, although
that association reflects mid-twentieth-century musicology’s preoccupation
with instrumental music more than nineteenth-century practices. An alter-
native narrative might be told by looking instead at opera, a profusion of
which was noted in German lands at the start of the nineteenth century.15
Musicologist Albrecht Riethmüller has noted that the notion of a canon of
great works was most prominent in symphonic repertory, which favoured
native composers; by contrast, opera ‘remained international in scope’.16 The
‘foreignness’ of much opera made it figure as a threatening other in discourse
about national identities, most obviously as manifest in the writings on the
‘twin styles’ of Rossini and Beethoven.17 Yet opera was performed frequently
and covered extensively by the musical and daily press. Historians tend to
highlight the negative comments made about Italian or French opera by
German critics in the mid-nineteenth century (Schumann, for instance, dis-
missed Meyerbeer’s Les Huguenots as ‘calculatedly shallow’ music).18 Often
critical discussions would touch on the importance of cultivating a national
style or school, or of nurturing homegrown performers, preoccupations that
intensified with the rise of Wagnerism in the second half of the century. But
this disregards the very real presence of opera from around Europe on German
stages and in German-language journals, especially in large cities such as
Berlin and Vienna.19 Taking the continued cosmopolitanism of German
15
According to John Warrack, German Opera: From the Beginnings to Wagner (Cambridge: Cambridge
16
Albrecht Riethmüller, ‘“Is That Not Something for Simplicissimus?!” The Belief in Musical Superiority’,
in Applegate and Potter (eds.), Music and German National Identity, p. 296.
17
On the ‘twin styles’ see Carl Dahlhaus, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1989), pp. 8–15; Bernd Sponheuer, ‘Beethoven vs Rossini – Anmerkungen
zu einer äesthetischen Kontroverse des 19. Jahrhunderts’, in Christoph-Hellmut Mahling and
Sigrid Wiesmann (eds.), Bericht über den internationalen musikwissenschaftlichen Kongress Bayreuth 1981
(Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1981).
18
Robert Schumann, ‘Fragmente aus Leipzig’, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 7/19 (5 September 1837), 73–5;
reprinted in Martin Kreisig (ed.), Gesammelte Schriften über Musik und Musiker, vol. I (Leipzig: Breitkopf
und Härtel, 1914), p. 323. Printed in translation as ‘The Huguenots’, in Schumann on Music: A Selection from
the Writings, ed. and trans. Henry Pleasants (New York: Dover, 1965), pp. 137–40. Attitudes to Italian
opera are traced in Michael Wittmann, ‘Das Bild der italienischen Oper im Spiegel der Kritik der Leipziger
allgemeine musikalische Zeitung’, Le parole della musica I I : Studi sul lessico della letteratura critica del teatro
musicale in onore di Gianfranco Folena, in Maria Teresa Muraro (ed.), vol. X X I I of Studi di musica veneta
(Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1995); Michael Fend, ‘“Es versteht sich von Selbst, daß ich von der Oper
spreche, die der Deutsche und Franzose will”: Zum Verhältnis von Opéra comique und deutscher
romantischer Oper’, in Herbert Scheider and Nicole Wild (eds.), Die Opéra comique und ihr Einfluß auf
das europäische Musiktheater im 19. Jahrhundert (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 1994).
19
In Berlin, for example, the two main music venues were theatrical (the Nationaltheater and Königliche
Oper, brought together under the title Königliche Schauspiele in 1807) and the Singakademie also played
a prominent role in the city. Italian opera was much discussed in Vienna; see, for instance, ‘Neuer Versuch
einer Darstellung des gesammten Musikwesens in Wien’, AMZ, 3/37 (10 June 1801), 622–7; AMZ, 3/38
(17 June 1801), 638–43.
174 LAURA TUNBRIDGE
musical life into account in this way would disturb conventional accounts of
musical nationalism in significant ways, but that lies beyond the scope of this
chapter.
The Invention of Romanticism

The advent of the AMZ coincided with the golden years of Viennese classicism:
Mozart had only recently died, Haydn was flourishing and Beethoven was
emergent. Yet the AMZ was not published in the great musical centre of
Vienna but in Leipzig, then known for business and – importantly –
publishing.20 Gottfried Christoph Härtel had taken over the music publishing
house of Breitkopf (founded in Leipzig in 1719) in 1795.21 Over the next
hundred years his firm would publish music by Beethoven, Mendelssohn,
Schumann, Liszt, Wagner and Brahms. As Härtel conceived it (and other
publishers soon followed suit), the primary purpose of the AMZ was to help
sell scores (this is to belittle Härtel’s achievements, though: he also founded
the Leipziger Literaturzeitung, began new complete editions of various compo-
sers’ works and adopted lithography for printing music).22 Under its first
editor, Friedrich Rochlitz (1769–1842), the AMZ achieved more than that: it
became, as well as an important means of educating the musical public, a way
to transmit the reputation of music and musicians around an international
network – a network that, in turn, helped define ideas about the cultural
characteristics of the nascent German nation.
Rochlitz, with the first issue of the AMZ, also established the format for
a weekly music journal.23 First came lead articles, typically on some aspect of
aesthetics or the theory of music, or about a new work. These could be
serialised over several issues. Then came sections dedicated to reviews of
printed music (‘Recensionen’), news of musical life in Leipzig and elsewhere
(‘Nachrichten’), short announcements (‘Kurze Anzeigen’) including reviews
of new scores, miscellaneous items (‘Miscellen’ or ‘Mancherley’) and short
20
Leipzig’s later reputation as a musical centre partly resulted from this period, when the musical
establishment – from music journals to concert series and the Leipzig Conservatoire (Rochlitz influenced
all) – were founded. Newly aware of its musical history, the town began to be celebrated as home to Bach,
Mendelssohn, Schumann and Wagner.
21
A brief early history of the firm is provided in George B. Stauffer, ‘The Breitkopf Family and Its Role in
Eighteenth-Century Music Publishing’, in George B. Stauffer (ed.), J. S. Bach, the Breitkopfs, and Eighteenth-
Century Music Trade (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996). After Rochlitz gave up the editorship in
1818, Härtel took over for ten years.
22
See Ole Hass, ‘Introduction to the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, Retrospective Index to Music
Periodicals (RIPM)’, available at www.ripm.org; Reinhold Schmitt-Thomas, Die Entwicklung der deutschen
Konzertkritik im Spiegel der Leipziger Allgemeinen Musikalischen Zeitung (1798–1848) (Frankfurt-am-Main:
Kettenhof Verlag, 1969).
23
The format of the AMZ is described in Ole Hass’s ‘Introduction’.
news items (‘Kurze Nachrichten’ and ‘Feuilleton’).24 In between might be

scattered anecdotes, biographical sketches and humorous pieces. The AMZ
would sometimes also include an advertising supplement (Intelligenz-Blatt),
pieces of music and illustrations. Contributions were solicited for the
Intelligenz-Blatt, but authors were asked to keep in mind the journal’s wide
readership and not to write anything hurtful: a reminder of the journal’s
commercial concerns and that it, and its successors, served a relatively close-
knit community that, as we shall see, was easily polemicised.
Many nineteenth-century music journals would serve as mouthpieces for
their editors, the majority of whom were their most prolific contributors.
Rochlitz, although a respected and active writer himself, was able, with the
financial support of Breitkopf und Härtel, also to assemble an impressive array
of contributors. They included academics, composers, acousticians and music
theorists. From its first issues, the AMZ also included regular correspondence
from major musical centres: Berlin, Munich, Vienna, Prague and Paris (initi-
ally accounts of events in Paris were translated, or provided by German
visitors, until Georg Ludwig Peter Sievers became the regular columnist
1817–20). Occasionally reports were received from further afield: London,
Barcelona, Warsaw, St Petersburg; even New York and Rio de Janeiro. As vital
was correspondence from other German towns, which might give notices of
artists soon to arrive, or known in, Leipzig.25
The AMZ was an important supporter of Beethoven, its reviewers helping to
develop an incisive critical vocabulary to describe and analyse his music. It
argued that works such as the Second Symphony required repeat performances
in order to be fully appreciated: one testament to the journal’s legacy were
changes made to programming at the Leipzig Gewandhaus to include complete
symphonies (not coincidentally, Rochlitz was on the board of its subscription
concert series).26 Perhaps the most influential writer about Beethoven’s music,
on staff from 1809 to 1815, was polymath E. T. A. Hoffmann (1776–1822).
Early contributors to the AMZ had advocated a sober and methodical evaluation
of musical works, in accordance with Enlightenment values of reasoned debate.
24
Generally, the AMZ was aimed at a more specialist readership than the popular feuilletons and
entertainment journals which also played an important role in German musical life, as discussed in
Ulrich Tadday, Die Anfänge des Musikfeuilletons: Der kommunikative Gebrauchswert musikalische Bildung in
Deutschland um 1800 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1993), p. 67.
25
William Weber comments that music magazines flourished during this era in part because they could
access so many well-educated writers who were prepared not to be paid; see The Great Transformation of
Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006),
p. 102.
26
For example, see report from Leipzig, AMZ, 6/32 (9 May 1804), 542–3. For more on the AMZ’s role in
concert life see Ulrich Schnitt, Revolution im Konzertsaal: Zur Beethoven-Rezeption im 19. Jahrhundert (Mainz:
Schott, 1990); Applegate, Bach in Berlin.
176 LAURA TUNBRIDGE
For example, in an 1802 essay, Hans Georg Nägeli put forward a twofold system,
whereby the critic should first consider whether the established rules of compo-
sition had been followed before deducing the music’s effect on the listener.27
Rochlitz recommended this as a model for evaluating the extent to which
a composer’s creative intentions matched their work’s technical realisation.28
Hoffmann perpetuated these writers’ interests in musical technique and formal
expectations. His reviews followed the journal’s conventions: they were invari-
ably in three parts, with an introduction, analysis and concluding comments
about performance and editions. However, he went beyond his predecessors by
devising a new poetics of music criticism.29 Although Hoffmann wrote about
composers we would now term Classical – the most famous being Mozart,
Haydn and Beethoven – the values inscribed in his reviews can be said to have
established the main tenets of musical German Romanticism.
Hoffmann’s review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony, at twenty columns the
longest essay then published in the AMZ, has been described as ‘the most
celebrated document in the history of music criticism’.30 In places his prose
was unashamedly technical – he used specialist vocabulary to describe themes
and harmonies – and he insisted on including multiple music examples. At the
same time, he attempted to convey the experience of the music, bar by bar. (Of
the symphony’s ending he wrote, ‘The chord that the listener takes as the last
is followed by one bar’s rest, then the same chord, one bar’s rest, the same
chord, one bar’s rest, then the chord again for three bars with one ♩ in each,
one bar’s rest, the chord, one bar’s rest, and a C played in unison by the whole
orchestra.’)31 Hoffmann then stepped back to consider the effect of the whole,
27
Hans Georg Nägeli, ‘Versuch einer Norm für die Recensenten der Musikalischen Zeitung’, AMZ, 5/14
(29 December 1802), 225–37 and AMZ, 5/16 (12 January 1803), 265–74.
28
Friedrich Rochlitz, ‘Vorerinnerung’, AMZ, 5/14 (29 December 1802), 225–7.
29
On the literary, philosophical and political contexts for Hoffmann’s music criticism, see Carl Dahlhaus,
‘E. T. A. Hoffmanns Beethoven-Kritik und die Aesthetik des Erhabenen’, Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, 38/2
(1981), 79–92; Karl Michael Komma, ‘Ursprünge der modernen Musikanalyse: E. T. A. Hoffmanns
Beethoven-Rezensionen’, in Wolfgang Budday and Heinrich Deppert (eds.), Musiktheorie: Festschrift für
Heinrich Deppert zum 65. Geburtstag (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 2000); Abigail Chantler, ‘Revisiting E. T. A.
Hoffmann’s Musical Hermeneutics’, International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, 33/1 (2002),
3–30; Elio Matassi, ‘The Adaemonic/Daemonic Spirit of Music: E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Review of
Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and the Apology of Instrumental Music in W. H. Wackenroder’, Ad
Parnassum: A Journal of Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century Instrumental Music, 2/3 (April 2004), 153–62;
Stephen Rumph, Beethoven After Napoleon: Political Romanticism in the Late Works (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2004), pp. 9–34; Nicholas Mathew, Political Beethoven (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2012).
30
Ian Bent (ed.), Music Analysis in the Nineteenth Century, Volume I I : Hermeneutic Approaches (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 141. Hoffmann’s review originally appeared, unsigned, in the AMZ,
12/40 and 41 (4 and 11 July 1810), cols. 630–42, 652–9. English translations in David Charlton (ed.), E. T.
A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings: ‘Kreisleriana’, ‘The Poet and Composer’, Music Criticism (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 235; and by Bent, Charlton and Martyn Clarke in Music Analysis
in the Nineteenth Century, II, pp. 141–60, both with useful introductions.
31
Bent (ed.), Music Analysis in the Nineteenth Century, II, pp. 158–9.
using organicist metaphors to emphasise the work’s coherence (tree, buds,

leaves, blossom, fruit, spring from the same seed, he observed, much as
musical motifs grow into themes, even whole symphonies).32 Throughout
the review there are revelations of what aestheticians would call the sublime:
Hoffmann senses in Beethoven’s music ‘endless longing’; it reveals ‘an
unknown realm, a world quite separate from the outer sensual world . . .
a world in which he [the listener] leaves behind all feelings circumscribed by
intellect, in order to embrace the inexpressible’.33 Instrumental music’s abil-
ity to reach beyond words, beyond representation, made it ‘the most romantic
of the arts’.
Beethoven was far from the only German composer to be discussed at
length in the pages of the AMZ: Carl Maria von Weber, Louis Spohr and,
later, Mendelssohn and Schumann were treated similarly (although the latter
not always so positively). So too were French and Italian composers: the piece
accorded most space after Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony was Rossini’s
Guillaume Tell.34 By comparison with other countries, and through self-
reflection, the journal reflected on and cultivated ideas about what it meant
to be German, musically speaking.35 While there were calls to advance
German-language opera, and for patriotic songs, the genre most strongly
associated with expressions of a nascent national identity (at least until mature
Wagner) was instrumental music.36 The challenge for critics – as already
apparent from Hoffmann’s review of the Fifth Symphony – was how to
explain the significance of such abstract or, as they came to be referred to,
‘absolute’, musical works.37
Rochlitz’s editorship of the AMZ outlasted several other music journals (for
example, the Berlinische Musikalische Zeitung ran for only eighteen months),
32
On organicism, see D. L. Montgomery, ‘The Myth of Organicism: From Bad Science to Great Art’,
Musical Quarterly, 76/1 (1992), 17–66.
33
Stephen Downes, ‘Beautiful and Sublime’, in Downes (ed.), Aesthetics of Music, p. 86; Mark Evan Bonds,
Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2006), pp. 45–50.
34
A comparison of the reception of Beethoven and Rossini, paying close attention to the role of the
musical press, is provided in Nicholas Mathew, ‘On Being There in 1824’, in Mathew and Walton (eds.),
The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini.
35
In an 1867 tribute to Breitkopf und Härtel, Alfred Dörffel described the AMZ as having advanced the
‘cultural interests of the German nation’ at a time when there was a paucity of other journals.
Alfred Dörffel, ‘Breitkopf & Härtel’, Signale für die musikalische Welt, 25/12 (12 February 1867), 189;
quoted in Hass, ‘Introduction’, x.
36
Stephen C. Meyer, Carl Maria von Weber and the Search for a German Opera (Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 2003); Warrack, German Opera; Cecelia Hopkins Porter, The Rhine as Musical Metaphor:
Cultural Identity in German Romantic Music (Cincinnati: Northeastern University Press, 1996). By 1848,
according to Pederson, it was ‘the idea of a German musical culture that – gradually and against
resistance – became the aesthetic paradigm of absolute music in the nineteenth century’ (‘Enlightened
and Romantic German Music Criticism’, 110).
37
Mark Evan Bonds, Absolute Music: The History of an Idea (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
178 LAURA TUNBRIDGE
and until 1818 – when Rochlitz stepped down as editor, though he continued
as a contributor for another decade – it was undoubtedly the most respected
and influential German-language music journal. Many of its contributors were
involved with subsequent publications and would contribute to others. For
instance, in 1823, lawyer, theorist and composer Gottfried Weber started the
well-respected Cäcilia: eine Zeitschrift für die musikalische Welt, herausgegeben von
einem Vereine von Gelehrten, Kunstverständigen und Künstlern in Mainz (pub-
lished by B. Schott’s Söhne). Its subtitle – a newspaper for the musical world,
edited by a team of scholars, art experts and artists – emphasised the communal
aspect of the journal: the aim was to create a Sprachsaal or meeting place for
the exchange of ideas, and articles were scholarly; there were few daily reviews
of the kind Weber had written for the AMZ. While Cäcilia has been credited as
the AMZ’s main rival, A. B. Marx proclaimed himself heir to Rochlitz with the
foundation in 1824 of the Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung [BAM], in
collaboration with the publisher Adolph Martin Schlesinger. Reflecting
Marx’s theoretical interests, BAM contained more analytical articles than
reports of concerts, and German music – especially Beethoven’s – featured
prominently. There were wide-ranging debates on musical comedy, of con-
tent in music, and on the role of analysis.38 Another journal deliberately set up
in competition with the AMZ and Cäcilia, this time in Leipzig, was the Neue
Zeitschrift für Musik [NZM]. When it began in 1834 the NZM had four editors
but they soon became one, composer and critic Robert Schumann
(1810–56).39
Against the Philistines

From its title to the music it covered, the NZM emphasised the new.
Schumann was determined to make a case for those composers overlooked
elsewhere, and to encourage a certain type of composition: Chopin and
Berlioz were discussed at length, and Schubert’s C Major Symphony (now
known as the Great) was ‘rediscovered’ in its pages.40 In addition to the usual
array of reviews and theoretical and practical articles, Schumann championed
38
A selection of Marx’s writings can be found in A. B. Marx, Musical Form in the Age of Beethoven: Selected
Writings on Theory and Method, ed. and trans. Scott Burnham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006). For more on Marx’s approach to Beethoven see Scott Burnham, ‘Criticism, Faith, and the “Idee”:
A. B. Marx’s Early Reception of Beethoven’, 19th-Century Music, 13/3 (Spring 1990), 183–92; reprinted in
Burnham, Sounding Values: Selected Essays (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010). On the cultivation of German music
in the BAM see Pederson, ‘Enlightened and Romantic German Music Criticism’, 117–37.
39
The other editors were pianists Friedrich Wieck, Julius Knorr and Ludwig Schunke. Schumann had
contributed articles to the AMZ since 1831.
40
Schumann’s writings are reproduced in Kreisig (ed.), Gesammelte Schriften über Musik und Musiker;
slightly dated translations of these articles are included in Schumann on Music.
the relationship between music and literature.41 Epigraphs from Shakespeare,

Goethe, Jean Paul and Novalis adorned each issue of the NZM. What is more,
during this period in his career, Schumann adopted a self-consciously literary
style of criticism, writing in the names of a ‘Davidsbund’ or ‘League of David’
made up of fictional characters and alter egos for his circle of like-minded
artists. As with the biblical David, their adversary was the Philistines, those of
mediocre talent and mundane taste who could or would not recognise
genius.42 Schumann was against ‘empty’ virtuosity; he encouraged the study
of early music, especially J. S. Bach; and he hoped for a future music that
would encompass the poetic.
Hoffmann’s ‘poetic’ criticism may have influenced Schumann to some
degree, but whereas Hoffmann had attempted to describe the way a piece of
music was perceived and the emotions it aroused, Schumann endeavoured to
write in a manner that would produce an effect similar to the work in
question.43 In his famous review of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique (1835) he
conveyed the excitement of first glimpsing the beloved:
That is where he sets eyes on her. I imagine this feminine creature, like the
principal idea of the entire Symphony, to be pale, slender as a lily, veiled,
silent, almost cold; – but words are lifeless things, whereas his notes have
a searing effect upon us, – you can see it written in the Symphony itself: how
he rushes towards her and tries to embrace her with all his heart, how he
shrinks back, his breath taken away.44
This manner of ‘reflective’ criticism – often ironic and multi-voiced – was in

keeping with Schumann’s own compositional approach during the decade of
his editorship; he composed using the names of his Davidsbund (Florestan,
Eusebius, et al.), and his Noveletten, Op. 21 end with ‘Fortsetzung und Schluß’
41
More on Schumann’s literary interests with reference to his criticism can be found in Leon
B. Plantinga, Schumann as Critic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967); Thomas Alan Brown, The
Aesthetics of Robert Schumann (London: Peter Owen, 1969); Ulrich Tadday, ‘Life and Literature, Poetry and
Philosophy: Robert Schumann’s Aesthetics of Music’, in Beate Perrey (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to
Schumann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007); John Macauslan, Schumann’s Music and
Hoffmann’s Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016).
42
Significantly, the NZM was not sponsored by a music publisher. The purpose of art had been debated in
the pages of the AMZ. While it was conceded that music could refresh and stimulate a weary mind, many
critics vouched for it being more than the pleasant amusement described by Kant. See, for example, ‘Ist es
der Hauptzweck der Musik, uns zur Erholung zur dienen?’ AMZ, 4/6 (4 November 1801), 81–7.
43
Bodo Bischoff points out that while Schumann could have had access to earlier issues of the AMZ there
is no record of whether he actually read Hoffmann’s reviews, although Kreisleriana and Serapion include
substantial portions of them. See Bischoff, Monument für Beethoven: Die Entwicklung der Beethoven-Rezeption
Robert Schumann (Cologne: Dohr, 1994), p. 243; Peter Uwe Hohendahl, ‘Literary Criticism in the Epoch of
Liberalism, 1820–187’, in Peter Uwe Hohendahl (ed.), A History of German Literary Criticism (Lincoln:
University of Nebraska Press, 1988), pp. 195–8.
44
Translation: Robert Schumann, ‘[Review of Berlioz: Fantastic Symphony] (1835)’, in Bent (ed.), Music
Analysis in the Nineteenth Century, I I , p. 168.
180 LAURA TUNBRIDGE
(‘Continuation and Conclusion’) as if a serialised journal article.45 Yet

Schumann did not shy away from detailed musical description; in
the second part of his Berlioz review he considered, in turn (and with refer-
ence to examples from the score):
the viewpoint of form (at the level of the whole, of its separate parts, of the
period, of the phrase), of techniques of composition (harmony, melody, counter-
point, working out, style), of whatever idea the composer was striving to
convey, and of the spirit which governs form, material and idea.46
The combination of poetic and technical aspects within one review underlines
that Schumann was writing for a specialist audience, not the casual reader.
Despite his florid writing style (and his own compositional practices)
Schumann remained sceptical of the extra-musical programmes produced by
his contemporaries, arguing that they limited, rather than liberated,
interpretation.47 Tellingly, he framed his antipathy to the programme of
Symphonie fantastique in nationalist terms: ‘the Germans, with their sensitive
feelings and their aversion to the invasion of privacy, prefer not to have their
thoughts led by the nose in this crude way’, he explained; the French, by contrast,
are unimpressed ‘by displays of delicate modesty’.48 The superiority of German
aesthetic appreciation may be represented somewhat sardonically here, but
nonetheless Schumann’s comments reflect a tendency among critics the momen-
tum of which grew as the nineteenth century progressed: to associate the higher,
‘purer’ forms of instrumental music with an inherently German spirit.
Musical conceptions of the German nation were not necessarily parochial;
indeed, in many ways they were defined on the international stage. Under
Schumann’s editorship the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik privileged foreign corre-
spondence over local activities. There were high-profile Paris-based contribu-
tors (François-Joseph Fétis, Stephen Heller and Berlioz) as well as extensive
reviews of contemporary French operas, reports from British and Dutch
music festivals, and reflections on musical life in cities such as Riga, or on
the experiences of German musicians in Italy.49 One reason for this more
45
See Bernhard R. Appel, ‘Schumanns Davidsbund. Geistes- und sozialgeschichtliche Voraussetzungen
einer romantischen Idee’, Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, 38 (1981), 1–23; John Daverio, ‘Piano Works I :
A World of Images’, in Perrey (ed.), Cambridge Companion to Schumann, p. 69.
46
Schumann, ‘[Fantastic Symphony]’, in Bent (ed.), Music Analysis in the Nineteenth Century, II, p. 170.
47
For more on Schumann’s views see Jonathan Kregor, Program Music (Cambridge: Cambridge
48
Schumann, ‘[Fantastic Symphony]’, in Bent (ed.), Music Analysis in the Nineteenth Century, Vol. I I , p. 192.
49
Michael Heinemann, ‘Korrespondenz aus Danzig: Eine Stadt im Spiege der Berichterstattung
der Neuen Zeitschrift für Musik’, in Janusz Krassowski and Jolanta Woźniak (eds.), Musica Baltica: The
Music Culture of Baltic Cities on Modern Times/Musikkultur der Ostseestädte in der Neuzeit (Gdań sk:
Akademia Muzyczna im. Stanisława Moniuszki, 2010), pp. 105–12; Jochen Lebelt, ‘Die
Wiederspiegelung des Musiklebens der ostsächsischen Stadt Bautzen in der NZfM: Eine Studie über die
outward-looking perspective was that many of the younger generation of

professional musicians the journal promoted toured internationally – includ-
ing Schumann and his wife Clara, a virtuoso pianist. As Anna Harwell Celenza
explains, having connected with sympathetic Danish musicians through the
NZM, Schumann found he and Clara had a ready band of followers when they
visited Copenhagen.50
Subscriptions to music journals, though, rarely amounted to the kind of
numbers that would constitute an international readership. What seemed
more significant, as the century progressed, was the way in which certain
journals came to stand for particular aesthetic viewpoints – or, perhaps
better, polemics. Schumann’s successor as editor of the NZM, Franz
Brendel (1811–68), put forward a Hegelian view of music history, empha-
sising the role critics played in determining artistic progress.51 Under his
editorship, and reflecting the upheavals of the 1848 revolutions, the
political purpose of music criticism also came under scrutiny in the
pages of the NZM and sparked debate with the AMZ.52 While his own
essays tended towards the philosophical, and so could be said to be
inherently elitist, during the uprisings Brendel advocated that music
should be emancipated from its status as a ‘luxury of the educated
classes’.53
Like Rochlitz, Hoffmann and Schumann before him, Brendel had several
other interests besides editing the journal.54 These complemented the con-
cerns of the NZM, serving as a reminder that music criticism was part of
a network of institutions that, through the course of the nineteenth century,
supported particular performance, scholarly and professional practices – and
that those institutions changed considerably during the second half of the
century. Brendel lectured on music history at the University of Leipzig
through the 1850s and 1860s, indicating the subject’s rising status within
higher education (as did Hanslick’s appointment as a Professor of Music at the
Beziehungen Robert Schumanns zu Karl Eduard Hering (1807–1879)’, in Gerd Nauhaus (ed.), Schumann-
Studien V (Cologne: Studio, 1996), pp. 153–67.
50
Anna Harwell Celenza, ‘Imagined Communities Made Real: The Impact of Robert Schumann’s Neue
Zeitschrift für Musik on the Formation of Music Communities in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’, Journal of
Musicological Research, 24/1 (2005), 1–26.
51
For further discussion of Hegelian principles, see William Brazill, The Young Hegelians (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1970); Barbara Titus, ‘Conceptualizing Music: Friedrich Theodor Vischer and
Hegelian Currents in German Music Criticism’, unpublished DPhil thesis, University of Oxford (2005);
James Garratt, Music, Culture, and Social Reform in the Age of Wagner (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2010), pp. 54–70.
52
See Pederson, ‘Enlightened and Romantic German Music Criticism’, 199–204; and Pederson,
‘Romantic Music under Siege in 1848’, in Ian Bent (ed.), Music Theory in the Age of Romanticism
53
See his draft petition to the Frankfurt Volks parliament of March 1848.
54
He also co-edited, with Richard Pohl, Anregungen für Kunst, Leben und Wissenschaft from 1856 to 1861.
182 LAURA TUNBRIDGE
University of Vienna in 1861).55 He was also a founder and the first president
of an early musicians’ union, the Allgemeine Deutscher Musikverein, whose
annual meetings (the Tonkünstler-Versammlungen) included concerts of new
music, and public discussions of the state of music and musicians in Germany
and Austria.56
In 1859, Brendel declared the advent of a Neudeutsche Schule or ‘New
German School’. The term, like many others, was problematic. Only
Wagner was named explicitly, but it was apparent that the other two leading
lights were Liszt and Berlioz.57 A German exile, a French-speaking Hungarian
and a Frenchman hardly seemed like the best representatives of a German
school. In one of his first articles for the NZM, Brendel had discussed the
schools of Leipzig (Mendelssohn), Düsseldorf (Schumann) and Weimar
(Liszt).58 It cannot be said that the ‘New German School’ united those various
factions, but as Daniel Ortuno has pointed out, for a while it served to connect
those musicians who sympathised with the Wagnerian or Lisztian worldview
(Berlioz’s association with the group, such as it was, was uncomfortable and
short-lived).59 Brendel’s impulse towards unification of activities on
a national scale was in keeping with the political manoeuvres of Otto von
Bismarck, who was appointed Minister President of Prussia in 1862 and, after
a series of wars, formed the German Empire in 1871. Music’s role in promul-
gating cultural nationalism is typically discussed through particular composi-
tions and performances – as exemplified through choral festivals or Wagner’s
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.60 Writing about that music – be it, in Wagner’s
case, by the composer himself, his acolytes or his detractors – was a vital means
55
Thomas S. Grey, in his entry on Brendel in Grove Music Online, points out that while he was a respected
lecturer and author (his Geschichte der Musik in Italien, Deutschland und Frankreich (1852) was revised three times
during his lifetime), it is evident from Brendel’s writing that his vocation was as a journalist and critic, not as
a historian. His focus was the recent past and present, rather than antiquity (Thomas S. Grey, ‘Brendel, (Karl)
Franz’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, available at www.oxfordmusiconline.com).
56
See James Deaville, ‘Organizing German Musical Life at Midcentury: Brendel, Schumann and the
Leipzig Tonkünstlerversammlungen and Tonkünstlerverein’, in Roe-Min Kok and Laura Tunbridge (eds.),
Rethinking Schumann (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
57
In his New Year’s article of 1866, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 33 (1866). Brendel said that the achievement
of the School had ended with Liszt’s move to Rome. Further discussion can be found in Detlef Altenburg
(ed.), Liszt und die Neudeutscher Schule (Laaber: Laaber Verlag, 2006).
58
Franz Brendel, ‘Robert Schumann with Reference to Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and the Development of
Modern Music in General [1845]’, trans. Jürgen Thym, in Larry Todd (ed.), Schumann and His World
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994).
59
Daniel Ortuno, ‘Liszt’s Heirs: The New German School after 1861’, paper given at the Eighteenth
Biennial International Conference on Nineteenth-Century Music, University of Toronto (18 June 2014).
60
See Ryan Minor, Choral Fantasies: Music, Festivity and Nationhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2012); Nicholas Vazsonyi (ed.), Wagner’s Meistersinger: Performance, History, Representation
(New York: University of Rochester Press, 2002); Susanna Grossmann-Vendrey (ed.), Bayreuth in der
deutschen Presse. Beiträge zur Rezeptionsgeschichte Richard Wagners und seiner Festspiele, vols. I and I I
(Regensburg: Gustav Bosse, 1977).
not only of encouraging critical engagement but also of reinforcing music’s

role in public life. Criticism served as the fertilising flesh of the fruit around
the kernel of the work, helping to determine whether it would flourish or fail.
The construction of a musical nation was also facilitated by developments in
communication technologies in the second half of the nineteenth century.
Advances in printing enabled mass reproduction, transforming the daily press
and encouraging larger readerships for established publications and the pro-
liferation of specialist or factional journals in the second half of the nineteenth
century. The rapid development of photography in the 1840s meant that, as
Jürgen Osterhammel points out, while journal readers could never have seen
a photograph of Beethoven or Schubert, they could see photographs of
Chopin and Rossini.61 The advent of the electric telegraph in the mid-
nineteenth century also quickened the dissemination of international news;
once a permanent transatlantic cable was laid in 1866, it became much easier
for musicians in Europe to know what was happening in the United States and
vice versa. The strong German presence among musicians in American cities –
especially New York and Chicago – was supported by critics. In many ways, it
can be said that the representation of German musical life around the world –
the external view – helped strengthen a stronger sense of nationhood within.
The View from Vienna

Austria renounced its membership of the German Confederation after the
Austro-Prussian war of 1866, and hence remained at the head of its own,
multinational empire, until the end of the First World War. However,
Austrian critics of a liberal political persuasion were no less concerned with
musical expressions of Germanic identity than their Leipzig- and Berlin-based
counterparts. Vienna’s renowned critic Eduard Hanslick (1825–1904) recalled
of 1848:
The mighty Storm of the March Revolution almost immediately found

a trembling echo in Vienna’s artistic life, first in the expulsion of Italian
opera. The Italian season was to have begun on 1 April 1848, with Verdi’s
Ernani, but no sooner had the placards been posted than they were defaced or
torn down. These demonstrations prompted the Court authorities to post-
pone, and finally to cancel, the season. Behind this demonstration lay two
powerful emotional currents. The first was one of which everyone was con-
scious and which found open, unashamed expression. This was a general trend
towards all that was German – manners, politics, art. Away with the mortal
61
Jürgen Osterhammel, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth Century, trans.
Patrick Camiller (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2014), p. 39.
184 LAURA TUNBRIDGE
enemies of Germanism! Down with the Italians! The second motive was less
conspicuous, but it played an undeniable part. It was of a democratic nature.
Italian opera was regarded as an exclusive artistic luxury, as the music of the
Court, of the aristocrats, and of the rich. Thus it was the artistic expression of
anti-German, and specifically aristocratic, entertainment.62
Hanslick, like many others before and since, chose here to define German
qualities by comparison to a foreign other – Italian opera. His emphasis on its
undemocratic and elitist nature is also typical of the time, although the extent
to which Vienna audiences diversified and expanded during the second half of
the nineteenth century has rightly been queried.63
After 1848 Hanslick attempted to reinvigorate the Enlightenment
model whereby the critic could guide his reader towards greater under-
standing and appreciation of music.64 He had previously sympathised with
Brendel’s progressive, philosophical criticism, and as mentioned there
were striking parallels between their careers, including that they were
both university professors and that they wrote theoretical and cultural-
historical texts as well as criticism.65 The influence of their journalistic
activities can be felt in their historical writings, which reflect their present
situation more strongly than conventional scholarly texts. Indeed,
Hanslick advocated what he called ‘living history’ (lebendige Geschichte),
which emphasised what was actually being heard in Vienna’s concert halls.
His preference was for new music, rather than established works, and he
eschewed the empirical research of his academic colleagues along with
their emphasis on early repertoire. Hanslick likened the critic’s pen to
a camera and the writing of historical essays to taking a photograph, ‘to
62
Eduard Hanslick reminiscences quoted in Henry Pleasants, ‘Edward Hanslick (1825–1904)’, in
Eduard Hanslick, Music Criticism 1846–99, ed. and trans. Henry Pleasants (London: Penguin Books,
1950), pp. 23–4. For more on the impact of 1848 on musical life see Barbara Boisits (ed.), Musik und
Revolution. Die Produktion von Identität und Raum durch Musik in Zentraleuropa, 1848/49 (Vienna: Hollitzer,
2013).
63
Subscriptions to the Vienna Philharmonic Concert Series were limited, both by the small number of
events and the size of the hall of the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde. The resultant high ticket prices meant
that the audience was predominantly upper-middle class; indeed, as an anonymous critic put it in 1888, to
be a subscriber was ‘a mark of good breeding’. See David Brodbeck, Defining Deutschthum: Politics,
Ideology, German Identity, and Music-Critical Discourse in Liberal Vienna (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2014), pp. 12–13.
64
See Dana Gooley, ‘Hanslick and the Institution of Criticism’, The Journal of Musicology, 28/3 (2011),
289–324; Hiroshi Yoshida, ‘Eduard Hanslick and the Idea of “Public” in Musical Culture: Towards
a Socio-political Context of Formalistic Aesthetics’, International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of
Music, 32/2 (December 2001), 179–99.
65
On Hanslick’s philosophical and cultural context, see Christoph Landerer, ‘Eduard Hanslicks
Ästhetikprogramm und die Österreichische Philosophie der Jahrhundertmitte’, Österreichische
Musikzeitschrift, 54/9 (1999), 6–20; Landerer, ‘Eduard Hanslick und die österreichische
Geistesgeschichte’, in Theophil Antonicek, Gernot Gruber and Christoph Landerer (eds.), Eduard
Hanslicks Gedenken. Bericht des Symposions zum Anlass seines 100. Todestages (Tutzing, 2010); and Bonds,
Absolute Music, pp. 140–204.
fix, as it were, á l’instant’.66 Media technology not only changed the way
information and reviews were transmitted, this suggests; it also helped
critics reconceptualise their role in history.
Another way in which Hanslick was a man of his time – more specifically,
a liberal nationalist who played a prominent part in Austrian public life – was
his privileging of Germanness, or Deutschthum. In his account of musical life in
Vienna for the first volume of the ambitious anthropological series Die
österreichisch-ungarische Monarchie in Wort und Bild (The Austro-Hungarian
Monarchy in Words and Pictures, 1886) Hanslick described the city as
a powerful empire in itself: ‘Gentle echoes of Slavic, Magyar, and Italian
tunes, enlivening and embellishing rather like miscegenation
[Racenmischung], gently resound, without distracting from the eminently
German character of Viennese music.’67 As David Brodbeck observes, for
Hanslick, detecting German qualities in a work – seriousness, genuineness,
strength – could grant a composer the status of being a German, even if he
came from elsewhere in the Empire.68 His was a supple, cosmopolitan defini-
tion of national identity that did not deny the charms of ‘foreign’ music; an
attitude that would put Hanslick at odds with the increasingly chauvinistic
political rhetoric around him.69
The composer with whom Hanslick is now most closely associated was
actually German: Hamburg-born Johannes Brahms (1833–97), who moved to
Vienna in the 1860s. The two men first met in 1856, the year Hanslick became
the music critic for the liberal daily Die Presse (when a breakaway group of
editors formed the Neue Freie Presse in 1864 he went with them). However, it
took some time before Hanslick was fully convinced of Brahms’s merits as
a composer; for several years, he found his music too densely contrapuntal and
rhythmically complex. Although histories of music tend to caricature
Hanslick as a conservative in comparison to supporters of Wagner
and Bruckner, it is worth remembering that he was not always the most
conservative critical voice in Vienna. The city teemed with music critics
writing for newspapers and specialist journals, and as foreign correspondents.
66
See Kevin C. Karnes, Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History: Shaping Modern Musical Thought in Late
Nineteenth-Century Vienna (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 12, 60–1.
67
Hanslick, ‘Die Musik in Wien’; quoted in Brodbeck, Defining Deutschthum, p. 3.
68
Brodbeck, Defining Deutschthum, p. 6; Brodbeck here draws on Pieter Judson, ‘Rethinking the Liberal
Legacy’, in Steven Beller (ed.), Rethinking Vienna 1900 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn, 2001).
69
Hanslick’s reputation is currently being reassessed, especially from a political standpoint. See for
example Margaret Notley, Lateness and Brahms: Music and Culture in the Twilight of Viennese Liberalism
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Nicole Grimes, Siobhán Donovan and Wolfgang Marx (eds.),
Rethinking Hanslick: Music, Formalism, and Expression (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2013);
Andrea Winklbauer and Nick Somers (eds.), Euphorie und Unbehagen: Das jüdische Wien und Richard Wagner
(Vienna: Metroverlag, 2013); Brodbeck, Defining Deutschthum.
186 LAURA TUNBRIDGE
Each had – more or less – a different standpoint, and even within a particular
publication, critics could disagree.70 Among the Brahms sceptics were Rudolf
Hirsch of the Wiener Zeitung, Selmar Bagge of the Deutsche Musikzeitung and
Eduard Bernsdorff of Leipzig’s Signale für die musikalische Welt. The composer
found greater support from Hermann Dieters of the Deutsche Musikzeitung
(who would later write a Brahms biography), Ludwig Speidel, Hanslick’s
colleague at the Neue Freie Presse, and from the Vienna correspondent of the
Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (in which Adolf Schubring published extensive
analyses of Brahms’s music). Examining this range of responses, Michael
Musgrave explains that there developed two types of audience for Brahms:
one, musically educated, which recognised innovations and technical mastery;
the other, a general audience which needed longer to grasp a new work’s
significance.71 The same could probably be said of any composer of ambition.
The point is that such was the varied and extensive nature of music journal-
ism, critics catered for either audience: they could contribute to erudite
discussions about the finer points of Brahms’s compositional style, or attempt
to explain those qualities in terms a layperson might understand.
Hanslick’s reputation as a critic was strengthened by his addressing specia-
list and general audiences simultaneously. His reviews appeared on the front
page of the Neue Freie Presse, ensuring him a wider readership than a specialist
music journal. A brief read through his reviews of Brahms’s four symphonies
is revealing. ‘Even the layman will immediately recognise it as one of the most
individual and magnificent works of the symphonic literature’, he wrote of the
First Symphony, invoking its ‘Faustian conflicts’, before remarking on the
inferior quality of the Scherzo, whose theme he found ‘wanting in melodic
and rhythmic charm’.72 In comparison to this, ‘a work for earnest connois-
seurs capable of constant and microscopic pursuit of its minutely ramified
excursions’, the Second Symphony, reviewed two years later, ‘extends its
warm sunshine to connoisseurs and laymen alike’.73 By the Third
Symphony, premiered in 1883, Hanslick bemoaned his inadequacy, explain-
ing, ‘the eloquence of the critic declines in inverse proportion to that of the
composer’.74 Of the Fourth Hanslick concluded: ‘For the musician, there is
not another modern piece so productive as a subject for study. It is like a dark
70
During the Vormärz (pre-1848) period, editors had ‘protected’ certain performers and moderated
reviews. See Gooley, ‘Hanslick and the Institution of Criticism’.
71
Michael Musgrave outlines Brahms’s Viennese reception in ‘Years of Transition: Brahms and Vienna
1862–1875’, in Michael Musgrave (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Brahms (Cambridge: Cambridge
72
Hanslick, ‘Brahms’s Symphony No. 1 [1876]’, Music Criticism 1846–99, 125–8.
73
74
well; the longer we look into it, the more brightly the stars shine back.’75 This
relatively rare instance of poetic imagery in Hanslick’s writing serves as
a reminder of the critical legacy of Hoffmann and Schumann; now, though,
the emphasis is less on the work’s effect on the listener than on how the
listener might engage with the music.
Hanslick coupled the notion that Brahms’s music deserved thoughtful, close
attention with an evaluation of his forebears (primarily Beethoven) and com-
parison to his contemporaries. Thus – with shades of Brendel – he embedded
Brahms’s output within a historical trajectory. Another thread in these reviews
is Brahms’s Germanness: for example, the First Symphony, despite Hanslick’s
reservations, is declared ‘a possession of which the nation may be proud’.
The Second Symphony was praised by Hanslick for not making recourse to
‘foreign artistic fields’, but this was less a swipe at cosmopolitanism than
a reference to composers that made extra-musical reference to poetry or paint-
ing. By contrast, Brahms’s Symphony was said to be ‘purely musical in concep-
tion and structure, and purely musical in effect’ (ideas Hanslick had pursued in
more abstract terms in his Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, a further example of the
exchange between aesthetic tracts and everyday journalism).76 This music
provided proof, according to Hanslick, that one could still write symphonies
and build on tradition: a deliberate refutation of Wagner, who claimed that
since Beethoven the only way for the symphony to progress was for it to
transmogrify into (his) opera.77
Wagner and Brahms are conventionally cast as antagonists and, to be sure,
they pursued very different paths and had very different followings. Hanslick
reviewed Wagner’s works at length. While he certainly made some negative
comments about the music, his greatest disdain was expressed for the cult of
Wagner – for the cliques surrounding the composer and the quasi-mystical
aspects of performances.78 There was also some personal animosity, caused by
Wagner’s anti-Semitism as expressed in his 1850 essay Judaism in Music (an
1869 preface which addressed Hanslick directly), and his caricature of the
critic as the character Beckmesser in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg.79 The
75
76
Sanna Pederson argues that the term absolute music was adopted as a corrective to programme music
in the 1880s (not, as previous musicologists had argued, with Hanslick’s 1854 publication) in ‘Defining
the Term “Absolute Music” Historically’, Music & Letters, 90 (May 2009), 240–62.
77
The alternative to the symphony, the Lisztian ‘symphonic poem’, Hanslick decried as a ‘nonsensical
theory’. Hanslick, ‘Brahms’s Symphony No. 2 [1878]’, Music Criticism 1846–99, 158.
78
Two translations of his Wagner essays are introduced in ‘Hanslick contra Wagner: “The Ring Cycle
comes to Vienna” and “Parsifal Literature”’, translated in Thomas S. Grey (ed.), Richard Wagner and His
World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009), pp. 409–25.
79
There were performances of Wagner in Vienna in 1860 and 1875, and a Wagner-Gesellschaft was
founded by Josef Schalk in 1873; see Amanda Glauert, ‘The Reception of Wagner in Vienna, 1860–1900’,
188 LAURA TUNBRIDGE
more interesting case, though, in terms of assessing the polemics of music

criticism in late nineteenth-century Vienna, is the relationship between
Brahms and Anton Bruckner (1824–96).80 Bruckner began to compose sym-
phonies in the late 1860s, soon after he moved to Vienna to take up a teaching
post at the Conservatory. Hanslick hailed his early works as a means to save
the great symphonic tradition. By the mid-1870s, however, Hanslick found
Bruckner’s music too Wagnerian. Personal politics no doubt played a part:
Brahms’s First Symphony was premiered in 1876, and Hanslick had repeat-
edly – and ultimately unsuccessfully – endeavoured to prevent Bruckner from
being appointed to a professorship at the University. By the following decade,
with performances of his Seventh Symphony around Europe, Bruckner had
gathered a fervent crowd of supporters, many of whom were also avid
Wagnerites.81
Hanslick may have been an influential tastemaker in Vienna, but he was well
aware that his views were not held by all. In his review of Bruckner’s Eighth
Symphony, he noted that ‘Wagner’s dramatic style’ had been applied to the
symphony, with certain pieces, such as the Prelude to Tristan und Isolde, having
been taken as the model for symphonic construction.82 According to
Hanslick, short chromatic motifs were repeated ‘until the listener is simply
crushed under the sheer weight and monotony of this interminable lamenta-
tion’ and there were ample Wagnerian orchestral effects, from divisi tremolo
violins to ‘Siegfried’ tubas. Most objectionable, for Hanslick, was Bruckner’s
juxtaposition of ‘dry schoolroom counterpoint with unbounded exaltation’,
leading to ‘dismal long-windedness’ (the Adagio lasted twenty-eight minutes,
he complained: as long as an entire Beethoven symphony). Hanslick explained
that he had studied the score before attending the dress rehearsal but only
discovered its ‘mysteries’ from the accompanying programme note (by
Bruckner’s one-time pupil Josef Schalk), which explained its programmatic
aspect (something guaranteed to raise Hanslick’s bile). Yet Hanslick conceded
that the concert was a huge success: ‘A stormy ovation, waving of
in Barry Millington and Stewart Spencer (eds.), Wagner in Performance (New Haven: Yale University Press,
1992).
80
The relationship between the two composers is discussed further in Hans-Joachim Hinrichsen and
Laurenz Lütteken, Bruckner-Brahms: Urbanes Milieu als kompositorische Lebenswelt im Wien der Gründerzeit –
Symposien zu den Zürcher Festspielen 2003 und 2005. Schweizer Beiträge zur Musikforschung 5 (Bärenreiter,
2006).
81
Multiple reviews of Bruckner’s works are included in Crawford Howie, Anton Bruckner: A Documentary
Biography (Lewiston Edwin Mellen Press, 2002); the views of his supporters are discussed in
Norbert Tschulik, ‘Anton Bruckner in der Wiener Zeitung: Ein Beitrag über die zeitgenössiche Bruckner-
Berichterstattung’, Bruckner-Jahrbuch (1991).
82
Hanslick, ‘Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony [1892]’, Music Criticism 1846–99, 288–90. On the impact of
Viennese criticism on Bruckner’s revisions of the Symphony see Bryan Gilliam, ‘The Two Versions of
Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony’, 19th-Century Music, 16/1 (Summer 1992), 59–69.
handkerchiefs from the standees, innumerable recalls, laurel wreaths, etc.!’

For a critic dedicated to guiding and reflecting public opinion, such a response
was particularly galling.
Hanslick retired from writing regular criticism and lecturing in 1895. The
following year Bruckner died; then, in 1897, Brahms. Fin-de-siècle Vienna was
peopled by a younger generation of musicians, some of whom – Richard
Strauss (1864–1949), Gustav Mahler (1860–1911), Alexander von Zemlinsky
(1871–1942) – Hanslick would continue to review, though their sensibilities
were quite different from his own. The anti-Semitism he had encountered in
Wagner’s essays became more virulent at the end of the century, with the
election of Karl Lueger as mayor of Vienna.83 Nation-building had been
fundamental to German-language music criticism through the nineteenth
century, but for figures such as Hanslick it had been a nation of the spirit;
or, as Hoffman put it, ‘a kingdom not of this world’. Now, with the founda-
tion of university departments and the establishment of musicology as an
academic discipline, a different kind of musical writing was gaining currency:
more technical, and more historically minded.84 Along with concert series and
mass publications, through the efforts of critics such as Hoffmann, Schumann
and Hanslick, music was embedded within, and could even be said to symbo-
lise, German culture: ready for export and for creating empires.
83
For more on the impact of anti-Semitism on musical life, see Nicholas Cook, The Schenker Project:
Culture, Race, and Music Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 140–98; K. M. Knittel,
Seeing Mahler: Music and the Language of Antisemitism in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010);
Karen Painter, Symphonic Aspirations: German Music and Politics, 1900–1945 (Cambridge: Harvard
84
The AMZ became more musicologically oriented in the late nineteenth century under the editorships of
Handel scholar Friedrich Chrysander and Berlin librarian Joseph Müller. On the institutionalisation of
musicology see Alexander Rehding, ‘On the Quest for the Origins of Music in Germany circa 1900’, Journal
of the American Musicological Society, 53 (2000), 345–85.
. 10 .
Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Century Italy

ALEXANDRA WILSON
‘Unfortunately, music criticism does not exist in Italy.’1 Such a sweeping

statement, uttered in 1900 by the writer Michele Virgilio within the context
of a damning critique of Puccini’s Tosca, might seem to negate the need for the
present chapter. It is, of course, not true. There was plenty of music criticism
in nineteenth-century Italy, published in newspapers, in cultural periodicals
of a general nature and in numerous specialist music journals and magazines.
What Virgilio’s comment reveals, however, is a frustration felt by many turn-
of-the-century Italian intellectuals about the prevalence of what might be
called ‘dilettante’ criticism, characterised by descriptiveness, venality and
provincialism, and the perception that Italian music criticism was lagging
behind that of neighbouring France and, in particular, Germany. These lim-
itations are, to some extent, hard to dispute but it is important to recognise
the modernist bias that coloured Virgilio’s derision. The more pluralistically
minded reception historian of today is willing to acknowledge that, for all its
‘weaknesses’, nineteenth-century Italian music criticism nevertheless offers
a vital window onto the repertory, performance practices, audience demo-
graphics and preoccupations of the time, telling us a great deal about canon
formation, the social business of opera-going and the nationalistic agendas
that shaped contemporary attitudes towards music.
Nineteenth-century Italian music criticism differed in two important
respects from contemporaneous criticism in neighbouring France or
Germany. First, Italian music reviewing was comparatively limited in the
early part of the nineteenth century but expanded and diversified immensely
following Unification in 1861: thus, the present chapter will inevitably be
weighted to some extent towards the latter decades of the century. Second,
the history of nineteenth-century Italian music criticism is notable in being,
1
‘Ma, pur troppo, in Italia, non esiste critica musicale’. Michele Virgilio, Della decadenza dell’opera in Italia:
a proposito di ‘Tosca’ (Milan: Gattinoni, 1900), p. 15.
[190]
Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Century Italy 191
for the most part, primarily a history of opera criticism: isolated examples of
a more wide-ranging type of music criticism are to be found but are in
a distinct minority. This was the natural consequence of an unusually pro-
nounced degree of cultural introspection in the local performing repertory
and also of the tight control exercised over music journalism by Italian opera
publishers and other parties from the operatic world with vested interests.2
Music criticism was, then, inextricably bound up with operatic practices,
just as it was by local journalistic practices, both of which were inherently
shaped by Italy’s particular politico-geographical circumstances, both prior to
and following Unification. In contrast to France, where operatic activity was
predominantly concentrated in Paris (at least according to standard narratives
of the period),3 Italy’s was a decentralised operatic culture. The Italian custom
was to stage a number of regional premieres following one another swiftly,
performed by different companies, orchestras and conductors. Large opera
houses were scattered the length of the Italian peninsula, from Venice in the
north-east to Palermo in Sicily; it has been estimated that there were 1,055
Italian theatres in the 1890s and 3,000 by 1907, including many serving small,
isolated communities.4 Each theatre provided not only entertainment but an
important forum for social gatherings, political debate and displays of power
within its local community. While some theatres, notably La Scala, took on
particular national significance, the importance of the regional theatres can-
not be disputed, as may be gleaned from a glance at the diverse range of
locations in which Rossini’s or Verdi’s operas received their premieres. Music
criticism could also be found in periodicals and newspapers from all over Italy,
although again there tended to be certain cultural ‘pockets’ where the review-
ing industry was particularly vibrant. Particularly noteworthy was Milan,
which was the effective musical capital of the Italian peninsula from the
beginning of the nineteenth century, where many of the major publishers
and agents were based.5
2
Caterina Criscione, Luigi Torchi: un musicologo italiano tra Otto e Novecento (Imola: Editrice La
Mandragora, 1997), p. 38. Non-operatic music was very much a minority taste, predominantly favoured
by intellectual connoisseurs in large cities: the music of Brahms and even that of Mozart and Beethoven
was scarcely known in Italy as late as the 1870s.
3
See Katharine Ellis’s work on the musical history of the French regions, including Ellis, ‘Mireille’s
Homecoming? Gounod, Mistral and the Midi’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 65 (2012),
463–509; Ellis, ‘How to Make Wagner Normal: Lohengrin’s “Tour de France” of 1891/2’, Cambridge Opera
Journal, 25/2 (2013), 121–37.
4
Fiamma Nicolodi, ‘Opera Production from Italian Unification to the Present’, in Lorenzo Bianconi and
Giorgio Pestelli (eds.), Opera Production and Its Resources (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press,
1998), p. 168; John Rosselli, Music and Musicians in Nineteenth-Century Italy (London: Batsford, 1991),
p. 140.
5
Marco Capra, ‘La Casa Editrice Sonzogno tra giornalismo e impresariato’, in Mario Morini,
Nandi Ostali and Piero Ostali (eds.), Casa musicale Sonzogno: cronologie, saggi, testimonianze, vol. I (Milan:
Sonzogno, 1995), p. 244.
192 ALEXANDRA WILSON
Two seminal periodicals loom especially large in the story of nineteenth-

century Italian music criticism: the Gazzetta musicale di Milano and the Rivista
musicale italiana. The former merits attention for its longevity and its place at
the heart of the Italian musical establishment and the latter for its radical
attempt to break with earlier patterns of Italian music criticism. I shall discuss
both of these publications in detail later in this chapter. We should not,
however, ignore the fact that music criticism appeared in many other types
of periodical in nineteenth-century Italy and that these publications also have
their historical value, even those that might at first seem to contain ‘bad’
criticism. I shall begin by providing an overview of the periodicals and news-
papers in which music criticism was published at various points throughout
the century, before analysing the reviewing practices and biases of particular
publications, the interactions between the publishing and performing indus-
tries, and the ways in which music reviewing intersected with wider cultural
and social debates.
Journals and Newspapers: An Overview

Italian music criticism in the earlier part of the nineteenth century was
primarily located in periodicals – both wide-ranging arts periodicals and
specific music journals – while newspapers were predominantly politically
inclined at first but would emerge as an increasingly important forum for
discussion about music and the arts more broadly as the century progressed.
During the early century, music was typically discussed in periodicals aimed at
the intelligentsia that covered a range of cultural topics, including fine art,
literature and drama: these included Il corriere dei teatri, La fama, Il Figaro, La
moda and Il pirata.6 Some of the discussion about music in these early period-
icals with a broad remit was reasonably ‘highbrow’ and philosophical in
nature, considering aesthetic questions about, for instance, the influence of
French and German music upon Italian music of the eighteenth and early
nineteenth centuries.7
The 1830s saw the rise of the specialist music periodical, and the drive to
establish such publications gathered pace in the 1840s and 1850s: early titles
included the Gazzetta musicale (established in Naples in 1838), L’Italia musicale
(Milan, 1847), and the Gazzetta musicale di Napoli (1853). As these titles would
suggest, music periodicals were set up in a variety of different cities. There
6
Capra, ‘La Casa Editrice Sonzogno tra giornalismo e impresariato’, pp. 243–4.
7
Andrea della Corte, La critica musicale e i critici (Turin: Unione Tipografico-Editrice Torinese, 1961),
p. 456.
was, however, a particular concentration of rather atypical journals in mid-

century Florence, a historically important cultural centre. Following the lead
of the Rivista musicale di Firenze, established in 1840, the Florentine music
publishing firm run by Giovanni Gualberto Guidi established the Gazzetta
musicale di Firenze (1853–5), its successor L’armonia (1856–9: subtitled ‘organ
of musical reform in Italy’), and Boccherini (1862–82), the official journal of the
Società del Quartetto, all of which benefitted from contributions by the
enlightened intellectual and Verdi scholar Abramo Basevi.8 The subtitle of
the second of these three journals and the affiliation of the third gives us a clue
to the fact that these periodicals were highly unusual, by later Italian stan-
dards, in not prioritising opera. Rather, they spoke to and for a niche com-
munity of Italian enthusiasts for north European instrumental and orchestral
music: Florence had become a particular centre for the performance of such
works from 1830.9
A great deal more mainstream was the Gazzetta musicale di Milano, founded
in Milan in 1842 by Giovanni Ricordi, at the suggestion of his son Tito, in
order to raise music out of what many perceived to be a subordinate position
within Italian culture.10 The journal ceased publication six years later in 1848
as a result of revolutionary activity in Milan, but was revived between 1850
and 1862. After a further hiatus of four years prompted by low sales, the
journal ran again for thirty-six years between 1866 and 1902 and became the
musical mouthpiece of post-Unification Italy. The front page of the first issue
of the Gazzetta consists of three columns of dense text in small font, devoted
to a consideration of an ‘introduction to the current state of the musical arts in
Italy’.11 But the coverage in these early days was by no means entirely slanted
towards Italian music: composers discussed in the initial issues included
Thalberg and Gluck. An extended article on ‘Music in Germany’, both instru-
mental and orchestral, by none other than a young Richard Wagner was
serialised over three of the earliest issues,12 and the journal also featured
8
Stefano Castelvecchi, ‘Introduction’ to Abramo Basevi, The Operas of Giuseppe Verdi (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2013), p. xiii.
9
Castelvecchi, ‘Introduction’, pp. xiii–xiv. For further reading on the performance and reception of non-
operatic music in nineteenth-century Italy, see Roger Parker, ‘“Classical” Music in Milan during Verdi’s
Formative Years’, Studi musicali, 13/2 (1984), 259–73; Aaron S. Allen, ‘Beethoven’s Music in Nineteenth-
Century Italy: A Critical Review of Its Reception Through the Early 1860s’, unpublished PhD disserta-
tion, Harvard University (2006).
10
Francesco Degrada et al., Music, Musicians, Publishing: 175 Years of Casa Ricordi, 1808–1983 (Milan:
Ricordi, 1983), p. 15.
11
‘B.’, ‘Introduzione delle attuali condizioni delle arti musicali in Italia’, Gazzetta musicale di Milano, 1
(2 January 1842), 1.
12
Richard Wagner, ‘La musica in Germania (I )’, Gazzetta musicale di Milano, 5 (30 January 1842), 19–20;
‘La musica in Germania (I I )’, Gazzetta musicale di Milano, 7 (13 February 1842), 26–8; ‘La musica in
Germania (I I I )’, Gazzetta musicale di Milano, 8 (20 February 1842), 31.
translations of articles by Fétis and Berlioz.13 The journal was by no means

opera-exclusive at this stage, but later on opera would loom much larger, and
the journal became increasingly focused upon musical events in Italy and the
reception of Italian works abroad. Much of the language was (as elsewhere in
the Italian music press) coloured by a nationalistic focus, which would inten-
sify with the passing of the years. That said, even the issues of the journal from
the tail end of the century covered important musical events abroad and
reprinted stories from foreign music periodicals, most notably La Revue et
Gazette musicale de Paris. Composers discussed in 1890 alone included less
well-known non-Italian figures such as Adolf von Henselt, Franz Lachner and
Rudolph von Procházka, alongside the canonical figures of Wagner, Mozart,
Schubert and Beethoven.
Speaking to and for the bourgeois opera-going Milanese, the Gazzetta
musicale di Milano occupied a position at the heart of Italian musical life, and
it provides a fascinating window onto the mainstream operatic culture of
nineteenth-century Italy. The journal included numerous substantial reviews
of premieres and also gave extensive coverage to regional revivals. Issues of
contemporary musical debate were discussed, as was music history and musi-
cal training and education (conservatoire news was featured on a reasonably
regular basis). Although it lacked the academic pretensions of some of the
music journals that would emerge at the tail end of the nineteenth century,
there is no doubt that the journal was a serious-minded periodical, particu-
larly in its earliest manifestations.
Other music publishers launched rival journals to the Gazzetta musicale di
Milano later in the century: in 1881 Sonzogno established Il teatro illustrato and,
a year later, La musica popolare (the two would merge in 1886). Il teatro illustrato
was a serious publication along similar lines to the Gazzetta musicale di Milano,
which contained historical articles and articles about spoken theatre as well as
opera reviews from around Italy and from Paris.14 The Sonzogno company also
used the journal as a vehicle for advertising its competitions for new one-act
operas (Cavalleria rusticana was the most famous and successful work to win) and
for promoting the French operas and operettas it began to introduce to Italian
audiences from the 1860s onwards.15 This illustrates the important role that the
press played in fashioning repertories and the close intersection between differ-
ent branches of the late nineteenth-century Italian music industry.
A broader range of music journals – some perhaps better referred to as
magazines – also began to be established after Unification. In the cases where
13
Claudio Sartori, Casa Ricordi: 1808–1958 (Milan: Ricordi, 1988), p. 55.
14
Capra, ‘La Casa Editrice Sonzogno tra giornalismo e impresariato’, p. 254. 15
Ibid., p. 251.
such publications were not sponsored by music publishers, they tended to be

run by other parties with a commercial interest in the opera industry, most
notably music agents: well-known agency journals included the titles Il trova-
tore, Il mondo artistico and the Gazzetta dei teatri. Some of these publications,
such as L’arte melodrammatica and the Rivista teatrale melodrammatica, were
little more than recruitment vehicles for the opera industry, listing singers
who were attached to particular agencies. Presumably such periodicals were
read largely by those employing performers and the singers themselves, rather
than by audience members, but they provide useful information for the
historian writing about the lifestyle of jobbing singers or concerned with
the statistics of opera production. Other agency journals were aimed more
directly at the general opera-going audience. Whereas publishing house jour-
nals were based in a number of major centres, agency journals were, for the
most part, published in a single city, Milan, where the majority of theatrical
agents were based.16 It is worth emphasising that, long after the rise of these
varying types of music-specific journal, music also continued to be given
detailed attention in serious cultural journals with a broad remit, such as the
Nuova antologia and Il marzocco.
Towards the end of the nineteenth century, two interesting and seemingly
contradictory developments took place simultaneously in the world of Italian
music criticism. On the one hand, music journalism began to ‘democratise’. As
historian of music criticism Marco Capra has argued, music journalism chan-
ged from being something aimed exclusively at a limited, elite readership to
something accessible to the masses.17 This was in part a consequence of the
growing importance of the daily press as a locus of music criticism, but the
number of periodicals also expanded, and as publishers strove to reach a wider
audience, the style of writing began to change. Some publications undoubt-
edly became more banal: the most high-profile example of this change was the
transformation of the Gazzetta musicale di Milano in 1903 into a small-format
glossy illustrated journal (now published monthly rather than weekly)
entitled Musica e musicisti, which was in turn superseded in 1906 by the
broadly similar Ars et labor.18 These two journals, with their colourful
‘Liberty-style’ covers (the Italian equivalent of art nouveau), were exquisitely
16
John Rosselli, The Opera Industry in Italy from Cimarosa to Verdi: The Role of the Impresario (Cambridge:
17
Marco Capra, ‘Alla ricerca dei periodici musicali: in margine alla pubblicazione del catalogo dei
periodici musicali delle biblioteche della Campania’, Rivista italiana di musicologia, 32/2 (1997), 373.
18
From 1907 Ars et labor was given away free to subscribers to the conservative Gazzetta di Venezia,
indicating the disposition of Ricordi’s target readership. Ricordi flatteringly described the readership of
the Venice newspaper as ‘intellectually aristocratic’ and drawn from ‘the most cultured classes’; it claimed
that such a readership would appreciate the character and aims of Ars et labor (Ars et labor, 61/2/12,
December 1906, 1065).
presented but there was little disguising a distinct shift of editorial emphasis:
Capra has gone so far as to call them ‘devoid of any critical function’.19
Fashion took precedence over intellectual credibility: they had effectively
become general-interest magazines that reflected the contemporaneous
growth of Italian consumer culture, with features on travel, sport, current
affairs and a wide array of leisure pursuits. The two journals tell us much about
the cultural history of 1900s Italy, its pleasures and its prejudices – a sense of
voyeuristic exoticism and wishful colonialism is fairly pronounced – but little
about music. Music criticism and indeed any type of comment upon music was
to be found only rarely, as in-depth reviews were replaced by brief listings.20
The second development that took place at the tail end of the nineteenth
century was the rise of a genuinely intellectual type of music journal that went
hand in hand with the development of an Italian musicology. Although this
might seem to go against the grain, as Italian journalism more broadly was
seeking to expand its readership, it is not entirely a surprising development.
The foundation of such periodicals was prompted precisely by
a dissatisfaction on the part of a small northern intelligentsia with the poor
state of wider Italian music criticism. These journals remained aloof from
commercial interests and favoured repertories largely ignored by most Italian
music writers: music from northern Europe, contemporary music and early
music. They sought deliberately to challenge received wisdom about music:
popular Italian opera, and the audiences that enjoyed it, were treated with
some disdain. The most significant publication in this bracket, which I shall
discuss in some detail below, was the Rivista musicale italiana (RMI), founded in
1894 by the musicologist, historian and librarian Luigi Torchi. The RMI was
an early example of a new type of journal that would take off in earnest in the
first decade of the twentieth century when, as Luca Somigli suggests, ‘the
cultural periodical becomes the laboratory of modernity, the privileged site of
intellectual exchange where writers, artists, critics, and philosophers meet to
test out new theoretical horizons’.21
Music criticism was also increasingly to be found in Italian newspapers as
the century progressed. The newspaper industry as a whole developed later in
19
Capra, ‘Alla ricerca dei periodici musicali’, 373.
20
The publishing firm tried to deny that the repackaging of the journal represented a move downmarket,
although an official history of the publishing house would later concede that the change in emphasis had
been misguided and that the history of ‘the new monthly is very much less interesting than that of the old
Gazzetta’: ‘In così vasto panorama tuttavia, l’attività specifica della Casa Ricordi un poco si disperde e per
la storia della sua vicenda il nuove mensile è assai meno interessante della vecchia “Gazzetta”’ (Sartori
(ed.), Casa Ricordi, p. 67).
21
Luca Somigli, ‘Towards a Literary Modernity all’italiana: A Note on F. T. Marinetti’s Poesia’, in
Ann Hallamore Caesar, Gabriella Romani and Jennifer Burns (eds.), The Printed Media in Fin-de-Siècle
Italy: Publishers, Writers, and Readers (London: Legenda, 2011), p. 79.
Italy than in neighbouring European countries and gained impetus from the
1860s and 1870s; as Ann Hallamore Caesar and Gabriella Romani have argued,
‘Most critics agree that the cultural modernization of Italy began soon after
the political unification of the country.’22 Newspapers were, generally speak-
ing, the preserve of a fairly small political and intellectual elite for the first half
of the century, and even after Unification the market for newspapers was far
smaller than in Germany, France or Britain: high illiteracy rates impeded
efforts to create a culture of reading. The national illiteracy rate at
Unification was 74.7 per cent, rising as high as 90 per cent in some areas of
the south,23 and half of the population remained unable to read in 1900.24 It
should be noted, however, that patterns of literacy varied sharply across the
peninsula and, in the large urban centres of the north, were as high as in any
other Western European city of the day.25
The launch in 1866 by the Sonzogno publishing house of Il secolo (a
Milanese newspaper aimed explicitly at the middle classes) marked an impor-
tant turning point in the expansion of the industry, although the readership
for newspapers would only really start to grow to any really significant extent
around the turn of the twentieth century, as belated industrialisation brought
large numbers of people to the major cities.26 In the latter part of the nine-
teenth century, newspapers began to devote more space to matters other than
politics, and the ‘terza pagina’ – the third page, devoted to the arts – began to
grow in importance.
The Italian newspaper industry was regional in focus, for obvious historical
reasons, and remained so after Unification. Although a cluster of important
newspapers sprung up in Milan and Rome in the 1870s – notably the Corriere
della sera in Milan in 1876 and the Fanfulla in Rome in 1871, followed eight
years later by its culturally focused sister paper, the Fanfulla della Domenica –
they did not have a monopoly on opera reviewing.27 Reviews of local opera
22
Caesar and Romani, ‘Introduction’ to Caesar, Romani and Burns (eds.), The Printed Media in Fin-de-Si
ècle Italy, p. 2.
23
David Forgacs, Italian Culture in the Industrial Era, 1880–1980 (Manchester: University of Manchester
Press, 1990), p. 17.
24
Giovanni Vigo, ‘Gli italiani alla conquista dell’alfabeto’, in Simonetta Soldani and Gabriele Turi (eds.),
Fare gli italiani: scuola e cultura nell’Italia contemporanea, I , La nascita dello Stato nazionale (Bologna: Il Mulino,
1993), pp. 39, 47.
25
John Davis, ‘Media, Markets and Modernity: The Italian Case, 1870–1915’, in Caesar, Romani and
Burns (eds.), The Printed Media in Fin-de-Siècle Italy, p. 11. In 1911, while the overall picture had undoubt-
edly improved, 65 per cent still could not read in Calabria, but only 15 per cent were illiterate in wealthy
Lombardy and Piedmont. See Enrico Decleva, ‘Un panorama in evoluzione’, in Gabriele Turi (ed.), Storia
dell’editoria nell’Italia contemporanea (Florence: Giunti, 1997), pp. 231–2.
26
Forgacs, Italian Culture in the Industrial Era, p. 31. For instance, the Corriere della sera expanded its
circulation from 74,000 in 1900 to 600,000 by 1920 (Forgacs, p. 35).
27
The foundation of the Fanfulla della domenica encouraged other newspapers to launch cultural and
literary supplements.
productions proliferated in small-town newspapers in the second half of the

century, as is testified by the range of reviews that were subsequently rep-
rinted by Ricordi in the Gazzetta musicale di Milano. Certain cities had distinct
musical identities that shaped the criticism published in the local press, with
Bologna, for example, being the city most welcoming to avant-garde and
foreign music, notably that of Wagner. Thus, although the regional character
of the papers arguably limited the influence of the press as a shaper of national
thought, in Italy there was in fact more justification in talking about operas as
‘patriotic’ symbols in which the regions felt that they had a stake.
Bias and Commercial Interests

The world of music reviewing was a political endeavour. Music periodicals
represented particular commercial interests, just as the daily press was,
towards the end of the century, increasingly tied up with the world of
business (everything from steel and armament manufacturers to big
banks).28 Music journals were, as we have seen, owned, financed and edited
either by music publishers or by theatrical agencies for much of the period.
Bias was therefore, from the perspective of the present-day music
historian, a significant problem – critics frequently attended performances
with a premeditated agenda. However, it was not necessarily regarded as
a problem at the time; the practice has to be considered within the context
of a cultural economy within which claques were regularly paid to interrupt
performances of operas that belonged to rival publishing houses. Even some
daily newspapers had connections to the world of music publishing: most
notably, Il secolo was run by the Sonzogno firm, and the paper could be
guaranteed to support the composers within that particular stable, such as
Mascagni and Cilea. A letter of 1890 to Luigi Mancinelli reveals Puccini’s
distrust of the partisan press. He had read in Il secolo about the resounding
success of Cavalleria rusticana and wrote: ‘is it all true or is this Il secolo’s usual
over-blown prose?’29
As one might expect, Puccini was not heard to utter such cynical words
when the rival Ricordi-sponsored press lavished similar praise on his own
works. The Gazzetta musicale di Milano expressed lofty ambitions from the
start, asserting its promise that
28
The commercial affiliations of particular Italian newspapers are itemised in Forgacs, Italian Culture in
the Industrial Era.
29
‘Lessi sul Secolo il riboante successo della Cavalleria, i bis, le ovazioni infinite: è tutto vero o il Secolo
secondo il suo sistema gonfiò?’ (Puccini to Luigi Mancinelli (22 December 1890), in Eugenio Gara (ed.),
Carteggi Pucciniani (Milan: Ricordi, 1958), p. 52.)
praise will never echo public clamour or ill-founded fame, just as censure will
never derive from a desire to encourage the nationalistic vanity of those who
(especially when it comes to music) consider as more or less barbaric all the
works of those sublime creative minds which did not happen to be born under
our splendid Italian sky . . . Needless to say, personal passions or favours will in
no way influence our judgement.30
The journal’s claims to neutrality are to be taken with a rather large pinch of
salt. The Gazzetta was, naturally enough, linked closely to the publishing
house’s own commercial interests and, certainly by the latter years of the
nineteenth century, its enthusiasm for the works of Verdi and subsequently
Puccini is hard to miss: in Claudio Sartori’s words, Verdi and Puccini were
Giulio Ricordi’s ‘point of departure and point of arrival’.31 These two com-
posers, and particularly Verdi, also loomed large in the Italian music press
more generally. Andrea della Corte goes so far as to argue that ‘The history of
nineteenth-century Italian criticism, at least up to around 1870, is to a large
degree the history of Verdi criticism,’ with Verdi’s works constantly being
compared to those of Donizetti, Meyerbeer or Wagner.32
The power of the agents within the world of nineteenth-century music
journalism should not, meanwhile, be underestimated: the line between the
roles of agent and journalist was in many cases distinctly blurred, and the
agency journals would take subscriptions from singers and, in John Rosselli’s
words, ‘[print] what they were paid to print’.33 Clearly this climate of parti-
sanship verging on blackmail makes it extremely difficult for the reception
historian to distinguish between genuine responses and rapacious falsifica-
tion. The fact that there were so many agency journals, however, suggests that
the practice was regarded as acceptable. Furthermore, the agencies were
under the sway of other commercial parties: as a general rule, for instance,
the popular music press swallowed and regurgitated Ricordi-sponsored pro-
paganda about its star composers.
Reviewing Practices
The seriousness and analytical incisiveness with which nineteenth-century
Italian journals and newspapers approached music and musical culture were
highly variable. Many journals aimed at a wide readership, and agency journals
30
Degrada et al., Music, Musicians, Publishing, p. 16.
31
‘Verdi e Puccini sono il suo punto di partenza e il suo punto di arrivo’ (Sartori, Casa Ricordi, p. 64).
32
‘La storia della critica italiana nell’Ottocento, almeno fino a circa il 1870, è sommamente la storia della
critica verdiana’. Della Corte, La critica musicale e i critici, p. 481.
33
Rosselli, The Opera Industry in Italy from Cimarosa to Verdi, pp. 138, 145.
in particular, printed reviews in which analysis was at best superficial and at

worst non-existent; it is worth bearing in mind that practically anybody who
felt so inclined could set himself up as an agent and no formal music qualifica-
tions of any sort were required.34 Assiduous in reporting the attire of the
noble ladies in the audience, critics usually limited their assessment of an
opera’s quality to noting the number of curtain calls it received. There is,
however, still something of interest to be gleaned from such seemingly bland
reports. Reviews which assessed music and drama purely in terms of audience
response can inform us about contemporary operatic practice. Critics docu-
mented the numbers which were greeted with rapturous applause, and those
which drew only stony silence; audiences were evidently notoriously fickle,
sitting in judgement like Roman emperors at the Colosseum. The fact that the
number of times that a composer was called to the footlights during the
course of an opera’s action itself was regarded as a barometer of a work’s
success indicates that audiences made very little attempt to suspend disbelief.
Neither did critics, who paid attention primarily to issues of execution rather
than characterisation. Most appear to have regarded operas as pure spectacle,
almost as nothing more than feats of musical endurance or athleticism for the
singer.
Although appraisive writing was relatively rare, it would be overstating
matters to claim that such journals were always blindly uncritical. Better
reviews included a judgement of the music and drama and addressed ‘guiding’
comments to the composer. Journals with a wider remit, such as La lanterna,
La frusta teatrale and Il mondo artistico, provided long articles and reviews
similar in format to the newspapers, which commented upon the music and
libretto, albeit in language tailored to a lay readership. And, for all their
weaknesses, nineteenth-century music journals were certainly eagerly awaited
by readers. Rosselli notes that ‘up to 1848 [music journals] held a central place
in the life of the educated classes’,35 while the second half of the century
witnessed the flourishing of a popular music press aimed at a growing mass of
enthusiasts.36
As has already been observed, Italy lagged behind its neighbours in terms of
the development of serious music criticism. In Germany and France the 1830s
witnessed the foundation of arguably the two most significant nineteenth-
century music journals, Schumann’s Neue Zeitschrift für Musik and
Schlesinger’s La Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris, both of which built upon
well-established traditions of criticism. At an equivalent date in Italy, and
throughout the nineteenth century, music reviewing was a somewhat
34
Ibid., p. 139. 35
Ibid., p. 144. 36
Capra, ‘Alla ricerca dei periodici musicali’, p. 373.
sporadic affair, largely the preserve of literary figures rather than musicians.37
While the same was generally true of French newspaper reviews, at least in the
first half of the century, Kerry Murphy reports that as early as Berlioz’s time in
France, ‘many of the romanciers . . . were knowledgeable dilettantes, quite
discerning in their musical judgments, and able to give reasons for their
appreciations . . . The dilettante’s knowledge of music was quite
extensive.’38 It was hard to say the same of Italian dilettante criticism, and
dilettante writing lived on right to the end of the century, even if one might
point to a broader ‘professionalisation’ of writing as the Italian cultural
industry modernised in the decades after Unification.39
The critics writing for Italian newspapers also tended to fall back upon
a tried and tested format in their opera reviews, which consisted of a list of
notable people in attendance, a plot summary, a tally of curtain calls and
a brief discussion of the singers. This formulaic approach was, in part,
a consequence of the fact that, as is very often still the case for newspaper
reviews, copy had to be produced within a matter of hours. The fact that the
members of the audience loomed so large in press reports (and were usually
discussed at the top of a review) tells us much about the high status accorded
to opera in nineteenth-century Italian society: the opera house remained,
throughout the century, an important social and political meeting place and
‘the place to be seen’. The presence of princesses, cabinet ministers and
famous artists, authors and composers was also used as an index of an opera’s
success.
Given the profusion of new operas being performed with great regularity at
this time, many of the reviews in the Italian press were of premieres or
regional premieres and thus focused more upon the operatic work than its
interpretation. Singers were mentioned, but usually in brief and hyperbolic
terms: a singer might be referred to as ‘exquisite’ or ‘delicious’, but in general
little further comment about the specifics of their performance was offered.
Whereas present-day reviews focus largely upon production styles – the
consequence, of course, of an operatic museum culture and of more diverse
and creative approaches to staging40 – it is unusual to find any commentary at
all upon the visual appearance of an opera’s staging in nineteenth-century
37
Capra, ‘La stampa ritrovata: duecento anni di periodici musicali’, in Alessandro Rigolli (ed.), La
divulgazione musicale in Italia oggi (Turin: EDT, 2005), p. 66.
38
Kerry Murphy, Hector Berlioz and the Development of French Music Criticism (Ann Arbor: UMI Research
Press, 1988), p. 6.
39
Caesar and Romani, ‘Introduction’, in Caesar, Romani and Burns (eds.), The Printed Media in Fin-de-Si
ècle Italy, p. 1.
40
For further reading on the former, see Tom Sutcliffe, Believing in Opera (London: Faber and Faber,
1996); and on the latter, see David J. Levin, Unsettling Opera: Staging Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, and Zemlinsky
Italian reviews, and acting was very rarely discussed. Given the primacy of
voice in nineteenth-century attitudes towards music, it is perhaps hardly
surprising that the theatrical aspect to opera was regarded as secondary to
the musical aspect. Having said that, there were many reviews in which
detailed musical commentary was also scant; rather, the bulk of the discus-
sion, for a first performance of an opera, was often about the plot. The purpose
of a review, in many cases, was to guide a reader through the content of an
opera rather than to problematise the work in question or to educate the
reader in ways of listening critically. In general, critics also refrained from
discussing operas in explicitly political terms, even though many were rich in
political content and commentary. This is not to say, however, that music
critics did not have political biases or that operas were not understood to
contain political meaning.41
The musicologist Oscar Chilesotti, writing in 1900, dismissed the Italian
music press as risible, arguing that ‘music criticism in the periodical press
would be truly laughable if it were not such a painful subject’.42 Such sweep-
ing criticisms about the poor standard of newspaper reviewing are, however,
exaggerated; indeed, some of the most skilled reviewers eventually abandoned
music journals in favour of the daily press.43 Notably, we might point to the
example of the highly respected critic Filippo Filippi, who edited the Gazzetta
musicale di Milano from 1858 to 1862 but simultaneously took up the post of
music critic for La perseveranza, where he remained until 1887.44 Filippi also
reviewed for L’illustrazione italiana and Il mondo artistico under the pseudonym
‘Dottor Veritas’, illustrating the fact that critics tended to range widely across
an array of publications rather than writing exclusively for a single newspaper
or periodical.45 Critics also often had ‘day jobs’ outside of the world of
journalism: Il secolo employed Amintore Galli, who was, as well as being
a critic, a theorist and musicologist who taught aesthetics at the Milan
Conservatoire.46 Nevertheless, despite the existence of a number of esteemed
critics, there was a growing awareness among members of the Italian musical
41
Della Corte, La critica musicale e i critici, p. 454. I have analysed the ways in which the press politicised
Puccini in my book The Puccini Problem: Opera, Nationalism, and Modernity (Cambridge: Cambridge
42
‘La critica musicale della stampa periodica farebbe ridere davvero, se non si trattasse di argomento
lagrimevole.’ Oscar Chilesotti, Cronache musicali illustrate, 28 (1900); cited in della Corte, La critica musicale
e i critici, pp. 652–3).
43
Marco Capra, ‘Criticism: Italy: 1890–1945’, in Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (eds.), The New Grove
Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., vol. 6 (London: Macmillan, 2001), pp. 685–6.
44
Marco Capra, ‘Filippi, Filippo’, in Roberta Montemorra Marvin (ed.), The Cambridge Verdi Encyclopedia
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 168.
45
Della Corte, La critica musicale e i critici, p. 513.
46
Capra, ‘La Casa Editrice Sonzogno tra giornalismo e impresariato’, p. 254.
establishment that the overall state of Italian criticism was rather weak, even
in the later years of the century. As Filippi himself wrote in 1881:
There are critics who are fairly well-educated, enlightened and passionate
about art, but they are in an absolute minority, and in the opposing camp
there is a rabble of light, superficial writers who adopt the airs of critics, and,
opposing all artistic progress, become accessories to ignorance, happy and
content to declare to be ugly all that which they do not understand, or do not
wish to understand.47
Part of the problem was that Italian critics were in thrall to public taste, and
to an almost excessive degree. As David Kimbell writes, ‘if a composer wrote
operas that thrilled or delighted people all over Italy he was a great composer;
if he didn’t he wasn’t, and it cut no ice to read in the newspaper the next day
that his modulations were sublime, or his instrumentation deeply scientific’.48
Many of the dilettante critics went so far as to ally themselves with the least
knowledgeable of their readers, arguing that unschooled audience members
were the best judges of art because their impressions were uncontaminated
and uncomplicated by any sort of theoretical knowledge. Technical knowl-
edge was commonly held to be a veritable barrier (for both audience members
and critics) to hearing music in a ‘pure’ way. The heart was deemed to be vastly
more important than the head: thus, the way an opera made one feel was all-
important and a work’s success could be judged in terms of the amount of
tears it prompted. Those reviewers who were not musically literate were not
necessarily devoid of musical sense, it was argued, and had a kind of insight
into the music that matched that of their readership better than that of the
critics whose prose was overly theoretical. This was, of course, an extremely
convenient line for the less musically adept reviewers to be promoting: it gave
them a justification for writing in a style that was highly impressionistic and
for making extravagant claims about a composer’s merits that were rarely
backed up by any specific reference to the music itself. Critics often argued
that audiences did not want technical criticism and caricatured it as being
‘German’ – something that was clearly intended as an insult.49
47
‘C’è una critica abbastanza colta, illuminata e appassionata per l’arte, essa è in assoluta minoranza, e nel
campo opposto avvi una turba di scrittori leggeri, superficiali, che si atteggiano a critici, e, opponendosi
a qualunque progresso dell’arte, si fanno complici dell’ignoranza, beati e contenti di dichiarare brutto
tutto quello che non comprendono o che non vogliono comprendere’ (della Corte, La critica musicale e i
critici, p. 535.)
48
David Kimbell, Italian Opera (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 15.
49
I have discussed these issues in more detail elsewhere. See Wilson, The Puccini Problem; ‘Defining
Italianness: The Opera that made Puccini’, Opera Quarterly, 24/1–2 (2008), 82–92; and ‘Music, Letters and
National Identity: Reading the 1890s Italian Music Press’, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, 7/2 (2010),
99–116.
In the final decades of the nineteenth century the better music critics began
to agitate for matters to improve. Debates about the state of criticism raged in
the pages of the Gazzetta musicale di Milano itself during the spring of 1886, and
the next two decades would witness the rise of a new, different type of music
criticism. The Cronaca musicale, for example, was founded in 1896 in order to
promote the serious study of music history (it contained lengthy articles
addressing historical, aesthetic and technical issues), with the explicit inten-
tion of raising critical standards. The journal’s editor, Tancredi Mantovani,
argued that there was a causal relationship between criticism and composi-
tion: a lack of direction in music criticism was, he argued, encouraging a weak
and uncertain state of musical production in contemporary Italy.50 (To sug-
gest that Italian opera of the turn of the century was entering a period of
decline may now strike some readers as absurd, but this was indeed the
perspective shared by a significant minority of elite music critics of the day.)
Broadsheets such as Musica and La riforma musicale also published serious,
lengthy reviews and articles on music history, aesthetics, theory and issues
of contemporary musical debate, often adopting a fiercely polemical tone.
The new musical commentators of the last years of the century were in
many cases librarians, often employed in conservatoires: figures such as
Arnaldo Bonaventura, Guido Gasperini, Giovanni Tebaldini and Angelo
Solerti, who were authors of serious books on music and who had aspirations
to change the way in which music was studied.51 Their emergence in the field
of music criticism coincided with the rise of Italian musicology at the turn of
the century, although it was not until 1925 that the first university course in
musicology was offered, at Turin.52 Inspired by trends in German scholarship,
these scholars were primarily concerned with cataloguing the contents of
archives and producing modern editions of early Italian music, especially
sixteenth-century polyphony.53 To accompany this work, they began to pro-
duce specialist journals such as La rinascita musicale, which was explicitly
devoted to sacred music.
This period also saw the emergence of a new generation of polemical
writers who were profoundly dissatisfied with the state of Italian music and
of Italian music criticism: some, like Luigi Torchi and Fausto Torrefranca,
were more academically inclined, whereas others, such as the composer
Ildebrando Pizzetti and the composer-pianist Giannotto Bastianelli, were
50
Anon. [presumed to be Mantovani], Cronaca musicale, 1/1 (18 February 1896), 1.
51
Criscione, Luigi Torchi, pp. 121–2.
52
Nicolodi, ‘Opera Production in Italy from Unification to the Present’, p. 167; Carolyn Gianturco,
‘Musicology, §I I I , [2]: National Traditions: Italy’, in Sadie and Tyrrell (eds.), The New Grove Dictionary of
Music and Musicians, vol. 17, p. 510.
53
Criscione, Luigi Torchi, p. 120.
principally practitioners. It is into this context that we must place Torchi’s

Rivista musicale italiana, which was founded in Turin, the capital of Italian
academic publishing, rather than Milan, the capital of opera-going and of
more populist publishing (although the journal would eventually transfer
there). Torchi was something of a musical polymath: not only a critic (for-
merly of the Gazzetta musicale di Milano) but also an author of books (including
the first Italian study of Wagner), a teacher and a librarian.54 The RMI, which
was published by Fratelli Bocca, Italy’s pre-eminent positivist academic pub-
lishing house, was more critically incisive than any previous Italian music
journal.55 Torchi set forth his stall in the first issue with an announcement
that the publication would be rigorous, objective and at times severe in its
judgements.56 Protestations of neutrality are often a smokescreen for parti-
sanship, as we have already seen, but while the RMI had an agenda which
disposed it towards and against certain repertories, its content suggests that it
remained aloof from the widespread practice of taking money in return for
favourable notices. The journal’s aspiration was to devote space to the ideas of
Italy’s most talented music critics, who at that time felt that they had no outlet
for their creativity.57
The RMI sought to differentiate itself from other Italian music periodicals
in terms of the repertory that it covered. Contemporary music by the likes of
Strauss and Debussy was favoured on the one hand, early music on the other.
Torchi was himself an editor of early instrumental and sacred music, and the
rediscovery and promotion of early Italian instrumental music were impor-
tant concerns of the RMI. Torchi’s status as a Wagner enthusiast – and his
hope that Italian opera might itself be remodelled along Wagnerian lines –
inevitably led him to promote Wagner’s music dramas and theoretical writ-
ings in the pages of the RMI.58 Indeed, we might say that the arrival of
Wagner’s works in Italy had a hand in prompting a sea change in Italian
criticism. Such was the complexity and sophistication of Wagner’s music
that it baffled the dilettantes: this was an oeuvre that demanded a more
sophisticated or professional type of music criticism, and a new generation
of competent writers emerged to rise to the challenge. The RMI’s pro-Wagner
bias was inevitably accompanied by an anti-Verdi/anti-Puccini bias: both
composers were almost entirely ignored, save for an article about Verdi’s
death and a review of Tosca.59 In the RMI’s mission statement its editors
54
Ibid., p. 9. Torchi’s book was Riccardo Wagner: Studio critico (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1890).
55
Contributors included Amintore Galli, Vincenzo Tommasini, Giovanni Tebaldini and Fausto
Torrefranca. Criscione, Luigi Torchi, p. 77.
56
‘Ai lettori’, Rivista musicale italiana, 1 (1894), 1–6. 57
Ibid., 2, 9.
58 59
Criscione, Luigi Torchi, p. 9. Ibid., pp. 72, 96.
declared that while they would devote space to every genre and form of music,
however humble or simple, works of a ‘popularising’ nature would not fit the
journal’s remit and would therefore be excluded.60 Essentially, the RMI
sought to tell an ‘alternative’ story of Italy’s musical past – as well as to
campaign for a starkly different musical future.
The writers that the RMI used were often distinguished names from abroad,
such as Eduard Hanslick, Romain Rolland and J. A. Fuller Maitland. Articles
by French contributors were printed in the original language, reinforcing the
point that the journal did not seek to address the average Italian opera-goer,
but rather an educated elite. The RMI’s reviews were lengthy and contained
technical detail – even music examples, more akin to what one might expect to
find in an academic journal. The journal followed the following format:
‘memorie’ (historical, philological and archive-focused articles); ‘arte contem-
poranea’ (consideration of recent works, stylistic and theoretical issues, acous-
tics, ethnomusicology); ‘recensioni’ (reviews of Italian and foreign books);
‘spoglio dei periodici’ (a summary of articles from a range of Italian and
foreign periodicals); ‘notizie’ (news and announcements); ‘elenco di tutti
i libri’ (books published) and ‘elenco della musica’ (music received). Books
reviewed included titles on music history, criticism, aesthetics, theory, instru-
mentation, sacred music, ‘Wagneriana’ and editions of music.
The journal’s remit sometimes went beyond music per se: scientists such as
Cesare Lombroso contributed articles considering the latest research in phy-
siology, psychology and acoustics. The interdisciplinary nature of the journal
pointed the way forward to the early years of the twentieth century, when
serious music criticism would find another outlet in the wide-ranging avant-
garde cultural journals that flourished in Florence. Particularly significant
among these was La voce (founded in 1908), in which Torrefranca, Pizzetti
and Bastianelli, among others, outlined their plans for the overhaul of the
national art form, as part of a broader attack on the values of the Italian
bourgeoisie.
In conclusion then, to return to the quotation from Michele Virgilio at the
beginning of this chapter, we see that music criticism most certainly did exist
in Italy, and in a wide range of different types of format. Indeed, the Centro
internazionale di ricerca sui periodici musicali, based in Parma, lists more than
seventy-five Italian journals founded between 1800 and 1900 that were
devoted to music.61 Some of these were short-lived and others were different
60
‘Volemmo esclusi i lavori così detti di volgarizzazione che mal si acconcerebbero all’indole della
Rivista’ (‘Ai lettori’, Rivista musicale italiana, 1 (1894), 3).
61
Centro internazionale di ricerca sui periodici musicali, available at cirpem.lacasadellamusica.it/cirpem-
2.htm.
versions of essentially the same publication under successive guises; never-

theless, the figure remains impressive. The market for literature about music
grew across the course of the century, and particularly so in tandem with the
post-Unification expansion in opera-going. The readership for serious music
criticism along the lines of that published in the RMI, on the other hand,
would undoubtedly have been restricted, but it would have been composed of
an influential beau monde who played an important role in defining taste (or
at least attempted to, in the case of the more extreme critics who aspired to
lure audiences away from the standard operatic repertoire). The pages of the
press became a battleground in which bitter debates were played out not only
about the state of criticism but about what Italian music ought to be and
whom it ought to be for. By the end of the century, old certainties were
coming under question, as critics began to debate whether it was still accep-
table or desirable for composers to work more or less within the horizon of
expectation of their audiences, long regarded as one of the fundamentals of
populist Italian opera composition.
. 11 .
Music Criticism in Imperial Russia

EMILY FREY
Criticism was not a parasitical genre in imperial Russia. In a nation given to

regarding its literature as holy writ, with real power to shape both the
behaviour of individuals and the sociopolitical organisation of the country,
the critic played a role of something like a high priest. During the realist
ferment that engulfed Russia in the mid-nineteenth century, coinciding with
the rapid expansion of the public press and the rise of professional criticism,
a critic’s job was not simply to appraise, but also to sermonise: to plumb the
central ideas of a work of literature (that literature should be about ideas was
a near-universal assumption) and to distil the significance of those ideas in
ways that could be applied in real life. According to the Slavist Irina Paperno,
the role of a literary critic during the heyday of Russian realism was
to mediate between the literary work and its actualization in reality . . . On this
view, the critic is a full co-author of the text (even though his presence is
frequently uninvited and unwelcome) . . . [During the age of realism] literature
was almost universally regarded as an all-encompassing ‘guide to life’ . . . and
a driving force of social and historical progress; and literary criticism was
viewed as an essential part of literature.1
Many works of Russian literary criticism – among them, Vissarion Belinsky’s

‘Survey of Russian Literature in 1847’, Nikolai Dobroliubov’s ‘What Is
Oblomovitis?’ and ‘A Ray of Light in a Dark Kingdom’, and Dmitri Pisarev’s
‘Bazarov’ – have become classics in their own right, their fame rivalling that of
the fictional works they critique. The prestige of literary criticism in imperial
Russia owes something to the exigencies of tsarist censorship, which forbade
(more or less strictly, depending on who was wearing the crown) the publica-
tion of anti-establishment social and political views. The discussion of fiction
thus provided an outlet for the left-leaning intelligentsia to consider issues
1
Irina Paperno, Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism: A Study in the Semiotics of Behavior (Stanford: Stanford
[208]
Music Criticism in Imperial Russia 209
that could not otherwise be debated openly. Critique the society represented
in a work of realist literature, after all, and you implicitly critique the society
you inhabit in real life. The influence of criticism on Russian history has been
enormous; it is little exaggeration to say that the intellectual origins of the
Russian revolution were forged in mid-nineteenth century literary criticism.
Compared with those of literature, music’s ambitions in Russia have gen-
erally been modest. Nineteenth-century Russian composers evinced little of
the didactic impulse that characterised so many of their literary colleagues;
there is not much in Russian music to compare with the famous epilogues of
War and Peace or Crime and Punishment. Music critics likewise tended to
entertain more life-sized aspirations than did their literary counterparts,
advocating for revolutions that were usually artistic rather than political in
nature. But the high stakes and broad scope of contemporary literary criticism
need to be kept in mind when we consider some of the peculiarities of Russian
music criticism in the imperial period: the often-strident polemics, the fla-
grant biases, the frequent detours into philosophy, aesthetics and even ethics.
Many music critics saw their task as not so very different from that of their
contemporaries among literary critics. For music, they believed, was also
about ideas. In 1844, the incipient music and art critic Vladimir Stasov
elaborated his views on the purpose of criticism in a letter to his father:
Hitherto all criticism of the arts has consisted of saying: this is good, this is
bad, this is not seemly, here are such-and-such errors in costume, here in
proportion, etc. No talent is needed for such criticism as this, only a certain
degree of study and learning . . . and consequently all the criticism written up to
this time can be quietly destroyed since it is helpful neither to the works
themselves nor to those who look at them . . .
Every real work of art . . . bears within itself its meaning and its allotted task;
to reveal both of these for the human race is the task of criticism, and such
criticism has not existed for the arts . . . The duty [of criticism] is to extract
from the work of art itself its vital idea, by which and for which the whole work
exists with all its beauty and greatness; in short, criticism of the arts must
show what works have been created in the world up to now . . . by what means
they utter their inner thought, and the meaning of this thought for the world,
i.e. criticism must show the indispensability of these productions to the
world . . .2
Like their literary colleagues, music critics in imperial Russia saw their aims as
encompassing more than description and evaluation. By illuminating the
‘inner thoughts’ of musical works and explaining their significance for the
2
Quoted in Gerald Abraham, ‘Introduction’ to Vladimir Stasov, Selected Essays on Music, trans. Florence
Jonas (London: Barrie & Rockliff, The Cresset Press, 1968), pp. 9–10.
210 EMILY FREY
world, they hoped to shape both the kind of music that was produced and the
ways in which people thought about it. They were remarkably successful: the
narratives produced by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century music critics
would dominate discourse on Russian music, both in Russia and in the West,
for over a century.
Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism

Just as there were Russian composers before Mikhail Glinka (1804–57), there
were Russian music critics before Vladimir Odoevsky (1803–69), despite the
reputation of these two figures as the founders of their respective traditions.3
Prince Odoevsky, an aristocrat with a sparkling education, was a man of
diverse enthusiasms. In addition to being a music critic and sometime com-
poser, he was an author of popular fiction, an advocate of railroads,
a proponent of educational reform, a member of the Imperial Geographic
and Archaeological Societies, an editor of a literary journal, a civil servant and
the host of a fashionable literary and musical salon.4 But Odoevsky was no
musical dilettante. He differed from his predecessors in his fluent command of
musical technique, which he combined with a coherent and consistent aes-
thetic stance. Odoevsky was certainly not the first Russian to write about
music, but he was the first music critic in the strong sense of the term. His
critical activity spanned, on and off, from the mid-1820s to his death in 1869,
and his writings encompassed a wide variety of genres, from concert promo-
tion to reviews, to longer essays to fiction on musical themes. He made
occasional contributions to a number of publications, including both daily
newspapers such as The Northern Bee [Severnaia pchela] and monthly journals
such as Notes from the Fatherland [Otechestvennye zapiski], and availed himself
of a dizzying array of pseudonyms, from his initials, ‘K. V. O.’ (the ‘K’ stands
for kniaz, the Russian word for ‘prince’) to more fanciful inventions such as ‘P.
Bichev’, a name that suggests a scourge or a whip.
Odoevsky does not fit easily into any of the categories into which we are
accustomed to sorting nineteenth-century Russian thinkers. Slavophiles
regarded him as a cosmopolitan, and Westernisers as a mystic; he both
venerated ancient Russian customs and advocated for modernisation and
3
See the first chapter of Tamara Livanova and Vladimir Protopopov’s Opernaia kritika v Rossii, vol. I
(Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Muzyka, 1966), for a history of Russian music criticism before Odoevsky.
4
For a biography of Odoevsky, see Neil Cornwell, The Life, Times, and Milieu of V. F. Odoyevsky (Athens:
Ohio University Press, 1986). For a more specific discussion of Odoevsky’s musical activities, including his
criticism, his activities on behalf of music education in Russia and his interactions with Russian and
Western composers, see James Stuart Campbell, V. F. Odoyevsky and the Formation of Russian Musical Taste in
the Nineteenth Century (New York and London: Garland, 1989).
reform. He is best known today as a writer of Romantic stories, and the

fantastic and musical content of those stories, as well as his reverence for
Beethoven and Mozart (particularly the latter’s Don Giovanni), has earned him
the nickname ‘the Russian Hoffmann’. He came of age during a heady vogue
for German idealism among educated Russian society, and the philosophies of
Schelling, Fichte and Hegel left a lasting impression on his thought.5 But
a straightforward designation of Odoevsky as a Romantic is complicated by
the fact that, by the end of his career, he was championing the music of Serov
and Dargomyzhsky, the two leading ‘realists’ of the 1860s. Rather un-
Romantically, too, Odoevsky was sceptical of the idea of autonomous art.
He believed that art could directly influence social mores: just as good art
(which, for Odoevsky, was almost always of German or Russian provenance)
could uplift society, so too could bad art usher in moral disease. These
dynamics are made explicit in Odoevsky’s short story ‘Sebastian Bach’
(1835), which depicts the visit of a self-promoting Italian singer to the
German master. Though finding the Italian’s voice ‘beautiful, pure . . . bright,
dazzling’, even ‘tempting’, Sebastian Bach does not yield to its siren call; he is
nonplussed by the lack of ‘mathematical necessity’ in the melody.6 Magdalena
Bach, however, is utterly taken in, her seduction legible in the involuntary
responses of her body: her pale cheeks, her cold hands, her tears, her trem-
bling. Her moral sense upended, Magdalena abandons her household duties,
returning to herself only over the course of several months. The sensual appeal
of a beautiful voice was dangerous, Odoevsky believed, for it could put the
hearer’s rational faculties to sleep. Sonic beauty needed to be allied with
upstanding moral content (which Odoevsky thought borne by a deliberate,
‘mathematically necessary’ melody), or else confusion and degeneration could
ensue.7 The belief that art had ethical obligations was, of course, a central
tenet of Russian realism, and it put Odoevsky in company with his counter-
parts among literary critics such as Vissarion Belinsky.
But if Odoevsky was not reliably a Westerniser or a Slavophile, a liberal or
a conservative, a Romantic or a realist, he was reliably a foe of Italian music.
The period of Odoevsky’s activity as a critic coincided with the ascendancy of
the Italian Opera in St Petersburg, when the tsar’s patronage kept the
5
For a more general analysis of the influence of German idealism on the early nineteenth-century Russian
intelligentsia, see Isaiah Berlin’s famous essay ‘A Remarkable Decade’, in Russian Thinkers (New York:
Penguin Books, 1979), particularly the section ‘German Romanticism in Petersburg and Moscow’, pp.
136–49.
6
Odoevsky, ‘Sebastian Bach’, in Russian Nights, trans. Olga Koshansky-Olienikov and Ralph E. Matlaw
(Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1997), p. 184.
7
As David Lowe notes, Odoevsky’s qualms about the potential moral threats posed by music anticipate
those of Tolstoy, the author of The Kreutzer Sonata. See David Lowe, ‘Vladimir Odoevskii as Opera Critic’,
Slavic Review, 41/ 2 (1982), 312.
212 EMILY FREY
imported Italian troupe flush with world-famous singers and lavish sets and
costumes.8 The Russian troupe, which did not so benefit from the imperial
purse, had no hope of matching the Italians in terms of star power, production
values and sheer fashionability – a situation that soured the grapes of two
generations’ worth of Russian musicians. For his part, Odoevsky objected to
Italian opera on both aesthetic and social grounds. Odoevsky’s aesthetic
complaints about Italian opera were the familiar ones: he thought it trivial,
cliché-ridden, over-reliant on vocal feats and ‘barbaric’ orchestral effects, and
generally arbitrary, the music forever at odds with the scenario. Reviewing the
Russian troupe’s production of Norma in 1836, Odoevsky remarked:
We cannot share the dilettantes’ predilection for the music of Bellini, and
especially for Norma; in it this composer of musical sighs and tender cabalettas
resembles a child who has smeared on a moustache with coal and taken
a wooden sabre in his hands, seeking to frighten everyone gathered
round . . . In Norma Bellini is not himself: he wants to produce strong,
expressive singing, and under his pen appears a sentimental, fussy romance;
poorly acquainted with the orchestra, he does not know how to create bold
strokes without gongs and cymbals. When will these barbaric instruments
disappear from the orchestra?9
Even Bellini’s celebrated melodies received no praise from this determined

critic. Odoevsky considered melody the bearer of national spirit, and in
a jeremiad of 1867 he described Italian melody as ‘the song of slaves,
forced through their tears to entertain a company of Metternichs or else
King Bomba’.10 Even worse, this ‘unnatural, constantly lying sort of
music’ threatened to turn the Russian opera-going public into slaves
too.11 Odoevsky lobbied some of his sharpest social criticism at the
urban elite who swarmed to the Italian opera, branding them just as
mindless and senseless as the music that left them so enraptured. This
theme is already present in ‘Vexing Days’, a short story Odoevsky wrote at
the age of nineteen, which depicts the Russian public’s fashionable enthu-
siasm for Rossini’s Tancredi as a symptom of uncritical herd mentality. For
the next forty-five years, his opinion of the social threat posed by Italian
opera would remain largely the same. ‘What have these thoughtless Italian
groans in common with our healthy, virginal, strong musical elements?’ he
8
For a history of the state-subsidised Italian Opera in St Petersburg and an account of Russian reactions
to it, see the chapter ‘Ital’yanshchina’, in Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically: Historical and
Hermeneutical Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).
9
Vladimir Odoevskiĭ, ‘Eshche o predstavlenii Normy’, in Muzykal’no-literaturnoe nasledie (Moscow:
Gosudarstvennoe muzykal’noe izdatel’stvo, 1956), pp. 149–50.
10
‘Russkaia ili ital’ianskaia opera?’, in ibid., p. 313. 11
Ibid., p. 314.
thundered in 1867. ‘Probably these tawdry, hollow Italian sounds will

knock the sense out of our national feelings.’12
Those ‘national feelings’ were of great consequence to Odoevsky. His most
lasting contribution to the annals of Russian music criticism is the ‘Hats off,
gentlemen!’ reception he gave to Glinka’s A Life for the Tsar, a work in whose
genesis Odoevsky had in fact played a role.13 It was Odoevsky who first hailed
Glinka’s opera as a national monument, marking a new era in the history not
only of Russian music, but of music in general. Odoevsky considered the
significance of A Life for the Tsar to lie in its synthesis and elevation of
the elements of Russian folk melody – again, for Odoevsky, the carrier of
the nation’s spirit. ‘Even before Glinka’s opera’, Odoevsky wrote in his first
review of A Life for the Tsar:
moderately successful attempts had been made to seek out these general forms
of Russian melody and harmony . . . But never before has the use of these
forms been carried out on such a large scale as in Glinka’s opera. Initiated into
all the secrets of Italian singing and German harmony, the composer has
penetrated deep into the character of Russian melody! Rich in his own talent,
he has demonstrated by this splendid attempt that Russian melody, naturally
by turns melancholy, happy and daring, can also be elevated to the realms of
tragedy.14
Striking, here, is the degree to which Odoevsky’s idea of ‘national’ music

differs from that of later critics, particularly those associated with the kuchka
or Mighty Five. Glinka’s opera is ‘a matter . . . of genius’,15 Odoevsky writes,
because it had managed to combine sophisticated European technique – the
fruit of the composer’s initiation into ‘all the secrets of Italian singing and
German harmony’ – with Russian melody. Whatever his phobia of Italian
opera (which, as the quotation above indicates, did not necessarily extend to
Italian singing), Odoevsky’s conception of national music was not a narrow
and xenophobic one. For Odoevsky, A Life for the Tsar’s melody, and thus its
12
Ibid.
13
For more on Odoevsky’s involvement in the creation of A Life for the Tsar, see Campbell, V. F. Odoyevsky,
pp. 192–6.
14
‘Letter to a Music Lover on the Subject of Glinka’s Opera A Life for the Tsar’, in James Stuart Campbell
(ed.), Russians on Russian Music, 1830–1880: An Anthology (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge
University Press, 1994), p. 3. Odoevsky published this 1836 review in The Northern Bee [Severnaia pchela],
a newspaper noted for the breadth of its circulation, the scope of its musical coverage and the reactionary
politics of its editor, Faddey Bulgarin – a man whom even the genial and diplomatic Odoevsky found
difficult to tolerate. The two clashed in print over A Life for the Tsar, with Bulgarin arguing that Odoevsky’s
effusive praise of the opera was unjustified. (They would do battle again over Ruslan and Liudmila in
1842–3.) From 1837 Odoevsky began to publish his criticism and his fiction in more sympathetic venues,
especially the Literary Supplement to the Russian Veteran [Russkiĭ invalid], the St Petersburg Gazette [Sankt-
Peterburgskie vedomosti], and Notes of the Fatherland [Otechestvennye zapiski].
15
Campbell (ed.), Russians on Russian Music, 1830–1880, p. 3.
214 EMILY FREY
character, were Russian, but its form and technique were universal, and that
was the model to which Russian music should aspire.16 Forever grumbling
about the dilettantism of Russian musicians and audiences, Odoevsky was
a lifelong advocate of musical education who helped to draft the charter for
the St Petersburg Conservatory, that quintessentially ‘cosmopolitan’ institu-
tion that the kuchka so ardently opposed.
What is ‘Truth’?
Prince Odoevsky, sharply opinionated but consummately aristocratic, would
seem a pussycat next to two critics of the next generation, Alexander Serov
(1820–71) and Vladimir Stasov (1824–1906). Befriending each other as teen-
agers at the Imperial School of Jurisprudence,17 Serov and Stasov fell out both
in private (over Stasov’s romantic entanglement with Serov’s sister) and in
print (over their diverging opinions of Ruslan and Liudmila).18 Despite their
differences on the matter of Ruslan, the two former schoolmates had much in
common as critics. Both were hardened musical progressives, proclaiming
that musical beauty could not come at the expense of dramatic ‘truth’. Like
Nikolai Chernyshevsky and Nikolai Dobroliubov, their contemporaries
among literary critics, Serov and Stasov both believed that art had ethical
obligations to society, and so ‘truth’ in art was for them a matter of almost
sacred importance. Both were virulently anti-Conservatory, believing (pace
Odoevsky) that European technique could only stunt a Russian musician.
Both, too, wrote with a certain belligerent vigour – a quality Gerald
Abraham termed ‘gusto’19 and Stuart Campbell ‘vitriolic zest’.20 Measured
and even-handed judgements are scarce commodities among their writings;
neither Serov nor Stasov was a man to let objective fairness get in the way of
rhetorical wallop. Of the two, Stasov is far better known in the West for
16
For a discussion of the different ideas of nationalism circulating in early nineteenth-century Russia, see
Marina Frolova-Walker, ‘Constructing the Russian National Character: Literature and Music’, in Russian
Music and Nationalism from Glinka to Stalin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007). For a consideration of
the dynamics of nationalism and cosmopolitanism in A Life for the Tsar, see ‘M. I. Glinka and the State’, in
Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically; and Rutger Helmers, ‘A Life for the Tsar and Bel Canto Opera’, in Not
Russian Enough? Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century Russian Opera (Rochester: University
of Rochester Press, 2014).
17
The Imperial School of Jurisprudence, a prestigious training ground for future civil servants, was in
Gerald Abraham’s words a ‘hot-bed of musical activity’ that mandated instrumental lessons and participa-
tion in the school orchestra. (Abraham, ‘Introduction’ to Stasov, Selected Essays on Music, p. 3.) The School
produced at least one other Russian musician of note: Piotr Il’ich Tchaikovsky, along with his brother and
sometime librettist, Modest.
18
The history of their critical battles over Ruslan is recounted in Richard Taruskin, ‘Glinka’s Ambiguous
Legacy and the Birth Pangs of Russian Opera’, 19th-Century Music, 1/2 (November 1977), 142–62.
19
Abraham, ‘Introduction’, p. 9. Italics original.
20
a number of reasons: he had thirty-five years after Serov’s death to state his
case as loudly as he liked, he attracted an Anglophone disciple, Rosa
Newmarch,21 who produced some of the first English-language books and
articles on Russian music, and towards the end of his life he penned, in
Richard Taruskin’s words, ‘the great synoptical articles that formed the
basis for Western reception of Russian music in the early twentieth
century’.22 During the 1850s and 1860s, however, Stasov addressed the public
only rarely in print; his reputation as a critic rests primarily on those later
‘synoptical articles’, which will be discussed at the end of this essay. Serov,
meanwhile, was the most prolific and respected music critic in mid-century
Russia. His skills of musical observation outstripped even his friend
Odoevsky’s, to say nothing of his rival Stasov’s, and for years he eked out
a livelihood on the proceeds of his criticism. During the last decade of his life
Serov also became one of the most renowned composers in Russia. The
smashing success of his patriotic opera Rogneda (1865) earned him a pension
from Tsar Alexander II, and thus a respite from the graphomaniacal frenzy
that had sustained his finances for so long.
Serov’s musical writings ran the gamut from concert reviews to polemics to
what might frankly be called musicology: extended treatments of various
composers – both Russian and Western, living and historical – often supple-
mented with musical examples. Much of his criticism is concerned with the
search for ideals, both operatic and critical. (‘The absence of the ideal is death to
art!’ he wrote in 1863.)23 In his earliest articles Serov expressed some despair at
the low level of Russian musical criticism, which he characterised as dealing
mainly in superficial comments about performances and trivia about composers
and singers. Music criticism did not stand comparison with Russia’s by now
robust tradition of literary criticism, he believed, and its advancement required
two things. The first was a journal dedicated specifically to music, so that
musical works could be discussed in specialist, rather than dilettantish,
terms – a criterion that was fulfilled with the founding of the weekly
Musical and Theatrical Herald [Muzykal’nyi i teatral’nyi vestnik] in 1856.24 The
21
In the summer of 1897, Newmarch travelled to Russia to work under Stasov at the Imperial Public
Library; the two would meet again in London in 1900 and the following year in St Petersburg. She carried
on an extensive correspondence with both Stasov and Balakirev until their deaths in 1906 and 1910,
respectively. For more on Newmarch and her influence on the English reception of Russian music, see
Philip Ross Bullock, Rosa Newmarch and Russian Music in Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth-Century Britain
22
Richard Taruskin, ‘Serov, Alexander Nikolayevich’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, available
at www.oxfordmusiconline.com (accessed 24 August 2017).
23
Aleksandr Nikolaevich Serov, Kriticheskie stat’i, vol. I I I (St Petersburg: Tipografiia Departamenta
Udelov, 1892), p. 1542.
24
Serov had a regular column in the Musical and Theatrical Herald for all four years of its operation, and
several of his most important articles were published there, including his monumental cycle of articles on
216 EMILY FREY
other item Serov believed indispensable to the maturation of Russian music

criticism was far more abstract: a set of ideal principles about ‘what real (that is
excellent) music and real (that is excellent) performance ought to be’.25 Music
criticism, in other words, could not be merely reactive; it had to be principled,
with individual works and performances measured against firmly established
critical ideals. Further, Serov continued, ‘beyond the establishment of ideal
principles, music criticism must certainly touch upon the bottomless pit of
deep aesthetic questions – questions about truth and beauty in art in general’.26
For Serov, the minute details of a particular musical work (for which the
perceptive Serov had an unparalleled ear) should serve the critic as points of
entry into the realm of ‘universal’ questions. Good criticism, then, was for
Serov a matter of moving from the individual to the infinite. He embodied this
critical ideal in an astonishing cycle of ten articles on Dargomyzhsky’s Rusalka
(1856); the cycle juxtaposes in-depth analysis of the music and libretto against
a broad aesthetic and historical background.27 In the later 1850s and 1860s
Serov’s writings were also influenced by the so-called ‘organic criticism’ of his
friend, the conservative literary critic Apollon Grigor’ev, who believed that art
was an organic outgrowth of the nation that produced it. On this theory, the
small details of a work of art could be related to larger questions of national
identity – and Serov was apt to make just those connections in his criticism.28
In terms of musical ideals, the conviction that an opera was primarily
a dramatic work was – as Tchaikovsky wrote in 1872, the year after Serov’s
death – virtually ‘the motto of his whole career as a critic’.29 This credo clearly
owed much to Wagner, and the Russian critic’s immoderate and impolitic
enthusiasm for the author of Opera and Drama provided his enemies with
a convenient cudgel with which to beat him in the 1860s. But Serov’s affinity
Dargomyzhsky’s Rusalka. In 1867, Serov and his wife, Valentina, founded their own biweekly journal for
musical and theatrical criticism, entitled Music and Theatre [Muzyka i teatr].
25
Serov, ‘Ital’ianskaia opera v Peterburge’, in Stat’i o muzyke, vol. I (Moscow: Muzyka, 1984), p. 14.
26
Ibid.
27
The entire cycle is printed in Aleksandr Nikolaevich Serov, Stat’i o muzyke, vol. I I b (Moscow: Muzyka,
1986), pp. 42–137. The Soviet music historian Tamara Livanova compares Serov’s Rusalka cycle to the
famous Pushkin cycle (1843–6) of Vissarion Belinsky, the first professional literary critic in Russia and one
of the founders of the realist movement. See Tamara Livanova, Opernaia kritika v Rossii, vol. I I (Moscow:
Muzyka, 1969), pp. 139–41.
28
For a discussion of Serov’s relationship to the Russian movement known as pochvennichestvo (sometimes
translated as ‘native soil conservatism’), whose prominent figures included Grigor’ev and Dostoevsky, see
Richard Taruskin, ‘Pochvennichestvo on the Russian Operatic Stage: Serov and his Rogneda’, in Opera and
Drama in Russia as Preached and Practiced in the 1860s (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1981). Serov’s
connections with the pochvenniki are exemplary of the variance between musical and literary politics in this
period: the musical left is here allied with the literary right. Members of the musically progressive
Balakirev circle also entertained certain conservative, Slavophilic ideas, despite their affinities for literary
leftists such as Belinsky and Nikolai Chernyshevsky.
29
P. I. Tchaikovsky, ‘The Revival of Ruslan and Lyudmila’, in Campbell (ed.), Russians on Russian Music,
1830–1880, p. 135.
for Wagner was more a matter of sympathy than imitation. Hints of ‘refor-
mist’ ideas about the relationship between words and music were already in
the air, after all, present in Odoevsky’s railings against the ‘arbitrariness’ of
Italian opera – which Serov was all too happy to amplify in his own writings
on Italian music.30 For example, Serov wrote in 1851 that Verdi’s Ernani
sacrificed the dramatic effectiveness of Hugo’s original play for noisy and
tasteless musical effects:
Ernani, Victor Hugo’s famous play, would have been a very decent subject for
opera with a different, competent development; the gravitation of all interest
toward the very last scenes and the passion of these scenes are extremely
favourable for musical poetry. But what did Mr. Verdi make use of here? The
choirs of robbers and conspirators for their eternal unison ‘fortissimo’, the
scene of Karl V in the dungeon for its deafening finale, again with the soloists
and choristers all in unison, along with banging tamtams, ringing bells, and
firing cannons. The scenes of love and passion, and, finally, the pathetic
denouement of the play are given the most superficial and melodramatic
treatment, serving as a canvas for the most banal arias, cut out in the well-
known Italian manner, and with the same duets and terzets in unison!
As Richard Taruskin has pointed out, Serov’s ideas about music and drama were
already percolating by 1852, years before he had even heard a note of
Tannhäuser.31 And the practical implications of those ideas, at least as far as one
can judge from Serov’s operas of the 1860s, were not always particularly
Wagnerian. For other Russian critics, perhaps the most shocking features of
Judith were the deliberately harsh timbres Serov had demanded of his singers in
the name of dramatic ‘truth’, with violent situations calling for violent sounds. In
any event, Serov honed his ideas on musical drama in his polemics with Stasov on
the relative merits of A Life for the Tsar and Ruslan and Liudmila, which began to
appear in print shortly after Glinka’s death in 1857. This debate continued for
the better part of a decade, featuring both critics at their vitriolic best,32 and drew
commentary from a wide swathe of the Russian musical universe.
30
Serov, ‘Ital’ianskaia opera’, in Stat’i o muzyke, vol. I , pp. 85–6. Italics original. In the same article Serov
asserts that ‘the main character [of Ernani] is the Turkish drum and its allies, the copper cymbals.’ Ibid.,
p. 85.
31
See Taruskin, Opera and Drama in Russia, p. 14. Serov’s Wagnerian ‘conversion’ dates to 1858, when he
travelled to Weimar, was captivated by a live performance of Tannhäuser (an opera whose score had
previously left him cold) and met Wagner himself. He would meet Wagner again during the German
composer’s 1863 tour of Russia, which Serov publicised in the Russian musical press.
32
An early salvo, for example, contained this characteristically Serovian slam: ‘In view of the roughness of
the language and sometimes the complete inability of the author to set out his stock of ideas in any
coherent or elegant fashion, ideas in which one occasionally glimpses a confused flash of truth, it is fairly
difficult to guess what [Stasov] is trying to say.’ Serov, ‘A Life for the Tsar and Ruslan and Lyudmila’, in
218 EMILY FREY
The Glinka debate raged with a vehemence that was out of all proportion to
the magnitude of Serov and Stasov’s differences, which amounted to
a contrary prioritisation of progressive musical values. Both preached the
gospel of musical ‘truth’, though they had different ideas about what that
truth looked like in practice. At the heart of Stasov’s preference for Ruslan was
that opera’s musical audacity: its diversity of style, its flexibility of form, and
its greater independence from established operatic convention. ‘Above all’,
wrote Stasov in 1857:
[in Ruslan] Glinka was attracted by the combination of diverse elements and
different nationalities, of tragic and comic moments, of magic in which the
themes of horror, grace, and strangeness are all manifested, of the fusion of
west and east, north and south – [which provided] the possibility and even the
necessity of using expressions and forms that are still unknown in the world of
European music.33
To this Stasov added a host of other tendentious justifications that fluctuated,

and not infrequently reversed themselves, over the course of the debate.34
Even in this early essay, however, Stasov attempted to forestall what he knew
would be a likely line of attack, adding: ‘What does it matter if all of these
tasks, fulfilled with masterly and ingenious art, do not cohere into one solid
whole, but instead appear as a series of separate pictures?’35
Serov, naturally, countered that Ruslan’s undisputed musical glories could
not make up for its slapdash plot, which he described as ‘only a thread upon
which Glinka wanted to string his musical pearls and diamonds’. And, he
continued:
on the scales of strict organic criticism can a necklace like this strung arbitrarily
on one thread from pearls and stones which are precious certainly but alien
one to another, can such a necklace match the inexhaustible profound treas-
ures of an organic unity in a creation which is poetic, which has grown up and
blossomed forth magnificently from one creative idea, as from a seed?36
For Stasov at this point in time, operatic ‘truth’ meant above all musical
innovation, and in particular the transcendence of conventional form, which
the realist literary critic Nikolai Chernyshevsky had famously declared the
33
Vladimir Stasov, Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka, ed. Vladimir Protopopov (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe
Muzykal’noe Izdatel’stvo, 1953), p. 212.
34
See Taruskin, ‘Glinka’s Ambiguous Legacy’, for a discussion of the vagaries of Stasov’s position.
35
Stasov, Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka, p. 212.
36
Serov, ‘A Life for the Tsar and Ruslan and Lyudmila’, in Campbell (ed.), Russians on Russian Music,
1830–1880, p. 117. Italics original. One thing Stasov and Serov could agree upon was that the politics
of A Life for the Tsar – which smacked of the repressive Tsar Nikolai I’s (r. 1825–55) doctrine of Official
Nationality (Orthodoxy, Autocracy, Nationalism) – were distasteful; Serov once derided the opera as
‘kvass-patriotic’.
opposite of ‘real’ emotion.37 For Serov, however, ‘truth’ meant primarily

musico-dramatic coherence, a banishment of that ‘arbitrariness’ that was so
characteristic (in Russian critics’ minds, at least) of Italian opera.38 These two
visions of operatic ‘truth’ were hardly incompatible, and indeed Serov had
explicitly linked musico-dramatic cohesion with the avoidance of convention
in the preface to his opera Rogneda, writing that his ideal of ‘dramatic truth in
tones’ had led him ‘to sacrifice “conventional” beauty, the “jewelled” refine-
ment of musical form’.39 In the war over Ruslan, however, the crack between
Serov and Stasov’s positions became a chasm.
If the battle over what constituted ‘truth’ in Russian opera was not resolved
in this debate, the matter of Ruslan’s reputation largely was – in Serov’s favour.
Tchaikovsky, an infrequent critic whose output was remarkably fair-minded
and insightful, was among the first to note the fact. In 1872, Tchaikovsky
claimed it ‘impossible to avoid the conclusion that Serov’s criticism is the
more profound and the more rational . . . [for] everyone knows that major
works of art are evaluated not so much by the strength of the immediate
creativity shown in them as by . . . the successful fusion of an idea with its
external expression’. But whatever the various merits of Glinka’s two operas,
as Taruskin has argued, the lasting impact of this high-profile critical con-
troversy was to get everyone in the Russian operatic world talking about the
relationship between music and drama, an issue that would have profound
effects on musical composition and criticism in Russia for decades hence.
Music and Words

Two of those who cut their teeth on the Ruslan controversy were a pair of
young critics destined to become rivals: César Cui (1835–1918) and Herman
Laroche (1845–1904). Unlike with Serov and Stasov, whose mutual antipathy
had its roots in personal rather than ideological conflict, Cui and Laroche’s
rivalry was founded on solid aesthetic grounds. Cui, who had inherited
Stasov’s blind hatred for all things Serovian, turned professional critic in
1864 with an article in defence of Ruslan. He became the journalistic mouth-
piece of that band of proud autodidacts variously known as the kuchka, the
Mighty Five, or the New Russian School, who were implacably opposed to the
37
‘Emotion and form are opposites’, Chernyshevsky declared in 1855’s ‘The Aesthetic Relation of Art to
Reality’ – the bible of the realist movement and perhaps the most influential Master’s thesis ever penned.
Chernyshevsky, ‘The Aesthetic Relation of Art to Reality’, in Selected Philosophical Essays (Moscow:
Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1953), p. 347.
38
Tchaikovsky, ‘The Revival of Ruslan and Lyudmila’, in Campbell (ed.), Russians on Russian Music,
1830–1880, p. 136.
39
Aleksandr Nikolaevich Serov, Izbrannye stat’i, vol. I I (Moscow: Muzgiz, 1957), p. 65.
220 EMILY FREY
use of traditional musical forms. Laroche, who penned his own Glinka article
three years later in 1867, was an early product of the St Petersburg
Conservatory (he was a member of the second graduating class, a year behind
Tchaikovsky) who taught music theory and history at both his alma mater and
the Moscow Conservatory in later years. A cosmopolitan and a traditionalist,
Laroche believed that the healthy development of Russian music depended on
a mastery of Baroque and Renaissance counterpoint. As regular music critics
for two of St Petersburg’s broadest-circulating daily newspapers (Cui for
Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti and Laroche for Golos), the two would clash
many times throughout their long careers. While their differences were
countless, among the most significant were their diametrically opposed con-
ceptions about the relationship between words and music.
Cui’s articles for Sankt-Petersburgskie vedomosti, written anonymously under
the insignia of three asterisks, were relentlessly partisan, and his bias was
widely commented upon by his contemporaries. As Robert Ridenour reports,
in 1864 Cui’s own newspaper printed a notice distancing itself from his
judgements and offering ‘to provide space for any reasonable objection to
the opinions of the associate for music criticism, which can seem . . . too
extreme and harsh’.40 Laroche, too, made a veiled but unmistakable reference
to Cui’s critical procedures in his review of Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa, accusing
his rival of measuring all operas by a kuchkist yardstick: ‘The reviewer will take
as the norm some single opera, sometimes of his own manufacture, sometimes
written by a friend, will look for similarities and differences in Tchaikovsky,
where it’s longer and where shorter, where it’s louder and where softer, and
will then draw up a balance sheet’.41 To the end of his career Cui remained all
but incapable of finding merit in the works of composers outside his circle,
and his acid pen produced no shortage of quotable jabs at the expense of
Serov, Rubinstein and Tchaikovsky. Reviewing Evgeny Onegin in 1884, Cui
remarked: ‘There are people who are constantly bemoaning their fate and
recounting their illnesses with special enthusiasm. In his music Mr
Tchaikovsky also bemoans his fate and recounts his illnesses’.42 A lifelong
aficionado of Schumann, Cui regarded the kuchka as a kind of Davidsbund in
need of protection from the forces of Russian philistinism, and as a critic he
laboured ever to provide that defence. ‘My goal’, he wrote later in life,
‘consisted in propagandizing our ideas and in vindicating the composers of
40
Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti (December 1864); quoted in Robert C. Ridenour, Nationalism, Modernism,
and Personal Rivalry in Nineteenth-Century Russian Music. Russian Music Studies I (Ann Arbor: UMI
Research Press, 1981), p. 115.
41
Laroche, ‘P. Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa’, in James Stuart Campbell (ed.), Russians on Russian Music,
1880–1917: An Anthology (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), p. 23.
42
Cui, ‘Notes on Music’, in Campbell (ed.), Russians on Russian Music, 1880–1917, p. 250.
the New Russian School . . . [who] had revolted against the time honoured
laws of routine, disrespected the authorities, and so on. All of this called forth
the public’s hostility toward us and especially toward me as the
mouthpiece.’43 The central tenets of the New Russian School, and thus of
Cui the critic, were nowhere near as iconoclastic as the quote above indicates.
Like Serov before him, Cui was adamantly anti-Conservatory, publishing
several screeds against that institution in the later 1860s. He was just as
adamantly anti-Italian opera – though, as we have seen, that attitude was
only de rigueur among Russian musicians of the time.
Just what Cui was for, rather than against, is more difficult to specify.
Taruskin has linked the vagueness of Cui’s aesthetics with the critic’s deter-
mined partisanship: any set of musical principles that validated the works of
Glinka and the kuchka and disqualified those of Serov and Tchaikovsky would
have to be pliant if not completely arbitrary.44 There was one work, however,
that Cui esteemed above all others. Dargomyzhsky’s opera The Stone Guest,
written in 1868–69 under the approving eye of the kuchka, was in Cui’s mind
a watershed in the history of music. The Stone Guest, Cui wrote in 1868, ‘is the
first conscious attempt to create a contemporary opera-drama without the
slightest compromise; this will be the codex to which Russian composers will
direct questions concerning . . . the truthful setting of the text’.45 The ‘truth-
fulness’ of Dargomyzhsky’s text setting appears for Cui to have lain in The
Stone Guest’s sensitive declamation and its flexible, songlike ‘melodic recita-
tive’, which Dargomyzhsky used throughout in place of traditional musical
forms. The music of The Stone Guest was designed to sound improvisatory, as if
adapting itself continuously and immediately to the nuances of the text (an
1830 verse drama by Pushkin that Dargomyzhsky set verbatim). This sort of
marriage of music and words, Cui believed, was the condition towards which
contemporary opera ought to strive. Even by the late 1870s, when Cui
admitted in his book La Musique en Russie (a kuchkist history of Russian
music written for a Western audience) that the verbatim setting of literary
masterpieces was not, perhaps, the most viable compositional method, The
Stone Guest remained for the critic a locus classicus of good operatic practice.46
43
Tsesar Kiui, ‘Pervye kompozitorskie shagi Ts. A. Kiui’, in Tsesar Kiui, Izbrannye stat’i, ed. I. L. Gusin
(Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe Muzykal’noe Izdatel’stvo, 1952), p. 547.
44
See the chapter ‘“Kuchkism” in Practice’, in Taruskin, Opera and Drama in Russia, especially pp. 345–51.
45
Tsesar Kiui, ‘Kamennyĭ gost’ Pushkina i Dargomyzhskogo’, in Izbrannye stat’i, p. 147.
46
‘In general’, advised Cui, ‘it is better to avoid such texts by great poets [as The Stone Guest by Pushkin],
for though their intrinsic beauty may render them seductive in the eyes of musicians, they are not made for
music. A truly lyrical text, which lends itself favourably to the development of vocal melody, is, on the
whole, that which should be principally sought in a libretto’ ( César Cui, La Musique en Russie (Leipzig:
Zentralantiquariat der DDR, 1974), p. 108). The fact that Cui felt the need to make this statement at all
betrays the remarkable literary bent of Russian opera during this period. He does not speak of having
222 EMILY FREY
Other composers’ recitatives were invariably and invidiously compared

against Dargomyzhsky’s model: the recitatives of Rimsky-Korsakov’s Sadko
amounted to ‘something halfway between the meaningless recitatives of, for
example, Mozart’s Don Giovanni and the melodic recitatives of, for example,
Dargomïzhsky’,47 while those of Tchaikovsky’s Evgeny Onegin were ‘not the
recitatives of Dargomïzhsky . . . which reinforce the meaning of the most
important phrases of the text and give them special power and
expressiveness’.48 Even Rimsky’s Mozart and Salieri, an opera written in delib-
erate (though not unqualified) homage to Dargomyzhsky, could not satisfy
Cui’s standards for meaningful recitative:
For all its merits, Mozart and Salieri lacks the most important – there is no
melodic recitative . . . there is not a single characteristic phrase that merges
forever with its text in our memory. People will object that it is impossible to
write melodic phrases to a prosaic text . . . in response, I lay before them The
Stone Guest.49
One searches Cui’s writings in vain for what, musically speaking, distin-
guishes Dargomyzhsky’s recitatives from anyone else’s – though musical
specifics were a thing with which this critic rarely dirtied his hands. Cui’s
own operas provide still fewer clues on what for him constituted operatic
‘truth’. Indeed, the distance between Cui’s music and his own critical dic-
tates – to say nothing of the rather quirky and singular methods of his beloved
Stone Guest – has been frequently observed by commentators in both Cui’s
time and ours.50 Such ambiguities aside, one idée fixe that persisted in Cui’s
criticism over the years was the notion that good music was music that meant
something, music that combined deeply and insolubly with text and idea.
Laroche’s first foray into criticism dates from the same year as Cui’s – 1864 –
when, as a teenaged music theory student, he took to the pages of The Northern
Bee [Severnaia pchela] to defend the St Petersburg Conservatory against
Serov’s attacks.51 As Anton Rubinstein, the director of the Conservatory,
a new text created specifically to serve as an opera libretto, with designated arias and recitatives, but rather
of composers seeking an appropriate text that would allow for moments of lyrical expansion.
47
Cui, ‘Sadko, Opera/Heroic Ballad (Opera-Bïlina) by Mr Rimsky-Korsakov’, in Campbell (ed.), Russians on
Russian Music, 1880–1917, p. 56.
48
Cui, ‘Notes on Music – Eugene Onegin’, in ibid., p. 251.
49
Tsesar Kiui, ‘Moskovskaia chastnaia russkaia opera. Motsart i Sal’eri A. S. Pushkina i N. A. Rimskogo-
Korsakogo’, in Izbrannye stat’i, p. 497.
50
For a comparison of Cui’s operatic ideals with two of his actual operas (William Ratcliff, whose
composition occupied Cui for most of the 1860s, and Angelo, composed between 1871 and 1875), see
Taruskin, ‘“Kuchkism” in Practice: Two Operas by César Cui’, in Opera and Drama in Russia.
51
Laroche’s anonymous letter to the editor was published on 8 May 1864, five days before the future
critic’s nineteenth birthday. It is reprinted in Campbell (ed.), Russians on Russian Music, 1830–1880, pp.
89–91.
had forbidden students and faculty from participating in musical polemics,

this caper nearly got Laroche expelled from the very institution for which he
advocated. After a four-year stint in Moscow, where he developed a joint
professional identity as pedagogue and critic, he returned to Petersburg in the
autumn of 1871 to assume a regular critic’s position with Golos, a newspaper
popular among the liberal bourgeoisie. Golos offered extensive musical cover-
age from a perspective that sympathised with Laroche’s own: the two main
critics already on staff were Feofil Tolstoy (pen name ‘Rostislav’), a mid-
ranking civil servant and musical dabbler who was a dependable foe of
Russian music’s ‘realist’ tendencies, and Alexander Famintsyn (1841–96),
a professor of music and aesthetics whom Musorgsky had satirised in his
song ‘The Classicist’ (1867).52 In Laroche, however, Golos acquired
a conservative critic with both the musical chops and the rhetorical panache
to stand up to the critical titans on the other side of the aesthetic aisle.
Especially after Serov’s death in 1871, the young Laroche would become the
main critical voice opposing Cui and Stasov.
Laroche relished his role as the progressives’ bête noire. In a country where,
in Taruskin’s words, ‘even Romanticism had to be called realism’,53 Laroche
proudly championed the cause of aesthetic beauty over dramatic ‘truth’.
(‘What a Moloch is [the contemporary demand for] “dramatic truth”, and
how much musical beauty, how many composers’ talents it has devoured in
our day in its insatiability!’ wrote Laroche in an 1889 review.54) In the face of
Serov and the kuchka’s anti-academicism, Laroche paraded his education – and
not just that which he received in the Conservatory. His articles, extravagant
in their allusions to classical mythology and European literature, often begin at
professorial remove from the musical works in question. ‘Perhaps the reader
will resent me telling too hackneyed an anecdote, but I cannot resist quoting
an apocryphal dictum of the dying Hegel,’ reads the opening line to Laroche’s
review of Tchaikovsky’s opera Mazeppa.55 Unlike those of his kuchkist rival,
Cui, Laroche’s allegiances were more to his conservative, Hanslickian aes-
thetics than to a particular composer or school. In general sympathetic to
the works of his friend and schoolmate Tchaikovsky, Laroche did not spare
Tchaikovsky the critical rod when he saw fit.56 He was capable, too, of
52
Famintsyn’s tenure at Golos postdated Rubinstein’s at the Conservatory; thus he was not subject to
Rubinstein’s ban on Conservatory staff and students contributing to the press.
53
Taruskin, Opera and Drama in Russia, p. xiv.
54
Laroche, ‘P. Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa’, in Campbell (ed.), Russians on Russian Music, 1880–1917, p. 21.
55
Ibid., p. 18.
56
For example, even in Evgeny Onegin, Laroche’s favourite of all Tchaikovsky’s operas, the critic detected
‘an act of violence against [Pushkin’s] poetic work’. Laroche, ‘Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin in the
Conservatoire’s Production’, in Campbell (ed.), Russians on Russian Music, 1830–1880, p. 246.
224 EMILY FREY
recognising that there could be good and bad among musical conservatives and
progressives alike, writing in his review of Rimsky-Korsakov’s opera
Snegurochka:
It is possible in criticism to be a very shallow Hanslickian and a very honour-

able follower of Bernhard Marx. In composition it is possible to be a very
splendid Wagnerian and a very dull classicist. In performance it is possible to
play the piano exquisitely in Field’s manner and vilely in Rubinstein’s.57
This admission, however, did not prevent him from systematically under-
rating the works of the kuchka, and in particular those of Musorgsky.
Laroche’s condescending judgements on the composer of Pictures at an
Exhibition have aged rather badly, and Rimsky-Korsakov – who of all the
original kuchka might have been the most sympathetic to the views of
a fellow Conservatory professor – never forgave him for them. In his memoirs
Rimsky linked Laroche’s poor review of Boris Godunov with Musorgsky’s slide
into despair and alcoholism, the disease that killed the composer at the age of
forty-two. On Laroche’s own death in 1904, the normally diplomatic and
dispassionate Rimsky-Korsakov had this to say: ‘Laroche, once famous among
us as a music-critic, but in reality a copy of Eduard Hanslick, died after having
dragged out a pitiful existence . . . His activity was mere grimace and gesticu-
lation, lies and paradoxes, exactly like his Viennese prototype.’58 Among his
enemies, Laroche’s open admiration for Hanslick has thus proved no less
useful than Serov’s Wagnerism.
One way in which Laroche did not differ from his left-leaning counterparts
was that his idea of criticism was no less ‘philosophical’ than theirs. He drew
no firm distinction between music criticism and music aesthetics, referring
frequently to aesthetics in his reviews and devoting several newspaper articles
to the aesthetic theories of German writers such as August Wilhelm Ambros
and, of course, Eduard Hanslick. In 1880, too, Laroche translated an abridged
version of Vom Musikalisch-Schönen into Russian, complete with a lengthy and
glowing translator’s preface.59 Laroche parted ways with all other major
Russian critics, however, in denying that music carried ethical content – or
57
Laroche, ‘A New Opera from the Young Russian School. Snegurochka by A. Ostrovsky and N. Rimsky-
Korsakov, staged by the Private Opera Theatre’, in Campbell (ed.), Russians on Russian Music, 1880–1917,
p. 45.
58
Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, My Musical Life, ed. Carl van Vechten, trans. Judah A. Joffe (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1942), pp. 409–10.
59
Laroche’s preface to the abridged translation is printed in German Avgustovich Larosh, Sobranie
muzykal’no-kriticheskikh stateĭ, vol. 1 (Moscow: Tipo-Litografiia I. N. Kushnerev i Ko., 1913), pp. 334–61.
For a history of Hanslick reception in Russia, see Olga Panteleeva, ‘Formation of Russian Musicology
from Sacchetti to Asafyev, 1885–1931’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley
(2015), 38–73.
indeed, that music was well suited to carrying any sort of ‘content’ whatso-
ever. ‘Music is not an art of expression’, he wrote,
[and] by forcing her to speak and depict, we are doing violence to her nature,
that she finds her true power and beauty where she is completely free of poetic
pretensions. The greatest models of musical drama are no more than compro-
mises between the nature of art and our age’s striving to illustrate stage action
musically, compromises in which the composer is obliged at every turn to hold
the balance between opposing demands, to walk a tightrope.60
Laroche was virtually alone among Russian music critics in considering opera
a compromised and debased form rather than the very summit of musical art.
Nor, for that matter, did Laroche highly esteem programme music, the
proclivity for which Stasov had identified as one of four factors distinguishing
the composers of the New Russian School.61 He took strong exception to his
fellow critics’ attempts to supply programmes for instrumental works with-
out suggestive titles or accompanying text, calling such a practice ‘oneiro-
mancy, divination, palmistry, prophecy – whatever you like, only not music
criticism’.62 While Cui had argued that music and words should bind to form
an organic expressive unit, for Laroche such a merger – as well as any expecta-
tion that music should be ‘expressive’ at all – could only constitute an
adulteration of music’s power. Though a great admirer of literature, and
even an occasional literary critic, Laroche held that music and words ought
to occupy entirely separate realms.
Empire’s End
Of the other music critics active in late imperial Russia, two bear brief
discussion. Mikhail Ivanov (1849–1927, not to be confused with his near
contemporary, the composer Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov) was a critic in the
Larochean mould. It was Ivanov, in fact, who produced the first complete
Russian translation of Hanslick’s Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, five years after the
publication of Laroche’s abridged version. Known for his sarcastic and some-
times poisonous tone, particularly in his reviews of the former members of the
kuchka, Ivanov found himself on the receiving end of many a composer’s ire.
(According to reports, his obituary of Musorgsky in New Time [Novoe
vremia] – by that time a daily newspaper with a conservative, statist
60
Laroche, ‘P. Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa’, in Campbell (ed.), Russians on Russian Music, 1880–1917, p. 20.
61
See ‘Our Music’, in Stasov, Selected Essays on Music, pp. 73–4.
62
‘Predislovie perevodchika k knige Ganslika O muzykal’no-prekrasnom’, in Larosh, Sobranie muzykal’no-
kriticheskikh stateĭ, vol. I , p. 358.
226 EMILY FREY
reputation – even occasioned a coffin-side row with Stasov.)63 More signifi-

cant was Nikolai Kashkin (1839–1920), whose reviews and articles in such
newspapers as Russkie vedomosti and Moskovskie vedomosti spanned a period of
nearly sixty years. An intimate of Tchaikovsky’s from the 1860s, Kashkin was
a fellow professor at the Moscow Conservatory, where he taught courses in
history, theory and piano. Like Tchaikovsky himself, whose sporadic dabbles
in music criticism produced some real gems, Kashkin was both a perceptive
and an equitable critic, and his reminiscences of Tchaikovsky remain indis-
pensable sources of information on the composer. Kashkin’s writing, less
ostentatious than Laroche’s and less energetic than Serov’s, was no less secure
than theirs in its command of musical detail. What Kashkin lacked in literary
élan, he made up for in dependability and fair-mindedness – rare qualities
indeed among music critics of his time.
But the world of Russian music in the imperial period was dominated by big
personalities, and there was none bigger than Vladimir Stasov. In 1901, the
septuagenarian critic produced his magnum opus, a lengthy treatise entitled
Art in the 19th Century. Most of the text is devoted to various visual arts:
painting (given by far the most detailed treatment), sculpture and architec-
ture, of which Stasov’s father Vasily was a famous early nineteenth-century
practitioner. Stasov only gets to music in the last quarter of the treatise, and
his discussion of Russian music occupies just nine of the document’s seventy-
seven total chapters. Those nine chapters, however, are the basis for many of
the most enduring myths about music in imperial Russia. In them, Stasov
summarised – and fixed his own, peculiar slant on – many of the debates that
had concerned Russian music critics since the time of Odoevsky.
Stasov’s rather disingenuous strategy throughout Art in the 19th Century was
to depict his party as Russian music’s eternal underdogs. The critic’s martyr
complex, already evident in the maudlin title of one of his articles on Ruslan
and Liudmila (‘A Martyr of Our Time’), reaches Olympian heights in Art in the
19th Century. He describes the artists he admires most, from Glinka to
Musorgsky, as having all been misunderstood and rejected by a public with
corrupt, Italianate tastes and ‘critics (for example, Herman Laroche), who
seek in music only beauties, saccharine melodies . . . and traditional musical
forms’.64 What Stasov often forgets to mention is that perhaps the two most
prolific critics of the century, Serov and Cui, were both staunchly anti-Italian
63
Ivanov’s obituary is reprinted in Alexandra Orlova (ed.), Musorgsky Remembered, trans. Véronique
Zaytzeff and Frederick Morrison (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), pp. 136–9. Stasov’s
rival obituary of the composer appears in Vladimir Stasov, Izbrannye sochineniia, vol. I I (Moscow:
Iskusstvo, 1952), pp. 117–18.
64
Vladimir Stasov, ‘Iskusstvo X I X veka’, in Izbrannye sochineniia, vol. I I I , p. 730.
and anti-tradition – though Stasov, naturally, denies Serov’s progressive

credentials. The acerbic pen of Cui, too, had ensured that the members of
Stasov’s party were never just the passive victims of hostile traditionalists:
they had a means of dispensing scorn as quickly as they collected it. As for
Serov, who after all could not be easily assimilated to the aestheticist camp of
Laroche, Stasov deals with him briefly and dismissively, branding him an
untalented composer whose renowned music criticism amounted to nothing
more than ‘barnfuls of countless delusions, mistakes, flip-flops, endless
changes, and inconsistencies’.65 Without acknowledgement, Stasov concedes
Serov’s point that the lack of drama in Ruslan prevents Glinka’s ‘greatest
creation . . . [from] having the right to call itself “the first opera in the
world”’,66 but in the very next lines he diagnoses Don Giovanni, Fidelio and
Der Freischütz with the same shortcoming, and questions whether drama is
really the alpha and omega of opera. Operatic ‘truth’, as far as Stasov is
concerned here, is not a matter of dramatic coherence. He defines the term
much as Cui had done, locating it in ‘the inseparable combination of words
and music, the truth of intonation, brought up to the highest level of natural-
ness and vitality’.67 This was a narrow and peculiarly kuchkist version of the
‘truth’, one that anointed Musorgsky and Dargomyzhsky as the quintessential
Russian realists and delegitimised Serov (who was by that point thirty years
dead and in no position to defend himself).
Stasov’s vision of musical nationalism, perhaps the most influential element
of Art in the 19th Century, was similarly narrow and partisan. His image of
Russian music’s Ur-nationalist, Glinka, is the very opposite of Odoevsky’s:
while Odoevsky had seen in his friend’s music a healthy synthesis of Russian
melody and cosmopolitan technique, Stasov depicted the composer – who had
spent the last thirteen years of his life in the West, and died in Berlin – as
a downright provincial, all but untouched by European decadence. Glinka’s
thoroughgoing Russianness apparently sprang from his remote (and, in
Stasov’s hands, highly sentimentalised) upbringing, where he could absorb
the salubrious tones of Russian folk music in perfect rustic seclusion. With
a wave of his hand Stasov dismissed the effects of Glinka’s four-year musical
apprenticeship in Europe: according to Stasov, all Glinka had learned in Italy
was to despise Italian music, and from Germany he had taken ‘just enough’ to
give him a fluent technique without destroying his spontaneous
Russianness.68 The danger of too much ‘German’ learning was that it could
turn one into a cosmopolitan, which was for Stasov the baneful business of the
Conservatory. In Art in the 19th Century the dividing line between the
65 66 67 68
Ibid., p. 744. Ibid., p. 721. Ibid., p. 729. Ibid., p. 718.
228 EMILY FREY
nationalists and the Conservatorians appears absolute: no one who had had
Conservatory training, particularly during Anton Rubinstein’s tenure as
director, could be considered truly Russian. And so Stasov’s treatise identifies
Tchaikovsky as ‘one of the most determined opponents of the “Balakirev
party”’, and even an ‘enemy’,69 this despite the fact that Tchaikovsky’s rela-
tionship with the kuchka had been perfectly cordial during the entire period
when that group really could have been considered a united ‘party’, despite
the fact that near the end of his life Tchaikovsky identified the former kuchkist
Rimsky-Korsakov as ‘the one among living Russian composers whom I love
and value above all others’,70 and despite the fact that Tchaikovsky’s child-
hood had been spent in a provincial town no less rustic and remote than
Glinka’s birthplace. On account of his Conservatory training, Tchaikovsky,
who might have fulfilled Odoevsky’s image of the ideal musical nationalist,
becomes for Stasov ‘a cosmopolitan and an eclectic from head to toe’ who had
‘no elements of “nationalism” in his musical nature’.71 Nationalism in music,
then, was no longer a matter of elevation and inclusivity as it had been in
Odoevsky. It was, rather, a matter of a quasi-mystical folkishness that
excluded all outside influences, a nationalism defined by insularity and
ineffability.
But Stasov’s views, so ascendant in twentieth-century accounts of the
Russian ‘classical’ repertoire, were never monolithic in their own time.
Music criticism in imperial Russia was characterised above all by its passionate
polemics, its philosophical debates and its well-matched rivalries. It came of
age along with the musical tradition it described, its pugilistic style helping to
establish that tradition as something worth arguing about.
69
Ibid., p. 728.
70
‘Beseda s Chaikovskim v noiabre 1892 g. v Peterburge’, in Petr Il’ich Chaĭkovskiĭ, Muzykal’no-
kriticheskie stat’i, ed. V. V. Iakovlev (Moscow: Muzgiz, 1953), p. 372.
71
Stasov, Izbrannye sochineniia, vol. I I I , p. 746.
· PART III ·
CRITICAL INFLUENCE AND INFLUENCES

. 12 .
Critiquing the Canon: The Role of Criticism

in Canon Formation
LAURA HAMER
The Gatekeepers of the Canon

Music critics wield great power. Their writing influences public opinion and
contributes to how audiences receive works. They focus attention upon
specific works and musicians, thus justifying these as most worthy of public
recognition and debate. They help works to achieve repeat performances, and
thereby to establish their places within the performing canon. In the age of
recorded sound, they influence sales and affect charts. Although some claim
that with the recent rise of ubiquitous digital critical commentary (much of it
amateur) professional critics have lost their traditional authority, online criti-
cism continues to exercise considerable sway. In a very real way, critics have
been – and continue to be – the gatekeepers of the canon. As Roy Shuker has
observed, ‘popular music critics . . . function as significant gatekeepers and as
arbiters of taste’.1 For the purposes of the present discussion, we can usefully
extend this comment to embrace music critics of all genres. Through their
writing, critics decide who should be included within, and who should be
excluded from, the canon. Criticism invests the works contained within any
canon with a high degree of cultural capital; thereby further entrenching these
works’ places within their respective canons. As Mark Everist has commented,
‘texts and documents which articulate the reception of a work are similar – in
many cases identical – to those that are responsible for imparting value to the
work, and hence for its inclusion in, or exclusion from, the canon’.2 Within
this process the concept of genre hierarchy is crucial, as canons tend to be
dominated by specific genres, and these in turn are constructed as possessing
the highest values of cultural capital. Works within other genres are thus often
denigrated as being of lower cultural worth, and effectively excluded from
canon formation.
1
Roy Shuker, Understanding Popular Music, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 83.
2
Mark Everist, ‘Reception Theories, Canonic Discourses, and Musical Value’, in Nicholas Cook and
Mark Everist (eds.), Rethinking Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 378–9.
[231]
232 LAURA HAMER
This chapter examines the role which critics play in canon formation.
Discussion is focused upon the contentious, yet somehow ephemeral, notion
of canonical values, and the part that criticism plays in exclusion and margin-
alisation from the canon. As it would be impossible to survey the role played
by criticism in the formation of every single musical canon, the nineteenth-
century Austro-German classical and later twentieth-century rock canons are
taken as illustrative examples. These two specific musical canons have been
chosen as both, within their respective spheres of classical and popular music,
have been viewed as sitting at the pinnacle of the genre hierarchy (although
there are also, of course, good grounds to dispute these claims). Furthermore,
they have both been heavily invested with (different forms of) cultural capital.
They have been seen as embodying gold standards against which to judge
everything else. Prior to the broadening out of music scholarship since the
1980s, the Austro-German-dominated classical music canon was, of course,
seen as the music canon. Although this is now (thankfully) far from still being
the case, examining the role that critics played in constructing that canon is
still a revealing exercise. Interestingly, the canonical values which critics
developed to describe works contained within the nineteenth-century
Austro-German canon still echo strongly in the criticism of other musical
canons (especially rock) to this day. In the case of rock, the role that criticism
has played in its canon formation is, moreover, intriguingly under-explored.3
Defining Canonical Values

Although (historically) consideration of the canon within music scholarship
focused very much upon Western art music, the existence of multiple musical
canons – usually specific to particular genres – has now long been acknowl-
edged. Critical discourse is vital to shaping the values and contents of each of
these. All have their own specialised critical platforms, forums and/or press
through which reception is formed, debated and disseminated. As early as
1983, Joseph Kerman claimed that ‘repertoires are determined by performers,
3
Carys Wyn Jones’s The Rock Canon: Canonical Values in the Reception of Rock Albums (Aldershot: Ashgate,
2008) makes an important contribution to this area, although it is slight on considerations of actual
criticism. As Wyn Jones states in her introduction ‘canons in popular music have not been explored in
detail in academic literature, and the general position of the academic study of popular music towards
canons has been ambivalent’ (p. 1). In his seminal text Understanding Popular Music, Roy Shuker has also
made the case that ‘the music press has received surprisingly little attention in academic popular music
studies. General accounts of the development of pop/rock make considerable use of the music press as
a source, while largely ignoring its role in the process of marketing and cultural legitimation’ (p. 86). To
this we can usefully also add canon formation. Although now dated, Simon Frith’s consideration of ‘The
Music Press’ within his Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure and the Politics of Rock ‘n’ Roll (New York: Pantheon,
1981) remains an important source.
Critiquing the Canon: Criticism in Canon Formation 233
canons by critics’.4 William Weber, however, has cautioned that ‘we must
never forget that many factors other than criticism came into play in the
establishment of works in repertoires’.5 It is undeniably true that a complex
matrix of other factors, including performance and programming practices
and preferences, and historical circumstances, have also played important
roles in the process of canonisation. Critics, however, remain the gatekeepers.
Their writing not only records their own reception, but also shapes wider
audience reception, as critical discourse actively shapes an audience’s
Erwartungshorizont (horizon of expectations).6
David Beard and Kenneth Gloag have commented that ‘canonical values
are . . . implicitly active in shaping writing on music’.7 Explicit definitions of
what these ‘canonical values’ consist of, however, are rare. Beard and Gloag
have further observed that ‘the notion of a canon is inextricably linked with
aesthetic value. The works that are considered to belong to the canon do so
because they embody what for some constitute eternal qualities and transcen-
dent dimensions.’8 Everist has claimed that ‘locations of reception overlap
substantially with contingencies of value’.9 Yet notions of how to define these
‘aesthetic values’, ‘eternal qualities’, ‘transcendent dimensions’ and ‘contin-
gencies of value’ remain, at best, somewhat hazy.
Carys Wyn Jones has warned that ‘drawing up an inventory of canonical
criteria is potentially misleading since canons rely on a nexus of perceived
greatness rather than a list of rules for canonicity’.10 She has, nonetheless,
identified a number of ‘similar qualities’ (for which we might substitute
‘canonical values’) which canonical works ‘tend to share’.11 In particular she
has identified that such works are ‘believed to possess great aesthetic strength’
and that ‘perceived truths, and associated authenticity, remain important
markers of value in canons’.12 She has further observed that ‘perhaps the
most important and unifying criterion of all canons is that canonical works
must above all be original’ and that ‘complexity is also a valued quality in
a canonical work’.13 In addition, she has commented that ‘secondary
literature . . . plays a vital role in canon formation and perpetuation . . .
4
Joseph Kerman, ‘A Few Canonic Variations’, Critical Inquiry, 10 (1983), 107.
5
William Weber, ‘The History of Musical Canon’, in Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (eds.), Rethinking
Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 350.
6
The Erwartungshorizont was a term coined by the German literary theorist Hans Robert Jauss. In Jauss’s
theory of reception it refers to the expectations which a reader (or, when applied to music, listener) applies
to a work to understand and interpret it. These cultural expectations are specific to their historical
moment. Thus readers (or listeners) from different generations understand and value the same works
differently.
7
David Beard and Kenneth Gloag, ‘Canon’, in Musicology: The Key Concepts (London and New York:
Routledge, 2005), p. 33.
8
Ibid., p. 33. 9
Everist, ‘Reception Theories’, p. 402. 10
Wyn Jones, The Rock Canon, p. 14.
11 12 13
Ibid., p. 15. Ibid. Ibid., p. 17.
234 LAURA HAMER
Canonical works require secondary material to support their position of great-

ness in the ongoing debate of value judgment in the arts.’14 Although Wyn Jones
limits her definition of ‘secondary literature’ to ‘commentaries and analyses,
anthologies, catalogues of works, edited editions of seminal texts, biographies
of authors, centenary festivals and celebrations, and the translation of works into
other languages’,15 to these it is important to add criticism. In the case of music
in particular, it is via criticism that a work’s canonical status is established. As
Weber has observed, ‘the product of canonization is the bestowal of authority
upon certain pieces of music. If repertory constitutes the framework of canon,
then critical discourse empowers it.’16 But how do critics decide which works to
‘bestow authority upon’ and how do they decide which values to celebrate?
Critics must choose vocabulary to describe aspects of works they wish to
praise (or denigrate). As Sandra McColl has commented, ‘music critics con-
tinually find themselves in a situation of having to find words to explain and
justify their reception of music. Consciously or unconsciously, any attempt to
verbalize one’s reaction to a piece of music will involve bringing to bear one’s
aesthetic predispositions.’17 As the vocabulary which critics choose to
describe attributes of works that they consider desirable becomes established
within critical discourse, these words and phrases become synonymous with
canonical values. Over time these canonical values come to represent the
cultural capital which the works they are applied to are considered to possess.
Criticism, Canon Formation and Marginalisation

Music criticism, via the articulation of cultural capital through critical dis-
course, functions as a powerful tool of marginalisation and exclusion. As
Beard and Gloag have commented, ‘this process of exclusion highlights the
reality that the canon acts as a source of cultural power and as such it becomes
a mechanism through which non-canonical music is excluded from the public
domain’.18 Although criticism may at first appear to be impartial, a judgement
based purely on a particular work’s merits, this is rarely the case. Even
a cursory glance at the Western art music canon reveals how homogenous it
is. Given criticism’s key role in canon formation, exclusion along the lines of
gender, race, ethnicity and class takes on an invidious light.19 Those who are
14
Ibid., p. 18. 15
Ibid., pp. 18–19. 16
Weber, ‘The History of Musical Canon’, p. 350.
17
Sandra McColl, Music Criticism in Vienna 1896–1897: Critically Moving Forms (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1996), p. 170.
18
Beard and Gloag, Musicology, p. 33.
19
See my ‘The Gender Paradox: Criticism of Women and Women as Critics’, Chapter 14 in the current
volume, for a detailed consideration of the systematic use of gendered criticism to exclude women from
music’s canons.
excluded from the canon via critical discourse find themselves effectively
culturally disenfranchised.
In his well-known and highly controversial defence of the literary canon, The
Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (1994), Harold Bloom staunchly
proclaims that ‘I am not prepared to agree with the Marxists that the Western
Canon is another instance of what they call “cultural capital”’.20 In The Western
Canon Bloom presents an impassioned argument for the (literary) canon’s
authority. His study places Shakespeare at the centre, and considers twenty-
six authors (including Chaucer, Milton, Goethe, Austen, Tolstoy, Proust and
Joyce) in relation to him. Bloom seeks to identify ‘the qualities that made these
authors canonical’.21 In his consideration of these work’s canonical values,
Bloom also staunchly defends their authority against those scholars who believe
in critiquing the canon and opening it up. Bloom denigrates these as the ‘School
of Resentment’, and counts among their numbers ‘Feminists, Afrocentrists,
Marxists, Foucault-inspired New Historicists, or Deconstructors’.22 Bloom
claims that ‘some recent partisans of what regards itself as academic radicalism
[i.e. the “School of Resentment”] go so far as to suggest that works join the
Canon because of successful advertising and propaganda campaigns.’23
Although it is vital to historicise Bloom’s polemic within the canon wars of
the 1980s and 90s, critics effectively do advocate for particular works and
musicians. It is through this that criticism contributes so successfully to musical
canon formation. Given criticism’s tendency to exclude or marginalise parti-
cular groups of musicians along the lines of gender, race, ethnicity and class, it is
hard not to disagree with Bloom’s assertion that ‘those who oppose the Canon
insist that there is always an ideology involved in canon formation; indeed they
go further and speak of the ideology of canon formation, suggesting that to
make a canon (or to perpetuate one) is an ideological act in itself’.24 Although
critics rarely have complete control over what they write about, their control
over how they write feeds directly into canon formation. Any attempt to ignore
the ideological dimensions of canon formation is, at best, naive.
Forging Lasting Canonical Values:

The Nineteenth-Century Tradition
The development of music criticism and the rise of canon formation occurred
concurrently in the later eighteenth and earlier nineteenth centuries. As
Robin Wallace has commented, ‘it is . . . shortly after the first appearance of
20
Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (London: Macmillan, 1994), p. 37.
21 22 23 24
Ibid., p. 1. Ibid., p. 20. Ibid. Ibid., p. 22.
236 LAURA HAMER
works by Beethoven in Germany that serious music critics gained their first
permanent forum’.25 Thus it is unsurprising in some ways that Beethoven
became central to the emerging musical canon. Music criticism became more
widespread within daily newspapers from the later eighteenth century
onwards. Meanwhile journals dedicated exclusively to music also began to
emerge. Die Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, established in Leipzig in 1798,
containing reviews of new works and performances, became the first specialist
music journal. It became a model for other publications which quickly began
to appear throughout Europe. At the same time, the rise of public concerts –
intended to satisfy the cultural and social needs and aspirations of the bur-
geoning middle classes – was also intimately connected to canon formation.
Here music critics played key roles in determining which works should be
deemed worthy of repeat performance, and thus inclusion in the emerging
performance canon. Katharine Ellis has observed that ‘A work’s “contempor-
aneity” – defined by its acceptance as repertoire – was essential to its status as
canonic, but its canonicity was argued and defended by practitioners of two
new disciplines: musicology and music criticism.’26 The terms ‘canon’, ‘cano-
nical’ and ‘canonicity’ themselves were not actually used by nineteenth-
century critics. In their place, as Ellis has further commented, ‘the words
“classic”, “model” and “masterpiece” were conferred upon music which had
achieved, or was deemed worthy of achieving, canonic status’.27 Indeed, as
Wyn Jones has observed, ‘general use of the word “canon” as a collection of
prized works has only become common in the last 30 years’.28
The centrality of Beethoven to the canon which emerged in the earlier
nineteenth century has long been acknowledged. As Beard and Gloag have
observed, ‘the concern with a critical response and evaluation of new and
recent music became a recurrent preoccupation through the Romanticism of
the nineteenth century, with the music of Beethoven being the most clearly
defined object of attention’.29 Wallace, meanwhile, has commented that
‘Beethoven was almost at once, and universally, recognized as a composer of
genius, and this recognition is reflected in practically everything that was
written about him during his lifetime.’30 E. T. A. Hoffmann’s well-known
review of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony (1807–8), published in Die Allgemeine
25
Robin Wallace, Beethoven’s Critics: Aesthetic Dilemmas and Resolutions During the Composer’s Lifetime
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 4.
26
Katharine Ellis, Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Century France: La Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris,
1834–1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 5.
27
Ibid., pp. 5–6.
28
Wyn Jones, The Rock Canon, p. 6. As Wyn Jones’s study was published in 2008, it is now closer to forty
years.
29
Beard and Gloag, ‘Criticism’, in Musicology, p. 42. 30
Wallace, Beethoven’s Critics, p. 1.
musikalische Zeitung in 1810, is still widely regarded as having been immensely

influential in establishing not only a tradition for German-language criticism
of the composer but also a tradition for how Beethoven’s music should be
received. Hoffmann’s comments in his slightly later essay ‘Beethoven’s
Instrumental Music’ (1813) – that ‘Beethoven’s instrumental music opens
up to us the realm of the monstrous and the immeasurable . . . this wonderful
composition [the Fifth Symphony], in a climax that climbs on and on, leads
the listener imperiously forward into the spirit world of the infinite!’ – co-opts
Beethoven’s symphony to the romantic aesthetic of the sublime (already
firmly established within literature but newly emerging in music).31
Hoffmann proclaimed that:
When we speak of music as an independent art, should we not always restrict

our meaning to instrumental music, which, scorning every aid, every admix-
ture of another art (the art of poetry), gives pure expression to music’s specific
nature, recognizable in this form alone? It is the most romantic of all the arts –
one might say, the only genuinely romantic one – for its sole subject is the
infinite.32
Thus Hoffmann celebrated pure autonomous instrumental music, liberated

from poetic text to give it meaning, and from court, civic or ecclesiastical
patronage to provide it with purpose or function.33 Accordingly, he helped to
establish Beethoven’s symphonies as the bedrock of the performance canon,
and shaped future writing – and thus understanding – about the composer’s
music.34
Discussion of Beethoven dominated nineteenth-century German-language
musical and aesthetic discourse, just as Austro-German works dominated the
simultaneously emerging performance canon. As a widely disseminated wri-
ter, Hoffmann’s views had a powerful influence upon subsequent generations
of critics. Successive commentators on Beethoven’s music sought to identify
what Scott Burnham has characterised as ‘a set of dynamic values for composi-
tion that attempt to account for what was deemed new and compelling in
Beethoven’s music’.35 It is in these that we find the vestigial forms of canonical
31
E. T. A. Hoffmann, ‘Beethoven’s Instrumental Music’ (1813); cited from Oliver Strunk, Source Readings
in Music History, trans. Strunk, Leo Treitler (General Editor), revised ed. (New York and London: W. W.
Norton, 1998), pp. 1194–5.
32
E. T. A. Hoffmann, ‘Beethoven’s Instrumental Music’ (1813); cited from ibid., p. 1193.
33
For a detailed consideration of Hoffmann’s aesthetics, see Abigail Chantler, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical
Aesthetics (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).
34
Hoffmann’s comments also inverted the traditional artistic hierarchy between music and poetry, for
once placing music firmly at the top. This helped to establish music as the most important, and most
romantic, of the art forms throughout the nineteenth century.
35
Scott Burnham, Beethoven Hero (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 66.
238 LAURA HAMER
values. A concept of musical form which was perceived as organic, progressive

and developmental became central. Emphasis upon form, as Burnham com-
ments, allowed ‘musical thinkers like E. T. A. Hoffmann and A. B. Marx . . . to
make the same claims for musical works that had been made by leading
romantic critics for the literary works of authors such as Shakespeare and
Goethe’.36 The concept of a canon of literary works – within which both
Shakespeare and Goethe were recognised cornerstones – was already well
established. Thus these literary analogies may have further helped to legit-
imise the concept of a musical canon, with Beethoven as its focus. Burnham
has further stated:
The importance of the motive as a type of seed begins to be stressed, and

thematic development gains precedence as a means of achieving the newly
touted aesthetic goal of a unity that integrates the greatest possible degree of
variety. Sonata form emerges as the chief vehicle of this type of unity, just as
the Bildungsroman, with Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre as its most celebrated exem-
plar, had emerged within literary studies. Musical composition in this its
highest manifestation began to be characterized by a thematic process of
development in which every episode (and later every note) was essential to
the overall design. The musical process that seems to press inexorably forth to
transcendent and exhaustive closure brings about an emphasis on the notion
of necessity and organic unity.37
This emphasis upon motivic development, organicism and form helped to

reinforce the notion of the fixed, autonomous musical work; a crucial criter-
ion for the formation of a canon of closed musical works.
This is not to suggest that all commentators on Beethoven celebrated these
values in the same way. As the canonical status of his music became
entrenched, it also allowed a spectrum of different readings.38 For Wagner,
the inclusion of words in the Ninth Symphony paved the way for the ‘artwork
of the future’, whereas for Hanslick, Beethoven’s music represented beautiful
form.39 For German-language critics, Beethoven’s music, especially his sym-
phonies, became the benchmark against which all other works’ worthiness for
inclusion in the canon was judged. Advocating for Schubert in an article
written for Die Neue Zeitschrift für Musik in 1835, for instance, Schumann
compared Schubert’s piano writing to that of Beethoven, even suggesting
that Schubert’s innovations in that field surpassed those of Beethoven:
36 37
Ibid. Ibid., pp. 66–7.
38
On Beethoven’s importance in the role of canon formation in early nineteenth-century Austro-
Germany, see also Tia DeNora, Beethoven and the Construction of Genius: Musical Politics in Vienna
1792–1803 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997).
39
Richard Wagner, Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft (1849); Eduard Hanslick, Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (1854).
Particularly as a composer for piano, he [Schubert] has something more to

offer than others, in certain ways, more even than Beethoven (however mar-
vellously the latter, in his deafness, heard with his imagination). This super-
iority consists in his ability to write more idiomatically for the piano, i.e.
everything sounds as if drawn from the very depths of the instrument, while
with Beethoven we must borrow for tone color, first from the oboe, then the
horn, etc.40
Deriving from writing on Beethoven, emphasis upon form continued to be

an important focus for German-language music criticism throughout the
nineteenth century. In her detailed study of fin-de-siècle Viennese music criti-
cism, Music Criticism in Vienna 1896–1897: Critically Moving Forms, McColl has
commented that ‘of all the criteria which appear and reappear in judgements
of the value of musical works, that of structure is the nearest to concrete’.41 As
she observes further, ‘although critics are apt to disagree as to whether the
large-scale structure of a piece is coherent, this remains the most concrete
criterion for the evaluation of music’. Handling of form as a canonical value
upon which to base an exalted critical criterion took on a (somewhat ugly)
politicised context in fin-de-siècle Vienna, as the ability to control large-scale
form was firmly identified as a Germanic quality.
Within a contemporary political climate in which nationalism was on the
rise within the Habsburg Reich, with many minority ethnic groups asserting
their rights to their own languages and cultures, the politically conservative
reacted with Germanising tendencies and an assertion of the supposed inher-
ent superiority of Germanic culture. Critics were not immune to this. In their
hands, music written by those outside the Austro-German mainstream was
either appropriated or Othered. For instance, the well-known cultural
Germanocentric, Heinrich Schenker, attempted in 1897 to co-opt the
Bohemian composers Smetana and Dvořák to the Austro-German tradition:
Smetana and Dvořák . . . succeeded more happily in bringing their national

music into a system than did the Russian artist [Tchaikovsky]. The system is
naturally that of German art, for this is best able to solve the principal problem
of the logical development of a piece of music. So it was first of all Smetana,
who with his brilliant predisposition towards the classical simply applied the
German system to Bohemian music, and because he understood the German
logic of music as it were in its necessity and sensibleness as no other, it was
granted to him to present Bohemian music in a perfection which will not be
surpassed. Since then Dvořák has also succeeded, always with the German
40
Robert Schumann, Die Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 3 (1835), 208; cited in Leon B. Platinga, Schumann as
Critic (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1967), p. 220. Translation by Platinga.
41
McColl, Music Criticism in Vienna, p. 170.
240 LAURA HAMER
system as a basis, in nearly every field of composition, in the naturalization of

his national tone. His chamber music in particular, with all its Bohemian
roots, is blessed with such outstanding German virtues that it justly seems
to us most highly attractive.42
Beyond critical interest in form, McColl has also identified that fin-de-siècle
Viennese critics were concerned with, what she has termed, ‘music’s lofty
purpose’.43 Again this connects to an established German-language romantic
critical tradition which sought to elevate music to metaphysics and can be
traced back to Hoffmann. McColl has further identified that for fin-de-siècle
Viennese critics, originality – balanced against respect for tradition – was also
an important canonical value. Thus the critics, cast in their roles as gate-
keepers, determined who should be included within and who should be
excluded from the canon. As McColl puts it, the critics identified as ‘carrying
about with them the whole weight of the musical tradition, of which they saw
themselves as guardians’.44
The nineteenth century also saw the emergence of the composer-critic.
These were active throughout the period, and include such figures as
Berlioz, Weber and Wolf. As composers themselves, these critics have
come to be viewed as authoritative commentators on the music of others,
and their critical writings often played key roles in canon formation. Better
known for most of his lifetime for his criticism rather than his music,
Schumann remains a prime example of the nineteenth-century composer-
critic. Schumann co-founded Die Neue Zeitschrift für Musik in 1834 and
edited it from January 1835 until July 1844.45 Through his writing,
Schumann actively constructed himself as a crusader for serious, progressive
music. His prose is saturated with elevations of canonical values, whilst he
denigrated what he considered to be artistically valueless, commercialised,
populist music.46 In particular, the contemporary cult of the piano virtuoso,
which, with its empty showmanship he felt exemplified this, was anathema
to him. Leon Plantinga has characterised Schumann’s writing style as
‘vigorous idealism, partisanship, and, often, irreverent impetuosity’.47
Schumann himself described his rabble-rousing motivations for co-
founding Die Neue Zeitschrift für Musik in his own collected edition of his
critical writings in 1854 thus:
42
Heinrich Schenker, Die Neue Revue (26 November 1897), 654; cited from McColl, Music Criticism in
Vienna, p. 176. Translation by McColl.
43 44
McColl, Music Criticism in Vienna, p. 176. Ibid., p. 180.
45
Platinga’s Schumann as Critic remains a key and perceptive source on Schumann’s criticism.
46
In this, Schumann’s critical writing is curiously similar to later twentieth-century rock music criticism.
47
Platinga, Schumann as Critic, p. 3.
At the end of 1833 a few musicians in Leipzig, mostly young men, found
themselves together as though by accident every evening. They met princi-
pally to enjoy each other’s company; but they were also fully as interested in
exchanging their ideas about the art that was for them the food and drink of
life – music. The state of music in Germany was at that time hardly gratifying.
Rossini still ruled the stage; Herz and Hünten, almost by themselves, held the
field in piano music. And yet only a few years had passed since Beethoven, C.
M. von Weber, and Franz Schubert had lived among us. Mendelssohn’s star, it
is true, was rising, and wonderful things were heard of a Pole, Chopin. But it
was only later that they began to exert a lasting effect.
Then, one day, an idea occurred to these young hotheads: ‘Let us not look
and on and do nothing! Take action and improve things! Take action, so that
poetic qualities may again be honored in this art.’ In this way originated the
first pages of a new musical journal (neue Zeitschrift für Musik).48
In 1839, Schumann proclaimed in Die Neue Zeitschrift für Musik that his most
important duty as a critic was ‘to promote those younger talents, the best of
whom are called “romantic”’.49 In particular he championed Schubert,
Mendelssohn and Chopin, composers he admired greatly. Although the
place of each of these is now secure within the canon, Schumann’s critical
writing on them bolstered their reception and helped to establish this.
Writing about Schubert in 1835, when the composer was not well known
(as Schumann reminds us), for instance, he insisted that:
Now we come to our favourites, the sonatas of Franz Schubert [A Minor,

D845; D Major, D850; and B[ Major, D617]. Many know him only as a lieder
composer, though most people, by far, hardly even know his name. We can
make only certain sketchy points here. It would require whole books to show
in detail what works of pure genius his compositions are. Perhaps there will be
time for this some day.50
Schumann’s sentiments intriguingly foreshadow the detailed analyses and con-

siderations of Schubert’s music which would follow in the twentieth century,
when he was recognised as a leading composer of his generation. In the case of
Chopin reception, Schumann also functioned as a trailblazer. Writing in 1841,
for example, he described Chopin’s B[ Minor Sonata, Op. 35 thus:
To look at the first measures of the sonata last named [Chopin’s B[ Minor
Sonata, Op. 35], and yet to have doubts about its authorship would be
48
Robert Schumann, Gesammelte Schriften (1854); cited from Platinga, Schumann as Critic, pp. 3–4.
Translation by Platinga.
49
Robert Schumann, Die Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 10 (1839), 1; cited from Platinga, Schumann as Critic, p.
219. Translation by Platinga.
50
Robert Schumann, Die Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 3 (1835), 208; cited from Platinga, Schumann as Critic,
pp. 219–20. Translation by Platinga.
242 LAURA HAMER
a disgrace for a good critic. For only Chopin begins thus, and only he ends
thus: from dissonance, through dissonance, to dissonance. And yet there is
a good deal of beauty in this piece.51
Thus composers, in their dual roles as critics, were also able to act as gate-
keepers of the canon, the careful curation of which they had an invested
interest in.
Rock Criticism: Constructing Rock’s Cultural Significance

Turning now to rock criticism, a number of intriguing parallels emerge in
relation to desired canonical values, exclusion and criticism’s role within
canon formation, alongside several interesting differences. As new popular
musical genres emerged, so did specialised publications. (For an insightful
account of the development of the popular music press, see Simon Frith’s
‘Writing about Popular Music’, Chapter 26 in the present volume.) Critical
popular music criticism did not emerge in the UK until the later 1960s/early
1970s. Prior to this, the popular music press focused on providing news of the
latest stars to an assumed teenage audience, with much coverage reading like
rehashed press releases. Frith has previously observed:
The British music papers and record companies saw themselves as having the
same interests. Music press ‘news’ was news of the latest recording stars, the
latest entrants to the charts; all such stars were equally important and their
importance lasted precisely as long as their chart success . . . The 1950s music
papers functioned like the film fans’ magazines of the 1930s . . . keeping pop
fans informed of who was doing what and where.52
The impetus for the development of critical rock reception came from two
directions. First, in December 1963 William Mann published his famous (to
some, infamous) review of The Beatles in the arts pages of The Times. In
a language clearly derived from analytically informed classical music criticism,
Mann praised The Beatles thus:
The outstanding English composers of 1963 must seem to have been John
Lennon and Paul McCartney, the talented young musicians from Liverpool
whose songs have been sweeping the country since last Christmas . . . I am not
concerned with the social phenomenon of Beatlemania, which finds expres-
sion in handbags, balloons and other articles bearing the likeness of the loved
ones, or in the hysterical screaming of young girls whenever the Beatle
51
Robert Schumann, Die Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 14 (1841), 39; cited from Platinga, Schumann as Critic,
p. 232. Translation by Platinga.
52
Frith, Sound Effects, pp. 166–7.
Quartet performs in public, but with the musical phenomenon . . . the songs of
Lennon and McCartney are distinctly indigenous in character, the most
imaginative and inventive example of a style that has been developing on
Merseyside during the past few years . . . harmonic interest is typical of their
quicker songs . . . and one gets the impression that they think simultaneously
of harmony and melody, so firmly are the major tonic sevenths and ninths
built into their tunes, and the flat submediant key switches . . . Those sub-
mediant switches from C major into A[ major, and to a lesser extent mediant
ones (e.g. the octave ascent in the famous ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’) are
a trademark of Lennon–McCartney songs.53
Although numerous popular music scholars have denigrated Mann’s review

for being couched in the language of classical music criticism and analysis – and
a solid argument could be made that this is neither an appropriate methodol-
ogy nor an adequate vocabulary for popular music – it must be remembered
that, at the time that he wrote it, a critical British rock language had not yet
been developed. What it is also crucial to acknowledge is that Mann was
among the first to take popular music seriously and to treat it as a valid form
of cultural expression.
The second impetus came from the development of a new breed of reflective
rock criticism from the United States. This critically aware rock criticism first
emerged in the underground music press. Frith has commented:
Rock turned out to be the basic form of underground culture, but in becom-
ing so it was imbued with an ideology that was at marked variance with
previous notions of pop: rock was valued for its political stance, its aggression,
its sexuality, its relationship to cultural stance. The music that was most
despised and mistrusted by the underground press was precisely the commer-
cial, successful, teenage pop that had been essential to the development of the
British press. Rock was defined as the music that articulated the values of
a new community of youth; it was opposed to the traditional values of show
biz; and as the appeal of the underground spread from its original bohemian
roots so did this notion of rock . . . underground papers were important as the
source of what became the dominant ideology of rock.54
A clear genre hierarchy subsequently emerged between ‘authentic’ rock

music and ‘commercialised’ pop music, with rock music frequently con-
structed as an authentic, non-commercialised expression of artistic and aes-
thetic strength. Stuart Borthwick and Ron Moy, however, have commented
on the contradiction inherent within this situation:
53
William Mann, ‘What Songs the Beatles Sang’, The Times (27 December 1963), available at www
.beatlesbible.com (accessed 19 June 2016).
54
Frith, Sound Effects, pp. 168–9.
244 LAURA HAMER
Rock, as a term, was coined to differentiate the music and attitudes of both
performer and audience from the ‘pop’ and ‘commercial’ form. This rock/pop
binarism can be viewed as a false bifurcation on a number of levels . . .
However, it did serve to reflect the growing fragmentation of the audience
for popular music into what we might term ‘taste hierarchies’ often based
upon class, gender, geographical or ethnic distinctions.55
As Wyn Jones has also commented, ‘rock is sometimes presented as the more
artistically serious counterpart of pop’.56 Despite its obvious fallacy, this pop/
rock genre hierarchy runs deep in popular music discourse and criticism. It
tends to privilege rock music within the popular music canon and genre
hierarchy as the more culturally authentic form of popular music and to
steep it in (counter-)cultural capital.
Wyn Jones has observed that ‘from the mid-1990s onwards there has been
a growing suggestion of a canon in the reception of rock music’.57 As evidence
she points to ‘the swell in the number of rock music histories, lists (and books)
of greatest albums’.58 Although Wyn Jones focuses her argument upon the
reception of albums, her argument can easily be extended to embrace rock
criticism in general. On canonical values, she comments that:
The most immediate way in which rock writing displays canonic tendencies is
in the language used to describe its subject matter. Canonical words mingle
with more vivid, everyday spoken language; the terms ‘masterpiece’, ‘classic’,
‘genius’, ‘artist’, ‘test of time’, and ‘sublime’ all appear regularly . . .
Originality, in its various different guises, is as much a hallmark of greatness
in rock music as in literature and classical music.59
Although it might appear natural to Wyn Jones that rock music criticism
should have borrowed its canonical values from literature and classical music,
it is worth briefly considering the justification for this. It is not particularly
likely that rock critics, en masse, would be deeply aware of nineteenth-century
classical music criticism. Possibly the canonical values of literature and classi-
cal music had so fully permeated wider cultural discourse by the 1960s that
they were almost unconsciously absorbed into rock criticism. The same
canonical values were adopted as the most desirable qualities of rock
music too.
In another parallel to nineteenth-century criticism, Wyn Jones has also
identified the centrality of the struggling outsider figure: ‘again and again
albums are regarded as direct expressions of the artists who made them, cast in
55
Stuart Borthwick and Ron Moy, Popular Music Genres (New York and London: Routledge, 2004),
pp. 61–2.
56 57 58 59
Wyn Jones, The Rock Canon, p. 40. Ibid., p. 25. Ibid. Ibid., pp. 29–30.
the role of troubled Romantic genius, and perceived truths and honesty of
expression become markers of value’.60 This image of the disturbed outsider
figure who has come – in an almost Messianic style – to lead us into music’s
promised land is well exemplified in a review of a performance by Cranes
written by Simon Price for Melody Maker in July 1990:
Cranes, the most important band of the new decade . . . they evoke abused
childhood, the point where infancy takes flight from the torture and damage
inflicted by adults, and from the iron mould of oncoming maturity. Cranes
take refuge in introversion, exploring the unchartered areas of the mind . . .
Their minimalist/maximalist metallic funeral marches induce physical terror.
Between songs, no one dares speak – stunned into hushed awe. A backwards
human pulse introduces the monumental neo-classical chords of ‘Focus
Breathe’, and I realise how unexpected and undeserved Cranes are in 1990.
This, at last, is the resumption of a forgotten alley – the early Eighties’
decadent ‘luxury’ of experimentalism – which we have denied ourselves for
too long. This, at last, is the perfect soundtrack to a New Europe of autobahns
and forests, statues and opera houses . . . Just as we were all losing hope,
Cranes give cause for renewed faith, kicking rock one step ahead of dance
music . . . Cranes are in another world, out there on their own. Next to them,
hardly anyone matters. I have seen the future. This is the beginning of the new
Ice Age.61
Price’s florid prose clearly positions the members of Cranes as uneasy outsider
figures. His evocations of classical music and concern to historicise them
within a musical tradition are designed to confer cultural value. The allusion
to Cranes ‘kicking rock one step ahead of dance music’, meanwhile, reinforces
the genre hierarchy which privileges rock above all other forms of popular
music. (It is difficult to escape the irony, however, that despite this flamboyant
proclamation of their coming significance – and although they did achieve
some moderate success – Cranes did not become ‘the most important band’ of
the 1990s!)
Wyn Jones has also observed an often related tendency within rock criti-
cism to construct ‘canonic’ songs and albums as the autonomous product of
a single individual, generally the lead singer-songwriter, and to downplay the
input of others, including band members, session musicians, sound engineers,
agents and producers. As she expresses it:
This ideal of autonomous vision is played out in descriptions of these albums

that suggest that the singer/songwriter is in truth an auteur, responsible for all
60
Ibid., p. 36.
61
Simon Price, ‘Cranes, ICA, London’, Melody Maker (7 July 1990); Liverpool Hope University Popular
Music Resources Centre, Press Clipping [n. p].
246 LAURA HAMER
aspects of its creation . . . What these accounts tend to ignore is the division of
labour involved in making albums, even for solo artists . . . However, the
concept of the authenticity of music written by the performer based on his
(or her) own experiences is such familiar trope in rock music reception that
accounts of albums by groups as opposed to individual artists are often
reduced to accounts of the main singer-songwriter.62
Another echo of nineteenth-century reception commonly found in rock criti-

cism is a trend to appreciate the music’s artistic and aesthetic strength over
any commercial value. As Wyn Jones puts it:
Although rock albums are clearly commercial works, the reception of these
albums often makes a point of emphasizing their aesthetic strengths above any
commercial success . . . Since canonical works are meant to be made of pure
artistic motivation, the canon is based on values other than commerce . . . In
the field of rock music it is harder to separate art from commerce since wealth
visibly attaches itself to successful artists and albums are clearly commercial
products. However, the reception of this music underplays such
a connection . . . Accordingly, the reception of . . . rock . . . tends to reflect
the non-commercial, aesthetic ambition of canons more than the ephemeral
disposability of rock music, thus creating one of the most glaring contra-
dictions between canonic and rock ideology.63
Or as Borthwick and Moy comment, ‘how can an act that sells millions of
albums be considered “uncommercial”’?64
The tension between artistic integrity and commercialism inherent in rock
criticism is further problematised by the often symbiotic relationship
between the popular music press and the music industry. As Frith has
commented:
Most rock writers are . . . almost completely dependent on the record business.
Their news, their interviews, their access are provided by record companies . . .
there is continuous job mobility between rock journalism and rock publicity –
record company press departments recruit from the music papers, music
papers employ ex-publicists; it is not even unusual for writers to do both
jobs simultaneously.65
An important aspect of rock criticism is providing an evaluation of parti-

cular acts and new releases to readers (who are also, of course, potential
buyers). This further exacerbates the conflict between rock criticism as
ideology and commercial enterprise. Shuker has discussed this opposition
thus:
62 63
Wyn Jones, The Rock Canon, pp. 37–9. Ibid., pp. 30–40.
64 65
Borthwick and Moy, Popular Music Genres, p. 61. Frith, Sound Effects, p. 173.
Music critics act as a service industry to the record industry, lubricating the
desire to acquire both new product and selections from the back catalogue.
Both the press and critics, however, also play an important ideological func-
tion. They distance popular music consumers from the fact that they are
essentially purchasing an economic commodity, by stressing the product’s
cultural significance. Furthermore, this function is maintained by the impor-
tant point that the music press is not, at least directly, vertically integrated
into the music industry (i.e. owned by the record companies). A sense of
distance is thereby maintained, while at the same time the need of the industry
to constantly sell new images, styles and product is met.66
Conclusion: Criticism, Hagiography and Canon Formation

As with the case of the centrality of Beethoven criticism to the nineteenth-
century classical music canon, a formidable hagiography developed around
the reception of 1960s rock music which deeply affected rock’s canon forma-
tion. Again, criticism helped to entrench one dominant genre, time and
ideology as the gold standard against which all subsequent rock must be
judged. Rock criticism is frequently nostalgic and retrospective, valuing
aspects of new acts which recall the ‘great’ rock bands of the past.
Commenting specifically on Rolling Stone in 1981, Frith has identified that:
Rolling Stone writers . . . tend to judge records according to their relevance for
a rock community that no longer exists. Because that community – 1960s
youth culture – is gone, the critical question becomes: Can this artist, this
piece of music, provide the experience of that community in itself? Hence the
emphasis on artistic purposes and skills, the equation between emotional
intensity and rock excellence. This approach has two consequences. First, it
is essentially conservative: it looks to music to recreate the past – the most
important rock cultural figures for the paper are the same now as they were
when it started . . . Second, it is essentially mystical: the rock experience – ‘the
magic that can set you free’ – is never described but endlessly referred back to
as some mythical adolescent moment against which all subsequent rock
moments can be judged. Punk, for example, was eventually welcomed by
Rolling Stone not for what it said, not for its political or social stance, but
because it offered the authentic rock ’n’ roll buzz – the Clash were just like the
Stones!67
This tendency to legitimise new acts by situating them within a rock tradi-
tion continues into the twenty-first century. For instance, in January 2006
Paul Morley, writing about Secret Machines in The Telegraph, described and
66 67
Shuker, Understanding Popular Music, p. 98. Frith, Sound Effects, p. 176.
248 LAURA HAMER
critiqued them through evoking a whole myriad of established, past rock

bands:
From their haircuts, it’s not immediately clear what specific period of music
Secret Machines are obsessed by. The haircuts could place them in the 1960s
Kinks or the early 1970s Sparks. They throw shapes like mid-1970s New York
bands such as Television and the Patti Smith Group . . . They take one parti-
cular history of rock – a straightforward indie-ish one that goes from late-
1960s English pop via early-1970s glam and punk, 1980s post-punk and 1990s
grunge and post-rock, from The Who to Radiohead, from Bowie to
Spiritualised – and embroil it with influences that don’t usually fit inside the
indie model. They refer to epic Floyd and Zep . . . not afraid to mix deranged
punk economy with grandiose scheming and dreaming . . . Somehow, among
all this spooky, spinning history, Secret Machines are themselves getting
closer and closer to transcending the spectacular sequence of transcendent
music that has inspired them. If they make it, they could be as great as
anything that has influenced them, and possess haircuts they can truly call
their own.68
The quasi-biblical reference to transcendence – albeit downplayed by the

everyday quip about hairstyles – reinforces the special cultural status granted
to those permitted entry to the rock canon.
Thus critical rhetoric creates a fearsome hagiography around canonical acts
and works. It props them up as the benchmark against which all others must
be measured. In this guise, criticism is clearly an ideological pursuit, and one
intimately connected to canon formation. Ultimately canons are supposed to
represent the greats within any one given genre. (Whether they actually do or
not is, of course, a matter for debate.) Critics, in their roles as gatekeepers,
play a fundamental part in determining which works and musicians come to
be considered as the canonical gold standards against which all other works
within their field must be judged. By investing these with canonical values
such as non-commercialised aesthetic and artistic strength, authenticity, ori-
ginality, complexity, organicism, progressiveness and individual genius, their
rhetoric imbues those chosen with cultural capital and power, whilst margin-
alising or excluding others. The preservation of canonical values first exulted
in the nineteenth century – aesthetic and artistic strength, originality, indivi-
dual genius, etc. – reveals how strongly the cultural priorities of that era
continues to cast a shadow into the current age. Although I have been able
to consider only two musical canons in any depth here, critical gatekeepers,
via their roles in constructing cultural values and directing public tastes, are
always fundamental to canon formation.
68
Paul Morley, ‘Secret Machines’, The Telegraph (29 January 2006), 33.
. 13 .
Comparing Notes: Recording and Criticism

CHRISTOPHER DINGLE
In London on my way to Italy I had some talks in the Savile billiards-room

with Robin Legge, the musical critic of the Daily Telegraph . . . [who] said
suddenly: ‘Why don’t you write me an article about the gramophone? Let me
have it as soon as you can.’ That suggestion from Robin Legge after he had just
potted the brown made that moment one of the most decisive moments in my
life. Compton Mackenzie, My Life and Times (1966)1
It would be absurd now to suggest that recordings were not a legitimate

subject for music criticism. For some genres, they are arguably the primary
focus of reviews and comment, whether these appear in newspapers, maga-
zines, journals, online or are broadcast. At the time Compton Mackenzie
conceived The Gramophone in September 1922, the notion of reviewing
records was far from established.2 Forty-five years had passed since Thomas
Edison’s invention of the phonograph in 1877 and commercial recordings had
started to be produced in significant quantities in the 1890s. Moreover, the
years immediately after the end of the First World War saw a substantial
expansion of activity for the record companies. However, according to
Mackenzie’s perception in his entertaining autobiography, Robin Legge
(Daily Telegraph) and Percy Scholes (the Observer) ‘were the only musical critics
who had as yet recognized that such an instrument as the gramophone
existed, and occasionally noticed some new record’.3 Nor was this situation
peculiar to Britain, for record reviews were equally scarce, if not non-existent,
in US newspapers and those from continental Europe. Just as recording has
fundamentally transformed how music in general is composed, performed,
I am profoundly grateful to Sophie Redfern for her ferreting on my behalf for various sources that feed
into this chapter and some insightful comments on it. It should be noted at the outset that, as a member of
the review panel for BBC Music Magazine since 1994, I am a participant in, as well as an observer of, aspects
of this particular field.
1
Compton Mackenzie, My Life and Times: Octave Five 1915–1923 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1966),
p. 232.
2
The Gramophone became plain Gramophone in June 1969. This chapter uses the title relevant to the period
under discussion.
3
Mackenzie, My Life and Times, Octave Five, p. 232.
[249]
heard, mediated and understood, it has also specifically affected criticism in

profound ways. The criticism of recordings constitutes a prime exemplar of
what Mark Katz refers to as the concept of the ‘phonograph effect’, that is, the
ways in which the ability to capture and reproduce sound influences musical
life.4 It is not merely that there is something additional to review, that
recordings have encouraged and facilitated engagement with new genres
and repertoires, or even that recording has changed approaches to perfor-
mance, but also that they have stimulated changes of method, language and
understanding for music criticism itself.
This chapter starts with consideration of some ways in which the criticism
of recordings is distinct from that of live performance, then moves onto
a broadly chronological exploration of the emergence of recordings as an
object for criticism. The London Times is a thread through this discussion,
acting as a case study of changing attitudes within a key newspaper, while
other titles naturally also feature along the way, notably The Gramophone. In
the latter part of the chapter, two controversies act as a catalyst for discussion
of issues and challenges specific to reviewing recordings.
Differences Between Live and Record Reviewing

In some respects, the criticism of recordings is simply an adaptation of concert
reviewing with its twin elements of chronicle and judgement. There is clear
overlap between a live concert and an audio recording for the reviewer, but
there are also significant differences of approach and intention that are set out
in Table 13.1.
In terms of chronicling, whereas concert reviews recount what has hap-
pened at an event, the record review is more akin to the preview, informing
the reader of new opportunities for experiencing music. With recordings,
the element of critique is of a specific performance that can, in principle, be
shared by all readers, rather than one ephemeral exemplar: concert reviews
refer to the past, record reviews to an eternal present. As a consequence,
the review helps to establish a reputation for the recording itself, so that
reference is made to Glenn Gould’s 1955 recording of Bach’s Goldberg
Variations as distinct from his 1981 version or those by numerous other
performers. This has exaggerated the trend towards concentrating on dis-
cussion of performance that had already begun with the canon formation of
the nineteenth century.
4
Mark Katz, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 2004), p. 3.
Comparing Notes: Recording and Criticism 251
Table 13.1 Key traits of concert and record reviewing
Concerts Recordings
Ephemeral event experienced Artefact heard multiple times

once
Immediate impression of an Considered view of performance that can still be
historical event heard
Performers (and audience) can Performance is acousmatic
be observed
Evaluation of a unique event Performance can be placed in direct comparison
with others
Contributing to reputation from Strong element of consumer advice for specific
multiple events product in addition to general reputation
Thanks to recordings and broadcasts, critics of both live and recorded

performances can now assume that readers are familiar with much music or
could easily become so. Moreover, because record reviews discuss artefacts
that continue to be sold, compilations in book form continue their usefulness
to the reader. When reading what Newman or Cardus wrote about
a particular performance of Sibelius or Wagner, it is possible to critique
their writing and to consider whether their view of the music differs from
current perceptions. However, their judgements about the performance can,
at best, only provide clues as to whether they would be shared today. By
contrast, Gramophone now has a monthly ‘Classics Reconsidered’ feature in
which two current critics discuss a notable historical recording in the context
of its original review.
The ability to listen more than once to a recording has significant practical
implications for the critic. To start with, deadlines tend to be appreciably
more generous with recordings, being at least a week or two rather than a day
or even just an hour or so for concerts. Whereas there is an imperative to
publish reviews of concerts and gigs as soon as possible after the event, it is
still worthwhile printing a perceptive review of a recording several months
after its release date. Crucially, it is not necessary to reside in the metropolis to
access the music, significantly broadening the potential pool of critics. For the
first few years of The Gramophone’s existence, Compton Mackenzie was resi-
dent on the tiny island of Jethou, in the Channel Isles, communication while
there being exclusively via small boat.
The fact that records could be listened to anywhere represented vastly
increased access to music for all, with a concurrent enlarging of the potential
readership for reviews. This, allied to the fact that there was now a choice of
competing performances for purchase, has meant that, from the outset, it has
usually been imperative for record critics not just to report and critique, but
also recommend from among the alternatives. The critic needs to cater both
for those on a limited budget seeking advice on which is the recording to buy
and those wanting insight on whether to add a newcomer to those already on
their shelf. As early as 1935, the American Music Lover5 used a system of star
ratings for popular records and The Gramophone did the same for jazz and
swing from 1936. Star ratings were adopted in numerous pop, rock and jazz
magazines, but it was not until the late 1980s that their use became wide-
spread both in classical magazines and reviews in broadsheet newspapers.
One consequence of recordings entering critical discourse was that a new
generation of non-specialist critics appeared at the very time that, with varying
degrees of success, newspaper criticism had been attempting to professionalise.
As noted in The Times in 1929: ‘One of the chief functions of the gramophone
and its records is to supply the semi-musical with a library. Few of us can read
satisfactorily from a score; we need to hear the notes as well as to see them.’6
Compton Mackenzie was open about the limitations of his own musical train-
ing and that, at least initially, The Gramophone was written by enthusiasts,
though it is worth remembering he was a professional writer with numerous
books to his name by the time The Gramophone was launched. Regardless, his
manner of record reviewing raises eyebrows:
My quarterly review of records running to about six thousand words would

have been an impossible task if I had not learnt to listen to records being
played while I was writing a book . . . Without it I should never have been able
to maintain my rate of production. I would know at once if [my secretary]
Nellie Boyte had put on the wrong side of a record and was listening critically
all the while. Yet I was able nevertheless to concentrate on my writing.7
It is worth remembering at this point that, save for those with a dutiful
secretary to assist, listening to recordings was punctuated every four or five
minutes by the need to change the sides of the record. More sustained listen-
ing only became possible from 1948 with the approximately twenty-three
minutes per side of the long player (LP).
The comparative possibilities of record reviewing were apparent early on.
A December 1922 review of a recording of Beethoven’s ‘Emperor’ Concerto,
5
The successor, in essence, of Phonograph Monthly Review (founded 1926), and the brief Music Lovers’
Guide. The title eventually became American Record Guide.
6
Unsigned, ‘The Musician’s Gramophone. Bach, Brahms Beethoven’, The Times (2 April 1929), 14.
7
Compton Mackenzie, My Life and Times: Octave Six 1923–1930 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1967), p. 15.
for instance, characterised soloist Frederic Lamond’s approach as being

‘Beethoven as seen through another personality, albeit one very much in sym-
pathy with, and appreciative of, his art’ before contrasting it with that of Harold
Bauer’s, who had appeared in several concerts in November and who ‘gives us
the essence of Beethoven’s music as a universal rather than a personal
experience’.8 It was natural, and part of the raison d’être of The Gramophone to
parse the differences between rival recordings of works, such as this 1937
round-up of available versions of Debussy’s Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune:
The Albert Hall Orchestra’s flute seems more matter-of-fact: the sun is not so
cordial. Philadelphia’s spaciously speaking flute seems to be mirroring itself in
a lake . . . For the full-scale sweep and swirl, the effulgence of the whole
garden’s perfume, the Philadelphia; for perhaps an even subtler fragrance, at
moments, the Straram.9
While such comparisons are now a natural part of musical discourse, and
were not entirely absent before the advent of recording, they marked
a profound shift in critical sensibility. Even as late as 1940, the critic in The
Times observed that ‘Comparisons are said to be odious, and criticism gen-
erally avoids them. Gramophone connoisseurs, however, do not, and one of
their favourite occupations is to compare readings and recordings.’10
While most of the differences between concert and record reviewing noted
in Table 13.1 are self-evident, the acousmatic aspect of recordings, the ability
to hear music without musicians present, is now such a pervasive and natural
part of everyday life that it is easy to overlook. The solid artefact of a recording
paradoxically enables the music to become completely disembodied and
portable. As if to compensate for the lack of a visible performer, early writing
and criticism of recordings often referred to the gramophone as an instru-
ment. This habit may initially have reflected scientific interest in Edison’s
invention, but mutated as recordings began to proliferate at the turn of the
twentieth century to suggest that having a gramophone in the house was
equivalent to possessing a piano.
Early Coverage
While it was not until the 1920s that reviewing records became commonplace,
the phenomenon of recording was certainly discussed. News of Edison’s
8
Unsigned [From A Correspondent], ‘New Gramophone Records. Piano Reproductions’, The Times
(1 December 1922), 10.
9
W. R. A [William Robert Anderson], ‘Second Reviews’, The Gramophone (May 1937), 525.
10
Unsigned, ‘The Gramophone. A Tallis Fantasia’, The Times (6 August 1940), 6.
invention drew significant comment on both sides of the Atlantic, featuring

widely in the US press in November 1877. These reports were picked up in the
UK by the Liverpool Mercury at the end of the month, spreading to London and
elsewhere by January 1878.11 A flurry of articles followed demonstrations of
the phonograph in London at the Crystal Palace and at the Royal United
Services Institution in the spring of 1878. Recording then largely drops from
view for about a decade, reflecting in part the fact that Edison put his inven-
tion to one side while developing the electric light. Even after the advent of
his improved phonograph and Emile Berliner’s gramophone, discussion of
recording before the turn of the twentieth century was primarily limited to
sporadic reports of exhibitions, scientific lectures and business application of
these talking machines, with shortcomings often being to the fore: ‘The
phonograph, ingenious as it is, cannot at present be regarded as anything
more than a philosophical toy . . . not one of the useful purposes of every-day
life has been subserved by this remarkable machine.’12 Mention of music in
this period was generally restricted to noting the use of national anthems or
similar patriotic songs in demonstrations.
Even once recordings of music, notably classical music, began to proliferate
in the 1900s, with artists such as Adelina Patti, Nelly Melba and Enrico Caruso
being prominent in the catalogue of the Gramophone and Typewriter
Company, the notion of reviewing the records themselves simply did not
occur. Rather, the earliest exemplars of recordings being reviewed are where
they appear as part of a ‘gramophone concert’. These events, which were
covered by newspapers from as early as 1904,13 were organised by the nascent
record companies to display the technology and the latest recordings:
The result was a considerable surprise to many of those present, the pro-
gramme including reproductions of the voices of many of the most eminent
singers of today . . . The long programme of new records contained much
admirable singing admirably reproduced . . . the records vary in quality, but all
are good, and some of them are delightful.14
On occasion the recordings were accompanied by a live piano or even an

orchestra.15 Whatever the nature of the event, at least as much of the comment
centred on the quality of the reproduction achieved, a natural concern given
not only that the technology was still in its infancy but also that advertise-
ments lauded the reality of the recordings. A concert at the Savoy Hotel in
11
Liverpool was the principal port for trade with the United States.
12
Unsigned, ‘Recent Developments in Acoustical Science’, The Times (19 August 1878), 4.
13
See, for instance, Unsigned, ‘The Gramophone’, The Times (25 March 1904), 5.
14
Unsigned, ‘Opera on the Gramophone’, The Times (21 May 1906), 4.
15
See, for instance, Unsigned, ‘A Gramophone Concert’, The Times (2 May 1909), 12.
London went so far as to place the voices of Clara Butt and Kennerley
Rumford on record alongside their live performances of the same repertoire,
resulting in critical insight of potential value to current-day scholars:
Had we not just listened to the singers viva voce we should certainly have
declared the gramophone’s a wonderful imitation . . . But with Mme Clara
Butt’s tones still ringing in our ears it was impossible not to notice that it had
introduced a faint nasal tinge into her lower notes and tightened some of her
higher notes so as to give the impression that her throat was not fully open. . . .
An odd little weakness on the instrument’s part is its inability to pronounce
sibilants – it lisps.16
Such comments are corroborated by a review from the end of acoustic era that
also notes a distorting effect on the contralto voice: ‘Miss Leila Megane makes
a success in two of Mr. Bantock’s “Songs of Egypt,” avoiding in these that
“scoop” into which the lower contralto notes are sometimes perverted by the
gramophone.’17
Critical Concerns
The quality of the reproduction was often the primary factor in judging the
success or otherwise of a particular disc. In fact, it was not unusual for short-
comings to be attributed to the technology rather than the musicians, as in this
review of Thibaud and Cortot’s record of Franck’s violin sonata: ‘There are
occasional passages in the later [sic] where the recording makes the E string playing
uncertain.’18 The improvement in quality by 1940 is clear from a review of
Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending: ‘The recording (by Decca) is conspicuously
good since one can hear the pull of the bow on the string and the tone is both pure
and full even on the highest notes – only the triangle cuts a poor figure!’19
It should be remembered that another recording medium was prevalent in
the first three decades of the twentieth century: player pianos. Until the mid-
1920s, the poor quality and difficult studio conditions of audio recording
meant that solo piano repertoire was far more likely to be committed to piano
roll than discs or cylinders, along with transcriptions of chamber and orches-
tral works.20 The overwhelming majority of these remain unknown to
16
Unsigned, ‘A Gramophone Concert’, The Times (5 October 1909), 11.
17
Unsigned, ‘New Gramophone Records. Mozart’s Fourth Violin Concerto’, The Times (13 April
1925), 8.
18
Unsigned, ‘Gramophone Notes. Additions to Chamber Music’, The Times (17 February 1925), 12.
19
Unsigned, ‘The Gramophone. Music Round the Map’, The Times (1 June 1940), 4.
20
For more on this in relation to French repertoire, see Christopher Dingle, ‘Players and Pianos: An
Overview of Early Recorded Resources for the French Piano Repertoire’, in Scott McCarrey and
Lesley Wright (eds.), Perspectives on the Performance of French Piano Music (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014).
modern listeners as they have not been realised for audio recordings.
Improvements in audio quality even before electric recording meant that
demand was already on the decline, so that the inclusion of a Player Piano
supplement with The Gramophone in June 1924 lasted only until March 1925.
A sign of the increasing acceptance of audio recording in the years after the
First World War is reflected in the fact that two elements of the service for the
burial of the Unknown Warrior at Westminster Abbey on Armistice Day 1920
were captured: Kipling’s ‘Recessional’ and ‘Abide with me’. Intriguingly, the
Columbia Gramophone Company used an ‘electrical process’, five years ear-
lier than commercial electrical recordings were generally available (albeit by
a different technology).21 The years after the First World War also saw signs of
how recordings enabled artists to have international profiles, making them
familiar figures before stepping foot in a country. Reviewing Jascha Heifetz’s
first appearance in Britain at the Queen’s Hall, London, on Wednesday
3 May 1920, the critic in The Times noted that the violinist ‘brought a huge
audience . . . because his fame had preceded him in a series of gramophone
records . . . [which] instantly convinced people that here was something
exceptional in the art of violin playing’.22 The critic went on to bemoan the
fact that Heifetz did not play any substantive works, missing the opportunity
to build on what was already known through the records. By the time of
Amelita Galli-Curci’s first London performances, not only had recordings
ensured that her fame preceded her, leading to sell-out recitals at the Royal
Albert Hall, but they also raised expectations that, in the view of The Times
critic, were met only partly:
It is possible that the artist who, like Mme Galli-Curci, is blest with the perfect
recording voice and style may find that it brings moments of embarrassment.
Only the unblemished record goes out from the shop, and it a creates
a standard to which she must live up on the concert platform . . . Generally
what one admires about Mme Galli-Curci is that she can do so much with
a voice confined to one colour, and that a pale one.23
Such observations reflect a keen awareness of which types of performer were

most effective without the visual stimuli of live performance and within the
restricted soundworld of the gramophone:
Cortot seems to understand the limitations of the gramophone better than

any other solo pianist, or is it that the natural crispness of his style is
21
There are several reports, notably Unsigned, ‘Gramophone Records by Electricity. Memorial of
Unknown Warrior’s Funeral’, The Times (8 December 1920), 14.
22
Unsigned, ‘A New Violinist. Jascha Heifetz at Queen’s Hall’, The Times (6 May 1920), 14.
23
Unsigned, ‘Mme Galli-Curci. First Concert at The Albert Hall’, The Times (13 October 1924), 12.
sympathetic to the medium? Paderewski, in recent records of favourite things

from Chopin . . . seems to forget the impersonality of the disk [sic]. Many
players partly enact their music, so that for the perfect appreciation of what we
hear we need to see the movement of head and hands. Certainly, his rendering
of the familiar A[ Prelude comes disjointedly in the gramophone’s disembo-
died echo, and exhibits the liberties a great artist takes with his score rather
than the qualities which justify him in taking them.24
Years later, Neville Cardus reflected that for certain artists, even those whose
recordings are revered, the extraordinary impact of their live performances
died with them: ‘I would implore everybody who listens to Kathleen Ferrier
on record – no matter how much they are charmed by her voice – to remember
that they are experiencing only 50 per cent of her.’ He goes on to cite Karajan
as someone where much less was lost.25
The potential threat posed by recordings to broader musicality, even culture
in general, has been a periodic refrain from various composers and musicians, so
it is little surprise to find critics occupied by similar concerns at an early stage:
The gramophone is listened to just because it is a gramophone; as the cine-

matograph is watched just because it is a cinematograph. In both cases
mechanical ingenuity is taking the place of art as a source of amusement:
and it is doing this because we have learnt to be merely passive enjoyers of art
and have lost all knowledge of the true delight of art, which can come only to
those who practise it.26
If this 1910 reflection is prophetic of, for instance, Britten’s 1964 Aspen
speech declaring the loudspeaker an enemy of music and outside true musical
experience,27 others saw recordings as a catalyst for greater attentiveness:
There is an excellent gramophone record of Kreisler and Zimbalist playing

together Bach’s concerto for two violins. Their differences of detail are clearly
distinguishable, and to appreciate it is a more complete lesson in phrasing than
the most thorough verbal analysis could be. It compels the hearer to active
participation in the art, and that is listening as distinct from hearing.28
Such comment from 1921 demonstrates that, while Compton Mackenzie’s

characterisation of the paucity of interest in records among the press in 1922
24
Unsigned, ‘The Musician’s Gramophone. Beethoven, Schumann, Mendelssohn’, The Times (12 July
1929), 12.
25
Robin Daniels, Conversations with Cardus (London: Victor Gollancz, 1976), pp. 230–1.
26
Unsigned, ‘Mechanical Amusement’, The Times (7 September 1910), 9.
27
Benjamin Britten, ‘On Receiving the First Aspen Award’, speech given on 31 July 1964 at Aspen Music
Festival, Colorado. The speech is reproduced in full on the festival website: www.aspenmusicfestival.com
/benjamin-britten (accessed 30 September 2017).
28
Unsigned, ‘The Future of the Gramophone. Converted Musicians’, The Times (23 July 1921), 8.
was broadly true, Legge and Scholes were not actually the only UK critics to
have shown an engagement with records. The Musical Times began a monthly
‘Gramophone Notes’ feature in January 1921, over six years before the
German equivalent, Die Musik, began its ‘Mechanische Musik’ section in
October 1927. Written by ‘Discus’, ‘Gramophone Notes’ opened with con-
firmation that consumer advice was a strong impetus, referring to a letter
from a reader who ‘warns me in a friendly way that what gramophone users
require is candid information as to what records are satisfactory from
a musical point of view’.29 Similarly, by February 1922, The Times had recog-
nised the need for regular critical engagement with the gramophone:
A great number of people buy gramophones without having any very clear
idea of what use to make of them, beyond a vague sense that it will be nice to
‘turn it on’ in a dull moment. It is thought that an occasional short article here
may suggest some of the more definite uses.30
Periodic reviews began to appear a fortnight later, several months before

Mackenzie’s fateful game of billiards:
Among the more recent acquisitions of the gramophone repertory the records
of Elizabethan madrigals, ballets, and other choral songs made by the English
Singers for ‘His Master’s Voice’ seem peculiarly valuable and interesting . . .
these records are very good music, good in the sense that they are music
originally made for people of ordinary musical capacity to enjoy, sung by
a first-rate combination of singers, who have on the whole been extraordina-
rily successful in transferring their performance to the disc.31
Nonetheless, if Mackenzie’s memory of events typically brushes over the

nuances, the launch of The Gramophone remains a significant moment in record
reviewing.
Mackenzie, whose own exploits would be barely credible in one of his many
novels (including work in military intelligence and helping found the Scottish
National Party while being the sole resident of Jethou in the Channel Islands),
had only recently discovered the potential of recordings and combined his
customary energy with the zeal of the convert. The article for The Telegraph
requested by Robin Legge in the Savile Club billiards room appeared on
22 September 1922, but an encouraging letter from Legge the day before
prompted more ambitious plans: ‘I began to wonder if it might not be a good
idea to bring out a monthly magazine devoted to the gramophone. I recall that
29
‘Discus’, ‘Gramophone Notes’, Musical Times (1 January 1921), 40–1.
30
Unsigned, ‘Gramophone Music. Encouragement of Close Listening’, The Times (23 February 1922), 10.
31
Unsigned, ‘Madrigals on the Gramophone. Records by the English Singers’, The Times (9 March
1922), 10.
at about half-past five on the afternoon of this notion’s occurring to me I saw

the planet Venus over Monte Solaro.’32 To some, including Mackenzie’s
brother-in-law, Christopher Stone, the timing was less auspicious as the
advent of the wireless appeared likely to render the gramophone obsolete.
Stone was eventually prevailed upon to invest in the magazine, which duly
launched in April 1923.33 Mackenzie himself was initially dismissive of the
wireless, stating in the opening editorial of the first edition: ‘We shall have
nothing to do with Wireless in these columns. Our policy will be to encourage
the recording companies to build up for generations to come a great library of
good music.’34 A meeting with John Reith, the Managing Director of the
recently formed British Broadcasting Company,35 was the catalyst for
a change of heart by Mackenzie prompted by their shared desire to promote
‘good music’.36 Indeed, in 1929 he set up Vox, a sister magazine to The
Gramophone devoted to radio criticism, but it received the support of neither
the radio manufacturers nor the Radio Times and only lasted a few issues.37
The potential educational benefits widely perceived in recording prompted
strong debate about taste and the quality of the music being disseminated.
Some bemoaned the dangers of recordings spreading poor music, by which
was generally meant dance and jazz records:
But how good is the thing which we now enjoy? Musical pleasure of a kind is
undoubtedly now more widely distributed than ever, but discrimination is
still rare. Europe, without Prohibition, imports musical drugs from
America.38
The prevalent view among commentators, though, was an enthusiastic

embrace of the gramophone’s potential for educating the public and provid-
ing access to ‘good’ music. In the early years, it was usual for the first few
paragraphs of a review in The Gramophone to be a descriptive introduction to
the music in the manner of a programme note even for commonplace reper-
toire (it should be remembered that recordings were not accompanied by any
booklet or sleeve notes at this time). As Percy Scholes wrote to Compton
Mackenzie, ‘it seems admirable that fine music should no longer remain the
private preserve of a tiny body of initiates’.39 Similarly, Axel B. Johnson’s
32 33
Mackenzie, My Life and Times: Octave Five, p. 235. Ibid., pp. 235, 250.
34
Compton Mackenzie, ‘Prologue’, The Gramophone, 1/1 (1923), 1.
35
The British Broadcasting Company was formally dissolved on 31 December 1926 and the British
Broadcasting Corporation was created on 1 January 1927 by Crown Charter, Reith’s new designation
being Director General.
36
Mackenzie, My Life and Times: Octave Five, pp. 251–2.
37
Mackenzie, My Life and Times: Octave Six, pp. 178, 197–8, 204, 206.
38
Unsigned, ‘Ubiquitous Music. Jazz and the Gramophone’, The Times (31 July 1926), 10.
39
Mackenzie, My Life and Times: Octave Six, p. 20.
editorials for The Phonograph Monthly Review (October 1926–March 1932) are
littered with references to ‘the cause of music’ and ‘the movement’.40 Others
were more zealous: a headline in The Times in July 1921 proclaiming with
relish ‘“Popular” Records Now Unpopular’.41 The article, signed ‘A
Correspondent’ observed that ‘With the technical improvement [in the gra-
mophone] there has come an artistic improvement, and with the latter there
has come a further improvement in popular taste.’ Purporting to draw on
information from an industry insider, the article goes on to note that ‘far
better business was being done with records of good pieces of music’ and that
‘Wagner, Stravinsky, and the Russian composers seemed to be most in favour
at present’.42 In a similar vein, Smith C. McGregor wrote an editorial article
for Etude, a US magazine, seeking to provide advice for the uninitiated in
starting a record collection, explaining that:
‘Unbalanced’ record collections are a common failing among phonograph

owners. You probably know several people who have expensive phonographs
and plenty of records, but who do not seem to get full enjoyment from them.
There are a great many such record collections, especially outside the cities;
for country people, as a rule, do not have the opportunity to attend concerts
and otherwise become familiar with the best music. And unless good music
predominates in a collection, the owner is not going to receive lasting pleasure
from it.43
The antipathy towards jazz and other ‘light’ music was commonplace
between the wars. As late as April 1937 Compton Mackenzie railed in The
Gramophone: ‘Most of the light music and dance music of the time is the work
of pickpockets, not artists, or rather of nasty little boys who steal the sticky
sweets of other nasty little boys.’44 If Mackenzie wore his prejudices on his
sleeve, one unsigned article in The Times on the direction of music marks an
early exemplar of the argument against the ‘great man’ view of history
(though possibly out of a wish to undermine claims of greatness for contem-
porary figures), disputing the importance of individuals in influencing taste:
One has to consider that music of one sort or another enters the lives of
millions where formerly it affected hundreds . . . All these new conditions
40
See, for instance, the editorial for the third issue: The Phonograph Monthly Review, 1/3 (December
1926), 99.
41
Unsigned [From A Correspondent], ‘The Gramophone Habit. “Popular” Records Now Unpopular’,
The Times (22 July 1921), 7.
42
Ibid.
43
Smith C. McGregor, ‘Twelve Foundation Stones for Your Record Collection’, The Etude (May 1921),
339. The complete run of Etude (1883–1957), compiled by Dr Pam Dennis, is available at digitalcommons
.gardner-webb.edu/etude/ (accessed 7 March 2018).
44
Compton Mackenzie, ‘Editorial’, The Gramophone (April 1937), 460–2.
are creating new tendencies, which are far more powerful than the experi-
ments of a group of composers, however clever they may be. Some of these
tendencies threaten disaster, others hold out hope of a wider artistic life, but
all strike hard at the doctrine of the divine right.45
Despite Mackenzie’s antipathy, The Gramophone included reviews of popu-

lar genres (light, swing, jazz and even rock) with varying regularity until the
1990s. Similarly, dance and popular records were regularly featured from the
outset of record reviewing in newspapers, including The Times, and with no
hint of disparagement:46
The popularity of gramophone records of dance music is increasing rapidly,

and during the last month a large number of admirably played selections of
this kind have been issued by the Columbia, the Gramophone, and the Æolian
companies.47
In terms of The Gramophone, just as the income from popular artists has
often subsidised recordings of substantial classical works, Mackenzie came to
recognise the economic imperative of including this music. In this respect, it
is likely that he was persuaded by Cecil Pollard, who, having left a firm of
accountants for The Gramophone in 1925, was essentially responsible for
the day-to-day running of the magazine until his death four decades later,
negotiating numerous financial and logistical challenges. While popular gen-
res were a vital part of The Gramophone’s business model, as Simon Frith has
observed, Melody Maker (launched 1926) and Rhythm (launch 1927) were far
more influential for British collectors of jazz records.48 Similarly, as Mark
Racz observes in Chapter 24 of this book, Downbeat and Metronome emerged in
the 1930s from the numerous fanzines. Since recordings were the principal
means for many of hearing jazz, the limited timespan of the 78 rpm disc, as
mediated through the observations of critics, came to define the initial under-
standing of what constituted a genre actually founded on much longer impro-
visational forms. A generation later, pop, and especially rock, came to be
delineated first by the 7-inch single, then by the span of an LP. In the words
of Frith, ‘to be a rock critic was to be a record critic’.49 The advent of rock
criticism spawned new magazines, notably Rolling Stone, though in the UK
Melody Maker reinvented itself for the new market.
45
Unsigned, ‘Modern Tendencies in Music. The Composer’s Estimate’, The Times (17 July 1920).
46
For more on this, see Simon Frith, ‘Writing about Popular Music’, Chapter 26 in this book.
47
Unsigned, ‘New Gramophone Records. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony’, The Times (28 March 1924), 12.
48
Simon Frith, ‘Going Critical: Writing About Recordings’, in Nicholas Cook, Eric Clarke,
Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and John Rink (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music (Cambridge:
49
Ibid., p. 267.
The Times: A Case Study

Back in the 1920s, newspapers were still working out how to tackle record-
ings. From August 1924 record reviews in The Times were given a specific
column, ‘Gramophone Notes’, which generally appeared monthly. The col-
umn was eclectic, featuring not just classical and dance music, but also Morris
and other folk music, the Aldershot Tattoo and even an early keep fit record in
the form of a pair of discs released to ‘to teach listeners “physical jerks” and
exercise’.50 While critical comments appeared, the column was primarily an
elegant litany informing readers of what had been released. A qualitative
change occurred in April 1928 with the appearance of a new column, initially
called ‘The Gramophone’, then, from August the same year, ‘The Musician’s
Gramophone’. It is a title reflecting the retrenchment of snobbery, for it was
concerned exclusively with classical music. The column considered just three
or four discs in detail, providing substantive comment on the performances
and giving catalogue numbers, first of all at the bottom, then, from
February 1929, incorporated into the body of the review. As with its pre-
decessor, ‘The Musician’s Gramophone’ was broadly monthly, though not
every month, and it was occasionally more frequent. The length was similarly
variable, generally being 600 to 800 words, but it could be over 1,200 words or
barely 300. This was record reviewing much as it is still practised today:
‘Kreisler, great player that he is, constructs his tone, constructs his rhythm;
Szigeti’s come from him. Therefore his rendering of [Brahms’s] Concerto . . .
less uniformly magisterial than Kreisler’s, has a supple rhythmical vitality
which brings us very near the secret of the constructive evolution of the
work. Kreisler is rectilinear, Szigeti yielding.’51
As might be expected, the Second World War brought changes, with the
length of reviews in what was by now ‘The Gramophone’ column dropping to
less than 350 words in the early years of the war. Although clearly an oasis
from dwelling on contemporary events, a periodic refrain is the potential for
recordings to compensate for the reduced opportunities to experience live
performance: ‘There will be no opera at all in London this May . . . Opera
lovers may console themselves with complete recordings of quite a number of
the operas we usually hear in the summer.’52 Similarly, just over a year later,
there is understandable yearning: ‘It is a reminder of happier times to put on
the new records of Verdi’s Otello that have come to us from America during
50
Unsigned, ‘Gramophone Notes. The Aldershot Tattoo’, The Times (29 July 1926), 10.
51
Unsigned, ‘The Musician’s Gramophone. Stravinsky, Borodin, Ravel, Brahms’, The Times (21 May
1929), 10.
52
Unsigned, ‘The Gramophone. Operatic Fare’, The Times (27 April 1940), 4.
May, the very time when we should normally be going to Covent Garden to
hear it.’53 ‘The Gramophone’ column varied from monthly appearances to
flurries of activity, such as in the summer of 1941, when it appeared on 5, 6,
15, 26 and 28 August and then on 3 September. Thanks to continued paper
rationing, the length rarely went much beyond 500 words, even in the decade
after the war.
With the advent of long-playing records, record reviews from March 1951
simply appeared under bespoke headers, losing ‘The Gramophone’ as an
identifying feature. It returned as a title in the mid-1950s. The column
broadly doubled in length and moved from appearing once or twice monthly,
usually on a Tuesday, to almost every week on Saturdays. From June 1956 it
periodically featured a round-up of jazz records, initially ‘from
a correspondent’ and becoming in December 1962 ‘from a music critic’,
a reflection of the paper’s move towards having a bespoke jazz critic. It
might have been thought that popular music would gain similar acceptance
following William Mann’s landmark positive appraisal of The Beatles in
December 1963,54 but it was only with the release of Sgt Pepper’s Lonely
Hearts Club Band in 1967 that an album was reviewed on release rather than
discussed in retrospect.55 With the following year’s The Beatles (commonly
known as the White Album), Mann’s informed admiration prompted him to
open with the declaration that ‘The most important musical event of the year
occurs today’ and conclude without any hint of sarcasm that ‘no other living
composer has achieved so much this year’.56 Nonetheless, Mann’s reviews of
the later albums by The Beatles were distinct from the ‘Records’ column (as
‘The Gramophone’ had become by the late 1960s), which remained devoted to
classical music with periodic jazz input. Spring 1970 marked the addition of
folk and rock criticism with two writers from Melody Maker, Karl Dallas and
Richard Williams joining the paper. An early statement of intent, and con-
firmation that there was no collective view among the critics, came with
that year’s Critics’ Choice feature. Paul McCartney’s first solo album
McCartney, nestled among Wagner, Debussy, Tavener and Henze in Mann’s
selections, supported by the claim that ‘If the Beatles are finished, history will
surely regard McCartney as their musical genius, the writer of their most
progressive and viable music.’57 Williams, by contrast, stated provocatively
53
Unsigned, ‘The Gramophone. Verdi’s “Otello”’, The Times (1 July 1941), 6.
54
Unsigned [‘From Our Music Critic’ (William Mann)], ‘What Songs the Beatles Sang’, The Times
(27 December 1963), 4.
55
William Mann, ‘The Beatles Revive Hopes of Progress in Pop Music’, The Times (29 May 1967), 9.
56
William Mann, ‘The New Beatles Album’, The Times (22 November 1968), 9.
57
William Mann, ‘Critics’ Choice: Records of the Year’, The Times (28 November 1970), 19.
that the second album from Canadian-American group The Band ‘has more
good songs than Lennon and McCartney have ever written’.58
In February 1974, The Times moved to a ‘Records of the month’ feature,
essentially collating what had previously been weekly columns, variously by
one of Alan Blyth, Joan Chissell, Max Harrison, John Higgins William Mann
or Stanley Sadie, onto a single monthly page. For the remainder of the decade,
this was almost exclusively classical in orientation. Contrary to common
perceptions, when jazz and rock versions of the feature started to appear in
October 1982, this was essentially additional coverage, appearing in different
weeks from the classical records. Weekly reviews returned in the autumn of
1986, but this time with classical, rock and jazz all represented – the essence of
the format that has endured to the present, with the periodic addition of other
genres such as world and country music.
Changing the Landscape

The more established status given to rock and jazz from this point on may
have been influenced by a new UK broadsheet, The Independent, which had
dedicated sections for each genre, while the appearance of new magazines
such as Q and Uncut also impacted on the priorities of newspaper record
reviewing. Although the number of jazz and, especially, rock discs being
reviewed grew significantly, this was not generally at the expense of classical
coverage. Rather, the number of recordings reviewed grew overall.
Regardless, space for reviews was always an issue. As with concerts, there
are more recordings released each month than even dedicated magazines can
accommodate. From the start, The Gramophone included round-up features
traversing several recordings alongside the reviews dedicated to individual
releases. The pressure has also applied to newspapers. Interviewed by Jennifer
Skellington, Paul Griffiths recalled: ‘There was a time when I had to do a lot of
little record reviews [for The Times], certainly in the late 1980s . . . I think all
newspapers find this a problem, that it’s very difficult to give adequate space
to recordings because there’s so many coming out.’59 The challenge for
editors in the face of the substantial volume of recordings released is persis-
tent. In recent years, this has led to developments such as BBC Music Magazine
including two pages of ‘brief notes’, where the disc in question is discussed in
a mere twenty-five to thirty words. This reviewing equivalent of a Haiku
58
Richard Williams, ‘Critics’ Choice: Records of the Year’, The Times (28 November 1970), 19.
59
Jennifer Skellington, ‘Transforming Music Criticism? An Examination of Changes in Music Journalism
in the English Broadsheet Press from 1981 to 1991’, unpublished PhD thesis, Oxford Brookes University
(2010), 428.
serves its purpose in terms of at least informing readers that a release exists
with some indication of its merits or otherwise. From the perspective of the
artists and record companies, any review is better than no review, though it is
increasingly striking that record reviews of any genre are relatively brief in
newspapers, whereas book reviews have tended to retain their length.
As Symes has noted, the evidence for whether record reviews actually influ-
ence sales, for good or ill, is contentious, at best.60 Anecdotally, the press officer
for one leading classical record label was emphatic that the only discernible
spike in sales came after a disc was featured on BBC Radio 3’s Record Review
programme.61 Aside from the fact that this may have been flattering talk for an
undoubtedly influential individual, this does not mean that reviews in maga-
zines have no influence on sales. A radio programme is generally heard at
a single, specific time and date, whereas a magazine may be bought and read
at any time during the month of its issue, or even quite some time later.
This raises the question of who is writing the reviews and who is reading
them. In the early days it may have been true, as Katz claims, that women
bought the phonographs,62 but Symes states with some justification that ‘those
who write for record magazines are mostly male, as are their readers’,63 and
Frith similarly observes that record collecting and the associated review-
dominated magazines are a ‘man’s world’.64 Certainly Gramophone retained
the air of its origins in the Savile Club, of male-dominated affluent exclusivity,
both perceived and real, for much of the twentieth century. In reality it was
never a male only preserve, with Faith Mackenzie (F♯) contributing from the
first issue and Joan Chissell another prominent writer, but these were the
exceptions that proved the rule. Changes in printing methods in the late
1980s saw a raft of new challengers to Gramophone, such as CD Review and
Classic FM magazine. Perhaps most significant, though, was BBC Music
Magazine, which despite association with the national broadcaster, avoided
any sense of the old boy network through an openness to new writers and,
especially, a far better gender balance. For instance, at editorial level, its
founding editor, Fiona Maddocks, created a team where eight of twelve editor-
ial staff were women, with senior roles in subsequent years being filled by
figures such as Helen Wallace, Harriet Smith, Claire Wrathall, Amanda
Holloway and Rebecca Franks, to name but a few. While jazz and world
music have largely fallen by the wayside in Gramophone, they still feature in
60
Colin Symes, Setting the Record Straight: A Material History of Classical Recording (Middletown: Wesleyan
61
In a conversation with Andrew McGregor, presenter of Record Review, and myself at the 2016 BBC
Music Magazine Awards.
62 63
Katz, Capturing Sound, pp. 57–8. Symes, Setting the Record Straight, p. 177.
64
Simon Frith, ‘Going Critical’, p. 276.
the pages of BBC Music Magazine, even if the content is primarily oriented
towards classical music. In this respect it broadly reflects the mix of music on
BBC Radio 3. That may be unsurprising, but it is remarkable nevertheless that
a magazine that is putatively about music, without any qualifier, on behalf of an
organisation as all-encompassing as the BBC, is not concerned with the music
genres the corporation broadcasts on its other radio stations.
Even more so than newspapers, the landscape of magazines featuring record
reviewing is littered with short-lived titles. Gramophone is uncommon not only
in enduring but also in managing to outlast the title’s association with the
technology of the time.65 As Symes observes, changes in recording technology
have tended to prompt new magazines named after the latest format.66 For
instance, in tandem with its golden anniversary, Gramophone launched the
short-lived Cassettes & Cartridges, while the advent of compact discs spawned
Digital Audio (later CD Review) and Classic CD. Similarly, BBC Radio 3’s Record
Review programme became CD Review in September 1998, a title that became
increasingly untenable in the face of SACDs, Blu-ray audio, downloads and
streaming. However, it appears to have been the unexpected revival of vinyl
that prompted a reversion to Record Review at the beginning of 2016. In this
context, it is striking that the musical associations of long-lasting titles in
France, Diapason (launched 1956), and the United States, Fanfare (launched
1977), both pre-date the recording era. It is also notable that the two principal
classically oriented survivors of the proliferation of UK magazines in the early
1990s are not named after a recording format, but established broadcast
brands, Classic FM Magazine and BBC Music Magazine.
In the mid-1980s, following over a decade of reports and false dawns, a new
dimension became possible for the criticism of recordings with the advent of
home video. There were confident predictions in some quarters that this would
replace audio recording. Releases started to appear in 1982, just a year before the
launch of the compact disc, but it was not until April 1986 that Gramophone began
reviewing them. While cassettes and discs of operas and concerts, as well as
documentaries, ensured that video reviewing became a significant strand in the
classical sphere, it has remained a relatively incidental aspect of rock criticism.
Critical Scandals
The late 1980s and 1990s saw the marketing of some classical artists in the
manner of the pop sphere. The release of Nigel Kennedy’s 1989 recording of
65
American Record Guide is another, though it ceased publication between 1972 and 1976.
66
Symes, Setting the Record Straight, p. 162.
Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons set the ball rolling, followed soon after by The
Three Tenors’ success following their appearance at the Italia 90 football
World Cup. From the other side came recordings of ‘classical’ works by
Paul McCartney, notably Liverpool Oratorio in 1991. Such releases inevitably
posed challenges for reviewers. With extensive publicity cultivating
a narrative that these releases were breaking the stuffy world of classical
music, any caveats about the quality of the performances of The Three
Tenors or Nigel Kennedy or the music of Liverpool Oratorio risked being
taken as evidence that classical reviewers were high-minded and elitist. This
narrative reached its high (or low) point with the release of Vanessa Mae’s
album The Violin Player, with associated singles, by the pop arm of EMI.
Taking the sexualised marketing pioneered by Ofra Harnoy the previous
decade several steps further, Mae was packaged for the pop market. The
promotional team of Mae and EMI protested over the refusal on principle
of the classical press, notably Gramophone and BBC Music Magazine, to carry
reviews. This shunning of a young artist trying to engage a new audience
for classical music appeared to epitomise the snobbishness of the classical
press, and is even cited as such by scholars such as Colin Symes.67 While
some critics were indeed sceptical, this was, in fact, an artificially con-
structed controversy as the records in question were released as ‘pop’
products and not sent to classical critics. When EMI classical released
Mae’s The Classical Album in 1996, Gramophone and BBC Music Magazine
both reviewed it.
A scandal a decade later was potentially more damaging for it struck at
a fundamental and necessary assumption made a priori by any record
reviewer. Since the advent of editing in the late 1940s, it has been
known that many recorded performances are essentially artificial con-
structs. This may be dropping-in certain moments where infelicities
occurred, but can extend in extreme cases to the entirety being an assem-
blage of moments, like an audio jigsaw. Even supposedly live recordings
are routinely touched up, to cover either intrusive audience noise or
obvious errors in the performance, a prominent example of the latter
being Horowitz’s 1965 comeback recital at Carnegie Hall, where some
minor slips magically evaporated when an LP of the concert was released
by CBS.68 Nonetheless, it is assumed that the performances on a disc are
by the named artists. This was fundamentally undermined when a stream
67
Symes, Setting the Record Straight, p. 201, n. 25.
68
The unedited recital was eventually released by Sony in 2003.
of CDs from the pianist Joyce Hatto started to appear on the newly
formed Concert Artist label.
Discs from Hatto had appeared several decades before on the Saga label,
but, according to interviews she gave shortly before her death and the
publicity provided by the label, her activities had long been confined to
the studio on account of the cancer that was now in its final stages. The
performances on the recordings were spectacular and came with fulsome
tributes from Hatto’s concert-giving days by figures such as Britten,
Cortot, Hindemith, Richter, Rubinstein, Tippett and Vaughan Williams.
Combined with the emotive back story, it seemed a harshly overlooked
exceptional talent had finally been recognised in her dying days thanks to
her loving husband capturing her heroic feats of pianism made under the
shadow of terminal illness. With over ninety discs, encompassing swathes
of Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, Chopin, Schumann, Liszt, Rachmaninov,
the Chopin–Godowsky studies, Prokofiev and even Messiaen, it is little
wonder that Jeremy Nicholas described her in a Gramophone appreciation as
‘one of the greatest pianists I have ever heard’.69 Similarly, reviewing the
set of Messiaen’s Vingt regards sur l’enfant-Jésus, Bryce Morrison purred that
‘Her playing recreates Messiaen’s vision with a fervour and a generosity
unknown to even her finest competitors . . . she achieves a musical honesty
and integrity that resists all compromise.’70
Unfortunately, almost without exception, the performances on the discs
were those of other pianists. Her husband, William Barrington-Coupe, had
simply taken and remixed existing recordings, altering the sound in
a manner akin to changing a wine’s bouquet. For instance, the Messiaen
performance was actually the recording by Paul Kim made for the Centaur
label with the piano made to sound closer and a change in resonance. When
the fraud was exposed by Gramophone, aided by Pristine Audio, some were
quick to heap derision on the likes of Nicholas and Morrison and question
the integrity of the entire basis of reviewing if experts could not detect
such a fake. While they may regret their hyperbole, they were simply taken
in by a conman preying on their understandable desire to believe
a ruthlessly exploited human interest story with a consequent loss of
critical distance.71
69
Jeremy Nicholas, ‘Joyce Hatto: Piano Dreams’, Gramophone (March 2006), 67.
70
Bryce Morrison, ‘Messiaen: Vingt regards sur l’enfant-Jésus’, Gramophone (December 2006), 92–3.
71
In a phone conversation shortly before the fraud was exposed, Barrington-Coupe told me that he was
convinced the effort of completing the Messiaen recording had shortened his wife’s life. A few minutes
later, he stated that she had also recorded Messiaen’s even larger cycle Catalogue d’oiseaux. With
Morrison’s glowing review of the Vingt regards, he presumably perceived a further opportunity to profit
from Kim’s complete Messiaen set.
Beyond the ‘Objective’ Microphone

In a sense, the Hatto fraud exploited the potential for certain recorded
performances to move beyond the normal bounds of criticism and expose
the fallacy of the objective comparison of recorded artefacts. Every live
performance is exceptional, in that it is an irrecoverable experience unique
to those in attendance. By fixing sound, recording suggests the possibility of
a particular performance being contemplated free from the possibly distorting
effect of the event and listened to purely for the music. The context of some
live performances means that the usual critical faculties are, if not suspended,
then of reduced relevance. One clear example would be the ‘Ode to Freedom’
performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9 conducted by Leonard
Bernstein in Berlin on 24 December 1989 just after the Berlin Wall came
down.72 The same applies to certain recordings that are either historic (rather
than just historical) or have an exceptional hinterland. Alongside the disc
released of the Bernstein concert, instances might include Bruno Walter’s
live recording of Mahler’s Ninth Symphony made with the Vienna
Philharmonic Orchestra in January 1938 just weeks before the Anschluss, or
Dinu Lipatti’s last recital, given while severely ill. Once the circumstances are
known, it would be pointless including such recordings in a blind listening for
their significance does not reside in the sound alone. Other recordings acquire
historic status either through the participation or imprimatur of the compo-
ser, the significance of certain performers or simply being the first of
a particular work or repertoire. In the case of Pablo Casals and the Bach solo
cello suites, his recording might even be considered an ur-performance, in
that it arguably created a performing tradition. There are also, of course,
plenty of recordings that are regarded as historic simply for the excellence
of the performance. Except that, even here, it can become unclear whether
what is heard is coloured by the reputation, the classic status, possibly con-
sidered through rose-tinted glasses.
The point is that the criticism of recordings is, and has always been,
inherently canon-forming, not just in terms of repertoire, but also specific
performances of any given piece. This can be seen as early as Percy Scholes’s
First Book of the Gramophone Record which, along with its sequel, explicitly set
out to assist the novice in building a library of key works from Byrd to the
present (i.e. 1924) in reliable recordings.73 It is an approach subsequently
72
Bernstein had the chorus replace ‘Freude’ (joy) with ‘Freiheit’ (freedom) for the hastily arranged
concert, which featured performers from East and West Germany, the United States, USSR, UK and
France.
73
Percy A. Scholes, The First Book of the Gramophone Record (London: Oxford University Press, 1924);
The Second Book of the Gramophone Record (London: Oxford University Press, 1925).
adopted by books such as The Record Guide,74 The Stereo Record Guide (the
forerunner to The Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music),75 The Rolling Stone
Record Guide76 and The Penguin Guide to Jazz77 (to name but a few). The explicit
use of recordings cited as benchmarks has been a regular feature of record
reviewing from its earliest days, but it has become increasingly tempered by
the realities of an ever-expanding catalogue. Whether in the pages of
Gramophone or one of the book-length guides to recordings, it has long been
recognised that, even if a single recommendation is required, there may be
additional important performances that suit different needs. The ever-
increasing number of recordings for even relatively unusual repertoire
means that it is increasingly rare for the long-running ‘Building a Library’
feature on BBC Radio 3’s Record Review to include all the currently available
recordings for the work in question, and certainly not all those ever made. For
the jazz critic, recent years have seen the canon of a given artist’s recordings
made more complex not only by increasingly prevalent issues of performances
captured for radio broadcast, but also numerous alternate takes to those
originally released.
As Mark Katz has observed, recording has made musical sound something
tangible, reified through the products in which it is captured and the pro-
cesses involved in playing them.78 That remains true, though the rise of
downloads and streaming has reintroduced an element of its former ephemer-
ality, not just in terms of the lack of a physical artefact, but also the transitory
nature of streaming in particular. These new media question the notion of the
recording as a solid, collectible, permanent artefact. While there is no reason
why such new formats and media for hearing music should not be the subject
of critical attention, they pose challenges that are, as yet, unresolved. It is not
just that music critics themselves are used to dealing with discs, but that many
of the operating practices of the music industry that has grown up in the era of
recordings are also built around the production and marketing of physical
formats. It is striking that, especially for classical music, discs rather than
downloads or streaming overwhelmingly remain the predominant subject of
reviews, not just in physical magazines and newspapers, but also online
journals and blogs. Whereas there is no single authoritative recorded perfor-
mance for most classical music, since the LP, the album has effectively acted as
the urtext in pop and rock, the fundamental source, against which live
74
Edward Sackville-West and Desmond Shawe-Taylor, The Record Guide (London: Collins, 1951).
75
Edward Greenfield, Ivan March, Robert Layton and Denis Stevens, The Stereo Record Guide, 9 vols.
(Blackpool: Long Playing Record Library, 1960–74).
76
Later The Rolling Stone Album Guide. It was published between 1979 and 2004.
77 78
First published in 1992. Mark Katz, Capturing Sound, pp. 9–10.
performance is compared and judged. The unexpected revival of vinyl demon-

strates that a traditional readership still exists, while formats such as audio-
only Blu-ray can accommodate the entirety of Wagner’s Ring on a single disc.
However, consumers are now increasingly purchasing tracks rather than
albums, fundamentally changing the relationship between what is reviewed
and what readers may actually hear. Nearly a century after the advent of The
Gramophone, engagement with recorded music increasingly resembles the
fragmentary nature of the acoustic era with its emphasis on individual
songs, movements and excerpts. Despite the extraordinary technological
advances and vast back catalogues, the work of record critics from all genres
is far from done.
. 14 .
The Gender Paradox: Criticism of Women

and Women as Critics
LAURA HAMER
In May 2014 a storm erupted in the British classical music world when five
established male critics fat-shamed Irish mezzo-soprano Tara Erraught, who
was performing Octavian in Der Rosenkavalier at Covent Garden. Instead of
focusing upon Erraught’s technique or interpretation, the critics ridiculed
her physique. Writing in the Financial Times Andrew Clark referred to
Erraught as ‘a chubby bundle of puppy-fat’; Michael Church in The
Independent and Rupert Christiansen in The Telegraph both described her as
‘dumpy’; Andrew Clements in The Guardian called her ‘stocky’; and Richard
Morrison in The Times characterised her as ‘unbelievable, unsightly and
unappealing’.1 Although these sexist comments drew widespread condem-
nation, they are symptomatic of a centuries-old tendency for empowered
male critics to fail to produce objective assessments of female musicians.
When writing about women, critics have inclined to rely upon cultural
stereotypes and to focus upon the performing female body, either to ridicule
(as in the case of Erraught) or to sexualise. Whilst these general traits are
discernible across a wide spectrum of critics’ evaluations of female musi-
cians, it is important to bear in mind Marcia J. Citron’s caution that ‘it is
probably simplistic merely to speak of women’s reception as some mono-
lithic concept’.2 As gender has so strongly affected the criticism of women
musicians, it would be impossible to provide a comprehensive survey of their
reception across all types of music and at all points in music history. Thus the
following discussion is focused upon general trends which have affected the
criticism of women musicians, both historically and from a contemporary
context. The chapter concludes with a consideration of women as music
critics.
1
Norman Lebrecht drew these comments together for the blog Slipped Disc; see ‘Singers in Uproar over
Critical Body Insults at Glyndebourne’ (19 May 2014), available at slippedisc.com (accessed
11 March 2018).
2
Marcia J. Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon, 2nd revised ed. (Urbana and Chicago: University of
Illinois Press, 2000), p. 183.
[272]
The Gender Paradox: Criticism of Women and Women as Critics 273
The Gender Paradox

Despite general acceptance of the complex nature of gender identification, the
concept of gender duality – with the Universal constructed as male and the
Other as female – has been particularly prevalent in the criticism that women
musicians have received. As Leo Treitler has commented, ‘from early on music
history has been guided by gender duality in its description, evaluation, and
narrative form’.3 Even in the supposedly objective realms of theory and
analysis, the so-called masculine and feminine subjects of sonata form
and ‘strong’ masculine and ‘weak’ feminine cadences are familiar. In her
pioneering work on music’s gendered semiotics, Feminine Endings: Music,
Gender and Sexuality, Susan McClary noted that ‘music theorists and analysts
quite frequently betray an explicit reliance on metaphors of gender (“mascu-
linity” vs. “femininity”) and sexuality in their formulations’.4
The brand of gender duality that has particularly affected criticism has
tended to be heavily influenced by cultural gender stereotypes, with ‘mascu-
line’ music and genres constructed as strong, powerful and frequently public;
and ‘feminine’ music and genres as soft, gentle and often private. Women’s
engagement with music as inscribed via criticism implies a marked gender
paradox. Women’s musical activities have not been judged on the same
grounds as those of men. Writing about music as a whole, women musicians,
and the music of women, draws upon long-held dualities of Universal versus
Other.
Trends and Stereotypes

Marcia J. Citron’s seminal work on the exclusion of women composers from
the musical canon and the particular role which criticism has played within
this has been extremely useful in shaping the thinking underlying this
chapter.5 Citron has opined that ‘women have been subjected to gender-
linked evaluation, placing them in a “separate but not equal” category that
has widened the gulf between themselves and the homogenous canon’.6 The
gender paradox has been marked in the criticism of women composers who
‘were criticized as being true to their sex if their music exhibited supposedly
3
Leo Treitler, ‘Gender and Other Dualities in Music History’, in Ruth A. Solie (ed.), Musicology and
Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship (Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of
4
Susan McClary, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality (Minnesota and London: University of
Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 10.
5
See Marcia J. Citron, ‘Gender, Professionalism and the Musical Canon’, Journal of Musicology, 8/1 (1990),
102–17; Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon.
6
Citron, ‘Gender, Professionalism and the Musical Canon’, 108.
274 LAURA HAMER
feminine traits, yet derided as attempting to be masculine if their music

embodied so-called virile traits’.7 McClary has also neatly summarised this
trend thus:
The music that has been composed by women . . . has often been received in
terms of the essentialist stereotypes ascribed to women by masculine culture:
it is repeatedly condemned as pretty yet trivial or – in the event that it does not
conform to standards of feminine propriety – as aggressive and unbefitting
a woman.8
This can usefully be extended from referring specifically to women composers

to encompass all female musicians.
Before the twentieth century, women critics were very rare. Historically, as
Citron has observed, ‘the critical establishment has been overwhelmingly
male’.9 This has meant ‘the absence of a female voice’, and that ‘male modes
of discourse have formed the basis of professional criticism’.10 For aspirant
female critics this has also meant the absence of role models. As Citron further
comments, ‘the authority vested in the male critic has implications for women
composers . . . who may find themselves objectified by the patriarchal sub-
jectivity of the critic’.11 The concept of the male gaze of the critic is useful
here, as this has resulted in an empowered male observer passing judgement
upon a female creator. This can result in a number of issues: in a ‘patronizing
posture’, as Citron observes,12 or in sexualisation.
When we consider the criticism of women musicians, we need to bear in
mind that a large part of women’s music-making has not been captured.
Published criticism has tended to focus upon the public sphere of the concert
hall or the opera house, frequently constructed as masculine sites of perfor-
mance and reception. Historically, much women’s music-making often took
place within the private sphere of the home, conversely understood as
a feminine site of performance, and only a small proportion of women’s
music was published. As critics rarely wrote about private performances or
unpublished works, only a small proportion of women’s musical activity has
been documented in reviews. Citron has commented on this ‘scarcity of
written reception’, and observed that ‘written reception has belonged to the
public sphere . . . many women, however, have channelled their creative
energies into other areas, including music for pedagogy, children, and social
gatherings in more intimate settings. Formal criticism has generally passed
over such activities’.13
7 8
Ibid., 109. McClary, Feminine Endings, p. 18.
9 10 11 12
Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon, p. 181. Ibid. Ibid., p. 182. Ibid.
13
Ibid., p. 187.
Citron’s writings on women and reception highlight one further useful

caveat when considering music criticism: pervasive assumptions linking gen-
der and genre. The concept of genre hierarchy within Western art music –
which persistently privileges large-scale public genres over small-scale private
ones – was effectively enshrined in music criticism. Citron has commented
that ‘reviewers regularly made a gender/genre association and as a result
invariably cast negative aspersions on pieces in smaller forms’.14 Due to
a complex range of factors, including access to music education and opportu-
nities for performances and publication, women composers (historically)
tended to concentrate upon smaller musical genres. As a result they were
caught in a critical trap which denigrated their efforts virtually by default.
Thus the gender paradox not only dictated which genres women were able to
write in but also controlled how critics viewed those works.
Although Citron’s comments on genre and criticism are concentrated on
Western art music, her ideas can usefully be extended to embrace popular
music. As the vast majority of popular music is highly gendered, how women
interact with popular genres – which have themselves been constructed as
masculine or feminine – as songwriters and/or performers, and how critics
describe their activities also rely heavily on underlying assumptions between
gender and genre.
Negotiating the Image of the Male Genius

Criticism about women musicians has also had to negotiate the complex
notion of the genius. Since the time of music’s emancipation from state and
ecclesiastical patronage, and the emergence of autonomous music in the early
nineteenth century, the concept of the heroic genius has gained a strong
foothold in criticism. However, the figure of the genius was invariably and
irrevocably constructed as male. As Citron has commented:
In music and the other arts, genius has meant power, status, authority and
quality, and it has managed to perpetuate itself because of the almost mystical
associations it evokes. The creator as divine and other-worldly has reinforced
ideologies of masculinity and acted to suppress the possibility of a female
creator.15
To further problematise the issue, the otherworldliness of the male genius

often placed him on the edge of conventional sanity. As Marion Leonard has
commented, ‘historically in art, music and the media, links have been drawn
14
Citron, ‘Gender, Professionalism and the Musical Canon’, 110.
15
Citron, Gender and the Musical Canon, p. 185.
276 LAURA HAMER
between creativity and madness’.16 Specifically, male creativity and madness

have been strongly linked. (The enduring image of Beethoven as the heroic,
quasi-divine genius exemplifies this trend particularly strongly.) Female mad-
ness – embodied by such figures as the female hysteric or the madwoman in
the attic – has long been condemned within Western rhetoric as a signifier of
instability, dangerousness and sickness. Madness in women has not marked
them as creative geniuses, but has served as a strong device to cast them as
Other. Writing about the representation of rock musicians in print, Leonard
has further noted that ‘the notion of mental torment is used in reviews of male
musicians to construct a profile of the tortured romantic artist’; however,
‘associations with mental ill health are called upon by journalists to dismiss or
“other” female performers’.17
We must approach reviews of female musicians with caution. They are
anything but objective critiques of women’s music and/or performing abil-
ities. Reviews of women draw upon a long tradition of gender duality. They
tend to position women and their music as Other. They are informed by
discourses which make strong assumptions about gender and genre, and
understandings of creativity as being intrinsically male. They only capture
a small amount of women’s musical activities. Thus reviews of women musi-
cians must be read through a gendered lens which assumes objectification,
trivialisation or sexualisation, and which acknowledges the prevalent ten-
dency to place them in an unequal category.
Historical Perspectives
The following discussion of the criticism of women musicians is divided into
historical perspectives and changing critical trends in the twentieth and
twenty-first centuries. This is to take account of the very different social
context within which women functioned prior to the twentieth century.
Considerations of historical critical trends are focused on the nineteenth
century, as this was the period during which music journalism developed
rapidly. Before the emergence of organised feminism in the later nineteenth
century, issues of women’s rights were virtually unheard of. Strict gender
codes were in place. Women largely lacked the basic political and legal rights –
such as voting and controlling their own property and money – that are now,
in the West, taken for granted. Contemporary theological, political and
16
Marion Leonard, Gender in the Music Industry: Rock, Discourse and Girl Power (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007),
pp. 69–70.
17
Ibid., p. 69.
philosophical discourses and societal attitudes constructed a woman’s proper

place as being in the home. Women of the middle and upper classes were
effectively debarred from public and professional life.18 Such gender-
polarised social conventions posed serious issues for aspirant women
musicians.
Widespread understanding of creativity and genius as essentially masculine
attributes were particularly problematic for the reception of nineteenth-
century women composers.19 The reviews which greeted Clara Wieck-
Schumann’s Piano Trio, Op. 17 (1846) exemplify the gendered tropes which
generally described women’s works. On 5 April 1848, Die Allgemeine musika-
lische Zeitung published the following comments: ‘Women rarely attempt the
more mature forms because such works assume a certain abstract strength that
is overwhelmingly given to men. Clara Schumann, however, is truly one of the
few women who has mastered this strength’.20 These remarks must be read
with the pervasive nineteenth-century gender/genre assumptions in mind.
Chamber music was constructed as a ‘mature form’. As such it was understood
as a masculine genre. The special status that was frequently accorded to
Wieck-Schumann – as a female musician who had ‘mastered’ masculine musi-
cal ‘strength’ – is evident. This places her within a discernible critical trend to
view such women as ‘honorary men’.
A later review, which appeared in Die Schlesische Zeitung on
23 December 1877, commented:
Does not the Trio of Clara Schumann give us a veiled picture of her husband as
a youth? Except that all the coarseness and energy of that striking head has
been softened into feminine features . . . had that G-minor Trio turned up
posthumously, half of us would have considered it to be one of his earliest
works. Every creative mind has two sides, a male, giving one and a female,
receiving one; the Trio points predominantly in the later direction and hence
to its true origin.21
The comments that Wieck-Schumann’s Trio could be mistaken for a work by

Schumann foreshadow accusations (largely made by earlier twentieth-century
Schumann biographers) that he must have written her compositions. The
18
It was common for working-class women to work.
19
See Scott Burnham, Beethoven Hero (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); Tia DeNora,
Beethoven and the Construction of Genius: Musical Politics in Vienna, 1792–1803 (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1997).
20
Unsigned, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 50 (5 April 1848), 232–3; cited and translated in Nancy
B. Reich, Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman, revised ed. (Ithaca and London: Cornell University
Press, 2001), p. 312.
21
Unsigned, Schlesische Zeitung (23 December 1877); cited and translated in Reich, Clara Schumann: The
Artist and the Woman, p. 312.
278 LAURA HAMER
common binary opposition between masculine attributes (‘coarseness’,

‘energy’) and ‘feminine softness’ are clear. In this context, the extension of
gender duality to an active, creative masculine half of the mind and a passive,
receptive feminine half (tropes familiar in many contemporary reviews of
female performances) is ironic considering that Wieck-Schumann was the
composer. Such comments act to negate her active agency as the creator.
Active as pianist and composer, Wieck-Schumann ran a double gauntlet by
exposing herself to contemporary critics’ views of women participants within
both fields.
Women active as professional performers in the nineteenth century posed
a complex set of gendered issues and paradoxes for their (largely) male critics.
Firstly, women performing professionally for money directly confronted the
social convention which dictated that working for a living should be
a masculine pursuit. Secondly, professional women performers challenged
the idea that learning music as a social ornament (but not as a profession)
was an essential part of a woman’s education. Thirdly, women who performed
in public – literally making spectacles of themselves – ran the risk of the old
association between public performance and sexual availability.22
In an age which actively sought to confine women’s bodies, public female
display via the act of musical performance posed challenges both for women
performers and their male critics. Often linked to sexualisation, physical
appearance is frequently commented upon in reviews of female performers.
To take just one example, the following review of the Wiener
Damenorchester which appeared in The New York Times in 1874 illustrates
that this critic was more focused upon the (female) musicians’ appearance than
on their performance abilities:
The orchestra presents a coup d’œil attractive enough to compel the sternest
critic to lay down his pen, supposing he may have anything unkind to say. But,
happily, the Viennese ladies, with their uniformity of pretty costumes and
(may it be added) their uniformity of pretty faces, are no mere pretenders.23
The critic’s condescending admission that the (professional) women within

the orchestra were not mere musical ‘pretenders’ rings off grudging praise.
The use of the male pronoun (his pen) accentuates both the assumed gender of
critics and the authority of their male gaze. This critic clearly felt that physical
22
Associations between performance and sexual availability affected women musicians less than actors
and dancers.
23
Unsigned, ‘The Viennese Ladies’ Orchestra’, The New York Times (27 July 1874), 6; cited in Julie
C. Dunbar, Women, Music, Culture: An Introduction (New York and London: Routledge, 2011), p. 134.
appearance should form a large part of the evaluative criteria of female

musicians.
Writing specifically about female pianists and their male critics in mid-
nineteenth-century Paris, Katharine Ellis has commented that ‘metaphors of
prophetesses and priestess abound, reinforcing the idea of woman as vessel for
divine truth, serving the cult of the work’.24 This trend to construe women as
mediums serving the sacred cult of the artwork (invariably created by a male
composer) allowed critics to portray female musicians as non-threatening,
passive interpreters and not active creators. Such comments were widespread
in reviews of female performers throughout the nineteenth century all over
Europe and North America.
Stationary and Shifting Rhetorical Trends in the Twentieth

and Twenty-First Centuries
Although a number of rhetorical trends present in the criticism of women
musicians shifted throughout the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries,
a surprising number that had become entrenched during the nineteenth
century – notably gendered language, sexualisation and gender/genre assump-
tions – continued to mark reviews. Whilst it is undeniable that the social roles
of women have changed dramatically since the turn of the twentieth century
and employment rights have improved radically, it is vital to acknowledge the
non-linear nature of women’s history. Each successive wave of feminism has
been subjected to a backlash, similar in effect to the domestic resettlements
which followed the freer lives available to women during both World Wars.25
Although gender equality is now often assumed for Western women, post-
feminist discourses suggest a more complex picture. Early twenty-first-
century popular culture often presents feminism as a bogeywoman that
actually threatens young women. Contemporary media images of women –
and musicians are no exception – are marked by their high levels of
sexualisation.
Gendered language continued to be commonplace in reviews of women
musicians up to the mid-twentieth century. An anonymous review of a 1955
revival of Salome at Covent Garden which appeared in The Times, for example,
expressed unmasked horror at Christel Goltz’s ‘undignified’ portrayal of
Strauss’s eponymous character:
24
Katharine Ellis, ‘Female Pianists and Their Male Critics in Nineteenth-Century Paris’, Journal of the
American Musicological Society, 50 (Summer–Autumn, 1997), 371.
25
See Susan Faludi, Backlash: The Undeclared War against Women (London: Vintage, 1992).
280 LAURA HAMER
Some of the horrors have been vouchsafed to her audiences already, and
connoisseurs may be glad to know that she still rolls herself off the cistern
and across the stage, but some are new, and others are executed with even
more repulsive effect . . . Mme Goltz might, without sacrificing the thrills,
dignify her portrayal a trifle.26
The works of female composers, up to the mid-twentieth century, also con-

tinued to be subjected to gendered analysis and condescending praise, as is
evident in a review of a concert of new chamber works given by the British
Society of Women Musicians in April 1950. Bridget Fry’s Cinq Chansons du
Moyen Age were criticised for ‘coquetry at the end’, whilst Ann Hamerton’s
Three Night Songs were described as ‘Fauré-esque’.27 Likening the works of
women composers to ‘coquetry’, an adjective traditionally associated with
flippant, seductive female behaviour, and also praising them for being deriva-
tive of the style of male composers are both trends that have characterised
reviews of women composers’ music since at least the eighteenth century.
By the later twentieth century, however, reviews of classical women musi-
cians written on more equal terms with their male counterparts were increas-
ingly becoming the norm. In a review of Jacqueline du Pré’s performance of
a cello transcription of Franck’s Violin Sonata written in 1970, for example,
Stephen Walsh described her interpretation in The Times as having ‘brought to
the sonata an intensity and warmth of line which few violinists could expect to
equal’.28 Stanley Sadie, in a similar vein and also writing in The Times,
described Janet Baker’s singing as ‘beyond praise’ in a glowing review of
a 1975 production of Mozart’s La clemenza di Tito at Covent Garden.29 To
take just one example that suggests that female composers are less likely to
face gender-biased criticism in the early twenty-first century, electro-acoustic
composer Manuella Blackburn’s first CD, Formes audibles, received laudatory,
and gender-neutral, praise from (among others) Stuart Marshall. Writing for
The Sound Projector, he described the release as a
spellbinding selection of surgically sculpted, swiftly shifting sounds and tun-

nelling [sic] tones, cosmic flourishes and vacuumed hushes; all emulsified by
a convulsive cohesiveness that obviates any hint of homogeneity, while mark-
ing every tone as Blackburn’s own . . . These six pieces are as hypnotising in
their brief moments of luxuriance as in their explosions of visceral morphol-
ogy, and will yield their manifold mysteries for much time to come.30
26
Unsigned, ‘Covent Garden Opera’, The Times (6 July 1955), 6.
27
Unsigned, ‘Society of Women Musicians’, The Times (3 April 1950), 2.
28
Stephen Walsh, ‘Frank Transcribed’, The Times (17 August 1970), 11.
29
Stanley Sadie, ‘La clemenza di Tito’, The Times (11 February 1975), 7.
30
Stuart Marshall, ‘A Six-Part Syntax of Sound’, Sound Projector (13 October 2013), available at www
.thesoundprojector.com (accessed 7 November 2015).
Although classical female composers and performers are now treated on

more equal terms with their male colleagues – though a certain degree of
sexualisation remains in the publicity images of performers such as
Vanessa Mae – the same is not true for conductors. Despite the presence
of a number of internationally renowned women, including Marin Alsop,
JoAnn Faletta and Siân Edwards, conducting remains one of the most
male-dominated fields. When Alsop became the first woman to conduct
the Last Night of the Proms on 7 September 2013, the Royal Albert Hall
was decorated with pink ‘it’s a girl’ balloons and streamers. Although
these decorations were (presumably) intended as a celebration of Alsop’s
achievement, it is hard not to read them as, at best, patronising, or, at
worst, offensive. (It is difficult to imagine the Royal Albert Hall being
festooned with blue balloons for a male conductor.) Writing in The
Guardian, Fiona Maddocks (passing over the unfortunate connotation of
the decorations) commented:
With the pink balloons and pastel-coloured streamers, the Prommers deco-
rated the conductor’s podium with a powerful message: ‘It’s a girl!’ The girl in
question, 56-year-old American Marin Alsop, was the first woman to conduct
the Last Night of the Proms . . . She took it in her stride . . . Of all Last Nights
in recent memory, this was the most enjoyable, the least hysterical and the
most warm-hearted. Taking on the tricky end-of-term speech, Alsop showed
who was wearing the trousers, in this case her usual discreet black suit with
a flash of scarlet at the collar and cuffs.31
Intriguingly, Maddocks, herself an important voice among contemporary

female music critics, draws on the old tradition of commenting upon (and
thus ascribing some sort of spurious significance to) a woman musician’s
clothing. Unfortunately, the photograph that appears above the online ver-
sion of Maddock’s review features not Alsop but the mezzo-soprano Joyce
DiDonato, who appeared as a soloist. The photograph is accompanied by the
inopportune caption advising that ‘[DiDonato] caused gasps when she walked
on dressed in a shimmering Vivienne Westwood dress’.32 It would appear
from this review that sexualisation is still alive and well within some quarters
of the classical music press.
31
Fiona Maddocks, ‘Last Night of the Proms – Review’, The Guardian (8 September 2013), available at
www.theguardian.com (accessed 7 November 2015). Alsop conducted the Last Night of the Proms for
a second time on 12 September 2015.
32
Ibid.
282 LAURA HAMER
Pop and Rock’s Gendered Discourse

The criticism of women in the field of popular music remains highly
gendered.33 If anything, the sexualisation of female popular musicians seems
more rampant than ever. The gender paradox which underlies so much of the
criticism of women musicians cuts deep into the heart of popular music itself,
in the form of a marked gender/genre association between pop music (often
feminised) and rock music (often masculinised). Pop has been constructed as
inconsequential, trivial, inauthentic and unserious; rock has been constructed
as an authentic and serious form of music, heavily imbued with genuine
countercultural capital. This intriguingly recalls the critical rhetoric that
was historically employed to trivialise women’s music.
Kembrew McLeod has located the masculinisation of rock criticism in the
1960s counterculture from which it partly evolved. He has commented:
The 1960s counterculture ethos that celebrated attributes associated with

masculinity . . . dismissed as counterrevolutionary or unprogressive cultural
expression typically the domain of women. With men defining the discourse
of the civil rights and antiwar movements – and of the counterculture, more
generally – not surprisingly, men dominated these areas of activism. And
because these discourses of the counterculture heavily influenced the rock
community, the terms for entry into this area of cultural production were
defined early on as, to quote James Brown, a ‘man’s man’s man’s world’. In the
critics’ sincere commitment to connect their vision of a better world to
a particular version of popular music (their version), they unwittingly created
the discursive conditions that helped reproduce gender inequality.34
Echoing these sentiments, Sheila Whiteley has commented:
The counter culture’s marginalisation of women in rock is . . . particularly

disturbing. Apart from biting social and political commentaries from such
performers as Joan Baez, Buffy St Marie and Peter, Paul and Mary, and the
success of such frontline performers as Mama Cass (The Mamas and the Papas),
Grace Slick (Jefferson Airplane) and Janis Joplin . . . both the lifestyle and the
musical ethos of the period undermined the role of women, positioning them as
either romanticised fantasy figures, subservient earth mothers or easy lays.35
McLeod has analysed the adjectives used to describe rock music and orga-
nised them into a serious of ‘semantic dimensions’.36 He has commented:
33
I am indebted to Mike Brocken for many stimulating conversations about women and popular music.
34
Kembrew McLeod, ‘Between Rock and a Hard Place: Gender and Rock Criticism’, in Steve Jones (ed.),
Pop Music and the Press (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002), pp. 108–9.
35
Sheila Whiteley, Women and Popular Music: Sexuality, Identity and Subjectivity (London and New York:
36
McLeod, ‘Between Rock and a Hard Place’, p. 97.
The dimensions employed to favorably describe an artist or album (aggressive

intensity, violence, rawness, simplicity, personal expression, seriousness, tra-
dition, authenticity and originality), as well as those used to dismiss an artist
(softness, sweet sentimentalism, blandness, slickness, formulaic unoriginality,
and commercialism), tell a story. That is, the way [McLeod’s emphasis] critics
employ these ideas within the discursive space of reviews tells a story.37
Although McLeod claims that some of the dimensions that he has identified
are ‘not inherently gendered’ (positing instead that it is the way that they are
used within rock discourse that is),38 it is difficult to accept this, if one takes
the long view of the criticism of women musicians. The adjectives (dimen-
sions) which he has identified have been used to exult male creative genius and
to trivialise women’s music since at least the early nineteenth century.
Presumably rock critics unconsciously developed a strikingly similar rhetoric,
as they were most likely unaware of nineteenth-century (classical) gendered
critical tropes. Ideas about appropriate gender roles and modes of cultural
expression were, however, deeply encoded, and remained firmly entrenched,
in Western society in the 1960s. The counterculture, for all its revolutionary
boasts, ironically continued to enforce conservative gender roles.
The highly masculinised counterculture that developed around rock, which
critics have been complicit in perpetuating, has made it notoriously difficult
for women to be taken seriously within this genre. The review of Janis Joplin’s
posthumously released final album, Pearl, by Jack Shadoian, which appeared in
Rolling Stone on 18 February 1971, in prose which was dense with the assumed
(though ill-defined) artistic, musical and aesthetic value of true authentic rock
music, initially granted her honorary-man status (a common critical tendency
to describe ‘exceptional’ female musicians).39
Janis was a heavy, and had incredible presence whether at the top or bottom of
her form. She was a remarkable, if erratic, singer, and she proved it, live and on
record. Anyone who exhibits qualities of greatness earns certain privileges –
not critical immunity so much as the right to be forever removed from
inconsequentiality . . . you listen, and you care, because you know that what-
ever is going down is genuine and may contain a revelation.40
Despite the identification of a Joplin as a rock ‘heavy’, the description of her

as an ‘erratic singer’ recalls marked critical tendencies to other women musi-
cians by associating their creativity with madness or mental ill health. The
37 38
Ibid., p. 108. Ibid.
39
Consider, for example, the review quoted above of Wieck-Schumann’s Piano Trio, Op. 17 that
appeared in the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung on 5 April 1848.
40
Jack Shadoian, ‘Janis Joplin: Pearl’, Rolling Stone (18 February 1971), available at www.rollingstone.com
(accessed 8 November 2015).
284 LAURA HAMER
review (which also stands as a quasi-obituary) continues by removing her

creative agency, granting musical authority instead to the (male) bands and
producers that she worked with:
With Big Brother, Janis was free to leap and range; the band was always there
to break any falls . . . ‘Kozmic Blues’ was bound to be a disappointment . . .
Janis seemed displaced. The new band didn’t help much and her voice, sub-
jected to studio clarity, sounded more strained than expressive. Her style, too,
transplanted to a tighter setting, seemed overblown and uncontrolled . . . Full
Tilt Boogie, the band that backs her on Pearl . . . are simply a better band and
more congenial to Janis, which is a big reason why Pearl is more satisfying . . .
It is also clear that Paul Rothschild was working hard to find the right material
and the right context for Janis, to shape her gifts and give them direction and
balance . . . Her urge for drama, sometimes too hasty and spurting – not
developed and sustained – is controlled by the solid foundation Full Tilt
Boogie provides. She stays in control, and invitations to hysteria notwith-
standing, gives a fantastic performance.41
Thus her talent is presented as an instinctive musicality (bordering on mad-

ness) that needs to be reined in and shaped by men. Her creative agency is
removed through the familiar trope of feminine expression being controlled
by rational masculine logic.
Rock critics have also used their reviews to reinforce passive and submissive
roles for women. For example, a review of Joni Mitchell’s Blue by Timothy
Crouse that appeared in Rolling Stone on 5 August 1971 dwelt heavily upon her
(assumed) feminine fragility and sensitivity:
Joni Mitchell’s singing, her songwriting, her whole presence give off a feeling
of vulnerability . . . Blue is loaded with specific references to the recent past . . .
[It] is the chronicle of Joni, a free-lance romantic, searching for a permanent
love . . . In comparing love to communion, Joni defines explicitly the under-
lying theme of Blue: for her love has become a religious quest, and surrender-
ing to loneliness a sin . . . ‘Blue’ more than any of the other songs, shows Joni
to be twice vulnerable: not only is she in pain as a private person, but her
calling as an artist commands her to express her despair musically . . . on Blue
she has matched her popular music skills with the purity and honesty of what
was once called folk music and through the blend she has given us some of the
most beautiful moments in recent popular music.42
Although Crouse undoubtedly admires Mitchell and considers Blue a fine

album, he presents her as a passive femme fragile, interpreting the well-
41
Ibid.
42
Timothy Crouse, ‘Joni Mitchell: Blue’, Rolling Stone (5 August 1971), available at www
.rollingstone.com (accessed 8 November 2015).
known autobiographical aspects of the album as her search for fulfilment

through male love. Thus he presents her in a non-threatening light; she is
using music to pursue a traditional feminine path, not to pose a serious rivalry
with her male peers.
Women as Critics
Despite a few isolated cases of women active as music critics in the nineteenth
and first half of the twentieth centuries, female music critics were a rarity
prior to the Second World War. The slow emergence of women as music
critics directly parallels their wider situation in mainstream journalism. As
Deborah Chambers, Linda Steiner and Carole Fleming have observed,
‘women had to overcome many obstacles to get into the newsroom’.43 The
gender paradox is once again apparent in relation to women’s entry into
journalism. As Chambers, Steiner and Fleming have further commented,
‘women occupied a subordinated “ghetto status” . . . They were often con-
fined to marginal areas of news – fashion, domestic issues and a form of
“society news” . . . essentially glorified gossip about the lives of the rich and
famous’.44 Throughout most of the nineteenth century, journalism was not
considered to be a suitable job for a woman. Newspaper reporting was often
viewed as a rough trade, and thus not a suitable profession for an educated
woman. The aggressive and masculinised space of the newsroom was deemed
an inappropriate space for ladies.
By the late nineteenth century, however, a new type of ‘women’s journal-
ism’ appeared. The invention of the telegraph in 1844, and the development of
the railway, dramatically increased newspapers’ circulation. The expansion of
advertising – which specifically targeted middle-class women as consumers –
led to the expansion of newspapers. The increase in newspapers’ contents and
circulation, along with increased reliance upon advertising revenue, moti-
vated editors – who largely viewed women as passive consumers of news not
active producers of it – to hire ‘women journalists’ or ‘girl reporters’ (as they
were generally called) to supply items designed to be of primary interest to
female readers. Thus women were engaged to write about fashion and domes-
tic issues, society gossip, human interest stories, and to fill the new ‘women’s
pages’. With few exceptions (in 1892 Flora Shaw, for example, became the
first woman to be appointed to the permanent staff of The Times, and Emilie
43
Deborah Chambers, Linda Steiner and Carole Fleming, Women and Journalism (London and New York:
44
Ibid., pp. 15–16.
286 LAURA HAMER
Peacocke was the first full-time woman reporter active on Fleet Street), women
rarely obtained opportunities to write about political or economic news, which
were actively constructed as masculine interests. The tight control of the
dissemination of information (via the 1914 Defence of the Realm Act in the
UK) and the ban on sending women reporters to the Front during the First
World War did not greatly enhance their status as journalists. It was not until
male military conscription during the Second World War that places for
women journalists opened up, and it was not until the later twentieth century
that they gained greater opportunities to write across the full spectrum of news
stories, including politics, economics, business and world affairs.
Music criticism is a highly specialised type of journalism. Surveying the
situation of female music critics in the United States in the early 1980s,
Barbara Jepson commented that ‘critics, like conductors, have traditionally
been viewed as authority figures, and newspaper journalism has been a male
preserve until recently’.45 Whilst this is generally true, there have been some
notable exceptions.
The presence of early pioneers is particularly striking in the French musical
press. Lia Duport and Thérèse Wartel were both active in mid-nineteenth-
century France. In the early years of the twentieth century, the composer
Armande de Polignac contributed a series of articles to the new music journal
Le Mercure musical, for which Colette also occasionally wrote.46 During the
interwar period, Suzanne Demarquez, Madeleine Portier, and Lucie Delarue-
Madrus regularly contributed to a range of French musical publications. In
the UK, Dame Ethel Smyth, never one to shy away from traditionally male-
dominated fields, turned her hand to music criticism on several occasions.
A surprising number of women were active as critics in the United States in
the first half of the twentieth century. It is difficult to know how many
American women wrote criticism during the nineteenth century, as the vast
majority of US reviews before 1900 were either anonymous or initialled.47
However, the Baltimore Sun employed a May Garrettson Evans as music critic
from 1888 to 1895. In the years following the First World War, a number of
women held posts with important American newspapers, including Isabel
Morse Jones, who served as music critic and editor for the Los Angeles Times
from 1925 to 1947, and was also musical correspondent for Musical America
45
Barbara Jepson, ‘Women Critics in the United States’, in Judith Lang Zaimont, Catherine Overhauser
and Jane Gottlieb (eds.), The Musical Woman: An International Perspective (Westport: Greenwood Press,
1983).
46
For a consideration of Armande de Polignac’s music criticism, see Laura Hamer, ‘Armande de Polignac:
An Aristocratic Compositrice in Fin-de-Siècle Paris’, in Paul Fryer (ed.), Women in the Arts in the Belle Époque:
Essays on Influential Artists, Writers and Performers (Jefferson and London: McFarland, 2012), pp. 178–9.
47
Jepson, ‘Women Music Critics in the United States’, p. 245.
from 1940 to 1947, and Claudia Cassidy, who worked as arts critics for the
Chicago Journal of Commerce from 1925 to 1941 and was later music and drama
critic for the Chicago Tribune. Harriet Johnson worked as head music critic at
the New York Post from 1943 to 1986,48 and Minna Lederman worked as sole
editor of Modern Music from its founding in 1924 until 1946.
Opportunities for female music critics in the United States actually
retracted in the second half of the twentieth century. Successive waves of
reduction in the circulation of print newspapers since the 1960s – combined
with the standard practice of newspapers only hiring one or two staff critics
(often combing music with at least one other art form), and otherwise relying
on freelancers – resulted in stiff competition for an ever decreasing number of
full-time positions. In the UK, several women have held influential positions
within classical music criticism since the later twentieth century. Joan
Chissell, became the first female music critic to be employed by The Times in
1948. She continued to work for The Times until 1979, becoming one of the
three staff music critics in the early 1960s.49 At the time of writing, Fiona
Maddocks occupies the post of Chief Classical Music Critic at The Observer.50
Women critics in popular music have experienced considerable gender-
specific barriers. Writing in 2002, McLeod commented that, ‘the field of
rock criticism in North America is still dominated by men’.51 Over a decade
later, this situation is not much improved, and is not restricted to North
America. Leonard has observed a ‘discernible masculinist style’ of rock
criticism.52 Pondering the various reasons for this, she has noted that the
majority of rock publications ‘are targeted primarily towards a male reader-
ship’; thus ‘it is perhaps unsurprising that the prose style adopted within these
publications is generally masculinist in tone, geared towards the idealised
male reader’.53
Reflecting on the dearth of female popular music critics in 1996, Caroline
Sullivan, however, expressed herself surprised that ‘more girls don’t try it’.54
Sullivan, who, as rock and pop critic for The Guardian since the mid-1990s
occupies a position of considerable influence, claims, in the same essay, that
she has experienced very little sexism (and that at the hands of a female press
48
Johnson was, in fact, the second woman to be hired as head music critic by the New York Post. Olga
Samaroff had briefly held the post from 1926 to 1927.
49
Joan Chissell also wrote for Gramophone and broadcast for the BBC. See Kenneth G. Fry, ‘Lives
Remembered: Joan Chissell’, The Times (23 February 2007), available at www.thetimes.co.uk (accessed
25 October 2015).
50
Maddocks was previously founding editor of BBC Music Magazine.
51
McLeod, ‘Between Rock and a Hard Place’, p. 93.
52 53
Leonard, Gender in the Music Industry, p. 67. Leonard, Gender in the Music Industry, pp. 67–8.
54
Caroline Sullivan, ‘The Joy of Hacking: Women Rock Critics’, in Sarah Cooper (ed.), Girls! Girls! Girls!
Essays on Women and Music (New York: New York University Press, 1996), p. 138.
288 LAURA HAMER
officer). In a striking extension of Leonard’s ‘discernible masculinist style’ of

rock journalism, however, Sullivan has attributed the masculinised subcul-
tures of many popular music magazines – ‘whose pages reek of male bonding
and footie references’55 – as being off-putting to many would-be female
popular music critics. She continues, ‘the problem . . . is finding women who
want to do it’.56
It is (partly) possible to attribute the difficulty in finding potential female
critics to the working conditions and job pressures. Critics work long and
unsociable hours, with a lot of their work taking place during the evenings and
at weekends. As Sullivan has commented:
[Another] difficulty is the unsocial hours, and having to go to shows alone . . .

It isn’t reviewing gigs on my own that I dislike – that happens to us all as
friends tire of the novelty of going to concerts for free. It’s all the late-night
travel . . . There’s nothing more dismal that waiting for a night-bus in
Wembley on a freezing night.57
Karen Monson has offered a curious echo of these sentiments, from a classical
music perspective:
There is no reason to keep to a regular 9-to-5 schedule at the office, since that
is nether the time nor the place where the serious work of the job is done . . .
This sounds great until you realize that you are free in the daytime and your
friends are not . . . Most of us . . . have to get used to eating at 6 or 6:30 p.m. and
then running to get to the concert on time, filled with enough energy and
adrenalin to keep going until the review is finished and submitted (which can
be at 1 or 2 a.m.) . . . Most of the time . . . the chair next to me, my second
ticket, belonged to my coat.58
Critics work under constant deadline pressure, are under pressure to keep up
with the latest musical trends and must learn to cope with angry reactions
from aggrieved musicians and, sometimes, fans.
In addition to the strain that such a lifestyle places upon a critic’s social life,
it also places a considerable burden upon home and family life. As many
women continue to bear the primary responsibility for childcare, the critic’s
professional reality can easily appear daunting to women who also hope to
have families. Monson has commented that
55 56
Ibid. Ibid., p. 139.
57
McLeod, ‘Between Rock and a Hard Place’, p. 143. It is important to note that late-night travel can
present dangerous situations for women alone.
58
Karen Monson, ‘Byline Monson: Music Critic’, in Judith Lang Zaimont, Catherine Overhauser and
Jane Gottlieb (eds.), The Musical Woman: An International Perspective, Volume I I : 1984–1985 (Westport:
Greenwood Press, 1987), pp. 62–3.
I have been quoted as saying that a woman cannot have a family and be a music
critic at the same time . . . I was not quite correct. It would be possible, but it
would be hard . . . Some women have done it, and more will do it in the future.
Having never tried the combination, I can only say that I cannot imagine
getting home at 2:00 a.m. to a sleeping husband and a fussy child, trying to
unwind from the evening’s work, and being able to nap only until the baby
awakened or the copy desk phoned to check some fact or misspelling.59
Female music critics might also feel less able to relocate to take a better
position, if it meant moving a family and/or disrupting a partner’s career.
Such concerns over relocating to obtain a better and/or more senior position
might help explain why, despite the fact that there are relatively high numbers
of junior women critics and freelancers, they are still under-represented at the
highest levels of the profession. Few hold positions as head critics or music
editors with either national newspapers or specialised music magazines.
For women who do succeed as critics, a further important issue for them to
negotiate is how they should write about and review women musicians. Here
women critics have to tread a fine line. They have to negotiate perceptions of
favouritism and/or partisan feminism. Of the women critics that Jepson
interviewed, many reported ‘going out of their way to give preconcert pub-
licity, in the form of a photo, profile, or interview, to women composers and
conductors. The reasons cited were that such individuals are still a rarity in
their communities, and they believed these women have been discriminated
against in the past.’60 As she has further commented, however, ‘even the most
ardent feminists rebelled at the notion of giving less-than-honest reviews to
music by women’. On many occasions women have been assigned to cover
female musicians, under the assumption that a common sex gives a review
more authority. This practice has exacerbated the critical tightrope that
female critics in such positions have to brave. Politics aside, some female
critics have preferred reviewing women for a wide range of reasons, including
feeling more comfortable with other women. Sullivan has commented that:
I prefer interviewing women . . . The task of gaining someone’s trust . . . when

you’ve only just met them . . . seems easier when you’re the same sex . . . You
can approach the interview as a conversation rather than an interrogation . . .
it’s the spirit of comradeship, however spurious that may be. Because of the
obstacles most of them have had to surmount, women artists are more
interesting . . . Generally . . . women are better, more obliging interviewees,
59
Karen Monson, ‘Byline Monson: Music Critic’, p. 66. Changing working practices may help here, as it
is no longer the universal norm that copy goes in straight after a concert.
60
Barbara Jepson, ‘Women Critics in the United States’, pp. 261–2. It is important to position Jepson’s
study within the wider contemporary political context of the Women’s Liberation Movement.
290 LAURA HAMER
possibly because, like the rest of girlkind, they were raised to try to please . . .
But I sometimes find myself tolerating artistic mediocrity in women when
I wouldn’t in a man. I’ve never written an unjustified favourable review, but
occasionally I’ll find reasons to excuse an uninspired performance.61
Despite the various pitfalls which female critics must negotiate when review-
ing women, it is possible that a greater degree of objectivity is achieved in
their reviews purely through the empowered male gaze being removed.
Conclusion
The criticism of women musicians has been and continues to be anything but
objective. Criticism of women musicians has tended to be highly gendered,
and to place them in an unequal category to their male colleagues. Critics have
tended to trivialise, sexualise and Other women musicians and their music.
Although some women critics have obtained a considerable degree of success,
they remain under-represented at the most senior levels of their profession.
The strong gendering and sexualisation apparent in popular music criticism is
particularly disturbing, as this serves as one of the most powerful teaching
tools about appropriate gender roles, behaviours and modes of cultural
expression for young people. The continued gendering of music criticism is
reflective of the deeply embedded and wide-scale gender bias that remains
rampant within the music industries. This is one of the most serious impedi-
ments to gender equality that female musicians continue to face. Although
this may be driven by economics, until steps are taken to address it, women
musicians will continue to operate within an unequal environment that
heavily affects their reception.
61
Sullivan, ‘The Joy of Hacking: Women Rock Critics’, p. 144.
· PART IV ·
ENTERING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

. 15 .
Music Criticism in the United States and Canada

up to the Second World War
MARK MCKNIGHT
The development of serious music criticism in Canada and the United

States has paralleled in many ways the more general growth of music in
the two nations. Musical independence from Europe came somewhat
later than in the other arts. Eurocentric critics based their evaluative
criteria on European models; even today vestiges of this subservience
remain. Nevertheless, reviews in the United States and Canada have
usually been more reportorial than their European counterparts, which
tend more towards analysis and reflection; as a result, the focus has been
on timeliness and objectivity, although certainly biases are by no means
absent.
For many early Americans, classical music was synonymous with sacred
music. This association was due largely to such men as Lowell Mason
(1792–1872) and Thomas Hastings (1784–1872), who both had a profound
influence on the development of American music in the nineteenth century.
Mason and Hastings were raised in the eighteenth-century tradition of New
England psalmody and village singing schools, yet they were each motivated to
reform what they saw as the musical crudities of the earlier Yankee psalmodists
(William Billings, Daniel Read et al.). Active as educators, composers, choral
directors, tune book compilers and publishers, Mason and Hastings vigorously
promoted the edifying value of music throughout their long lives. Hastings, in
addition, wrote what is considered the first significant treatise on musical
criticism by an American, titled A Dissertation on Musical Taste;1 he also pub-
lished a short-lived journal, The Musical Magazine (1835–7), and wrote for other
periodicals. Hastings’s views on music were extremely conservative, but they
were also grounded in the writings of Burney and the French encyclopédistes,
reflecting eighteenth-century progressivist ideas. Additionally, Hastings held
the firm conviction that musical taste required careful cultivation, and that it
was the musician’s duty to foster a greater appreciation of music by first
1
Thomas Hastings, Dissertation on Musical Taste (Albany: Websters and Skinners, 1822; revised 1853).
[293]
294 MARK MCKNIGHT
meeting the public on its own grounds (‘as he finds it’) and then gradually
progress to ‘higher levels of comprehension and appreciation’.2
Hastings’s early treatise notwithstanding, music criticism did not develop
from learned treatises; instead it was tied to the rise of the American news-
paper industry. Serious, substantive music criticism did not appear regularly
in US newspapers before the mid-nineteenth century. Prior to the 1830s,
American newspapers were intended mainly for the elite classes. Most were
classified as political, hyper-partisan in nature or as essentially advertising
organs for the mercantile community, although some papers gradually began
to exhibit features of both types, with many ads, but also political commen-
tary and sometimes reviews of music and other arts. Daily papers were
normally published six days a week with subscription rates of around ten
dollars annually, which put them out of reach for most working Americans.3
Weekly papers, such as the New York Albion, begun in 1822, were somewhat
cheaper and did include music reviews. The Albion, in fact, billed itself as
a ‘British, Colonial, and Foreign Weekly Gazette’ that included ‘distinct and
proper’ coverage of ‘Poetry, history, music and the Drama’, with much con-
tent reprinted from European sources.4 Despite its greater attention to the
arts, coverage of music in the Albion included much uninformed commentary
focused mainly on performance and execution with little critical insight into
the music itself. Like most other similar reviews, the pieces in the Albion were
generally unsigned, with obligatory references to the ‘beauty and fashion’ of
the attendees. Such commentary tells us a great deal about music in early
nineteenth-century New York, not only regarding the typical critic’s lack of
musical knowledge, but also in the focus on opera as a marker of wealth and
status. New Yorkers considered opera as the venue, according to Vera Brodsky
Lawrence, for prosperous bachelors to find eligible brides, as well as a place for
‘electioneering, stock-jobbing, and gossiping’.5
Other US cities, principally Boston and Philadelphia, were much more
serious and sedate, according to the influential critic W. S. B. Mathews.
Looking back on this early period from later in the century, Mathews wrote
that New Yorkers before 1850 were mainly concerned with ‘showiness and
frivolity’, preferring ‘spasmodic brilliancy’ over the ‘higher musical lines’
2
James E. Dooley, ‘Introduction’ to Thomas Hastings, Dissertation on Musical Taste (New York: Da Capo
Press, 1974), p. xiv.
3
Mark N. Grant, Maestros of the Pen: A History of Classical Music Criticism in America (Boston: Northeastern
4
Ibid., p. 10.
5
Vera Brodsky Lawrence, Strong on Music: The New York Scene in the Days of George Templeton Strong,
1836–1875, Volume I : Resonances, 1836–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), p. 496; New-York
Herald (30 January 1848), quoted in Grant, Maestros of the Pen, p. 8.
Music Criticism in the United States and Canada 295
demonstrated by Philadelphians or Bostonians. This difference, he observed,

was due to the wealthy class of New Yorkers called the ‘Upper Ten Thousand’,
or ‘Upper Ten’, upon whose patronage opera largely depended.6
As with their early American counterparts, most early reviews in Canadian
newspapers also tended to be reportorial, commenting as much on the non-
musical elements of a concert – the beauty and fashion of the audience and
performers, or even the refreshments offered at intermission. Reviewers often
used empty rhetorical flourishes to disguise their lack of musical knowledge.
In his history of early Toronto, D. C. Masters observed that music criticism in
that city in the mid-1800s was ‘written with a simplicity and naïveté, which
suggests the efforts of a modern rural paper to do justice to some artistic
efforts of the local inhabitants, written probably by the local clergyman’s wife
or some other lady of cultural pretensions . . . Something good had to be said
of everyone although the compliments at times appeared slightly strained’.7
Canadian music historian Helmut Kallmann, in his landmark History of Music
in Canada 1534–1914, cited from an unnamed Montreal newspaper during
this period comments in reviews regarding ‘“extremely difficult pieces per-
formed with marked success” or an artist who “played with quiet ease and
grace characteristic of that gentleman’s performance and elicited hearty
applause from his hearers”’. ‘These samples’, Kallmann noted, ‘are typical of
many written in equally non-commital [sic] and florid style.’8 Reporting on
performances by the Holman English Opera Company at Gowan’s Opera
House in Ottawa in 1875, the critic of the Ottawa Free Press noted: ‘The
scenery was really beautiful, the dresses of the ladies and gentlemen of the
Company gorgeous to a degree which few would expect a travelling company
to be in possession of. The music incidental to the piece was ably executed by
Mrs. Harriet Homan who is an able conductor, and to whom much of the
success of the opera is due . . . Mr. Gowan’s fine orchestra was present and
played several choice selections between the acts.’9 An 1875 review in the
Ottawa Free Press of the visiting Boston Philharmonic Club, performing the
overture to Rossini’s Tancredi, solos for horn and violin, along with vocal
selections and Mozart’s Piano Quartet in G Minor, commented: ‘There was
a very large and very select audience . . . It looks as though our citizens had
6
W. S. B. Mathews, A Hundred Years of Music in America, reprint ed. (New York: AMS Press, 1970; first
published Chicago: G. L. Howe, 1889), p. 64.
7
D. C. Masters, The Rise of Toronto, 1850–1890 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1947), p. 94,
quoted in Helmut Kallmann, A History of Music in Canada 1534–1914 (Toronto: University of Toronto
Press, 1960), p. 108.
8
Kallmann, A History of Music in Canada 1534–1914, p. 108.
9
Ottawa Free Press (4 February 1875), quoted in Elaine Keillor, ‘Musical Activity in Canada’s New Capital
City in the 1870s’, in John Beckwith and Frederick A. Hall (eds.), Musical Canada: Words and Music
Honouring Helmut Kallmann (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988), p. 127.
296 MARK MCKNIGHT
finally come to the conclusion to show their appreciation of really first class
talent, and by this means secure for Ottawa a better order of talent than we
have hitherto been favoured with . . . Mozart’s Quartet held the interest of the
audience to the end although it was exceedingly long.’10 Though lacking in
substance, these early accounts nonetheless reflected a sincere appreciation
for art music by both reviewers and audiences, as a critical awareness of music
began to emerge with the increasing frequency of touring companies.
While support for classical music and opera in New York remained princi-
pally under the domain of the Upper Ten Thousand, the birth of the penny
press, around 1830, signalled the beginning of a revolution that profoundly
changed the American newspaper industry, including music criticism. Selling
on the streets for one penny, and featuring less partisan, more sensationalistic
human interest stories that appealed – and were affordable – to the working
classes, these penny papers also had education as one of their main goals. As
the field of penny dailies grew more crowded, publishers looked for new ways
to attract subscribers. James Gordon Bennett (1795–1892), who had pre-
viously served as a music and drama reviewer for the New-York Enquirer,
founded in 1835 what would become one of the most influential penny dailies
in the country, the New-York Morning Herald. Bennett had an almost evange-
lical vision for what he thought the Herald should be: ‘What is to prevent
a daily newspaper from being made the greatest organ of social life? Books
have had their day – the theatres have had their day – the temple of religion has
had its day. A newspaper can be made to take the lead of all these in the great
movements of human thought and human civilization.’11 As an astute busi-
nessman, Bennett also saw coverage of the arts and music as one way to set his
own newspaper apart, and so he printed a regular amusements column that
actively voiced support for opera and musical events, thereby providing his
readers, many of whom could not afford to attend such happenings, at least
the opportunity to appreciate them vicariously.
These early years of music criticism in New York were a rough-and-tumble
period in many respects, as competition heated up with more and more penny
dailies entering the field. Publishers and writers frequently sued each other for
libel, often charging their rivals with accepting bribes from performers for
favourable notices. Despite all of the loud protestations, there was, however,
much truth to these charges, present-day notions of journalistic integrity
having yet to become the norm. The ‘paid puff’, whereby critics received
10
Ottawa Free Press (13 January 1875), quoted in Keillor, ‘Musical Activity in Canada’s New Capital City
in the 1870s’, p. 129.
11
James Gordon Bennett, [Editorial], New-York Morning Herald (19 August 1836), quoted in Grant,
Maestros of the Pen, pp. 12–13.
remuneration or other compensation for favourable reviews, was pervasive.

The Boston Musical Gazette in 1847 reprinted an anonymous letter to the
London Musical World charging that such popular touring virtuosos as violinist
Ole Bull and pianist Leopold de Meyer, among others, had purchased their
fame and success in America largely through their efforts at buying off US
critics: ‘Nothing, indeed, can surpass the despicable corruptibility of the
American press. For one line of truth there are a dozen lines of falsehood in
almost every paper.’12 Such practices did, in fact, greatly influence the public’s
reception of these European artists, many of whom capitalised on the critics’
‘puffery’. In his memoirs, newspaperman Charles T. Congdon recalled the
gullibility of Americans during this early period, and how Ole Bull ‘took
advantage of our uneducated condition’.13 He continued, ‘as a historian,
I may set down the fact that we all made asses of ourselves; that we thought
nonsense, talked nonsense, and printed nonsense about this Norwegian’. That
de Meyer and, especially, Bull, were widely recognised as performers of the
first rank in Europe raises the question as to why paying off critics would have
been necessary in the first place; perhaps it was just the ‘cost of doing business’
in America during this time, and it may speak more about Americans’ lack of
musical knowledge or interest than it does about the talents of the performers
themselves.
Although most reviews of musical performances were anonymous, some
writers resorted to the long-standing journalistic practice of using literary or
stylised pseudonyms. One such critic, whose true identity is still unknown,
wrote for the New-York American in the 1820s under the byline ‘Musœus’.
Musœus’s reviews stand apart as revealing a higher level of musical acumen
than others from the time. The reviewer wrote with obvious knowledge of his
subjects and frequently provided constructive criticism to the performers; at
other times, however, his opinions could turn more caustic, providing what
historian Mark N. Grant has called a ‘New York City archetype . . . that has
held to this day’.14
The idea that the critic should educate as well as report was clearly evident
in the admonitions Musœus proffered to readers and performers alike in his
reviews. It was also a role that most other serious critics were beginning to
undertake as well. Chief among them was Henry Cood Watson (1816–75),
generally regarded as the first person in the United States to earn his living
primarily as a music critic. Watson wrote for and edited a number of
12
Anon., London Musical World (31 October 1846), reprinted in the Boston Musical Gazette (4 January 1847),
quoted in Grant, Maestros of the Pen, p. 22.
13
Charles T. Congdon, Reminiscences of a Journalist (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1880), p. 196.
14
Grant, Maestros of the Pen, p. 14.
298 MARK MCKNIGHT
New York publications starting in the 1840s, eventually succeeding William

Henry Fry as the New York Tribune’s music critic in 1863. A member of
a musically prominent English family, Watson arrived in New York in 1840
and quickly established himself in the New York arts community, writing on
music and art, penning poems and librettos, editing and even composing. He
was also active in the formation of various music societies in New York,
including the American Musical Fund Society and the Mendelssohn Union.
Although musical activity in New York during the 1840s was growing more
and more robust, the level of professionalism, if the writings of the critics are
any indication, still left a great deal to be desired. Watson himself observed
this lack of competence and set about to raise the standards, forthrightly and
sometimes without a great amount of tact. Upon his appointment as critic for
the New World in 1841, Watson declared his intention ‘to cleanse out this
Augean accumulation and to establish in its place a healthy principle that shall
revolutionize the state of music in the city’.15 Watson’s reviews were percep-
tive, plainly pointing out the deficiencies he heard and offering constructive
yet oftentimes severe and uncompromising assessments of a trained and
exacting professional, without the empty flourishes that marked so much
music criticism of this time. Richard Grant White (1822–85), a highly
regarded literary critic, also wrote intelligently on music, for the Morning
Courier and New York Enquirer and for Century magazine. Though criticised
by Watson for his lack of musical knowledge, White’s reviews nonetheless
displayed a degree of erudition that was also free from overly hollow verbiage.
As musical activities in the United States continued to increase in number
and improve in quality, the level of music criticism also began to rise. In
New York, the burgeoning number of critics offered a variety of insights and
opinions, sometimes turning into heated and lively exchanges. Often these
journalistic battles involved the Philadelphia-born journalist-composer
William Henry Fry (1813–64), one of the most significant figures in nine-
teenth-century American music history. Fry started his career working for his
family’s newspaper, the National Gazette and Literary Register, in the 1830s,
while launching his career as a composer, writing operas and other large-scale
works in a decidedly derivative Italianate style. Following an assignment in
Paris as correspondent for the Tribune (1846–52), Fry returned to the United
States and served as the Tribune’s music critic until shortly before his death.
Back in New York, Fry launched an unprecedented series of eleven lectures on
music he underwrote himself, in which he employed a large orchestra, chorus,
band and several soloists to illustrate his concepts, primarily through his own
15
Henry Cood Watson, New World (4 December 1841), quoted in Grant, Maestros of the Pen, p. 17.
compositions. An ardent advocate for American composers, his dual roles as

composer and critic sometimes came into conflict; his insightful evaluations
were often coloured by his own ambitions to be accepted as a serious compo-
ser, and he frequently clashed with the New York musical establishment.
By nature provocative and quick with a barb, Fry was himself frequently the
focal point of criticism, particularly in his dogmatic views on his own music.
Among his principal opponents was British transplant Charles C. Bailey
Seymour (1829–69), chief music critic for the New York Times for nearly two
decades. Reviewing the ‘Grand Finale’ of Fry’s path-breaking lecture series in
1852–3, during which Fry angrily decried the lack of support for American
composers, Seymour drily observed: ‘When we in this country shall have
produced a great work of Musical Art, we have little fear that the public will
pass it slightingly, or refuse to hear it at all.’16 Prominent composer and writer
Richard Storrs Willis (1819–1900) also weighed in, diplomatically praising
Fry for his audacity and originality. Nevertheless, Willis felt, Fry was much
too undisciplined, lacking ‘synthesis, continuity, method’, and far too impet-
uous: ‘In short, we know of no more brilliant and interesting speaker than
Mr. Fry; but he is inconsistent and contradictory, and sometimes gets on both
sides of a question in the same paragraph . . . [H]is feelings often carry him
away, and his desire or tendency to say biting things causes him to contradict
himself most openly.’17
The feud between Willis and Fry escalated the following year in what writer
Vera Brodsky Lawrence has called ‘the musical battle of the century’.18 This
latest episode involved the performance, the previous December, of several of
Fry’s orchestral pieces, including his hyper-programmatic holiday work the
Santa Claus Symphony, by French conductor-composer Louis-Antoine
Jullien, whose highly touted orchestra was then touring America. Willis called
Santa Claus ‘a good Christmas piece: but hardly a composition to be gravely
criticised like an earnest work of Art. It is a kind of extravaganza which moves
the audience to laughter, entertaining them seasonably with imitated snow-
storms, trotting horses, sleigh-bells, crashing whips, etc.’19 Willis’s casual
dismissal of the work infuriated Fry, who issued a long and scathing letter
to Willis, which Willis dutifully printed. Fry excoriated Willis for calling his
16
[Charles C. Bailey Seymour], New York Times (10 February 1853), quoted in Vera Brodsky Lawrence,
Strong on Music: The New York Scene in the Days of George Templeton Strong, 1836–1875, Volume I I :
Reverberations, 1850–1856 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), p. 386.
17
Richard Storrs Willis, ‘Mr. Fry’s Lectures’, Musical World and New York Musical Times (19 February
1853), 114–16, quoted in Lawrence, Strong on Music, Vol. I I : Reverberations, pp. 386–7.
18
Lawrence, Strong on Music, Vol. I I : Reverberations, p. 387.
19
Richard Storrs Willis, ‘Musical News from Everywhere’, Musical World and New York Musical Times
(7 January 1854), 5–6, quoted in Lawrence, Strong on Music, Vol. I I : Reverberations, p. 378.
300 MARK MCKNIGHT
work a mere extravaganza, when in reality, Fry proclaimed, it was the most
serious of works. He then followed with an almost stream-of-consciousness
tirade condemning both Beethoven and Mozart for their deficiencies in
expressing mirth in music, and declaring Weber’s overture to Der Freischütz
as far superior to Beethoven’s ‘Eroica’ Symphony. Moreover, Fry blasted the
leaders of the German-dominated New York Philharmonic Society, arguing
that they had consistently ignored American compositions. Fry went so far as
to call the Society an ‘incubus on art’, and denounced it for never having
‘asked for or performed a single American instrumental composition during
the eleven years of its existence’.20
In his next issue, Willis issued a rejoinder to Fry’s charges, point by point,
while continuing to insist that Santa Claus was merely an extravaganza. Willis
concluded on a somewhat patronising note, assuring Fry that he admired the
composer’s ‘genius’, but declaring that it was ‘genius astray. You are wrong in
your views of Art . . . You are a splendid frigate at sea without a helm.’21 The
war of words between the two critics continued for several more rounds and
with increasing intensity, each refusing to concede a point. As Lawrence
noted, Fry’s condemnation of Willis and the Philharmonic for callously
ignoring American composers has been embraced by some twentieth-
century scholars as ‘the archetypal Declaration of Rights for American
Music and Musicians’. But, she notes, Fry’s outbursts smacked more of simple
petulance, ‘an uninhibited display of self-glorification intermingled with an
outpouring of personal grievances, frustrations, wounded vanity, boastful-
ness, bitterness, abusiveness, defensiveness, offensiveness, pretentiousness,
idiosyncratic pronouncements, and an apparently unappeasable hunger for
adulation’.22
Though the writings of these early critics demonstrate their musical knowl-
edge and keen insights, some of their perceptions – such as Fry’s belittling of
Mozart and Beethoven – may strike present-day readers as wildly off the mark.
In his writings Fry frequently expressed his own ideas of the primacy of
20
William Henry Fry, ‘Mr. Fry’s Letter to Mr. Willis (New York Tribune Office: January 10th, 1854)’,
Musical World and New York Musical Times (21 January 1854), reprinted in Dwight’s Journal of Music, 4/18
(4 February 1854), 138–40. Fry’s assertions were not quite accurate; George Frederick Bristow,
a Philharmonic violinist as well as a composer, offered a swift rebuttal to Fry’s statement, noting, rather
sarcastically, that the Society had indeed, perhaps ‘by mistake or accident’, in its eleven years of existence
once played a single American composition, one of his own overtures. Perhaps not fearful of biting the
hand that fed him, Bristow added with further indignation: ‘What is the Philharmonic Society in this
country? Is it to play exclusively the works of German masters, especially if they be dead? . . . Or is it to
stimulate original art on the spot?’, quoted in Richard Crawford, America’s Musical Life (New York: W. W.
Norton, 2001), p. 329.
21
Richard Storrs Willis, ‘Reply to Mr. Fry, of the Tribune’, Musical World and New York Musical Times
(28 January 1854), 37–9, reprinted in Dwight’s Journal of Music, 4/22 (4 March 1854), 171–3.
22
Lawrence, Strong on Music, Vol. I I : Reverberations, p. 480.
programmatic over absolute music: in a January 1854 review of the New York
Philharmonic Society’s performance of Schumann’s Symphony No. 2 and
Mendelssohn’s overture Meeresstille und glückliche Fahrt, he criticised
Schumann’s use of such an ‘antiquated’ form, declaring that Schumann had
by no means improved on his model, Beethoven, and adding that Schumann
was ‘inferior to his master’.23 According to Fry, Schumann’s symphony was
a ‘sheer waste of powder’ marked by a ‘lack of melody’. Likewise, he declared
Mendelssohn’s overture as ‘destitute of a singular musical idea’, and ‘equally
inferior in conception and execution’. Fry noted furthermore that ‘if
Mendelssohn’s musical voyage was undertaken to steer clear of an idea, he
has done so’.24 Melody, it seems, was indeed one of the most important critical
elements during this time, not only for Fry. Watson, writing on Verdi in the
Albion in 1847, unfavourably compared Verdi’s melodies with those of Bellini
or Donizetti, noting that they seemed to have been written ‘under restraint,
that is, as though they were composed under the most impressive remem-
brances of the masters of his school who had gone before him’. Watson
continued by criticising Verdi’s ‘passion for instruments of brass and
percussion . . . This love of noise is the curse of our modern writers; with
the Italians it is mere noise without substance . . . It will be a happy day for
music when writers return to Mozart’s simplicity!’25
The divergent perceptions that nineteenth-century critics and audiences
held towards now canonical composers and works is of course one of the main
benefits in studying reception. Equally informative is seeing how the canon
came to be. What makes Beethoven today more esteemed than Spohr, for
example? Setting aside the opinions of Fry, Beethoven’s ne plus ultra status in
the composer pantheon stems in large part from nineteenth-century writers
and critics whose views of the composer and his works elided with their own
conception of music as an almost quasi-religious emotional expression that
transcended any attempts at verbal articulation. Though many Americans
continued to view music, as W. S. B. Mathews put it, as ‘exemplifying gospel
teachings’,26 some American literati and musical elite, principally in New
England, began to approach it from a more humanistic perspective, appreciat-
ing the science of music but also recognising what they saw as its transcendent
powers. The American Transcendental movement of the 1830s and 40s, led by
such intellectuals as Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–82) and Margaret Fuller
23
Quoted in Mark McKnight, ‘Music Criticism in the New York Times and the New York Tribune,
1851–1876’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Louisiana State University (1980), 63–4.
24
McKnight, ‘Music Criticism’, 64.
25
Albion (6 March 1847), quoted in Grant, Maestros of the Pen, p. 19.
26
Mathews, Hundred Years, p. 35.
302 MARK MCKNIGHT
(1810–50), rejected religious rituals and creeds along with the Calvinist idea of
humans as inherently sinful beings. Likewise, the Transcendentalists
eschewed eighteenth-century rationalist thought in favour of a personal,
intuitive relationship with the Divine.27 Central to their aesthetic was the
primacy of European art music – especially the symphonies of Beethoven –
which they promoted with near religious zeal.
Among the greatest champions of Beethoven in the United States in the
decades immediately following his death was the prominent American writer
John Sullivan Dwight (1813–93). Dwight, a graduate of Harvard College
(1832), trained for the ministry and was ordained as a Unitarian minister in
1840. Despite his initial clerical ambitions, his interests in music and his
subsequent acquaintance with members of the Transcendentalist movement
then sweeping New England led Dwight instead to a career as music journal-
ist, a role that suited him much better. He joined the utopian communal
enterprise Brook Farm, located in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, and
founded by former Unitarian minister George Ripley and his wife, Sophia,
in 1841. There Dwight taught music and Latin, and began writing columns on
music for the Dial, the foremost journal of the Transcendentalist movement,
and the Associationist magazine The Harbinger. His greatest contribution to
American music criticism, however, rests with his own periodical, Dwight’s
Journal of Music, which he edited between 1852 and 1881.
In the journal’s prospectus, Dwight stated that his aim was to include not
only reviews of the latest concerts, but also more substantive critical analyses,
historical and biographical sketches, notices of new music, and articles on
music education and all musical genres, in addition to occasional pieces on
literature and the fine arts: ‘The tone [is] to be impartial, independent, catho-
lic, conciliatory, aloof from musical clique and controversy, cordial to all good
things, but eager to chime in with any powerful private interest of publisher,
professor, concert-goer, manager, society, or party.’28 It was clear that
Dwight was neither satisfied with the state of classical music in the United
States nor in the journalistic coverage it was being given. Moreover, he saw art
music as ‘an important saving influence’ in the young democracy: ‘very con-
fused, crude, heterogeneous is this sudden musical activity in a young, utili-
tarian people. A thousand specious fashions too successfully dispute the place
of true Art in the favour of each little public.’ To facilitate this salvation, he
27
One of the few women music critics of this period, Fuller, though primarily known for her literary
criticism, also contributed thoughtful, practically oriented reviews, first to the Dial (1840–44), then to the
New York Tribune (1844–6).
28
Quoted in George Willis Cooke, John Sullivan Dwight: Brook-Farmer, Editor, and Critic of Music
(New York: Da Capo Press, 1969; first published Boston: Small, Maynard, & Co., 1898), p. 147.
wrote in the first issue, required ‘a regular bulletin of progress; something to

represent the movement, and at the same time to guide it to the true end’.29
Though based in Boston, Dwight had as his goal to advocate for classical
music throughout the United States. ‘This paper would make itself the
“Organ” of no school or class, but simply an organ of what we have called
the musical movement in this country; of the growing love of deep and genuine
music,’ which for Dwight meant the German classical tradition he held as
supreme.30
Dwight’s Journal, published weekly until 1869 and every two weeks there-
after, regularly included reports on musical happenings from correspon-
dents across the country as well as Europe, often reprinting articles, in
translation, from major European periodicals. Dwight had a stable of regular
contributors, including Beethoven biographer Alexander Wheelock Thayer,
Transcendental writer and journalist George W. Curtis, and William
F. Apthorp, later principal music critic for the Boston Evening Transcript for
many years. And though he continued to favour German classics, Dwight
dutifully reported on more modern trends (Verdi and Wagner, for example),
and even included coverage of more ephemeral and popular idioms. An
ardent foe of slavery, he also wrote with sympathy towards African
American music. He published without hesitation notices of the earliest
publications of Negro spirituals, including a prescient review by the editor
of the New York Weekly Review, who claimed, in citing public reception of the
Fisk Jubilee Singers after the Civil War, that at last ‘the American school of
music has been discovered’.31
Despite Dwight’s lofty aims at bringing Americans to a greater appreciation
and understanding of classical music, the development of music in the country
did not follow the path Dwight had envisioned or for which he had so
assiduously laboured. Never very profitable, Dwight’s Journal obtained more
stable support when he arranged for prominent Boston music publisher
Oliver Ditson & Co. to take over the publication and distribution of the
journal in 1859, allowing Dwight to retain editorial control. Resisting
Ditson’s pressure to adopt a more popular tone, however, Dwight severed
ties with that company in 1879, and set up a similar arrangement with another
Boston publisher, Houghton, Osgood, and Co., but that partnership failed to
keep the Journal afloat. Dwight published the last issue of his Journal on
3 September 1881. In that final issue he expressed his somewhat bitter
disappointment in having failed in his mission:
29
[John Sullivan Dwight], ‘Introductory’, Dwight’s Journal of Music, 1/1 (10 April 1852), 4. 30
Ibid.
31
[John Sullivan Dwight], ‘Negro Folk Songs’, Dwight’s Journal of Music, 32/26 (5 April 1873), 411–12.
304 MARK MCKNIGHT
The truth is, we have for some time been convinced that there is not in this
country now, and never has been, any adequate demand or support for
a musical journal of the highest tone and character . . . A journal which devotes
itself to art for art’s sake, and strives to serve the ends of real culture, however
earnestly and ably, gets praise and compliment, but not support.32
Although Dwight felt he had failed to see his vision of music in America
realised, his influence was great on the readers he did reach, as Grant has
observed, ‘a select but influential audience of community leaders, university
and literary people, and others in position to implement, sometimes directly,
sometimes indirectly, many of his ideas’.33 Perhaps Dwight’s greatest con-
tribution, in the end, is the window he provided future scholars on a period of
rich and vibrant development in America’s musical life, even though that
development did not happen as he had hoped.
The end of Dwight’s Journal in 1881 occurred during the period of
American history – between Reconstruction and the First World War – that
has frequently been called the Gilded Age.34 As America advanced economic-
ally and industrially, men of great wealth, largely unencumbered by the
federal income taxes or governmental regulations of later generations, saw
their personal fortunes multiply, while they and their families displayed their
riches ever more conspicuously – building ornate, lavishly furnished man-
sions, taking extravagant voyages abroad and, like New York’s antebellum
Upper Ten, patronising the arts and music, particularly the opera. Because of
this attention from the elite classes, music in America, as Joseph Horowitz has
observed, gradually assumed the reputation as ‘queen of the arts’.35 The status
of music critics, particularly in America’s large metropolitan dailies, rose
concomitantly. Indeed, this era in many ways may be seen as a ‘golden period’
for American music criticism, as music critics became, according to Horowitz,
the ‘leading embodiments of taste and opinion’.36 Never before or since, in
fact, have music critics enjoyed such a prominent and important role in
shaping American musical taste.
Although music criticism in American newspapers generally improved,
both in the amount and quality of coverage, a number of critics, in
New York, Boston and Chicago, are remembered today for their exceptional
32
[John Sullivan Dwight], ‘Valedictory’, Dwight’s Journal of Music, 41/1051 (3 September 1881), 123–4.
33
34
Writers Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner coined the term in their 1873 novel The Gilded Age:
A Tale of Today to satirise what they perceived as a myriad of social problems and greed disguised by a thin
layer of gold.
35
Joseph Horowitz, Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall (New York: W. W. Norton,
2005), p. 3.
36
Horowitz, Classical Music in America, p. 63.
careers, some well into the twentieth century. They are often referred to
collectively as the ‘Old Guard’, a term first applied to them by Oscar
Thompson. In Boston, which considered itself the true cultural capital of
America, the Old Guard included two leading critical luminaries, William
Foster Apthorp (1848–1913) and Philip Hale (1854–1934). Apthorp and Hale
both enjoyed privileged upbringings and Ivy League educations, Apthorp at
Harvard, where he studied with influential composer and organist John
Knowles Paine, and Hale at Yale. In addition, both men had extensive per-
forming backgrounds. Before turning full-time to criticism, Apthorp taught
piano at New England Conservatory. Hale, having spent five years of music
study in Europe and despite passing the bar and practising law for a few years,
supported himself as a church organist until he settled in Boston and began
writing reviews for the Boston Post in 1890; he moved to the Boston Journal the
following year.
Apthorp, as noted previously, gained much of his early training writing
for Dwight’s Journal of Music, as well as for the literary magazine Scribner’s
Monthly. In 1881, the year Dwight’s folded, he began his long association with
the Boston Evening Transcript, a tenure than ended in 1903. From 1892 to
1901 he also served as programme annotator for the Boston Symphony
Orchestra. In addition, he published several books on music and edited
Scribner’s Cyclopaedia of Music and Musicians (New York, 1888–90). Though
sometimes characterised, perhaps unfairly, as ultra-conservative and reac-
tionary, Apthorp in fact held a centrist position, revering the classics cham-
pioned by his mentor Dwight, while also promoting Wagner and American
composers, though he condemned Dvořák’s ‘New World’ Symphony and
Edward MacDowell’s ‘Indian’ Suite for using what he considered ‘barbaric’
materials. Apthorp, like many of his predecessors, felt deeply about the
power of music as an ameliorating agent in people’s lives, and, unlike some
of his peers, he was basically self-effacing regarding his role as tastemaker,
noting that ‘the critic can easily learn more from artists than they are likely
ever to learn from him’.37
Equally conservative, if not so modest, Apthorp’s colleague-rival Philip
Hale held similar negative views on Dvořák and nationalistic music and also
championed American composers. An ardent Francophile, unlike Apthorp
and others, Hale in fact disdained Wagner and German music and musicians
in general, noting disparagingly that German composers and singers ‘subsist
mainly upon pork, veal, cabbage and beer . . . The diet of your average German
is indigestible; it puffs out logy men. Could a sparkling operetta in the French
37
Quoted in Grant, Maestros of the Pen, p. 72.
306 MARK MCKNIGHT
style be written after a year’s stay at a German boardinghouse?’38 Hale also

displayed a bias against programmatic works, preferring absolute music, and
though he championed Debussy, the extra-musical elements in such works as
La Mer troubled him.39
Hale’s career in Boston spanned several decades, and he wrote for
a succession of Boston papers, including the Post (1890–91), Journal
(1891–1903) and Herald (1903–33). In addition, he served as Boston corre-
spondent for the Musical Courier (1892–98) and edited the Musical Record
(1897–1901), the Musical World (1901–2) and the two-volume collection
Modern French Songs (Boston and New York, 1904). Hale’s principal contribu-
tion, however, was in his role as programme annotator for the Boston
Symphony Orchestra (1901–34), for it was Hale, as Grant has observed,
‘who did the most to develop orchestra programme annotator as an occupa-
tional genre for music critics ever since’.40 In his long association with the
BSO, Hale wrote notes for close to a thousand works. Though others, such as
Apthorp, had written programme notes before Hale began, Hale became the
model for all subsequent annotators. He approached this species of writing
differently from his subjective reviews, which were often quite opinionated;
his job here was to provide objective descriptions, including a ‘play-by-play’
narrative of the piece, as well as offering concert-goers a vivid sense of the
composer’s personality and mien. As an example, his depiction of composer
Franz Schubert, in his programme notes for the composer’s ‘Unfinished’
Symphony:
Schubert was a clumsy man, short, round-shouldered, tallow-faced, with

a great shock of black hair, with penetrating though spectacled eyes, strong-
jawed, stubby-fingered. He shuffled in his walk, and he expressed himself in
speech with difficulty. He described himself as unhappy, miserable; but his
practical jokes delighted tavern companions, and he was proud of his perfor-
mance of The Erlking on a comb.41
Yet even in his annotations, Hale could not sometimes escape his penchant for
archness: in the same passage on Schubert, Hale continued by extolling the
virtues of the composer’s lieder, claiming that ‘no one has treated the passion
of love more purely’.42 Then he gets down to the business at hand, beginning
38
Boston Home Journal (26 April 1890), quoted in Horowitz, Classical Music in America, p. 64.
39 40
Horowitz, Classical Music in America, p. 65. Grant, Maestros of the Pen, p. 75.
41
Philip Hale, ‘Franz Peter Schubert’, in John N. Burk (ed.), Philip Hale’s Boston Symphony Programme
Notes: Historical, Critical, and Descriptive Comment on Music and Composers (Garden City: Doubleday, Doran
& Co., 1936), pp. 261–5. The online Boston Symphony Orchestra Archives allows access to the BSO
programme books at: collections.bso.org/digital/collection/PROG.
42
Hale, ‘Franz Peter Schubert’, p. 264.
his discussion of the symphony by exhorting: ‘Let us be thankful that

Schubert never finished the work. Possibly the lost arms of the Venus of
Milo might disappoint if they were found and restored.’43 While his annota-
tions may not have been as widely read as his newspaper reviews, nonetheless,
they reflected the important role of critics, especially the ‘Old Guard’, in
forming the musical canon: ‘to be hailed by Hale into BSO annals was to be
incorporated by other annotators and professional music appreciationists ever
after into the composer pantheon’.44
While Apthorp and Hale were pontificating on all things musical in Boston,
Old Guard critics in other cities were also guiding the musical tastes of
Americans. In New York the list began with Fry and Watson’s successor at
the Tribune, John R. G. Hassard (1836–88), whose ardent promotion of
Wagner did much to fuel Wagnermania during this period. Hassard wrote
for the Tribune from 1866 to 1884, just when resistance to Wagner’s ‘Music of
the Future’, decried by earlier critics, was breaking down. Whereas thirty
years earlier Henry Watson had shunned Verdi’s brassy excesses for the more
melodious operas of Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti, Hassard’s critical assess-
ment of the latter’s La figlia del reggimento in 1874 tells us much about the
tastes of New York audiences at this time:
it may be questioned, however, whether not merely this bright little opera of
Donizetti’s . . . but the whole class of works it represents, has not seen its day.
People are no longer content with the music over which one gently smiles.
They look for more stimulating entertainments – tears, madness, agony, and
heroism at the opera house, and the heartiest sort of farce on less pretentious
stages.45
Hassard’s assessment of Wagner’s Lohengrin when it premiered at the Academy

of Music, New York’s principal opera house, in March 1874 (and also in
Italian!), was equally insightful; Hassard called this performance ‘of the very
first importance in the field of art’, and perceptively observed that Wagner’s
work was not an opera, but ‘a new form, an “Art-work”’.46 If Wagner’s music
dramas were to succeed in New York, he continued, the public would have to
learn to judge each work as a whole, rather than the ‘attractiveness of individual
scenes’.
43 44
Ibid., pp. 261–5. Grant, Maestros of the Pen, p. 77.
45
[John R. G. Hassard], ‘The Opera: La figlia del reggimento’, New York Tribune (8 October 1874), 6, quoted
in McKnight, ‘Music Criticism’, 405.
46
[John R. G. Hassard], ‘Wagner’s Lohengrin’, New York Tribune (23 March 1874), 7, quoted in McKnight,
‘Music Criticism’, 403; Hassard in his review also noted correctly that Lohengrin had in fact been produced
three years earlier by a German opera company at the Stadt Theatre, but he dismissed that production as
strictly ‘for the Germans’ and attracting ‘little attention from the native population.’
308 MARK MCKNIGHT
The acceptance of Wagner continued to grow; three years later several

New York papers dispatched their critics to Bayreuth to report on the highly
anticipated premiere of Wagner’s Ring des Nibelungen, perhaps the decade’s
most significant operatic event. Hassard declared the performance of the cycle
to be ‘one of the most stupendous successes the stage has ever witnessed . . .
nothing in the remotest degree approaching the grandeur and effectiveness of
what we are now hearing has ever been presented on the lyric stage. The
victory of Wagner is overwhelming.’47 The Times critic, Frederick A. Schwab
(1844–1927), was no less effusive in his praise of the cycle, but he did express
some doubt as to the practicalities of transferring Wagner’s concept of the
Gesamtkunstwerk to New York, and he observed that full appreciation of
Wagner’s Ring required prior study and ‘the intent to labor . . . This may be
the temper of the music-lover of the future, but it is certainly not that of the
music-lover of the present.’48
Following Hassard and Schwab in New York were a group of critics, Henry
E. Krehbiel (1854–1923), Henry T. Finck (1854–1926), William J. Henderson
(1855–1937) and James Gibbons Huneker (1857–1921), whose careers and
writings are seen today as encapsulating the full essence of the fin-de-siècle
New York musical scene. These Old Guard critics continued the advocacy for
Wagner that Hassard had initiated, yet they each left their mark on music in
New York in different ways, not only by their newspaper reviews, but also
through their many other writings.
Krehbiel was born in Michigan to German-American parents and raised in
Cincinnati, Ohio. He studied law and was self-taught in music, though he
possessed a thorough musical knowledge. Unlike his Ivy League-educated
colleagues, he never attended college. Krehbiel came to New York in 1880 and
was soon hired by the Tribune as assistant music critic, before replacing the
ailing Hassard in 1884. Krehbiel stayed at the Tribune for forty-three years,
retiring in 1923. He was a prolific author, penning a dozen books in addition
to his journalistic writings. Chief among these was his translation and com-
pletion of Thayer’s Life of Ludwig van Beethoven.49 His How to Listen to Music was
frequently reprinted; his two-volume history of opera in New York, Chapters
of Opera, and More Chapters of Opera, remains a landmark of its kind.50 Often
47
[John R. G. Hassard], ‘Wagner at Bayreuth’, New York Tribune (23 August 1876), 1–2, quoted in
48
Frederick A. Schwab, ‘The Baireuth Festival’ [sic], New York Times (14 August 1876), 5, quoted in
49
Alexander Wheelock Thayer, The Life of Ludwig van Beethoven, eds. Hermann Deiters and
Hugo Riemann, trans. Henry Edward Krehbiel (New York: Beethoven Association, 1921).
50
Henry Edward Krehbiel, How to Listen to Music (New York: C. Scribner’s, 1896); Chapters of Opera
(New York: H. Holt, 1908); More Chapters of Opera (New York: H. Holt, 1919).
called the dean of New York music critics, Krehbiel championed Dvořák and
was a leading advocate of nationalism in music. Among his most important
contributions was his promotion of ethnic music, especially that of African
Americans, during a time when many critics displayed what Krehbiel called an
‘ungenerous and illiberal attitude’ towards African American music,
a statement voiced in the preface to his path-breaking study, Afro-American
Folksongs: A Study in Racial and National Music.51
Unlike Krehbiel, Henry T. Finck and William J. Henderson were Ivy
League graduates, Finck at Harvard and Henderson at Princeton. Finck, like
Krehbiel the Midwest-born son of German immigrants, studied with John
Knowles Paine at Harvard before spending several years in Germany and
Austria; he helped finance his studies abroad by writing articles on music for
American papers. Also an ardent promoter of Wagner, Finck spent the major-
ity of his long career as music critic for the New York Evening Post and The
Nation, retiring after forty-three years. Of somewhat more genial tempera-
ment than his peers, he viewed his role as that of the enthusiastic advocate,
and he sometimes despaired of having to give a negative review. Finck’s wife,
Abbie Cushman Finck (1868–1940), frequently collaborated with Finck and is
thought to have written many of the reviews attributed to her husband.
William J. Henderson, whose lengthy career spanned fifteen years at the
Times (1887–1902) and another thirty-five at the New York Sun (1902–37), in
addition to his Princeton studies also received training in voice and piano.
Besides his newspaper reviews, Henderson wrote music appreciation books,
operetta librettos, some volumes of verse and fiction, and even books on
seamanship and sailing – his Elements of Navigation was used as a training
manual by the US Navy in the First World War. Unlike his predecessor at
the Times, Frederick Schwab, whose sometimes questionable journalistic
practices harkened back to an earlier era, Henderson was highly respected,
particularly with regard to vocal music and opera, as well as for his plain, clear
but often stinging prose. Though revered among his peers and the music-
loving public in New York as one of the ‘grand old men’ of music criticism,
Henderson, like most of the other Old Guard members, was never able to
come to terms with modern music, and in his later years he seemed increas-
ingly out of touch with contemporary currents.
Not so James Gibbons Huneker, whose status as perhaps the most enligh-
tened of the Old Guard, and the most versatile, is demonstrated by his prolific
output – more than twenty books and myriad writings on music, art, drama
51
Henry Edward Krehbiel, Afro-American Folksongs: A Study in Racial and National Music (New York:
G. Schirmer, 1914).
310 MARK MCKNIGHT
and literature, in addition to his reviews in numerous New York and

Philadelphia newspapers and magazines. Equally proficient as a critic in all
artistic areas, he described himself as ‘steeplejack of the arts’ in his autobio-
graphy Steeplejack.52 Despite his varied interests, music remained the focal
point of Huneker’s critical writings. A man of enormous, polymathic intellect,
his lack of a college education did not hamper the course of his career. Early
attempts at apprenticing for the law were soon replaced by his desire to
become a concert pianist, but after several years of study, his work as freelance
journalist for the Etude and other music journals showed Huneker the path to
his true calling. Where Henderson’s forte was opera, Huneker’s was the
piano; he published a highly acclaimed biography of Chopin and edited
volumes of Chopin’s piano music. Huneker could sometimes be less than
kind towards other music critics, but was generally regarded as a critic’s critic;
Irving Kolodin, writing in 1960, declared Huneker among all the Old Guard
critics to be ‘the universal choice as elder statesman . . . not only for erudition
and wit, but also for the racing fluency of his writings’.53
Although the Boston–New York axis continued to be central to classical
music in America, as the country expanded westward, musical activities began
to intensify in a number of Midwestern cities. The most influential centre for
music criticism outside New York or Boston was Chicago, where two New
England-born music critics, W. S. B. Mathews (1837–1912) and George
Putnam Upton (1834–1919), led much of the musical growth. Mathews,
a piano teacher and organist, had little formal education but was highly
literate in the arts and music. He began his journalistic career by contributing
articles to Dwight’s Journal of Music under the pseudonym ‘Der Freyschutz’ –
his reports on musical activities in Chicago helped bring the city national
exposure – and later he was a fervent advocate for music in his adopted
hometown. He set out to inform people ‘back East’ that although
Midwesterners had initially been slow to respond to ‘the art enthusiasm’ of
those who laboured on behalf of music in their cities, ‘when they did, how-
ever, awaken to the dignity and importance of musical culture, they met the
zeal of those who pointed out the way, with an equal enthusiasm and with
ardent, liberal and generous appreciation’.54 Mathews worked as music critic
for the Chicago Tribune from 1877 to 1886 and also wrote for other Chicago
dailies during this time; later he edited the magazine Music (1891–1902) and
contributed more than five hundred articles to the Etude and other music
52
James Huneker, Steeplejack (New York: C. Scribner’s, 1920).
53
Irving Kolodin, ‘Huneker’s Hundredth’, Saturday Review (30 January 1960), 53.
54
Mathews, Hundred Years, p. 82.
journals. Like the others, Mathews also wrote books – his Hundred Years of
Music in America, the first comprehensive history of American music, provides
a wealth of information on nineteenth-century musical life in the United
States.55 Mathews’s insightful writings show a critic who was forward-
thinking and progressive yet thoroughly grounded in the Western European
musical tradition, and one whose prodigious output was unmatched.
George P. Upton, by contrast to Mathews, had an Ivy League pedigree, but
no formal musical training. Nonetheless, his influence on music in Chicago
during his life was large. As longtime critic (writing under the pseudonym
‘Peregrine Pickle’) for the Chicago Tribune (1863–81) and then senior editor for
that paper (1881–1905), he tirelessly promoted music, especially local musical
groups, and was instrumental in founding the Chicago Symphony Orchestra
in 1891, lobbying strongly for the hiring of conductor Theodore Thomas, the
leading orchestral conductor in America.
Chicago continued its rise in musical importance throughout the early
twentieth century. As the Old Guard passed away and the Gilded Age faded
into the Jazz Age, a new generation of critics emerged. These younger critics
wrote in leaner, more direct prose and were, as a group, more open to
contemporary music, if not always championing it. In Chicago, the leading
critic and successor to Upton and Mathews was Claudia Cassidy (1899–1996),
who wrote authoritatively – and often vituperatively – on music, dance and
drama for various Chicago dailies for forty years, including a twenty-three-
year run at the Chicago Tribune (1942–65). On the West Coast, Chicago native
Alfred Frankenstein (1906–81) had an even longer tenure at the San Francisco
Chronicle (1934–75), where the level of his influence recalled that of the Old
Guard critics a generation earlier. John Rosenfield (1900–66) also had a similar
reputation and impact in Dallas, where he began writing the ‘Amusements’
column for the Dallas Morning News in 1925. Rosenfield’s writings on music
and the arts made him the leading cultural voice for the Southwest. He was
also active in helping to revive the Dallas Symphony in the mid-1920s, and in
the selection of its conductors.
In Canada, the first significant music critic to appear was the French-
Canadian composer, conductor and choirmaster Guillaume Couture
(1851–1915). Couture, the first Canadian to be admitted to the Paris
Conservatoire, trained there under Romaine Bussine and Théodore Dubois.
Once back in Canada, he wrote highly penetrating reviews in both national
languages for various Montreal papers, including La Minerve, Revue de
Montréal, La Patrie and the Montréal Star. His exacting standards and often
55
Ibid.
312 MARK MCKNIGHT
harsh critiques of local musicians made him unpopular in some quarters, and
Couture left Montreal for Paris in 1876 to become choirmaster at Ste-
Clotilde, the church where César Franck served as organist. Couture returned
to Montreal the following year, however, and set about cultivating the growth
of music in his native city, directing church choirs, conducting, teaching, and
composing with vigorous intensity until his death in 1915. Couture’s student
Léo-Pol Morin (1892–1941), the next major French-Canadian composer-
critic, also studied in Paris, immersing himself in the musical life of that city
and forming close friendships with Maurice Ravel, Ricardo Viñes and Alexis
Roland-Manuel in the years immediately following the First World War.
After returning to Montreal in 1925, Morin maintained an active career
teaching, composing and writing about music. He helped found Le Nigog
(1918), a short-lived yet influential journal devoted to contemporary litera-
ture and the arts; that journal exposed young Canadians to French modern-
ism. Later Morin wrote for La Patrie (1926–9), La Presse (1929–31) and Le
Canada (1933–41).
Leading Anglophone critics during this time in Canada included J. D.
Logan (1869–1929), Augustus Bridle (1868–1952) and Hector Charlesworth
(1872–1945). Charlesworth, a journalist and arts commentator, reviewed
music for Toronto’s Mail and Empire and later edited and provided music
criticism for Saturday Night, Canada’s premiere weekly. Bridle and
Charlesworth were among the first to write on and assess Canadian compo-
sers; Logan, a poet, literary critic, and aesthetician, explored the foundations
of Canadian criticism. Other critics included Thomas Archer (1899–1971),
who wrote for the Montreal Gazette for almost forty years and also provided
commentary for New York Philharmonic concert broadcasts on the CBC; H.
P. Bell (1872–1961), music and art critic for the Montréal Daily Star and the
Daily Herald; S. Roy Maley (1897–1967), critic for the Winnipeg Tribune;
Vancouver Sun critic Stanley Bligh (1883–1975); and George J. Dyke (1864–
1940), who wrote for the Vancouver World under the pseudonym ‘Gamba’.
Besides Morin, other French-language critics from this period included
Gustave Comte (1874–1932), Eugène Lapierre (1899–1970), Marcel Vallois
(1898–1991), Omer Létourneau (1891–1983) and Léo Roy (1887–1974).
Although few enjoyed very long publishing runs, also appearing during the
later nineteenth century were journals devoted to music, including Le Canada
musical, Musical Canada, TCM Conservatory Bi-Monthly, L’Album musical, La Lyre
and Le Passe-temps, the longest-lived Canadian music periodical (1895–1935,
1945–9).
Back in New York, many of the Old Guard would enjoy careers lasting well
into the 1920s and even 30s, by which time their now-conservative opinions
made them increasingly out-of-step with newer currents. Lawrence Gilman

(1878–1939), who began at Harper’s magazine in 1901 and succeeded Krehbiel
at the Tribune from 1923 until his death, may be seen as a transitional figure,
advocating, like his predecessors, for Wagner, but also championing, much as
Huneker did, the French impressionists, and even such ultramodern compo-
sers as Edgard Varèse. Richard Aldrich (1863–1937), who began his career in
New York in 1891 as Krehbiel’s assistant at the Tribune, was appointed music
editor at the rival Times in 1902, where he remained until his retirement in
1923. Aldrich’s writings were marked by their wit and refinement, and he was
also generally more receptive to modern trends. His most important legacy
lies in his role in raising the profile of the Times as the pre-eminent newspaper
for music criticism in America.
That legacy was continued by Olin Downes (1886–1955). Downes, who
brought a populist tone to classical music, enjoyed one of the longest careers
of any American music critic. He worked at the Boston Post as music critic from
1906 to 1924 before moving to the New York Times, where he served as critic
until his death. He was one of the first to exploit the new medium of radio,
providing commentary for broadcasts of the New York Philharmonic and
Boston Symphony. His popular broadcast-intermission Opera Quiz pro-
grammes for the Metropolitan Opera made him a national celebrity in the
1940s. Because of his national exposure, and in part because of market attri-
tion, Downes’s tenure at the Times reflected his position as the most influen-
tial critic in the country, but many of his opinions and views on contemporary
music now seem outdated – he praised Gershwin and Shostakovich but
vehemently denounced Stravinsky and Schoenberg, calling the latter’s Five
Pieces for Orchestra ‘very horrible’ and ‘the music of raw and tortured nerves’.56
Writing on Stravinsky’s first appearance in the United States in 1925, Downes
commented that the Russian composer had failed to live up to the expecta-
tions created by Le Sacre du printemps: ‘there is little question that the bewil-
dering rise of Igor Stravinsky from apparent creative nonentity to the position
of composer of the Sacre du printemps has been followed by a decline fully as
rapid and destructive of the high hopes of those who believed that in him
there was a prophet of a new age’.57 By contrast, Downes gave his most ardent
support for Sibelius, whose reception in America was to a great extent the
result of Downes’s tireless championing of the composer among American
56
Olin Downes, ‘Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra in Boston’, in Olin Downes on Music, ed.
Irene Downes (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1957), pp. 47–58.
57
Downes, ‘Stravinsky Visits America at Forty-three’, in Olin Downes on Music, p. 95.
314 MARK MCKNIGHT
conductors. Musicologist Glenda Dawn Goss has noted that Downes

‘preached the gospel of Sibelius as salvation for the twentieth-century soul’.58
Also making his mark on the radio as well as in print was the composer-
critic Deems Taylor (1885–1966), who succeeded Huneker at the New York
World in 1921. Taylor reached millions across America as a commentator for
New York Philharmonic and Metropolitan Opera broadcasts throughout the
1930s and 40s, and his books on music, largely based on his own radio talks,
were also popular. Though Taylor was generally sympathetic to modernism,
his own music was academically post-Romantic, and while well received
during his time, it was soon forgotten after his death.
Despite the fact that a few critics during this time avidly promoted it, much
avant-garde music continued to experience resistance from the mainstream
press, with a few exceptions. Among the rare early supporters of the new
music were writer-photographer Carl van Vechten (1880–1964), also one of
the first to write on modern dance as well as black music, and Paul Rosenfeld
(1890–1946), who wrote intelligent and persistent essays championing avant-
garde currents, including literature and the arts, in a number of literary and
progressive magazines (Seven Arts, New Republic, Vanity Fair and The Dial,
among others). Rosenfeld also wrote for the most important journal devoted
to new music at this time, Modern Music, founded by the League of Composers,
formed in 1923 for the purpose of promoting contemporary music. One of the
founding members of the League, Minna Lederman (1896–1995), served as
sole editor of the journal from its founding in 1924 until it ended in 1946.
A number of prominent American composers wrote frequently for her journal
(originally called League of Composers’ Review), among them Virgil Thomson,
Aaron Copland, John Cage, Elliott Carter, Roger Sessions and Leonard
Bernstein. She also solicited articles from such major European composers
as Arnold Schoenberg, Béla Bartók and Alban Berg. According to Joan Peyser,
Lederman ‘probably shaped pre-World War II American music more than any
single composer did’.59
Peyser notes that while Modern Music’s first issues were modelled after such
European publications as La Revue musicale, with short articles by European
scholars and an international focus, Modern Music soon ‘took on an idiosyn-
cratic American tone: fresh, brash, brusque, contentious’, a tone primarily due
to the composers – mostly young and American – Lederman invited to write
for the magazine.60 It was this composer’s perspective that set Modern Music
58
Glenda Dawn Goss, Jean Sibelius and Olin Downes (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1995), p. 57.
59
Joan Peyser, ‘A Power Broker Who Helped Shape American Music’, New York Times (25 December
1983), H17, 20.
60
Ibid., 17.
apart from other American music criticism of the time and provided American
composers with a vehicle to promote – and defend – not only their own music
but also to write perceptively about all current musical developments and
genres, including jazz and the new technology of sound recording.
Although many of Lederman’s regular composer-contributors were gifted
and accomplished writers on music, Virgil Thomson (1896–1989) was one of
the few who enjoyed equally distinguished professional careers both as com-
poser and as newspaper critic. After gaining acclaim for such works as Four
Saints in Three Acts (1927–8), The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936) and The River
(1937), Thomson began writing for the New York Herald Tribune in
October 1940 and remained there until he stepped down in 1954.
Thomson’s prose in his reviews matched his compositional style – plain,
clear and direct, but also frequently marked by a dry wit. He focused less on
performance than on composition, and often had sharp words for classical
music’s star system as well as for management. A pronounced Francophile, his
frequently expressed disdain for ‘the Germanics’ was no doubt coloured by
his early years studying in Paris. Thomson also fostered the discipline of
criticism, helping to found the New York Music Critics Circle and the
national Music Critics Association of North America. Thomson’s philosophy
of music criticism was simple and straightforward, like his music and prose: as
Grant observed, Thomson felt that the best music critics were good musicians
who can write well, rather than good writers who can play music.61 His
writings were published during his lifetime and afterward in a number of
collections, most recently and significantly in The Library of America’s The
State of Music and Other Writings.62
Although the Second World War often provides a convenient line of
chronological demarcation for many historical surveys, in the case of
American music criticism the division is especially apt. The continued demise
of major US dailies only intensified after the war, with Downes and Thomson
in New York as the twin pillars of substantive and influential music criticism
in the immediate post-war period. By then, the days of the ‘paid puff’ were
long gone, but so too were the ‘golden years’ of music critics as popular
celebrities, whose lengthy musings and opinions were followed eagerly by
the general public. Classical music itself was being transformed, as serialism
claimed ascendancy, leaving most audiences and many critics far behind. New
forms of media and entertainment also played a role in this evolution, with the
61
62
Virgil Thomson, The State of Music and Other Writings, ed. Tim Page (New York: The Library of America,
2016).
316 MARK MCKNIGHT
rise of television and the development of LP recordings in the immediate post-

war years greatly impacting live performances and concert attendance nation-
wide. With a few exceptions – notably, Harold Schonberg (1915–2003),
powerful New York Times critic from 1960 to 1980, whose crusade for the
revival of nineteenth-century performance practice led to a surge of interest in
it by performers and scholars – contemporary music criticism has tended more
towards objective reporting and analysis and away from personal agendas. But
the role that music critics played in the development of a vibrant musical
culture, both in the United States and Canada, is one that should not be
underestimated.
. 16 .
Music Criticism in Portugal: Towards an Overview

PAULO F. DE CASTRO
The problem of Portuguese music is not only a problem of creation, but also
one of criticism.
Fernando Lopes Graça1
The history of music criticism in Portugal is only slowly emerging as a field of

musicological inquiry, owing in part to the lack of a systematic inventory of
the relevant source materials, but also, no doubt, to the inherited view of the
nineteenth century (if not the twentieth) as a period of decadence following
a purported ‘golden age’ of Portuguese music – a view amounting to
a foundation myth of Portuguese musicology that has only recently begun
to be challenged.2 A reversal of this perspective was first articulated by the
composer, essayist and critic Fernando Lopes Graça, who claimed provoca-
tively, as early as 1935, that the nineteenth century had been, on the contrary,
‘the most fruitful, the one with the strongest and most beneficial conse-
quences’, providing the country with the first outline of a modern musical
life, less exclusively centred in the court, the church and – in theory, at least –
the Italian opera.3
Among the typical milestones of this renewal, reflecting the advances of
political liberalism and the development of a true public sphere, Lopes Graça
(like most historians since then) singled out the creation of the Sociedade
Filarmónica by the composer and pianist João Domingos Bomtempo (1822),
the founding of the Lisbon Conservatoire (1835) and the overhaul of the
1
Fernando Lopes Graça, ‘Criação e crítica na música portuguesa’, A música portuguesa e os seus problemas, I
(Lisbon: Caminho, 1989), p. 33. Portuguese spelling is normalised; all translations are my own.
2
For an introduction to the history of music in Portugal, see Rui Vieira Nery and Paulo Ferreira
de Castro, História da música (Sínteses da cultura portuguesa) (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, Casa da Moeda,
1991); also available in English, French and Mandarin versions. On the implications of the idea of national
decadence for Portuguese musicology, see Paulo Ferreira de Castro, ‘O que fazer com o século X I X ? Um
olhar sobre a historiografia musical portuguesa’, Revista portuguesa de musicologia, 2 (1992), 171–83.
3
Fernando Lopes Graça, ‘A música portuguesa no século X I X ’, A música portuguesa e os seus problemas, I
(Lisbon: Caminho, 1989), p. 65.
[317]
318 PAULO F. DE CASTRO
S. Carlos Theatre’s management under the wealthy dilettante Joaquim Pedro

Quintela, Count of Farrobo (1838–40).4 However, a typically ‘progressive’
musical culture of a bourgeois stamp was slow to develop in Portugal, espe-
cially as regards the establishment of public concert series, the cultivation of
the classical repertoire or the ever-elusive nationalisation of the opera theatre.
As we shall see, such concerns, reflecting a long-standing aspiration towards
the reform of public taste, the convergence with North and Central European
models of artistic organisation and the musical construction of identity,
would provide the essential background for the practice of music criticism –
especially in its more ‘idealist’ manifestations, which, like all aesthetic-
ideological forms of discourse, must themselves be understood as a shaping
force in musical life.
In Portugal as elsewhere the development of music criticism has been
closely linked to the flourishing of the periodical press, in its various forms:
the daily or weekly newspaper, the literary or cultural journal or the music
periodical as such, all of them providing platforms for the activity of the music
critic.5 Questions of authorship and readership of course loom large in any
approach to criticism, whether it is addressed to the general reading public or
to a more specialist, even a professional audience; whether critics lay claim to
some kind of professional qualification or see themselves as intuitive connois-
seurs – although clear-cut distinctions cannot always be made in this domain,
leaving room for a variety of rhetorical and communicational strategies to be
reckoned with. Whatever form it may assume, however, music criticism tends
to thrive on the production of differential schemata (beautiful versus ugly,
imitation versus imagination, foreign versus national, traditional versus mod-
ern, serious versus frivolous, etc.), each historical period being to an extent
4
The S. Carlos Theatre, inaugurated in 1793, had been the focus of Italian opera in Lisbon, followed at
a distance by its Porto counterpart, the S. João Theatre, opened in 1798. On the history of the S. Carlos,
see Francisco da Fonseca Benevides, O Real Teatro de S. Carlos de Lisboa. Desde a sua fundação em 1793 até à
actualidade. Estudo histórico (Lisbon: Castro Irmão, 1883); Benevides, Memórias 1883–1902 (Lisbon:
Ricardo de Sousa e Sales, 1902); Mário Moreau, O Teatro de S. Carlos: Dois séculos de história, 2 vols.
(Lisbon: Hugin, 1999); and, from a sociological perspective, Mário Vieira de Carvalho, Pensar é morrer ou
O Teatro de São Carlos na mudança de sistemas sociocomunicativos desde fins do séc. X V I I I aos nossos dias (Lisbon:
Imprensa Nacional, Casa da Moeda, 1993). See also Luísa Cymbron, Olhares sobre a música em Portugal no
século X I X : Ópera, virtuosismo e música doméstica (Lisbon: Colibri, 2012).
5
On the history of the Portuguese press, see José Tengarrinha, Nova história da imprensa portuguesa das
origens a 1865 (Lisbon: Temas e Debates, Círculo de Leitores, 2013); and Jorge Pedro Sousa, Helena Lima,
Antonio Hohlfeldt and Marialva Barbosa (eds.), A History of the Press in the Portuguese-Speaking Countries
(Porto: Media X X I, 2014). For bibliographical information on Portuguese periodicals, see Biblioteca Geral
da Universidade de Coimbra, Publicações periódicas portuguesas existentes na Biblioteca Geral da Universidade
de Coimbra, 3 vols. (Coimbra: Biblioteca Geral da Universidade, 1983/1991/2001); José Manuel Motta
de Sousa and Lúcia Maria Mariano Veloso, História da imprensa periódica portuguesa: Subsídios para uma
bibliografia (Coimbra: Biblioteca Geral da Universidade, 1987); Gina Guedes Rafael and Manuela Santos
(eds.), Jornais e revistas portugueses do século X I X , 2 vols. (Lisbon: Biblioteca Nacional, 2002); Mário Matos
e Lemos, Jornais diários portugueses do século X X : Um dicionário (Coimbra: Ariadne, 2006).
Music Criticism in Portugal: Towards an Overview 319
characterised by its predominant polarity; the fact that these and other pola-
rities often disguise larger issues of authority and power should come as no
surprise.
A Precursor
Properly speaking, the rise of music criticism in Portugal is a typical nine-
teenth-century phenomenon. Before that time, there is only scant evidence of
music being regarded as a worthy subject of discussion in the periodical press,
the development of which was itself marred by the country’s prevailing social,
economic and political conditions under the absolutist regime, eventually
abolished in 1834. Typically, the primitive gazetas were small in size, mainly
fulfilling an informative or a recreational function. Circulation of the gazetas
was limited to the upper echelons of society, and for a long time there was
little incentive to broaden their editorial scope, so that reputable men of
letters tended to look down on journalistic work. The spread of the
Enlightenment would nevertheless leave its mark in the Portuguese press, as
shown in a number of publications devoted to the propagation of the latest
advances in the sciences and the arts, one of which, the Gazeta literária of
Father Francisco Bernardo de Lima (1761–2), is not without musical
relevance.6 Throughout its pages, references to subjects as varied as dramatic
poetry, Italian opera, acoustics and music theory can be found, the most
interesting piece being a review (June 1762) of Il trascurato, a dramma giocoso
(music presumably by Vincenzo Ciampi, with interpolated material by
Pergolesi) staged in Porto’s public theatre, which served as the springboard
to some extended remarks on the aesthetics and civic function of the opera
theatre. Lima shows himself well acquainted with the theories of the French
philosophes and their appraisal of sentiment and naturalness as essential aes-
thetic values; he discusses the peculiarities of libretto-writing and the ques-
tion of operatic verisimilitude, firmly advocating a view of music – both vocal
and instrumental – as an imitation of the ‘natural signs’ of the passions (in
what amounts to an unacknowledged borrowing from the Abbé Du Bos’
Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la peinture, whose references to French
opera must have puzzled Lima’s readers). Regarding the actual Porto perfor-
mance, Lima pointed out that the prima donna’s virtuosity had elicited admira-
tion rather than emotion from the audience, thus drawing on a clear-cut
6
Full title of the first issue: Gazeta literária ou Notícia exacta dos principais escritos, que modernamente se vão
publicando na Europa. Conforme a análisis, que deles fazem os melhores críticos, e diaristas das nações mais
civilizadas (Porto: Na Oficina de Francisco Mendes Lima, 1761); later published in Lisbon.
differential paradigm – ‘artificial’ versus ‘expressive’ music – well-attuned to

the first stirrings of the age of sensibility.7
Periodicals of an encyclopedic character, appealing to an emerging bour-
geois reading public and the growing taste for a lighter kind of erudition, were
to become more popular with the approach of the new century. That the
dissemination of Enlightenment ideals – and with it, the exercise of criticism –
was subject to the vagaries of the status quo, however, can be inferred, for
instance, from the negative opinion put forward by the General Intendent of
the Police as late as 1813, regarding the licensing of a new periodical, on the
argument that such publications tended to spread ‘the poison of criticism,
that has upset great nations’.8 Predictably, the history of the press would
closely follow the vicissitudes of the country in the early decades of the
nineteenth century, throughout the convoluted sequence of foreign occupa-
tion, political strife, civil war and the loss of Brazil as a colony.9
Music in the Public Sphere

With the impact of the 1820 Liberal Revolution and the consolidation of the
freedom of the press after 1834, Portuguese periodicals entered a new phase,
marked by the quick multiplication of titles in circulation, together with the
number of their readers; as a journalist was to put it in the following decade,
‘this century is made of paper’.10 The trend coincides with the establishment
of the political partisan press, fostered in part by the return of journalists and
intellectuals previously exiled in England and France. This new generation of
activists and ideologists was quick to embrace the press as a tool for the
development of a civic consciousness, in tandem with a call for the reform
7
Francisco Bernardo de Lima, Gazeta literária, I I (June 1762), 99. See also Manuel Carlos de Brito, Opera
in Portugal in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), pp. 110ff; and Paulo
Ferreira de Castro, ‘Sobre os primórdios da crítica musical em Portugal’, in Manuel Pedro Ferreira and
Teresa Cascudo (eds.), Música e história: Estudos em homenagem a Manuel Carlos de Brito (Lisbon: CESEM/
Colibri, 2017).
8
Cited in Tengarrinha, Nova história da imprensa, p. 107.
9
Musical activity in the country remained relatively intense throughout the period, although press
coverage of musical events does not seem to have been extensive. Perhaps surprisingly, some of the most
detailed chronicles of Portuguese musical life until c. 1825 can be found in the Leipzig Allgemeine
musikalische Zeitung, whose Lisbon informants must have included some musically active members of
the local German community. See Manuel Carlos de Brito and David Cranmer, Crónicas da vida musical
portuguesa na primeira metade do século X I X (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, Casa da Moeda, 1990);
Francesco Esposito, ‘Lisbona 1822: La vita musicale attraverso la stampa periodica’, Revista portuguesa
de musicologia, 10 (2000), 31–81; ‘Os primeiros passos em direcção à crítica musical: Algumas considerações
sobre a presença da música na imprensa da Lisboa liberal (1822–1855)’, in Música e história.
10
In the period between the Revolution of September 1836 and the end of 1841 (the most radical and
consequential phase of the liberal regime) alone, over 200 new periodicals made their appearance in the
country (Tengarrinha, Nova história da imprensa, p. 508). Quotation from O espelho do palco, 1
(1 September 1842), 1.
of public instruction, a project that would henceforth mobilise (and often

frustrate) the country’s political energies. Among the arts, theatre in particu-
lar – in its double function as education and entertainment – had a crucial role
to play, thus giving rise to a close and enduring association between the
worlds of theatre and journalism, with immediate consequences for the
practice of criticism. Since opera was to remain the true focus of musical life
for a long time to come, it was only natural that music criticism should have
developed in the shadow of theatrical criticism, not infrequently the province
of journalists with a personal stake in theatrical business, making it sometimes
hard to distinguish criticism from propaganda (or partisan polemics, as the
case may be). At any rate, at a time when genuine music periodicals were rare
or non-existent in Portugal, music criticism was frequently to be found in
publications nominally devoted to the theatre.
It is only fitting that the figure largely responsible for the organisation of
both the National Theatre and the Lisbon Conservatoire, the author and
liberal politician Almeida Garrett, should also have played a relevant role as
a critic, paving the way for countless imitators throughout the nineteenth
century and beyond.11 Not surprisingly, Garrett’s criticism relates to music
via the opera stage, as exemplified in a review of Mercadante’s Didone abban-
donata (to a Metastasian libretto), published in the daily O Português in 1827.12
In this review, the first part of which consists of a discussion of previous
dramatic adaptations of the Virgilian episode, Garrett displays the deep
Classicist roots of his sensibility, never disowned in spite of his Romantic
proclivities. He praised Mercadante for the choice of libretto and a concern for
literary standards unusual among contemporary Italian composers, noting
how the ‘delicate and vague sensations of the poem’ had been faithfully
rendered by the musician. The critic also found words of praise for the
performance, singling out the prima donna for her vocal and dramatic artistry
(stressing the naturalness and expressiveness of her acting, in terms that a man
of the Enlightenment would have found congenial), adding some interesting
comments on the insufficient archaeological truth of the costumes, but above
11
Garrett was entrusted in 1836 with the plans for the foundation and organisation of a National
Theatre, which, as a school of good taste, was meant to contribute to the civilisation and moral improve-
ment of the Portuguese nation. He served as Inspector-General of National Theatres and Spectacles – the
highest position in the State theatrical apparatus – between 1836 and 1841. For a handy survey of
theatrical life in the period, see Ana Isabel Teixeira de Vasconcelos, O teatro em Lisboa no tempo de
Almeida Garrett (Lisbon: IPM, Museu Nacional do Teatro, 2003).
12
Unsigned [attrib. Garrett], ‘Teatro de S. Carlos. (Ópera, Dido abandonada . . .)’, O Português
(28 April 1827), 416–17. The presence of Mercadante in Lisbon in the years 1827–28 must have stimulated
the activity of local publicists, as can be inferred from the debates on the relative merits of Mercadante and
his Portuguese rival J. E. Pereira da Costa, which found an echo in the pages of O Constitucional in the early
months of 1828, followed by a war of pamphlets. The case seems typical of a time when critical debate
could easily degenerate into personal feud.
all, chiding the audience over what he deemed their anarchic enthusiasm (the
habit of interrupting the performance with extemporaneous applause), a sign
of the new standards of polite conduct in society that were part and parcel of
the critic’s ‘civilising’ zeal. Garrett’s example seems to have inspired
a plethora of followers, with the sudden proliferation of new periodicals
(however short-lived) devoted to theatrical and musical activity, among
them O entreacto (1837, 1840), Atalaia nacional dos teatros (1838),
O desenjoativo teatral (1838), Revista teatral (1839, followed by other periodicals
bearing the same title), A sentinela do palco (1840–1), O espelho do palco (1842),
A fama (1843), O raio teatral (1843), O espectador (1843, 1844 and 1848–51),
Revista dos espectáculos (1850–7) and the slightly later Crónica dos teatros
(1861–80), together offering a lively cross-section of critical writing (or
what passed for such) in the mid-century.13
Some of those periodicals are also valuable for their coverage of the activ-
ities of philharmonic societies, responsible for a noticeable surge in amateur
and semi-professional musical practice in the liberal era. Significantly, by
1850, a critic from O espectador would claim that the love of music had spread
among the Portuguese public in a prodigious fashion, as ‘one of the most
outstanding features of the progress of our civilisation’; whereas a fellow-
critic from the Revista dos espectáculos wryly deplored the decline of the theatre
at a time when ‘a contagious musical fever [was] seizing the country, victor-
iously invading even the least philharmonic theatres of Lisbon’.14 Probably as
a result of this development, the 1850s would see the publication of the first
specialist music periodicals, such as O trovador in 1855 (followed by O Rigoleto
[sic] in 1856), two titles obviously echoing the growing local popularity of
Verdi as an opera composer (a popularity soon to be denounced as too
exclusive).15 Interestingly, in the inaugural issue of O trovador, the pianist
and composer Emílio Lami denounced the lack of musically authoritative
voices in the press, calling for a more professional kind of criticism at a time
when, as he put it, music was increasingly regarded as a social necessity rather
than a mere pleasure, thus staking out a new position for the musical specialist
in the cultural sphere.16 In the meantime, a combination of chronicle and
13
For an overview of theatrical periodicals in Portugal, see Luís Francisco Rebello, ‘Jornais e revistas de
teatro em Portugal’, Sinais de cena, 1–2 (June–December 2004), 69–71, 56–8.
14
‘Filarmónicas’, O espectador (2nd series), 15 (8 December 1850), 118; ‘Teatros nacionais’, Revista dos
espectáculos, 1/10 (16 November 1850), 1.
15
See Biblioteca Nacional Portugal, Verdi em Portugal 1843–2001: Exposição comemorativa do centenário da
morte do compositor, exhibition catalogue (Lisbon: Biblioteca Nacional – Teatro Nacional de S. Carlos,
2001).
16
E. Lami, ‘Da necessidade e conveniência dum jornal musical em Lisboa’, O trovador. Jornal musical,
literário, e de variedades, 1 (12 May 1855), 1–3. Incidentally, Lami’s references to French authorities denote
the all-pervading influence of French critical models in Portugal at the time.
criticism came to define the ever-popular, French-inspired feuilleton, regularly

cultivated in both the general and the specialist press by a number of promi-
nent littérateurs. The most important mid-century daily, A Revolução de
Setembro (1840–92), for instance, counted some highly successful feuilletonistes
among its collaborators, such as António Pedro Lopes de Mendonça and Júlio
César Machado, who would often choose theatrical and musical subjects for
their articles.17 In Porto, the prolific novelist Camilo Castelo Branco was also
an active provider of feuilletons for the local press.
‘Philosophical’ Music
A more genuinely Romantic note is sounded in the press echoes of the Count
of Farrobo’s management of the Lisbon opera on the threshold of the 1840s,
during which, in a conscious effort to emulate Parisian fashions, the French
repertoire of grand opéra for the first time began to compete with the Italian
standards for public attention (even though only Italian versions were used
locally). For a brief period, opera productions in the S. Carlos Theatre attained
an unprecedented degree of artistic coherence and overall lavishness, lending
a new brilliance to Lisbon’s social and music-theatrical life. Among the works
then premiered, Auber’s La muette de Portici, Meyerbeer’s Robert le diable (both
1838) and even Mozart’s Don Giovanni (1839) loom large, the latter’s excep-
tional status as a ‘classic’ work signalled by an extended presentation article in
the Diário do Governo (5 January 1839). However, the spectacular impact of
Robert far surpassed that of Mozart’s work at the time, firmly securing
Meyerbeer’s reputation as a ‘German’ (or ‘philosophical’) composer, and
thus providing criticism with a new differential paradigm that seems to
prefigure the Wagnerian wave later in the century (the epithet ‘philosophical’
being increasingly applied to all music with lofty aesthetic credentials). The
recently launched Jornal do Conservatório set the tone in its second issue
(15 December 1839), with an enthusiastic review of Meyerbeer’s ‘fantastic
and sublime work’, in which ‘novel musical harmonies’ were made to enhance
all that was ‘astounding, passionate, sentimental, religious and terrible’ in the
old legend, thus investing music with an imaginative power that resolutely
announced the threshold of a new age. Less predictably, the review also placed
the composer in the lineage of the great Viennese triad of Haydn, Mozart and
17
Other widely read newspapers featuring music reviews included the long-lived Jornal do comércio
(1853–1976) and O comércio do Porto (1854–2005). For some samples of Mendonça’s writing, see
António Pedro Lopes de Mendonça, ‘Revista de Lisboa. Fisiologia do Teatro de S. Carlos’, A Revolução
de Setembro (3 March 1849), 1–3; ‘Revista dos espectáculos’, A Revolução de Setembro (16 June 1849), 1–2, in
which, apropos a concert by the Polish pianist A. Kontski, the critic rhapsodises on the idealistic nature of
music as an art, as opposed to the materialist outlook of the modern world.
Beethoven – a lineage that, despite the lip-service paid by a few critics, had yet
to take deep roots in Portuguese musical culture. The somewhat crude stereo-
typing of ‘Italianism’ versus ‘Germanism’, as easily politicised ciphers for
‘routine’ (conservatism) and ‘progress’ (evolution, ‘the future’) respectively,
was to remain in place well into the twentieth century, re-emerging whenever
critics sought to denounce the perceived backwardness of Portuguese cultural
life. Interestingly, towards the end of the century, there were signs that
French influence was destined to provide the most viable alternative to such
a manichean opposition, as a kind of artistic juste milieu.18
The usual polarities, nonetheless, preside over the feuilletons of the future
novelist Eça de Queirós for the Gazeta de Portugal (1866–7), as well as his
unsparing assessment of Portuguese theatre in As farpas (December 1871), in
which he shows himself an antagonist of Italian operatic ‘sensuousness’ and an
advocate of the somewhat nebulous, Romantic idea of German music that he
shared with the majority of his progressive contemporaries – without how-
ever paying due attention to Wagner. (On the other hand, Eça’s satiric bent
made him an enthusiastic admirer of what he termed Offenbach’s ‘philosophy
in song’.)19 Although Wagnerian ‘symphonic’ excerpts had been sporadically
played in orchestral concerts since the 1860s, and his scores privately studied
by a handful of devotees, a closer acquaintance with Wagner’s work would
only begin in earnest after the local premiere of Lohengrin in 1883.20 Wagner
was to reach true cult status around the turn of the century, thanks to
a number of committed critics and publicists, among whom were Jaime
Batalha Reis, José de Arriaga, António Arroio, José Júlio Rodrigues and
Aarão de Lacerda (running the gamut of ideological positions, from positivism
to mysticism), alongside the prime mover in Porto musical life, Bernardo
Moreira de Sá, and the distinguished pianist José Viana da Mota, a Liszt
pupil and a highly respected collaborator of the Bayreuther Blätter and other
publications during his prolonged sojourn in Germany.21
18
See, for instance, Manuel Ramos, A música portuguesa (Porto: Imprensa Portuguesa, 1892). For
a dissenting voice, see P. P., ‘A música alemã e a música latina’, A arte musical, 1/33 (21 July 1874), 1–2.
19
Eça de Queirós, ‘Sinfonia de abertura’, ‘O Macbeth’, ‘Mefistófeles’, Textos de imprensa I (da Gazeta de
Portugal) (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, Casa da Moeda, 2004), pp. 65–74, 75–83, 155–61; Queirós, As farpas.
Crónica mensal da política, das letras e dos costumes (Cascais: Principia, 2004), pp. 28–9, 302–11. On the
subject of music in Eça de Queirós’s work, see Mário Vieira de Carvalho, Eça de Queirós e Offenbach. A ácida
gargalhada de Mefistófeles (Lisbon: Colibri, 1999).
20
See for instance the series of articles published in the journal O Ocidente from 1 March 1883, signed
V. de D. (= Jaime Batalha Reis), in connection with this premiere.
21
On Portuguese Wagnerism, see Mário Vieira de Carvalho, Pensar é morrer, pp. 131ff; and Paulo F. de
Castro, ‘Wagnerism at the Edge: Some Aspects of Richard Wagner’s Impact on Portuguese Fin-de-Siècle
Culture’, in Luca Sala (ed.), The Legacy of Richard Wagner: Convergences and Dissonances in Aesthetics and
Reception (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012).
The topic of artistic nationalism was also increasingly discussed in the press,
even though palpable musical results in this area tended to remain meagre,
owing, no doubt, to the limited number of performance opportunities and
a lack of clarity about what should count as typically Portuguese in music.
Calls for a mythic return to the purity of national song resounded from time to
time, as for instance in an article (probably penned by the poet António
Feliciano de Castilho) in the widely read Revista universal (1841) deploring
the corrupting influence of Italian opera on national music,22 whereas fado
(the typical Lisbon urban song genre), if at all discussed in the press, tended to
be dismissed on account of its demoralising effect and its associations with
prostitution. Throughout the nineteenth century, opera remained very much
the province of Italian companies (apart from a feeble tradition of comic opera
in Portuguese), the creation of a national musical idiom remaining an elusive
aim in spite of a few isolated attempts, usually thwarted by the lack of
institutional support and the insufficient level of public interest. At any rate,
in a review of an opera by the composer Sá Noronha in 1868, the critic
Andrade Ferreira bluntly pointed out that the label ‘national’ was still tanta-
mount to bad publicity for a product of Portuguese art or industry.23 Such
debates, and the discursive strategies underwriting them, were largely carried
over into the next century.
Criticism Comes of Age

In many respects, the years 1865–70 marked a watershed in the history of
Portuguese culture, with the emergence of a group of artists and intellectuals
(the so-called ‘Geração de 70’, to which Eça and Batalha Reis belonged) who saw
as their mission the systematic scrutiny of the country’s endemic problems, thus
expressly foregrounding criticism as a prerequisite of social, political and cultural
regeneration. Calls for reform in all spheres of public life were given added
resonance by technological and communicational advances, as reflected in the
industrialisation of the press and the beginnings of modern informative journal-
ism, with the launching of the newspaper Diário de notícias in 1864. Music too was
to embrace the spirit of the times. A number of operas by Portuguese composers
reached the stage with some measure of success (sometimes exploring national
themes, as in the works of Alfredo Keil), and the question of the organisation of
a national opera theatre became a topic of public discussion. Orchestral and
22
Unsigned, ‘Progressos da música italiana’, Revista universal, 6 (4 November 1841), 66–8.
23
José Maria de Andrade Ferreira, ‘O arco de Santana’, repr. in Literatura, música e belas-artes, I I (Lisbon:
Rolland e Semiond, 1872), pp. 261–8.
chamber concerts became more and more frequent (although always on a modest
scale by European standards): ‘classical concerts’ under guest conductors
(Barbieri, Colonne, Dalmau, Bretón and Rudorff), for instance, were organised
by the Musicians’ Association from 1879, while foreign touring orchestras began
to include Lisbon and Porto in their schedules in the wake of the Berlin
Philharmonic (under Nikisch) in 1901 – even though regular concert series by
relatively stable local orchestras did not become a reality before 1911–12. All in
all, musical life showed signs of a considerable renewal, under the banner of
progress, modernisation and the recognition of music as an agent of social
harmony, thus instigating a true wave of missionary zeal in the press.24 As
early as 1867, the journal Crónica dos teatros, for instance, announced a change
in its editorial policy, henceforth increasing the coverage of opera and music
(while ceasing to report on bullfights); three years later, the German-schooled
Joaquim de Vasconcelos became responsible for the journal’s music section,
setting new, idealistic standards of criticism, as exemplified in a stern review of
a Mass by Emílio Lami that had the ring of a manifesto.25 As might be expected,
the most active phase of music criticism in the country coincided with the
expansion of music periodicals (usually the property of music publishers or
professional associations), of which the most significant were the Gazeta musical
de Lisboa (Lence and Viúva Canongia, 1872–6), Eco musical (T. S. Pinto dos Reis,
1873–4), A arte musical (Montepio Filarmónico, 1873–5), Crónica musical (J. A.
Pinto, 1877–8), Perfis artísticos (Associação Música 24 de Junho, 1881–3), Amphion
(A. and J. Neuparth, 1884–7 and 1890–8), Gazeta musical (J. Amann, 1884–6),
Gazeta musical de Lisboa (J. G. Pacini, 1889–97), A arte musical (J. M. Barreto,
1890–1), A arte musical (M. A. Lambertini, 1899–1915) and Eco musical (J. M.
Cordeiro, 1911–31).26 Naturally, theatre periodicals, such as the Revista teatral
(1885 and 1895–6), Eco artístico (1911–20) and Jornal dos teatros (1917–32), con-
tinued to report on musical events, as did cultural magazines and daily news-
papers, too numerous to be cited here.27
24
See Maria José Artiaga, ‘Continuity and Change in Three Decades of Portuguese Musical Life 1870–1900’,
unpublished PhD thesis, Royal Holloway, University of London (2007); João Silva, Entertaining Lisbon: Music,
Theater, and Modern Life in the Late 19th Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016).
25
Unsigned [second presumed to be Joaquim de Vasconcelos], Crónica dos teatros, 7/9 (6 September 1867),
1; ‘Missa do sr. E. Lami’, Crónica dos teatros, 10/12 (24 December 1870), 1–3. In the prologue to his major
work Os músicos portugueses: Biografia – Bibliografia, 2 vols. (Porto: Imprensa Portuguesa, 1870), pp. xiii–
xiv, Vasconcelos openly deplored the absence of true music criticism in the country, as opposed to what he
called the ‘school of mutual praise’, a derogatory catchphrase propagated by the ‘Geração de 70’.
26
See Isabel Maria Freire de Andrade, ‘Edições periódicas de música e periódicos musicais em Portugal’,
Boletim da APEM, 62 (July–September 1989), 47–50 (although her listing of periodicals is not exhaustive).
For the twentieth century, see the entry ‘Periódicos de música’, in Salwa Castelo-Branco (ed.), Enciclopédia
da música em Portugal no século X X , I I I (Lisbon: Temas e Debates, Círculo de Leitores, 2010), pp. 990–98.
27
For an introduction to the history of the press in the First Republic (1910–26), see A. H. de Oliveira
Marques, Guia de história da 1a República Portuguesa (Lisbon: Estampa, 1981). Among the most relevant
newspapers, one may cite the conservative Diário ilustrado (1872–1911), Novidades (1885–1923) and O dia
Questions of authoritativeness remained very much at the forefront of

critical discourse in the early part of the twentieth century. The most striking
development around the fin de siècle was probably the fact that, increasingly,
music criticism became the province of musicians rather than littérateurs – or,
to put it differently, musicians themselves for the first time came to aspire to
the status of intellectuals. Leaving behind such precursors as Júlio Neuparth
and Adriano Mereia, the outstanding representatives of the new class of
musician-intellectual, other than the previously cited Moreira de Sá and
Viana da Mota, were the composers Luís de Freitas Branco and Fernando
Lopes Graça, whose work as music critics would set new standards for the
entire century.28
Luís de Freitas Branco (1890–1955), who came of an aristocratic family,
benefitted from a cosmopolitan education (completed in Berlin as a pupil of
Humperdinck), being much influenced as a youth by an uncle with literary
and theatrical connections. As a composer, Freitas Branco evolved from
a youthful attachment to late Romanticism, via Impressionism, to
a somewhat academic commitment to neoclassicism, under the impact of
the movement known as Integralismo Lusitano (a Portuguese variant of the
Action Française), which was to leave a persistent trace in his personality as an
artist and an intellectual. In spite of his personal allegiance to the monarchy
(eventually abolished in 1910), he found himself increasingly drawn to the
political left after the 1926 military coup that ushered in several decades of
authoritarian rule. Although not primarily interested in folk music, he advo-
cated a nationalist-classicist aesthetic, based on his firm belief in an epochal
renaissance of the Latin spirit (thus enacting a ‘dialectical’ reversal of the
inherited nineteenth-century dichotomy), which transpires in many passages
from his critical writings.29 A precocious talent, he wrote his first critical
review for the Diário ilustrado on the 26 March 1907 (a rather pert assessment
of an opera by a much senior composer, provocatively couched in highly
technical language), and continued to produce criticism throughout his life,
for the daily as well as the specialist press, alongside a substantial musical and
literary output. In 1930 and 1950 respectively, he became director of the
journals A arte musical (new series) and Gazeta musical, two of the most
(1887–1927), whereas O século (1881–1978), O mundo (1900–27), A luta (1906–23), República (1911–75) and
Diário de Lisboa (1921–90) were prominent Republican dailies. The later Diário da manhã (1931–71)
eventually became the organ of Salazar’s single-party regime.
28
The list of twentieth-century Portuguese composer-critics further includes Rui Coelho, Francine
Benoît and Joly Braga Santos, the latter Freitas Branco’s best-known disciple.
29
See for instance the essays Freitas Branco, ‘A música e o pensamento latino’, De música, 1/2 (August
1930), 1–3; and ‘A hora do pensamento latino’, Arte musical, 3/97 (10 September 1933), 2. See
Alexandre Delgado, Ana Telles and Nuno Bettencourt Mendes (eds.), Luís de Freitas Branco (Lisbon:
Caminho, 2007).
influential Portuguese music periodicals of the twentieth century – a sure sign

of Freitas Branco’s unmatched intellectual prestige among musicians. Both
titles remain prime sources for the history of music-critical discourse, which,
especially from the 1930s, increasingly addressed the impact of radio and
recorded music30 – although at first in a rather defensive spirit, as many
professional musicians and music critics reacted to the new technologies,
and to the new music economy they made possible, with extreme suspicion.
Freitas Branco’s one-time pupil Fernando Lopes Graça (1906–94), encoun-
tered at the beginning of this chapter, was by far the most articulate
Portuguese musician of his generation. A man of deep left-wing convictions,
he was to take an intransigent stance against Salazar’s dictatorship, while
pursuing a highly individual path as a composer, his musical style aiming
towards a synthesis of Portuguese folk music and the modernism of
Debussy, Stravinsky and Bartók, sometimes inflected by a personal approach
to atonality. His critical mind and wide culture were matched by a genuine
literary talent, making his prose a model of clarity and acumen, as well as
polemical sharpness, as can be seen in his many contributions to the journals
Seara nova, Presença and O diabo, among others.31 Lopes Graça’s writings
touch upon virtually all the major issues of Portuguese musical life, such as
the social responsibility of the artist, the conflicting forces of nationalism and
cosmopolitanism, the impact of modernism on the European periphery, the
political uses of folklore and the vexed question of ‘Portugueseness’ in music.
His views were to resound throughout the subsequent history of music
criticism in Portugal.32
A Golden Age of Criticism?

In the second half of the twentieth century, Portuguese musical life benefitted
from the establishment in Lisbon of a powerful institution, the Calouste
30
The national broadcasting station (Emissora Nacional de Radiodifusão) was officially established in
1935. For an overview of the history of broadcasting in Portugal, see Manuel Deniz Silva, ‘Rádio’, in Salwa
Castelo-Branco (ed.), Enciclopédia da música em Portugal no século X X , I V , pp. 1080–7.
31
The journals Seara nova (1921–79) and Presença (1927–40) count among the most important twentieth-
century Portuguese literary and cultural journals. See Clara Rocha, Revistas literárias do século X X em
Portugal (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, Casa da Moeda, 1985); Daniel Pires, Dicionário da imprensa
periódica literária portuguesa do século X X , 2 vols. (Lisbon: Grifo, 1996 and 1999/2000).
32
See in particular Fernando Lopes Graça, A música portuguesa, I and its companion volumes, as well as
Lopes Graça, Talia, Euterpe e Terpsicore (Lisbon: Caminho, 1990). A selection of the composer’s critical
writings has been published as Lopes Graça, Páginas escolhidas de crítica e estética musical (Lisbon: Prelo,
n.d.). Recent literature on Lopes Graça includes Mário Vieira de Carvalho, Pensar a música, mudar o mundo:
Fernando Lopes-Graça (Porto: Campo das Letras, 2006); Teresa Cascudo, A tradição como problema na obra do
compositor Fernando Lopes-Graça: Um estudo no contexto português (Seville: Doble J, 2012); Ricardo
António Alves and Teresa Cascudo (eds.), Fernando Lopes Graça e a Presença (Cascais: Câmara Municipal
de Cascais/Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, Casa da Moeda, 2013).
Gulbenkian Foundation (created in 1956), whose broad outlook helped to

widen the cultural horizons of the previous decades by increasing the coun-
try’s exposure to international artistic and musical trends, thanks to its own
concert programming and a generous programme of grants and exchanges.
Following the re-establishment of democracy in 1974 and the accession to the
EEC in 1986, Portugal underwent major political, social and cultural changes,
reflected in the modernisation of the country’s infrastructure and a degree of
convergence with European standards in the domains of education and cul-
ture, as well as in consumption patterns. As a result, and in spite of the
fluctuations in the country’s official arts policies, at least the two main cities,
Lisbon and Porto, witnessed a surge in musical activity in the last three
decades of the twentieth century, marked by the great variety of genres,
repertoires and discourses on offer.
In a new internationalist age, critical focus within the field of art music tended
to shift away from neoclassical, folkloristic and identitary concerns towards
urbanism, modernism and the avant-garde, although the asymmetries in the
country’s musical development remained a topic widely discussed in the press.
Journals specifically devoted to art music entered a period of relative decline, but
ample coverage of musical life was nevertheless given by the generalist press
throughout the period, in widely read daily newspapers (or their arts supple-
ments) such as O comércio do Porto, O Primeiro de Janeiro (1868–), O século, Jornal de
notícias (1888–), Diário de notícias, Diário de Lisboa, Diário popular (1942–91),
A capital (1968–2005), O diário (1976–90) and Público (1990–), in the weekly
Expresso (1973–), and in cultural journals such as Jornal de letras e artes
(1961–70) and JL-Jornal de letras, artes e ideias (1981–). Among prominent critics
of art music were Francine Benoît, Macario Santiago Kastner, José Blanc de
Portugal, Manuel de Lima, João José Cochofel, João de Freitas Branco33
and Mário Vieira de Carvalho, although a detailed assessment of critical writing
in the late twentieth century remains beyond the scope of this chapter. Several
journals devoted mainly to popular music made their appearance from the late
1960s, such as Mundo da canção (1969–85), Musicalíssimo (several series in the
1970s and 1980s), Música & som (1977–89), Se7e (1978–95) and Blitz (1984–), but
on the whole there was little overlap in critical practice (and, presumably, in
readership) between the ‘art’ and ‘popular’ spheres, with perhaps a middle
ground occupied by jazz. More recently, the concept of ‘Lusophony’ (lusofonia) –
the idea of a community of Portuguese-speaking nations, including Portugal,
33
Between 1958 and 1973 João de Freitas Branco was the director of yet another series of the journal Arte
musical, henceforth the organ of the Juventude Musical Portuguesa (Portuguese branch of the Jeunesses
Musicales), itself established in 1948.
Brazil, Angola, Mozambique and Cape Verde, among others – has lent a new
dimension to the discussion of musical topics in the context of post-colonialism,
immigration and multiculturalism.34
Even before the end of the millennium, there were signs that the digital
revolution, in Portugal as elsewhere, was to have a profound and lasting
impact on all facets of musical life, including, of course, the structure of the
music market itself. With regard to music criticism, the most obvious con-
sequence of the crisis of the traditional press and the expansion of so-called
social media has been the shrinking of space given to music reviews in general-
ist newspapers, partly replaced since the late 1990s by digital platforms such as
the weblog (‘blog’) – whose ephemerality, incidentally, renders listings
instantly obsolete and may prove a huge challenge to documentation and
research purposes in the future. What long-term consequences the democra-
tisation of technological access and the current mystique of immediacy will
entail remain to be seen, although it would appear that new forms of partici-
patory criticism could develop out of the relatively fluid, non-hierarchical
structures of the new media. In any case, it is difficult to imagine the total
disappearance of the critic either as a reinforcer of prejudice or as a producer
of difference, as long as there will be an audience for music, the sheer amount
of music made available by the Internet making it almost inevitable that
someone, at some point, should assume the role of the ‘expert’ listener for
the benefit of some section of the public, and thus ensure the survival of
criticism as a viable option in the age of post-everything. In this too, Portugal
will most likely mirror global trends.
34
On popular music journalism in Portugal, see Pedro Nunes, ‘Good Samaritans and Oblivious
Cheerleaders: Ideologies of Portuguese Music Journalists Towards Portuguese Music’, Popular Music,
29/1 (2010), 41–59. Although not primarily concerned with music criticism, the following articles contain
relevant materials on the local reception of jazz: Pedro Roxo, ‘Jazz and the Portuguese Dictatorship
Before and After the Second World War: From Moral Panic to Suspicious Acceptance’, in Bruce Johnson
(ed.), Jazz and Totalitarianism (New York: Routledge, 2016); Pedro Roxo and Salwa Castelo-Branco, ‘Jazz,
Race, and Politics in Colonial Portugal: Discourses and Representations’, in Philip V. Bohlman and
Goffredo Plastino (eds.), Jazz Worlds/World Jazz (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2016). For a survey
of recent developments, see ‘Do século X X ao século X X I : processos, práticas musicais e músicos emer-
gentes’, appendix to Salwa Castelo-Branco (ed.), Enciclopédia da música em Portugal no século X X , I V , pp.
1361–92. This reference work also includes individual entries on a number of music critics.
. 17 .
Spanish Music Criticism in the Twentieth Century:

Writing Music History in Real Time
EVA MOREDA RODRÍGUEZ
This chapter examines how the documenting and reflecting on current musi-
cal life carried out by two Spanish music critics whose careers spanned most of
the twentieth century – Adolfo Salazar (1890–1958) and Federico Sopeña
(1917–91) – provided a crucial foundation for the historiography of Spanish
music after 1900. For decades, Salazar and Sopeña have shaped our thinking
about Spanish twentieth-century music; their works are still regarded as
authoritative to a considerable extent and they are frequently cited as second-
ary sources in studies of Spanish music. Indeed, it is only in the last decade
that their writings and biographies have started to be examined with a view to
identifying and critiquing the master narratives they crafted to present and
explain Spanish music of the twentieth century: the music they were
immersed in and, in some cases, turned into history almost from the moment
they heard it for the first time.1 This chapter aims to discuss how Salazar and
Sopeña, through their engagement with music criticism, crucially shaped
understandings of twentieth-century Spanish music. In order to do so, I will
examine both Salazar’s and Sopeña’s careers, some of their writings, and the
historical, sociocultural and political contexts which informed their work.
Important here is that Spanish musicology and Spanish music criticism
developed during the nineteenth century across completely antagonistic but
sometimes separate paths, which Salazar and Sopeña managed at times to
bring together. Modern Spanish musicology is typically considered to have
1
Javier Suárez-Pajares, ‘Joaquín Rodrigo en la vida musical y la cultura española de los años cuarenta.
Ficciones, realidades, verdades y mentiras de un tiempo extraño’, in Javier Suárez-Pajares (ed.), Joaquín
Rodrigo y la música española de los años cuarenta (Valladolid: Glares, 2005); María Palacios, La renovación
musical en Madrid durante la dictadura de Primo de Rivera: El Grupo de los Ocho (1923–1931) (Madrid: Sociedad
Española de Musicología, 2008), p. 14; María Palacios, ‘El Grupo de los Ocho bajo el prisma de Adolfo
Salazar’, in María Nagore, Leticia Sánchez de Andrés and Elena Torres (eds.), Música y cultura en la Edad de
Plata 1915–1939 (Madrid: ICCMU, 2009); Javier Suárez-Pajares, ‘Adolfo Salazar: luz y sombras’, in
Nagore, Sánchez de Andrés and Torres (eds.), Música y cultura; Eva Moreda Rodríguez, ‘Federico
Sopeña: los años formativos’, in Teresa Cascudo and María Palacios (eds.), Los señores de la crítica
Periodismo musical e ideología del modernismo en Madrid (1900–1950) (Seville: Doble J., 2011); Igor
Contreras, ‘El “empeño apostólico-literario” de Federico Sopeña: sueños, lecturas y reivindicaciones
musicales’, in Cascudo and Palacios (eds.), Los señores de la crítica.
[331]
332 EVA MOREDA RODRÍGUEZ
been founded by Felipe Pedrell in the late nineteenth century. Pedrell’s research
interests focused on early Spanish sacred music and Spanish folklore, for a very
specific reason: according to the Pedrellian narrative, Spanish music had flour-
ished in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, but it had then entered
a period of decline, mostly because of the influence of Italian theatrical music,
especially during the nineteenth century. Pedrell’s musicological and archival
work was supposed to unveil a number of treasures of Spanish music which
would inspire a Spanish musical renaissance in which Pedrell himself partici-
pated by composing a number of Spanish operas.2 Pedrell’s ideas remained
highly influential during the twentieth century, with his student Higinio
Anglès establishing himself as one of the most active and prolific Spanish
musicologists after Pedrell’s death in 1922; Anglés was named founding direc-
tor of the Instituto Español de Musicología when it was founded by the Franco
regime in 1943. It was not that every Spanish musicologist followed the
Pedrellian narrative au pied de la lettre – for example, from the 1910s onwards,
Spanish theatrical music of the eighteenth century attracted the attention of
a number of researchers, such as José Subirá, Julio Gómez and Roberto
Gerhard – but, in any case, musicology was widely regarded in Spain as the
study of the musical past, which may or may not include the nineteenth century
but certainly did not include contemporary music.
Like Spanish musicology, Spanish music criticism developed in the nine-
teenth century, with the earliest known Spanish concert review being pub-
lished by the Barcelona newspaper El Brusi in 1819.3 Initially, music criticism
simply documented musical life in Spain rather than reflecting on it. Early
examples include José María Carnerero’s pioneering writings on music in
Queen Isabella’s court for the magazine Cartas españolas (1831–32) and the
first Spanish music periodical, La Iberia musical (1842), which focused mostly
on Italian opera.4 Even though Pedrell abhorred Italian opera, Spanish audi-
ences thought differently. Nevertheless, writers on music soon felt a desire to
engage in a more in-depth approach aimed not only at documenting but also
at explaining and reflecting. The Asociación Musical of Madrid had in 1843
a column of concert reviews in the periodical La Iberia musical y literaria, but
the members of the Asociación wished to have a space for more reflective, less
immediate writing, and so the magazine El Anfión matritense was born with the
2
Felipe Pedrell, Por nuestra música (Barcelona: Heinrich & Co., 1891), p. 17.
3
María del Valle de Moya Martínez, ‘Aproximación a la crítica musical madrileña del último tercio del
siglo X I X ’, Ensayos: Revista de la Facultad de Educación de Albacete, 12 (1997), 166; Emilio Casares Rodicio,
‘La crítica musical en el X I X español: Panorama general’, in Emilio Casares Rodicio and Celsa Alonso
(eds.), La música española en el siglo X I X (Oviedo: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Oviedo,
1995), p. 464.
4
Casares Rodicio, ‘La crítica musical’, p. 466.
Spanish Music Criticism in the Twentieth Century 333
aim of ‘clarifying lines of thought’ (aclarar las doctrinas).5 In the subsequent

decades, music criticism evolved into a tool not only for explaining and
reflecting on the present, but also for suggesting improvements and trying
to bring them to life. Several music magazines in Madrid (Gaceta musical de
Madrid, La zarzuela, La España artística, La ilustración musical hispano-americana)
wholeheartedly supported the development of a truly national tradition of
Spanish opera; and, in Barcelona, music critics such as Pau Piferrer were
furthering the nascent nationalist ideals of the Renaixença through their writ-
ings on traditional music.6
Both Salazar and Sopeña can be regarded as part of this tradition of activist
music criticism committed to achieving tangible results for Spanish music and
musicians, mostly through asking for increased governmental support and
intervention. Indeed, Salazar and Sopeña were so convinced that governmen-
tal support was crucial in reinvigorating Spanish music that they both held
offices in the governments they lived under: Salazar was a member of the Junta
Nacional de Música y Teatros Líricos under the Second Republic (1931–6),
and Sopeña was secretary of the Comisaría de Música under Francoism from
1940 to 1943, and then Comisario from 1971 to 1972. Moreover, they both
explicitly embraced music criticism in opposition to music historiography or
musicology: Salazar was frequently scornful of Spanish musicologists7 whom
he ironically labelled ‘the wise men of the archives’,8 and in one of his memoirs
Sopeña congratulated himself that he had chosen music criticism as opposed
to musicology as a path to intervention: ‘When I see our “official” musicol-
ogists who are unable to write true history from the archives, I am almost glad
that I did not fall into the Roman nets of Anglès.’9
Before I proceed to discuss Salazar’s and Sopeña’s careers in more detail, as
well as some of their writings, it is worth pointing out a further similarity.
Sopeña and Salazar were outliers in the landscape of Spanish music criticism of
the twentieth century, in that they were primarily music critics. Most other
Spanish critics of this period were composers, performers, music teachers,
musicologists, journalists, authors and even medical doctors who also wrote
music criticism. Indeed, for most of the twentieth century, with Spanish musical
life being scarcely professionalised and articulated, it was usual for musicians to
hold a variety of music-related jobs. Nevertheless, this does not mean that those
5
Juan Manini, ‘Asociación Musical’, La Iberia musical (1 January 1843), 3.
6
Xosé Aviñoa, ‘La crítica musical: donde el oficio absorbe la función’, in Cascudo and Palacios (eds.), Los
señores de la crítica, p. 359.
7
See Adolfo Salazar, ‘El estado de la música española al terminar el primer año de la República’, El sol
(1 January 1932), 6; Salazar, ‘La República y el Cancionero de Barbieri’, El sol (14 April 1933), 35.
8
Salazar, ‘Musicología’, El sol (20 February 1934), 5.
9
Federico Sopeña, Escrito de noche (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1985), p. 176.
who wrote music criticism did so for financial reasons only; many understood it
as an extension of their professional practice in other areas or as a patriotic or
political duty. Salvador Bacarisse’s writings for the newspapers Crisol and Luz
from 1931 to 1934 were in many ways an extension of both his work as
a composer committed to new music and his involvement in the reorganisation
of Spanish musical life through the Junta Nacional de Música y Teatros Líricos.10
On 29 March 1939, the day after Franco’s troops entered Madrid putting an end
to almost three years of conflict, Joaquín Turina, despite his health having
severely deteriorated during the Spanish Civil War, promptly turned up at the
headquarters of El debate, ready to go back to his post as staff music critic and
contribute as such to the reconstruction of a devastated country.11 Composer
Julio Gómez, who after the war lost his job as staff music critic for the newspaper
El liberal, wrote in his column in the magazine Harmonía that he regarded himself
as a music critic and would be happy to write daily concert reviews again if
someone offered him a suitable position.12 Whereas most critics regarded writ-
ing music criticism as a significant part of their professional and artistic identity
rather than as something they did on the side, Salazar and Sopeña were practi-
cally the only ones who chose the written word as their main mode of engaging
with Spanish musical life, present and future.
1914–1936: Adolfo Salazar

Salazar briefly tried his hand at composition, having studied under Bartolomé
Pérez Casas in Madrid and Ravel in Paris, before developing an interest in
music criticism. In 1914 he joined, together with well-known figures of
Spanish music such as Manuel de Falla, the staff of Revista musical hispano-
americana, becoming editor from 1915 until the magazine ceased publication
in 1918. It was also in 1918 that Salazar got the appointment he would
become known for: that of staff music critic at El sol. El sol was no ordinary
newspaper in the media landscape of early twentieth-century Spain; it was
more expensive than most of its direct competitors and, as a consequence, its
print run was lower and it was circulated less widely. However, it did manage
to carve a very successful niche for itself among the cultured minorities who
were less interested in football and bullfighting than they were in literature,
the visual arts or art music.13 In an attempt to adapt itself to the tastes of its
10
Christiane Heine, ‘La crítica musical de Salvador Bacarisse en Crisol y Luz (1931–1934)’, in Cascudo
and Palacios (eds.), Los señores de la crítica, pp. 198–202; pp. 242–3; pp. 251–2.
11
Joaquín Turina, Diary (1 January–31 December 1939), unpublished, Fundación Juan March, Madrid.
12
Julio Gómez, ‘Comentarios del presente y del pasado’, Harmonía (April–June 1944), 3.
13
Cascudo and Palacios (eds.), Los señores de la crítica, p. xii.
readers, El sol was the first newspaper in Spain to take music criticism seriously
and hired Salazar in an attempt to offer its readers a high-quality music
section.14
Salazar, therefore, despite his liberal politics, wrote for an elitist newspaper.
His interest in international musical modernism – with a particular focus on
French neoclassicism, impressionism and Stravinsky’s objectivism – can be
regarded as elitist as well, and certainly was by some of his contemporaries,
such as Julio Gómez, who advocated a return to Spanish musical traditions as
the path to renovating Spanish contemporary music.15 Nevertheless, Salazar’s
focus on contemporary music should not be regarded as detached from the
sociocultural context he lived in; it was informed by a desire to engage in an
ongoing conversation about some of the country’s problems. Spain had lost its
last colonies in 1898, marking the starting point of a debate that occupied
successive cohorts of intellectuals up until the beginning of the Franco
regime: namely, how to modernise Spain, or how to be modern while remain-
ing Spanish. Solutions ranged from fully adopting European ideas and trends
to going back to the essential and traditional values of Spain.
In these debates, contemporary music was not solely the province of
musicians and music critics, as other intellectuals committed to the renova-
tion of Spain interested themselves in music as well. The most influential of
such intellectuals was probably the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset,16 who
developed the concept of the dehumanisation of music. He argued that
modernist music placed an emotional distance between the composer and
his audience, who were thus unable to comprehend it,17 and that modern art
and music were dehumanised because they were directed exclusively to the
elites and were thus devoid of the importance, transcendence and appeal to
the broader public they had enjoyed in the nineteenth century.18 Salazar and
the young composers writing new music in Madrid at the time, collectively
known as Grupo de los Ocho (‘Group of Eight’),19 embraced Ortega y Gasset’s
14
Francisco Parralejo, ‘Jóvenes y selectos: Salazar y Ortega en el entorno europeo de su generación
(1914–1936)’, in Cascudo and Palacios (eds.), Los señores de la crítica, p. 68.
15
Beatriz Martínez del Fresno, Julio Gómez: una época de la música española (Madrid: Instituto
Complutense de Ciencias Musicales, 2003), p. 23.
16
See Carol A. Hess, Manuel de Falla and Modernism in Spain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001);
Parralejo, ‘Jóvenes y selectos’, p. 88.
17
See José Ortega y Gasset, ‘Musicalia’, El sol (8 March 1921), 3.
18
See José Ortega y Gasset, La deshumanización del arte (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1925).
19
Members of the Grupo de los Ocho include: Salvador Baccarise, Julián Bautista, Rosa García Ascot,
Ernesto Halffter, Rodolfo Halffter, Juan José Mantecón, Gustavo Pittaluga and Fernando Remacha. It
must be taken into account, nonetheless, that the Grupo was a rather loose association of composers,
conceived as a way to promote and disseminate their works rather than an alliance established on the basis
of a shared aesthetic and artistic outlook.
concept of dehumanisation to an extent as a reaction against the perceived

excesses of nationalism and romanticism.20
Salazar’s commitment to not only documenting the present but also to
shaping it is obvious from his love of polemics with other critics and his
involvement with the Junta Nacional de Música.21 Nonetheless, even his
documenting of musical events was more than just that. While it has been
claimed that Salazar was not a historian,22 there transpires in his writings
a desire to construct grand narratives for the interpretation of Spanish music.
The clearest and most illustrative example is Salazar’s defence of Ernesto
Halffter from 1925 onwards, after Halffter was awarded, at only twenty
years of age, the government’s Premio Nacional de Música (National Prize
for Music) for his Sinfonietta. Salazar did not simply see in Halffter a great,
even an exceptional composer but also a key figure to be inserted in the
narrative of Spanish music; Salazar claimed that Halffter had absorbed
Pedrell’s commitment to founding a school of truly Spanish music, and he
presented Halffter as Falla’s heir as well as the composer who had finally freed
Spanish musical nationalism from folklore in a way which was suitable for
a country that was slowly entering modernity.23
Salazar’s canonisation of Ernesto Halffter did not only involve music criti-
cism. Indeed, Salazar was one of the few music critics at the time to write
monographs on Spanish contemporary music, in which Halffter was similarly
awarded a prominent place, namely in La música contemporánea en España.24
Salazar’s music reviews were therefore not intended to be ephemeral: they
were the basis for a historiographical narrative heavily based on ‘hero’ figures
such as Pedrell, Falla and Halffter that has substantially informed musicolo-
gical thinking in Spain even to the present.25 Perhaps more interestingly, it
must be noted that other dominant assumptions in Spanish musicology have
20
Emilio Casares Rodicio, ‘Música y músicos de la Generación del 27’, in Emilio Casares Rodicio (ed.),
La música en la Generación del 27: Homenaje a Lorca 1915–1939 (Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura/INAEM,
1986), p. 25; Rodolfo Halffter, ‘Manuel de Falla y los compositores del Grupo de Madrid de la Generación
del 27’, in Antonio Iglesias (ed.), Rodolfo Halffter: Tema, nueve décadas y final (Madrid: Fundación Banco
Exterior, 1991), p. 412.
21
Parralejo, ‘Jóvenes y selectos’, p. 72; María Cáceres-Piñuel, ‘“Una posturita estética que no representa
sino un frenazo”: El discurso crítico de Subirá en torno al neoclasicismo (1929–1936)’, in Cascudo and
Palacios (eds.), Los señores de la crítica, pp. 261–4.
22
Cascudo and Palacios (eds.), Los señores de la crítica, p. xiii; Suárez-Pajares, ‘Adolfo Salazar: luz
y sombras’, pp. 201, 208.
23
Elena Torres Clemente, ‘El “nacionalismo de las esencias”: ¿una categoría estética o ética?’, in Pilar
Ramos López (ed.), Discursos y prácticas musicales nacionalistas (1900–1970) (Logroño: Servicio de
Publicaciones de la Universidad de La Rioja, 2012), pp. 37–8; Ruth Piquer Sanclemente, ‘El semanario
España (1915–1924) y la crítica musical: Novecentismo y renovación’, in Ramos López (ed.), Discursos
y prácticas musicales nacionalistas, p. 93.
24
Adolfo Salazar, La música contemporánea en España (Madrid: Ediciones La Nave, 1930), pp. 247–55.
25
Suárez-Pajares, ‘Adolfo Salazar: luz y sombras’, p. 209; Torres Clemente, ‘El “nacionalismo de las
esencias”’, p. 37.
been based on partial or incomplete readings of Salazar’s writings. Although

he was for decades portrayed as a champion of all new Spanish music and
especially of the Grupo de los Ocho,26 in reality it was only Ernesto Halffter
who got Salazar’s almost unconditional support, with the other seven receiv-
ing far less attention and understanding.27
In order for Salazar’s narratives to become influential, Salazar himself had
to be regarded as an authoritative, impartial, almost hegemonic witness of
musical life in 1920s and 1930s Madrid. Paradoxically, this ‘Salazar legend’
only started to develop under Francoism, while Salazar was in exile in Mexico.
When Salazar died in October 1958, some of the most prominent figures of
Spanish music praised him in their obituaries as a tireless champion of new
music, a very effective mediator between young composers and audiences, an
administrator fully committed to improving Spanish musical life and an
excellent writer.28 Yet it is highly doubtful that Salazar’s contemporaries in
pre-Francoist Spain regarded him as such a figure: he himself wrote shortly
after he arrived in Mexico in 1939 that he had felt hostility towards him before
he left Spain.29 Although Salazar never hid his political sympathies for the left
in a time in which music criticism, like most spheres of Spanish public life, was
increasingly politicised,30 it would not be accurate to assume that such hosti-
lity towards him was solely motivated by political reasons. Salazar’s approach
to music criticism and to new music had detractors among left-wingers as
well, and it was indeed another supporter of the Republic, Julio Gómez, who
called into question the idyllic picture other critics painted on the occasion of
Salazar’s death. Gómez refused to call Salazar ‘the best Spanish critic of all
time’, arguing that Salazar had excellent writing skills but his judgement of
music was not always reliable or impartial, nor was it unanimously embraced
even by those who were, in principle, supporters of new music.31
Similarly, although I am aware that this chapter may in itself contribute to
this impression, contemporary music and its developments in Spain were not
the sole focus of music criticism in the period 1914–36, and thus Salazar’s
26
Emilio Casares Rodicio, ‘Música y músicos de la Generación del 27’, p. 20; Emilio Casares Rodicio,
‘La música española hasta 1939, o la restauración musical’, in Emilio Casares Rodicio, Ismael Fernández de
la Cuesta and José López Calo (eds.), España en la música de Occidente, 2 vols. (Madrid: Instituto Nacional de
Artes Escénicas y de la Música, 1987), vol. I , p. 301.
27
Rodolfo Halffter, ‘Julián Bautista’, Música, 1 (1938), 9; Palacios, La renovación musical en Madrid, p. 14.
28
See Cristóbal Halffter, ‘Guía de la música española’; Joaquín Rodrigo, ‘Lo que fue para nosotros’;
Enrique Franco, ‘Crítica creadora’; all Arriba (7 October 1958), 29; Ramón Barce, ‘Adolfo Salazar. La obra
y el hombre’, Índice, 20 (1958), 23.
29
Consuelo Carredano, ‘Danzas de conquista: herencia y celebración de Adolfo Salazar’, in Nagore,
Sánchez de Andrés and Torres (eds.), Música y cultura en la Edad de Plata, p. 175.
30
María Palacios, ‘César M. Arconada, el crítico progresista de una vanguardia musical inexistente’, in
Cascudo and Palacios (eds.), Los señores de la crítica, pp. 154–6.
31
Julio Gómez, ‘Comentarios del presente y del pasado’, Harmonía (October–December 1958), 5.
writings for El sol will necessarily be an incomplete reflection of musical life in

Spain at that time. There were other sectors in Spanish music which made use
of the written word, be it as a means of communicating with others based
elsewhere in Spain, or as a way of lobbying for their own interests. The period
1914–36 saw the foundation of the three longest-lived music magazines in
twentieth-century Spain. Tesoro musical de ilustración del Clero was first
launched in 1917, changed its name to Tesoro sacro musical in 1925 and did
not cease publication until 1978. Focusing on sacred music, it provides
a glimpse of the rich musical culture within the Catholic church, though it
was neither the first nor the only one to publish on this topic in Spain,
with Música sacro-hispana running from 1907 to 1923. Second, in 1929 the
composer, music teacher and critic Rogelio del Villar (1875–1937) founded
the music magazine Ritmo, aimed at a generalist audience interested in
Western art music. Apart from four years in which publication ceased as
a result of the Spanish Civil War (from 1936 to 1940), Ritmo has survived to
this day. Thirdly, Harmonía: Órgano musical started publication in 1936 and
survived until 1958 (again, with a three-year interruption during the Civil
War). Harmonía was both a magazine and a music publishing venture: it
distributed arrangements for wind band to conductors throughout Spain,
and with the arrangements came a magazine which discussed both the pro-
blems of the profession and broader musical topics; Julio Gómez was a regular
contributor both before and after the Civil War.
1939–1981: Federico Sopeña

The Spanish Civil War (1936–9) changed the landscape of Spanish music
criticism in a significant way, with a number of writers in exile or dead. The
most conspicuous absence was probably that of Salazar, who did not com-
pletely abandon music criticism but founded, together with fellow exiles
Rodolfo Halffter and Jesús Bal y Gay, the periodical Nueva música in Mexico
City in 1944. Nevertheless, for financial reasons, he chose to focus on writing
books on a variety of musical topics and giving talks and lectures. The land-
scape of newspapers and magazines in Spain had also changed quite substan-
tially: ABC survived under the direction of the Luca de Tena family, El debate,
owned by Editorial Católica, was transformed into Ya, but the new big players
of the newspaper industry were controlled by the fascist single party of the
Franco regime, called Falange Española. Some already well-known names of
the musical scene took up posts as music critics for these newspapers, writing
reviews of concerts on an almost daily basis in order to transmit to their
readership the idea that Spanish music, and the country at large, was on its
way to recovery after Franco’s victory. Conrado del Campo (Professor of

Composition at the Conservatorio de Madrid) wrote for El Alcázar, Joaquín
Rodrigo for Pueblo,32 guitarist Regino Sainz de la Maza for ABC,33 and
composers Ángel María Pompey and José María Franco for Ya. The press
was tightly controlled by the regime through consignas and censorship, and
arts criticism was supposed to be, according to Manuel Prados y López’s
handbook for journalists, ‘positive and constructive’, because ‘in this new
Spain in which it is of vital interest to seize all talents available, negative
criticism expresses not only bad taste, but is intolerable and dangerous for the
mission of the State’.34
Nevertheless, there was a remarkable degree of continuity as well. Harmonía
and Ritmo, two of the music magazines whose publication had been cancelled
during the Civil War, were relaunched in in 1940. The latter was now more
directly controlled by the government, with Nemesio Otaño – former
Comisario de Música and director of the Conservatorio de Madrid – as its
editor. Nevertheless, it is perhaps the career of Federico Sopeña which best
exemplifies the mixture of continuity and rupture which characterises musical
life in early Francoist Spain. Sopeña was a newcomer to music criticism when
he was appointed staff music critic at the Falange newspaper Arriba in 1939.
He was, moreover, a member of the Falange Liberal, and as such he shared the
Falange Liberal’s aspirations of reconstructing and renovating Spain and not
just going back to the values of the past.35 Yet, at the same time, Sopeña’s
career was clearly – and self-confessedly – inspired by Salazar’s.36 They shared
a commitment to new music and its ramifications in Spain, they both wrote
monographs in Spanish music at a time when very few critics or writers were
doing so, and they both regarded themselves as music critics rather than
historians or musicologists. Yet their writings show a commitment to crafting
master narratives for Spanish twentieth-century music even, in the case of
Sopeña, at a time in which the constant pressure on music critics to attend and
positively review multiple concerts a week admittedly took its toll on the
depth and acumen that critics could be expected to exhibit in their analysis.37
Sopeña had admittedly been looking for a hero figure, a redeemer of Spanish
music, since he was appointed staff music critic at Arriba,38 and he found it in
32
José Antonio Gutiérrez, ‘La labor crítica de Joaquín Rodrigo en el diario Pueblo (1940–1946)’, in
Suárez-Pajares (ed.), Joaquín Rodrigo.
33
Leopoldo Neri de Caso, ‘Regino Sainz de la Maza, crítico musical en ABC (1939–1952)’, in Suárez-
Pajares (ed.), Joaquín Rodrigo.
34
Manuel Prados y López, Ética y estética del periodismo español (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1943), p. 72.
35
Moreda Rodríguez, ‘Federico Sopeña’, pp. 293–6. 36
Sopeña, Escrito de noche, p. 169.
37
Regino Sainz de la Maza, ‘Informaciones musicales’, ABC (12 June 1942), 13.
38
Federico Sopeña, Joaquín Rodrigo (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1946).
Joaquín Rodrigo, whose guitar concerto Concierto de Aranjuez was given its first
performance in Madrid on 11 December 1940. The concert was quickly recog-
nised as one of the most significant musical events in post-Civil War Spain, and
through the 1940s and 1950s music critics repeatedly named it as such.39 The
Spanish government was similarly enthusiastic about the work. The Concierto was
repeatedly selected as one of the examples of Spanish contemporary music to be
performed in musical exchanges; it was included in the programme of the third
Hispanic-German music festival in August 1942, as well as for the visit of the
Orquesta Nacional and the Comisaría de Música to Lisbon in April 1943. Even
contemporary scholarship still regards the performance as a milestone in the
musical life of early Francoism,40 even though at the time in which the concert
took place not everybody was equally enthusiastic. Otaño, in a letter to Falla,
expressed his horror that the work had been compared to Falla’s Noches en los
jardines de España and explained to Falla that he himself felt obliged to argue
against these opinions in a radio broadcast because Rodrigo ‘is subtle and well-
intentioned, but his talent is limited’.41 Julio Gómez was also highly critical of
the concerto’s success and wrote to musicologist José Subirá that: ‘The main
event [in Madrid musical life] has been the first performance of Concierto de
Aranjuez, by Joaquín Rodrigo, who has been the object of a pre-concert promo-
tion and a post-concert success which has never been seen in Spain – not even in
the best days of the Salazar-Halffter duo.’42
Like Salazar’s treatment of Halffter, Sopeña’s attempts at placing Rodrigo
in the canon of Spanish music started shortly after the performance of the
Concierto and took different forms beyond just music criticism. For example,
in a talk about Spanish music during the above-mentioned visit of the
Comisaría to Lisbon, Sopeña chose to focus on Falla, Turina and Rodrigo
and their significance for contemporary music aesthetics, crucially placing
Rodrigo besides the two living Spanish composers with the most significant
international reputations. In Sopeña’s opinion, the music of Falla, Turina and
Rodrigo was intrinsically Spanish, but never picturesque or provincial; it had
a universal appeal because it was based on feeling and emotion.43 In an
39
Antonio de las Heras, ‘La música en el año que termina’, Informaciones (31 December 1940), 7;
Joaquín Rodrigo, ‘La música en 1940’, Pueblo (31 December 1940), 8; Antonio de las Heras, ‘Música’,
Informaciones (12 June 1942), 6; Sainz de la Maza, ‘Informaciones musicales’, 13.
40
Tomás Marco, Spanish Music in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993), pp.
130–1; Gemma Pérez Zalduondo, ‘Continuidades y rupturas en la música española durante el primer
franquismo’, in Suárez-Pajares (ed.), Joaquín Rodrigo, p. 70.
41
Nemesio Otaño, Letter to Manuel de Falla (20 August 1938), unpublished, Archive of the Seminary of
Loyola.
42
Julio Gómez, Letter to José Subirá (25 December 1940), unpublished, Fondo José Subirá, Biblioteca
Nacional de España.
43
Anon., ‘La Orquesta Nacional, en Lisboa’, Arriba (3 April 1943), 7.
account of the initial years of music under Francoism published on the

occasion of the Día del Caudillo on 1 October 1943, Sopeña established
a connection between the ‘generation of musicians . . . led by Turina’, who
had gathered successes for Spanish music in Europe before the war, and the
first performance of the Concierto de Aranjuez in 1940.44 Sopeña thus entirely
skipped the Grupo de los Ocho and the other young composers active during
the Second Republic, with the exception of a passing mention of Ernesto
Halffter, suggesting that the principal dynasty of Spanish music went from
Falla to Turina to Rodrigo. Sopeña’s narrative about Rodrigo was one of
necessity and historical inevitability: in several writings through the 1940s
and beyond, Sopeña claimed that Spanish audiences were feeling dissatisfied
with both dehumanised modernism and romanticism after the Spanish Civil
War. They hoped for a piece of music that would bring feeling and sincerity
back to modern music and this allegedly was what Rodrigo had managed to do
with the Concierto de Aranjuez.45
Sopeña’s views of Rodrigo’s Concierto de Aranjuez were rooted in his belief
that feeling and emotion were the most significant characteristics which
modern music should keep at all costs – in clear contrast with Ortega
y Gasset’s dehumanisation. As Sopeña was the only Spanish music critic
during the 1940s to engage systematically with contemporary music, his
writings on the subject were influential among his contemporaries and
beyond. For example, he repeatedly opposed Falla and Stravinsky as the two
main poles of European modernism, because the former was humanistic,
reasonably respectful of the past and, above all, truly national, whereas
Stravinsky cultivated a dehumanised, non-national and cool modernism.46
This opposition certainly proved popular among other music critics of the
1940s.
Perhaps the first time in which Sopeña explicitly framed his work as
a continuation of Salazar’s was in 1958 in the prologue to his Historia de
la música española contemporánea, which was presented as a sequel to Salazar’s
1930 La música española contemporánea.47 Almost twenty years after the end of
the Civil War, acknowledging or even praising the exiles was becoming more
44
Federico Sopeña, ‘La música de estos años’, Arriba (1 October 1943), 3.
45
Federico Sopeña, Joaquín Rodrigo, p. 90; Federico Sopeña, ‘El nacionalismo en la música de estos años’,
Arbor, 9/27 (1948), 474–5; Gerardo Diego, Joaquín Rodrigo and Federico Sopeña, Diez años de música en
España. Musicología, intérpretes, compositors (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1949), p. 189.
46
Eva Moreda Rodríguez, ‘A Catholic, a Patriot, a Good Modernist: Manuel de Falla and the Francoist
Musical Press’, Hispanic Research Journal, 14/3 (2013), 221–3.
47
Federico Sopeña, La historia de la música española contemporánea (Madrid: Rialp, 1958), p. 13; Salazar,
La música contemporánea en España.
and more common, as opposed to mentioning them in passing or simply

ignoring them, which had been the norm during the 1940s:
More than 25 years have gone by since Adolfo Salazar’s relatively short book
about contemporary Spanish music was published. All these years require not
only more history and a different landscape, but also, in the specific case of
Spanish music, a certain change of approach.48
By now, however, the Spanish avant-garde composers typically grouped

under the label Generación del 51 (Generation of 51) were starting to become
dominant in Spanish musical life. Sopeña did indeed strike close relationships
with some of them, such as Cristóbal Halffter, during his tenure as director of
the Conservatorio de Madrid. However, he did not champion them in the
same way that he had championed Rodrigo in the 1940s; the Generación del
51 had its own critics, namely Enrique Franco, and critic-composers including
Ramón Barce, Luis de Pablo and Tomás Marco. They, and not so much
Sopeña, crafted the narratives of history of music and progress and avant-
garde as historical inevitability that have informed the reception of the
Spanish avant-garde to the present day.49
As was the case during the Salazar years, however, music criticism writings
of the Franco era reflect a broader range of interests rather than just new
music. A particularly interesting development is the emergence of publica-
tions focusing on popular music and recordings, starting with the jazz-
focused Ritmo y melodía in 1944 and moving on to Aria jazz, Discóbolo,
Fonorama and others, which reflect the changing listening and consumption
habits of Spanish audiences – and indeed, even in established magazines such
as Ritmo, reviews of recordings quickly replace reviews of live events from the
1970s onwards, with the Spanish government establishing a prize for
reviewers of recordings (Premio Nacional de la Crítica Discográfica) in 1980
(with no equivalent prize for reviewers of live music events).
The generation of critics succeeding Sopeña, starting their careers between
the 1950s and the 1970s (Enrique Franco, Carlos Gómez Amat, Ángel
Fernando Mayo) still managed to keep some of Sopeña’s dual status as music
critic and music historian/musicologist, but this has not been the case in more
recent decades. Part of the reason for this has to be sought in the increasing
48
Ibid.
49
See for example, Tomás Marco, La música de la España contemporánea (Madrid: Publicaciones Españolas,
1970); and Marco, Música española de vanguardia (Madrid: Guadarrama, 1970). Contemporary scholarship
indebted to such narratives includes to a great extent Germán Gan Quesada, ‘A la altura de las
circunstancias . . . Continuidad y pautas de renovación en la música española’, in Alberto González
Lapuente (ed.), Historia de la música en España e Hispanoamérica: La música en España en el siglo X X (Mexico
City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2012), p. 169.
professionalisation of musicology in Spain, with the first university depart-

ment in musicology opening in 1984 at the University of Oviedo; nevertheless,
some musicologists still combine scholarly research and teaching with regular
engagement in music criticism in national or regional newspapers, some
examples being Pablo L. Rodríguez, Xoán Manuel Carreira, Diana Díaz and
Luís Costa. Not surprisingly, it is in the field of popular music that critics and
journalists still seem able to exert some influence on the shaping of historio-
graphical narratives, with many of them publishing books and other extended
works on areas and topics still unexplored by the popular music studies field;
names include Eduardo Guillot, Roberto Moso, Luis Clemente and January
Ruiz. Access to a broader range of musical genres and technological develop-
ments (e.g. the pioneering Spanish-language music criticism portal mundocla
sico.com) has also transformed music criticism into a varied, somewhat frag-
mented landscape; it would be difficult to imagine a personality like Salazar’s
and Sopeña’s occupying such a central, influential role today.
It is perhaps this diversity that most clearly illustrates that Salazar and
Sopeña truly occupied an exceptional place in Spanish twentieth-century
music criticism. They did not necessarily fully capture the zeitgeist of the
time they lived in – although they were often believed to have done so – and
yet their commitment to writing as an interpretative and transformative tool
granted them remarkable influence on other critics and musicologists to the
present day. Even though such influence will no doubt be the object of further
critical analysis in the future, Salazar’s and Sopeña’s attempts at extending the
boundaries of music criticism as a mode of writing, blurring them with those
of music historiography and even those of literary writing, will ensure that
their writings remain relevant in the future.
. 18 .
Critical Battlegrounds in the French

Third Republic
DELPHINE MORDEY
But, like a kaleidoscope which is every now and then given a turn, society
arranges successively in different orders elements which one would have
supposed immutable, and composes a new pattern.
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time (1996)1
The Third Republic was paradoxically both a ‘golden age’ – of the press, of
cinema and of music – and a time of tragedy, humiliation and almost perpetual
pessimism. Bookended by Bizet’s Carmen (1875) and Messiaen’s Quatuor pour
la fin du temps (1940–1), the musical world experienced a dizzying array of
schools and movements, as musicians negotiated the transition from nine-
teenth-century romanticism to twentieth-century modernism, via the loom-
ing spectre of Wagnerism. These musical transformations took place against
an extraordinarily turbulent political background: born out of, interrupted
and ended by war with Germany, the Republic was also regularly rocked by
internal crises, not least the Dreyfus Affair, which split the already deeply
divided country further into two.2
Within an ever-expanding press, itself made possible by unprecedented
rates of technological development, music criticism followed the contours
of this highly charged landscape, becoming an arena for intertwined social and
cultural battles. These battles are most famously exemplified by the era’s
succession of succès de scandale, including the Parisian premieres of Wagner’s
Lohengrin (1887), Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande (1902) and Stravinsky’s Rite of
Spring (1913), each of which drew scores of reviews across the specialist and
general press, exposing conflicting ideals as critics attempted to influence, and
were influenced by, fractured public opinion.
1
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 2: Within a Budding Grove, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and
Terence Kilmartin (London: Vintage, 1996), p. 103.
2
In 1894 Captain Alfred Dreyfus was accused of passing French military secrets to the Germans. The case
brought to the fore deep divisions between the largely Catholic, Monarchist anti-Dreyfusards and the
anticlerical, pro-republican Dreyfusards, and infiltrated every facet of French cultural and political life; see
Ruth Harris, Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century (New York: Henry Holt, 2010).
[344]
Critical Battlegrounds in the French Third Republic 345
The overwhelming quantity and heterogeneity of music criticism in this

period has resulted in a vast repertory of opposing, overlapping and intersect-
ing narratives. From this apparent morass, certain patterns emerge, mapping
out a complex critical battleground: the same disputes were fought and
refought, albeit in new permutations, reflecting the continual clashes between
generations, between conservatives and progressives, and between the rival
compositional schools, or petites chapelles, that flourished in the belligerence
of the Third Republic. Indeed, such was the impact of this climate of conflict
that the language of the criticism was itself suffused with military metaphors;
these have subsequently influenced the perception and historiography of the
period.
While many of these battles appeared to be intramural, others were
more clearly contested on external fronts: no issue dominated the
Republic more than its fraught relationship with Germany, and the fear
of cultural as well as political invasion. Such anxieties inspired a critical
obsession with forging a true French musical identity; this, in turn,
prompted wrangling over what exactly constituted that identity and the
most appropriate genres through which to express it. As ever, the battle
lines were far from static, frequently realigning to mirror the tangled
ideologies of the time: political and aesthetic binaries failed to coincide,
critics resisting the categorisations that historians have so often
attempted to create for them.
These, then, are the central concerns that underpin this overview of music
criticism and its debates between 1870 and 1940. Of course, the intricacy,
length and immense bibliography of the period preclude the possibility of
comprehensiveness; any single study can offer only one set of patterns within
the kaleidoscope of possible interpretations. Within these limitations, how-
ever, the following chapter begins by surveying the rise of the press, the
corresponding changes to the corpus of critics who contributed to it, and
the battles they fought over the nature and practice of their burgeoning
discipline. In the second half, the focus moves from questions about criticism
itself to the struggles over French musical identity, inferiority and cultural
conquest that repeatedly preoccupied critics between the belle époque and
the Second World War.
The Golden Age of the French Press

The Third Republic witnessed a remarkable transformation and expansion of the
press industry. Many scholars have pointed to the Law on the Freedom of the
Press of 1881 as a crucial catalyst in this development, but the wheels had been set
346 DELPHINE MORDEY
in motion well before:3 technological innovations had led to faster and cheaper
printing, and growing railway networks had facilitated distribution. Moreover,
literacy rates had been steadily growing over the course of the century, feeding
the demand for inexpensive newspapers – la petite presse.4 The statistics are
striking: in the period up to the First World War, circulation of Parisian daily
newspapers went up by 250 per cent; by 1900, there were 142 dailies published in
the capital (up from fourteen in 1853), and one newspaper alone – Le Petit journal –
had a print run of one million by 1890.5 Every possible combination of political,
social and cultural orientations was catered for within this huge number of dailies,
with obvious ramifications for the character of the criticism each newspaper
published.
But this was not just the golden age of the daily press. Periodicals also
enjoyed a surge in popularity, with publications appearing (and often disap-
pearing) at an extraordinary rate: in 1882 there were at least 3,800 periodicals
in France; a decade later, the number had risen to 6,000.6 The broad spectrum
of Revues covered both those aimed at the intellectual elite, such as the long-
lived Revue des deux mondes (1829–), and more ephemeral publications target-
ing new audiences and their leisure pursuits. By the turn of the century, most
institutions, associations, activities and artistic movements had their own
periodical, from L’Orphéon (1855–1939), a gazette for the popular choral
movement, to the in-house journal at Le Chat noir (1882–9).
The rapid growth of the press was brought to a halt by the First World War.
Publications lost millions of readers to the front, and personnel and paper
shortages meant that those papers that persevered did so on a much smaller
scale and at inflated prices. Fighting this trend, a handful of new titles sprang
up in response to current circumstances, including, most notably, La Musique
pendant la guerre (1915–17); many more disappeared for good. Almost all
specialist music periodicals ceased during this period, and musical coverage
in the general press was greatly reduced. Following this enforced hiatus, the
French press industry would struggle to regain its pre-war vigour: the number
3
This law meant, inter alia, that anyone could now set up a newspaper, and that censorship was relaxed;
see Raymond Manevy, La Presse de la Troisième République (Paris: J. Forêt, 1955), p. 9.
4
On the rise of the press in the Third Republic, see in addition Claude Bellanger, Jacques Godechot,
Pierre Guiral and Fernand Terrou (eds.), Histoire générale de la presse française, tome 3: de 1871 à 1940 (Paris:
Presses universitaires de France, 1972); and Christophe Charle, Le Siècle de la presse, 1830–1939 (Paris: Le
Seuil, 2004).
5
See Christian Goubault, La Critique musicale dans la presse française de 1870 à 1914 (Geneva: Slatkine,
1984), p. 25; and Déirdre Donnellon, ‘Debussy, Satie and the Parisian Critical Press (1890–1925)’,
unpublished PhD thesis, University of Liverpool (2000), 1. These two sources provide invaluable accounts
of French music criticism in the first fifty years of the Third Republic. For discussion of the interwar
period, see Barbara L. Kelly and Christopher Moore (eds.), Music Criticism in France, 1918–1939: Authority,
Advocacy, Legacy (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2018), published after completion of this chapter.
6
Manevy, La Presse de la Troisième République, p. 9.
of Parisian dailies dropped sharply from 80 in 1914 to 31 by 1939, as print runs

stagnated,7 and many of the younger critics who had contributed to the
changing face of the press, failed to return from the trenches. But by then
the developments in the French press industry had already left their mark on
music criticism.
Music Criticism in the Press

One of the most obvious ways in which the extraordinary efflorescence of the
press before the war affected music criticism was the increase in the number of
critics that it brought about, both to fill the pages of the expanding specialist
musical press and to contribute columns to a broad swathe of generalist
publications. Music criticism, in one form or another, particularly of opera,
could be found virtually everywhere, from the heavyweight cultural revues to
the plethora of sporting and fashion magazines. It also had a place in nearly
every newspaper: most dailies would have at least one critic to churn out
a variety of copy, generally adhering to formulas established earlier in the
nineteenth century. The serious music reviews usually took the form of six-
column feuilletons, which filled the bottom half of the page, and were custo-
marily published, weekly or fortnightly, on Mondays; hence the critics, or
feuilletonistes, were also commonly known as lundistes. The relative length of
the feuilleton, a format borrowed from literary critics and made famous during
the Second Empire by Berlioz in Le Journal des débats, allowed for the most
detailed, reflective and influential writing on musical works available in the
general press.
While the lundistes persisted in many papers during the Third Republic,
they were increasingly supplemented, and in some cases supplanted, by the
soiristes (or lendemainistes): critics appointed to write next-day reports, or
comptes rendus, of new works.8 The resulting articles, usually no more than
a column in length, commonly focused on backstage gossip, as well as
accounts of who was present in the audience, what they wore, and how
warmly they applauded. Any mention of the work itself tended to be super-
ficial at best, limited to discussion of the staging and costume design, with
a few comments on the quality of the singing and dancing. In 1867, Le Figaro
had become one of the first newspapers to switch from the weekly, fixed-day
7
See Charle, Le Siècle de la presse, p. 250.
8
See Roman Piana, ‘La Diversification du discours critique après le Second Empire: la rubrique de
“soirée”’, in Mariane Bury and Hélène Laplace-Claverie (eds.), Le Miel et le fiel: La critique théâtrale en France
au XIXe siècle (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2008), p. 44.
348 DELPHINE MORDEY
feuilleton in favour of the next-day review, a decision that Arthur Pougin

blamed for the death of the true critic.9
Controversial or otherwise, these various forms of criticism were supplied
by a growing body of critics, whose status evolved over the course of the Third
Republic. One of the by-products of press expansion was the increasing
professionalisation of journalism, marked by the foundation of numerous
professional bodies, including the Association de la critique dramatique et
musicale (1877), and the Syndicat de la presse artistique (1899). It thus became
increasingly possible to consider journalism a full-time occupation, rather
than merely as a springboard for, or accompaniment to, another career. The
majority of music critics, at least initially, however, continued to pursue more
than one vocation: typically writer, composer, or musicologist. Each addi-
tional occupation had a profound effect on the criticism produced.
An Usherette and a Schoolgirl

There was a well-established tradition of gens de lettres dabbling in music
criticism as part of a broad literary portfolio. Such figures, including
Stendhal, Gérard de Nerval and Théophile Gautier, contributed to the
genre’s development despite little or no musical training. Their reviews,
mostly of operatic productions, tended to focus on literary aspects of the
work – particularly the qualities of the plot and libretto – with only vague
allusions to the musical setting. This approach was alive and well in the
Third Republic. Examples abound, but perhaps the most renowned example
of the ‘literary’ music critic from this period was Henri Gautier-Villars
(1859–1931), commonly known as Willy.
Playwright, novelist, editor, critic, not to mention Parisian man about
town, Willy reigned over his own literary empire, a living embodiment of
the effervescent spirit of the belle époque. Early on in his career, he had
identified a gap in the market for a different kind of music criticism: ‘the
music columns of the great dailies were in the hands of boring writers . . .
which distanced the reader . . . My idea was to produce a column that was gay,
mocking, droll, and fun to read’.10 The result was the Lettres de l’ouvreuse
(Letters from the Usherette), a long-running weekly column, written under
the pseudonym ‘Une ouvreuse du Cirque d’été’, and first published in the
journal Art et critique (1889), before being promoted to the pages of the widely
9
See Pougin’s response to the ‘Enquête sur la critique dramatique française’, La Reuve d’art dramatique, 6
(January–March 1899), 189. All translations are the author’s own unless otherwise indicated.
10
Willy quoted and translated in Judith Thurman, Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette (London:
Bloomsbury, 2000), p. 51.
circulated daily newspaper Echo de Paris in 1892. The column was ostensibly
concerned with reviewing orchestral concerts, but devoted as much space, if
not more, to the indiscretions of the Tout-Paris. Written in a lively, frequently
provocative prose, packed with puns, witticisms and innuendos, these col-
umns are representative of the increasingly irreverent tone of music criticism
in the daily press; short, casual and caustic, they marked a significant depar-
ture from the more serious contemplations of the feuilletonistes. The composer
(and critic) Pierre de Bréville suggested that, with his ouvreuse, Willy had in
fact ‘invented a new type of criticism: entertaining criticism, where it’s not
necessary to be of the profession to find pleasure in it’.11
Demand for this new brand of criticism was high: Willy contributed to
numerous newspapers and journals, including Comœdia, La Nouvelle presse and
Le Mercure musical. His extraordinary prolificacy was made possible by
a ‘factory’ of ghostwriters; among them was the Conservatoire-trained
Emile Vuillermoz, who cut his critical teeth penning the Ouvreuse columns
between 1904 and 1906.12 This helps to explain the fact that, for all their
apparent triviality, and despite Willy’s own lack of musical training, his
reviews were not entirely devoid of technical details.13 They also helped to
establish him as one of the most influential music critics of the era. Debussy
reportedly remarked ‘there is only one music critic and that’s Willy. He may
not know what a semiquaver is, but it is to him that I owe the best part of my
reputation.’14
This influence may be partially attributed to Willy’s canny exploitation of
the new possibilities presented by mass media at the fin de siècle. Courting
scandal, both through his romantic affairs, and deliberately inflammatory
reviews, he became adept at manipulating and marketing details of his life
to feed his art (and pocket) and maintain a prominent place in the public eye.
Nowhere was this complex nexus of public and private more evident than in
‘Claudine au Concert’, a series of columns written by Willy’s most famous
ghostwriter – and wife – Colette, that appeared in the left-leaning literary
daily Gil Blas between 12 January and 29 July 1903.
Claudine was the fictional heroine of an eponymous series of novels, the
fourth and final instalment of which, Claudine s’en va, was published in
11
Pierre de Bréville, ‘Musique’, Mercure de France (July 1898), 276.
12
See Jacques Lonchampt (ed.), Emile Vuillermoz, critique musicale 1902–1960: au bonheur des soirs (Paris:
l’Harmattan, 2013), p. 18.
13
Willy is also known to have sought advice on musical matters from several composers, including
Debussy; see Thurman, Secrets of the Flesh, p. 51.
14
Claude Debussy, Debussy on Music: The Critical Writings of the Great French Composer Claude Debussy,
collected by François Lesure, ed. and trans. Richard Langham Smith (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977),
p. 64.
350 DELPHINE MORDEY
March 1903. Authored by Colette, but published in Willy’s name, the gently
risqué stories related the coming of age of a young girl from the Burgundian
countryside. Recognising the financial potential in the stories, Willy squeezed
them for all they were worth, generating large amounts of publicity through
cartoons, posters and songs, as well as a theatrical dramatisation featuring the
actress Polaire. ‘Claudine au Concert’ added to the elaborate publicity stunt:
writing in Claudine’s name, Colette deliberately played the part of the
ingénue, cultivating a tone that was chatty, carefree and conspiratorial.
In keeping with her character, Colette as Claudine took amateur criticism
to a new level, declaring in her opening column that she did not intend to
write very much about music at all.15 Elsewhere, she happily wore her alleged
ignorance on her sleeve; in a review of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, she
declared: ‘The experts will tell you why it’s beautiful. I’m just Claudine, and
more often than not I submit to beauty . . . overwhelmed, without analysing
it.’16 Disingenuous pronouncements such as this were interspersed with in-
jokes and references to characters from the novels, including Claudine’s
husband Renaud, as well as to Willy, L’Ouvreuse and Polaire, lightly tripping
across different narrative planes. A similar fusion of the real and the imagined
is present in the semi-autobiographical Claudine novels themselves, the last of
which, partly set in Bayreuth, draws on Colette’s own experience as a regular
pilgrim to the ‘Holy City’.17 Here Colette partakes in a long literary tradition
of what Cormac Newark has described as the soirée à l’opéra: the almost
obligatory operatic outing featured in French novels of the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries.18 More importantly, this tradition was part of
a broader phenomenon in which the distinction between factual reporting
and fictional accounts was increasingly blurred. Colette’s ‘Claudine’ columns
are indicative of this generic blurring; but they also draw attention to the then
prominent practice among music critics of obscuring authorial identity
through the use of pseudonyms, ghostwriters and fictional characters, making
the task of identifying the true voice behind the competing narratives, the
functions and the meanings of the criticism, often very difficult indeed.
15
[Colette], ‘Claudine au Concert’, Gil Blas (12 January 1903).
16
[Colette], ‘Claudine au Concert’, Gil Blas (2 February 1903). It was all a pose: Colette was not nearly as
ignorant as her alter ego. She was, by all accounts, an accomplished pianist, and her earlier music criticism
had demonstrated a degree of technical understanding; see Christian Goubault, ‘Colette et Debussy:
“Compagnons de chaîne” au Gil Blas en 1903’, Revue international de la musique française, 17 (June
1985), 76–8.
17
Colette, ‘Claudine and Annie’, in The Complete Colette, trans. Antonia White (New York: Farrar, Straus
and Giroux, 2001), p. 582.
18
Cormac Newark, Opera in the Novel from Balzac to Proust (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2001), p. 5.
Composers as Critics: Debussy at the Gil Blas

Claudine/Colette shared the duties of music critic at Gil Blas with Claude
Debussy, who himself made occasional use of a fictional alter ego – the
irascible Monsieur Croche – to voice some of his typically robust opinions.19
These unlikely critical bedfellows started their respective columns on the
same day (12 January 1903), and continued to appear alongside each other
every Monday for the next six months, often reviewing the same concerts.
Responsible for the longer, and supposedly more serious feuilleton, Debussy,
as a professional musician, promised a more knowledgeable form of criticism.
In taking on this task, Debussy was just one of an impressive roll call of
Third Republic composers who, following in Berlioz’s footsteps, carved out
a secondary career as a critic; these included Reyer, Saint-Saëns, Fauré,
Bruneau, Dukas, Schmitt, Auric and Messiaen. Unlike some of these figures,
Debussy’s critical career was only intermittent, albeit no less important for
that. His first articles appeared in the radical cultural journal La Revue blanche,
in 1901, where he lasted eight months; after a six-month spell at Gil Blas, he
published only occasionally until November 1912, when he agreed to take
charge of a column reviewing the Concerts Colonne for La Revue musicale S. I.
M. This final engagement, which lasted until March 1914, once more paired
Debussy with a contrasting voice: fellow composer Vincent d’Indy, respon-
sible for reviewing the Concerts Lamoureux.
Debussy was a somewhat reluctant critic, and throughout his career he
turned down numerous requests for his critical collaboration.20 He also
expressed his scepticism over the quality of a profession that anyone and
everyone thought they could try their hand at; as he complained to Louis
Laloy, ‘Today, if you don’t know what to do or, especially, what to say, you
improvise some art criticism.’21 The composer was himself, however, far from
conscientious as a critic: he confessed to not always staying to the end of the
concerts under review, and often reused material from older articles.
Moreover, despite his superior musical authority, his reviews often came
close in tone to those of his critical confrère Colette: amusing, sarcastic and
riddled with wordplay, they also refused to engage with technical analysis.
‘What you will be finding here’, he announced, ‘are my own sincere
19
Monsieur Croche first appeared in Debussy’s sixth article for La Revue blanche on 1 July 1901; he made
only five further appearances, including three in Gil Blas on 16 February, and 16 and 23 March 1903; see
Déirdre Donnellon, ‘Debussy as Musician and Critic’, in Simon Trezise (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to
Debussy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
20
See François Lesure, ‘Introduction’, in Debussy, Debussy on Music, pp. xviii–xx.
21
Deborah Priest (ed.), Louis Laloy (1874–1944) on Debussy, Ravel, and Stravinsky (Aldershot: Ashgate,
1999), p. 11.
352 DELPHINE MORDEY
impressions, exactly as I felt them – more that than “criticism”’; he did not
want to kill the ‘mystery’ of musical works.22 Perhaps most importantly,
Debussy’s reviews shared with Colette’s a broader purpose: self-promotion.
Where ‘Claudine au concert’ was a vehicle for marketing novels, Debussy’s
feuilletons offered the composer a platform from which to disseminate his
strongly held views and shape his reputation. His outspoken attacks – against
contemporaries such as Bruneau and Saint-Saëns, against creaking state musi-
cal institutions and, of course, against Wagner – helped to confirm his reputa-
tion as an iconoclast, while his championing of Rameau, and a revised French
musical historiography, served to construct the historical narrative into which
he wished to situate himself.23
It was precisely this potential for conflating criticism with personal
advancement that led to extensive disparagement of composer-critics.
Indeed, as the Third Republic progressed, composers became increasingly
adept at utilising criticism as a means of publicity: several members of Les Six,
for example, including Auric, Milhaud and Poulenc, regularly wrote for the
press, generating exposure for the group. A few voices did come out in
support of composers, arguing that their experience made them exceptionally
well suited to the job of critic, but such support was usually from composer-
critics themselves.24 That said, not all composers were tarred with the same
brush: for Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi, ‘second-rate artists [who are] more
assimilators than creators’ could make successful critics.25 Certainly, many of
the most influential and respected critics of the day were relatively minor or
frustrated composers, including Victorin Joncières, Gaston Carraud and
Emile Vuillermoz. There was, however, at the same time, a third category of
critic emerging, one that was both musically trained and comparatively dis-
interested: the musicologist-critic.
Music Criticism and the Rise of Musicology

The discipline of musicology slowly gained recognition in France through
a constellation of seminal events in the late nineteenth century. In 1871, the
Paris Conservatoire introduced its first music history classes, made compul-
sory following Fauré’s appointment as Director in 1905; its rival institution,
22
Debussy, La Revue blanche (1 April 1901); translated in Debussy, Debussy on Music, p. 13.
23
See Donnellon, ‘Debussy as Musician and Critic’; and Anya Suschitsky, ‘Debussy’s Rameau: French
Music and Its Others’, Musical Quarterly, 86/3 (2002), 398–448.
24
See, for example, Charles Koechlin, ‘Les compositeurs et la critique musicale’, La Revue musicale
(1 September 1927), 108–16.
25
Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi, ‘La Critique musicale’; Le Courrier musical (1 November 1910); translated
in Donnellon, ‘Debussy, Satie and the Parisian Critical Press’, p. 24.
the Schola Cantorum, had music history at the core of its curriculum from its
foundation in 1894. At the Sorbonne, musicology was accepted as a doctoral
subject in the 1890s, with the first doctorate awarded to Jules Combarieu in
1894; further doctorates followed for Romain Rolland (1895), Louis Laloy
(1904) and Jules Écorcheville (1906), all of whom went on to make their mark
in the twin fields of musicology and criticism.
The gradual institutionalisation of musicology led to a new breed of critic, well
versed in music history, and capable of analysing and contextualising works, old
and new. Many of these critics found an outlet for their lengthy ruminations in
the pages of the growing specialist music press, editions of which were usually
published weekly or fortnightly, allowing more time to reflect on musical works
and catering to a smaller, possibly more discerning audience than the daily
papers. Le Ménestrel, founded in 1834, remained one of the dominant music
journals, and although its long-running rival, the Revue et Gazette musicale (1834),
ceased publication in 1880, a large number of periodicals surfaced to challenge
Le Ménestrel’s position, including L’Art musical (1860), La Chronique musicale
(1873), La Renaissance musicale (1881), Le Monde musical (1889), Le Journal musical
(1894) and Le Courrier musical (1899). In addition to these, and hundreds of short-
lived publications, a small number of decidedly more academic journals began to
appear, spearheaded by musicologists with a view to disseminating their work:
these included La Tribune de Saint-Gervais (1895), which, much like its affiliate
institution, the Schola Cantorum, promoted early music and historical studies;
La Revue musicale (1901), founded by Jules Combarieu; Louis Laloy’s Le Mercure
musical (1905), which eventually became La Revue musicale S. I. M.; and Henry
Prunières’s Revue musicale (1920).26
Combarieu’s journal, initially titled La Revue d’histoire et de critique musicales,
made clear at the outset its intention to bring together music history and
criticism.27 In a letter to the journal’s readers, the editors explained:
The history of music is not finished: it progresses before our eyes through the
creation of new works. Thus in addition to history, we also provided from the
beginning a place for criticism . . . In our criticism as in our history, we
proceed with texts in hand, we do not claim anything without evidence, and
we have no ambition other than to express our opinions.28
26
See Jean-Adrien Thoumin, Bibliographie rétrospective des périodiques français de littérature musicale,
1870–1954 (Paris: Union Française des Organismes de Documentation, 1957).
27
The journal changed its title to La Revue musicale: revue d’histoire et de critique in October 1902, before
becoming simply La Revue musicale in 1904.
28
‘À nos lecteurs’, La Revue musicale, 2 (November 1902), translated in Michel Duchesneau, ‘French
Musicology and the Musical Press (1900–14): The Case of La Revue musicale, Le Mercure musical and La Revue
musicale SIM’, trans. Kimberly White, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 140/2 (2015), 247–8.
354 DELPHINE MORDEY
At first glance, this seems to point towards a more rigorous, analytical

approach to criticism, far from Debussy’s ‘impressions’ as he ‘felt them’.
But, as Michel Duscheneau has noted, the editors’ stated aim to ‘express our
opinions’ belies a ‘confusion of epistemological approaches’, in which aca-
demic objectivity was intricately intertwined with personal subjectivity.29
For the Lyon-based musicologist-critic Léon Vallas, such an amalgamation
of academic and journalistic methodologies was to be encouraged, a view
disputed by Prunières. In the context of a long-running spat over the con-
struction of Debussy’s legacy, the critics’ bitter disagreement would give
rise to a collateral battle over the very nature of musicology.30 With both
music criticism and musicology in their relative infancy, the pages of the
newly founded journals offered a valuable forum for debating crucial meth-
odological questions, and in doing so, helped to mould the respective
disciplines.
Internecine battles aside, one of the most important attributes of the
musicologist-critics was their ability to elucidate the growing crop of complex
and innovative new musical works to bewildered audiences. It was one thing
for untrained, amateur critics to dash off next-day reviews of Auberian opéra
comiques that they – and their readers – were hearing for the hundredth time; it
was quite another to have to explain Pelléas et Mélisande or the Rite of Spring,
and many of the press critics were simply not up to the task. It was not just
new works that demanded skilled interpreters; alongside incipient modern-
ism, the Third Republic enjoyed a resurgence of interest in early music.31 This
interest was nurtured and facilitated by musicologists through their historical
research and editions of pre-nineteenth-century repertoire, but it also
required their expertise to explain these newly rediscovered works to the
public.
The increasingly pedagogical role of music criticism was similarly reflected
in the trend for distributing detailed historical and analytical programme
notes at concerts, a practice first regularly implemented by the Concerts
Colonne from 1885 onwards.32 In their shared didacticism, the programmistes
and musicologist-critics (often one and the same) were not only responding to
29
Duchesneau, ‘French Musicology and the Musical Press’, 247.
30
See Barbara L. Kelly, ‘Remembering Debussy in Interwar France: Authority, Musicology, and Legacy’,
Music & Letters, 93 (2012), 374–93.
31
See Katharine Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past: Early Music in Nineteenth-Century France (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2005).
32
See Jann Pasler, ‘Building a Public for Orchestral Music: Les Concerts Colonne’, in Hans Erich
Bödeker, Patrice Veit and Michael Werner (eds.), Le Concert et son public: mutations de la vie musicale en
Europe de 1780 à 1914 (France, Allemagne, Angleterre) (Paris: Les Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de
l’homme, 2002), pp. 214–34.
significant changes in the musical landscape, but also echoing the concern
with educating the citizen that was so prevalent in the Third Republic.33
Criticising Criticism
In tandem with the growth of music criticism at the end of the nineteenth
century, critics began to turn the spotlight on themselves, questioning the
raison d’être of their profession, its aims, responsibilities, methodologies,
training and protagonists. The overriding tenor of the resulting articles was
negative: despite – perhaps because of – the expansion of the field, the death
knell of criticism was constantly tolled, an obbligato accompaniment to the
soundtrack of the Republic. This pessimistic perception was explored at
length in a number of enquêtes – or surveys – which focused on the current
state of the discipline.34 In response to one of the most famous such enquêtes,
undertaken by the Revue d’art dramatique in 1899, Romain Rolland argued that
criticism was ‘equally harmful to art and to the public spirit’, and should be
suppressed.35 Much of this pessimism focused on what was felt to be the
shameful incompetence of music critics indiscriminately hired by the daily
papers to produce insubstantial and highly subjective reviews. We have
already seen the concerns raised over next-day reviews, but the situation
was exacerbated by the deepening divide between the general and the specia-
list press, as musically trained critics gravitated towards the latter, taking with
them an ostensibly more objective and technical approach. Although there
were exceptions who straddled this divide, the battle lines had been drawn
and were frequently invoked, not least by Rolland in his savage fictional
portrayal of Théophile Goujart, a critic who ‘knew nothing about, nor liked,
music; but that did not stop him from talking about it’.36
The old-school critics put up a defence: in ‘L’École des amateurs’, a ten-part
series for Le Courrier musical, Jean d’Udine outlined his theories on the impor-
tance of subjectivity and intuition over objectivity, describing theoretical and
doctoral training as an ‘ugly cul-de-sac’.37 The incomprehensibility of more
‘technical’ criticism was a frequent complaint from the ‘amateur’ side of the
divide; attending a concert of music by Guy Ropartz, Colette’s alter ego
33
See Jann Pasler, Composing the Citizen: Music as Public Utility in Third Republic France (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 2009), pp. 189–202.
34
The enquête was a ubiquitous journalistic medium in the Third Republic; in soliciting and then
juxtaposing opinions from a range of personalities, the enquêtes provided a multifaceted snapshot of the
current state of debate at any particular moment, giving voice to a variety of competing views.
35
Rolland’s response to the ‘Enquête sur la critique dramatique française’, 161.
36
Romain Rolland, Jean Christophe à Paris, Vol. 2: La Foire sur la Place (Paris: Ollendorf, 1908), p. 57.
37
Jean d’Udine, ‘L’école des amateurs I I ’, Le Courrier musical (15 October 1905), 565.
356 DELPHINE MORDEY
Claudine, protested that ‘the programme gives itself a devil of a job trying to
explain [why the work is beautiful] . . . There are perhaps people for whom
a thing like this aids comprehension; me, it makes me feel like a complete
idiot!’38 Faux-naive or not, Colette’s comment nevertheless points to the need
for critics to know their audience: just as the pressure of next-day reviewing
was unconducive to in-depth analysis, so too was the need to cater for the
mass readership of the general press, many members of whom might only
rarely, if at all, attend the performances. In other words, the shorter, less
technical press reviews so common at the time were not necessarily evidence
of critical ignorance, so much, perhaps, as responses to practical exigencies.
In addition to questions of competence, critics regularly voiced concern
over the issue of independence in their profession. Accusations of corruption
and bias were rife, not least, as we have seen, in the reception of composer-
critics. Similar rebukes were aimed at critics who formed partnerships with
particular composers or compositional schools, using the power of their
position to promote their chosen artist or aesthetic.39 Impartiality was further
thought to be compromised by the custom of giving out free tickets to critics;
if that failed to secure a positive review, theatre directors could turn to paid-
for puff pieces, acting as covert publicity. For Calvocoressi, the deliberate
obfuscation of the distinction between genuine reviews and publicity, was ‘an
unspeakable disgrace’,40 but failing to play the game could have serious
consequences. When, in 1875, Bizet’s Carmen met with an unfavourable
reception, blame soon fell on the Opéra-Comique’s Director for neglecting
to bribe the most influential critics.41
The difficulty of distinguishing between genuine criticism and puffery in
the Third Republic press continues to pose a problem for historians today. As
with the example of Colette’s Claudine, this difficulty is also representative of
the wider complications of criticism in the period: a criticism characterised by
a multitude of voices, agendas and narratives, sometimes overt, sometimes
hidden, as it tried to establish itself within the new and constantly evolving
technological, cultural and political contexts of the fin de siècle. While this
resulted, as we have seen, in a great deal of self-reflection, when critics did
turn their gaze from internal debates, it was, more often than not, to focus
on – and shape – the broader external aesthetic and political battles that
38
[Colette], ‘Claudine au Concert’, Gil Blas (23 February 1903).
39
See Barbara L. Kelly, Music and Ultra-Modernism in France: A Fragile Consensus, 1913–1939 (Woodbridge:
Boydell Press, 2013), pp. 67–94.
40
Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi, ‘De la critique musicale’, Revue française de musique, 8 (1 February
1913), 325.
41
See Lesley Wright, Carmen: Dossier de presse parisienne (1875) (Weinsberg: Lucie Galland, 2001), p. viii.
dominated the cultural landscape. Chief among these was the relationship
with Germany.
Revanche, Regeneration and the Republic

Scarred by the double trauma of military defeat and civil war, and further
mutilated by the loss of Alsace-Lorraine, the early Third Republic achieved
some sense of unity through a collective desire for revanche.42 Although the
strength of this desire appeared to recede as new generations emerged,
periods of political crisis – not least the 1887 Schnæbelé affair,43 the Dreyfus
affair and, of course, the First World War – would bring the issue of revanche
back to the fore. Saint-Saëns’s views were typical: interviewed in 1897 for an
enquête on current attitudes towards Alsace-Lorraine, he argued that anyone
who ‘considers the war of 70–71 as a “purely historical” event, and who is not
prepared to take up arms to reconquer the lost provinces, is unworthy of
being called a Frenchman’.44 Revanche alone was not enough, however, to
repair a fragmented French sense of self: the search to identify a ‘true’ France
through which to project a renewed sense of national pride would be one of
the recurrent features of the Third Republic.
The shadow of military defeat, the simmering – and twice realised – threat
of future conflict with Germany, and the concomitant search for French
identity were perpetually reflected in critical debates about music. German
culture had appeared as a complex, ambivalent role model for many French
intellectuals, including musicians, for much of the nineteenth century: the
character of the ‘bon Allemand’, an artistic, naive and sensitive soul, had
provided an idealised counterpart to the shallow, sophisticated Parisian of
the Second Empire. But following the Franco-Prussian War, Flaubert’s ‘peu-
ple de rêveurs’,45 was replaced in the French imagination with a new breed of
German that was cruel and menacing; the image of a barbarous and malevolent
nation shattered previously held French illusions of a German utopia peopled
by Goethe, Schiller and Beethoven.46
42
French defeat in the Franco-Prussian war led to the ideology of revanche, dedicated to avenging defeat
and reclaiming lost territories; see Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma,
Mourning, and Recovery (New York: Picador, 2004), pp. 128–35.
43
In April 1887, Guillaume Schnæbelé, a French police inspector, was arrested by the Germans on the
Franco-German border; it was widely feared that the ensuing dispute might lead to war.
44
Saint-Saëns’s response to the ‘Enquête sur L’Alsace-Lorraine et l’état actuel des esprits’, Mercure de
France (December 1897), 645.
45
Gustave Flaubert, ‘Allemands’, in his Dictionnaire des idées reçues (Paris: L. Conard, 1913).
46
See Claude Digeon, La Crise allemande de la pensée française (1870–1914) (Paris: Presses universitaires de
France, 1959).
358 DELPHINE MORDEY
This apparent betrayal led to heated arguments in the press over the extent
to which French composers could, or should, continue to draw inspiration
from their Teutonic neighbours. As will be discussed further below, while for
some critics any hint of Germanic style was akin to treason, for others the
victors offered a model for French regeneration. Any such defence of German
influence, however, required careful rhetorical justification and, in many
cases, judicious revision of music history. Beyond questions of influence,
the new character assigned to the Germans presented French critics with an
opportunity to claim cultural superiority over their rivals: translating military
defeat into moral victory, the French awarded themselves the mantle of
civilised and humane culture, capable of producing great artworks, in contrast
to the spiritual bankruptcy of their German foes. This was the moment to
present a new, stronger image of French music, and to vanquish the Germans
on the musical battleground, exacting a cultural revanche.
But there was a serious sticking point in this plan: critics from different
political, institutional, musical and social factions were embroiled in a battle
over the nature of French music, endlessly debating the current state of the
repertoire and the future directions they thought it should take. Aesthetic
disputes ranged from the sources deemed necessary to ensure the revival of an
innately French music – especially native chanson populaire and early music – to
the most appropriate musical genres.47
The ontological uncertainty that lay at the heart of debates over French
music may have contributed to the deep sense of anxiety and inferiority that
underpinned the critical hubris of Gallic superiority. A more significant
factor, however, was the perpetual fear of future invasion, both musical and
military. As the historian Robert Tombs has explained, the French ‘sense of
national cultural exceptionalism’ was often paradoxically accompanied by ‘a
pessimism in the face of perceived threats from inferior yet overwhelming
foreign influences’.48 This fear was manifested in the metaphors of invasion
that recur throughout the music criticism of the Third Republic, not least in
the context of debates over Wagner,49 debates which, moreover, embodied
the complex matrix of connections between aesthetic appeal, political legiti-
macy and the self-consciously riven French identity.
47
See Annegret Fauser, ‘Gendering the Nations: The Ideologies of French Discourse on Music
(1870–1914)’, in Harry White and Michael Murphy (eds.), Musical Constructions of Nationalism: Essays
on the History and Ideology of European Musical Culture, 1800–1945 (Cork: Cork University Press, 2001).
48
Robert Tombs, ‘Culture and the Intellectuals’, in James F. McMillan (ed.), Modern France: 1880–2002
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), p. 173.
49
See Davinia Caddy, The Ballets Russes and Beyond: Music and Dance in Belle-Époque Paris (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2012), pp. 115–59.
Wagnérisme
If no issue dominated music criticism more than Franco-German relations, no
figure dominated this criticism more than Wagner: articles – even entire
journals – for, against or simply about Wagner saturated the press, especially
in the three decades prior to 1900. Wagner’s dominance was, however, far
from uncontroversial. His tempestuous relationship with France – a country
he had previously tried and failed to conquer – was already well under way by
the time the French and Prussians came to blows, but the 1870 war had
a significant impact on this relationship, lending critical debates about the
composer an ineluctably nationalist hue. When, in 1873, the conductor Jules
Pasdeloup dared to start programming Wagner again after a two-year hiatus,
the fiercely anti-Wagnerian journal L’Art musical was quick to remind readers
that ‘after the war, Monsieur Pasdeloup declared in patriotic faith that he
renounced the music of Wagner. Like the drunkards who have sworn never to
drink again, Monsieur Pasdeloup has quickly returned to his former loves . . .
The Director of the Concerts Populaires is not, as we can see, the musician of
la Revanche’.50
Not only was Wagner German, he had further damned himself in the eyes of
the French with his Eine Kapitulation; described by the author as an antique
comedy in the style of Aristophanes, this cruel farce, written at the height of
the Franco-Prussian war and set in besieged Paris, ridiculed the French,
portraying them as a frivolous, pleasure-loving people, incapable of taking
their situation seriously. First translated into French in 1876,51 Eine
Kapitulation was thereafter used by many anti-Wagnerian critics as a stick
with which to beat the composer (and his French supporters). It also helped
to ensure that the question of Wagner remained firmly tied to the political
situation, provoking regular audience protests. L’Art musical went so far as to
suggest that ‘The music of Wagner is no longer for us a question of art, it is
a question of public order. It is no longer for the critic to judge it. It is for the
Prefect of Police to prohibit it, in the interest of the peace.’52 The impassioned
debates over Wagner, which took place both within the specialist music
columns and in the more general press, reached a peak with the much-hyped
Parisian premiere of Lohengrin at the Eden-Théâtre in May 1887, a production
brought to a swift conclusion thanks to a heady mix of press hyperbole, street
50
Anon., ‘Nouvelles diverses’, L’Art musical (25 December 1873), 415.
51
The first French translation (in abridged form) appeared in Victor Tissot, Prussiens en Allemagne (Paris:
Dentu, 1876), shortly before a complete translation was published as ‘Richard Wagner et les Parisiens:
Une capitulation, comédie à la manière antique’ in a supplement to L’Eclipse (5 November 1876).
52
L’Art musical (2 November 1876), quoted in Élisabeth Bernard, ‘Jules Pasdeloup et les Concerts
Populaires’, Revue de musicologie, 57/2 (1971), 176.
360 DELPHINE MORDEY
riots and the concurrent Schnæbelé affair, which reignited anti-German

feeling.53
Wagnerism did not, however, simply sever Wagnerians from anti-
Wagnerians; it also generated discord within each of these camps. This
knotty situation arose in part from the many misconceptions that sur-
rounded Wagner, caused by, among other factors, the scant availability of
translations of his writings (not to mention the contradictions inherent
within them) and the patchy performance history of his music in France up
until the late 1880s. Although there were regular concert performances of
extracts from Wagner’s works, his operas were only performed regularly in
Paris after 1891, and many of those writing about Wagner thus had only
a limited acquaintance with his music.54 Indeed, French wagnérisme was as
much a literary as a musical phenomenon, attracting, in particular, a group of
young symbolist writers who sought to promote Wagner’s poetic and phi-
losophical ideas through the pages of La Revue wagnérienne (1885–88). One
corollary of this multidisciplinarity and ambiguity was that Wagner could be
drawn on by critics to serve varied ideological, aesthetic and political ends. If
there was one unifying factor in critical clashes over the composer, it was
that they were more concerned with an idea (or ideas) of Wagner, than with
details of his music.
Prominent among such ideas was that of Wagner as a progressive, synon-
ymous with the avant-garde; consequently, for conservative critics, Wagner
became a byword for undesirable innovation. This can clearly be seen in the
critical response to Bizet’s Carmen. When the work premiered in 1875, it
provoked a number of hostile reviews, partly due to the subject matter and
racy realism of Céléstine Galli-Marié’s central performance, but also because
of its departures from the musical conventions of opéra comique. Wagner’s
name made more appearances in these reviews than that of any other compo-
ser, barring Bizet himself.55 There were several reasons for this, not least that
the French composer was a member of the nouvelle école, a group widely
perceived as being under Wagner’s spell, pushing French music further
away from its national roots, and essential qualities of clarity and refinement.
Many critics thus labelled Bizet’s score ‘Wagnerian’, as a shorthand for it
being too difficult and lacking in melody (that is, for being too ‘progressive’);
pro-Wagnerians, on the other hand, accused the work of not being Wagnerian
53
The press quarrels over Lohengrin were reprised in September 1891, when a production was mounted at
the Paris Opéra.
54
See Gerald D. Turbow, ‘Art and Politics: Wagnerism in France’, in David C. Large and William Weber
(eds.), Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1984), pp. 156–7.
55
See Wright, Carmen, p. viii.
enough. As Lesley Wright reminds us, however, the references to Wagner

here must be understood not merely from the perspective of post-war atti-
tudes towards the German composer, but also in the wider context of efforts
to reform opéra comique in the 1870s. As already mentioned, in the wake of
defeat, there were increasing demands to promote a truly French musical
culture, and opéra comique, the quintessential French genre, was seen as one of
the great bastions against foreign (especially German) cultural incursion. By
straying from convention in his handling of opéra comique, Bizet was thus
always likely to cause concern. But to stray in a way that could be seen to
suggest Wagnerian influence, might, as Wright has suggested, be viewed
almost as ‘a form of national betrayal’.56 To invoke Wagner in reviews of
Carmen, then, was to press into service a dense web of allusions: nationalist
fervour, fear of German musical invasion, and concerns for a vulnerable
French identity could all be harnessed to give added weight to aesthetic
arguments, clothing the age-old battle between conservative and progressive
music critics in political discourse.
As the genre upon which many hopes for the post-war promotion of a truly
French musical identity were pinned, opéra comique was particularly sensitive
to accusations of Wagnerian invasion, but also to concerns that it did not
project quite the desired version of that identity. In particular, as Annegret
Fauser has observed, a number of critics worried that opéra comique was
inappropriately light and pretty; that is, too feminine.57 For a nation recover-
ing from the emasculating effects of military defeat and territorial loss, and
keen to demonstrate renewal and vitality, a more virile profile was felt to be
required for French music. It was in this context that Gustave Bertrand,
writing in Le Ménestrel in October 1871, suggested that opéra comique should
become ‘more masculine and sinewy’.58
Such gendering of musical discourse was a common feature of criticism
during the Republic, not least in the reception of Claude Debussy, whose
delicate, sensitive and seemingly formless compositions attracted charges of
effeminacy.59 This effeminacy was equated with fin-de-siècle decadence, which,
in turn, was associated with weakness and ill health; metaphors of sickness are
manifold in reviews of Debussy’s music.60 Writing for the Revue des deux
56
Ibid. 57
See Fauser, ‘Gendering the Nations’.
58
Gustave Bertrand, ‘Opéra-Comique: Hérold, 1000e representation du Pré au Clercs’, Le Ménestrel
(15 October 1870–71); translated in Fauser, ‘Gendering the Nations’, p. 72.
59
See Barbara L. Kelly, ‘Debussy and the Making of a musicien français: Pelléas, the Press and World War I ’,
in Barbara L. Kelly (ed.), French Music, Culture, and National Identity, 1870–1939 (Rochester: University of
Rochester Press, 2008), p. 64.
60
See Jann Pasler, ‘Paris: Conflicting Notions of Progress’, in Jim Samson (ed.), The Late Romantic Era:
From the Mid-19th Century to World War I (London: Macmillan, 1991), 396–7.
362 DELPHINE MORDEY
mondes, the conservative critic Camille Bellaigue suggested that the compo-
ser’s opéra comique, Pelléas et Mélisande, was ‘sick’ music: ‘Existing as it does
with the minimum of vitality, it tends to impair and destroy our existence.
The germs it contains are not those of life and progress, but of decadence and
death.’61 For anti-Debussy critics, such morbid music failed to satisfy the
demand for a strong and healthy – that is, masculine – musical language;
more than this, it could not hope to combat Wagnerian dominance on the
French operatic stage.
Symphonic Schisms
If many French critics sought a stronger, more masculine music to represent
the newly revived nation, they also wanted a more serious music. Part of the
blame for defeat in the Franco-Prussian War had been placed on the frivolous
and morally bankrupt Second Empire, nurtured as it was on a diet of
Offenbach and operetta; across the Rhine, the Germans had focused instead
on science, study and Beethoven symphonies, ensuring victory. This wide-
spread view of the debacle contributed to demands for an overhaul of French
musical culture, shifting the focus to instrumental genres, including the
symphony. In thus implicating French music in the account of national defeat
and renewal, those critics – and composers – who had long attacked French
operatic culture (whether because it was too trivial, too cosmopolitan or too
stagnant and closed to new composers) were yet again able to exploit the
political circumstances for their own aesthetic ends. The resulting narrative of
musical renewal has dominated music histories of France ever since.62
But there was a problem with this reformist agenda: instrumental music,
especially the symphony, was closely associated with Germany. It was, how-
ever, this association that gave the symphony its credibility in the first place.
Just as a number of commentators, including Ernest Renan, had argued that
the French could learn from their victors and look to Germany as a model for,
among other matters, educational reform,63 so too, it was argued, French
composers could usefully learn from their Teutonic counterparts.64 But critics
required further lines of defence to avoid accusations of cultural treason. One
61
Camille Bellaigue, ‘Pelléas et Mélisande’, Revue des deux mondes (15 May 1902); translated in Léon
Vallas, Claude Debussy: His Life and Works, trans. Marie and Grace O’Brien (New York: Dover, 1973), p. 128.
62
See Delphine Mordey, ‘Auber’s Horses: L’Année terrible and Apocalyptic Narratives’, 19th-Century
Music, 30/3 (Spring 2007), 213–29.
63
See Ernest Renan, La Réforme intellectuelle et morale (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1871).
64
This attitude even permeated the Société Nationale de Musique, founded by Camille Saint-Saëns and
Romain Bussine a month after the end of the Franco-Prussian war; see Michael Strasser, ‘The Société
Nationale and Its Adversaries: The Musical Politics of l’invasion germanique in the 1870s’, 19th-Century
Music, 24/3 (Spring 2001), 224–51.
of the most common such defences was to assert the universality of great
music: reviewing one of Pasdeloup’s German-centric Concerts Populaires
during the Siege of Paris, the music critic for Le soir dismissed any concerns
with the declaration that ‘Masterpieces have no fatherland.’65 Critics also
seized the chance to claim superior levels of artistic discernment: Benoît
Jouvin welcomed the invasion of concert programmes by German composers
as an opportunity for the French to demonstrate their ability to appreciate
these composers even better than the Germans themselves, engaging with art
on a transcendental level, beyond petty material conflicts.66 In appropriating
the symphony, critics argued, French composers could take this a step further,
claiming not only superior understanding of the genre but also the production
of superior works.
A further critical strategy was to offer a revised reading of music history,
portraying the French as the originators of the most important features of
German music. During the First World War, for example, d’Indy claimed that
seventeenth-century German composers had been influenced by Latin quali-
ties of clarity and proportion, which in turn underlay all forms of the sonata
and symphony.67 According to such readings, French composers were simply
reclaiming their heritage in turning to the symphony. French appropriation of
Beethoven was also common; strikingly, Camille Mauclair insisted that the
Ninth Symphony was French, as ‘each word and each tone correspond ade-
quately to our hopes and to our ideal . . . A German wrote it, but the whole of
Germany has lost every right to possess it.’68
Despite these justifications, as Brian Hart has observed, many conservative
critics refused to accept the idea of the symphony as a legitimate genre for
French composers and their audiences.69 The debate for and against the
symphony instead became a synecdoche for many of the binary oppositions
that appeared to divide the political and musical worlds of the Third Republic,
not least between the largely right-wing, anti-Dreyfusard Schola Cantorum,
led by chief champion of the symphony, Vincent d’Indy, and the Republican,
Dreyfusard, vocal-oriented Paris Conservatoire. As this institutional rivalry
evolved into a battle between the d’Indystes and the Debussystes (a transmu-
tation that stemmed in part from Debussy’s Conservatoire training), the issue
65
‘Les chefs-d’oeuvres n’ont point de patrie’; A. B., ‘Le Concert Pasdeloup’, La Liberté (1 November
1870).
66
Benoît Jouvin, ‘Chronique musicale’, Le Figaro (27 June 1871).
67
Vincent d’Indy, ‘Musique française et musique allemande’, La Renaissance politique, littéraire et artistique
(12 June 1915), 6.
68
Camille Mauclair, La Religion de la musique (Paris: Fischbacher, 1928); translated in Leo Schrade,
Beethoven in France: The Growth of an Idea (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1942), p. 242.
69
Brian Hart, ‘The Symphony and National Identity in Early Twentieth-Century France’, in Kelly (ed.),
French Music, Culture, and National Identity, pp. 134–6.
364 DELPHINE MORDEY
of Germanic genres continued to play a prominent role in critical disputes.

Debussyste critics, such as Vuillermoz and Charles Koechlin, accused d’Indy
and his disciples (the Scholistes) of succumbing to and disseminating German
influence, while d’Indy’s defenders, including Pierre Lalo and Mauclair,
bemoaned their opponents’ anti-German sentiments.70
These ostensible rivalries were, however, to a large extent constructed – or
at least exaggerated – and perpetuated by critics on either side of the perceived
divides; the battle lines between composers, institutions, politics and aes-
thetics were not nearly as neatly drawn as contemporary reports (and subse-
quently much historical musicology) made them out to be.71 This is not to
deny the existence of many schools, societies and factions, separated by
genuine differences, but the boundaries between them were neither imperme-
able, nor fixed. The relationship between d’Indy and Debussy offers a notable
case in point. While their supporters frequently pitted one against the other,
Debussy’s works were in fact regularly performed at the Schola, where they
received generally positive reviews from the in-house journal, La Tribune de
Saint-Gervais.72 Debussy, in his own criticism, praised d’Indy’s institution for
having ‘restored to us all the beauty of early music’, especially the music of
Rameau, the first two acts of whose Castor et Pollux were staged at the Schola
in 1903.73 Indeed, Rameau was an important point of consensus for the two
composers.74 Rameau’s works, with their ‘charming and delicate tenderness’
and ‘fine sense of elegance’, represented, for Debussy, ‘a purely French
tradition’,75 one unsullied by the foreign invasions of the nineteenth century
and which thus offered an important model for the resuscitation of French
music. D’Indy similarly recognised the nationalist potential in Rameau, claim-
ing for him the role of Wagner’s precursor; in doing so, d’Indy once again
placed France at the origins of a musical tradition, while simultaneously
justifying French submission to Wagnerian influence.76 Debussy, d’Indy
and their respective supporters and critics may have had their differences,
but the desire to restore pride in France and its culture following the 1870
defeat was felt across political and aesthetic factions: ‘nationalism was’, as
70
See ibid., p. 136.
71
See Jann Pasler, ‘Deconstructing d’Indy, or, The Problem of a Composer’s Reputation’, 19th-Century
Music, 30/3 (Spring 2007), 232.
72
See Donnellon, ‘Debussy, Satie, and the Parisian Critical Press’, 73–4
73
Debussy, ‘À la Schola Cantorum’, Gil Blas (2 February 1903); translated in Debussy, Debussy on Music,
p. 111.
74
Both composers contributed to the complete Rameau Edition (1893–1913) under Saint-Saëns’
direction.
75
Debussy, ‘À la Schola Cantorum’; translated in Debussy, Debussy on Music, pp. 112, 113.
76
See Ellis, Interpreting the Musical Past, p. 132.
Pasler has observed, ‘a wild card that cut across other basic issues and caused
unexpected realignments’.77
Plus Ça Change
Although the cast and context would change, many of the same issues that had
preoccupied critics at the start of the Republic continued to dominate debates
up to, and beyond, the First World War. Old battles were regularly resurrected
around familiar enemies, including Wagner, who, following a brief period of
relative acceptance, returned to the centre of press polemics with the onset of
the War. In September 1914, Saint-Saëns launched a counteroffensive with the
first in a series of vitriolic articles attacking Wagner specifically and German
culture more broadly. Published in the right-wing, nationalist newspaper
L’Echo de Paris, under the title ‘Germanophilie’, these articles were the culmina-
tion of thirty years of pent-up frustration at the failure of the Third Republic to
achieve revanche, and of what Saint-Saëns saw as the continuing neglect of
French composers in favour of their German counterparts.78 Wagner thus
again provided a focal point for the promotion of musical chauvinism, while
also, incidentally, serving the cause of the anti-modernists, who claimed that
the avant-garde was a German-influenced (by which they meant Wagnerian)
threat to French musical culture.79 As before, politics and patriotism were
commandeered to assist aesthetic aspirations.
Saint-Saëns’ Germanophobia was taken up by the Ligue nationale pour la
défense de la musique française, founded by the critic Charles Tenroc in
March 1916, which campaigned for a ban on the performance of all Austro-
German works not yet in the public domain.80 Not everyone was in favour of
such a ban: Ravel and Fauré refused to join the League, and rebuttals to Saint-
Saëns’s hard-line nationalism appeared in the more liberal sections of the
press. But in the aggressively nationalist climate of the First World War, the
chauvinists prevailed; although German works were never officially prohib-
ited, Wagner disappeared from the French stage until 1919.
The question of Franco-German relations fed into another of the cyclical
narratives outlined by music criticism across the Third Republic: that of French
musical decline and regeneration. In the wake of the Franco-Prussian War,
77
Jann Pasler, ‘Pelléas and Power: Forces behind the Reception of Debussy’s Opera’, 19th-Century Music,
10/3 (Spring 1987), 260.
78
The articles were later published together as Germanophilie (Paris: Dorbon-ainé, 1916).
79
See Marion Schmid, ‘À bas Wagner! The French Press Campaign against Wagner during World War I ’,
in Kelly (ed.), French Music, Culture, and National Identity, pp. 87–9.
80
See Charles Tenroc, ‘Rapport: Ligue nationale pour la défense de la musique française’, La Musique
pendant la guerre, 6 (March 1916).
366 DELPHINE MORDEY
critics may have hailed the dawn of a musical renaissance and the devel-
opment of a more serious artistic culture, but the subsequent belle époque
was to be more famously remembered as a time of absinthe-fuelled café-
concerts, cabarets and dancing girls. On the eve of the First World War, as
Robert Tombs has noted, the finger was once again pointed at a pre-war
culture that had been too ‘cosmopolitan, self-indulgent, and decadent’,
rehearsing the argument ‘that the war showed the need for a “purer”,
more “serious” art that expressed French and Latin cultural values against
the menace of German kultur’.81 In short, the First World War offered an
opportunity to reset the cultural dial, purging French music of recent
contaminations; that critics felt the need for such a purge is indicative of
the extent to which the regenerative rhetoric of 1870 had failed. Cocteau,
who had previously defended Wagner and the anti-chauvinist cause,
emerged from the First World War with his aphoristic pamphlet Le Coq
et l’arlequin, in which he demanded a return to French classicism, free
from foreign – especially boche – influence: ‘the music I want’, he wrote,
‘must be French, of France’.82 Even Debussy failed to meet Cocteau’s
exclusive demands: now deemed to be too Wagnerian, the formerly ‘pro-
gressive’ composer was consigned to history by a new generation of critics
and composers, including Les Six, keen to forge a wholly modern French
musical identity, in opposition not only to external forces but also to the
recent French musical past.83 Cocteau’s ‘Call to Order’, with its emphasis
on clarity and simplicity, would help to foster the climate of l’esprit
nouveau in which neoclassicism briefly flourished. But critics’ renewed
hopes for the establishment of a musical culture both truly French and
serious were to be frustrated once more. Just as the Franco-Prussian war
had been succeeded by the period of optimism, opulence and cosmopoli-
tanism that was the belle époque, the First World War was followed by
the cathartic release of the années folles, with their new technologies, mass
entertainment and the exotic sensationalism of Josephine Baker. What
critics thought people should listen to – dictated by a range of moral,
political and aesthetic agendas – did not necessarily correspond with what
audiences wanted: ‘to return to normality, forget suffering, and have
fun’.84
81
Tombs, ‘Culture and the Intellectuals’, p. 184.
82
Jean Cocteau, ‘The Cock and the Harlequin’, in A Call to Order, trans. Rollo Myers (London: Faber and
Gwyer, 1926), p. 19.
83
See Kelly, Music and Ultra-Modernism in France, p. 79.
84
Tombs, ‘Culture and the Intellectuals’, p. 186.
Cultural Conquests
Audiences also appear to have wanted Wagner, whose music was quickly rein-
stated on the Parisian stage after the end of the First World War. Contemporary
Austro-German composers – including Schoenberg – also gradually began to find
their way into French concert programmes, though not without controversy: the
1922 Parisian premiere of Pierrot lunaire resulted in the so-called ‘affaire des
poisons’, a series of articles in which Louis Vuillemin attacked the infiltration
of not only Germanic but also Jewish music into France.85 Such incidents
reinforce the perception of tense Franco-German relations as a dominant
theme of music criticism in this period, but there were also moments of political –
and musical – rapprochement between the two countries, as exemplified by the
‘Semaine artistique allemande’ during the 1937 Paris Exposition. During such
moments, fears over musical invasion did not, however, dissipate; instead they
were transferred to other foreign forces, each of which inspired their own
unsettling blend of fear and fascination in French critics.
In 1910, the perceived ‘invasion’ of French state-subsidised opera houses
(particularly the Opéra-Comique) by Italian verismo led to what one critic dubbed
‘la troisième guerre des Bouffons’;86 a flurry of enquêtes ensued, accompanied by
articles debating the merits, or otherwise, of musical protectionism.87 The arrival
of the Ballets russes in Paris sparked similar concerns over cultural conquest. For
Proust, ‘this charming invasion, against whose seductions only the stupidest of
critics protested, infected Paris, as we know, with a fever of curiosity less
agonizing, more purely aesthetic, but quite as intense perhaps as that aroused
by the Dreyfus case’.88 He may have played down the legitimacy of some critics’
anxieties, but Proust’s choice of military and epidemiological metaphors suggests
the ubiquity of such fears in contemporary thought, reflecting the perceived
threat that Russia’s musical exports posed for the fragile French identity.89
Another apparent challenge to the cultivation of ‘true’ French music was
presented by the invasion of jazz from across the Atlantic; conservative critics,
including Tenroc, recycled metaphors of sickness and disease, decrying the
contamination of French culture.90 But as the popularity of jazz gathered pace
85
Vuillemin’s articles appeared in Le Courrier musical on 1 January and 15 February 1923.
86
Ricciotto Canudo, ‘La Troisième guerre des Bouffons’, Comœdia (18 February 1910).
87
On the history of the controversy, see Jean-Christophe Branger, ‘Les compositeurs français et l’opéra
italien: la crise de 1910’, in Alban Ramaut (ed.), Le Naturalisme sur la scène lyrique (Saint-Étienne:
Publications de l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 2004).
88
Marcel Proust, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 5: The Captive, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence
Kilmartin; revised D. J. Enright (London: Vintage, 1996), p. 267.
89
See Caddy, The Ballets Russes and Beyond, pp. 115–59.
90
See Matthew F. Jordan, Le Jazz: Jazz and French Cultural Identity (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
2010), pp. 39–72.
368 DELPHINE MORDEY
in the 1920s, it generated its own branch of criticism. Professional jazz critics,
led by Hugues Panassié, set themselves apart from their mainstream counter-
parts in a growing number of specialist journals, including Panassié’s Jazz
Hot.91 Within the pages of this press, new and fiercely contested battles were
fought over what constituted ‘true’ jazz (‘hot’ versus ‘straight’, black versus
white) and whether it could ever be considered an appropriate conduit for
French self-expression. In a by now familiar critical technique, defenders of le
jazz français tackled this concern by claiming that the genre was in fact French,
arguing, among other explanations, that its origins lay in French chansons,
transmitted by early emigrés to Louisiana.92
Music Criticism in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction

The diffusion of jazz was greatly facilitated by the rise of new media technol-
ogies, especially the phonograph, radio and cinema, initially viewed by critics
with suspicion as representative of foreign mass culture. This unease did not
prevent rapid popular acceptance: the first daily public radio programme in
France was broadcast on Christmas Eve 1921 from a transmitter on the Eiffel
Tower; by 1931, there were twenty-five national and commercial stations
broadcasting throughout the country, permeating the daily lives of city dwell-
ers and provincial paysans alike.93 Music had been an integral part of the radio
soundscape from the beginning. As the popularity and accessibility of radio
grew, so too, then, did the demand for music to fill the ever-increasing
number of broadcast hours; with this came the inevitable critical debates
over what music should be performed. With the majority of radio stations
under state control, and able to reach large swathes of the country, the
medium offered an unprecedented vehicle for promoting French cultural
identity and national unity. But the question of what constituted truly
French music remained an open one, and conflicts over the value (moral and
aesthetic) of popular music, particularly jazz, and its position in French
culture, spilled over into critical discussions of radio programming.
For some traditionalist critics, such as Jean Chantavoine, radio represented
both a new enemy and a solution. The enemy here, inextricably entwined with
popular music, was market forces, to which, it was argued, the French music
industry was surrendering, filling the airwaves with what audiences wanted to
91
Jazz Hot (1935–9, 1945–), co-founded with jazz writer, producer and promoter Charles Delaunay,
began life as the in-house journal for Panassié’s Hot Club de France.
92
See Andy Fry, Paris Blues: African American Music and French Popular Culture, 1920–1960 (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2014), pp. 104–5.
93
Rebecca P. Scales, Radio and the Politics of Sound in Interwar France, 1921–1939 (Cambridge: Cambridge
hear, rather than what they should be hearing.94 At the same time, state-
owned radio offered the opportunity to impose taste from the top down,
educating audiences in the music of the classical masters, thus avoiding the
mediocre taste-traps of mass democratisation.
The reality lay somewhere in the middle: radio stations did include
serious masterworks alongside jazz, music hall and other popular genres,
in their generally eclectic programming. But even then, critics argued, it
was not enough to simply pump out high art to the masses; they also felt
a responsibility to explain the mysteries of this art to new audiences, in
a manner akin to the educative programme notes that had been introduced
at the Concerts Colonne thirty years before. In 1935, Emile Vuillermoz was
one of a number of critics and musicologists who contributed to what he
described as a kind of ‘manual’ for radio listeners, a 400-page musical
encyclopedia, L’Initiation à la musique à l’usage des amateurs de radio.95
Critical guidance also appeared in the many journals that sprang up to
accompany the proliferation of new media, including Radio-Magazine
(1923), Phono-Radio-Musique (1920) and Cinémonde (1928), as well as within
the pages of existing publications, which could not afford to miss out on the
opportunity to shape listener experience in the increasingly auditory cul-
ture of interwar Paris. The new technologies themselves afforded critics
further outlets for the dissemination of their criticism: the Breton compo-
ser-critic Paul le Flem, for example, enjoyed a successful career on the
radio, as well as in print.
While critics were concerned with educating new audiences in matters of
musical taste and history, the new technologies also brought with them a need
for new kinds of criticism: there were technical matters to consider, notably
the quality of sound recordings and broadcasts. Beyond these technical
details, critics also had to confront broader worries about the overload of
sound to which society was now exposed. Vuillermoz observed that audiences
were ‘gorging themselves tirelessly in uninterrupted listening to radio, sound
films, and the phonograph’.96 Alongside the old battles – over foreign influ-
ence, progress and musical identity – these developing challenges provided
a new cultural front for criticism in the lead up to the Second World War.
94
See Jordan, Le Jazz, pp. 86–7.
95
Dominique Sordet (ed.), L’Initiation à la musique à l’usage des amateurs de radio (Paris: Éditions du
Tambourinaire, 1935). Vuillermoz reviewed the book in his article ‘L’Initiation à la musique’, L’Ouest-
Éclair (4 October 1935).
96
Emile Vuillermoz, ‘La peur du silence’, Le Miroir du monde (6 April 1935), translated in Scales, Radio and
the Politics of Sound in Interwar France, p. 1.
370 DELPHINE MORDEY
Periodical Endings
The Third Republic ended, as it began, with France at war with Germany. On
14 June 1940, German troops entered Paris; the Republic was dissolved three
weeks later, and full powers awarded to Maréchal Pétain, head of the French
State. It was the third time in seventy years that war had shaken the nation,
and the third time that the vast majority of press publications were brought to
a halt. The number of specialist music periodicals fell from fifty-seven in 1939
to only nineteen by 1941, and although some of these periodicals – including
La Revue musicale and Comœdia – would reappear once hostilities ended, in
other cases, the war proved fatal.97 Founded over a hundred years earlier, the
grand old dame of French music journalism, Le Ménestrel, soldiered on
through the first eight months of the war, before drawing its final breath on
24 May 1940. One of the journal’s final issues led with an article entitled ‘Il y a
une musique française’, a brief history of French music, written in response to
the continued prevalence of German composers in French concert halls; not
only did France have an important musical culture of its own, the author
argued, but most of the significant developments in music history could be
traced to French origins.98 Given the political context, it was to be expected
that deep-rooted concerns over perceived French musical inferiority, and the
conflicted relationship with Germany, would come to the surface; but then,
after all, these concerns had never really gone away.
It is tempting to see the demise of the Ménestrel as symbolic of the end of an
era. Born in 1833, the journal coincided with what Christophe Charle has
identified as the complete cycle of growth, apogee and decline of the printed
press, as new forms of mass media emerged.99 Change may have been inevi-
table, but the Third Republic left an important legacy: the rise of the press,
and consequent professionalisation of music criticism, together with the
reciprocal developments in musicology, laid important foundations for the
future. What is more, the exponential expansion of criticism bequeathed
a multifaceted history of the musical events and preoccupations of the period,
one that allows us to chart the ever shifting and repeating battles and alliances
of this kaleidoscopic age.
97
Yannick Simon, ‘Les périodiques musicaux français pendant la seconde guerre mondiale’, Fontes artis
musicae, 49/1–2 (2002), 68.
98
Alex Cellier, ‘Il y a une musique française’, Le Ménestrel (22, 29 March and 5 April 1940), 49–50.
99
Charle, Le Siècle de la presse, p. 12.
. 19 .
British Music Criticism, 1890–1945

PAUL WATT
Music criticism in Britain underwent a major transformation in the late

nineteenth century, the effects of which were felt far into the twentieth
century. The rise of a new school of music criticism facilitated largely by
John F. Runciman (1866–1916) helped professionalise the music critic and
improve his – and her – literary status. While the reporting of music news
and events remained a mainstay of criticism, music critics, through men-
toring or self-education, asserted themselves as intellectuals. As
a consequence, their writings were no longer simply about music, but
often cast in relation to literary, philosophical and historical questions
and issues. European, North American and British music criticism had
long featured both reporters and intellectuals, but it was in the late
nineteenth century that such portfolio careers coalesced and the division
that once separated the journalist from the intellectual – or man of
letters – was no longer clear-cut. Moreover, there was a vast increase in
the number of women writing in all domains of criticism, and although
they were subjected to various degrees of misogyny and condescension,
they were nonetheless provided with opportunities for training and career
advancement. This chapter maps out the momentum of this period of
changing music criticism and looks particularly closely at the careers of
Ernest Newman (1868–1959) and Neville Cardus (1888–1975), both pro-
ducts of this era of intellectual transformation.
Setting the Agenda for Reform

Runciman was a key figure in setting the agenda for the reform of music
criticism. His articles in the 1890s were a stinging attack on contemporary
habits, and they appear to have set in motion further literature on the subject.
Although some members of the Musical Association had previously written
manifestos in the 1880s, their distribution was limited to a narrow circle of
[371]
372 PAUL WATT
insiders. Runciman’s articles in the literary press exposed the problems of

music criticism to the world.1
An unsigned and negative article on the state of contemporary music
criticism in the Saturday Review in August 1891, ‘Musical Criticism and
Musical Critics’, is attributed to Runciman.2 In it, he claimed there was
a ‘total absence of serious musical criticism nowadays’ with part of the
problem lying in the haste with which critics sent their reviews to print
without adequate time for considered reflection and analysis.3 He also
asserted that a lot of music criticism was badly written, arguing that literary
and dramatic criticism was of a much higher standard and supposing critics in
these fields were ‘perfect masters of their art as compared with musical ones’.4
Runciman bemoaned that music critics used technical terms and foreign
words without understanding them, or used adjectives that made little or
no sense. By way of an example, he explained how a critic, whom he did not
name, had claimed that the Polish tenor Jean de Reszke ‘speeded through the
adagio movement’ and that the singer’s vocalisation of Lohengrin was ‘splen-
did’. Runciman failed to see how ‘speeded’ was a word and wondered where
in the score in Lohengrin the direction for vocalisation – ‘to sing exercises
without naming the notes and on one vowel’ – was called for.5 For Runciman,
such criticism was the work of the ‘uneducated would-be specialist’.6
The rush of ill-written concert reviews also worried Charles Villiers
Stanford, who took up the topic (and other issues) in an article for the
Fortnightly Review in June 1894.7 Stanford identified what he believed to be
‘two baneful oppressions under which musical criticism in England is now
groaning’.8 The first was this haste to print. The second was the prevalence of
anonymous criticism, which allowed the same critic to write variations of
a review in many newspapers. In order to overcome rushed press notices,
Stanford advocated the French practice of publishing a concert notice days –
rather than hours – after the performance. He claimed that taking more time
to publish a review would bring England in line with ‘all other civilized
European countries’: the critic would have time to add literary polish to the
text and, as a consequence, the public would get a better reading experience.9
Stanford also warned that music reviews could not stand by literary merit
1
See, for example, John Stainer, ‘The Principles of Musical Criticism’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical
Association, Seventh Session (1880–81), 35–52; and Charles Kensington Salaman, ‘On Musical Criticism’,
Proceedings of the Musical Association, Second Session (1875–6), 1–15.
2
Unsigned [attrib. John F. Runciman], ‘Musical Criticism and Musical Critics’, Saturday Review
(15 August 1891), 187–8.
3 4 5 6
Ibid., 187. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 188.
7
Charles Villiers Stanford, ‘Some Aspects of Musical Criticism in England’, Fortnightly Review (June
1894), 826–31.
8 9
Ibid., 826. Ibid., 828.
British Music Criticism, 1890–1945 373
alone; that editors should employ music critics who knew the repertory. He
ended the article by strongly encouraging all music criticism to be signed, just
as it was in most major European cities he knew, so that it was clear to all
‘what ballast he carries’.10
Runciman was inspired to keep writing on the pitfalls and problems of
contemporary music criticism and responded to Stanford’s article with two
further essays: one in the Fortnightly Review in November 1894 (‘Musical
Criticism and the Critics’) and a second in the January 1895 New Review
(‘The Gentle Art of Musical Criticism’).11 These two articles stand as
a turning point in the argument for the promulgation of new criticism by
severely attacking the credentials of old-school critics and newspapers. In the
first of these articles, Runciman was particularly scathing of J. W. Davison
(1813–85), whose journalism he regarded as highly suspect:
His [Davison’s] criticism, and indeed most other of that day, is beneath
contempt. A few hours spent over old musical newspapers will reveal
a depth of ignorance, petty spite, stupid obstinacy, besides a lack of artistic
susceptibility, that are almost inconceivable to the modern person. For thirty
years this, the ‘old criticism’ hung like a millstone round the neck of English
music.12
Through a brief critique of many of his contemporaries, or near contempor-

aries, such as Franz Hueffer (1845–89), J. A. Fuller Maitland (1856–1936), E.
F. Jacques (1850–1906) and George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950), Runciman
attempted to define a new school of criticism. For Runciman, Hueffer was too
literary and narrow-minded. Fuller Maitland and Jacques were considered
new-school critics, if half-heartedly, but Runciman did not say why. He
ranked George Bernard Shaw as a new-school critic (a point on which he
would soon further elaborate) for his well-written work in the Star. Runciman
later described Shaw’s writing in the World as ‘the best example of what may
be done by the new method’.13 Eventually, Runciman came round to defining
the new critic and the qualities that make one:
The ‘new’ critic may be imagined as defining his position thus: Here am I,
endowed with certain faculties cultured to a greater or less extent; the ques-
tion for me to decide is not whether the artist I am criticizing produces a result
the same as or different from that produced by certain dead-and-gone
worthies, whom you call authorities, ‘standards of taste’, and what-not, and
10
Ibid., 831.
11
John F. Runciman, ‘Musical Criticism and the Critics’, Fortnightly Review (August 1894), 170–83; ‘The
Gentle Art of Musical Criticism’, New Review (January–June 1895), 612–24.
12
Runciman, ‘Musical Criticism and the Critics’, 171. 13
Ibid., 177.
374 PAUL WATT
for whom I care not one jot, but whether the result gives or does not give me
pleasure! The new critic, therefore, frequently gives no opinion – he implies it
merely, by indicating his delight of the opposite with the result produced by
his subject or victim. His criticism is purely an expression of personal feeling,
and as such has a value the old criticism never had – could not, and cannot
possibly have . . . The old method makes no demand upon the critic’s best
faculties.14
In his definition of new criticism Runciman placed a high value on readability

and the careful, rather than wilful, imparting of impressions or reflections
from personal experience. The critics of the old school were known for their
‘impersonal manner’ and ‘sheer dullness’. Moreover, the kind of criticism that
was neither old-school nor new school was mere description of performances
that Runciman likened to police reports. Runciman did not care for the
recording of a critic’s impression or biased view of a performance, but, should
a critic ‘expose himself to the fire of a thousand cross-influences in the big
world’, his bias and narrow-mindedness could be overcome.15 For Runciman
then, criticism based on wide knowledge, reading and musical experience was
the key to quality and the prime marker of this new era.
In the second article, ‘The Gentle Art of Musical Criticism’, Runciman
allowed himself a more detailed exposition on the qualities that made for
the quintessential new critic. Shaw’s criticism, which Runciman held in the
highest regard, was deemed to demonstrate ‘cleverness, feeling, wit, and
knowledge’.16 It did not simply impart ‘untutored impressions’ but was
based on a deep knowledge of music, which he believed Shaw possessed par
excellence.
To show the extent to which a critic’s knowledge and judgement could be
tested by so-called authorities or musicians of power and influence, Runciman
ridiculed a letter signed by Alexander Mackenzie, George Grove, Otto
Goldschmidt (former director of the Bach choir), Walter Parrett (Master of
the Queen’s Music) and C. Hubert H. Parry that defended a recent perfor-
mance of Bach’s St Matthew Passion conducted by Stanford, which had
received particularly unfavourable reviews in the press. Runciman himself
thought the performance was ‘disgraceful’ and was irritated that this coterie
of eminent musicians, performers themselves, claimed that they knew
better.17 The most damning review, in the Pall Mall Gazette, which also
appeared to be the most extensive account of the performance, was, according
to Runciman, written with ‘restraint and courtesy’ and did not deserve the
aggression brought against it by ‘academics’ who used their status and
14
Ibid. 15
Ibid., 180. 16
Runciman, ‘The Gentle Art of Musical Criticism’, 613. 17
Ibid., 614.
influence to resist reasonable and new-school criticism. Runciman was, of

course, using the label ‘academic’ pejoratively.18
In a further attack on old-school criticism Runciman continued the article
with a chapter of sins of the old-school critics:
Unless you turn out the old, old clichés; unless you fill your columns with
profound references to consecutive fifths, and the birth- and death-dates of
composers and popular singers, the Old Critics and the Academics of this land
(who should have read their Schumann, their Berlioz, and their Wagner, and
so know better) at once assume that you are ignorant, inept, fatuous, and so
forth, but chiefly ignorant – ignorant, that is, of the technique of music.19
The second part of the article dealt with expression and style, and Runciman
reprinted many excerpts from reviews, past and present, which continued to
ridicule his detractors. He complained about Joseph Bennett’s (1831–1911)
ignorance of music theory and also lambasted an unnamed critic from the
Musical Times, with whom Runciman had played duets but whose journalism
he did not like, for the same limitation. A further unnamed critic, writing for
the Times, while thought by Runciman to be a competent harpsichordist,
‘draws no distinction between a Bach fugue and a Parry fugue’.20 At the end
of the article, Runciman turned his attention to a fuller discussion of the use
of cliché and exaggeration in critical language employed by old critics, noting
long lists of tired adjectives and expressions used in their prose.
Runciman’s article was much discussed and held considerable interest for
writers in the leading music journals of the late nineteenth century, namely
the Musical Standard and the Musical Times. In June 1895, an unsigned article in
the Musical Standard (‘The Gentle Art of Musical Criticism’, a response to
Runciman’s article by the same title) took issue with most of Runciman’s
views, sarcastically stating that the old school did not have a monopoly on
ignorance and that many of the crimes against criticism that Runciman had
described could be readily spotted from the pens of critics old and new. The
article chastised Runciman for the abusive tone he adopted, especially in the
New Review article, and it defended both the importance of critics who had
a sound knowledge of technical terms and the continuing importance of
commenting on technical facility. The Musical Standard simply did not accept
Runciman’s view that old criticism was necessarily all that bad:
The ideal of the old school was that all personal feeling should be eliminated,
and that the critic should sit in his stall and solemnly register technical
mistakes, and give praise for technical excellence. That the musical critic
18 19 20
Ibid., 616. Ibid., 617. Ibid., 619.
376 PAUL WATT
should in any way attempt to bring to the minds of his readers something of
what he has felt was, and is, considered by the old school to be undignified and
the mark of the dilettante. The old idea of the school-master in criticism is
reasonable enough, but unfortunately it leads to absurd mistakes directly it is
applied to any new work or to any instrumentalist who has a decided indivi-
duality of his own.21
The writer for the Musical Standard went on to defend the standard of music
journalism and suggested it is the sort of criticism that is ‘done fairly well’ by
most critics, but admitted that inferior criticism occupied too much space in
most newspapers. The writer agreed with Runciman that George Bernard
Shaw ‘showed that there was another way of writing about music’ but was not
convinced that Shaw was as intellectually and musically worthy as Runciman
thought him to be. For the Musical Standard writer, Shaw believed himself to
be ‘omniscient’, something that lead him into ‘rather tight technical corners
sometimes’, but concurred that his chief skill was his ability to write and that
he had a ‘genius for listening attentively, which is not given to everyone’.22
The Musical Standard writer agreed also with Runciman that the cultivation
of a polished writing style was important but hardly necessary. He conceded
that ‘when a critic has no particular literary gift, there is no excuse for the
stereotyped phrases born of indolence which so much disfigure newspaper
criticism’. Some of the clichés the writer singles out for being particularly
unimaginative include phrases such as ‘remarkably fine rendering’ and ‘splen-
didly played’. In defence of some critics’ limited vocabulary, however, the
writer made the point that certain newspapers’ conservative house styles
constrained the sorts of prose and language that critics can use.23
By the end of the article, the writer appeared to be in agreement with
Runciman on the matter of what a critic should impart:
We come to this, then: musical criticism, in distinction to mere reporting,

should convey some idea to the readers of how the music affected the writer,
who must have an impressionable nature and cultivated musical taste and the
literary power of putting his impressions into words . . . It will be better if he
have some technical knowledge of the art, not so that he may scatter a few
technical phrases about his ‘copy’, because it will give him greater surety in
writing of his musical impressions. But the amount of his knowledge is no
measure of his capability of criticizing – the right temperament and the power
of writing are the real requisites, however: we do not want the remarks of
literary men who know next to nothing of music, whose musical taste has not
21
Unsigned, ‘The Gentle Art of Musical Criticism’, Musical Standard (8 June 1895), 447.
22 23
Ibid., 448. Ibid.
been sufficiently cultivated; for music is a profession to many and much harm
may be done by ill-judged and stupidly ignorant depreciation.24
The 1890s were characterised by editors taking up the mantle of criticism and
advancing the new school or new culture of authorship and authority. Just as
newspaper readers and later music critics had joined the call for reform, some
journal editors began to redirect editorial policy and give space to the new-
school criticism.
The Reform Agenda in Action: Education and Training

In the literature complaining about the standard of music criticism in
England, the education and training of critics was almost invariably raised.
We have seen already that a high value was placed on wide reading and
detailed knowledge of musical works, coupled with a desire for detailed
understanding of technical terms and a cultivated literary style. In
the second half of the nineteenth century in particular, a plethora of self-
help books were published for aspiring journalists, some of which gave advice
to would-be music critics. For most music critics, even established and suc-
cessful ones such as Newman, Herman Klein and Shaw, the route to becoming
a music critic was informal and unstructured. As Klein remarked in his
autobiography, Musicians and Mummers (1925):
My education as a musical critic was, I admit, rather of the practical, rough-

and-ready order. Still, I have good reason for thinking it to have been neither
better nor worse than that which was common to the period wherein
I graduated as a musical journalist. Not until much later was a university
training regarded as an essential preliminary for the young man who aspired to
follow his branch of the profession. The musical critics of the sixties and
seventies are nowadays dismissed with a smile as having been pleasantly
naïve and comparatively incompetent.25
Ernest Newman meanwhile served his literary apprenticeship for about

a decade from the late 1880s with the great Victorian polymath, rationalist
and literary critic, John M. Robertson.26 Through a combination of self-
instruction, studies at University College, Liverpool and close mentoring by
Robertson, Newman learned to read eight languages with varying profi-
ciency, wrote on a huge range of topics ranging from banking reform to
24
Ibid., 448–9.
25
Herman Klein, Musicians and Mummers (London: Cassell and Company, 1925), p. 83.
26
For more on Robertson, see Odin Dekkers, J. M. Robertson: Rationalist and Literary Critic (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 1998).
378 PAUL WATT
Russian literature, and was provided with publishing opportunities through

Robertson’s many contacts and work as an editor. He was also a voracious
reader with a substantial personal library of more than 10,000 volumes that
contained books on philosophy, science, history and music, in addition to
English, French, German and Russian literature.27
Shaw also benefited from contacts within the newspaper industry to secure
his job as a music critic, as recounted with characteristic humour in his well-
known essay, ‘How to Become a Musical Critic’:
My own plan [to become a musical critic] was a simple one. I joined the staff of
a new daily paper as a leader writer. My exploits in this department spread
such terror and confusion that my proposal to turn my attention to musical
criticism was hailed with inexpressible relief, the subject being one in which
lunacy is privileged. I was given a column to myself precisely as I might have
been given a padded room in an asylum; and from that time up to the
other day – a period of nearly seven years – I wrote every week, in that
paper or another, an article under the general heading ‘Music’, the first
condition of which was, as a matter of good journalism, that it should be as
attractive to the general reader, musician or non-musician, as any other sec-
tion of the paper in which it appeared.28
Like Shaw, Neville Cardus was mentored, but by C. P. Scott, editor of the
Manchester Guardian. In 1916, Cardus was desperate to become a full-time
writer. In his Autobiography, Cardus tells how he summoned up the courage to
write to Scott to ask for a job. Much to his surprise, Scott agreed to meet
Cardus in the December of 1916 and offered him a job as a secretary, which
involved writing short summaries of books that Scott gave him by the
following day. After some weeks, Cardus was relieved of the position (without
payment), but by March Scott had offered him a role at the Manchester
Guardian which saw him reporting on local council news and music hall. It
was not until much later that he would replace Samuel Langford as the
newspaper’s music critic, having already established himself as a noted cricket
writer.
Just as Robertson took Newman under his wing, Scott nurtured Cardus’s
career. In fact, Cardus attributed Scott’s reading of his work as a significant
point in his career because he refined Cardus’s writing style. Cardus described
Scott as a ‘puritan on matters of language’ who barred the use of the words
27
For more on Newman’s intellectual formation see Paul Watt, Ernest Newman: A Critical Biography
(Martelsham: Boydell Press, 2017).
28
George Bernard Shaw, How to Become a Musical Critic, ed. Dan H. Lawrence (New York: Da Capo Press,
1978). The article was first published in Scottish Musical Monthly in December 1894 and reprinted in New
Music Review, October 1912.
such as ‘commence’, ‘basically’ and ‘sex’ and occasionally reprimanded Cardus

over wayward expression or syntax.29 Cardus held Scott in high regard but
also identified his blind spots:
He [Scott] did not presume to be a judge of the writing of a critic, though he

once told me he preferred [Ernest] Newman’s writing to [Samuel] Langford’s.
Scott found Newman’s prose clearer, and more concrete; he couldn’t fully
appreciate the poetic imagery of Langford.30
But Scott was not Cardus’s sole mentor. Cardus wrote of the ‘gifted’ people at
the Manchester Guardian, who included Haslam Mills, Hedley Lockett and J. V.
Ratcliffe, who among others led Cardus to describe this heady environment as
‘like an Academy in the Athenian sense’.31 For Cardus:
There was a wonderful comradeship on the Manchester Guardian: it was the

best university in the world. We used to go into the underground cellars in
Manchester – they were for men only. No wine was served, just coffee. If you
wanted a meal, you stayed upstairs. In those cellars I was given tutorials, as
thorough and as wide-ranging as any that an undergraduate has had at Oxford
or Cambridge.32
By contrast, most other journalists, critics and reporters had to fight their way
into what was by the end of the nineteenth century a severely crowded
marketplace, and self-help books had long been published to give aspiring
writers a professional edge or, at the very least, some help. According to the
Reporter’s Guide of 1869, at best one in twenty journalists working on the top
journals had a university education, with very few having ‘a good classical
education’.33 Essential to the aspiring journalist, according to this book, was
a working knowledge of Latin, French and the Greek alphabet, some legal
knowledge, and shorthand; they should further capitalise on this knowledge
by owning copies of Webster’s Dictionary, Haydn’s Dictionary of Dates, Bohn’s
Dictionary of Classical Quotations and Cruden’s Concordance, among other refer-
ence works. Other manuals for self-instruction, such as Robert D. Blackburn’s
handbook, Composition and Style (1885), focused on the cultivation of style:
‘The present volume sets forth and illustrates all the rules which should be
observed by the young Author. These, if diligently practised, will enable any
one of ordinary intelligence to acquire for himself a clear and forcible style.’34
29 30
Neville Cardus, Autobiography (London: Collins, 1947), p. 161 Ibid., p. 160.
31
Ibid., pp. 98–9, 95.
32
Robin Daniels, Conversations with Cardus (London: Victor Gollancz, 1969), p. 163.
33
Thomas Allen Reed, The Reporter’s Guide (London: Pitman, 1869), p. 10.
34
Robert D. Blackman, Composition and Style: A Handbook for Literary Students, 5th ed. (London: C. W.
Deacon and Co., 1885).
380 PAUL WATT
Blackburn goes on to instruct the reader on sentence and paragraph construc-

tion, cautioning against ‘puffing’ and hyperbole, and advocating that the
prime rule of criticism was making prose readable.
Some manuals and self-help books encouraged aspiring journalists to steer
well clear of vicious attacks on authors and works of art. In his Practical
Journalism of 1885, for example, John Dawson cautioned his readers: ‘Let me
impress upon young journalists the seriousness of criticism – i.e., don’t rush;
take care to read fully . . . Praise the good, firmly, yet kindly condemn the bad;
and altogether seek rather to encourage than discourage a young writer if
signs of improvement can be discerned.’35 He further advised aspiring dra-
matic critics to cultivate a knowledge of music, ‘as opera bouffe is now so
popular on the stage, [it] would undoubtedly be a useful acquisition’.36
Few of these manuals and handbooks were written specifically for music
critics. A. Arthur Reade’s Literary Success (1885) merely mentioned that critics
of drama, art and music were generally specialised, and had nothing more to
say on the subject.37 But the issue of specific training for would-be music
critics surfaced in the press in the 1890s, following the establishment of
a training school for female journalists in Westminster around 1890. An
unsigned article in the Speaker of 15 March 1890 entitled ‘Lady Journalists’
belittled this initiative, complaining that women ‘not content with penetrat-
ing into the pulpit, should also bring the rustle of petticoats within the sacred
precincts of Fleet Street’.38 If there had to be female journalists, this writer
thought they ought to be confined to ‘writing articles on Shakespeare and the
musical glasses, to fill up the columns of the evening papers’.39 He predicted
‘danger’ about this newly established school for producing graduates ‘with
only a scanty knowledge of literature, and without the slightest instinct for
journalism’.40
Runciman provided a more sympathetic account of the female critic in the
March 1895 edition of Monthly Musical Record. In this article, Runciman
commented on the attributes of the music critic, regardless of their sex,
though his comment about women making better critics than men, given
their propensity for gossip, undermines his attempt to respect women as
equals.41 Still, Runciman was of the opinion that the essential qualifications
for criticism – a knowledge of technique, music history, aesthetics and ‘sanity
35
John Dawson, Practical Journalism: How to Enter Thereon and Succeed: A Manual for Beginners and Amateurs
(London: L. Upcott Gill, 1885), p. 48.
36
Ibid., p. 53.
37
A. Arthur Reade, Literary Success: A Guide to Practical Journalism (London: Wyman & Sons, 1885).
38
Unsigned, ‘Lady Journalists’, Speaker (15 March 1890), 283. 39
Ibid. 40
Ibid.
41
John. F. Runciman, ‘Women as Musical Critics’, Monthly Musical Record (1 March 1895), 49–50.
of judgment’, as well as the cultivation of a personal style – could be acquired

and demonstrated by both women and men.42
Women were further encouraged to take up musical criticism in Frances
H. Low’s Press Work for Women: A Textbook for the Young Woman Journalist
(1895).43 Low was not going to let a male-dominated profession stand in her
readers’ way:
This branch of journalism [musical and dramatic criticism] is, for the most
part, even in the sixpenny women’s papers, for some extraordinary reason,
almost wholly in the hands of men, and offers an interesting though limited
field for a cultivated writer’s taste, imagination and knowledge . . . Seeing
what a number of cultivated women musicians there are, this want of enter-
prise is striking; and I cannot help thinking that students who have a thorough
knowledge of the theory of music might do worse than qualify themselves as
critics.44
It was not until 1911 that an article-length discussion establishing a school

for music critics was ventured, and it was written by Ernest Newman in the
January Musical Times.45 The article was inspired by recent articles in Le
Courrier Musical in which it was reported that a paper entitled ‘La critique
musicale, ses dévoirs, sa méthode’ had recently been read by Michel-Dimitri
Calvocoressi at the École des hautes études sociales in Paris (where he had
been teaching a course on music criticism). Newman thought the idea of
a school for music critics was a worthy idea: ‘the critic alone has not only to
build his house but make his own bricks and find his own straw [but] he has, of
course, the writings of great critics to go upon’.46 The observation that
emerging music critics did not appear to take the job seriously troubled
Newman and he doubted they would be inclined to seek out an appropriately
qualified mentor. Newman had in mind a mentoring programme spread over
a handful of years in which an aspiring critic would be coached, presumably
reflecting his own path to criticism under Robertson’s mentorship. The critic
would benefit from assuming his own principles were right and that ‘until the
critic can go to school as the composer and the performer can, and profit, like
them, by what previous workers in the same field have learned, most criticism
will remain the haphazard and dogmatic and contradictory thing it is at
present’.47
42
Ibid., 49.
43
Frances H. Low, Press Work for Women: A Textbook for the Young Woman Journalist (London: L. Upcott
Gill, 1904).
44
Ibid., p. 23.
45
Ernest Newman, ‘A School for Musical Critics’, Musical Times (1 March 1911), 16–17. 46
Ibid., 16.
47
Ibid., 17.
382 PAUL WATT
Three months later, Calvocoressi himself answered Newman’s article in the

Musical Times, providing some background and context to his lecture.48 In it
he drew his readers’ attention to an article by a Dr Bradford in the Westminster
Review of November 1894 that suggested the introduction of an examination
for music critics, but mentioned that the only structured course with which
Braddon was familiar was at the Berlin Seminar für Musik by
Dr W. Altmann.49 Calvocoressi then went on to explain that music criticism
had been taught at the Paris École des hautes études sociales as early as 1908
by Mr Hellouin, and from 1908 Calvocoressi had also presented lectures.
Calvocoressi appears unconvinced that music criticism can be taught, but
suggests that
The pupil critic should now be taught how to cull facts, to discern and to
weight their import. He should be helped to train his perceptive, emotional
and intellectual faculties; to cultivate his receptiveness and his taste, on which
his opinions are founded, and to discern the connection between these opi-
nions and certain facts – thus discovering the true key to sound criticism.
Calvocoressi thought that teaching was most effective in groups of two or

three students. The method of instruction in his classes in Paris involved the
following:
All the principal accounts and criticisms issued after first performances are read
and compared, care being taken to render the starting-points – involving many
a ramble through the dangerous regions of pure aesthetics – and of the connec-
tions between the principles implicitly or explicitly professed and the actual
judgments. This is the more practical part of each lesson, devoted to applied
aesthetics and the acquirement, not of a particular method, but of method.50
Calvocoressi gave further instruction in music history and analysis, especially

rhythmic analysis, and the study of a range of criticism evaluating how
opinions are formed and ‘all the directions for the writing of articles or
books, including advice about scope, plan, tone, diction &c., with reference
to the requirements of publication or public for which they are intended’.51
Reform in Theory and Practice

By the 1920s the past, present and future of music criticism had been so much
discussed and had garnered so much interest that two landmark books were
48
Michel-Dimitri Calvocoressi, ‘Can Musical Criticism Be Taught?’, Musical Times (1 May 1911),
300–2.
49
Jacob Bradford, ‘Musical Criticism and Critics’, Westminster Review (November 1984), 530–6.
50
Calvocoressi, ‘Can Musical Criticism Be Taught?’, 302. 51
Ibid.
written on the practical as well as theoretical parameters of the craft:

Newman’s A Musical Critic’s Holiday (1925) and Calvocoressi’s The Principles
and Methods of Musical Criticism (1923).52
A Musical Critic’s Holiday was a reflective and sometimes pedestrian treatise
on criticism, but it stopped short of articulating a theory or method of
criticism, which was implied in the opening pages. Consequently, the book
confounded many readers, as Newman readily admitted.53 A Musical Critic’s
Holiday considered the need to separate objectivity from subjectivity in criti-
cism and for a critic to be able to stand apart from ‘the clichés of his day’.54
Newman saw detachment and perspective as characteristics of a process he
termed ‘backthought’ and argued strongly that ‘Genuine criticism must
always function in the past, not the present.’55
On publication, the book was misinterpreted by some of Newman’s collea-
gues, including Edwin Evans, who reviewed it in the Musical Times.56 Evans
claimed that Newman’s purpose was to ‘envisage a work of art in complete
detachment from all considerations arising from its, and from the critics’
period, environment, and personal idiosyncrasies’.57 But this was not so.
Newman had long advocated that musical works should be judged free of
a critic’s bias and appraised outside its immediate historical environment. For
example, Newman argued that a study of the historical circumstances and
later reception surrounding Wagner’s ‘unsavoury reputation’ was needed ‘as
regards general public recognition of his work’.58 This is an instance of
Newman’s ‘backthought’ in operation, the use of history and historical
method, a process Newman had long advocated, most self-consciously in
Gluck and the Opera (1895).
Calvocoressi’s book was an altogether different enterprise. It was based on
his work in Paris, but he stressed that the book was not aimed at ‘solving all his
problems for him’.59 In the preface, Calvocoressi outlined his view on the
characteristics of a good critic:
52
Ernest Newman, A Musical Critic’s Holiday (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1925); and Michel-Dimitri
Calvocoressi, The Principles and Methods of Musical Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press; London:
Humphrey Milford, 1923).
53
Following its publication, Newman wrote three articles on the purpose of his book, admitting people
had been confused by it: ‘A Postscript to “A Musical Critic’s Holiday”’, Musical Times, 66/992 (1 October
1925), 881–4; 66/993 (1 November 1925), 977–81; 66/994 (1 December 1925), 1076–9.
54 55
Newman, A Musical Critic’s Holiday, pp. vii–viii. Ibid., p. xi.
56
Edwin Evans, ‘Objectivity in Contemporary Criticism’, Musical Times, 66/990 (1925), 692–5.
Newman’s ‘A Postscript to “A Musical Critic’s Holiday”’ in the Musical Times was essentially a long-
winded reply to Evans. Evans and Newman were locked in an ideological battle for years, and the battle is
briefly discussed in Nigel Scaife, ‘British Music Criticism in a New Era: Studies in Critical Thought,
1894–1945’, unpublished DPhil thesis, University of Oxford (1994), 158–61.
57
Evans, ‘Objectivity in Contemporary Criticism’, 692.
58
Newman, A Musical Critic’s Holiday, p. 124.
59
Calvocoressi, The Principles and Methods of Musical Criticism, p. 6.
384 PAUL WATT
A perusal of this book will show that, in its author’s opinion, the musical
critic’s studies should include a good deal besides all that properly refers to
music as an art: various branches of philosophy, viz. psychology, aesthetics,
and logic; acoustics and other branches of musical science, if only in order to
test the conclusion or assertions of writers who draw upon these for contro-
versial purposes; and history (not of music only), more on account of the
mistakes which ignorance will occasion than for the help history affords in
criticism proper. Experience in other arts and other modes of thought will
prove the sole remedy against the dangers of specialization, which tends to
narrow, and warp the critic’s outlook.60
The Principles and Methods of Musical Criticism differs significantly from the
dozens of articles that complained about the lack of quality criticism and the
self-help books that attempted to remedy the situation. This literature was
largely empirical, self-referential and focused on practical matters such as
drawing attention to old-school criticism as a means of illustrating how new
criticism should work, providing working examples of poor writing styles in
order to cultivate better ones. Calvocoressi’s book was significantly more
theoretical, philosophical and, importantly, European in outlook. He referred
the student to many authorities, past and present, including Kant, C. A.
Sainte-Beuve, Berlioz and local experts on criticism such as Clive Bell,
Newman, John M. Robertson, George Saintsbury and Walter Pater. Major
sections of the book quoted their writings on the role and function of the
critic and criticism. It is clear that above all else, Calvocoressi practised what
he preached in terms of the necessity of wide reading.
In some respects, Calvocoressi’s publication did not cover especially new
ground in his views that aspiring music critics should be widely read, com-
mand a wide vocabulary and write in a readable style. He advised critics to
exercise discretion between documentary sources and circumstantial evi-
dence, and to discern nuances of meaning in literature in psychology and
the psycho-physiological sciences. He also stressed the importance of being
familiar with historical writing and the comparative method.
By the 1920s there was a vast literature on historical method that had been
appropriated across the spectrum of emerging specialist disciplines in the last
century. Calvocoressi was particularly interested in one pocket of this litera-
ture: Robertson’s rationalist approach to criticism, which had gained consid-
erable currency in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries,
ostensibly through two books, Essays Towards a Critical Method (1889) and
New Essays Towards a Critical Method (1897), and an article, ‘Criticism and
60
Ibid., p. 8.
Science’ (1919).61 These writings did not prescribe a strictly positivist frame-
work for reading history and philosophy, but rather sought to draw attention
to the way reason and logic – also referred to in some literature as induction –
should form the basis of all criticism in an effort to be rid of what Robertson
termed ‘the personal equation’, or bias. The result of this process was to
achieve a consistent view on art and, through comparison of works of art
and others’ judgements of them, to arrive at a considered, consistent and
rational judgement of one’s own.62
The strength of Calvocoressi’s book is his careful use of examples. It teaches
the student how to ‘read’ in between the lines, how to be alert for evidence of
bias and how to know the historiography of books and the philosophical and
aesthetic context in which they were written. It is a much more intellectual
account of how one might learn to be a critic, and it subtly, but powerfully,
allows students to discover their own blind spots and the ways in which the
ideal of objectivity, or ‘ethical critics’ as Calvocoressi also termed it, may be
attained.
The 1930s and 1940s: Newman and Cardus

Newman and Cardus dominated music criticism in Britain in the 1930s and
1940s and became household names. In 1920, when Newman was appointed
chief music editor at the Sunday Times, he had already developed a reputation
as a formidable and controversial voice. By contrast, Cardus was much less
fierce but equally well known. He worked on the Manchester Guardian from
1927 to 1940 but also travelled to Australia in the 1930s and 1940s to report
on cricket at first and then music. Despite Runciman’s and others’ efforts to
reform music criticism, it is important to bear in mind that this call to arms
was not about homogenising the style and tenor of criticism. And despite
their common backgrounds and interests – a provincial, working-class
upbringing, agnosticism and interest in rationalism, and a love of romantic
music – their styles of criticism could not be more different, even though
Cardus recorded Newman’s significant influence on his career.
Newman was twenty-one years older than Cardus and was well entrenched
in his own career when Cardus was just starting out. Cardus wrote that as
a youth he fell under the ‘spell’ of Newman’s work on the Birmingham Daily
Post (in the early 1900s), going so far as to admit he ‘borrowed’ from Newman,
61
John M. Robertson, Essays Toward a Critical Method (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1889); New Essays
Toward a Critical Method (London and New York: Bodley Head/John Lane, 1897); ‘Criticism and Science’,
North American Review, 209 (1919), 690–6.
62
Calvocoressi, Principles and Methods, p. 32.
386 PAUL WATT
meaning that he tried to emulate his mentor’s writing style: ‘I practised my

pen with Newman my model in music criticism, with Shaw and Montague and
Agate my models in theatre criticism.’63 Cardus also wrote of imitating or
‘aping’ Newman’s style.64 When Cardus reflected on the first article he
published, which was on Bantock in the 1916–17 volume of Musical Opinion,
he described it as ‘written in the scholarly manner of the rationalist school
presided over by J. M. Robertson and Newman. It contained footnotes and
was copious in allusions. I could almost have indexed it, beginning with
Alembert and ending it with Zukunfstmusik.’65 On the one hand, Cardus
was writing sarcastically, for this style of criticism was pedantic and a bit over-
cooked but, on the other hand, he admired it for its breadth and thorough-
ness. Cardus credits his love of Hugo Wolf’s lieder to Newman (whose book
on the subject was published in 1907).66 Cardus also wrote of his engrossment
with Newman’s writings on music, especially from his book on the piano-
player.67 In fact, Cardus attributed Newman with inspiring him to be a music
critic: ‘At around this time [1905], he [Newman] brought out a book called
Musical Studies. That book made me wish to become a music critic.’68
Despite a shared interest in and influence by Robertson, and Cardus’s deep
respect for Newman’s work, their approaches to music criticism were vastly
different. Cardus described these polarities:
I was blessed in my two teachers – Langford the Platonist, Ernest Newman the
Aristotelean: Spirit of Affirmation and Spirit of Denial. Langford taught me to
feel and translate, while Newman taught me to observe and analyse. Faust and
Mephistopheles! – without these two working in harness, so to say, no man
can hope really to know art or life. Langford was like the priest administering
the sacrament, the body and blood of Beethoven; Newman was the sceptic
who while he aesthetically savoured the ritual was alert of palate enough to
know always if the wine were good – qua wine. Newman never allowed me to
take my eye from the object . . . Newman remained outside the creative
process, and Langford was absorbed into it.69
Cardus’s criticisms were often imbued with the parlance of religion, especially
with a Roman Catholic hue, though he was not a practising Christian of any
63 64
Cardus, Autobiography, pp. 41, 47. Ibid., p. 69.
65
Ibid., p. 50; Cardus, ‘Bantock and Style in Art’, Musical Opinion, 40 (1916–17), 158–9.
66
Cardus, Autobiography, p. 55; Ernest Newman, Hugo Wolf (London: Methuen, 1907). Newman’s other
work on Wolf include ‘Hugo Wolf’, Contemporary Review (1 January 1904), 707–20; and Fifty Songs by Hugo
Wolf (Boston: Oliver Ditson, 1909).
67
Cardus, Autobiography, p. 50; Ernest Newman, The Piano-Player and Its Music (London: Grant Richards,
1920).
68
Cardus, Autobiography, p. 40; Newman, Musical Studies (London and New York: Bodley Head/John
Lane, 1905).
69
Cardus, Autobiography, pp. 213–14.
sort. He once described himself as ‘an atheist who prays’ and also wrote of this
distinction about Christ: ‘He [Jesus Christ] offered the world a complete code
for civilized living, but the majority of people reject Him. The fact that He
went to the Cross as an ordinary man – divesting himself of all power – moves
me much more deeply than the description and theology of the
Resurrection.’70 Under the influence of his employer at Shrewsbury School,
Cyril Alington, Cardus wrote that it was he who ‘compelled me to overhaul
my disbelief, much to my annoyance; a young man’s scepticism towards all
revealed religion could be mightily dogmatic a quarter of a century ago’.71 It is
therefore difficult to pin down Cardus’s religious outlook; suffice it to say that
he appeared to believe in some kind of divine spirituality. This manifested
itself in various ways in his writing, including the belief that a gramophone
recording was a poor substitute for experiencing the musicality of a performer
in the flesh. In reference to Kathleen Ferrier he wrote that on the gramophone
the listener ‘experienced only 50 per cent of her. The presence of Kathleen on
the platform . . . you felt a spiritual communication’.72 Cardus also spoke of the
value of communication in relation to writers: ‘The communication you
receive from the hands of a great genius such as Dickens and Shakespeare is
much more penetrating than a fleeting television show, which is only an image
on the retina – and I don’t think it goes very much farther than that!’73 Despite
these difficult nuances of religious thought, Cardus ultimately believed music
was on a higher plane than life and other arts.74
Cardus’s metaphysical appraisal of music is perhaps best demonstrated in
his writings on the Austrian pianist Artur Schnabel (1882–1951), widely
revered for his technique and interpretive depth. Cardus’s opinion was no
exception, and he was especially captivated by his performances of Beethoven:
‘You wouldn’t be told that Schnabel was a man of distinction. His conversa-
tion within ten minutes would have made you think to yourself, “Who is he?
What does he do? He’s either a philosopher, a writer, a painter, or a –
musician.”’75 Cardus described how ‘in an almost clairvoyant way’ he could
recall Schnabel playing Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 32 Op. 111; the pianist
was like a ‘spiritual medium’ and that ‘it is as though Beethoven was speaking
through him’.76 For Cardus, composers and conductors ‘work through the
medium of the senses’,77 this was what defined the ‘romantic temperament’.78
70 71
Ibid., p. 64; Daniels, Conversations, p. 266. Cardus, Autobiography, p. 81.
72 73
Daniels, Conversations, p. 230. Ibid., p. 268
74
See Christopher Brookes, His Own Man: The Life of Neville Cardus (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 60.
75
Daniels, Conversations, p. 116. Other pianists Cardus greatly admired were Arthur Rubinstein, Muriel
Cohen and Ignaz Friedman.
76 77 78
Ibid., p. 140. Ibid. Ibid.
388 PAUL WATT
In taking the spiritual dimension a step further, Cardus recounted how

Schnabel saw himself as a medium:
Before going on to the platform for a public performance I would call to mind
what Schnabel used to say to his students when they were nervous about playing
in front of the audience: ‘You will only be nervous, when you go to the piano, if
you are thinking about yourself. Think of Beethoven and then he will play’.
Schnabel wanted the pianist to be a medium – so far as a human being can be.
Whenever I heard Schnabel play I felt he was a medium through whom music was
speaking. There are very few pianists today whom I would put in that category.79
Believing music to be on a higher plane than the other arts and in the ability of
a musician to channel music are quintessential romantic values. Indeed Cardus
was very aware of this and once described himself as the last of the
romantics.80 It was even suggested to him by Daniels that he was ‘the arch-
romantic among English music critics’.81 And it was a belief that was far away
from Newman’s atheism.
Newman’s criticism rarely drew on metaphysical or religious hyperbole,
and he virtually never wrote of his rapture either with a performer or
a performance. He was reticent about claiming any degree of emotional
response to music. His style as a critic was typically rationalist: he strove to
be scientific, removed and impartial. His criticism may have betrayed
a disinterest in Mozart and a once over-inflated view of Joseph Holbrooke,
but by and large Newman’s criticisms were unbiased, in Cardus’s view.82
A particularly good example of Newman’s scientific approach to criticism is
found in a series of three articles in the Sunday Times in the early 1920s. In ‘A
Physiology of Criticism’, published in January and February 1929, Newman
acknowledged that personal biases got in the way of objective criticism and
that any appeal for a scientific method of criticism would be ridiculed.83
Undeterred, Newman proposed a ‘system of musical physiology’. In this
initial article, he reacted to Paul Bekker’s 1911 biography of Beethoven, in
which he felt its author had ‘read things into Beethoven’s music that are not to
be found in the music’.84 Newman insisted that his own physiological
79 80 81
Ibid., p. 260. Ibid., p. 262. Ibid., p. 95.
82
For Newman’s blind spots in Mozart. see Daniels, Conversations, p. 41. For an extended account of
Newman’s spectacular over-estimation of Holbrooke see Paul Watt, ‘“A Nationalist in Art”: Holbrooke’s
Contemporary British Composers (1925)’, in Paul Watt and Anne-Marie Forbes (eds.), Joseph Holbrooke:
Composer, Critic, and Musical Patriot (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014), especially pp. 160–2.
83
Ernest Newman, ‘A Physiology of Criticism’, Sunday Times (20 January 1929), 7; (10 February 1929), 7;
and (17 February 1929), 7. These three essays are reprinted in Felix Aprahamian (ed.), Essays from the World
of Music (London: John Calder, 1956), pp. 13–27.
84
Newman, ‘A Physiology of Criticism 1’, 7; Paul Bekker, Beethoven (Berlin: Schuster and Loeffler, 1911);
English trans. by M. M. Bozman (London: J. M. Dent, 1925). For background on Bekker’s career see
Christopher Hailey, ‘The Paul Bekker Collection in the Yale University Library’, Notes, 51 (1994), 13–21.
approach could arrive at a more tangible interpretation of a composer’s psy-

chology, but many of his readers were not entirely convinced.
Newman turned to his book The Unconscious Beethoven, published two years
before, in 1927, as an example of how a physiological study of a composer
might be realised.85 Newman argued that Beethoven had employed three
ascending notes (arranged and rearranged in about six different configura-
tions) as the basis for all his compositions, and that Beethoven was
the only composer in whom you will find such a sequence of three notes used
with such frequency, always at the same equivalent point in the melody, and
always as the obvious expression of a certain state of mind. The three-note
sequence, I contend, is a veritable Beethoven fingerprint, because it is not
found in any other composer.86
Although The Unconscious Beethoven was not widely reviewed, some critics
disagreed with Newman’s fingerprint thesis on the grounds that it was too
speculative. On the other hand, one reviewer believed Newman’s formal-
analytical treatment did not go far enough.87 Newman admitted in his first
article on physiology that the Beethoven book had met with ‘small success’,
but he remained convinced of its argument. Newman asserted that his type of
musical analysis, which was concerned, in part, with discerning compositional
processes, could go one step further: to ‘see a certain mood’ when particular
formulas were used, as in the case of Beethoven.88
If undertaking a study of Schubert, for example, Newman argued that it
would not be difficult to find a set of devices that would be ‘always uncon-
sciously employed when Schubert wished to express a certain mood’, just as
his study of Beethoven had concluded. This establishment of a mood, argued
Newman, was the benefit that a physiological study would bring and should
be approached in a particularly scholarly way:
I would argue that on the practical aesthetic side [of this physiological
method] alone a good deal would be achieved if for a few years writers upon
music would abandon their too easy psychological methods – which mean, in
the last resort, only saying the first thing that comes into your head – and
85
Ernest Newman, The Unconscious Beethoven: An Essay in Musical Psychology (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1927).
86
Newman, ‘A Physiology of Criticism 1’, 7.
87
A particularly trenchant and hostile review of The Unconscious Beethoven was written by Carl Engel in
‘Views and Reviews’, Musical Quarterly, 13/4 (October 1927), 646–62. Engel lambasted Newman for
throwing ‘mud’ (646) at Beethoven’s reputation and did not find the formal analysis section of the book
convincing. On the other hand, writing in 1929, Paul Miles was disappointed that ‘Newman’s book
received too little attention, I think, and its suggestiveness was not fully realized’, in ‘Beethoven
Sketches’, Gramophone (29 October 1929), 12.
88
390 PAUL WATT
devote themselves to establishing a preliminary physiology of each of the great

composer’s styles.89
Newman’s readers were puzzled. He spent the next two instalments

(27 January and 3 February) answering readers’ letters in a convoluted fashion,
going over old ground about the difficulties of impartial criticism and the
perils of the so-called ‘personal equation’. Newman was at pains to point out
that by a physiology of criticism he did not mean ‘a study of the composer in
the light of his nerves and arteries, or even of his liver’.90 Readers were still
confused, and the letters continued to pour in. In the last instalment, on
17 February, Newman called a truce:
The sooner I end this series of articles the better, for it is evident from the
letters I receive on the subject that no one has the slightest idea what it is I am
driving at. I must wait and see if I have better luck in a treatment of the subject
on a larger scale elsewhere. The term ‘physiology’ is plainly a stumbling-block
for most people; they read into it a meaning I never intended, and then write
me long letters that are most interesting in themselves, but hopelessly irrele-
vant to the theme.91
Cardus’s emphasis on spirituality and Newman’s preoccupation with physical

or scientific matters represented the extremes of musical criticism in the first
half of the nineteenth century. Newman distrusted any sort of criticism of
a spiritual hue, while Cardus was extremely ambivalent about any kind of
psychological outpouring. Indeed, the latter wrote in his autobiography: ‘It is
perhaps necessary here to point out that young men of thirty years ago did not
read books and listen to music and attend theatres and art galleries to “inte-
grate their personalities”, or to seek out some “higher synthesis.”’92
Despite their different approaches and styles of criticism Newman and
Cardus shared a disdain for much of the musical criticism written by their
peers. Cardus ‘hated the bulk of English musical criticism for its dryness of
nature and its parsimonious good-mannered use of the language’.93 He also
despised the party-politics of Lambert and the Sitwells: ‘It was Lombard
Street to a china orange that this new intelligentsia would praise Berlioz at
the expense of Wagner’; he also admonished H. C. Colles and Francis Toye for
being predictable.94 Echoing Runciman and Stanford, Cardus frequently
opined that modern criticism lacked wit and depth of knowledge about
music through research, and he commented on the ridiculous rush to get
concert reviews into print the next day, preferring instead for English
89
Ibid. 90
91
Newman, ‘A Physiology of Criticism 4’, 7. 92
Cardus, Autobiography, p. 257. 93
Ibid., p. 226.
94
Ibid., p. 267.
newspapers to adopt the French and German practice of printing longer

notices days after the performance. Cardus complained that criticism had
become too much of a business.95
Conclusion
The drive for quality music criticism in Britain that began in the second half of
the nineteenth century was in order to replace the dogmatic, opinionated and
hack reporting deemed old-school criticism, while a more carefully written
and nuanced approach to writing raised the quality of reviewing to criticism,
even science. This was the new era of criticism for which Runciman, Newman
and others had long agitated. It is not surprising, given the prevalence of
positivist thought in the nineteenth century, that a system of principles
should be developed for criticism of all types, but it was ultimately an
unworkable scheme that could never regulate individuality of style. The
best that could be hoped for was that music critics could be trained appro-
priately for their profession. Books by Newman and Calvocoressi represent
both theoretical and practical applications of musical criticism, but neither
book attempts to shoehorn musical criticism into formulaic approaches.
Furthermore, the careers of Newman and Cardus clearly demonstrate the
new tenor of criticism: reference to Shakespeare, Dickens, physiology and
aesthetics in the extracts above from Newman and Cardus illustrate the broad
depth of learning and a wider frame of reference of the new-school critics.
Moreover their style was not cast in an ‘impersonal manner’, nor was it ‘sheer
dullness’, terms in which Runciman had earlier described criticism of old.
A new criticism of much broader horizons, intellectual clout and polished
writing style had emerged and come of age.
95
Daniels, Conversations, pp. 173–5.
. 20 .
Music Criticism in Norway

PER DAHL
Introduction
The history of music criticism in Norway has yet to be written, though
quotations from music critiques and reviews have been used in music history
texts, and philosophical questions related to music criticism have been
debated. Happily, there is a substantial amount of material available for
research towards such a history, including newspapers, journals and scrap-
books (containing both concert programmes and concert reviews) and radio
programmes. In what follows, I will put forward some historical observations
that could serve as a background to a history of music criticism in Norway and
perhaps encourage further research into this fascinating material.
Background
A Norwegian tradition of music criticism (and of musical practice in general) did
not arise in tandem with the rest of the European nations. While musical life in
Europe became more and more institutionalised during the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries, Norway remained a dependency of Denmark from 1536
to 1814, and then became part of a union with Sweden from 1814 to 1905. Over
the course of these four centuries, then, there was no royal court in Norway, and,
more importantly, no nobility. This lack of resources and governmental influ-
ence perhaps explains why opera, theatre and a professional symphony orchestra
came about much later in Norway than they did in Denmark and Sweden. In
Denmark, King Frederik V inaugurated Det kongelige Teater (the Royal
Theatre) in 1748 to produce opera and ballet, and he launched one of the first
European ballet schools in 1771. Det kongelige kapel (the Royal Danish
Orchestra) actually dates back to 1448, when it served King Christian I as the
Royal Court’s Trumpet Corps, and it became Denmark’s symphony orchestra,
sharing in opera and ballet performances as well as offering its own concerts. In
Sweden, King Gustav III established Kungliga Dramatiska Teatern (the Royal
[392]
Music Criticism in Norway 393
Dramatic Theatre) in 1788 to produce opera, theatre and ballet. In addition, he

had founded Kungliga Musikaliska Akademien (the Royal Swedish Academy of
Music) in 1771, which offered several scholarships to young musicians to study
abroad and bring back the latest European music to Stockholm.
Norway’s history and general lack of infrastructure at the beginning of the
nineteenth century recalled a medieval agricultural society, but by the end of
the century, it had developed into a nation of consequence to European cultural
life, having produced such figures as Ibsen, Bjørnson, Grieg, Bull, Nansen and
Munch. This cultural growth was quite remarkable, and the last decades of that
century have been labelled the Golden Age in the history of Norway’s art.
Interestingly, the Norwegian Constitution Law of 1814 was one of the most
liberal in Europe, and for Bjørnson, Grieg, Bull and Nansen, it was fundamental
to their support for other nations’ fights for freedom and sovereignty.
For many hundreds of years, Copenhagen was the political, administrative
and cultural centre for Norway, thanks to the latter’s dependence upon
Denmark. This significantly hampered the dissemination of cultural tenden-
cies from Europe to Norway. Certain senior civil servants brought their
personal musical activities with them to their positions in Norway, but this
practice mainly stayed private. One positive consequence of this relative
insularity was that Norwegian folk music could continue to develop beyond
the reach of the dominant European classical music idiom. On the other hand,
of course, classical music would not play a part in Norway’s nation-building
even as late as the end of the nineteenth century. Grieg’s celebrated work to
promote Norwegian independence did not derive from his many attempts to
establish a symphony orchestra and music academy in Norway’s capital of
Christiania (renamed Oslo as of New Year’s Day, 1925). Instead, it was his use
and adaptation of folk music in his compositions that made him a national
hero (according to concert reviews from both Norway and abroad). Victorin
Joncières in La Liberté, 26 December 1889 reviewed Grieg conducting the Peer
Gynt Suite and the Piano Concerto in A Minor in Paris on 22 December 1889:
For me it is sufficient to hear some measures, before I feel transported to the

land of darkness with fir trees covered with snow, where the sleds, pulled by
reindeer, glide across the white-clad plains. It is the rarest and most valuable
trait of a musician, that out of his work radiates a special atmosphere including
the listener and gives him the illusion of being in an unfamiliar country that
suddenly reveals itself through sounds that almost become visible thanks to
the magic of art. Mr Grieg is the vivid and vibrant incarnation of Norway.1
1
Quoted in Harald Herresthal and Ladislav Reznicek, Rhapsodie norvégienne: Norsk musikk i Frankrike på
Edvard Griegs tid (Oslo: Norsk musikforlag, 1994), pp. 149–50. Translation my own.
394 PER DAHL
The violin virtuoso Ole Bull also combined classical repertoire with perfor-
mances of and improvisations over Norwegian folk tunes in both Europe and
America. Back in Norway, he organised concerts in Christiania where perfor-
mers on the Hardanger fiddle presented the repertoire of folk tunes and
dances. Initially, this particular effort met with little success, but when the
fiddlers adopted the position of a classical violin player (rather than sitting
down with the fiddle on the chest), these concerts and this repertoire became
pivotal parts of a national culture based on a Norwegian musical heritage.2
The search for a national identity and style quickened in Norway in the
middle of the nineteenth century, as it did in many other regions of Europe.
Among Norwegian scholars, two tendencies were particularly in evidence. One
arose among those with a background in the cities, and especially Christiania,
who aligned themselves with the broader nationalism that was developing in
Europe after the revolutions. Musically, they saw vocal music as possessing the
oldest pedigree and therefore as the most important part of Norway’s cultural
heritage. This brand of cultural nationalism also sought the national soul in its
natural wilds – by extension, then, the peasants in the most rural districts were
determined to have the most ‘original’ music. Unfortunately, these urban
nationalists found that rural country folk did not sing in tune and sometimes
lacked any sense of form at all. To make this material presentable to
a contemporary European context they had to ‘restore’ it. One proponent of
this strategy was the composer and organist Ludvig Mathias Lindeman
(1812–87), the publisher of Norske Fjeldmelodier [Norwegian Mountain Tunes]
in 1840.3 His collection was based on the performances he had witnessed by
singers and instrumentalists (mostly string instruments such as the Langeleik
and the Hardanger fiddle) who lived in the mountains, but the music was
inevitably revised and often arranged for either piano or choir. Prominently
lacking in Lindeman’s collections is any information about the context in which
the source music was actually performed. Nevertheless, bringing folk music to
the cities in this manner allowed it to become part of the classical concert life,
and thus part of the repertoire available to native composers hoping to add
a Norwegian flavour to their works.4
2
See the four-volume biography of Ole Bull: Harald Herresthal, Ole Bull: Vidunderbarnet erobrer verden:
1810–1837, I (Oslo: Unipub, 2006); Ole Bull: Republikaner blant konger og keisere 1837–1848, I I (Oslo:
Unipub, 2007); Ole Bull: Teaterdirektør, koloniherre og norskdomsmann 1848–1862, I I I (Oslo: Unipub, 2009);
Ole Bull: Drømmen om udødelighet 1862–1880, I V (Oslo: Unipub, 2010).
3
Ludvig Mathias Lindeman, Ældre og nyere norske Fjeldmelodier: 1 (Christiania: Malling, 1853); Ældre og
nyere norske Fjeldmelodier: 2 (Christiania: Malling, 1853).
4
Grieg was rather sceptical of Lindeman’s restorations, so he arranged for fiddler Knut Johannesen Dahle
to play the folk tunes to violinist (and conductor) Johan Halvorsen to produce notated melodies that were
as close as possible to the original performed music before composing his piano cycles titled Slåttene, Op.
72, in 1903.
Starting in the 1860s, a second music-cultural strategy arose that was partly
a reaction to this urbanised nationalism. This alternative started in the rural
districts and focused on the possibilities of reconstructing this old musical
material in its original form. For example, it was commonly assumed that the
Norwegian ballades were meant to be sung, but parallels were discovered
between them and the ballades of the Faroe Islands, which were danced.
Writer and theatre instructor Hulda Garborg5 promptly undertook the
work of incorporating dance back into this traditionally vocal repertoire.
The goal of reconstruction – rather than restoration – came to divide those
who were interested in Norway’s original musical heritage, and, in turn, to
inform many discussions and statements in newspapers, journals and books
about music in Norway starting in the mid-nineteenth century. There was no
tradition of reviewing performances of folk music in newspapers or other
media, but a discourse with elements of music criticism can be found in many
engaging texts arguing on both sides of the heritage debate. What both sides
also shared was a general scepticism towards anything related to the nobility
or cultural elitism surrounding the rarefied air of European classical music.
This emerging signifier of Norwegian identity carried forward into the twen-
tieth century, especially in the social-democratic movement, with its clear
links to the socialist movement across Europe and Russia.
Before elaborating on the consequences of this general attitude towards
Europe for Norwegian music and music criticism in the twentieth century,
there is a need to nuance further the historical narrative. After all, Norway was
by no means utterly isolated at any point. In the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, the Hanseatic League connected cities around the North and Baltic
Seas through trading, and a shared culture developed in this region. In
Norway, Bergen was the Hanseatic trade hub until the 1560s, but the
League’s cultural contacts continued to impact musical life in Bergen for
a long time afterwards. One result was the establishment of the first
Norwegian symphony orchestra, the Musikkselskabet Harmoniens
Orkester, in Bergen in 1765. The group started as twenty (amateur) musicians
and ten singers but doubled to the size of Haydn’s Esterházy orchestra,
managing to perform Beethoven’s Second Symphony in 1804, the year it
was published (and before it was performed in Berlin!). Over the course of
the nineteenth century, the orchestra became unstable and rather fragile,
thanks to its complete dependence on private funding. Starting in 1919, the
5
Hulda Garborg (1862–1934) was a pioneer in women’s rights as well as areas such as theatre and folk
dance, cooking and bunad (national costume) tradition.
396 PER DAHL
city of Bergen offered financial support to the orchestra (then forty musicians)
in combination with the private funds.6
Another important influence was the possibility of foreign musicians being
appointed as Stadsmusikant (Stadtpfeifer, city musician). There were formal
positions as organist and cantor in the cathedrals in the cities. Due to the very
low salary, the same musician often tried for all three positions. The first
Stadsmusikant contract was signed in Bergen in 1620; by the second half of
the eighteenth century, most of the cities in Norway had their own
Stadsmusikant, usually with six or seven apprentices. The position’s privileges
were gradually diminished after that time, and this role was abolished by
a royal decree on 26 January 1841.
Norway’s cultural ascendance as a nation started in Copenhagen in the
1770s with the establishment of Det Norske Selskab (the Norwegian
Society, a literary group). The process of developing a constitution in 1814
gave the people of Christiania and other Norwegian cities a new confidence
and the courage to begin to seek out their unique national roots. In line with
the post-Napoleon ideal of every nation having its own cultural identity,
Norway’s musical life stood in need of both organisation and direction.
Drawing upon notions from Romanticism, as well, people in Norway under-
took the elevation of folk music (as part of their identity) and the development
of a public musical life (as part of the institutionalisation of culture) in the
interests of the cultural emancipation of their society.
The discrepancy between Denmark (and Sweden), where the King initiated
the opera, the orchestra and various other music institutions, and Norway,
where these institutions were the result of more or less stable private support,
can be characterised as top-down versus bottom-up arrangements. Taking
Habermas’s theory of societal evolution and modernisation as a point of
departure,7 we could also schematise it as the difference between strategic/
instrumental rationality and rationalisation, on the one hand (Denmark), and
communicative rationality and rationalisation, on the other (Norway). We
might also introduce Habermas’s distinction between ‘work’ and ‘interac-
tion’, where the former includes modes of action based on the rational selec-
tion of efficient means – that is, forms of instrumental and strategic action (the
king’s actions), and the latter refers to forms of ‘communicative action’ in
which actors coordinate their behaviours based on ‘consensual norms’ (that is,
Norway’s spreading cultural emancipation). Such consensual norms would
6
Today, the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra has 101 musicians.
7
Society, trans. Thomas Burger and Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity, 1989).
develop from the dialogue between individuals who met in conversation or

exchanged views in the public sphere via printed media, a concept Habermas
refers to as eine Öffentlichkeit.
Habermas’s terminology, dedicated to the change from the eighteenth
century’s representational culture to the nineteenth century’s critical culture
seems, to align with cultural development in Norway as well, but there is one
important difference. Only in the last decades of the nineteenth century can
we find some indication of a public sphere in Norway. This relative delay in
cultural development and lack of eine Öffentlichkeit restricts Habermas’s com-
municative rationalisation, in this case, to the cultural elite. Because of this,
a kind of polarisation between high and low culture in Norway – or at least
a preference for a discourse that was shaped around high/elite versus low/
public culture – continued to characterise the Norwegian Öffentlichkeit into
the twentieth century.8
Norway’s actual fight for freedom and national sovereignty, which was
most intense in the period 1880–1905, did not include a stage of popular
revolution (as had happened elsewhere in Europe) but instead derived from
the aforementioned liberal Constitutional Law of 1814, a gesture originating
two generations before those who were the patriots of Norway’s cultural elite
in the Golden Age. The elite’s goal was less to achieve eine Öffentlichkeit than to
gain acceptance for Norway as a free and independent nation, above and
beyond any active public sphere. These elite leaders were supported and
admired for their advocacy of concepts such as freedom, equality and indivi-
dual rights, but there were, in fact, no radical changes to society itself (such as,
for example, the bourgeoisie assuming positions long held by the nobility),
only progressive development in the economy, school system and living
conditions. How Norway’s differences from European culture manifested
themselves in its music criticism will occupy my conclusion to what follows,
but first I will offer some glimpses of the documented history of music
criticism in Norway.
Music Criticism
We have now seen that the two preconditions for music criticism, a concert
life and a public press, did not develop simultaneously in Norway. Music that
is part of military and religious rituals is public at all times, but the emergence
8
The consequences of this polarisation for music criticism in Norway would make an interesting research
project especially compared to music criticism in Sweden (as documented by Kristina Widestedt, Ett
tongivande förnuft: musikkritik i dagpress under två sekler (Vol. X V I I ) (Stockholm: Stockholms univeristet,
2001).
398 PER DAHL
of a concert life devoted to the musical experience’s aesthetic qualities arose

only in the nineteenth century. Sources documenting this emergence include
manuscripts, printed music, notes in newspapers about concerts, occasional
reviews and articles about musical life in Norway.9 From the contracts of the
Stadsmusikant between 1620 and 1800, for example, we can see that offering
public concerts was part of their duties. The earliest texts addressing music in
public life were printed in the first Norwegian newspaper, the Norske
Intelligentzsedler, in 1763.10 These event announcements provided informa-
tion about performers but seldom said anything about the repertoire or how it
was received. Other sources indicate a focus on contemporary music in these
concerts until at least the 1840s. For many years, these kinds of music-related
texts served as a form of music criticism.
The Norwegian Constitution of 1814 proclaimed freedom of the press and
gave rise to several newspapers, bulletins and pamphlets, including, in 1819,
the first daily newspaper, called Morgenbladet.11 While Morgenbladet focused
on news and political issues, another newspaper, Den Constitutionelle, started
in 1836 and became an important platform for commentary on any issue,
including cultural life. Among the earliest music critics in Norway with a link
to the European tradition was Halfdan Kjerulf (1815–68). His feuilletons in
Den Constitutionelle from late 1839 to 1847 followed the model of Schumann in
their reflective, sometimes humorous and ironic, and always very subjective
conclusions, assessments and observations. For example, 15 January 1843:
Ole Bull is an extraordinary individual artist, but therefore we have the right
to require extraordinarily high quality, yet taking all essentials in considera-
tion, he delivers so extraordinarily little. It is the special characteristics of this
artist that one must admit him everything in one direction and yet almost
nothing in another.12
This subjectivity also characterises Kjerulf’s diaries and letters, and in it we

see the Romantic yearning for the exotic become, in Norway, a yearning for
national identity rooted in rural culture and the life of the mountains. This
was decidedly exotic to the urban citizens of Christiania and elsewhere in
Europe, where it influenced music critics in their reviews of music by Grieg
and other Norwegian composers.
9
One of the earliest articles was Lars Roverud, Et Blik paa Musikens Tilstand i Norge: med Forslag til dens
almindelige Udbredelse i Landet, ved et Instituts Anlæg i Christiania (Christiania: Self-publishing, 1815).
10
Børre Qvamme, Det musikalske Lyceum og konsertlivet i Christiania 1810–1838 (Oslo: Solum, 2002), p. 8.
11
Rune Ottosen, Helge Østbye and Lars Arve Røssland, Norsk pressehistorie (Oslo: Samlaget, 2012), p. 32.
12
Quoted in Nils Grinde, Halfdan Kjerulf: nordmann og europeer: en komponist og hans tid (Oslo: Musikk-
husets forlag, 2003), p. 273. Translation my own.
Over the next two to three decades (1850–80), there was no regular music
criticism published in the newspapers, even as Norway’s thriving concert life
became more and more evident to all. Here again, the differences between
developments in Norway and the arcs of music institutions in Denmark and
Sweden during the same period are quite remarkable. In Norway, the lack of
governmental support for cultural institutions caused orchestras, opera com-
panies and concert halls to come and go. However, music did become an
important part of the new public movements of the second half of the nine-
teenth century, including the Labour movement (with its international con-
tacts) and its workers’ unions, as well as the low-church revivals (Haugianerne),
which included singing hymns without an organ or other instruments. It was
also at this time that a major debate about the Norwegian language started, as
to whether it should be based on the Danish (the official written language, or
Riksmål) or Norwegian dialects (the Landsmål, for which Ivar Aasen argued in
his books of 1848 and 1850).13 Naturally, Landsmål supporters were also
interested in rural musical traditions, whereas Riksmål was associated with
urban and elitist European culture. In 1885, both languages became official
Norwegian languages. Today, the conflict between Riksmål and Landsmål (or
Bokmål and Nynorsk, in modern terminology) still arises when questions about
identity and cultural belonging come up. The link to musical expression,
however, is no longer so prominent.
The first Norwegian music journal was established in January 1880,14 and at
that time, newspapers began to include reviews more regularly. It remained
the case that these texts resembled annotations rather than actual criticism,
and the perspective of the critics themselves tended to drift from the social
event to a performer review to personal opinion. However, in the decade
leading up to the First World War, several of the capital’s principal news-
papers began to feature concert critiques by musically literate critics (mostly
composers).15 These pieces were generally in line with the European tradition
of music criticism and strongly influenced by the heritage of Hanslick.
Nevertheless, we find a strong bias towards promoting Norway as a nation
with its own culture.
During the interwar years, certain changes in society propelled the devel-
opment of music criticism in Norway. A new genre, jazz, became an impor-
tant part of public musical life, and an explosion of media – radio, the
13
Ivar Aasen and Terje Aarset, Det norske Folkesprogs Grammatik, I (Volda: Høgskulen i Volda, 1996). It is
worth noting that Aasen’s books on Norwegian dialects were written in the official Danish language.
14
The journal was Nordisk Musiktidende. Edited by Carl Warmuth, it was published in Oslo between 1880
and 1893.
15
Ulrik Mørk in Ørebladet (1900–25) and Nationen (1927–40); Reidar Mjøen in Dagbladet (1907–25) and
Aftenposten (1925–53); Hjalmar Borgstrøm in Aftenposten (1913–25).
400 PER DAHL
gramophone, magazines and even more newspapers – accompanied it. Music,

and texts about music, were everywhere and reflected the newfound ‘buying
power’ of the engaged consumer, whether of recordings, radio shows or
concerts. Individualism came to characterise music criticism as well, but
a tendency remained to align these texts with the reader rather than the
listener, in the sense that the narrative refers to information and knowledge
about the music and the musical performance rather than the listening process
and its associations. Reviews of classical concerts, now common in all of the
largest newspapers, became more focused on the musical work itself, its
aesthetic potential and the ways in which the actual performance accommo-
dated it, largely from a composer’s perspective.16 National celebrations such
as Olavsjubileet in 1930 (which marked 900 years since the killing of King
Olav at Stiklestad and the christening of Norway) and the twenty-fifth anni-
versary of Norwegian independence spurred some critics to become antag-
onistic towards new trends in classical music (impressionism, expressionism,
neoclassicism) and instead promote the perpetuation of Norway’s national
Romantic ideal.17 In magazines, features about music and musicians were
aimed at the consumer and did not necessarily respond to a special concert/
occasion.
The first gramophone records produced in Norway arrived in 1905.18 They
appear to have had no impact on the amount of music criticism in the news-
papers, however. Their distribution was limited to the larger cities, though
the technology reached into the countryside – several music scholars used the
equipment to make recordings with traditional folk musicians (vocal and
instrumental performers).
Only jazz records received reviews as such in the newspapers and magazines
of the 1920s; in fact, classical records were not reviewed in Norwegian news-
papers until the 1950s (the LP era). The critic Dag Winding Sørensen opened
his column titled ‘Grammofonen’ in the newspaper Aftenposten on
19 November 1949 with reviews of classical recordings, and the first LPs
arrived in April 1952.19 This cannot have been because of poor sound quality,
16
Composer and founder of ISCM Norway, Pauline Hall (1890–1969) was critic for Dagbladet (1934–63).
Composer David Monrad Johansen (1888–1974) was a critic at Aftenposten 1925–45.
17
Per Reidarsson, critic for Tidens Tegn (1913–21), Arbeiderbladet (1921–40) and Fritt Folk (1940–45), was
extremely negative to all new tendencies. Reviewing Harald Sæverud’s (1897–1992) Symphony No. 2 he
wrote: ‘However, for me, it was a torment to listen to this three-quarter-long jumble of false tones,
everything entirely formless and to that, ugly instrumentation’ Arbeiderbladet (24 October 1924); quoted
in Lorentz Reitan and Inger Bentzon, Harald Sæverud: (1897–1992): mannen, musikken og mytene (Oslo:
Forum/Aschehoug, 1997), p. 95. Translation my own.
18
Vidar Vanberg, Da de første norske grammofonstjernene sang seg inn i evigheten: norsk grammofonhistorie 100
år (Oslo: Nasjonalbiblioteket, 2005), pp. 65–102.
19
Dag Winding Sørensen (1910–93) was a critic for Aftenposten (1945–76).
as classical records were being reviewed in other countries. It may indicate

a lack of interest among readers, who continued to align classical music with
upper-class elitism rather than Norway’s strong national identity.20 It seems
to have been acceptable to buy some records in such a genre, but the idea of
cultivating a taste for a non-Norwegian, highbrow European cultural tradi-
tion was met with some suspicion, even in the years of rebuilding that
followed the Second World War.21
When jazz entered the public sphere in Norway in the 1920s, as mentioned,
newspapers printed reviews of both concerts and gramophone records. The
same thing happened with pop and rock music at the end of the 1950s and the
beginning of the 1960s. These genres also prompted new journals that fea-
tured a mix of announcements, annotations and reviews. They both chal-
lenged the classical concert concept, making their performances an event,
and their journals blurred the line between critic/reviews and comments.
The first distribution of jazz records came about when Skandinavisk
Grammophon produced two releases with the Original Dixieland Jazzband
in October 1919.22 Newspapers reported on events where ragtime, cakewalk,
Dixieland and dance/restaurant music were played. The definition and scope
of ‘jazz’ remained in flux until the mid-1930s, when Norwegian recordings
began to regularly feature more of the improvisation that was so central to the
music.23 Nevertheless, the popularity of jazz spread quickly around the
country;24 already in the 1920s, new ensembles and orchestras playing dance
and restaurant music were trading their German and European sources for the
new music from America, and the local press followed along with jazz-related
annotations and occasional reviews. In Christiania/Oslo, as well, several of the
main newspapers (Aftenposten, Ørebladet, Nationen, Verdens Gang, Dagbladet,
Tidens Tegn) started reviewing jazz concerts in 1921.
Even though the Norwegian newspapers assigned some correspondents
(mostly interested amateurs, not professional journalists) to cover local jazz
activity, information about the international jazz scene generally came from
the Swedish journals Orkesterjournalen and Estrad. At the end of the 1930s,
20
Arvid O. Vollsnes, et al. (eds.), Norges musikkhistorie. Inn i mediealderen: 1914–50, I V (Oslo: Aschehoug,
2000), pp. 38–45.
21
Arvid O. Vollsnes, et al. (eds.), Norges musikkhistorie. 1950–2000: Modernisme og mangfold, V (Oslo:
Aschehoug, 2001), pp. 13–39.
22
See Bjørn Stendahl, Freebag? Jazz i Norge 1960–1970 (Oslo: Norsk jazzarkiv, 2010); Bjørn Stendahl and
Johs Bergh, Jazz, hot & swing: jazz i Norge 1920–1940 (Oslo: Norsk jazzarkiv, 1987); Sigarett stomp: jazz
i Norge 1940–1950 (Oslo: Norsk jazzarkiv, 1991); Cool, kløver & dixie: jazz i Norge 1950–1960 (Oslo: Norsk
jazzarkiv, 1997).
23
Kristian Hauger Radiodanseorkesters recording (17 March 1936).
24
In an announcement in a small newspaper in the middle of Norway, we find ‘Jazz-plater’ (jazz records)
among the articles listed for sale already in 1920; Innherredsposten (3 March 1920).
402 PER DAHL
a discussion developed in Norway around the issue of the cultural conflict

between jazz and National Socialism – a conflict with real consequences for
many people during the German occupation of Norway (1940–45).25 While
a few attempts to publish jazz journals before the war failed straight away,
Norwegian jazz blossomed musically in the 1950s, and the Norsk
Jazzforbund (Norwegian Jazz Society) was founded in 1953, followed by
the journals Norsk Jazz (1954–) and Jazznytt (1965–). Nevertheless, it was not
possible to make a living as a full-time jazz musician in Norway until the mid-
1960s, and the first LP recording with Norwegian jazz musicians did not
arrive until November 1963.26 The early enthusiasm of the 1920s for jazz had
lost momentum, and the music criticism of the 1950s and 1960s was rather
conservative regarding new expressions and styles in jazz, in both newspapers
and journals. Jazz, after all, was no longer the music of the new generation; the
pop and rock movement had usurped that role. Jazz, like classical, instead
found itself saddled with an aura of elitism, as a genre that demanded special
competence to appreciate, and one where the music critic became an impor-
tant conduit to such competence.27
Rock and roll is often identified with the emergence of teen culture
among the first baby-boomer generation (after the Second World War),
when young people had both greater relative affluence and more leisure
time and adopted rock and roll as part of a distinct sub-culture.28 The
street riot at a concert in Oslo’s Sentrum Kino on 20 September 1956 is
frequently referred to as ground zero for rock in Norway.29 In the 1960s,
writing about rock and pop music mostly consisted of fan journalism
catering to a teenage market (for example, the magazine Pop Revyen,
1966–70), though accomplished British publications such as Melody
Maker and New Musical Express were widely distributed and read in
Norway as well. In the late 1970s, an independent Norwegian rock
press emerged (including Nye Takter, 1977–89; Puls, 1978–; Beat,
1985–97; and Rock Furore, 1988–96). Influenced by the do-it-yourself
aesthetics of the British punk movement, new forms of Norwegian rock
writing became a stylistic overlay on a new rock identity for the music,
25
Stendahl and Bergh, Jazz, hot & swing; Sigarett stomp, pp. 11–40.
26
Eleven different ensembles made recordings in Norsk Grammofonkompagni’s studio 12–14
November 1963, but copyright problems with one of Karin Krogh’s texts delayed the launching of
the first Jazz-LP to winter 1964. See Stendahl, Freebag?, pp. 66–9.
27
Vollsnes, et al. (eds.), Norges musikkhistorie 1950–2000, V , pp. 273–5.
28
Cultural analyses often use Bourdieu’s Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans.
Richard Nice (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984) as their theoretical platform for explaining the
rock movement.
29
Per Kristian Olsen, Asbjørn Bakke and Sigrid Hvidsten, Norsk rocks historie: fra Rocke-Pelle til Hank von
Helvete (Oslo: Cappelen Damm, 2009).
its performers and its listeners.30 The influence of the English/American

language gave rise to another aesthetic debate in the late 1970s and early
1980s when many musicians and critics decided that the Norwegian
language was not suitable for the expressivity in pop and rock songs.31
In the 1990s, in turn, more artists started to use Norwegian as their main
language for rock expression, and critics in the alternative rock press
supported them. An interesting aspect of Norwegian rock criticism is
its alignment with other fields, and particularly the literary field. Some
writers found an outlet for their prose in rock criticism, and some have
become central actors in the public sphere, or have combined musical
endeavours with their literary projects. This includes writers such as Jon
Nesbø (founder of the rock band Di Derre), Lars Saabye Christensen
(member of the band Norsk Utflukt and participating on several records)
and the poet Jan Erik Vold co-operating with jazz musicians including
Chet Baker, Jan Garbarek, Red Mitchell and Egil Kapstad.
The official Norwegian cultural policy in the second half of the twentieth
century moved away from its goal of distributing art as part of public educa-
tion in the decades following the Second World War to an ideology in the
1960s and 1970s that linked the use of artistic resources to social-democratic
ends. National institutions including Riksteateret (the Norwegian Touring
Theatre, established 1948) and Riksgalleret (the Travelling Art Gallery,
1953–87) made way for Rikskonsertene (the Norwegian Concert Institute,
established 1967), which was dedicated to organising school concerts, youth
concerts and evening concerts. The theatres in Oslo (and Christiania), Bergen,
Trondheim and Stavanger had traditionally produced operettas (and occa-
sionally operas) as part of their repertoire, but there was no permanent scene
around opera. After much discussion, a national opera house was opened in
Oslo in 1959. Meanwhile, in the major cities, private music schools/conserva-
tories began to receive more public funding, and in 1973 the Norwegian
Academy of Music was established in Oslo. Musicology was made
a university discipline in Oslo in 1958 and Trondheim in 1962. This overall
institutionalisation of music resulted in a great variety of discourses in the
media, including a professionalisation of music criticism. Critics became more
educated, as well as more dedicated to particular segments of musical life in
a given region. In the classical sphere, composer Klaus Egge (1906–79) was
a critic in Arbeiderbladet (1945–74) and Arne Nordheim (1931–2010), the
30
Ulf Lindberg, Hans Weisethaunet, Morten Michelsen and Gestur Guðmundsson, Rock Criticism from the
Beginning: Amusers, Bruisers, and Cool-Headed Cruisers (New York: Peter Lang, 2005).
31
Ulf Lindberg, Gestur Gudmundsson, Morten Michelsen and Hans Weisethaunet, ‘Critical
Negotiations: Rock Criticism in the Nordic Countries’, Popular Music History, 1/3 (2006), 251–2.
404 PER DAHL
composer most associated with modernism and electronic music, was a critic
in Dagbladet (1963–70). In pop/jazz, Terje Mosnes (1947–) was a freelance
critic in Dagbladet from 1966, being made permanent in 1977.
During the 1950s, a new trend developed in the newspapers towards pre-
senting culturally related material that favoured entertainment over ‘serious’
culture and aimed itself at the socioeconomically up-and-coming: the youth.32
In the 1970s and 1980s, then, the situation changed from an embrace of art as
a fundamental human value to a culture centred on events about which media
attention and short-term success dominated all else. During these decades,
public funds expanded the budgets of music institutions and organisations in
an unprecedented way. At the same time, Norwegian individualism mani-
fested itself in Norway’s fractious relationship with the EU (the first public
vote on membership took place in 1973), as well as the movement to decen-
tralise funding to music and other art forms. (People in Norway like scattered
settlement and decentralised funding is in line with national individualism.)
The result of all of this was the development of a policy dedicated to music as
a tool for solving regional and social problems. This process was closely linked
to the demystification of high culture, meaning that artists and intellectuals
saw all of it as a devaluation of artistic quality.33 As a result, two critical
discourses evolved: traditional music criticism, which concentrated on musi-
cal performances, and popular journalism’s ongoing critique of the musical
culture. Media outlets responded to the division by hiring part-time critics to
write concert reviews and full-time journalists to produce work for their
culture departments.
In the second half of the twentieth century, then, music criticism peaked
across all musical genres, in both newspapers and journals/magazines.
Classical concerts were reviewed on a regular basis (including the debut
concerts of young musicians), and after the CD revolution in the 1980s,
many newspapers began to include reviews of classical CDs in addition to
concerts. Critics were still generally composers and sometimes musicologists,
but in certain newspapers, listeners with a huge collection of records and CDs
could also become reviewers of classical records.34 Since the year 2000, on the
other hand, the number of classical music reviews has decreased dramatically,
and today there is no consistency regarding either concert or CD reviews of
classical music in Norway.35 At the same time, the number of professional
32
Ottosen, Østbye and Røssland, Norsk pressehistorie.
33
Håkon Larsen, Den nye kultursosiologien: kultur som perspektiv og forskningsobjekt (Oslo: Universitetsforlag,
2013).
34
Kjell Hillveg (1943–) reviewed classical music, but only recordings in Aftenposten (1987–2008).
35
Only the left-wing newspaper Klassekampen has a Monday music supplement featuring critiques of CDs
and concerts across all genres.
orchestras, ensembles, chamber and recital concerts has exploded. This could
be seen as a postmodern deconstruction of the post-war governance changing
the mid-century Norwegian Öffentlichkeit to a pluralistic cultural landscape.
Broadcasting
Broadcasting started with a private company (Kringkastingsselskapet) in
1925, and playing gramophone records as ‘concerts’ represented an important
means of the dissemination of music. After introducing the electric pick-up in
1927, the amount of recorded music increased. In 1933, Norwegian National
Broadcasting (Norsk Rikskringkasting, or NRK) was established by the gov-
ernment and given a monopoly over public service broadcasting. TV transmis-
sion became a regular occurrence in 1960, and NRK’s monopoly over it was
not revisited until the 1980s.36 In 1982, NRK launched a second radio
channel, P2, dedicated to light music and entertainment; starting in 1993,
culture-related discussion and interpretations of cultural expressions became
a prominent aspect of P2’s profile. A typical new programme was ‘Ny lyd på
gamle verker’ [New Sounds on Old Works], which presented recordings of
both classical and jazz music with two hosts, one representing classical music
and the other, jazz. The radio was a superb medium for presenting alternative
interpretations of the same musical work. Programmes like ‘På sporet’ [On
the Track] that focused on new interpretations (on CD) of the classical
repertoire became very popular. At the other end of these consumer-
perspective programmes, we find ‘Ring in musikken’ [A Call for Music],
where people could phone in to the NRK library to request their favourite
works. In addition, classical music even got its own twenty-four-hour chan-
nel, ‘Alltid klassisk’ [Solely Classics], starting in 1995. Channel P2 continued
to present a variety of programmes dedicated to individual music genres, such
as folk music (which was given a twenty-four-hour channel in 2004), jazz
(which was given its channel in 2007) and world music. NRK’s coverage of
classical music, then, followed the path of music criticism in the press, begin-
ning with gramophone concerts and progressing to programmes that brought
a critical perspective to the music itself. At first dominated by classical music,
this trend came to embrace all genres, before leaving classical music, for the
most part, behind.
In the 1960s, and especially from the 1970s onwards, the Norwegian
economic situation transformed young people into a viable group of
36
Hand Frederick Dahl, NRK i fred og krig: kringkastingen i Norge 1920–1945 (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget,
1991).
406 PER DAHL
customers with their own preferences in music (pop/rock), clothes, hairstyle

and lifestyle. NRK’s single channel (until 1982) was not able to satisfy this
segment of the public sphere, and in the 1950s and 1960s, for example,
Norwegians had to tune into Radio Luxembourg or the Swedish P3 (for
those living close to the border) in order to listen to a wide repertoire of
popular music. In 1993, NRK started a channel, P3, aimed specifically at
young people and where developing a discourse in Norwegian for their
music genres was important. Norwegian educational institutions were slow
to open up to this kind of music and its discourse, as presented in publications
such as Melody Maker, Rolling Stone and New Musical Express. Pop and rock
music, which seemed to elude conventional music theory and analysis, used
electric instruments and cultivated musical expressions based on the possibi-
lities of the recording studio. It therefore represented something new and
rather confounding to public Norwegian music criticism until the arrival of
the new millennium.
Conclusion
One of the main problems with describing the history of music criticism in
Norway is that we are forced to identify elements in its musical life using
a terminology that only developed much later. What we now call classical,
jazz, pop and rock did not register as such fifty or a hundred years ago. In
addition, today’s variety of musical genres is the result of strategic choices
made by the music industry (gramophone companies, impresarios, agents and
media houses), music organisations and institutions, and the educational
system, and this also distorts our view of the musical life (and discourse) of
the past. Recalling Habermas, we might say that the music industry has always
dominated our musical world with its contributing and strategic actions. In
the gramophone era, this industry impact strengthened the idea of the
recorded musical work as a fact or an object. However, the dissemination of
music on the Internet weakens this tendency. Even in this industry context,
however, music criticism was an independent communicative action in which
the relevant musical actors coordinate their behaviours based on consensual
norms. These norms are highly dependent upon what and where the critics
articulate them. Yet Norway’s political and cultural idiosyncrasy complicated
the possibility of an independently cultivated culture of music criticism;
often, what critics did ran counter to what people wanted or listened to,
deriving as it did from tenets of music theory, history and culture that did not
resonate with a consensus norm regarding the public’s listening experiences.
The lack of dialogue in an active public sphere (eine Öffentlichkeit) made music
criticism in Norway into a literary discipline that served to promulgate the

internal codes of highbrow musical tradition and to accommodate the inter-
pretative communities belonging to the various musical genres.
The delayed development of music criticism in Norway had some interest-
ing consequences as well. Music criticism as it came about in Europe was
imported into Norway as text about the music (that is, the work), not about
the listening experience. In the wake of several other developments in
Norwegian society (nationalism, the struggle for independence and the anti-
elitism of the post-war years), classical music was pigeonholed as highbrow
culture with rigid class boundaries and too much insider knowledge. These
judgements have been softened in the twenty-first century, as discussed
above. When jazz, and later pop/rock, became topics of music criticism, the
impact from foreign enterprises (such as the journals, magazines and news-
papers of Sweden, England and the United States) became quite evident.
However, because they appealed to a broader public and focused on the
music as something to experience rather than necessarily know about, these
genres were better aligned with the Norwegian society’s ethos of equality.
A written text can often be much more rigid in its definition than the
artistic expression in question might warrant. This makes music criticism
a supplier of relevant premises for people’s understanding of musical
expressions.37 Categories and norms expressed in these texts are sometimes
much more detailed than the musical expressions to which they refer and from
which they emerge. This is particularly the case in pop/rock/jazz criticism,
with its many references to extra-musical elements. The thing to remember is
that the concepts used in music criticism, musical and otherwise, are all rooted
in and part of a much larger web of cultural affiliations. To understand that
web, we must continue to return to the culture from which it all emerges.
I hope the above glimpses of the history of music criticism in Norway have
demonstrated the value of such a perspective for any critique of music
criticism.
37
See ‘The Rise and Fall of Literacy in Classical Music’, in Per Dahl, Music and Knowledge: A Performer’s
Perspective (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers, 2017).
. 21 .
Aesthetic Conservatism and Politics in

German-Language Music Criticism, 1900–1945
KAREN PAINTER
Time and again studies of German-language music criticism at the fin de siècle,

but also during the Weimar Republic, the First Austrian Republic and both
World Wars, have shown that politics influenced critics or that critics wished
to influence politics. And yet the mechanism in place differed vastly in the
respective historical contexts, often in unexpected ways. Critical discourse
did not necessarily reflect either the political view of the author or the
political milieu of the performance and review. This chapter focuses on the
clash between rhetoric and politics, not to diminish the significance of ideol-
ogy in the interpretation of critical discourse, but to understand the more
complex ways that music critics both responded to political pressure and
pursued their own ideological course.
One such apparent contradiction at the pinnacle of liberalism in the arts and
journalism around 1900 is the proliferation of violent metaphors as critics
sought to preserve aesthetic ideals in the face of modernism. It would be
difficult to determine whether profligate rhetoric at the fin de siècle actually
influenced the later politicisation of music, especially the abandonment to
opportunism and politics during the Third Reich. But such connections can
be examined for the two decades after the First World War. The lessons
learned and witnessed in the experiments with democracy after 1918 likely
affected the behaviour of critics who embraced National Socialism in 1933
(and after the Anschluss of Austria). There has been resistance to scrutinising
the politics behind Social Democratic music criticism, above all because
scholars, myself included, are sympathetic to those same political aspirations.
Yet the fact remains that the advocacy journalism that became so important in
Social Democracy, especially in Vienna, was propaganda in all but name.
Reports of success in proletarian ventures to promote classical repertoire
flew in the face of professional journalistic standards. A final irony this essay
explores is that in the Third Reich, political rhetoric all but disappeared from
much music criticism (the exceptions being mainly fringe authors), despite
the fact that in their reportage and their aesthetic judgements, critics
[408]
Aesthetic Conservatism and Politics 409
consistently showed their approval of patriotic and other politically directed

music. It was the victory of the apolitical in the service of extreme politics,
a move both encouraged and ultimately choreographed by Propaganda
Minister Joseph Goebbels.1
Apart from the longevity of some careers that stretched across historical eras,
there were few commonalities in the genres and practices of music criticism from
1900 to 1945. To oversimplify, critiques were often negative in the period before
the First World War but mostly descriptive and positive during the Third Reich.
In the bourgeois liberal press, music criticism lost its entertainment value after
the First World War as critics felt compelled to show the relevance of their craft.
Incisive satirical writing instead persisted mainly in the right-wing press,
although humour all but vanished in music criticism after 1933.
Another change across this time span was the importance of music criticism
altogether. Around 1900, the stakes were high. Feuilletons on important per-
formances often appeared on the front page of the newspaper. Preserving the
traditions of classical music mattered so much that one critic (Hans Liebstöckl)
pleaded for a law to protect concert-goers against what he experienced when
attending a performance of Schoenberg’s Second String Quartet; Schoenberg,
in turn, produced an essay titled, ‘A Legal Question’, taking the critic to task for
the terms of his outrage.2 The Austrian Social Democrats cared so much about
the arts that the Party arts office, established in November 1919
(Sozialdemokratische Kunststelle), maintained a journal, Kunst und Volk (sub-
titled Mitteilungen des Vereines Sozialdemokratische Kunststelle) from 1926 to 1931.
This intense commitment to music criticism as a vehicle for political change
continued in 1933, albeit with changes in language and venue – a veritable swell
in opportunism as critics sought to show the potential of their craft to support
the new regime – but disappeared soon thereafter. Music critics applied Nazi
tenets with zeal and on their own initiative, often adjusting terminology with
few changes in rhetoric. Their efforts notwithstanding, music criticism was
little valued, either as a contribution or as a threat. Apart from removing staff
who were Jewish or deemed politically dangerous, Joseph Goebbels barely
monitored music journalism; his ban on arts criticism, effective from 1937,
was self-regulating, with no mechanism for enforcement. Apart from the stench
of ideological writings on race and nationalism, the bread-and-butter reviews
that made up music criticism in the Third Reich were banal and ineffective,
1
This phenomenon is examined in a broader context in Pamela M. Potter, ‘What Is “Nazi Music?”’,
2
Schoenberg’s essay, eventually published in Der Fackel, has been translated in Arnold Schoenberg:
The Second String Quartet in F♯ Minor, Op. 10, Norton Critical Score, ed. Severine Neff (New York:
Norton, 2006), pp. 217–22. Liebstöckl’s review appeared in the Illustriertes Wiener Extrablatt (9 February
1907).
410 KAREN PAINTER
with the cadre of professionals depleted by cuts due to Aryanisation and

political cleansing.
One reason for the clumsy handling of aesthetic (or political) criteria in
music criticism, and so too the dilution of the craft altogether, was the
change in staffing. The erudition of music critics around 1900 was alto-
gether missing in the stringers who kept newspapers in print, especially
during the Second World War, when conscription further depleted the
ranks. At a time when degree programmes for musicology, composition and
performance were established, there was no commensurate training in
music criticism. In general, whereas staff positions at large newspapers
paid well, contributors to music journals could not earn a living as music
critics. Outliers on the Right often cobbled together a living from book
royalties – at a prodigious pace that further compromised the quality of
their reflections and writing. Compounding this, those who took up poli-
tical issues, particularly on the Right, tended to have less solid musical
training. The end result was that these authors were marginalised by the
musical establishment and secured more respect outside rather than within
the field of music. Karl Grunsky and Karl Blessinger are two such examples
considered further in this essay.
The misalignment of political and aesthetic values is seen most acutely
with respect to the goal of active listening. Concern about listening habits
intensified in the years around 1900. In particular, critics worried about
how new music appeared to hinder an informed and partly synchronic
comprehension. Mahler’s thick counterpoint and large symphony move-
ments made it difficult to listen synchronically, with an eye to the sche-
matic structure of the whole. This expectation for listening hewed to
conservative aesthetics but had no clear political valence at that time;
critics across the spectrum of newspapers invested in this stock symphonic
criterion. Only later, after the German defeat in the First World War, was
active listening taken up on the Right, with musical hacks such as
Blessinger and Richard Eichenauer.
Heinrich Schenker, whose right-leaning political views crystallised in the
wake of the First World War, developed a profound theoretical apparatus for
synchronic listening in the mid-1920s and 1930s. It is, however, unclear
whether Schenker influenced the embrace of synchronic listening on the
Right. His music criticism, published chiefly from 1892 to 1898, appeared
in publications that did not align with his later hard-line nationalism. Die
Zukunft (The Future), which featured articles by Schenker from the start, in
1892, was a manifesto for frank criticism on literary and political topics. Much
of Schenker’s critical output appeared in Neue Revue, a socially liberal
Viennese literary journal.3 As with Die Zukunft, Schenker had close ties to the
editor (co-editor) and he contributed articles from its third year of publication
through its final year.4
Gendered and Anti-Semitic Metaphors

In the decades around 1900, music critics saw their role not only as policing
musical developments but also as enlightening readers and assuring the con-
tinuation of revered aesthetic principles. Especially within the feuilleton but
also in some brief reviews, the goal of entertainment steered authors towards
parody and other witticism.
Aesthetic conservatism pushed critics to draw on gendered and anti-Semitic
rhetoric to reject modernism, implying a social agenda of discrimination and
gender stereotypes despite themselves. Many in this generation felt comfor-
table using veiled anti-Semitic tropes even when it was rare to reference the
Jewish identity of the composer, performer or audience – a practice limited to
explicitly anti-Semitic publications, such as the Deutsche Zeitung and Kikeriki.
Before the First World War, it was indecorous, at least in the mainstream
press, to make reference to a composer’s Jewish identity. Music was
a universal language, inclusive of those who participated in the process of
cultivation. In his capacity as music critic for the prestigious daily Münchner
Neueste Nachrichten, Rudolf Louis subjected Mahler’s music to harsh criticism,
even dismissing some works outright, but he also showed reserved praise, for
example, reviewing the Seventh Symphony. By contrast, as an author of
books – one on German music and another on Bruckner – Louis indulged in
explicitly anti-Semitic diatribes against Mahler.
Discussion of Jewish identity, both philo- and anti-Semitic, increased after
1918, though the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and concomi-
tant movement of national determination were more decisive to the explora-
tion of ethnic identity than the War itself. There was resistance to the subject
of Jewish identity, especially within the establishment, where music was still
hoped to be a universal language. Rudolf Louis’s writings faded from view
(particularly as he had died prematurely, age forty-four, in 1914). Richard
Specht chose to exclude Louis from his article on Mahler’s enemies, citing the
critic’s virulent anti-Semitism. The context was a Mahler issue of Musikblätter
3
According to Nicholas Cook, a full third of Schenker’s criticism appeared in Neue Revue. See
Nicholas Cook, The Schenker Project: Culture, Race, and Music Theory in Fin-de-Siècle Vienna (Oxford and
New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), p. 82.
4
The only scholarship I have found on the Neue Revue dates to a period of unreliability regarding political
affiliation. See the entry by Alfred Zohner in Deutsch-österreichische Literaturgeschichte, ed. Johann Willibald
Nagl, 4 (Vienna: Fromme, 1937), p. 1707.
412 KAREN PAINTER
des Anbruch published to coincide with the 1920 festival in Amsterdam

devoted to the composer’s symphonies. In Specht’s view, Louis’s capabilities
were clouded by anti-Semitism, to the point that, however deft, he failed to
grasp Mahler’s music: ‘On account of a racial feeling that is alien to art, the
Munich Rudolf Louis, just as clever as questionable, found no access to
Mahler’s music.’5 Specht dubbed him the ‘Meister Eckhart of music, who
rejected alien things as “Jewish”’. The reference was to the scholastic and
mystic Meister Eckhart, whom Pope John XXII tried for heresy in 1328, but
Specht was likely also alluding to Dietrich Eckart, the anti-Semitic author so
influential on Hitler. Eckart’s serial article ‘The Jew In and Around Us’, had
appeared a year earlier in the new anti-Semitic magazine which Eckart
founded with Alfred Rosenberg.6
Whether the diatribe against modernism had an impact – on what was
composed, what was programmed or how listeners responded – is difficult
to prove. Certainly the negative reception of Mahler’s symphonies clearly
hindered their performance. This was not, however, true with Strauss’s
Salome. Harsh reviews of the premiere in Dresden on 6 December 1905 did
nothing to dissuade future performances, a point of consternation to some
critics. When Salome was showcased at the annual composers’ festival in the
summer of 1907, critics from across Germany and Austria encountered
Strauss’s innovations alongside those of other composers represented at the
festival. In this context, some, for example, the Dresden critic F. A. Geissler,
attacked his bold harmonic language and thick leitmotivic writing in anti-
Semitic terms, in effect grouping Strauss’s brash modernism with that of
Arnold Schoenberg, represented at the festival through his First String
Quartet.7
It is striking how quickly the rhetoric of gender and Jewish stereotypes
dissipated in mainstream press after the First World War. The dangers seemed
quaint. In addition, the polarisation of conservative and modernist camps
made political metaphors more apt than those deriding the sensuality of music
by Mahler, early Schoenberg or Debussy. Karl Blessinger, who published
a series of polemical books immediately after the War, relished in debates
that professional critics no longer took seriously. His 1919 tract Die musika-
lischen Probleme der Gegenwart und ihre Lösung (Contemporary Musical
Problems and their Solutions) rejected the formal processes that more liberal
5
Richard Specht, ‘Mahlers Feinde’, Musikblätter des Anbruch, 3/13–14 (April 1920), 287.
6
Dietrich Eckart’s ‘Das Judentum in und ausser uns’, Auf Gut Deutsch: Wochenschrift für Ordnung und Recht,
1/2 (10 January 1919), 28–31; 1/3 (17 January), 45–8; 1/4 (24 January), 61–4; 1/5 (31 January), 79–80; 1/6
(7 February), 95–6; 1/7 (14 February), 109–12.
7
Friedrich Adolf Geissler, Leipziger Tagblatt (1 July 1907); clipping from the Arnold Schönberg Center,
Vienna.
critics found invigorating: rich thematic work, taut contrapuntal writing and
controlled intensifications [Steigerungen]. Rather, he complained:
In striving for immoderate complexity, the New Germans are not satisfied to
bring so-called motivic work into the developmental sections, but rather they
have it at the beginning and often continue it to the end, without interrup-
tion. The result is a confusion of form and an exhaustion of the listener.8
A similar point had been made at early performances of Mahler’s symphonies

around 1900 (even by the composer’s supporters, such as Julius Korngold in
his review of the Seventh Symphony), but the claims were more sweeping in
Blessinger’s bald rejection of musical modernism.
It is difficult to gauge Blessinger’s impact on contemporaries. Contemporary
Musical Problems and their Solutions seemed outdated. Blessinger received
a doctorate in musicology, but his academic stature had to wait until after
the National Socialists came to power. As a scholar who joined the Party in
1932 and published a large-scale attack on Jewish composers, Blessinger was
rewarded with a full professorship in 1942. In the aftermath of the First World
War, he wished for classical music to empower German listeners. ‘Most
dilettantes’, he grumbled later in the same book, ‘never elevate themselves
above the perspective of a frog’. He went on to quote Goethe: ‘Man does not
experience or enjoy, without being productive at the same time. This is the
most inward trait of human nature.’9 Lacking technical knowledge, Blessinger
continued, ‘our generation does not really enjoy music; they allow themselves
to be transported into a state of rush. This passivity [shows] the prevailing
feminine character of today’s culture’.10 Ironically, in the strident attacks on
musical modernism, the rights of the listener were invoked repeatedly.
Political and aesthetic right were at odds.
Music Criticism as Social Advocacy

Politically infused criticism was not limited to the Right. Emboldened by
developments at the turn of the century, Social Democrats took pride in their
insistence on the development of rational faculties among the workers’ move-
ment. They inherited and continued the discourse of Bildung so characteristic
of the German and Austrian bourgeoisie in the early nineteenth century and
claimed that these ideals could be extended to the working classes. At the
same time, Social Democrats all but rejected music criticism as it had
8
Karl Blessinger, Die musikalischen Probleme der Gegenwart und ihre Lösung (Stuttgart: Kunstverlag Benno
Filser, 1919), p. 36.
9 10
Ibid., p. 82. Ibid.
414 KAREN PAINTER
developed over the course of the nineteenth century. Enthusiasm for social
reform led to poor journalism, with respect to accuracy in reportage and in
biographical accounts. Ideologically inspired interpretation is itself not sur-
prising, except that scholars sympathetic with David Josef Bach’s political
goals turn a blind eye to these misrepresentations. As a case study, I turn to the
reportage on the Viennese Workers’ Concerts.
Appointed music critic at Vienna’s Arbeiter-Zeitung in October 1904, David
Joseph Bach shunned the enterprise and tenets that he had come to associate
with the bourgeois press. He lamented that Robert Hirschfeld, a friend and
eminent Viennese critic, had attended the workers concerts but remained
‘locked in the cage of the bourgeois newspaper business’.11 Bach’s aspirations
were to uplift and enlighten the working class; accuracy as a journal was beside
the point. Scholars sympathetic with his aims did not call out his failings; even
Schoenberg, whose right-leaning politics changed only in response to the rise
of National Socialism, felt compelled to speak about his friend’s virtues, citing
‘the ethical and moral power needed to withstand vulgarity and commonplace
popularity’.12
The most flagrant breach of journalistic ethics – if, admittedly, softer in
cultural than political reportage – was D. J. Bach’s composer biographies. In
an obituary for the Brahms biographer Max Kalbeck, Bach felt compelled to
provide a historical justification for the supposed inaccessibility of the com-
poser’s music: ‘Brahms, as Kalbeck knew, was not an artist for the few but
rather a national treasure of the German people’ but his music always needed
to be explained. In effect, Bach attributed this to the fact that ‘Brahms, the
proletarian son, moved within a very exclusively patrician circle of great
industrialists in Vienna’.13 Composer biography had long been used for
didactic purposes, but the evolution of journalistic practices had evolved
over the long nineteenth century.
The tenacity shown by Bach and his peers, seeking every opportunity to
engage workers and justify the project of classical music for the masses, is no
surprise considering the distrust their political colleagues harboured towards
music criticism. Victor Adler, founder of the Social Democratic Party, was
quoted – albeit years after his death – from one of his letters:
Music criticism, itself a questionable enterprise, is an empty word for workers

today. The worker can be brought to art not through contemplation but
11
David Josef Bach, ‘Fünfundzwanzig Jahre Arbeiter-Sinfonie-Konzert’, Kunst und Volk: Mitteilungen des
Vereines Sozialdemokratische Kunststelle, 4/2 (October 1929), 41–3.
12
Arnold Schoenberg, ‘My Evolution’ [1949], in Style and Idea: Selected Writings, ed. Leonard Stein, trans.
Leo Black (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984), p. 80.
13
David Josef Bach, ‘Max Kalbeck zur Erinnerung’, Der Merker, 12/10 (15 [May] 1921), 228–31.
through the facts of the art form . . . The monopoly of art must come to an end.
It is possible to begin this work with music.14
As the jewel of the Social Democratic enterprise, the Viennese Workers’

Symphony Orchestra Concerts (29 December 1905 to 11 February 1934)
amounted to more than an attempt to make classical music accessible to the
proletarian at cheaper prices than the public of the Vienna Philharmonic
enjoyed. However, from the start, there was an agenda – whether political
or social – behind bringing workers into the concert hall. The new journal
published by the Social Democratic arts office opened is first issue with the
longtime parliament member Anton Hölzl’s avowal that ‘listening to
a beautiful concert, one has a true and genuine joy in life (Lebensfreude),
whereas from drink one gets merely a poor surrogate’.15
The idea for a concert series dedicated to Viennese workers, according to D.
J. Bach, originated in a centenary commemoration of Friedrich Schiller which
he mounted with Victor Adler on 8 May 1905. Curiously, they decided that
the musical repertoire should replicate the official state programme from
earlier that day. To open, the Prelude to Die Meistersinger represented
Wagner the revolutionary. Alexander Zemlinsky conducted the Volksoper
orchestra.16 The quality was suboptimal, Bach conceded in his review, but the
performance nonetheless ‘unleashed a primitive power in the masses of
uncorrupted but sensitive audience members’.17 The official homage to
Schiller came from a festive hymn (Festhymne) written by Ferdinand von
Saar and set to music by Josef Reiter; two workers’ choruses performed.
Overall, in the judgement of Bach, Zemlinsky achieved something ‘truly
exceptional . . . The workers’ endless applause had affirmed the belief of
many party leaders that a deep desire for true art resided in the masses of
the people.’18
The Schiller commemoration concluded with a performance of Beethoven’s
Fifth Symphony. Its success became a call for programming more challenging
music for the Viennese workers:
For the first time the Viennese working class was able to hear the enormous
work spanning all emotions: and immediately they were pulled from their
14
David Josef Bach, ‘Fünfundzwanzig Jahre’, 41.
15
Anton Hölzl, ‘Ich hab’ kein Gelt!’ Kunst und Volk, 1/1 (1926), 1.
16
Before Alexander Zemlinsky’s appointment to the Volksoper, Wagner had not been in the repertoire of
that opera house. Quite possibly the recentness of his appointment – four months earlier – or the
repertoire or even the conditions are what led to some perceived weaknesses in the performance.
17
David Josef Bach, ‘Symphoniekonzerte der Wiener Arbeiterschaft’, Arbeiter-Zeitung (12 December
1905), 7–8; quoted in Jonathan Koehler, ‘“Soul is but Harmony”: David Josef Bach and the Workers’
Symphony Concert Association, 1905–1918’, Austrian History Yearbook, 39 (2008), 78.
18
Ibid.
416 KAREN PAINTER
seats by the power of their comprehension and impressionability. There was

no end to the rejoicing . . . One couldn’t suppress the wish that next year the
workers’ potential for enjoyment should be put to test: among all these
wishes, in the background, is Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Have courage!19
As a new music critic for the Arbeiter-Zeitung, Bach did not accept the
traditional tasks of assessing the performance and analysing the music. Two
months into the job, reviewing Mahler’s Third Symphony within the
Workers’ Symphony Concerts in December 1904, Bach wrote chiefly about
Beethoven’s role in the Social Democratic agenda; Mahler won praise insofar
as he was like Beethoven. Moreover, the artistic achievement was explained in
broad, non-technical terms: ‘Beethoven alone among all composers expressed
an imminently deep consciousness that spoke with all comprehensibility’.20
The goal of arts appreciation was for Bach chiefly political not aesthetic: ‘The
role of Social Democracy was to create a lived experience that could uncover
the creativity dormant within each worker. The souls of such titans as
Beethoven and Wagner exemplified the potential hidden in each individual.’21
In general, reportage gave way to brash claims of success in the pages of the
Arbeiter-Zeitung. On 18 April 1926, the Workers’ Symphony Concerts
celebrated its 200th performance in full splendour, with Anton Webern
conducting Mahler’s Eighth Symphony. The Arbeiter-Zeitung gauged the suc-
cess not by the applause, or any other seemingly objective measure, but
speculated that ‘it is a wholly personal success of Dr Bach to have brought
his flock so far that they could follow this most deep and most sublime work of
modern symphonic spirit with devotion and profound emotion’.22 Such
speculation about listener reaction did not however, surface in the liberal
press.
On the day of the performance, the Arbeiter-Zeitung announced the event on
its front page, in an article subtitled, ‘200 Worker-Symphony Concerts in
a Cultural Jubilee of the Viennese Proletariat’. (The review of that initial
performance, a mere paragraph, was buried on page 3 the following day.)
The paper claimed that ‘the number of Workers’ Symphony Concerts has
increased’ because ‘the workers’ movement has grown larger and more
powerful, and the worker has become more free economically and more
19
‘Die Schiller-Feier der Wiener Arbeiterschaft’, Arbeiter-Zeitung (9 May 1905); citation from Koehler,
‘“Soul is but Harmony”’, 76.
20
David Josef Bach, ‘Mahlers Dritte’, Arbeiter-Zeitung (20 December 1904), 1–2; discussed in Koehler,
‘“Soul is but Harmony”’, 73–4.
21
Ibid.
22
Arbeiter-Zeitung (23 April 1926); citation from Johann Wilhelm Seidl, Musik und Austromarxismus: zur
Musikrezeption der österreichischen Arbeiterbewegung im späten Kaiserreich und in der Ersten Republik (Vienna:
Böhlau, 1989), p. 159.
developed culturally’.23 In point of fact, the number of concerts per season

remained stable from the first season after the First World War until the
article was published in April 1926: eighteen in 1919/20; thirteen in 1920/21;
fifteen in 1921/22; twenty-one in 1922/23; seventeen in 1923/24; fifteen in
1924/25; and sixteen in 1925/26. Initially (1905/06 to 1909/10), there were
three to five performances per year; for a period of time the numbers rose,
with seven to nine per year (1910/11 to 1913/14); then there was a fall to one
to five per year during the First World War (1915/16 to 1918/19).24
Inflated reports of attendance or insupportable arguments about impact,
whether cosy anecdotes or rank speculation, were the bread and butter of the
Socialist arts organ, Kunst und Volk, not just the Arbeiter-Zeitung. The motiva-
tion was not propaganda alone. By drawing reminiscences (necessarily inac-
curate) into the genre of music journalism, the editors could validate the
workers’ movement by giving it historical roots. The politician August
Forstner, who was known as Der Kutscher (the coachman) in Parliament, was
invited to reminisce about the first Workers’ Symphony Concert, for which
the transport workers had been given a block of fifty seats. Despite the stench
of sweat and horses – the men had no time to bathe or change before the
concert – he reported that ‘During the concert itself, our workers paid close
attention to the programme, and one could see them at some points become
noticeably agitated, so much did the music affect them.’25 Can one truly
observe musical effect, and in such a way as to generalise about fifty indivi-
duals? Or was the purpose of Forstner’s article to compare the length of the
pre-war work day with the shorter eight-hour days of October 1928, which
allowed workers time to prepare suitably for a concert?
This early generation of socialist music critics was idealistic, hewing to the
idea of music as edification, not merely entertainment. D. J. Bach justified his
choice of absolute music for the Viennese Workers’ Symphony Concerts
because appreciation was sui generis. By contrast, he believed, proletarian
listeners lacked the level and kind of education to understand the historical
context necessary for programme music.26 In reality, the Viennese Workers’
Symphony Concerts, under his stewardship, featured numerous
23
Arbeiter-Zeitung (18 April 1926); quoted in Seidl, Musik und Austromarxismus, pp. 157–8.
24
These numbers are drawn from the programme listings in Seidl, Musik und Austromarxismus, pp.
178–210.
25
August Forstner, ‘Die Transportarbeiter im ersten Arbeiter-Sinfoniekonzert’, Kunst und Volk, 3 (1928/
29), 1–4. Koehler identifies Forstner as a ‘transport worker’, without citing the irony that this was merely
his nickname (Kutscher) in Parliament, where he served for many years (Koehler, ‘“Soul is but Harmony”’,
p. 79).
26
David Josef Bach, ‘Die Kunststelle’, Kunst und Volk: Eine Festgabe der Kunststelle zur 1000.
Theateraufführung, ed. David Josef Bach (Vienna: Verlag Leopold Heidrich, 1923), pp. 116–17; quoted
from Seidl, Musik und Austromarxismus, p. 139.
418 KAREN PAINTER
programmatic works. At the time of his article, the series had premieres or
first performances of Paul Graener’s Pan and Rudolf Bella’s symphonic poem
Herbst, as well as featuring numerous other programmatic works, including
Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht and Alfredo Casella’s rhapsody Italia. Nor did
these interests subside. After Bach’s essay, the Viennese Workers’ Symphony
Concerts went on to premiere Arkadia by R. Stimmer; Julius Toldi’s orchestral
variations Wanderskizzen, on a theme from Bartók’s Romanian Folk Dances,
followed over the next few years. Other performances of programme music
following Bach’s 1923 article included Stravinsky’s Pulcinella Suite,
Honegger’s symphonic poem Le Chant de Nigamon and Strauss’s Also sprach
Zarathustra.
The initial agenda of the Social Democrats, giving workers access to art
music, became more specific, focusing on music and the kind of music appre-
ciation that would bring about change. Bach published his call to action in
September 1927, in reference to the 1927–28 season, but formulated his goals
with respect to art in general. ‘True art is always revolutionary’, he professed,
adding that the subject need not refer to revolution.27 Likewise, new art, Bach
continued, is not art that was recently completed, but rather art which ‘is
“new” in its content’.28 Bach hoped that, at some point, artists would
embrace socialism as their goal, but his immediate concern was improving
the appreciation of art (‘we want to learn to understand and value what is new
and alien in art’). The necessary ‘education’ had to be self-directed and not
imposed by the state, although the Social Democratic arts office owed its
existence, Bach made clear, to the fact that ‘we do not consider art a luxury but
rather a necessary achievement of society’.29
In music criticism the politicisation under Social Democracy was more
explicit than, on the face of it, under National Socialism. Paul A. Pisk, writing
in 1929, took on the subject of ‘New Music for New People’. He claimed that
‘many important modern composers are Social Democrats’ because ‘in the
working class, and only in the working class, resides the will to a new musical
culture’.30 Yet he immediately revealed that this is an aspiration more than
a fact:
That is of course not yet seen everywhere. Before the revolution, the proletar-
iat still largely lacks the possibility to take up and rework the cultural goods of
past epochs, without which it is impossible to build further and rework. They
largely lack the ability to position themselves critically toward them.31
27
David Josef Bach, ‘Programm für das Jahr 1927–28’, Kunst und Volk, 2/6 (September 1927), 1–3.
28 29
Ibid. Ibid.
30
Paul Amadeus Pisk, ‘Neue Musik dem neuen Menschen’, Kunst und Volk, 4/1 (September 1929), 8.
31
Ibid.
This work, he believed, will still take a few decades.

However well-intentioned their enthusiastic reports, lax journalistic stan-
dards in the Arbeiter-Zeitung, and, later Kunst und Volk, committed music
criticism to the political sphere. Another area of advocacy through music
emerged in the Jewish community press. Heinrich Berl, best known for
writing the first philo-Semitic book on music, came from humble intellectual
stock and was employed chiefly as a cultural manager, variously directing
a lecture series and editing a book series. He wrote music articles for Jewish
cultural journals, and yet, despite his specialisation, only once was he invited
to contribute to a music journal.32 In a telling rebuke, Arno Nadel, who was
the pre-eminent authority on Jewish sacred music, denied that in Western art
music there was an identifiable so-called Jewish character. Attuned to his
audience (the Zionist readers of Martin Buber’s Der Jude), Nadel proclaimed
great potential of Jews in music in the future but did not concur with how
Berl typecast the style and aesthetics of Jewish composers.33
Politicisation and Accommodations under

National Socialism
The power base of music criticism began to erode in the 1920s on several
fronts. Arnold Schoenberg’s Society for Private Musical Performances, active
from February 1919 to December 1921, excluded critics from its weekly
performances. One of the satirical issues published by the Musikblätter des
Anbruch staff, a publication otherwise considered the organ of Viennese mod-
ernism, poked fun at the biases and venality of Viennese music critics.34 An
underlying question that drove the anxiety and the commitment of writers on
the Left and the Right was whether art music – both traditional and con-
temporary – still influenced society at large, as was presumed to have occurred
in the past. Music critics had to argue for the continuation of the art form
itself in a world where the niceties of aesthetics could pale in importance.
The Left and the Right both stressed that the inspiration and meaning of
the artwork came from the community not the individual. The divergence in
the two ideologies, Socialism and National Socialism, came in the status of the
composer. Whereas Nazi aesthetic precepts were vague and inconsistent
32
Heinrich Berl, Das Judentum in der Musik (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1926). See
Karen Painter, ‘Polyphony and Racial Identity: Schoenberg, Heinrich Berl, and Richard Eichenauer’,
Music and Politics, 5/2 (2011), doi:10.3998/mp.9460447.0005.203.
33
Arno Nadel, ‘Jüdische Musik’, Der Jude, 7/4 (April 1923), 223–36.
34
Musikblätter des Abbruch (1925), 21; cited in Hartmut Krones, ‘Humor als Waffe der Wiener Moderne:
Die Musikblätter des “Abbruch” (1924 und 1925)’, Musik/Revolution: Festschrift für Georg Knepler zum 90.
Geburtstag (Hamburg: Bockel, 1997), vol. I I , p. 203.
420 KAREN PAINTER
(other than the need for art to be völkisch and accessible), David Josef Bach left
no doubt that the artist is subordinated to this public: ‘The artist stands
within the community; he is nothing to speak of apart from it, just as art itself
developed only within a community. The artist only expresses what society
thinks and feels at the deepest level; he is its mouthpiece.’35 Ideologies on the
Left and the Right also shared a dislike of analysis and objective criticism.
Bach conceded that the role of the artist’s individuality in the creative process
poses difficulties for critics and the public. The solution Bach proposed was
that ‘contemplation’ (Betrachtung) would help the critic understand connec-
tions between different works by the same artist and understand connections
between an artist and his generation.36 This very same concept, Betrachtung,
prevailed under National Socialism as a surrogate when Goebbels’s banned
arts criticism.
The dismantling of Germany’s vast network of newspapers counts as
Goebbels’s first aggression against the state. Ironically, the indirect manner
of censorship – eliminating authors rather than prescribing content, at least
regarding music – quelled the enthusiasm of Nazi supporters as well. One of
the most virulent right-wing critics, Paul Zschorlich, retired early and left
Berlin for the Bavarian countryside, where he turned to composition.37 The
circumstances surrounding his departure from the Deutsche Zeitung in 1935 or
1936 are unclear, but certainly the Nazi echelons had little interest in rancor-
ous criticism by that point. To his peer Walter Abendroth, it was telling that
Zschorlich would withdraw at age fifty-nine.
Ostensibly honouring Zschorlich in an article title that would raise no eye-
brows (‘An Example of German Criticism: Paul Zschorlich on his Sixtieth
Birthday’), Walter Abendroth launched into a justification for music
criticism.38 His argument was twofold: on professional grounds and on cul-
tural-political grounds. First, to paraphrase, so long as there is public apprecia-
tion of the arts, judgement must be empirically grounded; music critics show
the weaknesses of the composition as well as helping listeners to correct their
impression and to understand better. His point is unremarkable, except for that
fact that Abendroth was a hard-line nationalist and anti-Semite writing in Nazi
Germany, and Goebbels would, months later, overturn his comments on the
Volk. Indeed, Abendroth’s defence of music criticism all but dismissed the
35
David Josef Bach, ‘Sozialismus und Kunst’, Kunst und Volk, 5/5 (July 1931), 92. 36
Ibid.
37
Paul Schwers, [Personal-Nachrichten], Allgemeine Musikzeitung, 63 (1936), 254; I am grateful to Lee
Rothfarb for providing a copy.
38
Walter Abendroth, ‘Ein Beispiel deutschen Kritikertums: Paul Zschorlich zum 60. Geburtstag am 8.
April 1936’, Zeitschrift für Musik, 103/5 (May 1936), 589.
‘public, which claps at what it likes and flees from what it does not like’,
referring to ‘the taste of the masses’.39
Most striking is Abendroth’s audacity in stating the obvious, namely that
a fascist state has no need for music criticism. In his words, ‘after an author-
itative state has definitively laid down the relevant cultural-political guide-
lines and taken over monitoring their compliance, deploying all available
means of power’, then the music critic’s ‘cultural-political responsibility
would seem entirely superfluous’.40 Abendroth protests that any professional
would heartily disagree, and yet the explanation of what a music critic should
undertake is, in fact, excessively vague. Predictably, it turns on the ‘national
cultural will’. But even here, the job is not reduced to a clear political aim: the
critic’s goals are the ‘clarification, explanation, assertion, and confirmation’ of
the ‘main ideas [i.e. the “national cultural will”]’.41
Karl Grunsky is a fascinating case of a figure who grew into his role as
protector of the right-wing nationalism in music criticism. When Grunsky
completed a doctorate in philosophy in 1895 (with a focus on aesthetics, and
his dissertation on rhyme), he had no job prospects in academia. A minister’s
son, Grunsky became editor of Neues Leben, a new journal on self-
improvement that aimed for ‘all those who strive for a free and natural
outlook’.42 (Beethoven was the subject of his own contribution). It flopped
within months, but as a competent pianist, Grunsky landed a position as
music critic at the Schwäbischer Merkur, the leading daily in Stuttgart, where
he remained for thirteen years. By 1908, Grunsky had gained sufficient stature
from recent book publications that he did not need the income from a regular
position. Heinrich Schenker, that same year, referred to Grunsky as ‘a very
well-known writer on music and reviewer’.43
As with so many Germans, the First World War proved decisive in spawn-
ing an outspoken anti-Semitism and hard-line nationalism in Grunsky’s writ-
ings. His notoriety came from positioning music in the right-wing pantheon
early on, although all in minor publications. Richard Wagner und die Juden,
from 1920, was the book that would win him the most attention in Nazi
Germany. It was published with a projected series that examined major
German figures in the context of anti-Semitism (‘Deutschlands
führende Männer und das Judentum’). A new anti-Semitic press, Deutscher
Volksverlag, started the series, but only four volumes appeared in 1920–22
(Schopenhauer, Wagner, Luther and Hebbel), and then nothing until a final
39 40 41 42
Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. Hygieia 8 (A. Zimmer, 1895), 323.
43
Henrich Schenker, Letter to Emil Hertzka [Universal Edition] (19 August 1908), available at www
.schenkerdocumentsonline.org.
422 KAREN PAINTER
volume in 1931, on Baron vom Stein, a crucial figure in the unification of

Germany.
Grunsky, for his part, pursued numerous ties to political publications. He
organised a Bruckner festival for the Stuttgart branch of the anti-Semitic
Bayreuther Bund (5–10 October 1921). His activities extended beyond
music; he became an official speaker for the Württemberg-Hohenzollern
Gau in 1928 or 1929 and apparently joined the Nazi Party in 1930.44 That
same year, Grunsky became music critic at a Party newspaper that was
established in Stuttgart (NS-Kurier). And yet what he published did not meet
the former standards of the profession. His articles for the national Nazi Party
newspaper, Völkischer Beobachter, or the Cologne Westdeutscher Beobachter were
biographical in nature, usually prompted by a composer birthday.
As before, when the National Socialists came to power, Grunsky staked out
a position early on, working with a new local press, Erhard Walter’s Verlag für
nationalsozialistisches Schrifttum. In 1933, Grunsky published a series (Der
Aufschwung) that celebrated the regime and its focus on music. The sequence of
volumes is unclear: either Der Kampf um deutsche Musik (released in June 1933)
or Warum Hitler? appeared first; two volumes followed, also in 1933
(Bekenntnisse Luthers zur Judenfrage and Lessing und Herder als Wegbereiter
Richard Wagners) and then the series ended. Der Kampf um deutsche Musik had
standing as the first book-length music history under National Socialism, and
yet, despite its grandiose structure of a twenty-chapter book, had little meat
(the text itself was seventy-three pages). Shortly after the book appeared, an
academic from the eastern outskirts of Prussia wrote to local Nazi officials in
Stuttgart attacking the book as ‘anti-National Socialist’ and noting that its
author was sixty-two years old. In turn, Grunsky had a well-connected friend
write to the Cultural Minister Hans Hinkel to intervene and supply guidelines
for the organisation that monitored German cultural life (Kampfbund für
deutsche Kultur).45 The internecine battles did not end, but it is clear
Grunsky’s journalistic efforts had no sustained impact. The director of the
Richard-Wagner-Forschungsstätte in Bayreuth proposed Grunsky for the
Goethe Medal on the occasion of his seventieth birthday. The matter was
assigned to a Propaganda Ministry staff-person who advised that Grunsky be
honoured but not with the Goethe Medal. His evaluation did not mention any
44
According to Fred Prieberg, Grunsky’s name is missing from the central records of the Nazi Party; the
1930 date for joining the Party was listed at the Reich Chamber of Music; Fred K. Prieberg, Handbuch
Deutsche Musiker 1933–45, 2nd ed. (Auprès de Zombry: Fred K. Prieberg, 2009), pp. 2720–2. It is possible
that Grunsky lacked the family documentation to apply for membership.
45
Karl Hasse, Letter to Hans Hinkel, Staatskommissar, Ministry of Culture, Berlin (17 June 1933);
excerpted in Joseph Wulf, Musik im Dritten Reich: Eine Dokumentation (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein, 1983),
pp. 65–6.
of Grunsky’s political publications by name (‘numerous cultural-political

tasks’) but instead recounted Grunsky’s Liszt and Bruckner biographies, his
multi-volume music history and his contributions to the Bayreuther Blätter (a
telling absence in this list is Grunsky’s musical aesthetics from 1907). By this
point, there was no value gained from identifying Grunsky as a music critic;
rather, he was named a ‘musicologist and cultural-political writer’.46
Goebbels went even further, in his birthday wishes to Grunsky, thanking
him for his service ‘to German musicology’.47 One of the most prolific right-
wing music critics went quietly into the night.
***
The vigorous response over Hindemith’s Mathis der Maler Symphony in 1934
showed – or attempted to show – that music criticism mattered. But the
inconsistency along political lines was alarming.48 Three years later, at the
premiere of Orff’s Carmina Burana in June 1937, there was less engagement
with the process of aesthetic judgement. Rather, most critics described the
music enthusiastically, drawing on political terms at will. The celebration of
Orff as a composer for the new Germany suggested that after a half century of
a vigorous critical tradition, the practitioners, Left as well as Right early on
and through Weimar, could not resolve where their higher obligation lay – to
a set of aesthetic criteria, or to the community of listeners as defined by non-
aesthetic, indeed political criteria. If criticism was an exercise in aesthetic
judgement, then one might defend modernism (or denounce it) on its own
terms; but if the obligation lay to the community and finally to the Volk, then
the exercise must have a different goal, that of proclaiming what music was
acceptable and what was not. In this respect, Goebbels’s declaration that
criticism should be silent, and mere description allowed, was a logical end-
point, since for the National Socialists what the community demanded was
clear – an awed endorsement of Party aesthetics. Ultimately the critics who
wanted to subordinate aesthetic criteria to the community had mostly them-
selves to blame for the silence that the regime compelled. When the regime
ended, however, the alternative tradition could be revived, as could the music
it had usually sought to support.
46
Personnel Director, Propaganda Ministry, to the Propaganda Minister (3 March 1941), Bundesarchiv
Berlin, Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda (R 55/96), sheets 498, 499; quoted in
Prieberg, Handbuch, p. 2721.
47
Goebbels, Letter to Grunsky (3 March 3 1941), Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und
Propaganda (R 55/96), sheet 500. According to Prieberg, Goebbels’s honouring of Grunsky was not
made public. Prieberg, Handbuch, p. 2469.
48
For more on this, see Karen Painter, ‘Symphonic Ambitions, Operatic Redemption: Mathis der Maler
and Palestrina in the Third Reich’, Musical Quarterly, 85/1 (2001), 117–66.
. 22 .
Music Criticism in Hungary until the Second

World War
LYNN M. HOOKER
There is no Hungarian person, no Hungarian or foreign musician . . . who

would not speak about, form an opinion on, or argue over this or that
characteristic of Hungarian song or music.
Kornél Ábrányi Sr, Characteristics of Hungarian Song and Music (1877)1
Not much is written in English about the history of Hungarian music criticism.
In addition to the language barrier, there is a persistent assumption that
Hungarian musicians who succeeded in the international arena had emerged
from an ‘underdeveloped’ region due to their own ‘lonely genius’.2 The sheer
number of Hungarian musicians who have achieved international success – see
the composers Liszt, Bartók, Kodály, Lehár and Kálmán; conductors Hans/
János Richter, Fritz/Frigyes Reiner, György/Georg Solti and Iván Fischer; and
pianists Annie Fischer, Zoltán Kocsis and András Schiff, among many others –
defy that assumption. Music criticism illuminates the active scene from which
they emerged, and shows how musicians, scholars and critics strove to shape the
nation’s sonic image. This chapter acts as an introduction to that criticism
through the early twentieth century, sketching the historical context, publica-
tion outlets and major personalities, and surveying some of the themes that
dominated discourse about music during this period of rapid growth.
Background: Hungarian Culture Emerging from the Shadows

Documents of Hungary’s music culture go back to the medieval period;
monastic institutions produced plainchant and polyphony manuscripts, and
splendid courts of Hungarian royals imported musicians from France, the
1
In his A magyar dal és zene sajátságai, nyelvi, zöngidomi, harmoniai s műformai szempontból [The
Characteristics of Hungarian Song and Music from the Viewpoint of Language, Tone Profiles,
Harmony, and Genre] (Budapest: A Magyar Királyi Egyetemi Nyomda, 1877), pp. 3–4. All translations
are by the author unless otherwise noted.
2
Judit Frigyesi, Béla Bartók and Turn-of-the-Century Budapest (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
[424]
Music Criticism in Hungary until the Second World War 425
Low Countries and Italy. Those glorious days faded, though, when Hungary
was beset both by the advance of Ottoman forces and by a succession crisis. As
Catholic noble families like the Esterházys sided with the Habsburgs’ claim to
the Hungarian crown, many of the Protestant nobility, especially in
Transylvania, fought to keep the crown in native-born hands. While music
and music criticism blossomed in Italy and France in the early 1700s, unrest in
Hungary effectively limited investment in both music and writing about
music.
Even after the consolidation of Habsburg rule ended armed conflict, devel-
opment of domestic culture outside aristocratic courts was slow, and foreign-
ers dominated both those courts and the few existing civic cultural
institutions. At least until the late eighteenth century, both foreign profes-
sionals and most native Hungarian musicians – for example Count Pál
Esterházy (1635–1713), who in addition to his military exploits was an
accomplished composer – practised a style that was an almost indistinguish-
able branch of the ‘panromanogermanic mainstream’.3 The acceptance of an
international style was in keeping with the Habsburgs’ goal of absorbing
Hungary into its cultural identity as well as its feudal authority.4
The Turkish wars and the conflict with the Habsburgs interrupted the
development of print journalism along with the rest of Hungarian culture.
Thus, the first Hungarian newspaper, Mercurius hungaricus, did not begin
publication until 1705 – a hundred years after regularly published newspapers
began appearing in Germany – and ceased publication in 1711, shortly after
Habsburg rule was fully consolidated.5 In addition to strict censorship, the
development of print culture beyond the aristocracy was inhibited by wide-
spread illiteracy as well as by the tumult of the times.6 In this context the first
true periodicals intended for a Hungarian audience, which began in the 1730s,
were published in German. They were often near-copies of Viennese
3
See Richard Taruskin, Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays (Princeton: Princeton
4
According to an oft-repeated saying, the Jesuits convinced Leopold I (1640–1705) that Hungary should
be rendered ‘miserable, then Catholic, finally German’ (cited in Alice Freifeld, Nationalism and the Crowd in
Liberal Hungary, 1848–1914 (Washington: The Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2000), p. 25).
5
Thomas Schroeder, ‘The Origins of the German Press’, in Brendan Dooley and Sabrina A. Baron (eds.),
The Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 123;
György Kókay, A magyar sajtó története I (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1979), p. 46.
6
In 1770 fewer than one in four of Hungary’s children attended school ( I. G. Tóth, ‘Hungarian Culture
in the Early Modern Age’, in László Kósa (ed.), A Cultural History of Hungary, vol. I (Budapest: Corvina,
1999), pp. 206, 222). For comparison, in the north of England in the 1740s, 70 per cent of men and
32 per cent of women were literate enough at least to sign their names to court documents ( R.
A. Houston, ‘The Development of Literacy: Northern England, 1640–1750’, Economic History Review,
New Series, 35/2 (May 1982), 204; in Hungary, it was still usual for official documents to be signed with
a cross (Tóth, ‘Hungarian Culture’, p. 222).
426 LYNN M. HOOKER
publications, and what little local news they included focused on society
events, church celebrations and natural disasters.7
It was only in the 1780s, the period of Joseph II’s ‘enlightened absolutism’,
that print culture gradually created a public space for the discussion of
Hungarian social and cultural issues. Around the same time, Johann
Gottfried Herder famously predicted that the Hungarian language, and by
implication the Hungarian people, would disappear into the sea of Germans
and Slavs that surrounded them. Herder’s prediction became one of the most
famous ‘examples of foreign hostility, indifference, or callousness’ to
Hungarian culture, part of the ‘recurring nightmare of “national death”
(nemzethalál)’.8 Many Hungarians perceived Habsburg Emperor Joseph II’s
1784 mandate that German, rather than Latin, be the official language of his
empire to be part of his effort to make Herder’s prediction come true.
Publications in both Hungarian and German echoed Herder’s call to pay
respect to ‘the language and poetry of every people . . . “with respect to time
and place . . . the genius of their nature, their country, their way of life”’.9 At
the same time, Joseph’s relaxation of censorship laws in 1780 allowed for the
circulation of publications on topics that had previously been banned, includ-
ing in the non-official languages of the Empire. As Hungary’s self-appointed
cultural vanguard (mostly aristocrats) worked to elevate Hungarian culture
and to Hungarianise elevated culture, the press began to blossom, quickly
distributing ideas about the ‘national imagination’,10 beginning with reform
of the language and extending through every aspect of society.
The context in which Hungarian elites strove to develop a native culture
and free themselves from Imperial influence helps us understand both music
and discourse about music in this period. Governmental press restrictions
focused the publishing infrastructure, including that for music, in Vienna, and
the abundance of Vienna’s musical life around the turn of the nineteenth
century also exerted a powerful pull. Given Hungary’s proximity to the
capital, musicians and critics naturally turned to Vienna’s publishers and
printers. Through the early nineteenth century, Vienna was where most
published Hungarian music appeared, from classic-style pieces such as Pál
Esterházy’s cantatas to dance items in ‘Hungarian style’ that began to appear
in large numbers beginning in 1784. As Catherine Mayes has demonstrated,
the fact that these materials were published in Vienna indicates ‘not only
7
Kókay, A magyar sajtó története I , pp. 54–7.
8
Freifeld, Nationalism and the Crowd in Liberal Hungary, p. 25.
9
Richard Bauman and Charles L. Briggs, Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the Politics of
Inequality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), pp. 179, 181, citing Herder.
10
Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, revised ed.
(London and New York: Verso, 1991), p. 30.
[that] the Hungarian music publishing industry was underdeveloped’ but also
that Hungarian dances were ‘suitable for and successful in that city’s musical
market’.11
The rise of Hungarian dances from rural celebrations of military recruiting
to the ballroom and the domestic music market may be attributed in part to
occasional performances of Gypsy bands in Vienna and Pressburg at court
events, generally sponsored by Hungarian nobles, in the late eighteenth
century.12 The published dances smoothed out most of the irregularities
observers reported in Gypsy performances, whether at court or in ‘folk’
settings, so that the results left ‘nothing [to] suggest . . . that [they are] any-
thing other than typical Viennese Hausmusik from the turn of the nineteenth
century’.13 German-language reports about Gypsies’ own performances, how-
ever, focused on distinguishing elements. Such reports, like those of travellers
to Africa and the Americas (written by ‘Western’ travellers to what
Enlightenment authors were then defining as ‘Eastern Europe’) ‘ventured
with their eyes and ears attuned to the sights and sounds of difference’.14
The anonymous article ‘Über die Nationaltänze der Ungarn’ in the Allgemeine
musikalische Zeitung in 1800, for example, not only describes specific musical
elements such as the preference for the minor mode and the modulations
through distantly related keys – with the musicians ‘snak[ing] their way
wonderfully through nothing but semitones’ – but also references more
nebulous characteristics like their ‘proud’, ‘heroic’ and ‘fiery’
temperament.15 That is, the author stresses elements, musical and otherwise,
that position the Hungarian or Gypsy (with little distinction made between
the two) as an exotic Other.
As the Hungarian-language press began to develop around this same time, it
had a more ‘civilised’ Hungary in mind, focusing on ‘high’ art and institutional
development. The primary language of Pest-Buda (the dominant city in the
historical Hungarian crown lands by the turn of the eighteenth century) was
11
Catherine Mayes, ‘Reconsidering an Early Exoticism: Viennese Adaptations of Hungarian-Gypsy
Music Around 1800’, Eighteenth-Century Music, 6/2 (September 2009), 168.
12
See Csaba Szíjjártó, A cigány útra ment: Cigányzenekaraink, valamint népzenei és néptánctársaságok
külföldjárása a kezdetektől a kiegyezésig (Korabeli sajtódokumentumok alapján) (Budapest: Masszi Kiadó,
2002), pp. 13–14. These dances were generally labelled simply ‘Hungarian (or Gypsy) dance’, but they
were associated with the men’s recruiting dances known as verbunkos (a Hungarianisation of the German
Werbung).
13
Mayes, ‘Reconsidering an Early Exoticism’, 162.
14
Kevin C. Karnes, ‘Inventing Eastern Europe in the Ear of the Enlightenment’, Journal of the American
Musicological Society 71 (2018), 78.
15
Anon. [Heinrich Klein], ‘Über die Nationaltänze der Ungarn’, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 2/35
(28 May 1800), cols. 609–16; quoted citations in Csilla Pethő, ‘Spieln Zigeuner Lustig Liedl: A magyar
szórakoztató zene es a cigányzenészek külföldi recepciója a 19. században’, Magyar zene, 40/1 (2002),
74–5; and Mayes, ‘Reconsidering an Early Exoticism’, 162, 166.
428 LYNN M. HOOKER
German, as it was for many other towns in the Habsburg Empire.16 ‘National
activists . . . despaired that performances in Buda-Pest’s theatres were almost
exclusively in German’; it was a great step forward when a Hungarian-language
theatre company ventured to present ‘dramas, tragedies, and musicals on the
towns’ stages’ beginning in 1790, but that company shut down in 1796 due to
financial difficulties.17 During the so-called Reform Era (1825–48), writers and
politicians agitated for the expansion of Hungarian public life and the use of
Hungarian. In addition to the challenges of negotiation with Imperial censors,
musicians struggled to settle on Hungarian-language terms for certain technical
concepts; a Hungarian-language encyclopedia published in 1831–2 proposed
certain terms, but those terms were not considered acceptable enough to enter
common use.18 Hungary’s few music critics took part in this process by publishing
occasional commentary on various musical issues, from chronicles of day-to-day
activities (particularly theatrical and operatic performances, whether in
Hungarian or other languages) to essays on the development of Hungarian
music and institutions. These reports ‘desire at once to discover and safeguard
[that which] propels the scholars and artists who would create, or bring to the
surface, elements of a characteristic national culture’.19
The case of the Pestbudai Hangászegyesület (Pest-Buda Music Society), one of
the first music societies in the country, shows how the press took a role in
accelerating the process of Hungarianisation while still seeking mastery of
international styles and trends. The Society began its operations bilingually,
with the dual goals of developing a public that could perform and appreciate
the works of the ‘great German composers’ on the one hand, and supporting the
cultivation of Hungarian popular elements (folk songs and dances like the
csárdás) and Hungarian concert composers on the other. At the height of
the Reform Era, one writer stated that the Society’s concerts ‘were of such
a perfect German physiognomy that it practically hurts the Magyar’s heart’; the
organisation decided in 1844 to ‘conduct its business in Hungarian alone’.20
Gábor Mátray (1797–1875), the ‘father of Hungarian musicology’,21 stood
at the crux of these events. Also in 1837, he wrote and conducted a choral
16
Buda, Pest, and Óbuda (Ancient Buda) already functioned as one cultural and economic agglomeration
by this time, but they were separate entities until their unification into Budapest in 1873. The hyphen in
Pest-Buda marks the pre-unification legal independence of those constituent parts.
17
Robert Nemes, The Once and Future Budapest (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005), p. 31.
18
Szabolcs Molnár, ‘“Mesterszóknak okos formálása”: Zenei terminológia, vita és karaktergyilkosság,
1831–1832’, Magyar zene, 53/3 (2015), 263–76.
19
Marianne Pándi, Száz esztendő magyar zenekritikája [100 years of Hungarian Music Criticism] (Budapest:
Zeneműkiadó, 1967), p. 11.
20
Nemes, The Once and Future Budapest, pp. 99–100.
21
Ferenc Bónis, ‘Mátray, Gábor’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, available at
www.oxfordmusiconline.com (accessed 15 June 2015). Mátray earned the title ‘father of Hungarian
musicology’ through accomplishments that included both important edited collections of Hungarian folk
work for the opening performance of the Hungarian National Theatre, and he
was the notary of the Pest-Buda Music Society from 1837 and the founding
director of its Music School from 1840, including during the Society’s lan-
guage-change drama. Most relevant for this article, in 1833 he founded two
partnered magazines (published and bound together), Regélő [Minstrel] and
Honművész [Native Artist], the first of several so-called literary fashion maga-
zines that emerged in Reform-Era Hungary. Regélő and Honművész promised
an editorial approach from a Hungarian point of view, with ‘pieces [that are]
interesting to those closer to our dear homeland’.22 The initial call for sub-
scribers, from which this quotation is taken, further explains that Regélő
would focus on literary content (both fiction and non-fiction) while
Honművész would publish pieces ‘dealing with art of our homeland’ (italics in
original), from visual arts old and new to architecture to trends in fashion to
‘reports of plays . . . of concerts . . . new works of music and other fine arts’.
This was the first Hungarian press outlet that regularly published theatre and
concert reviews.23
Literary fashion magazines in general cast their coverage well beyond
concert music and high art more generally. Such publications viewed ball-
room dance in Hungarian style and Hungarian popular song (the early magyar
nóta) as an important facet of the new Hungarian culture; they enthused over
new csárdáses by Márk Rózsavölgyi, Pest-Buda’s leading composer of dance
music, even while waltzes by Viennese composers such as Josef Lanner and
Johann Strauss Sr continued to be favoured at society balls.24 In Mátray’s
Honművész, however, high art, which usually excluded dance music, was at the
centre of the conversation about national culture. The magazine’s coverage of
Liszt is a good illustration. When Honművész reported on Liszt’s Parisian
exploits in 1833 and 1834, it applauded his virtuosity and cultured sensibility
but lamented his ‘affectation’ and apparent alienation from his homeland.25 In
the aftermath of the devastating 1838 flood of Pest, Liszt made known his
songs and historical songs and some of the first scholarly articles in Hungarian about Hungarian music,
including those discussed later in this essay (see also bibliography in idem).
22
Kókay, A magyar sajtó története I , p. 447.
23
Péter Várnai, ‘Egy magyar muzsikus a reformkorban: Mátray Gábor élete és működése
a szabadságharcig’ [A Hungarian Musician in the Reform Era], in Bence Szabolcsi and Dénes Bartha
(eds.), Zenetudományi tanulmányok I I (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1954), p. 554. Mátray began his career as
Gábor Róthkrepf but Hungarianised his family name in 1837. See also Péter Várnai, ‘Mátray Gábor élete
és munkássága a szabadságharctól haláláig’ [Gábor Mátray’s Life and Work from the War of Independence
to His Death], in Bence Szabolcsi and Dénes Bartha (eds.), Zenetudományi tanulmányok I V (Budapest:
Akadémiai Kiadó, 1955); and Zoltán Bene, ‘Az újságíró és könyvtáros Mátray Gábor’, unpublished MA
thesis, University of Szeged (2002).
24
Nemes, The Once and Future Budapest, pp. 98–101. See also Nemes, ‘The Politics of the Dance Floor:
Civil Society and Culture in Nineteenth-Century Hungary’, Slavic Review, 60/4 (2001), 802–23.
25
See Lynn M. Hooker, Redefining Hungarian Music from Liszt to Bartók (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2013), pp. 54–5.
430 LYNN M. HOOKER
reawakened commitment to Hungary, and Honművész reported the entire

story of his subsequent Hungarian tour including the anticipation generated
by the invitation extended in 1838 by Count Leó Festetics, the president of
the Pest-Buda Music Society, the pomp surrounding his actual arrival in
December 1839 and reviews of the individual concerts.26 But given that
most of the ‘serious’ music performed in Hungary necessarily came from
abroad, music critics at Honművész and other publications covered more
than just Hungarian composers; they also discussed the relative roles in
Hungarian musical life of different foreign repertoires, which comprised the
bulk of the music performed in the country.
The Advent of Specialised Music Journalism in Hungary

The Revolution of 1848 is an inescapable watershed in nineteenth-century
Hungarian history. After the fall of the revolutionary government in 1849,
Austrian officials cracked down on the Hungarian press, particularly publica-
tions in the Hungarian language. According to Nemes, they
closed dozens of newspapers, replaced editors, reintroduced stringent

censorship . . . When Imre Vahot, the former editor of [Reform Era literary
fashion magazine] Pesti Divatlap, wanted to start a new literary magazine,
a police official told him that permission would come immediately if he agreed
to publish his journal in German; otherwise, it would be impossible.27
Still, Hungarian print culture, including music journalism, continued to

expand after the fall of the Revolution. In an era when the idea of the nation
held sway in international discourse, even a ‘reliable political conservative’
like Count Emil Desewffy, who was installed as President of the Hungarian
Academy of Sciences under the strict post-Revolutionary government, ‘could
also speak approvingly of the “Magyarization of higher culture” and the
“intellectual battles that aim to sustain our nationality”’.28 By the end of
the 1850s in Pest, despite pressure from Vienna, there were almost three times
as many periodicals being published in Hungarian as in German.29
Articles on musical topics appeared in variety of outlets: shorter pieces in
daily or weekly newspapers, and longer and more scholarly pieces published
26
See Várnai, ‘Egy magyar muzsikus a reformkorban’, p. 254. On Festetics’ invitation, see Franz
von Schober, Briefe über F. Liszts Aufenthalt in Ungarn (Berlin: Schlesinger, 1843), p. 27; for more on
Liszt’s tour and Hungarian coverage of it, see Dezső Legány, ‘Liszt in Hungary, 1820–1846’, in
Michael Saffle (ed.), Liszt and His World: Proceedings of the International Liszt Conference Held at Virginia
Polytechnic Institute and State University, 20–23 May 1993 (Stuyvesant: Pendragon Press, 1998); and
Dana Gooley, The Virtuoso Liszt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 117–55.
27 28 29
Nemes, The Once and Future Budapest, p. 155. Ibid., p. 159. Ibid., p. 156.
either as pamphlets or, very occasionally, in general scholarly journals like Új

magyar múzeum (New Hungarian Museum, 1850–60) and Budapesti szemle
(Budapest journal, 1857–1944). These led in the 1850s to ‘an ever-growing
clamour for the establishment of a Hungarian music periodical’ by the daily
newspapers.30 Zenészeti lapok [Music Pages], first published in 1860, was the
answer to this call.
Unlike most other Hungarian periodicals of the time, Zenészeti lapok was
owned by its founding editor Kornél Ábrányi, Sr (1822–1903), a wealthy
landowner and Paris- and Vienna-educated pianist, composer and critic.
Ábrányi covered the cost of printing Zenészeti lapok himself rather than acting
as the employee of the printer, an arrangement that ‘brought about a relative
intellectual independence for the journal, as well as a chance for a unified
direction’.31 His colleagues in this endeavour were Hungary’s ‘most out-
standing resident musical experts of the time’, including music publisher
Gyula Rózsavölgyi (1822–61), musicologists István Bartalus (1821–99) and
Gusztáv Szénfy (1819–75), and especially composer Mihály Mosonyi
(1815–70).32 The journal developed Hungarian-language musical terminol-
ogy, promoted concert culture, advocated for the development of Hungarian
music education and institutions, published original scholarly articles and
summarised current German musicological literature in an accessible style.
The journal also evangelised for their vision of the Hungarian composer:
The ideal presented was that of a composer who commanded the highest level
of musical technique and who, by using the Hungarian folk song and the
verbunkos [recruiting dance] as his sources, could create an Hungarian national
style of art music of the same calibre as those of the German, French and
Italian national schools.33
Hints of this ideal already appear in some reviews of the 1840 premiere
production of Bátori Mária by composer Ferenc Erkel, the first major venture
in creating a Hungarian historical dramatic opera. Honművész’s review, in all
30
Katalin Szerző, ‘The Most Important Hungarian Music Periodical of the 19th Century: Zenészeti lapok
[Musical Papers] (1860–1876)’, Periodica Musica, 4 (Spring 1986), 1.
31
Ibid., 2.
32
Szerző, ‘Introduction’, in János Kárpáti (ed.), Zenészeti lapok (1860–1876) [Index], Répertoire interna-
tional de la presse musicale (Baltimore: NISC, 2005), pp. x, xii. Mosonyi reviewed scores and significant
Hungarian music books, notably including Liszt’s controversial 1859 book Des bohémiens et des leur
musique en Hongrie (see Hooker, Redefining Hungarian Music, p. 84), but he also wrote articles advocating
‘the propagation of musical art, but especially for the growth and development of Hungarian music’
(quoted by Klára Somogyi Gulyásné in ‘“. . . Szükséges a Pest-Budai Zenedének a dolgok élére állani . . .”
Mosonyi Mihály cikksorozata a magyar zenei műveltség felemeléséért’ [‘The Pest-Buda Music School
should stand at the forefront of things . . .’ Mihály Mosonyi’s article series about the elevation of
Hungarian musical cultivation], Magyar zene, 54/3 (2016), 319.
33
Szerző, ‘The Most Important Hungarian Music Periodical’, p. 2.
432 LYNN M. HOOKER
likelihood penned by editor Gábor Mátray himself, considered the work at

some length, comparing it to the ‘spirit and style of the newer Romantic
operas of Meyerbeer, Halévy, Weber, etc’.34 He also evaluated the music (as
well as the costumes and sets) of different scenes, and praised the Hungarian
character of a drinking song in the second act in particular. The Hungarian-
language daily press, however, did not expend much space on the work. Imre
Vahot, as the editor of one of Honművész’s competitors, attacked Erkel’s work
not only based on its own merits but because ‘if we should allow [the great
figures of Hungarian history] to caterwaul in Hungarian opera, the [national]
theatre deserves to succumb immediately’ – that is, he dismissed the very
premise of historical opera as it was rising across Europe.35
Some of Pest’s German-language newspapers, following a tradition of
criticism already established in Germany and Austria, published lengthier
reviews, but there was no outlet that regularly published detailed reviews
and articles about music in the Hungarian language until Zenészeti lapok. It
was instrumental in transforming readers’ and critics’ expectations so that by
the time of Erkel’s later premieres, Hungarian music criticism had grown into
‘highly professional, clear-sighted evaluations based on a well-developed aes-
thetic sense’, becoming ‘more thorough, more detailed and more broad-
minded’ over the decades.36
Zenészeti lapok’s forward-looking aesthetic agenda was evident in its advo-
cacy of Liszt and Wagner, and in its critiques of the repertoire selections of
Hungarian musical institutions and their leaders, particularly the National
Theatre and Ferenc Erkel, for giving short shrift to Wagner in favour of
French and Italian works.37 Once Wagner’s works came to be performed in
Buda-Pest more frequently – Hungarian-born Wagner disciple Hans/János
Richter (1843–1916) was the conductor at the Hungarian National Theatre
from 1871 until 1875, when he moved to the Vienna Hofoper – the journal
began to express a concern similar to what Erkel had shown earlier, worrying
that Wagner’s popularity was a symbol of the predominance of German
culture that Hungarians needed to overcome. The question of whether the
Hungarian scene should favour French or German opera was still alive and
well in the 1890s, when the short-lived journal Zenevilág (Music World)
(1890–91) promoted French opera and attacked Gustav Mahler, then the
director of the Hungarian Royal Opera House, for ‘German prejudice’.38
34
István Barna, ‘Erkel Ferenc első operái az egykorú sajtó tükrében’ [Ferenc Erkel’s First Operas in the
Mirror of the Press of the Time], in Szabolcsi and Bartha (eds.), Zenetudományi tanulmányok I I , p. 176.
35
Ibid., p. 182.
36
István Barna, ‘Erkel nagy művei és a kritika’ [Erkel’s Great Works and Criticism], in Szabolcsi and
Bartha (eds.), Zenetudományi tanulmányok I V , p. 285.
37
Szerző, ‘Introduction’ to Zenészeti lapok, pp. x–xii. 38
Kárpáti, Zenészeti közlöny, p. xviii.
Zenészeti lapok’s support for Liszt, which (unlike that for Wagner) remained
steadfast throughout its fifteen-year run, had more concrete significance than its
position on Wagner. Ábrányi ‘recognized what Hungarian musical life and the
ageing Liszt could gain by forming a close relationship’ and he ‘therefore seized
every opportunity for the Zenészeti lapok to propose invitations to Liszt, whether
to discuss plans for the Academy of Music, or to celebrate other noteworthy
occasions’.39 In this way the journal became one of the chief advocates for the
founding of the Academy of Music, which opened in 1875 with Liszt as its first
president. Ábrányi became the general secretary for the new Academy, taking
responsibility for much of the day-to-day operation of the institution as well as
teaching theory, history, aesthetics and Hungarian music in its early years.
The demands of Ábrányi’s position at the Academy of Music soon led him to
close Zenészeti lapok. This decision had been a long time coming. Already in
1868 the Hungarian National Choral Society accepted Zenészeti lapok as its
own official journal, relieving Ábrányi of the production costs; Ábrányi
remained in the position of editor-in-chief, but with the new mission of
promoting Hungary’s choral movement. This partnership expanded the read-
ership of the journal, but it turned out to be a poor fit as Ábrányi was
‘unwilling to compromise’: the Choral Society wanted an ‘expansion of the
scope of choral coverage at the expense of other columns’, including ‘a
disproportionate number of articles . . . concerning the internal organiza-
tional problems of the choral societies’, whereas Ábrányi wanted to continue
the specialised articles on aesthetics and musicology that had been key to his
conception of the journal.40 He reacquired ownership of Zenészeti lapok in
1873, but the colleagues with whom he had initially established the journal
had either passed away or moved on. As the operations of the new Academy of
Music ramped up, Ábrányi was unable to devote sufficient time to the pub-
lication of the journal along with his new duties, though he wrote a handful of
books on various Hungarian music topics over the next several years. The last
issues of Zenészeti lapok were published in early 1876.
Between the closure of Zenészeti lapok and the Second World War, no single
journal assumed its dominant role. Initially there was a dearth of music
journals altogether. Three journals, Zenészeti közlöny [Musical Journal]
(1882), Zenevilág [Music World] (1890–91) and Zeneirodalmi szemle/Művészeti
lapok [Music-Literature Journal/Arts Pages] (1894–6), came and went quickly,
none with a run of more than three years.41 But from the late 1880s on, music
39
Szerző, ‘The Most Important Hungarian Music Periodical’, p. 4. 40
Ibid., p. 5.
41
János Kárpáti (ed.), Zenészeti közlöny (1882), Zenevilág (1890–1891), Zeneirodalmi szemle–Művészeti lapok
(1894–1896) [Index], Répertoire international de la presse musicale (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press,
1996).
434 LYNN M. HOOKER
journals and music journalism in Hungary blossomed, and by 1909 at least ten
different music journals were being published, serving a variety of interest
groups in Hungary’s music world.42 Six of these journals were more specia-
lised in their purpose: most of the pages of Apollo (1872–81, 1884–1914,
1924ff) and Zenélő Magyarország [Music-Making Hungary] (1894–1913) con-
sisted of piano sheet music; Katholikus egyházi zeneközlöny [Catholic Church
Music Journal] (1894, 1900–18) and Protestáns zeneközlöny [Protestant Music
Journal] (1906–11) were dedicated to articles on church music; Magyar
cigányzenészek lapja [Hungarian Gypsy Musicians’ Page] (1908–10, 1927) was
a trade publication for Roma in the entertainment music industry; and Magyar
dal- és zeneközlöny [Hungarian Song and Music Journal] (1895–1910), later
retitled Magyar dal [Hungarian Song] (1910–31), was the post-Ábrányi journal
of the National Choral Society. More comprehensive in their approach were
Zeneközlöny [Music Journal] (1901–17, 1924–5), A zene [Music] (1909–14,
1924–31), Zenelap [Music Page] (1886–1912) and Zenevilág [Music World]
(1899–1910, 1912, 1916): they published a mixture of scholarly articles,
feuilletons, reviews of concerts and publications, reports on festivals and
other notable events, and opinion pieces on current issues in Hungary’s
musical life.
These comprehensive journals also varied in format and frequency of pub-
lication, in the length of their articles and in general aesthetic outlook.
Zeneközlöny and the newly constituted Zenevilág, for instance, were both
edited by associates and advocates of Béla Bartók – Dezső Demény
(1871–1937) and Pongrácz Kacsóh (1873–1923), respectively – and regularly
featured Bartók, Kodály and other associates, such as violist, composer and
musicologist Antal Molnár (1890–1983), in news columns and elsewhere.
Zenevilág and, especially, Zeneközlöny featured more modernist topics and
authors in the years leading up to the First World War, while Zenelap and
A zene tended to acknowledge modernist expression less and usually mini-
mised the role of forward-looking musicians, led by Bartók, in their news
columns.
Journals were not defined only by their relationships to Bartók’s circle,
however: these more conservative journals may be distinguished according to
their relationship to ‘national’ repertoire as well. Zenelap tended to highlight
Hungarian composers, events in the Hungarian provinces and populist
42
Journal titles are taken from ‘Zenei folyóiratok, I . Magyarok’ [Music Periodicals I . Hungarian], in
Bence Szabolcsi and Aladár Tóth (eds.), Zenei lexicon, vol. 2 (Budapest: Győző Andor, 1931), pp. 724–5.
Publication dates are also taken from this source; for this reason, no end dates are available for those
journals still being published in 1931. The date 1909 was chosen for the sampling because A zene, the last
of the most important journals that published in the period leading up to the First World War, began in
that year. Dozens of additional journals appear in this listing, but they had very short runs.
Hungarian music-making more generally (including the choral movement and

operetta), while A zene more frequently emphasised ‘high art’ composition
and criticism along with canonical German composers. Moreover, authors
sometimes contributed to journals on what would seem to be the ‘wrong’ end
of this spectrum. Antal Molnár, one of the ‘founders of modern Hungarian
musicology’, who ‘as early as 1912 was able to assign Bartók and Kodály to
their proper place in music history’, published an important article on folk
song in A zene in 1913.43 Meanwhile, Dezső Járosy (1882–1932), an aestheti-
cally more conservative critic whose activity coincided with the start of
Molnár’s career, authored an extended piece on ‘The beautiful according to
musical aesthetics in music history’ – with an emphasis on the importance of
classicism – in Zeneközlöny.44
Although no single publication assumed a dominant role through the
middle of the twentieth century, a handful of writers began to emerge as
major voices in Hungarian music criticism and musicology, particularly
Aladár Tóth (1898–1968), Bence Szabolcsi (1899–1973) and the aforemen-
tioned Antal Molnár. All three were trained as composers; Tóth and Szabolcsi
earned doctorates with dissertations on historical musical topics, while
Molnár completed his scholarly apprenticeship in the form of folk music
research under the guidance of the slightly older Kodály and Bartók. In the
interwar period, Tóth emerged as a leading music critic writing for the
‘progressive press’, from general-interest dailies (Új Nemzedék, Pesti Napló)
and weeklies (Nyugat) to specialised music periodicals in Hungary (Zenei
szemle) and abroad (Melos, Musical Courier, Revue musicale). His ‘mission’ was
to cultivate a high-quality, uniquely Hungarian musical life in his nation’s

capital . . . Tóth’s prescription for reaching this goal assigned the highest
priority to the programming of modern Hungarian works, but he also advo-
cated foreign contemporary works along with what he regarded as ‘classics’ –
works of Bach, Beethoven, Handel, Haydn, and Mozart.45
43
See Péter P. Várnai, ‘Molnár, Antal’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, available at
www.oxfordmusiconline.com (accessed 2 September 2015). Molnár’s article ‘A népdalról’ [About
Folk Song] appeared in A zene, 5/3 (March 1913), 54–7; it is discussed in Hooker, Redefining
Hungarian Music, pp. 138–9, 238–9.
44
Dezső Járosy’s ‘A zeneeszétikai szép a zenetörténelemben’ [The Music-Aesthetically Beautiful in Music
History] appeared in Zeneközlöny, 7 (1909), 147–50, 159–61, 167–70, 175–6, 183–8, 191–2, 199–204; it is
discussed in Hooker, Redefining Hungarian Music, pp. 127–8, 138–43ff.
45
David E. Schneider, Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition: Case Studies in the Intersection of
Modernity and Nationality (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2006), p. 123.
Information about publications to which Tóth contributed is found in ibid. and in Ferenc Bónis, ‘Tóth,
Aladár’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, available at www.oxfordmusiconline.com (accessed
2 September 2015).
436 LYNN M. HOOKER
Molnár’s career was grounded in his forty-year tenure, beginning in 1918,

teaching music history, theory and aesthetics at Budapest’s Academy of
Music; his books, written for readers both within that institution and beyond,
acted as the foundation of twentieth-century Hungarian musicology. Like
Tóth, Molnár stressed the importance of contemporary Hungarian compo-
sers, particularly Bartók and Kodály, while also contributing to public dis-
course on music history.46 Szabolcsi worked primarily as a critic and editor in
this period, like Tóth contributing to a variety of publications; he co-edited
the journal Zenei szemle from 1926 to 1929, and with Tóth co-edited
Hungary’s first major music dictionary, the two-volume Zenei lexikon
(1930–1), to which Molnár also contributed.47
These three figures also played central roles in Hungary’s musical and
musicological life in the early state-socialist period. Szabolcsi joined Molnár
in teaching music history at the Academy of Music, founded both the
Academy of Music’s faculty of musicology and the Budapest Bartók Archive,
which became the Institute of Musicology of the Hungarian Academy of
Sciences in 1969, and served as editor of the chief musicology publications,
both journals and other items, that came out of Hungary in the 1950s and
1960s. Tóth worked as director of the Hungarian State Opera from 1946 to
1956, rebuilding that institution after the ravages of the war and putting it on
the cultural map of Europe.
Ongoing Questions in Hungarian Music Criticism

Much of the scholarship about Hungarian music criticism has focused on
responses to major figures in art music, from Liszt and Erkel in the nineteenth
century to Bartók and Kodály in the twentieth. Though these personalities
were undeniably central to Hungarian musical life, a ‘great man’-centred
approach to critical discourses misses some of the ongoing themes in the
critical discourses to which those artists responded.
The dominant theme from at least the turn of the nineteenth century
through the middle of the twentieth century was the nature of
‘Hungarianness’ in music, and an important subject within that theme was
the ‘Gypsy question’, or the role of Gypsy musicians within Hungarian music
culture.48 Already in 1810, an anonymous item in the Allgemeine musikalische
46
See Várnai, ‘Molnár, Antal’.
47
Ferenc Bónis, ‘Szabolcsi, Bence’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online available at
www.oxfordmusiconline.com (accessed 8 September 2015).
48
‘Roma’ or ‘Romani’ are the terms this group uses to identify itself officially, and words like ‘Gypsy’,
‘Zigeuner’ and ‘cigány’ are often considered both incorrect and pejorative. Still, Gypsies in Hungary
generally refer to themselves as ‘cigány’ (Gypsy) even today. Though I try to use ‘Roma’ and ‘Romani’ to
Zeitung [AMZ] identified Hungary’s ‘Lyranten’ as Gypsies, and described them

as ‘artists of nature’ (as opposed to being formally trained musicians). This
status allowed them to free themselves from ‘the rules’ and to ‘wildly exult’ or
‘cry, depending on how [their] feelings are moved’.49
Not surprisingly, Hungarian authors came to the topic of Hungarian music
with a very different point of view than those writing in German. Where AMZ
correspondents highlighted the perceived exotic characteristics of Hungarian
Gypsy musicians and enthused over their otherness, a piece of music criticism
from 1791 in Hungarian (but also published in Vienna), Short Treatises on Music
[Rövid értekezések a muzsikáról] by literary scholar and Hungarian cultural
activist Ferenc Verseghy (1757–1822), reproached Gypsy musicians for ‘taste-
less “ornamentation”’.50 Unlike the Austrian and German commentators of
this and the following period, Verseghy and his compatriots had a stake in
developing a space for elevated Hungarian music that would follow ‘the rules’
rather than being dominated by the ‘chaos’ that some Viennese listeners
condescended to enjoy in Gypsy musicians’ performances.51
Gábor Mátray also wrote on the role of Gypsy musicians in the musical life
of his homeland in two articles for an 1850s encyclopedia.52 These articles
show how the role of Gypsy musicians in Hungary’s musical life had only
become more apparent in the years since Verseghy’s piece. Mátray’s effort to
come to terms with the central role of socially marginal Roma in Hungarian
musical life is typical of his time. The first of his two articles is a biography of
Hungarian Roma violin virtuoso and bandleader János Bihari (1764–1827); in
addition to celebrating Bihari specifically, Mátray’s article acknowledges the
importance of Roma musicians more generally as tradition-bearers, since,
‘Hungarians of . . . elevated social position never devoted themselves to the
national Hungarian music and specially avoided composition in this style,
refer to actual people, I also (cautiously) use the word ‘Gypsy’ here, in part to avoid anachronism and in
part because I am also concerned here not with real Roma musicians but with a largely fictional Gypsy
image.
49
Cited in Mayes, ‘Reconsidering an Early Exoticism’, p. 161.
50
Cited by Bálint Sárosi, Gypsy Music (Budapest: Corvina, 1978), p. 106. Verseghy was an advocate for
Hungarian culture and a member of the Hungarian Jacobin movement in the period of Joseph II’s
Germanisation campaign. In addition to his own poetry, songs and essays on Hungarian language,
literature and music, he translated a number of important items into Hungarian, both from German
(for example Herder’s Ideen as well as German song texts) and from French (significantly, the Marseillaise);
see Ágnes Kenyeres (ed.), ‘Verseghy Ferenc’, Magyar életrajzi lexikon, revised ed. (Budapest: Arcanum
Adatbázis Kft, 2001), available at http://mek.oszk.hu/00300/00355/html (accessed 22 January 2017).
51
Mayes, ‘Reconsidering an Early Exoticism’, pp. 161–2.
52
Gábor Mátray, ‘Bihari János, magyar népzenész életrajza’ [Biography of János Bihari, Hungarian Folk
Musician], in Imre Vahot and Ferenc Kubinyi (eds.), Magyarország és Erdély képekben, vol. 2 (Budapest:
1853), pp. 153–161; and ‘A magyar zene és a magyar cigányok zenéje’, in Imre Vahot and Ferenc Kubinyi
(eds.), Magyarország és Erdély képekben, vol. 4 (Budapest: 1854), pp. 118–25. Reissued in György Gábry
(ed.), A muzsikának közönséges története és egyéb írások (Budapest: Magvető, 1984).
438 LYNN M. HOOKER
which accounts for Hungarian music having been preserved and popularised
only by Bohemians [Gypsies].’53
However, in his second article, ‘Hungarian Music and the Music of
Hungarian Gypsies’, Mátray worried that foreign musicians might
begin to doubt the true Hungarian character of the national music customarily
performed by our Gypsies . . . we cannot doubt that the Gypsies of previous
centuries also occupied themselves not with Indian Gypsy [music] but rather
with real Hungarian music.54
Although Mátray’s article appeared five years before the publication of

Liszt’s book, Des bohémiens et de leur musique en Hongrie (1859), we may surmise
that Mátray aimed these remarks at least partially at Liszt and his international
audience. Liszt consulted Mátray while writing the book, and in the published
text included a translation of Mátray’s Bihari article (with attribution) and an
acknowledgement of his ‘service to this branch of musical literature’.55
But Mátray – along with most of the Hungarian music world – still perceived
Des bohémiens overall as an insult, since it suggested that Hungary’s ‘Gypsy
music’ was in fact created by its Gypsy performers. A controversy erupted
even before the book was published, from public letters to Liszt and feuille-
tons in the daily press to scholarly articles and pamphlets about Gypsy
musicians and their shortcomings, musical and otherwise.
Eventually most of the Hungarian musical establishment more or less
agreed to overlook Liszt’s slight as a mistake while celebrating his legacy.
However, the fact that so-called Gypsy music – a recently composed popular
genre performed by racial outsiders – was the basis of Hungarian national art
music continued to pose a problem, one that popped up regularly all over
Hungary’s music press for decades. It was only in the early twentieth century
that Bartók, Kodály and other members of their circle, particularly Molnár,
challenged prevailing assumptions about what made music Hungarian.
Composers also used the style and novelty of peasant music to facilitate
experimentation; thus debates about the merits of Bartók and Kodály, for
example, also focused on the relationship between ‘hypermodernism’ and
national music.56
53
Quoted in Franz Liszt, The Gipsy in Music, trans. Edwin Evans (London: William Reeves, 1881), p. 262.
54
In ‘A magyar zene és a magyar cigányok zenéje’, pp. 120–1.
55
In Liszt, The Gipsy in Music, p. 262. The Bihari article appears in ibid., pp. 341–8. Although none
of Mátray and Liszt’s original correspondence appears to have survived, Liszt’s mentions of Mátray in
letters to his collaborator Princess Carolyne Sayn-Wittgenstein, along with his acknowledgement
of Mátray in Des bohémiens support the conclusion that Mátray helped Liszt collect the source data
(Várnai, ‘Mátray Gábor élete és munkássága a szabadságharctól haláláig’, p. 180.)
56
Hooker, Redefining Hungarian Music, chapters 2 and 3 develop these themes in much greater detail.
By 1936, Bartók, Kodály, Molnár and others had published this argument
so frequently that in his lecture ‘Liszt problems’ on the occasion of being
elected to the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Bartók stated that ‘it would be
a pity to waste another word on proving it’.57 Bartók’s and Kodály’s folk
music research and their conclusions on which music is worthy of study and of
development into art music continue to be influential in criticism and scholar-
ship on Hungarian music.
The dominance of themes of ‘national music’ and ‘authenticity’ have, how-
ever, largely overshadowed other interesting issues in early twentieth-century
Hungarian music. Some scholars have begun to dig into these questions
through primary sources,58 but much remains to be explored around not
only other art music composers but also popular music genres from the magyar
nóta to operetta to jazz as well as the impact of new technologies, namely
sound recording, radio and film. On topic after topic, we may find an ongoing
conversation in the press about all kinds of music, ‘high’ and ‘low’, with
commentators addressing the issues at hand from all directions for a variety
of publics. Published collections of press coverage of Gypsy bands from the
eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, inside and outside Hungary, have
begun to lift the veil on the actual activities, rather than the generalisations
and stereotypes, of these musicians who both entertained and represented the
country for so long.59 Historians interested in Hungarian media have also
indicated the importance of popular publications such as Rádió élet [Radio
Life] and Rádió újság [Radio News].
As scholars from around the world have repeatedly demonstrated, music
criticism provides us a crucial window into the way musicians, audiences and
the critics who mediate between them ‘encounter the ways in which . . .
inhabitants [of this world] constructed their self-knowledge’.60 The study of
music criticism in Hungary, as elsewhere, still has much to reveal.
57
Béla Bartók, ‘Liszt Problems’, in Béla Bartók Essays, ed. Benjamin Suchoff (New York: St Martin’s Press,
1976), p. 506. For further discussion, see Hooker, Redefining Hungarian Music, pp. 252–7.
58
For example Péter Bozó, ‘Piszkos partitúrák, szennyes szólamok avagy Az eleven ördög és a magyar
operett nem teljesen szeplőtlen fogantatása’ [Dirty scores, dusty parts, or, The Living Devil and the
not-so-immaculate conception of Hungarian operetta], Magyar zene, 52/3 (August 2014), 318–33;
Géza Gábor Simon, Fejezetek a magyar jazz történetéből 1961-ig [Chapters from the History of
Hungarian Jazz before 1961] (Budapest: Magyar Jazzkutatási Társaság, 2001); and Kata Riskó,
‘Városi cigányzenekarok hangfelvételei a 20. század elejéről’ [Recordings of Urban Gypsy
Orchestras from the Beginning of the Twentieth Century], Magyar zene, 52/1 (February 2014), 28–42.
59
Bálint Sárosi (ed.), A cigányzenekar múltja az egykorú sajtó tükrében, I : 1776–1903 (Budapest: Nap Kiadó,
2004), and I I : 1904–1944 (Budapest: Nap Kiadó, 2012); and Szíjjártó, A cigány útra ment.
60
Bohlman, ‘Fieldwork in the Ethnomusicological Past’, in Gregory F. Barz and Timothy J. Cooley
(eds.), Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1997), p. 152.
. 23 .
The ‘People’ in Czech and Slovak Music Criticism

KELLY ST PIERRE
There is a pattern of circular logic built into discussions of ‘Czech’ and

‘Slovak’ music. On the one hand, scholars are long familiar with processes of
nationalist invention; indeed, the task of defining and even determining the
sounds of the Czech and Slovak nations – in many ways, the task of Czech and
Slovak music criticism – arose with their nationalist movements during the
nineteenth century.1 On another, as Oskár Elschek points out in his introduc-
tion to a History of Slovak Music (2003), the field of musicology hinges on its
own nationalist myths: it favours the study of European art music in which
notions of a stable, in some ways timeless, ‘Europe’ are generally left unin-
terrogated, or at least recognised as a given assumption.2 Taken together,
these circumstances mean that musicology as a field not only aims to decon-
struct the very myths from which it emerged, but that it also happens to lend
itself particularly well to the creation of new nationalist myths. To paraphrase
Elschek’s more eloquently argued point, for example, ‘if we can study the
music of a supposedly timeless and stable “Europe”, then why not that of
Special thanks to Brian Locke for his support and consideration in this project.
1
Understandings of the ‘Czech lands’ and ‘Slovakia’ are continually in flux. As Tom Dickins aptly
summarises, ‘the names of the Czechoslovak polity and its constituent territories have changed so many
times since the foundation of the First Republic in 1918 that its precise details are even sometimes lost on
historians’. See Tom Dickins, ‘Names of the Czech-Speaking Lands, Their Peoples and Contact
Communities: Titles, Names, and Ethnonyms’, The Slavonic and East European Review, 89/3 (2011), 416.
Here, the ‘Czech lands’ will refer to the combined areas of Bohemia, Moravia, and Czech Silesia. ‘Slovakia’
will similarly refer to regions at times recognised as Slovakia through the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries, which sometimes included parts of Carpatho-Ukraine and Hungary, among other locations. In
either case, the use of quotes around ‘Czech’ and ‘Slovak’ at the outset of this study (and occasionally
within it for emphasis) is not to undermine the lived experience of those who self-identified or currently
self-identify with either category. Instead, the quotes are a means to acknowledge the instability of these
identities. Much of this study, including analyses of the nationalist movements in the Czech lands and
Slovakia, is indebted to Stefan Auer’s chapters ‘Nationalism in the Czech Republic’ and ‘Nationalism in
Slovakia’, in his Liberal Nationalism in Central Europe (London: Routledge, 2004).
2
Oskár Elschek, ‘Introduction’ to Elschek and Burlas (eds.), A History of Slovak Music: From the Earliest
Times to the Present, trans. Martin Styan (Bratislava: Institute of Musicology of the Slovak Academy of
Sciences, 2003), pp. 15–18.
[440]
The ‘People’ in Czech and Slovak Music Criticism 441
“Slovakia”?’3 The chapters that follow his introduction correspondingly

begin by examining Slovak music from the time of the Neanderthals, well
before notions of a ‘Slovakia’ would ever have existed.
This chapter examines the ways musicology’s embedded nationalist dis-
courses can limit or circularly frame discussions of supposed Czech and
Slovak music, whether in music criticism or in scholarship more generally. It
begins by exploring nuances of the Czech and Slovak nationalist movements –
especially their increased attention to socialist and ethnonationalist thinking
into the turn of the twentieth century – to illuminate the political underpin-
nings of music criticism through the period. Then it examines the roles of music
criticism in continually defining and redefining the varying states of
Czechoslovakia from its founding in 1918 through the fall of Communism in
1989. Whether classifying the nation according to its imagined ‘people’, ‘eth-
nicity’, ‘race’, ‘labourers’ or rebellion, music critics and researchers were forced
to negotiate ever-changing understandings of their countries, their writings
paying special attention to the ways Czech and Slovak sounds seemed to align
or not align with shifting political circumstances. Czech and Slovak music
research, then, was prescriptive as much as it was descriptive through much
of its history and might best be understood as a still-unfolding process of
nationalist invention – one that even today is reforming itself within global
and capitalist systems.
Inventing Nations and the Long Nineteenth Century

A Czech národní obrození [national rebirth] took hold among Prague’s middle
classes from around the 1830s. A comparable nationalist movement took place
in Slovakia from around the 1840s, especially among Bratislava’s (then
Prešporok’s) middle classes. In either case, the typical patterns for nationalist
movements held true: though supposedly speaking for the whole nation,
individuals within these movements actually articulated the needs and inter-
ests primarily of urban elites. Similarly, participants within both movements
reconceptualised and reinvented their nations’ pasts towards constructing
new, modern states with implicitly autonomous futures.4 Such impulses
also became increasingly radicalised through the turn of the twentieth cen-
tury. Nationalism shifted from describing a possible nation to prescribing its
duties to – as well as the ethnic characteristics of – its ‘people’.
3
Elschek develops this argument with great sophistication through his introduction, see especially ibid.,
pp. 28–37.
4
Pieter Judson, ‘Introduction’ to Pieter Judson and Marsha L. Rozenblit (eds.), Constructing Nationalities
in East Central Europe (New York: Berghahn, 2005), pp. 6–9.
442 KELLY ST PIERRE
Sources of the Czech National Rebirth were many and varied, but the move-
ment was also a response to Josef II’s eighteenth-century ‘Germanisation’ of
Bohemia. As part of his centralization of power in Vienna, Josef had banned the
Czech language in higher social settings in 1780 in favour of German, which
was instituted as the national language in 1784, and decreased the power of the
Bohemian Assembly. Together, these circumstances inspired many to begin
self-identifying as specifically ‘Czech’, rather than Austrian or Bohemian (or
both), as would have been typical previously.5 As governor of Bohemia Leopold
Thun summarised in 1843, ‘the power of a state rests upon the development of
the spiritual forces of its peoples; for the spiritual development of the Bohemian
people a Slav national feeling and the revival of the Czech language is
a necessary, indispensable means’.6 For nationalists the nation’s future power
of the state hinged on a revival of the Czech language; a reawakening to their
supposedly Slav (and specifically not German) roots.
The region of Slovakia existed under Hungary from the Austro-Hungarian
Compromise of 1867, and so Slovak nationalism was formulated in response
to Magyarisation policies – especially the ways these policies revealed them-
selves in class systems – rather than Germanisation. As Martin Šimečka aptly
summarises, ‘Hungarian nobility occupied the castles and chateaux; the towns
belonged to the Germans, Hungarians, and the Jews; and the villages and
nature were left for the Slovaks’.7 Not just oppressed, Slovak nationalists saw
themselves as marginalised both geographically and in terms of privilege.
Religious affiliation fragmented the movement even further. When Ľudovít
Štúr codified the Slovak language at mid-century, he favoured a dialect of the
language spoken by the region’s Catholics rather than its Protestants, who
preferred Czech.8
Despite their differences, the Czech and Slovak nationalist movements
shared Herder’s influence; their investment in the reinvigoration of language
was met with the codification of folk song repertoires. Josef Jungmann’s
publication of his five-volume Czech–German dictionary in 1834, for exam-
ple, was followed by Karel Jaromír Erben’s two volumes on Písně národní
v Čechách [National Songs in Bohemia] (1842 and 1845) and his Prostonárodní
5
Pieter Judson, Exclusive Revolutionaries: Liberal Politics, Social Experience, and National Identity in the
Austrian Empire, 1848–1914 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan of Press, 1996); Rita Kreuger, Czech,
German, and Noble: Status and National Identity in Habsburg Bohemia (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2009); and Derek Sayer, The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1998) are all especially valuable sources for exploring the constructions and instability of ‘Czech’ and
‘German’ as political categories during the period.
6
Translation in Krueger, Czech, German, and Noble, p. 4.
7
Martin Šimečka, ‘Slovakia’s Lonely Independence’, Transitions (1997), 15; quoted in Auer, Liberal
Nationalism in Central Europe, pp. 136–7.
8
Auer, Liberal Nationalism in Central Europe, p. 137.
české písně a říkadla [Czech Folk Songs and Nursery Rhymes] (1862–4).
František Sušil similarly published his Moravské národní písně [Moravian
National Songs] in 1835. In Slovakia, Štúr’s codification of the language
took place alongside the publication of several extensive folk song collections
by Pavol Jozef Šafárik and Ján Kollár through the 1820s and 1830s.9
But even outside of folk song collection, the emergence of both the Czech
and Slovak nationalist movements happened to take place alongside the
emergence of musicology as a field. This circumstance, along with the nation-
alist assumptions that underpinned German musicological work during the
era, deeply impacted Czech music studies in particular: Prague’s Charles
University (then, the Univerzita Karlo-Ferdinandova) became the first in
Central Europe to establish musicological studies 1869 (neighbouring
Vienna and Berlin followed in 1870 and 1875), and – in keeping with the
Czech nationalist discourses of the day – the university divided into two
separate German and Czech schools in 1892, the Deutsche Karl-Ferdinands-
Universität and the Česká universita Karlo-Ferdinandova.10 The German
university named Guido Adler head of the musicology department in 1885 –
the same year of his landmark ‘Umfang, Methode und Ziel der
Musikwissenschaft’ [‘Scope, Method, and Aim of Musicology’] – and the
Czech university named Otakar Hostinský head of its own musicology depart-
ment. Within this setting, Hostinský and his colleagues carefully positioned
Czech musicology as something distinctly ‘other’ from ‘German’ musicology.
In 1906, for example, Leoš Janáček famously called for the development of
folk song research based on Hostinský’s model, rather than that of German
musicologist Josef Pommer’s Grundzüge für die Sammlung [Guidelines for
Collection] (1905), Hostinský publishing his Česká světská píseň lidová
[Czech Secular Folk Song] the following year.11
9
Šafárik’s and Kollár’s volumes on Písně světské lidu slovenského v Uhřích [Secular Songs of the Slovak
People in Hungary] were published in Pest in 1823 and 1827. Kollár also followed with his two-volume
Národnie zpievanky čili Písně světské Slováků v Uhrách jak pospolitého lidu tak i vyšších stavů [The National Songs
or Secular Tunes of Slovaks in Hungary, Both of the Common People and Higher Classes], which was
published in Buda in 1834 and 1835.
10
Albrecht Schneider, ‘Comparative and Systematic Musicology in Relation to Ethnomusicology:
A Historical and Methodological Survey’, Ethnomusicology, 50/2 (2006), 241.
11
Hostinský’s Česká světská píseň lidová was an updated version of his 36 nápěvů světských písní českého lidu
z XVI. století [Thirty-Six Melodies of Czech Secular Folk Song from the Sixteenth Century] (1892), which
became an enduring touchstone for Czech folk music research. For more on Hostinský, especially his
German-language theoretical writings, see Felix Wörner’s chapter ‘Otakar Hostinský, the Musically
Beautiful, and the Gesamtkunstwerk’, in Nicole Grimes, Siobhán Donovan and Wolfgang Marx (eds.),
Rethinking Hanslick: Music, Formalism, and Expression (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2013). For
more on Janáček’s early work alongside Hostinský, see especially Jarmila Procházková, ‘Janáčkova
koncepce činnosti Pracovního výboru pro českou národní píseň na Moravě a ve Slezsku’ [‘Janáček’s
Concept for the Activities of the Organizational Committee for Czech Folk Song’], in Jana Pospíšilová
and Jana Nosková (eds.), Od lidové písně k evropské etnologii: 100 let Etnologického ústavu Akademie věd České
444 KELLY ST PIERRE
In the realm of ‘art’ music, too, the impulse to situate Czech music as ‘other’
yielded long-standing assumptions in the field, especially concerning the
works of Bedřich Smetana.12 In 1873, music critic František Pivoda famously
argued that Smetana’s Wagnerian leanings meant his music had been ‘taken
over’ by a ‘foreign entity’.13 In what Hostinský later dubbed the ‘musical
battles’ of the 1870s, Hostinský and his colleagues argued that Smetana did
not just mimic Wagner’s aesthetics in his works, but out-synthesised them.14
In the same way that Czech musicology responded to German methods by
affirming its ‘otherness’, then, Hostinský and his colleagues situated
Smetana’s music as not reflecting but exceeding German nationalist aes-
thetics; Smetana’s music was distinctly ‘other’ or ‘Czech’ precisely because
of, not despite Smetana’s Wagnerism.
Outside of musicological methods, Smetana advocacy also adversely
impacted Antonín Dvořák’s reception in Prague, even at the level of political
affiliations. Smetana aligned himself with the so-called ‘mladočeši’ [‘young
Czechs’], who advocated against the direct quotation of folk song in the opera
and favoured instead an internalised sense of its aesthetics. The ‘staročeši’
[‘old Czechs’], however, advocated for the direct quotation of folk song and
chose Dvořák as their representative, likely to rival Smetana. Rather than
through divided audiences in Prague, Dvořák’s ultimate international success
was indebted to his friendships with Eduard Hanslick and, by extension,
Johannes Brahms. These individuals not only created new opportunities for
the publication and performance of Dvořák’s works, but also their German-
language advocacy helped Dvořák’s music avoid becoming tokenised as
‘Czech’, so that it appeared more universal and accessible to wider
audiences.15
republiky [From Folk Song to European Ethnology: 100 Years of the Ethnological Institute of the
Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic] (Brno: Etnologický ústav AV ČR, 2006), pp. 42–9, as well
as Jiří Vysloužil’s ‘Brněnský Pracovní výbor, Ústav a Kabinet pro lidovou píseň’ [‘Brno’s Organizational
Committee, Department and Institute for Folk Song’] in the same collection (pp. 133–6). Hereafter, this
collection of essays will be referred to as From Folksong to European Ethnology.
12
For more on constructions of ‘Czechness’, see Michael Beckerman’s landmark article, ‘In Search of
Czechness in Music’, 19th-Century Music, 10/1 (Summer 1986), 61–73, as well as the conclusion of Kelly St
Pierre’s Bedřich Smetana: Myth, Music, and Propaganda (New York: University of Rochester Press, 2017),
pp. 109–112.
13
Pivoda, Pokrok (22 February 1870), trans. in Brian Locke, Opera and Ideology in Prague: Polemics and
Practice at the National Theatre, 1900–1938 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2006), p. 23.
14
See, for example, Hostinský’s Z hudebních bojů let sedmdesátých a osmdesátých [From the Musical Fights of
the 70s and 80s] (Prague: Editio Supraphon, 1986).
15
Dvořák’s comparative ‘universality’ was reflected in Jeannette Thurber’s famous invitation for Dvořák
to direct New York City’s National Conservatory of Music, which he did from 1892 to 1895. For more
concerning Dvořák’s status as both universal and ‘other’, see Christopher Campo-Bowen, ‘Bohemian
Rhapsodist: Antonín Dvořák’s Píseň bohatýrská and the Historiography of Czech Music’, 19th-Century
Music, 40/2 (Fall 2016), 159–81.
In Slovakia, nineteenth-century nationalist aesthetics were theorised by and

modelled from the works of Ján Bella. Like many nationalist thinkers, Bella
concerned himself with how the nuances of the Slovak language might inform
composition – ideas which he presented in his Myšlienky o vývine národnej hudby
a slovenského spevu [Thoughts on the Development of National Music and
Slovak Song] (1873).16 But outside of his theoretical writings, Bella’s career
and compositional output were consistent with the ambivalence held by many
non-nationalists towards supposed ethnic, religious or geographical boundaries
during the era. Bella was born in the town of Liptovský Mikuláš in (now)
Slovakia; he completed his degree in theology in Vienna in 1863, during
which he also studied music; he returned to Slovakia in 1866, where he was
ordained as a Catholic priest; and he was named director of music at Kremnica,
Slovakia in 1869. But Bella converted to Protestantism in 1881 upon becoming
a teacher and choirmaster in Hermannstadt, Transylvania (now Romania),
moved back to Vienna following his retirement in 1921 and settled Bratislava
only from 1928. Bella’s compositional output mirrored the instability of
national identities that his career path followed. He wrote his symphonic
poem Osud a ideál [Fate and the Ideal] (1874) after meeting both Smetana (a
Liszt devotee) and Dvořák, though the title of the work aligned with suppo-
sedly more universal conceptualisations of fate and death, especially as articu-
lated in the programme to Franz Liszt’s first movement of Les Préludes
(published 1856). Similarly, Bella planned to write an opera in Czech titled
Jaroslav a Laura [Jaroslav and Laura] and on a libretto by Václav Pok
Poděbradský from 1873, but never completed the work. Instead, he worked
on an opera on Wagner’s libretto Wieland der Schmied [Wayland the Smith]
through the 1880s, the work left unperformed until 1926 in a Slovak translation
by Oskar Schlemm. Altogether, Bella’s compositional output moved unproble-
matically between differing and sometimes conflicting nationalist aesthetics.
The impulses of both the Czech and Slovak nationalist movements shifted
around the turn of the twentieth century, however, from imaging possible
nations to prescribing their social responsibilities and ethnic makeups. In
Prague, future Czechoslovak president Tomáš Masaryk spearheaded investiga-
tions of the social responsibility of the state with the 1895 publication of his
Česká otázka: snahy a tužby národního obrození [The Czech Question: The
Endeavours and Yearnings of the National Revival]. Masaryk’s philosophies
prioritised what he called ‘humanism’; rather than fact-driven historiography,
for example, Masaryk favoured histories that ‘subordinated [the past] to the
16
Smetana advocate Ludevít Procházka is credited with urging Bella to publish on Slovak nationalist
aesthetics, which he did from the pages of Pivoda’s journal Hudební listy [Music News] as early as 1872.
446 KELLY ST PIERRE
present’ so that they might offer insight into Czechs’ humanity.17 Such philoso-
phies of Masaryk initiated a ‘dispute over the meaning of Czech history’ that
impacted both political practices and music criticism at the turn of the twentieth
century. Masaryk’s philosophies meant that the better the scholar, the better the
understanding of the humanity of the Czech people; academics’ active participa-
tion within the ‘dispute over the meaning of Czech history’ consequently
became part of an imagined civic duty as much as a consideration of historio-
graphical questions. Similarly, Masaryk’s philosophies meant that, though
nationalism traditionally concerned boundaries between people, now it con-
cerned an imagined people’s universal well-being; as Masaryk summarised, the
answer to the ‘Czech Question’ was actually the ‘Social Question’.18 That is,
scholars who understood Czechs’ humanity might best serve the nation in
political office, rather than in academia, so that their participation in the ‘dispute’
also became a means of political platforming.
Hostinský’s now-infamous student Zdeněk Nejedlý was one of the academics
perhaps most deeply invested in the discourses of the ‘dispute over the meaning
of Czech history’, especially its embedded political posturing. Nejedlý began
work at Charles University in musicology in 1905, gained professorship in 1908,
and chaired its musicology department from 1909, but he was also an ambitious
politician, launching lengthy ‘affairs’ from these and other such positions to
serve his own self-promotion.19 Nejedlý slandered a number of composers,
supposedly as a means of preserving Smetana’s legacy, for example, but in
ways that ultimately allowed him to gain political office. He smeared Dvořák
following the premiere of his Rusalka in 1901 by positioning the composer as
representing everything for which Pivoda had previously stood; he attacked
Karel Knittl in 1906 for having anonymously criticised Smetana’s fourth opera
Dvě vdovy [The Two Widows] over thirty years earlier, in 1873; he disparaged
National Theater conductor Karel Kovařovic for performing altered versions of
Smetana’s scores; he advocated against Vítězslav Novák and Josef Suk, both of
whom had been students of Dvořák; and he clashed with Leoš Janáček, especially
because Janáček had sided with Pivoda early in his career.20 Two anti-Nejedlý
17
Tomáš G. Masaryk, Česká otázka: snahy a tužby národního obrození [The Czech Question: The Endeavors
and Yearnings of the National Revival], trans. Peter Kussi, in Ahmet Ersoy, Maciej Górny and Vangelis
Kechriotis (eds.), Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeastern Europe (1770–1945): Texts and
Commentaries, vol. I I I /1 of Modernism and the Creation of Nation-States (Budapest: Central European
18
See Masaryk’s discussion in ibid., pp. 207–9. See also Sayer, Coasts of Bohemia, p. 156.
19
Brian Locke’s Opera and Ideology and Prague, and Jiří Křesťan’s Zdeněk Nejedlý: Politik a vědec v osamění
[Zdeněk Nejedlý: Politician and Scholar in Solitude] (Prague: Paseka, 2012) are rich resources for
exploring the ways Nejedlý’s battles served his personal and political ambitions.
20
Locke, Opera and Ideology in Prague, pp. 21 and 33. Janáček’s ethnic alignments and pan-Slavic interests
also meant that he was not particularly receptive to assistance from German-aligned critics and publishers.
protests took place in period music journals in 1912 and 1918 in response.
Additionally, the Czech ‘Maffie’ [‘mafia’], which acted as a quasi-judicial system
under the provisional government of the First Republic, deemed Nejedlý’s
arguments against Suk invalid in 1919.21 Still, Nejedlý was awarded the position
of Minister of Education from 1945 to 1946 and 1948 to 1952.
But if the political platforming of the ‘dispute’ fundamentally concerned
notions of socialism, Czech nationalism at the turn of the twentieth century
also became increasingly enmeshed in ethnonationalism, especially in the possi-
bility of empirically determining who belonged to the nation and who did not.
Such interests manifested even in the passing of the 1905 Moravian Compromise,
which required Moravia’s 2.5 million inhabitants to register exclusively with
either Czech or German political parties, rather than moving freely within an
open political landscape.22 A 1910 update to the Compromise’s sub-clause called
‘Lex Perek’ also determined that the nationalities of Moravian children would be
determined through investigations of parents’ social lives, language use, reading
habits and ancestry, rather than through language proficiencies or parents’ self-
identification as they had been previously. A second update in 1920 regulated that
children’s ethnonationalities would be determined through the testimonies of
community members and distant family members, leading Czechoslovak citizens
‘to inform on their neighbours on a massive and unprecedented scale’.23
Czech and Slovak folk song research around this time mirrored shifts from
determining nationality through self-identification to relying on the observa-
tions of supposedly objective third parties and bodies of evidence. As early as
1883, folk song researcher František Bartoš published works such as his Lid
a národ [The People and the Nation], in which he classified humans according
to their specific biological landscapes, cultural practices (including folk song
repertoires) and social systems. For Bartoš, folk music research was just one of
many tools for exploring emerging notions of race and ethnicity.24 Alongside
Janáček, Bartoš famously participated in demonstrations of Moravian music at
Even then, Max Brod’s German translation of Janáček’s Jenůfa contributed substantially to Janáček’s
eventual success, as did Jan Löwenbach. See Leon Botstein’s chapter, ‘The Cultural Politics of Language
and Music: Max Brod and Leoš Janáček’, as well as Derek Katz’s ‘A Turk and a Moravian in Prague:
Janáček’s Brouček and the Perils of Musical Patriotism in Prague’, in Michael Beckerman (ed.), Janáček and
His World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003). See also Jaroslav Mráček, ‘The Reception of Leoš
Janáček as Seen through a Study of the Bibliography: A Preliminary Report’, in Michael Beckerman and
Glen Bauer (eds.), Janáček and Czech Music: Proceedings of the International Conference (Saint Louis, 1988),
Studies in Czech Music 1 (Stuyvesant: Pendragon, 1995), pp. 348–9.
21
Locke, Opera and Ideology in Prague, p. 130; Křesťan, Zdeněk Nejedlý, pp. 129–30, 143.
22
The information in the paragraph is indebted to Tara Zahra, ‘Reclaiming Children for the Nation:
Germanization, National Ascription, and Democracy in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1945’, Central
European History, 37/4 (2004), 501–43.
23
Zahra, ‘Reclaiming Children for the Nation’, 518.
24
For more on relationships between music, ethnography and racial studies, see Ronald Radano and
Philip Bohlman (eds.), Music and the Racial Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); and
448 KELLY ST PIERRE
the 1895 Czechoslovak Exhibition. The event took place outside of Prague
and attracted over 2,000,000 visitors, featuring elaborately detailed recon-
structions of area architecture, crafts, food and even whole villages. Despite its
title, however, the Czechoslovak Exhibition did not actually include Slovak
representation. Instead, potential Slovak collaborators reportedly feared reta-
liation from the Hungarian government, and so chose not to participate.25
Magyarisation policies meant that collaborations across both Austrian and
Hungarian halves of the empire were seen as a threat to Hungarian autonomy,
with ethnonationalism reinforcing borders, rather than expanding them as
the Czechoslovak Exhibition had seemed to promise.
The assumption that rich folk song traditions evidenced the scientific
validity of individual ethnicities also yielded immense folk song collections
at the turn of the century. Bartoš and Janáček not only produced their famous
Kytice z národních písní moravských [A Bouquet of Moravian Folk Songs] in
1890, for example, but also published over 2,000 songs in their Národní písně
moravské v nově nasbírané [Newly Collected Moravian Folk Songs] in 1901.
Janáček additionally participated in an Organisational Committee for Czech
Song in Moravia and Silesia, founded in 1905 as part of Universal Edition’s
Das Volkslied in Österreich [Folk Song in Austria] project. Hostinský was named
head of this organisation’s Czech department, Nejedlý its subdivision for
Czech Song in Bohemia and Janáček its subdivision for Czech Song in
Moravia and Silesia; together, these areas counted 30,000 folk songs in its
collection before the First World War.26 A group called the Friends of Slovak
Songs similarly collected 5,000 Slovak melodies through the nineteenth cen-
tury and published 2,000 of them in the volumes of Slovenské spevy [Slovak
Songs] (1880–1926).27 Even then, it was the Hungarian Béla Bartók – himself
an admirer of the collaborations between Bartoš and Janáček – who became
most recognised for his Slovak folk song collections. Articles such as his 1931
Slovenské l’udvé piesne [Slovak Folk Songs] allowed him to gain prominence in
this area of research, while his positioning of Slovak folk songs within his
nationalistically Hungarian works also brought him even further recognition:
as he once summarised, ‘my creative work, precisely because it arises from
Klára Móricz, Jewish Identities: Nationalism, Racism, and Utopianism in Twentieth-Century Music (Berkeley:
25
Karel Klusáček, Emanuel Kovář, Lubor Niederle, František Schlaffer and František Adolf Šubert (eds.),
Národopisná výstava českoslovanská v Praze 1895 [The Czechoslovak Ethnographic Exhibition in Prague
1895] (Prague: Nákladem J. Otty, 1895), p. 24.
26
The organisation’s subdivision for German folk song also counted 10,000 in its collection. Věra
Thořová, ‘Vznik Státního ústavu pro lidovou píseň a první léta jeho existence’ [The Genesis of the State
Institute for Folk Song and the First Years of Its Existence], in From Folksong to European Ethnology, p. 53.
27
Oskár Elschek, ‘I I . Traditional Music’, in Richard Rybarič, et al., ‘Slovakia’, Grove Music Online, Oxford
Music Online, available at www.oxfordmusiconline.com (accessed 22 April 2017).
three sources, Hungarian, Romanian, and Slovakian, might be regarded as the

embodiment of the very concept of integrity, which is so much emphasized in
Hungary today’.28 For Bartók, and in keeping with his hegemonic position
within Magyarisation policies, Slovak folk song was crucial for reflecting the
complexity of a multi-ethnic Hungarian state.
Outside of ethnographic studies of Czech and Slovak folk music, ethnona-
tionalist impulses were similarly reflected in the publication of studies such as
Richard Eichenauer’s Musik und Rasse [Music and Race] (1932) as well as
Bartók’s ‘Race Purity in Music’ (1942). Ethnonationalism also, of course,
had devastating consequences at the beginning of the twentieth century,
with several Central European states forcing the emigration of supposed
‘surplus’ populations both before and after the First World War.29 But even
outside of these geographic cleansings, ethnonationalism strongly informed
political discourses between Czechs and Slovaks upon the founding of the
First Czechoslovak Republic in 1918. The possibility of forming a ‘Czecho-
Slovak’ federation had been popular previous to the war, but a united
Czechoslovakia was not. Instead the ‘Czechoslovakism’ that reframed maps
in Central Europe following the First World War primarily reflected the
political manoeuvrings of Tomáš Masaryk.30 For the international community
from whom Masaryk sought approval, a Czecho-Slovak state appeared dan-
gerously reminiscent of a divided Austro-Hungary, and therefore likely to
inherit its instability. A fully integrated and united Czechoslovakia as Masaryk
proposed, however, was thought to carry fewer tensions, and so became
interwar policy.31
Czechoslovakia and Music Criticism

In reality, Czechoslovakia’s First Republic yielded exactly the ethnonationalist
conflicts a federalised ‘Czecho-Slovakia’ sought to avoid: the nation divided
into several segments at the outset of the Second World War, including the
Nazi-occupied Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia, the Nazi-satellite of
28
For a close examination of the instances in which Bartók and Janáček might have interacted with one
another, see James Porter, ‘Bartók and Janáček: Ideological Convergence and Critical Value’, Musical
Quarterly, 84/3 (2000), 426–51. The translation of this quote appears on p. 435.
29
Tara Zahra explains that ‘surplus’ populations previous to the First World War typically referred to
individuals’ class, gender, or occupation; after the First World War, ‘surplus’ populations were deter-
mined by national, religious and racial identities. See Zahra, The Great Departure: Mass Migration from
Eastern Europe and the Making of the Free World (New York: Norton, 2016), p. 17.
30
Andrea Orzoff’s Battle for the Castle: The Myth of Czechoslovakia in Europe, 1914–1948 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2009) is a rich resource for examining Masaryk’s ‘Czechoslovakism’ as well as the ways
he and his advocates self-consciously perpetuated the myth of ‘Czechoslovakia’ upon the founding of its
First Republic in 1918.
31
Auer, Liberal Nationalism in Central Europe, p. 143.
450 KELLY ST PIERRE
Slovakia and the Hungarian-occupied Carpathian-Ruthenia, which had pre-

viously been part of Slovakia. These states (with the exception of Carpathian-
Ruthenia, which became part of the USSR in 1945) came together under
Communist rule in 1948, splitting again only upon the ‘Velvet Divorce’ of
1993. Such rapidly shifting circumstances meant that the stakes and interests
of Czech and Slovak music criticism were in near-constant flux through the
twentieth century. That music critics themselves were continually forced to
negotiate shifting statehoods also meant that, more than nationalist musical
aesthetics, even their livelihoods were sometimes in danger based on their
theorisations.
Notions of ‘Czechoslovakism’ were especially threatening to Slovaks, who
risked becoming ‘othered’ under yet another centralised state, especially
because their agricultural economy could not easily compete with Czech
industry after the First World War. And Czechs did gain hegemony upon
the founding of Czechoslovakia, their teachers and professionals sent to
Slovakia to correct supposed ‘deficiencies’ within the region after 1918.32
Contemporary musical activity and criticism mirrored moves to build Slovak
resources to the presumed levels of Prague. In addition to the founding of
Bratislava’s Univerzita Komenského (Comenius University) in 1919, for
example, a musicology department was established within the school in
1921. A separate Slovak National Theatre was similarly founded in 1920.
Within this setting, Bratislava-based music critic Ivan Ballo emerged as
a ‘conceptual co-creator’ of Slovak nationalist music, his criticism positioning
music as a social and moral concern, much as Hostinský’s criticism had done
previously.33 For Slovak nationalists including Ballo, then, the best path
forward upon the founding of Czechoslovakia was for Slovak music to
become more in line with traditions in Czech musical aesthetics.
Outside of building resources in Slovakia, imagined paths forward for
Czechoslovakia slipped easily between notions of democracy – on which
Czechoslovakia was officially founded – and socialism (or, by then,
Communism, as the Komunistická strana Československa, or Communist
Party of Czechoslovakia had been founded in 1921), much as Masaryk had
done previously in his Czech Question. Just as before, too, Zdeněk Nejedlý both
participated in and fuelled the political posturing embedded in corresponding
32
Ibid., p. 142.
33
Ladislav Burlas, ‘7. Slovak Music of the 20th Century’, in Elschek and Burlas (eds.), A History of Slovak
Music, p. 306; and Naďa Hrčková, Tradícia, modernosť a slovenská hudobná kultúra 1918–1948 [Tradition,
Modernity, and Slovak Musical Culture] (Bratislava: Litera, 1996), pp. 171–86. See also Ján Palkovič,
‘Hudobná kritika v Slovenských pohľadoch v rokoch 1918–1948’ [Music Criticism in Slovenské pohľady
from the Years 1918–1948], in Zdenko Nováček and Katharína Horváthová (eds.), Hudobná kritika
v Bratislave: 1920–1980 [Music Criticism in Bratislava: 1920–1980] (Bratislava: Martin, 1980), pp. 28–32.
music scholarship during the era. He established the Hudební klub [‘music club’]
(1911–27) and the journal Smetana (1910–26) in order to cultivate even more
radical modes of Smetana advocacy, while his scholarship and platforming also
led to an important falling out with his ‘Music Club’ co-developer, one-time
student and (eventual) brother-in-law, Vladimír Helfert. Helfert had become
head of the newly established musicology department at Brno’s Masaryk
University from 1919 and, in direct opposition to Nejedlý’s previous work,
praised his colleague Janáček for his innovative compositional techniques in his
1937 Česká moderní hudba [Modern Czech Music]. In response, Nejedlý anon-
ymously launched attacks on Helfert from the pages of Smetana, though the
onset of the Second World War interrupted the dispute.34 Nejedlý left for
Moscow in 1939, at which point he officially joined the Communist party and
began work as a professor at Moscow State University. Helfert, who had incor-
porated anti-Nazi campaigning into his lectures at the university and smuggled
Janáček’s recordings into safekeeping just before the start of the war, was called
in for Gestapo questioning in November 1939, and was arrested soon after.
Helfert was held prisoner intermittently at a variety of institutions through the
war until arriving at the Nazi camp Terezín in 1944. He died of spotted fever two
days after the camp’s liberation on 18 May 1945.35
Beyond Nejedlý and Helfert, of course, the lives of several musicologists
and critics were deeply affected by the war. Ivan Ballo was arrested for his own
anti-fascist work in 1939, released only in 1943. Previous Charles University
faculty member Paul Nettl fled Prague with his family, including his then-
young son Bruno Nettl, in 1939, ultimately settling in the United States. Paul
Nettl’s one-time colleague in musicology, Gustav Becking, who worked at
Charles University from 1930 to 1945, was killed during Czechoslovakia’s
own post-war cleansing under the Košice programme. Nejedlý took up his
position as Minister of Education upon his return from Moscow, assuming it
again from 1948 to 1952, under the Communist regime. Nejedlý’s responsi-
bilities in this position included helping formulate the purges at Charles
University. Scholar Jiří Křesťan has shown that Nejedlý protected some of
his colleagues in this process.36 Nejedlý’s one-time student Josef Hutter, who
had publically sided with Helfert before the war and was similarly imprisoned
34
Helfert’s theorisations were extensively attacked in the pages of Smetana: Hudební listy [Smetana: Music
News]; Nejedlý fully responded in another publication, Útok na českou moderní hudbu [The Attack on
Modern Czech Music], published in 1937.
35
For more Helfert’s activities, see Rudolf Pečman, Vladimír Helfert (Universitas Masarykiana: Brno,
2003), pp. 29, 47–55, 223–4; and Jiří Vysloužil, ‘Brněnský Pracovní výbor, Ústav a Kabinet pro lidovou
píseň’ [‘Brno’s Organizational Committee, Department and Institute for Folk Song’], in From Folksong to
European Ethnography, pp. 133–6. All of Janáček’s recordings were returned after the war, only ten wax
cylinders damaged.
36
Křesťan, Zdeněk Nejedlý, pp. 336–7.
452 KELLY ST PIERRE
during the Second World War, was imprisoned for a second time under the
Communist regime, released on amnesty in 1956, and died in 1959.37
Outside of helping to organise the purges, Nejedlý’s role as Minister of
Education, especially under the Communist regime, allowed him to funda-
mentally shape Czech music and research up to 1989. He (re)founded the
Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences in 1952, for example, whose journal
Hudební věda [Musicology] remains one of the most esteemed publications
for Czech music research today.38 Nejedlý was also responsible for interpret-
ing socialist realism as prescribed by Andrei Zhdanov (though critics, com-
posers and researchers had already aligned themselves with similar standards
even from the 1948 Prague Manifesto); his resulting ‘Czech realism’ [‘český
realismus’] was unique in that it allowed for the celebration of Czech (and not
specifically Soviet) heroes.39 The restoration of the Bethlehem Chapel, from
which Jan Hus preached during the fifteenth century, reflected the national-
ism embedded in ‘Czech realism’, as did Nejedlý’s positioning of Smetana –
especially in the idealised version that Nejedlý most frequently presented in
his writings – as the centre of a specifically Czech musical canon, at the
expense of Dvořák and Janáček, among others.40
Though Nejedlý may have formulated ‘Czech realism’, Miroslav Barvík –
who scholar Thomas Svatos describes as ‘the most powerful musician during
the Stalinist years’ – was responsible for its enforcement.41 Barvík’s power
came from his position as head of the Union of Czechoslovak Composers
(UCC), the censorship board whose participation (or at least annual fee) was
mandatory for all composers, critics and researchers. As part of his work,
Barvík led ideological meetings, or ‘brainwashing’ events as later described by
emigré Miloš Jůzl, the first in 1950 titled The Composers Go with the People.42
Barvík was also editor of Hudební rozhledy [Musical Perspectives], under which
all previous music journals were reorganised and which became the primary
tool for instilling Czech and Socialist realism in the field of music. Even then,
37
Locke, Opera and Ideology in Prague, pp. 188–9, 235–7, especially chapter 9 n. 119, and chapter 11 n. 6.
38
For more on the history of the Academy of Sciences, see Stanley B. Winters, ‘Josef Hlávka, Zdeněk
Nejedlý, and the Czech Academy of Sciences and Arts, 1891–1952’, Minerva, 32/1 (1994), 53–78.
39
Translated from Smetanova pětiletka, 1949–1953: Program and pokyny [Smetana’s Five-Year Plan,
1949–1953: Programme and Instructions] (Prague: Společnost Bedřicha Smetany, 1949), p. 9.
40
See Locke, Opera and Ideology in Prague, p. 29.
41
Thomas D. Svatos, ‘Sovietizing Czechoslovak Music: The “Hatchet Man” Miroslav Barvík and His
Speech The Composers Go with the People’, Music & Politics, 4/1 (2010), 1. Slovakia was granted its own
Institute of Musicology of the Slovak Academy of Sciences from 1951, which founded its own
Hudobnovedné štúdie [Musicological Studies] in 1956. A specific Union of Slovak Composers also met for
the first time in 1959, and its (later-founded) journal, Musicologica Slovaca [Musicology of Slovakia],
remains an important resource for Slovak music research today.
42
M iloš Jůzl, ‘Music and the Totalitarian Regime’, International Review of the Aesthetics of Sociology of Music,
27/1 (1996), 35.
Slovakia was granted its own Institute of Musicology of the Slovak Academy
of Sciences from 1951, which founded its journal on Hudobnovedné štúdie
[Musicological Studies] in 1956. A specific Union of Slovak Composers met
for the first time in 1959, its subsequent journal, Musicologica Slovaca [Slovak
Musicology] similarly remaining an important resource for Slovak music
research today.43
Though Alexander Dubček’s liberalisation policies of the 1960s loosened
restrictions in Prague, the corresponding invasion of Soviet tanks in 1968 and
ensuing ‘Normalisation’ policies of the 1970s and 1980s reinvigorated radical
exertions of power.44 In (unofficial) music criticism, these circumstances led
to a break with past traditions, especially the long-standing custom of the
privileging of supposed ‘art’ over popular music in defining the nation.
Dissident poet and later Czechoslovak president Václav Havel led this move,
positioning rock music as not only the voice of an oppressed nation, but also
an important catalyst for the nation’s revolution.45 Havel had already helped
formulate Charter 77 (the 1977 call for the Communist administration to
respect basic human rights), but he also claimed in his writings as early as 1978
that the imprisonment of the band members of Plastic People of the Universe
inspired him to lead the wave of revolutions that ultimately toppled the
Communist regime in 1989.46 Relatedly, Havel famously invited Lou Reed,
an important influence on Plastic People, to perform in Prague in 1990; he
sponsored a free concert by the Rolling Stones that same year; and he hosted
a special ‘SOS proti Rassismus’ (‘SOS against Racism’) rock concert in Prague
just before the 1990 June elections, in no small part because popular music
was considered apolitical – or at least because Havel attempted to position it
as such.47 Still, Havel appointed Ivan Jirous, artistic director of Plastic People
of the Universe, to his administration upon his election and named Frank
Zappa, from whose songs Plastic People took their name, an adviser on trade,
culture and tourism.
Havel’s actions, along with the ways ‘Czechoslovakism’ manifested in
music from 1918, illustrate a movement from negotiating Czechs’ hegemonic
role in formulating a new Czechoslovak nation in ‘art’ music to redefining
43
For more on the ways Soviet radicalism was less aggressive in Bratislava than it was in Prague, see Auer,
Liberal Nationalism in Central Europe, p. 152; and Jůzl, ‘Music and the Totalitarian Regime’, 47.
44
Trever Hagen offers a close discussion of music under Normalisation in his ‘Converging on
Generation: Musicking in Normalized Czechoslovakia’, East Central Europe, 38 (2011), 307–35.
45
See Havel’s ‘The Power of the Powerless’ (1978), excerpted and translated in Tony Mitchell, ‘Mixing
Pop and Politics: Rock Music in Czechoslovakia Before and After the Velvet Revolution’, Popular Music,
11/2 (1992), 189.
46
For more on how the Charter effected the lives of musicologists and critics then working at Charles
University, see Jůzl, ‘Music and the Totalitarian Regime’, 47–8.
47
Mitchell, ‘Mixing Pop and Politics’, 192–3.
454 KELLY ST PIERRE
Czechoslovakia as a product of human rights-driven rebellion from at least

1989, if not earlier. The use of rock music as a platform for political comment
persists in Prague even today. The city’s famous ‘John Lennon Wall’ – a graffiti
wall created after Lennon’s murder in 1980 – was painted over on the twenty-
fifth anniversary of the Velvet Revolution in 2014 with the aim of creating
space for new political expression in today’s democracy.48 While music criti-
cism may have theoretically defined the nation in the past, today such moves
invite us to consider the roles popular music criticism might continue to play
within continually unfolding nationalist discourses.
Conclusion: Criticism in the Twenty-First Century

Any present-day author writing on nearly any topic in Czech and Slovak
history is faced with important ethical questions. A history of the Slovak
state, for example, might begin either with the country’s independence as
a Nazi-satellite, or with the 1944 Slovak Uprising against the Nazis. The latter
is more popular in Slovak historiography, though also a more problematic
choice, as the country’s first Prime Minister, authoritarian leader Vladimír
Mečiar (who served from 1993 to 1998), called on Nazi-era nationalist rheto-
ric in his campaigns; as such, Mečiar and his supporters situated the refounded
Slovak Republic as a continuation of, and not necessarily break from
Slovakia’s Nazi past.49 Similarly, Czechoslovakia’s expulsion of 2,000,000
Germans and nearly 100,000 Hungarians after the Second World War,
along with its treatment of Jewish and Roma populations throughout its
short history, raise important questions about to whom ‘Czech’ and ‘Slovak’
histories belong.50 All of these communities – along with individuals belong-
ing to countless other independent and intersecting identities – fundamen-
tally contributed to the formation of the Czech and Slovak nations. And yet
traditional ‘Czech’ and ‘Slovak’ histories (including this one) risk examining
only these nations’ most accessible voices – the ones privileged enough to have
been recorded and preserved in the first place, rather than marginalised or
oppressed.
48
The painting over of the John Lennon Wall was covered in a variety of news sources at the time. See, for
example, Adam Chandler, ‘The Life and Times of Prague’s John Lennon Wall’, The Atlantic (18 November
2014), available at www.theatlantic.com (accessed 1 May 2015).
49
See Stanislav J. Kirschbaum, ‘Whither Slovak Historiography after 1993?’, Canadian Slavonic Papers, 53/
1 (2011), 45–63.
50
Refer especially to Scott Brunstetter, ‘Escaping History: The Expulsion of Sudeten Germans as
a Leitmotif in German–Czech Relations’, and Edward Chászár, ‘Ethnic Cleansing in Slovakia’, in
Steven Béla Várdy and T. Hunt Tooley (eds.), Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe (New York:
Social Science Monographs, 2003).
But even outside of fundamental historiographical challenges, the nationalist

discourses embedded in musicology tend towards circular patterns of logic that
risk limiting discussions of Czech and Slovak music, as explored at the outset of
this chapter. On the one hand, musicology’s emergence from nineteenth-
century nationalist discourses, especially ‘German’ ones, means that its meth-
ods are prone to perpetuating, rather than interrogating, nationalist narratives.
On the other, even when such patterns are thoughtfully recognised, as Elschek
did in his introduction to the History of Slovak Music, moves to counter them can
yield further nationalist myths; as similarly illustrated in Elschek’s first chapter
for the same study, which begins in pre-history, well and deliberately before
notions of ‘Slovakia’ would ever have existed.
Altogether, such challenges remind us not only that processes of nationalist
invention might be unwittingly embedded in music scholarship – so much so
that even modern researchers like Elschek are forced to negotiate the circu-
larity of writing traditional, nationally oriented narratives for only decades-
old states – but also that examinations of music history might benefit from
supplementary questions. To that end, the Czech and Slovak Republics’
south-neighbouring (and controversial) philosopher, Slovenian Slavoj Žižek,
might ask us to consider music criticism not only as a category of ideology, but
also to situate it globally; to explore the possibility that consumers worldwide
are the most effective nationalist tastemakers today, rather than citizens
themselves.51 The tourist industries of both Czechia and Slovakia, for exam-
ple, might well represent today’s most active spaces for negotiating relation-
ships between these nations and their musical traditions, even if nightly
stagings of Mozart’s Don Giovanni and dinner-theatre performances of the
‘skočná’ (or ‘flying polka’) might speak more to the narratives international
audiences seek (and are willing to pay for), rather than these countries’
modern soundscapes. Though traditional music criticism and research
might simultaneously create and deconstruct nineteenth-century formula-
tions of nations and ethnonations, today’s might best speak to formulations
of the Czech and Slovak states within capitalist and global systems; it might
explore constructions of these nations for popular consumption not just as
a way examining modern modes of listening, but also because such moves have
historical basis, much as philosophies of ‘Czechoslovakism’ made the nation
of Czechoslovakia more palatable for international communities following
the First World War.
51
An example of Žižek’s cultural criticism in music is his ‘Staging Feminine Hysteria: Schoenberg’s
Erwartung’, in Matthew Flisfeder and Louis-Paul Willis (eds.), Žižek and Media Studies: A Reader (New York:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), though his attention to ideology and neoliberalism pervade his work
generally.
· PART V ·
NEW AREAS
. 24 .
Jazz Criticism in America

MARK RACZ
Since the formal academic study of jazz (historical, musicological, analytical or

cultural) developed only very late in the twentieth century, critics have
inevitably played a crucial role in developing discourses about the music.
This has been a great strength as well as an occasional weakness, but it has
given criticism a centrality in the literature of jazz that is noteworthy, parti-
cularly in comparison with the role of criticism in Western European art
music in the same period.
In this chapter, I have restricted my coverage of the subject in several key
respects. In the first place, there is very little consideration of pre-1930 criti-
cism, a large and fascinating body of writing, but which with relatively few
exceptions has more historical and cultural than musical significance. Secondly,
and more controversially, I have included very little about European jazz
criticism. The reception history of jazz in Europe is a vast subject, complicated
by both the geographical and cultural diversity of Europe and the multifarious
ways in which critics responded both to American jazz and to the development
of jazz in their own countries. Finally and inevitably, there are many distin-
guished critics who receive only a brief mention, or none at all. Their omission
is due to lack of space rather than any value judgement on my part.
Throughout the early twentieth century there was a significant amount of
writing about jazz in America popular music magazines as well as in more
mainstream newspapers and journals. However, it was not until the 1930s,
with the development of a mass audience for swing bands, that there began to
emerge a proliferation of mostly short-lived magazines devoted exclusively to
jazz, which nurtured an embryonic but rapidly developing critical tradition.
Two journals in particular stand out from this profusion of small ‘fanzines’
both in their longevity and influence: Downbeat and Metronome.
In retrospect the most startling if ultimately unsurprising aspect of pre-war
jazz criticism is that virtually all of the critics who published in the specialist
[459]
460 MARK RACZ
jazz press were white, male, from middle- or upper-class family backgrounds,
mostly Ivy League-educated and of left-wing political persuasion. There were
formally established ‘Hot Clubs’ in New York, Boston and New Haven, where
students from Columbia, Harvard and Yale respectively could listen intently
to either the latest or vintage recordings, debate their relative merits and
develop their critical faculties. Many of the most typical and long-lasting
features of jazz journalism are rooted in this culture of undergraduate
enthusiasm.
George T. Simon, Harvard educated and brother of the founder of the
publishing house Simon & Schuster, is a characteristic figure. He became
a key contributor to Metronome, serving as an associate editor from 1934 and as
editor-in-chief from 1939 to 1955. He was also an amateur drummer, and even
played briefly with Glenn Miller’s orchestra in 1937. He wrote brief, enthu-
siastically descriptive record reviews, including this characteristic one of
Jimmie Lunceford’s ‘Four or Five Times’: ‘For pure, unadulterated, insinuat-
ing swing, it’s really stupendous. What a tempo! And what sax figures! There
are excellent sax and trombone section passages . . . You must hear this.’1 He
also wrote longer reviews of swing bands, using a rating scale of E to A+.
Although his highest rated bands were mostly white, Simon awarded an A to
Duke Ellington and an A− to Andy Kirk.2
This urge to rate and quantify musical value is also exemplified by the
omnipresent readers’ polls, which have remained a distinctive part of jazz
journalism to the present day. In keeping with the demographics of its read-
ership, the Metronome readers’ polls in the 1930s consistently ranked white
bands the highest. As Ron Welburn has pointed out, this contrasts markedly
with the polls in African American newspapers of the time where, not surpris-
ingly, African American bandleaders were consistently ranked highest. For
example, the 1938 Chicago Defender readers’ poll gave first place to Duke
Ellington, followed closely by Jimmie Lunceford, Count Basie and Cab
Calloway. These rankings accord perfectly with modern consensus, and pro-
vide a powerful tribute to the critical discrimination of their audiences.3
The dominance of white jazz critics in the specialist jazz press is most
tellingly illustrated by the fact that in the 1930s Downbeat published only
one article by an African American writer: Frank Marshall Davis’s ‘No Secret –
White Bands Copy Negroes’.4 The factually accurate, if provocative title of
Davis’s article perhaps suggests why he was not asked to make further
1
Ron Welburn, ‘Jazz Magazines of the 1930s: An Overview of Their Provocative Journalism’, American
Music, 5/3 (Autumn 1987), 259.
2 3
Ibid., 260. Ibid., 261.
4
Frank Marshall Davis, ‘No Secret – White Bands Copy Negroes’, Downbeat (June 1938), 5.
Jazz Criticism in America 461
contributions. Davis’s criticism for the Associated Negro Press looks forward
to Amiri Baraka (formerly LeRoi Jones) in not pulling verbal punches: [Fats
Waller took] ‘the pretty aural confections of Tin Pan Alley and shov[ed] them
down the white world’s throat, dipped in the sardonic salt and vitriol of black
living’.5 In general, there is a surprising lack of jazz criticism in the African
American press of the 1930s, but as Billy Rowe, a journalist active at the time
explained: ‘in those days, and even now, black critics could not afford the
luxury of being critics, because we were so happy when one of our fellows got
a job someplace . . . that we never criticised them’.6
Among the many white critics who began writing and publishing in the
1930s, John Hammond is both typical in the breadth of what would now be
described as his ‘portfolio career’ and unique in the range of his accomplish-
ments. He wrote jazz reviews and longer critical articles for Downbeat, as well
as articles on racial politics for the left-of-centre journals Nation and New
Masses. He was a talent scout (his ‘discoveries’ included Billie Holiday, Count
Basie, Charlie Christian, Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen), a record produ-
cer (he produced both Bessie Smith’s last, and Billie Holiday’s first recordings,
as well as the classic series of Teddy Wilson small band recordings of the late
1930s) and a concert entrepreneur (most notably his ‘Spirituals to Swing’
concerts at Carnegie Hall in 1938 and 1939). He also served as an informal but
highly influential musical and career advisor to both Benny Goodman and
Count Basie. In 1935, Goodman, with Hammond’s encouragement, hired the
African American pianist Teddy Wilson to perform, record and tour with his
trio, which was, if not the first, certainly the most high-profile example of
a mixed race ensemble in jazz in the 1930s.
British-born Leonard Feather was one of the most influential of all jazz
critics, with a career spanning sixty years from his first articles in 1934 for the
British music magazine Melody Maker until his death in 1994. John Gennari
vividly evokes his first trip to New York in 1935, and his first evening out at
the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem, escorted by John Hammond, and in doing so
concisely summarises the character of much pre-war jazz criticism:
Two young white men without dates, in a room full of good-timing cheer and
ecstatic bodily release, position themselves between the musicians and the
audience . . . close to but also crucially distinct from the dancing mass body,
caught up in an imagined sense of privileged intellectual and emotional com-
munion with the music. Overlaying this subtle geography of inside/outside
5
John Gennari, Blowin’ Hot and Cold: Jazz and its Critics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006),
p. 107.
6
Ibid., p. 104.
462 MARK RACZ
was both a self-consciousness about racial and class difference and

a correspondingly self-justifying sense of exceptionalism . . .7
Feather moved permanently to the United States in 1941, taking American

citizenship in 1948. A prolific writer, he also worked as a concert promoter
and record producer, sometimes contributing his own compositions and
piano playing to sessions. In 1944 he pioneered a critics’ poll for Esquire,
with the intention of providing a more musically informed alternative to
readers’ polls. In contrast to the domination of white musicians in readers’
polls, the Esquire poll winners included a sizeable majority of African
American musicians. Although the Esquire critics’ polls lasted for only three
years, the concept was adopted by Downbeat in 1953 and has become an
omnipresent annual feature in the jazz and mainstream press as well as in
the blogosphere.
Feather’s ‘blindfold tests’, initially appearing in Metronome but moving to
Downbeat in the 1950s, featured an interviewee musician listening ‘blindfold’
to and commenting on a series of unidentified recordings. With the exception
of the small number of jazz musicians who also wrote formal criticism, this
became the most common and revealing format for musicians to publicly
express their views on their contemporaries. And if these achievements were
not enough, The Encyclopedia of Jazz (first published in 1955), conceived of and
edited by Feather, was for many years the only available large-scale reference
work on jazz.8
The Canadian-born Helen Oakley, who wrote for Downbeat from 1934 to
1941, was a very rare example of a female jazz critic. She also worked as
a concert promoter, and as a record producer was responsible for many classic
recordings of the 1930s, including sessions by Red Norvo and Mildred Bailey,
Bob Crosby and, most notably, some of Duke Ellington’s finest small band
recordings.
Duke Ellington and the Critics

The critical reception of Ellington’s music in the 1930s and early 1940s
provides an ideal case study with which to explore the leading currents and
cross-currents within jazz criticism of the period. Many commentators were
clearly overwhelmed by the originality, rhythmic vitality and musical intelli-
gence of Ellington’s early masterpieces, and often resorted to hyperbole to
communicate their enthusiasm. Roger Pryor Dodge, in his 1934 essay
7 8
Ibid., p. 23. Leonard Feather, The Encyclopedia of Jazz (New York: Horizon Press, 1955).
‘Harpsichords and Jazz Trumpets’ rather improbably compares Ellington’s

‘Black and Tan Fantasy’ to both Bach and Palestrina, the names clearly being
invoked as critical benchmarks rather than on specifically musical grounds.9
Also in 1934, English composer and critic Constant Lambert wrote about one
of Ellington’s 1928 recordings: ‘I know of nothing in Ravel so dexterous in
treatment as the varied solos in the middle of the ebullient “Hot and
Bothered”, and nothing in Stravinsky more dynamic than the final section.
The combination of themes at this moment is one of the most ingenious
pieces of writing in modern music.’10 Lambert’s high praise of Ellington was
doubtlessly sincere, but was also clearly crafted to serve as ammunition in his
iconoclastic attack on contemporary classical music. And in spite of his high
praise, Lambert’s final paragraph provides a sting in the article’s tail which was
prescient of future critical censure: ‘Ellington’s best works are written in what
may be called ten-inch record form . . . Into this three and a half minutes he
compresses the utmost, but beyond its limits he is inclined to fumble.’11
Just one year later, in 1935, John Hammond published a scathing attack on
Ellington’s newly recorded thirteen-minute extended composition
‘Reminiscing in Tempo’, criticising it as ‘formless and shapeless’ and for the
supposed influence of European music (Debussy and Delius in particular) on
its style.12 As Gunther Schuller has argued in some detail, there is nothing
either formless or shapeless about the work and the harmonic language has
little in common with Ellington’s supposed European models.13 Hammond
was clearly using his a priori view of what constitutes jazz as a critical bench-
mark and taking Ellington to task for stepping over the line. Hammond also
attacked Ellington for not engaging in his music with the pressing issues of
racial inequality. His presumption as a white critic in attempting to dictate
and narrowly define the aesthetic and political agenda of a leading African
American musician perfectly illustrates the way in which white criticism of
the time was permeated by the ‘self-justifying sense of exceptionalism’ iden-
tified by Gennari.14
The Carnegie Hall premiere in 1943 of Ellington’s extended programmatic
concert work Black, Brown and Beige (subtitled Tone Parallel to the History of the
American Negro) provoked a similar range of critical responses. New York Herald
Tribune critic Paul Bowles lamented both the frequent tempo changes and the
conceptual basis of the work: ‘If there is no regular beat, there can be no
9
Roger Pryor Dodge, Hot Jazz and Jazz Dance (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 24.
10 11
Constant Lambert, Music Ho! (New York: C. Scribner’s, 1934), p. 214. Ibid.
12
Frank Alkyer, 60 Years of Jazz (Milwaukee: Hal Leonard, 1995), p. 25.
13
Gunther Schuller, The Swing Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), pp. 74–83.
14
Gennari, Blowin’ Hot and Cold, p. 23.
464 MARK RACZ
syncopation, and thus no tension, no jazz [my italics]. The whole attempt to
fuse jazz as a form with art music should be discouraged.’15 In his review in
the magazine Jazz, John Hammond takes Ellington to task for addressing the
very issue that Hammond had found wanting in ‘Reminiscing in Tempo’, that
is the African American experience:
The conclusion that one can draw from this concert is that Duke is dissatisfied
with dance music as a medium for expression and is trying to achieve some-
thing of greater significance. No one can criticize him for this approach if he
keeps up the quality of his music for dancing. My feeling is that by becoming
more complex he has robbed jazz of most of its basic virtue and lost contact
with his audience.16
The most perceptive contemporary criticism of Black, Brown and Beige comes
in Mike Levin’s Downbeat review. Like Bowles, he criticises the frequent
tempo changes, but defends Ellington’s sense of musical form. His overall
assessment is that ‘BBB [Black, Brown and Beige] is not the final step by any
means. Duke is working towards music where he can use all the rich scoring
and harmonic advantages of the classical tradition, plus the guts, poignance,
and emotional drive of great hot jazz, specifically the solo.’17 Levin was
unusual among critics in his willingness to identify shortcomings while still
appreciating Ellington’s remarkable achievement and the promise the work
held for the future. These criticisms of Ellington’s extended works, including
his deployment of sophisticated ‘European’ harmony, increased formal com-
plexity and the abandonment of traditional jazz rhythm are all issues which
recur as critical shibboleths over the following decades in response to new
developments in jazz.
Bebop and Moldy Figs

The 1930s also saw the first book-length studies of jazz, beginning in France
with Robert Goffin’s Aux frontières du jazz in 193218 and Hugues Panassié’s
Jazz Hot in 193419 and with the first serious American critical study of jazz,
Winthrop Sargeant’s Jazz: Hot and Hybrid following just a few years later.20
But the book that was to have the most influence on the critical controversies
of the 1940s was Jazzmen, edited by Frederick Ramsey Jr and Charles Edward
15
Mark Tucker, The Duke Ellington Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 166.
16 17
Ibid., p. 173. Ibid., p. 169.
18
Robert Goffin, Aux frontières du jazz (Paris: Édition du Sagittaire, 1932).
19
Hugues Panassié, Le Jazz hot (Paris: Éditions R. A. Corrêa, 1934).
20
Winthrop Sargeant, Jazz: Hot and Hybrid (London: The Jazz Book Club, 1959; first published
New York: E. P. Dutton, 1938).
Smith.21 Although it was presented as oral history, Ramsey, Smith and their
contributors in effect created a poetic mythology for early jazz. The redis-
covery and promotion of New Orleans trumpet veteran Bunk Johnson
through concerts and numerous recordings provided a living demonstration
of ‘authenticity’. The successful revival in the late 1930s and early 1940s of the
careers of New Orleans musicians such as Sidney Bechet, ‘Jelly Roll’ Morton
and Kid Ory also owed much to the fervent advocacy of traditionalist jazz
critics.
What quickly developed was a bitter war of words between the supporters
of modern jazz (both swing and later bebop) and the standard-bearers of jazz
revivalism, nicknamed ‘moldy figs’ by their critics. While Rudi Blesh, author
of Shining Trumpets: A History of Jazz was arguably the most vocal supporter of
jazz revivalism,22 Leonard Feather and Barry Ulanov (a Metronome editor from
1943 to 1955) were the leading defenders of modernism. Blesh’s passionate
invective provides a characteristic example of ‘moldy fig’ criticism: ‘Hot
swing, with its riffs, is a highly organized form of instrumental noise devoted
to the superinducement of a wholly unnatural excitement . . . The mass auto-
hypnosis thereupon vents itself in anarchic, orgiastic and dangerous
excitement.’23
Feather’s response to Shining Trumpets was Inside Bebop, later republished as
Inside Jazz, which provided a sympathetic introduction to the music with
historical context, musical examples and brief biographies of the leading
musicians.24 Ulanov, another passionate supporter of modern jazz (and in
particular the music of pianist Lennie Tristano), was in many ways
a characteristic member of the first generation of jazz critics, but his studies
at Columbia with the distinguished New Critic Lionel Trilling anticipated the
way in which jazz critical discourse would develop in the 1950s under the
aegis of Martin Williams at The Jazz Review.
The Jazz Review and New Criticism

By the early 1950s, jazz criticism had achieved a much higher profile nation-
ally, with critic John S. Wilson appointed to the New York Times in 1953 and
21
Frederic Ramsey Jr and Charles Edward Smith (eds.), Jazzmen: The Story of Hot Jazz Told in the Lives of the
Men Who Created It (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1957; first published New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1939).
22
Rudi Blesh, Shining Trumpets: A History of Jazz (New York: Da Capo, 1986; first published Alfred
A. Knopf, 1946).
23
Blesh, Shining Trumpets, p. 290.
24
Leonard Feather, Inside Jazz (New York: Da Capo Press, 1976; first published Inside Bebop, J. J. Robbins,
1949).
466 MARK RACZ
Whitney Balliett to the New Yorker in 1954. Alongside the major specialist
journals (including Downbeat and Metronome), the Atlantic Monthly and Saturday
Review both published occasional articles about jazz, as did men’s magazines
such as Esquire and Playboy. The introduction of the LP led to the rise of liner
notes as a regular vehicle for jazz criticism, and major critics, including Martin
Williams, Nat Hentoff, Amiri Baraka, Ira Gitler, Dan Morgenstern and Orrin
Keepnews, all contributed notes regularly for both the major and the inde-
pendent record labels.
A key development was the founding of The Jazz Review in 1958, co-edited
by Williams and Hentoff, which appeared more or less monthly until 1961. In
spite of its short life, it played a key role in establishing a new critical approach
to writing about jazz. On the surface its content resembled that of other jazz
magazines, with record reviews, feature articles, interviews with musicians
and so forth. But what distinguished it was a new high seriousness in its
editorial policy, and the first article in volume 1 no. 1 was Gunther Schuller’s
‘Sonny Rollins and the Challenge of Thematic Improvisation’, a detailed
analytical study of Sonny Rollins’ ‘Blue Seven’, complete with transcribed
excerpts.25 Leading musicians were commissioned to review recordings,
including Cecil Taylor on John Coltrane, George Russell on Jimmy Giuffre,
Benny Golson on Sonny Rollins and, surprisingly but effectively, Julian
‘Cannonball’ Adderley on Dave Brubeck. In addition to the in-house team
of critics, there were also articles by guest writers, including leading European
critics such as André Hodeir and Max Harrison.
Martin Williams seems to have played the central role in creating an identity
for The Jazz Review, and it was his introduction of a high modernist critical
approach to writing about jazz that was to prove so influential over the
coming decades. Williams studied English literature and literary criticism at
Columbia University, and as he later recalled: ‘I was [particularly] influenced
by the New Critics. They were talking about a novel as if it were a novel,
a poem as if it were a poem, a play as if it were a play.’26 For Williams and other
New Critics, a work of art needed to be analysed for its formal qualities,
understood with reference only to other works of art and with no regard for
either biographical or social contexts. Alongside this, the critic’s role was to
establish a (very small) canon of accepted ‘masterpieces’ based on specific
criteria, to analyse other works in relation to the canon and to indicate the
ways in which they meet or fall short of the criteria. At the same time, a clear,
25
Gunther Schuller, ‘Sonny Rollins and the Challenge of Thematic Improvisation’, The Jazz Review
(November 1958).
26
Gennari, Blowin’ Hot and Cold, p. 186.
overarching, linear historical narrative is constructed on the premise of the

organic and seemingly inevitable development of the art form through the
contribution of a small number of key innovators and downplaying the roles
of more marginal or peripheral figures.
Williams was also deeply impressed with André Hodeir’s Jazz: Its Evolution
and Essence, first published in English in 1956, whose highly selective
approach to and relatively detailed technical analysis of jazz must have sug-
gested a way in which he could adapt his studies of English literature to
music.27 Hodeir, a distinguished composer in both classical music and jazz,
establishes the highly self-conscious seriousness of his approach in the intro-
duction, which quotes both Paul Valéry and Albert Camus. At a time when the
acrimonious disputes between the ‘moldy figs’ and the modernists were still
fresh in the memory, particularly in France, Hodeir argued for a view of jazz
which recognises a logical, orderly evolution in which both New Orleans jazz
and bebop are equally valued as part of a continuum. Just as importantly, he
values the presence of formal compositional processes in improvisation, or
‘symmetry and contrast’ as he describes it,28 and uses motivic analysis to
demonstrate unity. Both of these elements were to become key constituents
of Williams’ approach.
Williams’ New Critical approach to jazz is most clearly embodied in The
Jazz Tradition, in which each chapter focuses on a single major figure, ranging
in the first edition from King Oliver to Ornette Coleman.29 The role of each
musician in the development of the music is presented, and key recordings are
identified and discussed. Although the main emphasis is on the musician as
improviser, Williams also recognises the role of composers such as Duke
Ellington and Thelonious Monk who supposedly ‘consolidated’ the innova-
tions of their improviser predecessors (Louis Armstrong and Charlie Parker,
respectively, for Ellington and Monk). A canon of major recordings is deli-
neated and, indeed, was eventually published in 1973 as the Smithsonian
Collection of Classic Jazz, a set of LPs with an accompanying book. Although
Williams’ rather dry and formal style has not aged well, his selection of
‘masterpieces’ was intelligently made, and allowing for the time constraints,
few contemporary critics would disagree with his choice of key recordings by
(for example) Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie, Charlie Parker
and Thelonious Monk.
27
André Hodeir, Jazz: its Evolution and Essence, trans. David Noakes (New York: Black Cat, 1961; first
published New York: Grove Press, 1956).
28
Ibid., p. 69.
29
Martin Williams, The Jazz Tradition, new ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993; 1st ed. 1970).
468 MARK RACZ
Williams was an acute and sensitive listener and his writings had a widely
acknowledged influence on several subsequent generations of jazz critics,
including writers as varied in their approaches as Amiri Baraka, Gary
Giddins and Stanley Crouch. Above all, his use of an established critical
discourse, intelligently applied to jazz, was central in establishing it as an art
form worthy of serious attention. His vigorous and sustained advocacy of
Ornette Coleman in the late 1950s, a time when Coleman was facing con-
siderable resistance from both musicians and listeners, provided a model of
critical open-mindedness to new musical developments.
More important, and in common with both Hodeir and Schuller, was
a narrowly defined understanding of the nature of improvisation. In all
three writers, there is a seeming frustration with what they regard as the
limitations of improvisation. As André Hodeir expressed it: ‘many recorded
improvisations suffer from a lack of continuity that becomes overwhelmingly
apparent upon careful and repeated listening’. In other words, the improvisa-
tions lack a sense of balanced phrase structure, sequential repetition, motivic
development and other recognised elements of traditional composition in
Western classical music. But interestingly, he also correctly recognises
Charlie Parker’s ‘melodic discontinuity that yet avoids incoherence’.30
Gunther Schuller’s article ‘Sonny Rollins and Thematic Improvisation’ in
the first issue of Jazz Review goes even further, stating that ‘The average
improvisation is mostly a stringing together of unrelated ideas’, and his article
attempts to demonstrate that Rollins’ solo in ‘Blue 7’ is exceptional in show-
ing a developed and subtle use of motivic development, comparable to that of
a written composition.31 In his book The Swing Era, he likewise praises Bunny
Berigan’s two solos on Benny Goodman’s ‘King Porter Stomp’ as ‘miniature
compositions which many writing-down [sic] composers would be envious of
having created, even after days of work’.32 On the one hand, this begs the
question as to whether these solos had been carefully developed and refined by
Berigan over many performances (as we know is the case with Berigan’s
recording of ‘I Can’t Get Started’, which Schuller also discusses), and on the
other, it avoids tackling the more fundamental issue of whether improvisation
should always, by its nature, resemble written composition.33
Williams’ tacit assumption that improvisation should in some way demon-
strate the particular ‘coherence’ of written composition is most apparent in
his self-confessed critical resistance to John Coltrane. Writing about his 1961
Village Vanguard recordings of ‘Impressions’ and ‘Chasin’ the Trane’ he
30
Hodeir, Jazz, p. 104. 31
Schuller, ‘Sonny Rollins’, 6. 32
Schuller, Swing Era, p. 468.
33
Ibid., p. 471.
makes this explicit: ‘Coltrane’s use of reiterated phrases on these pieces seems
to me neither sequential nor organizational nor truly developmental’, imply-
ing that some or all of these qualities are essential elements of coherent
improvising while remaining vague about why Coltrane’s almost obsessively
motivic improvising does not fit his criteria.34
Gunther Schuller’s two major books on jazz (Early Jazz and The Swing Era)
are simultaneously a culmination of the 1950s critical tradition and seminal
works of jazz musicology and analysis.35 Both books include numerous
notated examples (of varying accuracy) and rely on the relatively limited
technique of motivic analysis as a means of demonstrating musical unity.
Early Jazz also retains the concept of an historical sequence of major innova-
tors whose work can best be appreciated through a narrowly defined canon of
masterpieces. However, Schuller’s omnivorous musical curiosity led him to
adopt a more inclusive approach than Williams, and Early Jazz includes
a detailed consideration of the then little-known trumpeter Jabbo Smith,
a lengthy footnote on Paul Whiteman, who for decades had been a target of
critical opprobrium, and high praise of several African American territory
bands (e.g. Alphonso Trent, Jesse Stone and Floyd Troy), whose names,
much less their recordings would have been virtually unknown even to
seasoned jazz listeners in the 1960s.
This inclusivity is even more evident in The Swing Era, where alongside
detailed consideration of the canonical soloists and big bands there is plentiful
and often sympathetic consideration of less heralded musicians and ensem-
bles, including Erskine Hawkins, Boots and His Buddies, and Horace
Henderson. There is often a sense of revisionism in his judgements about
major artists, including his very high praise for the traditionally undervalued
bands of Cab Calloway and Chick Webb as well as for well-known white
bandleaders such as Glenn Miller, Tommy Dorsey and Harry James, who were
rarely discussed seriously by jazz critics. He values the early 1940s recordings
of the Count Basie band with their more considered arrangements over
Basie’s universally more widely admired recordings of the late 1930s, which
by contrast emphasise the band’s outstanding soloists such as Lester Young
and Herschel Evans. He likewise prefers Benny Goodman’s early 1940s
recordings with sophisticated arrangements by Eddie Sauter and Mel Powell
to Goodman’s more celebrated earlier recordings. In both these latter cases, it
is clear that Schuller’s own interest in developing a ‘third stream’ of
34
Martin Williams, The Jazz Tradition, new ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993; 1st ed. 1970),
p. 233.
35
Gunther Schuller, Early Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968).
470 MARK RACZ
contemporary music which would combine jazz with more ‘classical’ ele-
ments predisposed him to champion composers and arrangers who were
attempting to break away from the relatively formulaic approach of much
Swing Era music. It is also interesting to note that in his chapter on small
group jazz he includes a number of full transcriptions of the rhythm section
along with the solo improvisations. This foreshadows what would become
accepted practice in the 1990s, when soloist-rhythm section interaction
became increasingly recognised as fundamental to the critical understanding
of jazz performance.
Williams’ co-editor of Jazz Review, Nat Hentoff, was another of the most
significant figures of this generation and contributed extensively to all the
major jazz periodicals as well as the mainstream press, including a long tenure
at the Village Voice. From 1960 to 1961, Hentoff was co-owner and manager of
Candid records, and the range and quality of the forty albums Hentoff
produced for his label are a lasting testament to his discrimination as
a critic. They include many of the most important jazz albums of the time,
including Mingus Presents Mingus, The World of Cecil Taylor, Booker Little’s Up
Front and Max Roach’s We Insist! Freedom Now Suite.
Another high-profile and much-admired writer whose career began in the
1950s was the longtime New Yorker critic Whitney Balliett. Balliett’s literary
style, rich in sometimes extravagant metaphor and vivid description, stands in
contrast to the high seriousness of the New Critical methodology of Williams
and the more analytical approach of Schuller. His extended series of profiles,
beginning in 1962, utilises extensive quotations from interviews with his
subjects interspersed with biographical and/or critical reflections. This
became and has remained a much utilised format in jazz criticism:
The pianist and composer Joe Bushkin is the size of a bean pole, but he is
highly detailed. He has a handsome, foxy face, a sharp nose, wavy black hair
that is turning gray, and Lincoln eyes. His face, worn by the winds of music, is
wrinkled . . . He becomes a dervish when he plays . . . He sways back and forth,
as if he were rowing in thick weather, sometimes leaning back so far he
disappears. His small feet dance intricately and furiously beneath the piano,
and he marks successful arpeggios by shooting his right leg into the air.36
Although Balliett wrote perceptive reviews of modern jazz musicians, his

sympathies were clearly with an earlier generation of swing-era musicians,
and he is at his best writing about Pee Wee Russell, Ben Webster, Henry ‘Red’
Allen or, an especial favourite, the great drummer ‘Big Sid’ Catlett.
36
Reprinted in Whitney Balliett, ‘Demi-Centennial’, American Musicians I I : Seventy-One Portraits in Jazz
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), p. 245.
The 1960s and Free Jazz

Amiri Baraka had, superficially at least, a typically varied career as a music
critic in the 1960s, writing concert and record reviews, liner notes, promoting
concerts, co-editing a short-lived mimeographed journal devoted to Black
Arts (The Cricket) and producing recordings for his own equally short-lived
record label (provocatively named Jihad). However, in contrast to most other
jazz critics, he also had a distinguished career as a poet and playwright. He
produced a recording of his play A Black Mass with incidental music by Sun Ra,
and recited his own poetry on recordings by both the New York Art Quartet
and Sunny Murray. His two books of criticism from the 1960s, Blues People
(1963) and Black Music (1967), are among the most influential books of the
time.37 They form a neatly contrasted pair; Blues People is an extended essay,
attempting to place African American music within its social and political
context, while Black Music is a collection of Baraka’s music journalism between
1959 and 1967.
Blues People was truly groundbreaking, in that it was the first book by an
African American writer to address at length the issue of the relationship
between blues, jazz and the African American experience. Baraka’s key refrain
was that ‘The most expressive Negro music of any given period will be an
exact reflection of what the Negro himself is.’38 He acknowledges the quality
of much white jazz, but considers it ‘at its most profound instance, a learned
art’.39 He sees bebop with its ‘wilfully harsh, anti-assimilationist sound’ as
representing a rejection of post-war American middle-class consensus by
African American musicians, but regards 1950s hard bop, with its use of
blues and gospel materials, as self-conscious, stylised and commercially dri-
ven. Finally, Baraka interprets the burgeoning avant-garde of Coleman,
Coltrane and Taylor as an attempt to ‘restore to jazz its valid separation
from, and anarchic disregard of Western popular forms’.40
Consisting of a number of disparate reviews, interviews and short articles,
Black Music provides an extraordinarily broad and vivid panorama of jazz in
the 1960s set against a background of the rise of the civil rights movement and
black nationalism. Although he writes sympathetically about the earlier gen-
eration of modernists (for example Monk, Rollins and Roy Haynes), he is at
his most characteristic and passionate writing about the avant-garde. Baraka
was a discriminating critic, and almost all of the artists he supported, includ-
ing Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders, Cecil Taylor, Sun Ra and Archie Shepp,
37
LeRoi Jones [Amiri Baraka], Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York: William Morrow,
1963); Black Music (New York: William Morrow, 1967).
38 39 40
Jones, Blues People, p. 137. Ibid., p. 153. Ibid., p. 225.
472 MARK RACZ
developed into major figures. Fifty years on, the freshness and vividness of his
critical responses remain impressive. Like Whitney Balliett (although with
radically different musical taste and prose style) he was a superb stylist, using
an extravagantly free-flowing, hyperbolic and improvisatory language which
manages to capture much of the energy and unpredictability of the music he
admired, particularly when writing about John Coltrane:
TRANE is now a scope of feeling. A more fixed traveller, whose wildest

onslaughts are now gorgeous artefacts not even deaf people should miss.41
The long tag of ‘Afro-Blue’, with Elvin thrashing and cursing beneath
Trane’s line is unbelievable. Beautiful has nothing to do with it, but it is. (I
got up and danced while writing these notes, screaming at Elvin to cool it) You
feel when this is finished, amidst the crashing cymbals, bombarded tom-toms,
and above it all Coltrane’s soprano singing like any song you can remember,
that it really did not have to end at all, that this music could have gone on and
on like the wild pulse of all living.42
Significantly, one of Baraka’s first published essays was in The Jazz Review, and
Blues People has a number of quotations from leading white critics, including
Marshall Stearns and Martin Williams. Like Williams, he founders when he
attempts to use technical language to describe the music (for example, they
both have trouble attempting to describe John Coltrane’s musical language of
the early 1960s). However, as the decade progressed, Baraka moved further
away from the language and assumptions of New Criticism, and towards
a critical agenda shaped by his increasingly radical political views. An inter-
esting measure of this is his changing attitude towards the participation of
white musicians in jazz. In the earlier part of the decade, he frequently praises
white musicians such as Roswell Rudd, Charlie Haden and Scott LaFaro,
often without mentioning their ethnicity. But by 1966, in his essay ‘The
Burton Greene Affair’, he contrasts the ‘beautiful writhe of the black spirit-
energy sound’ of black saxophonists Marion Brown and Pharoah Sanders with
the ‘white, super-hip (MoDErN) pianist’ Burton Greene, described as ‘bang-
ing aimlessly at the keyboard’.43 Greene was a much-respected musician who
collaborated regularly with many leading African American musicians, and
Baraka’s scorn was clearly a reflection of his own deepening engagement with
the black nationalist movement, rather than a strictly critical evaluation.
In the final essay of Black Music, ‘The Changing Same (R&B and New Black
Music)’, first published in 1967, Baraka argues that both ‘Rhythm and Blues’
(in particular the soul music of the mid-sixties) and the New Black Music (Free
Jazz) are a direct expression of the African American’s position in American
41 42 43
Jones, Black Music, p. 173. Jones, Black Music, p. 66. Ibid., p. 137–8.
society, a reiteration of the fundamental premise of Blues People, but with

a new militancy. He also sees an all-embracing spirituality as a key ingredient
in the music (John Coltrane, Albert Ayler, Pharoah Sanders and Sun Ra), as
well as political activism or ‘social consciousness’ (Charles Mingus, Max
Roach and Archie Shepp). It is interesting to note that Baraka’s bringing
together of Free Jazz and the popular African American music of the mid-
sixties in one overarching aesthetic anticipates a whole range of musical
developments in the late 1960s and 1970s. These include Miles Davis’ fusion
as well as the work of many musicians who combined Free Jazz with elements
of popular black music, often with a spiritual and/or political agenda, includ-
ing Archie Shepp, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Byard Lancaster, Phil Ranelin
and Joe McPhee.
The second major critical study of jazz by an African American writer was
A. B. Spellman’s Four Lives in the Bebop Business. In chapters on Cecil Taylor,
Ornette Coleman, Herbie Nichols and Jackie McLean, Spellman adopted the
format of Balliett’s New Yorker profiles and skilfully interweaves lengthy
quotations from interviews with his own commentary. However, in contrast
to Balliett, Spellman’s emphasis is on the challenges faced by his subjects in
their professional lives, and in addition to their reflections on music, he elicits
remarkably candid views on race, drugs and the barriers faced by African
American musicians in a business dominated by whites.
Much of the critical reaction to 1960s Free Jazz in the mainstream jazz press
bore a striking resemblance to the rhetoric of the ‘moldy figs’ in the 1940s. In
the 23 November 1962 issue of Downbeat, Kenneth Tynan wrote of a live
performance of John Coltrane’s quintet: ‘Coltrane and Dolphy seem intent on
deliberately destroying [swing] . . . They seem bent on pursuing an anarchistic
course in their music that can but be termed anti-jazz.’44 Ironically, it was
Leonard Feather, the champion of modern jazz in the 1940s, who became one
of the most outspoken critics of Free Jazz.
In general, jazz criticism of the 1960s tended to view Free Jazz as
a sociopolitical phenomenon, with the actual musical content left unanalysed,
and it was Ekkehard Jost, a European jazz musician and writer who first
attempted to explicate the music in a way which parallels Gunther
Schuller’s approach in Early Jazz. Jost is keen to demonstrate the rigour and
intellectual cogency of Free Jazz, and uses numerous transcriptions, diagrams
(Don Cherry’s Complete Communion), minute-by-minute descriptions of
recordings (Cecil Taylor’s ‘Unit Structures’) and even ‘electro-acoustic regis-
tration of the levels’ (Albert Ayler’s ‘Witches and Devils’) to underline his
44
Carl Woideck (ed.), The John Coltrane Companion (New York: Omnibus Press, 1998).
474 MARK RACZ
case.45 In his analysis of John Coltrane’s Ascension, he compares the approaches

of the different soloists, using Archie Shepp’s distinction between ‘post-
Ornette players’ and ‘energy-sound players’, the former employing motivic
and sequential elements as a basis for improvisation, and the latter using
timbre and vocalised sound.46 He identifies John Tchicai’s solo as being
unified by a recurring minor third plus major second motif derived from the
opening motif of the piece, whereas Pharoah Sanders’ solo contains ‘hardly
any lines that have a recognisable context’, serving only a ‘kinetic purpose’.
He furthermore sees Coltrane’s own solo as uniting these two approaches
‘that of tone colour and that of melody-and-motive’.47 In contrast to
Williams’ insistence on the primacy of motivic development and sequence,
Jost recognises and attempts to describe alternative ways of creating musical
coherence.
If Baraka was both theoretician and prophet, Spellman the literary portrai-
tist and Jost the musician analyst, then the journalist and photographer
Valerie Wilmer might best be described as the social historian of Free Jazz.
As Serious as Your Life vividly communicates both the tribulations and tri-
umphs of the burgeoning New York avant-garde jazz community of the
1960s. She also devotes two chapters to the role of women in jazz, addressing
their ambivalent stature with a directness unusual at the time.
Ralph Ellison, Albert Murray and Stanley Crouch

The occasional jazz criticism of the African American novelist Ralph Ellison
provided the starting point for two of the most prominent jazz critics at the
end of the twentieth century: Albert Murray and Stanley Crouch. In his
famous review of Blues People, Ellison argued against Baraka’s view of jazz as
an exclusive expression of a separate African American culture, seeing it
instead as an expression of a pluralistic, multifaceted American culture.48
For Ellison, the African American experience was ‘an important segment of
the larger American experience – not lying at the bottom of it, but inter-
twined, diffused in its very texture’.49 Ellison also viewed jazz as a form of
social interaction both among the musicians and with their audience (espe-
cially an audience of dancers): ‘The blues, the singer, the band and the dancers
formed the vital whole of jazz as an institutional form, and even today neither
part is quite complete without the rest.’50 This interaction is in stark contrast
45
Ekkehard Jost, Free Jazz (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994; first published Universal Edition, 1974).
46 47
Ibid., p. 90. Ibid., p. 90.
48 49
Ralph Ellison, Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964), pp. 247–58. Ibid., p. 172.
50
Ibid., p. 244.
to the role of the critic as aloof bystander that John Gennari evokes in his
account of John Hammond and Leonard Feather at the Savoy Ballroom in
1935.51
But most importantly for late twentieth-century debates about jazz, Ellison
sees the music as essentially life-affirming and the role of the artist as a search
for an individual voice within the tradition. He brings all these strands
together in one memorable description of 1930s jam sessions:
The delicate balance struck between strong individual personality and group
during these early jam sessions was a marvel of social organisation. I had
learned too that the end of all this discipline and technical mastery was the
desire to express an affirmative way of life through its musical tradition and
that this tradition insisted that each artist achieve this creativity within its
frame.52
Ellison’s essays on the guitarist Charlie Christian (a personal friend) and the
singer Jimmy Rushing are marvellous evocations by a great writer of
Oklahoma City in the late 1920s, capturing the poetry of time and place,
and the interweaving of jazz within the African American community:
In those days, I lived near the Rock Island roundhouse, where, with a steady
clanging of bells and a great groaning of wheels along the rails, switch engines
made up trains of freight unceasingly. Yet often in the late-spring night I could
hear Rushing as I lay four blocks away in bed, carrying to me as clear as a full-
bored riff on ‘Hot Lips’ Paige’s [sic] horn. Heard thus, across the dark blocks
lined with locust trees, through the night throbbing with the natural aural
imagery of the blues, with high-balling trains, departing bells, lonesome guitar
chords simmering up from a shack in the alley – it was easy to imagine the
voice as setting the pattern to which the instruments of the Blue Devils
Orchestra and all the random sounds of night arose, affirming, as it were,
some ideal native to the time and to the land.53
Albert Murray was a close friend of Ellison’s, and it is Ellison’s aesthetic which
underlies Murray’s major work of jazz criticism, Stomping the Blues.54 Murray
shares with Ellison his view of ‘blues music’ (which for Murray includes jazz)
as ‘affirmation and celebration’:55
The blues as such are synonymous with low spirits. Blues music is not. With all
its preoccupation with the most disturbing aspects of life, it is something
contrived specifically to be performed as entertainment. Not only is its express
purpose to make people feel good, which is to say in high spirits, but in the
51 52 53
Gennari, Blowin’ Hot and Cold, p. 23. Ellison, Shadow and Act, p. 189. Ibid., pp. 242–3.
54
Albert Murray, Stomping the Blues (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1976).
55
Murray, Stomping the Blues, p. 166.
476 MARK RACZ
process of doing so it is actually expected to generate a disposition that is both

elegantly playful and heroic in its nonchalance.56
For Murray, jazz is both communal ritual and a force for social cohesion
within the African American community, but he also shares with Ellison the
perception of jazz as a central component of a broader American culture. He
considers Duke Ellington as ‘the most representative American composer’ in
comparison with Ives, Copland, Cage and Carter, among others, whom he
describes as ‘if not downright European, at least as European as American’.57
Murray is exceptional among jazz critics in that his writing had a very
tangible influence on the development of both a major artist (Wynton
Marsalis) and a significant cultural institution (Jazz at Lincoln Center),
whose establishment owed much to the advocacy of Murray’s friend Stanley
Crouch. Crouch was undoubtedly the most vocal, provocative and controver-
sial jazz critic of the late twentieth century. In the early part of his career, he
worked as a drummer, performing and recording with many of the leading
avant-garde musicians of the 1970s. He gradually became disillusioned with
the avant-garde and by 1980 he had given up performing and begun to write
jazz criticism. Many of Crouch’s basic themes stem directly from Ellison and
Murray, including the affirmative nature of jazz and its dependence upon
tradition.
For Crouch, ‘the irrefutable jazz fundamentals that have maintained them-
selves from generation to generation [are]: 4/4 swing, blues, the meditative
ballad, and the Spanish tinge’.58 His bêtes noires are the ‘avant-garde frauds
and sellouts to the rock-and-roll God of fusion’,59 as well as any attempts to
broaden the remit of jazz to include elements outside of his four ‘irrefutable
fundamentals’: ‘[Jazz is] now under assault by those who would love to make
jazz no more than an “improvised” music free of definition.’60 ‘Putting the
White Man in Charge’, his notorious attack on trumpeter Dave Douglas, is
only a more extreme example of Crouch’s polemical intolerance of jazz falling
outside his strict definition.61 Crouch’s ‘fundamentalism’, with its clear set-
ting of parameters and boundaries for jazz, carries with it distant and para-
doxical echoes of the critical controversy over Ellington’s extended works, the
rhetoric of the ‘moldy figs’ and the ‘anti-jazz’ of Kenneth Tynan.
But putting aside his polemics and his famously (and sometimes literally)
combative approach, Crouch remains a musically astute and intelligent critic.
In his lengthy interview with pianist Ethan Iverson, his genuine enthusiasm
56 57
Ibid., p. 45. Ibid., p. 224.
58 59
Stanley Crouch, Considering Genius (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2006), p. 210. Ibid., p. 228.
60 61
Ibid., p. 211. Ibid., pp. 232–4.
for and detailed knowledge of a wide range of musical styles is evident and he
speaks warmly of the Henry Threadgill Sextett [sic], Air, Julius Hemphill and
the Art Ensemble of Chicago, all standard-bearers of the avant-garde.62 In
‘The Presence is Always the Point’ he even describes Herbie Hancock’s fusion
band Mwandishi as ‘one of the great ones [ensembles] of that era and perhaps
of any’.63 He has written about his admiration not only for Ellison and
Murray, but also for Williams, Schuller, Balliett and even Baraka (in his pre–
black-nationalist phase), and his writing can at various times suggest the high
seriousness of Williams, the extravagant metaphors of Balliett or the hyper-
bolic prose-poetry of Baraka:
On the front line were the Texas tenors: Arnett Cobb, who stands on his metal
crutches and shapes each saxophone note like an individual bellows crafted to
build heroic fire; Illinois Jacquet, a barrelhouse bull on wheels roaring into red
capes; and Buddy Tate, who can rattle the pulpit of the bandstand with his
sensuous renditions of blues-toned scripture.64
Whereas both Ellison and Murray grew up in the Swing Era and were
ultimately most at home with (if not positively nostalgic for) the music of
the 1930s, Crouch saw himself as an advocate for both the present and the
future of jazz and determined to help shape its development. In his 1986 essay
‘Jazz Criticism and its Effect on the Art Form’, Crouch set out his agenda:
‘What I am concerned about, and what I see as the task facing the serious
writer about jazz, is how the literature on the music might help create
a following for the art in this country that would parallel the listening public
that European concert music has.’65
Crouch’s advocacy was crucial in the founding in 1987 of Jazz at Lincoln
Center (JALC), initially as a concert series with Wynton Marsalis as Artistic
Director and Crouch as Artistic Consultant. In 1991 it became a department
within Lincoln Center with a year-round programme of activities, and in 2004
its own purpose-built venues opened at Columbus Circle. The establishment
of JALC and what was perceived by some to be its narrow range of program-
ming, including a neglect of avant-garde jazz and allegations of ‘Crow Jim’ or
reverse racism in its sparing employment of white musicians, was the subject
of endless commentary and acrimonious debate in both the specialist and the
mainstream press. The controversy almost threatened to overshadow what
was by any standards a remarkable achievement: the creation of a major
62
Stanley Crouch interviewed by Ethan Iverson, originally posted on Do the Math (site now defunct)
(February 2007), available at https://ethaniverson.com/interviews (accessed January 2018).
63 64 65
Crouch, Considering Genius, p. 275. Ibid., p. 194–5. Ibid., p. 227.
478 MARK RACZ
publicly funded arts organisation dedicated to jazz and headed by a young

African American musician.
Crouch’s view of Marsalis was based clearly on Martin William’s concept of
key innovators leading to step changes in the evolution of the music. Whereas
Williams saw Louis Armstrong (the improviser) as innovator and Duke
Ellington (the composer) as consolidator, Crouch sees both roles fulfilled in
Marsalis, with the substitution of Gillespie for Armstrong:
As the youngster developed and his vision clarified, he went on to become

both the Dizzy Gillespie and the Duke Ellington of his generation. He created
a new plane of technique and rhythmic complexity for his instrument as
Gillespie had and went on to compose perhaps the most wide-ranging and
impressive body of music since the death of Ellington.66
Jazz Criticism and Postmodernism

As jazz critic of the Village Voice from 1973 until 2003, Gary Giddins held
a position of unusual prominence in the mainstream media. His inspiration
and mentor as a critic was Martin Williams, but in response to the increasingly
diverse range of jazz which developed in the 1970s and 1980s, Giddins broke
ranks with Williams’ vision of a monolithic, single stream of jazz tradition in
favour of a broader critical perspective. In his essay on pianist Jaki Byard in his
1985 anthology Rhythm-a-ning, he admits that ‘For more than a decade, jazz
has been unencumbered by the sort of lodestar genius who so effectively
points new paths that his contemporaries lose sight of the old ones.’67
Whereas Stanley Crouch saw Wynton Marsalis as the next great innovator
in Williams’s lineage, Giddins viewed Marsalis’s music as only one aspect of
a broader ‘neo-classicism’, or what would later be described as postmodern-
ism. Giddins admired (if occasionally overstated) the blend of innovation and
respect for a wide range of jazz traditions in the work of musicians as diverse
as Muhal Richard Abrams, Julius Hemphill, John Carter and Don Pullen.68
This tension between visions of jazz defined as a single, narrowly defined
discipline or as a broad church of diversity and innovation was central to the
debates about the music in the 1980s and 1990s, particularly in the United
States. In the introduction to his 1998 book Visions of Jazz (with its carefully
chosen plural in the title) Giddins wrote disparagingly of ‘the guardians of
musical morality . . . [who] mean to cleanse jazz of impurities transmitted
66 67
Ibid., p. 289. Gary Giddins, Rhythm-a-ning (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), p. 3.
68
Gary Giddins, Visions of Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
through contact with the European classics, American pop, new music, and
other mongrel breeds’.69
Francis Davis succeeded Giddins at the Village Voice and was another
champion of stylistic diversity. Although he was less prolific than Giddins,
his reviews and profiles represent some of the best jazz writing of the past
thirty years. His profiles of Sheila Jordan, Roswell Rudd and Charles Gayle are
excellent examples of his particular affinity for musicians he calls ‘outcats’:
artists whose uncompromising individuality has tended to marginalise their
work. Howard Mandel also embraced the plurality of contemporary jazz, but
whereas Davis leaned towards a pessimistic view of the future of jazz, Mandel
celebrated the ability of musicians to constantly renew and reinvigorate their
art. Their contrasting world views are neatly encapsulated in their book titles:
Davis’ Bebop and Nothingness and Jazz and its Discontents as compared to
Mandel’s Future Jazz.70 Mandel showed a particular awareness and apprecia-
tion of the New York ‘downtown’ scene of the 1980s as well as the Brooklyn-
based M-Base coalition of Steve Coleman.
Apart from the central issues of tradition versus innovation and the ‘legiti-
macy’ of stylistic diversity within jazz, a third important area of critical
discussion was the role of composition in contemporary jazz, echoing
Gunther Schuller’s ideal of the ‘third stream’ in the 1950s and 60s. In
a 1983 essay, Giddins quotes Anthony Davis on the ‘shift from the pre-
eminence of the performer, the player, to what I believe is the natural ascen-
dance of the composer’.71 Davis’s street-cred as an improviser (with Wadada
Leo Smith, David Murray and James Newton among others) combined with
his success as a composer of large-scale notated works (including his acclaimed
opera X) gave him a high visibility in the 1980s, and he was profiled by
Giddins, Davis and Mandel. Henry Threadgill, James Newton, Anthony
Braxton and George Lewis all developed highly individual approaches to
reconciling notation and predetermined structure with improvisation, and
all received considerable critical attention.
A particular favourite of the critics in the 1980s was David Murray, whose
long, freewheeling tenor improvisations drew on the avant-garde tradition
(particularly Albert Ayler) as well as earlier players such as Paul Gonsalves and
Ben Webster, in contexts ranging from solo saxophone to octet and big band.
Murray was also a member of the World Saxophone Quartet, whose approach
69
Giddins, Visions, p. 8.
70
Francis Davis, Bebop and Nothingness: Jazz and Pop at the End of the Century (New York: Schirmer Books
1996); Francis Davis, Jazz and its Discontents: A Francis Davis Reader (New York: Da Capo Press 2004);
Howard Mandel, Future Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press 1999).
71
Giddins, Rhythm-a-ning, p. 59.
480 MARK RACZ
seemed, at the time, to typify stylistic diversity and the combination of

tradition and innovation, as well as a successful balance of compositional
structure and improvisation. It is worth noting that Martin Williams, in
a late essay, identified the four members of the quartet (Julius Hemphill,
David Murray, Oliver Lake and Hamiet Bluiett) as collectively taking on the
mantle of Morton, Ellington, Monk and Mingus as composer-consolidators of
the avant-garde tradition stretching back to the 1960s.72
African American critics have, of course, continued to play a central role in
developing discourses about jazz. A key work of the 1970s is Notes and Tones:
Musician-to-Musician Interviews by the drummer Arthur Taylor, a selection of
his interviews with a wide range of musicians.73 As both an African American
and a much-respected musician, he was able to broach controversial topics
related to politics, race and American society, as well as music, and to elicit
frank replies from his interviewees. Dizzy Gillespie, interviewed by Taylor in
1970 commented: ‘I think the idea now is for blacks to write about the history
of our music. It’s time for us to do it ourselves and tell it like it is . . . The
whites have a whitewash look at our music.’74
A comparison of the critical views of saxophonist Sonny Stitt by a white
critic (Martin Williams) and an African American critic (Gerald Early) pro-
vides a clear illustration of the difference between a strictly formalist approach
to criticism and one that situates the music within its social context in the
African American community. Williams notes Stitt’s dependence on Charlie
Parker’s style, while also acknowledging his own individuality: ‘He simply
finds his own voice in Parker’s musical language. He may construct a solo
almost entirely out of Parker’s ideas, but he will play them so as to convince
you that he discovered each of them for himself.’75 Early acknowledges the
Parker influence, but notes that ‘Stitt reached an entirely different audience
from Bird’s. Parker appealed to the white and black hipsters and intellectuals;
Stitt, on the other hand, was a great draw for the ordinary, working-class folk
whose favourite jazzmen did not have to be cultural rebels or the subject of
articles in Esquire.’76 Early also reminisces about the tenor sax battles Stitt
held with Gene Ammons in Philadelphia nightclubs, recalling Ralph Ellison’s
evocation of Oklahoma City in the 1920s: ‘During Stitt’s solos, the chorus
would be: “Make it talk, Sonny, make it talk,” or “Blow that shit, my man, and
work it on out.” The music was extraordinarily loud; on a summer evening
72
Williams, The Jazz Tradition, pp. 254–9.
73
Arthur Taylor, Notes and Tones: Musician-to-Musician Interviews, 2nd revised ed. (New York: Oxford
74
Ibid., p. 127.
75
Martin Williams, Jazz in Its Time (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), p. 112.
76
Gerald Early, Tuxedo Junction (Hopewell: Ecco Perss, 1989), p. 321.
you could stand outside the nightclub, as I did when I was a youngster, and
hear everything quite clearly.’77
Greg Tate is another African American writer whose journalism includes
social, racial and political commentary as well as jazz criticism. His style has
much of the flair and linguistic energy of Baraka at his best, and like Baraka, he
understands the music as the central expression of African American experi-
ence. In his obituary of Miles Davis he wrote: ‘For some of us coming from the
African-centric tip, Miles Davis is the black aesthetic. He doesn’t just repre-
sent it, he defines it . . . What black also meant to Miles was supreme intelli-
gence, elegance, creativity, and funk. Miles worked black culture
encyclopedically – from the outhouse to the penthouse and back again.’78
Unlike many critics, both white and African American, Tate sees Miles’ fusion
music of the 1970s not as a sell-out, but as a precursor of a wide range of
contemporary musical styles: ‘Punk, hip-hop, house, new jack swing, world-
beat, ambient music, and dub are all presaged in the records Miles made
between 1969 and 1975.’79
Jazz and the Internet

With the rapidly evolving medium of the Internet, any summary of current
trends must be inevitably provisional and in danger of being almost immedi-
ately out of date. At the same time, it is impossible to omit discussion of it,
because it is increasingly the case that much of the most engaging and
intelligent jazz criticism is now online. I have restricted my comments to
websites, blogs and forums which are relatively stable and have had
a significant lifespan.
The major print journals all have online presences, with tables of contents
of current issues, news items and brief CD reviews or other ‘tasters’ for their
magazines. Bill Shoemaker’s Point of Departure is a free access online journal
including feature articles, interviews, CD reviews and editorial comment, and
unusually for the medium, with a format and article lengths comparable to
print journals.80
There are innumerable jazz bloggers, including critics, musicians and non-
professional but often highly knowledgeable fans. Pianist Ethan Iverson’s
blog Do the Math (https://ethaniverson.com) is an outstanding example of
the potential of the blog as a medium for serious criticism.81 It includes
77 78
Ibid., p. 322. Greg Tate, Flyboy in the Buttermilk (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), p. 86.
79 80
Ibid., p. 88. Available at www.pointofdeparture.org.
81
Available at https://ethaniverson.com [Do the Math, now on Iverson’s personal site].
482 MARK RACZ
information about Iverson’s own performance activities and masterclasses,

but also features detailed articles and interviews with musicians. His lengthy
essays on Bud Powell, Lennie Tristano, James P. Johnson and Ornette
Coleman are of a very high standard, informed by his exemplary musicianship.
His interviews (such as with Billy Hart, George Cables, Keith Jarrett and Bob
Cranshaw), are unconstrained by normal print length, and often elicit a level
of both technical detail and personal candour that is rare in print journalism.
His interview with Wynton Marsalis and his follow-up posts offer a laudably
fair-minded view of Marsalis’ music and the critical controversy surrounding
it, and in his interview with Stanley Crouch he tackles head-on some of
Crouch’s more controversial pronouncements, eliciting lively and good-
humoured responses from a famously combative critic.
The medium of the blog has enabled non-professionals critics to contribute
in ways that were barely possible in the pre-Internet age. Begun in 1968, Jan
Evensmo’s extensive series of ‘solographies’ (single artist discographies with
critical comments about the improvised solos) were initially published pri-
vately, and quickly became difficult to obtain and expensive collector’s items,
but his publication and continuous updating of them on his Jazz Archeology
(sic) website has made a vast archive readily available.82 Rodger Coleman’s
Nuvoid: Sun Ra Sunday is an ongoing and marathon survey of Sun Ra’s vast
recorded output, including both officially issued recordings and countless
bootlegs.83
There are numerous jazz discussion forums on the web. The Organissimo
forum includes among its members many well-known musicians, critics,
record producers and jazz educators, as well as numerous fans.84 As is inevi-
table with the open nature of the medium, the discussions vary enormously,
but at its best there can be a remarkably intelligent, well-informed critical
debate which manages to capture a wide range of opinions (and prejudices)
about the music past and present.
In some respects blog culture may be seen as a return to the spirit of 1930s
jazz criticism, with its proliferation of short-lived magazines, its blurring of
professional and amateur perspectives and above all its sense of highly perso-
nal and passionate engagement with the music. In a similar way, the discus-
sion forum at its best replicates on a global scale the informal, lively debates
characteristic of the ‘Hot Clubs’ of the same period. But the scale and variety
of instantly available material on the Internet far outstrips the amount of
82
Available at www.jazzarcheology.com.
83
Available at nuvoid.blogspot.com [ceased uploading new content as of November 2016].
84
Available at www.organissimo.org.
critical writing available in any previous period. This has inevitably created
a highly disconnected and fragmented corpus of writing, which lacks the
sustained editorial framework provided by print journals such as Downbeat
and Metronome in an earlier era. As Ethan Iverson remarked in a posting on the
Organissimo forum: ‘In the postmodern age, it seems like everything is quite
fragmented, and my work both at the piano and on the blog was never
intended to be more than one of those fragments.’85 At its worst, this frag-
mentation can produce a level of almost impenetrable critical background
noise, but at its best, there is a richness and diversity of perspectives from
critics, musicians and fans that can provide a deeply rewarding counterpoint
to the listening experience, and which bodes well for the continuation of what
has been a long and remarkably sustained tradition of jazz criticism.
85
Ethan Iverson, response on ‘Ethan Iverson interviews Bob Cranshaw’ discussion forum post
(31 May 2014; topic started 28 May 2014), available at www.organissimo.org (accessed January 2018).
. 25 .
Catalysing Latin American Identities: Alejo

Carpentier’s Music Criticism as a Cuban
Case Study
CAROLINE RAE
Despite the rich diversity of cultures, language and musical traditions in the
Latin American world, the vast lands comprising Central and South America
have often been considered a monolithic cultural area when viewed from
a European perspective, issues of identity and belonging tending to be
assumed or over-simplified. While the Franco-American musicologist
Gerard Béhague has suggested that concepts of Latin American identity
remain fluid, even negotiable,1 the Cuban-American scholar Roberto
González Echevarría has observed that the fascination for European culture
throughout Latin America generated anxiety about the perceived cultural and
historical gap between the Old Continent and the New, creating a tension that
‘provoked a pendular movement of attraction and rejection, of servile imita-
tion of Europe and militant mundonovismo’ which has become a feature of the
Latin American cultural consciousness since the early twentieth century.2
During the nineteenth century, when many of the leading musical institu-
tions of Latin America were founded, European cultural colonialism persisted
long after individual states achieved independence. Western European reper-
tories were favoured almost exclusively, especially Italian opera, with major
houses such as the Teatro Solís in Montevideo, Teatro Lírico Fluminense in
Rio de Janeiro and Teatro Colón in Buenos Aires choosing Verdi for their
respective inaugural productions of the 1850s. Even one of the first so-called
national operas of Latin America, La Parisina (1878) by the Italian-trained
Uruguayan composer Tomás Giribaldi, had a strong European descendancy
owing much to Donizetti’s earlier work of the same title in setting an Italian
libretto on an Italian subject based on the poem by English poet Lord Byron.
The style of Latin American opera houses also aped the European as the
1
Gerard Béhague, ‘Latin America’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, available at
www.oxfordmusiconline.com (accessed June 2018).
2
Roberto González Echevarría, Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,
1977), p. 37.
[484]
Catalysing Latin American Identities: Alejo Carpentier 485
ultimate expression of grandeur and refinement; while the Teatro Amazonas

in Brazil (completed in 1895) was built with marble imported from Italy and
furnished with chandeliers of Murano glass from Venice, other opera houses
such as the Teatro Municipal de Santiago (Chile) and Teatro Municipal in São
Paulo were not only designed by French or Italian architects but also directly
modelled on the imperial opulence of the Palais Garnier.
The large number of Cavaillé-Coll organs that were exported to Latin
America during the 1880s and 1890s further testifies to the importance of
French musical culture on the continent, as does the temporary migration of
generations of composers who flocked to France to experience first-hand the
European culture it was then fashionable to emulate. Many studied in Paris
with the objective of returning to their respective homelands imbued with the
perceived mystique of being genuine afrancesados, their musical authority in
Latin America being defined in terms of their European credentials: the
Brazilian Henrique Oswald absorbed the French romantic style so effectively
that he became known as the ‘Brazilian Fauré’; pupils of the Argentinean
Alberto Williams, who had studied with César Franck, were acclaimed in
Buenos Aires as Franck’s ‘musical grandchildren’ (despite their teacher’s
interest in Argentinean Gaucho music); and the Haitian composer-pianist
Ludovic Lamothe, who trained at the Paris Conservatoire with Louis
Diémer, was celebrated as the ‘Black Chopin’.3
Although both France and Italy remained study destinations of choice for
composers well into the twentieth century, the relationship of Latin
Americans with European cultural influences became more complex during
the 1920s owing to an increasing desire to forge a distinctive Latin American
identity – one that was not defined in terms of indebtedness to the Old
Continent, but which acknowledged the fertile blend of indigenous traditions
with those both of the European settlers and Black African slaves that had
become an integral part of the New. This became a particularly potent issue in
Cuba when political opposition to the ultra-conservative regime of Gerardo
Machado by the country’s leading artists and intellectuals, in the form of the
leftist Grupo Minorista, resulted in demands for freedom from ‘Yankee’
imperialism and the quest for a new Cubanidad that recognised African culture
as part of the national profile. As Havana of the time was a major cultural
centre and city of international significance within the Latin American
world – not least because of its pivotal geographical position – the influence
of its vibrant intellectual community extended well beyond the Caribbean to
make Cuba a microcosm of new ideas that echoed throughout Latin America.
3
Nicolas Slonimsky, Music of Latin America (London: Harrap, 1946), pp. 102, 139, 211.
486 CAROLINE RAE
For this reason, this chapter considers issues of identity through a Cuban
lens by investigating the music criticism of Alejo Carpentier (1904–80), one of
the most influential writers of twentieth-century Latin America. The son of an
émigré Frenchman and Swiss-Russian mother who spent his formative years
and adulthood as much in Paris as in Havana,4 Carpentier was placed between
the cultures of the Old Continent and the New. While his cultural background
made him uniquely suited to providing an interface between European and
Latin American influences, it was also in danger of alienating him from the
country with which he sought to align his creative identity when he began
a career in writing; in Cuba, he was considered almost French, but in France
he was also a foreigner and an importer of the culturally exotic. Drawing on
his experiences in Paris both towards the end of the First World War as well as
during the interwar years and later, he sought to counter the entrenched
conservatism of contemporary concert life in Havana through raising aware-
ness of the latest developments of the Parisian avant-garde while vigorously
questioning the European–Latin American dichotomy. Ironically, it was his
advocacy of European modernism that served both as a model for the pro-
gressive in Latin America and as a metaphor for the struggle for political and
ideological freedom that was part of his quest to engender a new Latin
American identity.
Although Carpentier is best known for his novels and essays exploring his
seminal concept of lo real maravilloso, an idea that did much to ignite the so-
called ‘boom’ in Latin American literature,5 his music criticism served as much
as a workshop of ideas for developing his literary aesthetic as a means of
informing and educating his readership. Establishing close friendships during
the interwar years with composers in Havana and Paris, including Amadeo
Roldán, Alejandro García Caturla, Varèse, Villa-Lobos, Milhaud and Jolivet,
Carpentier subsequently drew on his musical knowledge and experience in his
literary writings. He had been a gifted pianist in his youth and was descended
from a musical family; his paternal grandmother had studied with César
Franck, and his father had been a student of Pablo Casals. Many of his most
acclaimed novels, including El reino de este mundo (1949), Los pasos perdidos
(1953), El acoso (1956), El siglo de las luces (1962) and Concierto barroco (1974),
4
Carpentier’s parents emigrated to Cuba in 1902. It is now known that Carpentier was born in
Switzerland, his mother having returned to her parental home near Lausanne for his birth in 1904.
5
For more on ‘El Boom’ see John King, ‘The Boom of the Latin American Novel’, in Efraín Kristal (ed.),
The Cambridge Companion to the Latin American Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005);
Roberto González Echevarría and Enrique Pupo-Walker (eds.), The Cambridge History of Latin American
Literature, vol. 2, The Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and
Gerald Martin, Journeys through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth Century (London:
Verso, 1989).
involve music both as a structural device and narrative theme. Borrowing its
title from Stravinsky – with the composer’s permission – his penultimate
novel La consagración de la primavera (1978) cites that most famous of bassoon
solos from the opening of The Rite of Spring as a preface in musical notation
rather than text to assert the primordial as the seed for creative renewal in his
exploration of Stravinsky’s ballet as a confrontation between African-
originated and European-based influences.6 Carpentier’s admiration of the
Russian works of Stravinsky, asserted repeatedly throughout his critical writ-
ings, provided a powerful model for redefining Latin American identity, the
‘primitive’ power of Stravinsky’s tribes of ancient Russia being equated by
Carpentier with the creative energy of the Black Africans of the Caribbean and
the Indians of mainland Latin America.7 For Carpentier, who had long been in
the thrall of Spengler’s The Decline of the West (circulated in Spanish translation
during the 1920s through Ortega y Gasset’s Revista de Occidente), Western
European traditions were in terminal decline as a result of Enlightenment
rationalism which he felt alienated the life of instinct, desire and imagination;8
creative regeneration was to be achieved through contemplation of the ‘pri-
mitive’ and primordial which, for him, was a natural feature of the ancient
cultures of the Latin American world.
Carpentier’s Music Criticism: Background and Context

Carpentier authored a vast body of music criticism over a period of more than
forty years from the 1920s to the 1960s, most of which was intended for
a Latin American readership thirsty for knowledge of the latest European
developments and whose thinking in terms of the progressive Carpentier
sought to influence. During the interwar years he was based in Havana from
around 1922 and in Paris from 1928 to 1939, where he was as much
a participant in the intellectual and musical milieu as an observer. Writing
6
Carpentier probably approached Stravinsky in the late 1950s, around the time he first announced the
title of his novel, although it was not completed until after Stravinsky’s death. Set against a background of
twentieth-century Cuban history and the confrontation between European and African cultures, the
novel concerns the lives of two generations of dancers and their attempts to perform Stravinsky’s Rite of
Spring in pre- and post-revolutionary Cuba. The novel does not yet exist in English translation but has
been translated into French by René L. F. Durand under the title La Danse sacrale (Paris: Gallimard, 1980).
For more on musical influences in Carpentier’s literary writings see González Echevarría, Alejo Carpentier:
The Pilgrim at Home; Verity Smith, Carpentier: Los pasos perdidos (London: Grant & Cutler/Tamesis, 1983);
Sally Harvey, Carpentier’s Proustian Fiction: The Influence of Marcel Proust on Alejo Carpentier (London:
Tamesis, 1994); Dominic P. Moran, ‘Carpentier’s Stravinsky: Rites and Wrongs’, Bulletin of Spanish
Studies, 79/1 (2002), 81–104; and Katia Chornik, Alejo Carpentier and the Musical Text (Oxford: Legenda,
2015).
7
Moran, ‘Carpentier’s Stravinsky: Rites and Wrongs’, p. 83.
8
Edwin Williamson, ‘Coming to Terms with Modernity: Magical Realism and the Historical Process in
the Novels of Alejo Carpentier’, in Modern Latin American Fiction (Faber: London, 1987), p. 82.
488 CAROLINE RAE
for a range of widely disseminated Cuban journals including Carteles, Social, La

discusión, Musicalia, Revista de avance, Revista de la Habana, Revista cubana and
Atalaya, as well as the magazines Chic and Diario de la Marina and the daily
newspaper El país, his eleven-year Paris residency provided opportunities to
contribute to the French journals L’Intransigeant, Comœdia, Documents and
Bifur. (Carpentier later contributed to Le Nouveau commerce and L’Esprit nou-
veau.) He also contributed to the Paris-based Spanish-language journal Gaceta
musical founded in 1928 by the Mexican composer Manuel Ponce, who then
resided in the French capital. Focusing on the music of Latin America and
Spain, although including notices and reviews covering a range of European
cities, Gaceta musical was circulated internationally but comprised only nine
issues, all published in 1928. (In addition to Carpentier, notable contributors
include Milhaud, Dukas, Rodrigo, Salazar, Turina and the French critics
Henry Prunières, Roland-Manuel, Henri Collet and Marc Pinchercle.)
Writing as much on literary, artistic and general cultural matters as specifically
about music, Carpentier attempted to found an avant-garde literary journal
under the title Iman, although it folded after its first edition in 1931.
During the 1940s Carpentier undertook more focused research on the
history of Cuban music from the sixteenth century to what was then the
present, framing a narrative that embraced the importance of African tradi-
tions and Cuban Son as much as the work of contemporary composers to assert
the validity of an ‘indigenous’ Cuban culture that no longer needed to be
defined in terms of European predecessors. Influenced by the work of the
Cuban ethnomusicologist Fernando Ortiz, the result was Carpentier’s mono-
graph La música en Cuba, published in Mexico in 1946, which remains
a significant study of the island’s rich musical traditions.9 After settling in
Caracas in self-imposed exile to escape the authoritarian regime of Fulgencio
Batista, Carpentier maintained a regular column in the Venezuelan broad-
sheet El nacional from 1951 to 1961, many of his articles being informed by
frequent visits to Paris. Returning to Cuba following Castro’s Revolution,
Carpentier was appointed director of the state publishing organisation
Editorial Nacional before serving the new government as cultural attaché to
the Cuban Embassy in Paris from 1966.10
Comprising several hundred articles (usually of around 2,000 words each),
the majority of Carpentier’s critical writings on music have been preserved in
two major collections: a two-volume anthology entitled Crónicas devoted to
9
Alejo Carpentier, La música en Cuba (Mexico City: Fondo de cultura económica, 1946); in English as
Music in Cuba, trans. Alan West-Durán (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2001).
10
Carpentier died in Paris but his remains were returned to Havana, where he received a state funeral as
a hero of Castro’s Cuba.
his criticism of the interwar years,11 and a three-volume anthology entitled

Ese músico que llevo dentro comprising a generous selection of his writings from
the 1940s onwards but including some earlier articles.12 Both anthologies are
reproduced in Carpentier’s Obras completes, but with some (unexplained)
internal reorganisation of content.13 Confusingly, the single-volume French
edition of Carpentier’s criticism entitled Chroniques is not a translation of
Crónicas but a free anthology of mostly non-musical writings drawn from the
pre- and post-war years.14 Several extended essays on general issues of musical
aesthetics, some representing reworkings of earlier articles or public lectures,
were published in other collections, including Ensayos americanos, Tientos
y differencias and Letra y solfa, the latter including Carpentier’s writings for El
nacional.15 His music criticism has yet to be translated into English.
Advocacies in Carpentier’s Music Criticism of the

Interwar Years
Carpentier’s first period of critical writing spans the years from 1922 to 1927
when, despite residing in Havana, he drew extensively on his observations of
musical life in the French capital during and just after the First World War.16
It was at this time that he began a long period as a correspondent for the
Cuban journals Social and Carteles. Widely disseminated throughout Spanish
Latin America, Social and Carteles were founded (in 1916 and 1919, respec-
tively) by the leftist political caricaturist and Minorista activist Conrado
Walter Massaguer as platforms for intellectual debate on recent develop-
ments in the literary, musical and visual arts as well as politics; the Minorista
Manifesto of 1927, which included among its prime objectives the promo-
tion of new art ‘in all its diverse manifestations’, was published in both
11
Alejo Carpentier, Crónicas, 2 vols. (Havana: Editorial Arte y Literatura, 1975–76).
12
Alejo Carpentier, Ese músico que llevo dentro, ed. Zoila Gómez, 3 vols. (Havana: Editorial Letras Cubanas,
1980).
13
Alejo Carpentier, Obras completes de Alejo Carpentier, ed. Anhelo Hernández, vols. 8–12 (Mexico City:
Siglo Veintiuno, 1985–7). Internal reorganisation of the Mexican edition results in Crónicas vol. 1
becoming largely but not entirely Crónicas vol. 2 in Obras completas vol. 9, and vice versa. Ese músico que
llevo dentro receives similar internal reorganisation.
14
Carpentier, Chroniques, ed. with an introduction Carmen Vásquez, trans. René L. F. Durand (Paris:
Gallimard, 1983). Excluding most of Carpentier’s interwar music criticism, this volume focuses on his
discussions of French cinema, the visual arts, literature and politics.
15
Alejo Carpentier, Ensayos americanos (Caracas: Imprenta Nacional, 1949) [43 pp.]; Tientos y differencias:
ensayos (Mexico [City]: Mexico Universidad autónoma, 1964); Letra y solfa (Caracas: Síntetis Dosmil,
1975), which includes many of Carpentier’s articles for El nacional.
16
For more detailed discussion of Carpentier’s music criticism of the interwar years, see Caroline Rae,
‘From a Foreign Correspondent: The Parisian Chronicles of Alejo Carpentier’, in Barbara L. Kelly and
Christopher Moore (eds.), Music Criticism in France, 1918–1939: Authority, Advocacy, Legacy (Woodbridge:
Boydell, 2018).
490 CAROLINE RAE
journals.17 While Social provided a monthly forum for the avant-garde in all
its guises, it was also something of a society magazine, including regular
features on the latest French haute couture as well as generous advertising of
notable Parisian luxuries from Pleyel pianos to objets d’art by Lalique. The
‘Prólogo’ to the Cuban edition of Carpentier’s Crónicas by the Cuban scholar
José Antonio Portuondo contains an apology for what he describes as the
‘bourgeois snobbism’ of Social.18 Although the journal actively promoted
new ideas in music, art and literature, it was in the context of other articles
aimed at the wealthy concert-going burguesía. By the 1970s, when Crónicas
was first published as a collection, the perceived elitism of Social had become
uncomfortable in Castro’s Cuba; Portuondo was at pains to provide
a context for the contemporary reader through emphasising that the journal
was a recognised forum for the Minorista, the core founders of the Cuban
Communist Party. The weekly Carteles, on the other hand, was less poten-
tially embarrassing, having served as a mouthpiece for political radicalism
through publishing many of the articles that fuelled the Cuban Revolution
of 1923 and that of 1927 which sought to overthrow Machado’s dictator-
ship. Social survived until 1933, the year Machado was eventually deposed,
while Carteles continued until 1960, ceasing publication following Castro’s
Revolution when its role as an organ for dissident opinions was no longer
needed.
Despite the contrasted characters of Social and Carteles there is little differ-
ence in the tone of Carpentier’s musical articles of the interwar years for the
journals, although those for Carteles tended to reflect his cosmopolitan view of
Parisian musical life in emphasising the activities of foreign participants and
their interactions with those from France. This internationalist standpoint
was carefully geared towards the interests of his Latin American readership,
which itself represented a hybridity of different cultural and national back-
grounds. While his articles frequently refer to individual performances,
whether in the concert hall, theatre, cafés, nightclubs or music hall,
Carpentier’s objective was not merely to provide reviews but to take particu-
lar performances as a point of departure for exploring broader aesthetic issues
relating to the music discussed. In this way, his articles for Social and Carteles
represent personal impressions of the cultural life of Paris in the manner of
a foreign correspondent’s diary and include discussions of literature, the
visual arts, theatre and cinema as much as music.
17
The Cuban literary website www.cubaliteraria.cu reproduces the original text of the ‘Declaración del
Grupo Minorista’ together with the complete list of signatories.
18
José Antonio Portuondo, ‘Prólogo’ to Alejo Carpentier’s Crónicas, vol. 1, pp. 16–17.
Carpentier’s early articles following his return to Havana around 1922

focused on composers whose music he particularly admired, notably
Stravinsky, Satie, Debussy, Ravel, Poulenc, Honegger and Falla, his aim
being to stimulate debate among his vanguardia contemporaries while raising
awareness of repertoire then little known in Cuba. Other topics discussed
during this early period include the Parisian vogue for Cuban jazz, Josephine
Baker’s ‘Revue nègre’, the Ballets Russes and the musical involvements of
Picasso, Léon Bakst and Jean Cocteau. While engaging with broader issues
relating to musical modernism, Carpentier also investigated the innovations
of Richard Strauss as well as Schoenberg, and explored the influence of
Wagnérnisme particularly in relation to Debussy. The latter subject was espe-
cially topical for his Cuban readership, Wagner having long been popular in
Havana where, according to Carpentier, the city’s operatic and concert pro-
gramming required enlightened rejuvenation through enhancing understand-
ing of the composer’s broader influence. Yet he did not neglect the activities
of his Cuban compatriots Amadeo Roldán and Alejandro García Caturla,
whose music was beginning to receive attention in Havana during the 1920s
and whom he had come to know personally through the Grupo Minorista.
(Carpentier completed several Afro-Cuban inspired musical collaborations
with both composers.19) Identifying their work as the most important new
music to emerge in Cuba due to the incorporation of Afro-Cuban idioms,
Carpentier compared aspects of their style to the Brazilian borrowings of
Milhaud, declaring that Cuba has composers of its own who are just as good as
any of the new European avant-garde.20 While most of Carpentier’s early
criticism is primarily discursive, his writings for La discusión and El país
included reviews of concerts he attended in Havana.
As many of these articles reveal, Carpentier despaired of the entrenched
conservativism of musical life in Havana as exemplified by the Sociedad Pro-
Arte Musical and Orquesta Sinfónica, which pandered to the tastes of the
city’s ruling classes through devoting their programmes to Austro-German
classics of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and swathes of Italian
opera. As testimony to the influence of Carpentier’s criticism, some improve-
ment had occurred with the founding of the rival Orquesta Filarmónica in
1924 which, under the directorship of the Spanish émigré composer-
conductor Pedro Sanjuán (whose music is frequently acknowledged in
19
See Caroline Rae, ‘In Havana and Paris: The Musical Activities of Alejo Carpentier’, Music & Letters, 89/
1 (August 2008), 373–95; and ‘The Musical Collaborations of Alejo Carpentier: Afro-Cubanism and the
Quest for Spiritual Renewal’, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 84/7 (November 2007), 905–29.
20
See Alejo Carpentier, ‘Amadeo Roldán y la música vernácula’, Carteles (13 February 1927); and ‘La
consagración de nuestros ritmos’, Carteles (22 April 1922), in Crónicas, vol. 2, pp. 80–6, 98–103.
492 CAROLINE RAE
Carpentier’s criticism), featured the Cuban premieres of Debussy’s Prélude à

l’après-midi d’un faune, L’Enfant prodigue, an orchestration (unspecified) of the
Petite suite, Ravel’s Pavane pour une infante défunte and several works by Roldán
and García Caturla in its initial seasons.21 Nevertheless, these were isolated
occurrences. Consequently, in 1926, Carpentier turned to concert promotion
and, together with his friend Roldán (who as a violinist was also the concert
master of the Filarmónica), founded the first society for the performance of
new music in Cuba, the Conciertos de Música Nueva. Inspired by the innova-
tions of Carlos Chávez, whose new music concerts Carpentier had heard in
Mexico the same year, the Havana Conciertos de Música Nueva began the
process of realising the advocacies expounded in his early music criticism.
Devoted to chamber works, the concerts included Cuban premieres of works
by Stravinsky, Satie, Poulenc, Debussy, Ravel, Malipiero and Scriabin, as well
as Falla, Prokofiev and Turina, the complete programmes being introduced
with lectures by Carpentier.22 The featured works by Stravinsky and
Poulenc – Three Pieces for String Quartet and Rapsodie nègre – are particularly
revealing in that they demonstrate the primitivist aesthetic Carpentier was at
pains to promote in his criticism as a model for Latin American nationalism;
indeed, he reserved his highest praise for the celebration of Africanisms, albeit
invented, in Poulenc’s Rapsodie nègre and described Stravinsky’s Three Pieces
(a work that distils many of the properties of The Rite of Spring) as one of his
icons of neoprimitivism.23
Carpentier’s early criticism stimulated other innovative musical organisa-
tions in Havana, including the progressive musical journals Musicalia (founded
by Antonio and María Muñoz de Quevedo in 1928)24 and Atalaya (founded by
Alejandro García Caturla in 1933). Inspired by the short-lived Revista de
avance, a journal founded by Carpentier in 1927 to promote the radical ideals
of the Minorista in the context of the avant-garde in the literary and visual
arts, Musicalia aimed to serve a similar role as a specialist music journal
focusing on contemporary music. While the Revista de avance survived only
until 1930, Musicalia published regular editions until 1942 before ceasing
publication in 1946. Both were disseminated throughout Latin America,
21
See programme listings in Maruja Sánchez Cabrera, Orquesta Filarmónica de La Habana Memoria
1924–1959 (Havana: Editorial Orbe, 1979). The orchestration of the Petite suite was probably that of
Henri Büsser.
22
For more on the Conciertos de Música Nueva see Caroline Rae, ‘In Havana and Paris: The Musical
Activities of Alejo Carpentier’, 378–82.
23
See Alejo Carpentier, ‘Música nueva: Francis Poulenc’, Diario de la Marina (Havana, October 1927); and
‘Stravinsky, Las Bodas [Les Noces] y Papá Montero’, Social, 12/12 (December 1927), in Crónicas, vol. 1,
pp. 70–6.
24
María Muñoz de Quevedo later founded the Sociedad Coral de La Habana and the Conservatorio Bach de
La Habana.
Musicalia managing to extend its reach to Spain as well as Italy and North
America. Musicalia also sponsored concerts of new music that became forma-
lised in 1929 as the Sociedad Cubana de Música Contemporánea, which
became affiliated with the International Society of Contemporary Music the
following year. Their concerts included a festival of music by Turina in 1929
(with the participation of the composer) and in 1933 García Caturla (who was
a member of the editorial committee of Musicalia) invited Nicolas Slonimsky,
a noted champion of Latin American music, to conduct two concerts with the
Orquesta Filarmónica at Havana’s Teatro Nacional.25 The programmes
included works by Satie, Falla, Schoenberg and Revueltas as well as the
Cuban premieres of Varèse’s Octandre and Ionisation, the latter representing
the work’s second performance following its New York premiere, and
included Henry Cowell among the performers. García Caturla and Roldán
had already become the Cuban representatives of Varèse’s Pan-American
Association of Composers. (In 1932 García Caturla also founded the short-
lived Orquesta de Conciertos de Caibarién, a chamber orchestra intended as
the Cuban counterpart to Slonimsky’s Chamber Orchestra of Boston, and
which featured programmes juxtaposing traditional and contemporary reper-
toire from North and Latin America.)
With the promotion of new music by Carpentier and his colleagues serving
as much of a political as an educational role due to the declared aims of the
Minorista, which included García Caturla, Roldán and Muñoz de Quevedo
among its sympathetic followers and Carpentier as one of its founder mem-
bers, Musicalia published a sort of manifesto for the Sociedad Cubana
de Música Contemporánea. Authored by Muñoz de Quevedo, this
‘Profesión de Fé’ (profession of faith) vigorously rejected the programming
of standard classical repertoire exemplified by Havana’s Pro-Arte Musical and
Orquesta Sinfónica as being mere entertainment for Havana’s ruling elite and
thus synonymous with the hyperconservatism of Machado’s regime. García
Caturla also wrote a quasi-political manifesto for the first edition of Atalaya
that specifically acknowledged the student uprisings of the Cuban coup d’état
of 1933; in an unequivocal rejection of Machado’s crumbling regime, which he
referred to as an ‘ignominious reign of tyranny’, García Caturla cited the well-
known slogan of Cuba’s national poet José Martí as a rallying cry for revolu-
tion: ‘to unite is the word of order’.26
25
See Charles W. White, Alejandro García Caturla: A Cuban Composer in the Twentieth Century (Lanham and
Oxford: Scarecrow Press, 2003), pp. 161–2.
26
See ibid., p. 159.
494 CAROLINE RAE
The second phase of Carpentier’s early, and perhaps most influential, period
of music criticism began in 1928 when he was forced to flee Havana for Paris
due to his leftist political activities which resulted in a period of imprisonment
following his signing of the Minorista Manifesto. He remained in Paris until
1939. Assisted in his escape by the poet Robert Desnos, who was in Havana at
the time attending a literary conference, Carpentier became associated with
the Surrealists but, like Desnos, was disenchanted with the restricted, and
musically resistant, ideas of André Breton and subsequently distanced himself
from the group. Building on the contacts developed in Havana and from his
visit to Mexico, where he met Carlos Chávez and first heard the music of
Varèse, Carpentier quickly expanded his circle of musical friendships. He
embarked on several musical collaborations, initially with the composer-
conductor-pianist Marius-François Gaillard, who introduced Carpentier
both to Varèse (then recently resettled in Paris) and to Milhaud, the dedicatee
of their Afro-Cuban ‘tragédie-burlesque’ for voices and orchestra Yamba-O
(1928).27 Gaillard had previously met Varèse in New York and conducted the
Paris premiere of the revised version of Intégrales at the Salle Gaveau on
23 April 1929 in a concert that also included the Paris premiere of Roldán’s
Danza negra (1928) with the Cuban soprano Lydia de Rivera as soloist, no
doubt at Carpentier’s suggestion. Carpentier subsequently worked with
Varèse on the never-to-be-completed opera The One All-Alone, and in 1930
Varèse set Carpentier’s poem Canción de la niña enferma de fiebre for soprano
and orchestra. Through Varèse, Carpentier became acquainted with Jolivet, an
association acknowledged by the composer’s wife in her later monograph.28
He met Honegger and Villa-Lobos through Milhaud. Carpentier later colla-
borated with Milhaud on his Incantations, Op. 201 (1939), writing a French
text with Afro-Cuban declamations that allude to Jolivet’s Cinq incantations for
solo flute (1936).
Carpentier’s musical friendships inspired many of his articles of the period,
several being devoted to Varèse and Villa-Lobos, whose work he described as
‘the formidable voice of America, his jungle rhythms, primeval melodies and
strident contrasts evoking the infancy of humanity . . . a most refined and very
modern music’.29 He praised the nationalist and folkloric aspects of Villa-
27
For more detailed discussion of Carpentier’s musical projects see: Caroline Rae, ‘In Havana and Paris:
The Musical Activities of Alejo Carpentier’, ‘The Musical Collaborations of Alejo Carpentier: Afro-
Cubanism and the Quest for Spiritual Renewal’, and ‘Forging Identities: Latin Americans in Paris and
the Musical Interactions of Miguel Angel Asturias and Alejo Carpentier’, in Steven Huebner and Federico
Lazzaro (eds.), Artistic Migration and Identity: Paris 1870–1940 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester
Press, in press).
28
Hilda Jolivet, Varèse (Paris: Hachette, 1973).
29
‘La voz formidable de América, con sus ritmos de selva, sus melodías primitivas, sus contrastes
y choques que evocan la infancia de la humanidad . . . una música refinadísima y muy actual’,
Lobos’s music, particularly the early ballets Uirapuru and Amazonas (1917)
which he compared favourably to Varèse’s Amériques (1921, revised 1928),
yet conspicuously ignored the neoclassical traits of works such as the early
Bachianas brasileiras which did not conform to his personal aesthetic.
A committed advocate of Stravinskian primitivism, an issue that looms large
throughout his criticism of the interwar years, Carpentier dismissed neoclas-
sicism as ‘the most inexplicable, most sterile, most fruitless movement in the
history of music’.30 It may be for this reason that Carpentier largely ignores
the music of Poulenc after resettling in Paris, although he rediscovered his
admiration for the composer in his writings of the 1950s. Carpentier also
underplayed the French impressionist colourings of Villa-Lobos’s early bal-
lets, preferring to emphasise parallels with Varèse and the Russian works of
Stravinsky; he reserved praise precisely for those who escaped what he con-
sidered the ‘dangerous’ influence of Debussy.31 The stimulus for linking Villa-
Lobos with Varèse was undoubtedly the Paris premiere of Amazonas at the
Salle Gaveau on 30 May 1929 in a concert conducted by Gaillard that also
included the Paris premiere of Amériques. Mindful of his Latin American
readership and the initiatives of Varèse in developing a new pan-
Americanism, Carpentier hailed both works as innovative and eloquent scores
that brought all of the Americas to Europe.32
Demonstrating unbridled enthusiasm for Varèse as one of the greatest
revolutionaries of the age who also vigorously promoted new music,
Carpentier’s articles yield tantalising insights into the projected opera The
One All-Alone.33 Suggesting that the work, when completed, would represent
the summation of Varèse’s compositional achievement, he describes the struc-
ture and orchestration as well as the mystic scenario, which included a voodoo
rite – one of Carpentier’s innovations that would have particularly fascinated
his Cuban readership. (Carpentier discusses Varèse further in later articles for
Le Nouveau commerce and the Cuban newspaper El mundo, both of which were
written to commemorate the composer’s death.34) Carpentier’s admiration
for Varèse almost certainly influenced his literary writings; while La
Alejo Carpentier, ‘Un gran compositor latinoamericano: Heitor Villa-Lobos’, Gaceta musical (July–August,
1928), reproduced in Ese músico que llevo dentro, vol. 1, Obras completas de Alejo Carpentier, vol. 10, p. 42.
30
‘El movimiento más inexplicable, más estéril, más inútil, de la historia de la música’, ‘Conversación con
Alejo Carpentier’, Ese músico que llevo dentro, vol. 3, Obras completas de Alejo Carpentier, vol. 12, p. 194.
31
Alejo Carpentier, ‘Marius-François Gaillard y su labor multiple’, Social (February 1929), 89. This article
is not reproduced in either Crónicas or Ese músico que llevo dentro.
32
Alejo Carpentier, ‘Una fuerza musical de América – Hector Villa-Lobos’, Social, 14/8 (August 1929), in
Crónicas, vol. 1, pp. 135–41.
33
See Alejo Carpentier, ‘Un revolucionario de música: Edgar [sic] Varèse’, Social, 4/6 (June 1929); and
‘Edgar [sic] Varèse escribe para el teatro’, Social, 16/4 (April 1931), in Crónicas vol. 1, pp. 129–34 and 201–5.
34
Alejo Carpentier, ‘Edgar [sic] Varèse vivant’, Le Nouveau Commerce, cahier 10 (Autumn–Winter 1967),
13–28.
496 CAROLINE RAE
consagración de la primavera refers specifically to Varèse by name, the unnamed

composer-protagonist of Los pasos perdidos who undertakes a journey of crea-
tive rediscovery to the depths of the Venezuelan jungle could easily have been
modelled on Varèse, who similarly suffered periods of creative stagnation and
retreated to live with native Americans.
Although only one of Carpentier’s articles of the period is devoted solely to
Milhaud, references to the composer’s Brazilian and African-originated jazz-
inspired works infuse his music criticism of the period. Hailing Milhaud as
one of the most original composers of contemporary music, Carpentier com-
pares his Brazilian borrowings with the Afro-Cubanism of Roldán and García
Caturla to highlight the new role of Latin American culture as a revitalising
force for supposedly ailing European traditions.35 He particularly celebrates
Milhaud’s use of Latin American rhythms, aligning Le Bœuf sur le toit (1920), La
Création du monde (1923) and the operas Maximilien (1930) and Christophe
Colomb (1930) with a broader pan-Americanism that he further connects
with Villa-Lobos and Varèse. An unusual and often overlooked Milhaud con-
nection to which Carpentier also draws attention is his admiration of the
music of Schoenberg, whose Pierrot lunaire was first performed complete in
Paris at the Salle Gaveau on 12 January 1922 with Milhaud conducting. While
Carpentier emphasised the importance of Milhaud for Latin America in his
writings for Social and Carteles, his articles for Comœdia, Documents and
L’Intransigeant underline the significance of Cuban music in Paris. Taking as
their points of departure recent Paris performances of works by Roldán and
García Caturla as well as the popularity of Cuban Son in the cafés and cabarets
of Paris, these French articles advocate the rituals of Afro-Cuban Ñáñigo
traditions as the ideal interface between the primitive and the modern in the
manner of Stravinsky’s Russian works. Carpentier seized the opportunity to
promote Cuban music and culture to a European readership for which attrac-
tion to the exotic ‘other’ was already an established form of eclecticism.
Honegger might seem an unusual figure for Carpentier’s Latin American
advocacies, not least given his negative views in respect of neoclassicism, yet
the composer receives considerable attention. Defending Honegger against
accusations of anti-modernism by figures such as Max Jacob, Carpentier
proposes that the composer’s interest in locomotives, skating, rugby and to
some extent opera, demonstrates an engagement with contemporary phe-
nomena that, far from being retrogressive, constitutes the essence of
a modernist aesthetic. Conceding that his music can sometimes be remote,
35
Alejo Carpentier, ‘Temas de la lira y el bongó’, Carteles (April 1929), in Ese músico que llevo dentro, vol. 2,
Obras completas de Alejo Carpentier, vol. 11 (Mexico, 1987), p. 426.
a factor ascribed to Honegger’s Swiss heritage, Carpentier equates what he

calls the ‘indisputable seriousness and sincerity’ of works such as the First
Symphony with Hindemith and Berg, concluding that Honegger remains
a composer of the first rank.36 Curiously, Carpentier appears more equivocal
in respect of Ravel, despite the composer’s fondness for Spanish idioms which
would presumably have appealed to Carpentier’s Cuban readership.
Carpentier is critical of what he considers Ravel’s antiquated approach to
musical structure, although he is more positive about his innovations in
harmony and orchestration as well as his attraction to jazz. Ravel’s music
began to be performed regularly in Havana following Paul Wittgenstein’s visit
in December 1934 to perform the Concerto for Left Hand with the Orquesta
Filarmónica under the directorship of Amadeo Roldán, who also conducted
the premiere of Daphnis et Chloé in June the following year.37
A startling omission in Carpentier’s criticism of the interwar years is the
avoidance of any reference to Messiaen or the inaugural concert of La Jeune
France in June 1936. His lack of interest in Messiaen is almost certainly due to
a critical selectivity that sought to promote an internationalist view of
Parisian musical life, in which Messiaen’s music would be uncomfortably
placed, the composer’s aesthetic being quite different from the cultural inter-
connections Carpentier proposed to his Latin American readership.
Messiaen’s overt expressions of his Christian faith would also have countered
Carpentier’s advocacy of the primitive, and perhaps his Communist leanings.
Indeed, Carpentier almost entirely ignores composers of the French organ
tradition, his comments on the great ecclesiastical establishments of Paris
being largely restricted to observations about the architecture. His articles of
this period also say little about Jolivet, whose ‘magic’ works of the 1930s
Carpentier would have had the opportunity of hearing and which have much
in common with the religious paganism Carpentier otherwise discussed.
Carpentier does, however, mention the composer’s early songs and leftist
political sympathies and briefly evokes the Cinq dances rituelles in an article
published in the Cuban newspaper Granma shortly after the composer’s death.
Carpentier’s Later Music Criticism

Returning to Cuba in 1939 to escape the outbreak of war in Europe,
Carpentier entered a period of assimilation of his Paris experiences, the
36
Alejo Carpentier, ‘Honegger y el canto a la velocidad’, Social, 12/8 (August 1927); and ‘Arthur
Honegger y el rey Pausole’, Social, 16/5 (June 1931), both in Crónicas, vol. 1, pp. 53–8 and 206–11.
37
See programme listings in Sánchez Cabrera, Orquesta Filarmónica de La Habana Memoria.
498 CAROLINE RAE
1940s representing a watershed in terms of his critical and literary output.

Appointed director of Cuban broadcasting while teaching a music history
course at the University of Havana, Carpentier began work on his monograph
La música en Cuba, stimulated by several visits to Haiti. More than a chronicle
of the island’s musical history, Carpentier’s study theorises the political role
of music throughout the Caribbean while asserting the importance of Cuba’s
musical heritage as much in terms of its cathedral, court and contemporary
composers as in its African traditions, to propose a Cubanidad that might
inspire a cultural awakening throughout Latin America. His most revealing
chapters are those on the ‘Blacks in Cuba’, ‘Afro-Cubanism’ and ‘Amadeo
Roldán – Alejandro García Caturla’, which are frequently addressed to young
Latin American composers, whom Carpentier advises should look to their
own heritage just as generations of Europeans have done with their respective
national traditions since the nineteenth century:
The young Latin American composer turns his eyes to his own world. There,
still fresh, virginal, are the themes that Milhaud has left for him; the primitive
impulses that did not appear in The Rite of Spring; a polyrhythm in an unpol-
ished state, which outpaces anything by the ‘advanced’ composers of Europe.
And, furthermore, what the French composer has used as an exotic, discon-
certing, unexpected element is full-fledged and authentic for a Brazilian, for
a Cuban, for a Mexican, who carries it deep within.38
Carpentier’s work on La música en Cuba spawned a series of essays on Latin

American musical folklore in which he proposed these diverse musical tradi-
tions – that in themselves represent a hybridity of influences – as the natural
source for Latin American composers to forge their creative identities and
thus establish a sense of national belonging. Written from the 1940s to the
1970s, these substantial articles were widely disseminated in Spanish-
speaking Latin America.39
38
Alejo Carpentier, ‘Amadeo Roldán – Alejandro García Caturla’, Music in Cuba, trans. Alan West-Durán,
p. 281.
39
See Alejo Carpentier, ‘Origines de la música y la música primitiva’ [c. 1944/6], reproduced in Chornik,
Alejo Carpentier and the Musical Text, pp. 85–123; ‘Los problemas del compositor latinoamericano’ [1946],
reproduced in Letra y solfa: Vision de America (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Nemont, 1976), pp. 83–102 and
Ese músico que llevo dentro, vol. 3, pp. 255–71; ‘Panorama de la música en Cuba. La música contemporanéa’,
Revista musical chilena (Santiago de Chile, December 1947), reproduced in Ese músico que llevo dentro, vol. 3,
pp. 272–84; ‘El folklorismo musical’ [1957], reproduced in Letra y solfa: Vision de America, pp. 72–82; ‘Del
folklorisme musical’, Tientos y differencias: ensayos, pp. 41–56 and Ese músico que llevo dentro, vol. 3, pp.
285–98; ‘El ángel de las maracas’, Entrevista de Salvador del Río, Revista Mexicana de Cultura, 305
(8 December 1974), reproduced in Ese músico que llevo dentro, vol. 3, pp. 308–14; ‘América Latina en la
confluencia de coordenadas históricas y su repercusión en la música’, in Isabel Aretz (ed.), América Latina en
su música (Havana: UNESCO Oficina regional de cultura para América Latina y el Caribe, Centre de
documentación, 1975), pp. 7–19, reproduced in Ese músico que llevo dentro, vol. 3, pp. 325–42.
With Carpentier’s Parisian criticism of the interwar years having provided

a literary apprenticeship that helped him formulate his aesthetic positioning,
the 1940s and 1950s witnessed his flowering as a major figure in Latin
American literature, most notably with the publication of his novels El reino
de este mundo, Los pasos perdidos and El acoso. During this period, Carpentier
was at pains to assert public distance from the surrealist circles with which he
had been associated in Paris, owing to what he considered André Breton’s
quasi-colonial appropriation of Latin America as a source of the mad, bizarre
and ‘marvellous’ (see the First and Second Surrealist Manifestos). Indeed, it
was Breton’s particular interest in Haiti (where in 1945 he gave a lecture on
‘Surrealism and Haiti’) that stimulated Carpentier to assert his anti-colonialist
reclamation of Latin American culture following his own visits to the island by
codifying his seminal concept of lo real maravilloso americano in the prologue to
his influential novel El reino de este mundo of 1949. His researches for La música
en Cuba did much to inform his thinking about what constitutes the ‘marvel-
lous reality’ of Latin America. Portentously, given Carpentier’s then recent
return to Cuba, the prologue includes the line: ‘The Latin American returns to
his own world.’40
As Carpentier’s literary writing began to assume greater prominence, the
scope of his music criticism during the 1950s and 1960s (most of which is
reproduced in Ese músico que llevo dentro) broadened beyond the advocacies of
the interwar period. Tending more towards conventional journalism
addressed at the general reader of a newspaper arts column rather than the
intellectual elite, his articles for Venezuela’s El nacional (and later for Cuba’s El
mundo and Granma) are shorter than those of his earlier period and also less
discursive. He no longer focuses exclusively on promoting the avant-garde
but comments more widely on the general musical repertoire of the opera
house and concert hall discussing representative composers of the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries that he had largely eschewed during the 1920s and
1930s, in addition to his favoured contemporaries. In this sense, his criticism
of the period provides a snapshot of musical life in Latin America, drawing
attention to the activities of leading international conductors and soloists of
the period, many of whom toured major Latin American cities, discussing
a range of Latin American festivals of music, as well as commenting on the rise
of rock and roll and other forms of popular music including French cabaret
songs and jazz. Other articles reveal a deepening of interest in particular areas:
40
Cited in Lois Parkinson Zamora and Wendy B. Faris (eds.), Magical Realism: Theory, History, Community
(Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995), p. 83. Carpentier published an expanded version of
the prologue as ‘De lo real maravilloso americano’, Tientos y differencias (Montevideo: Arca, 1967), pp.
96–112.
500 CAROLINE RAE
Wagner and his influence; the problems of musical notation; the relationship
of composers and performers; the significance of the introduction of LP
recordings and the rise of technology in music.
Among Carpentier’s more conventional journalism for his column in El
nacional, other articles nevertheless reveal concern for recent developments in
new music from an international perspective. In addition to pondering the
transience of what constitutes the avant-garde and the aesthetic problems
facing contemporary composers in Europe as much as in Latin America, he
discusses the significance of the First Warsaw Autumn Festival of 1956, the
Darmstadt Summer School, new music in Italy, and René Leibowitz (who
visited Caracas in 1957), and he devotes two articles to Pierre Boulez, who
visited Caracas in 1958 and whom Carpentier describes as the most interesting
figure of the young generation in contemporary French music.41 While he
remains largely silent on the subject of Messiaen, Carpentier writes about the
music of Maurice Ohana, Alexandre Tansman, Maurice Jaubert, Joaquín
Rodrigo, Scriabin, Schoenberg and Varèse, as well as Poulenc’s Les Mamelles
de Tirésias (a work which Carpentier particularly admired). He provides
further reflections on Milhaud’s works of the period in addition to discussing
Stravinsky in no fewer than eight articles, one of which draws parallels with
Scriabin, and another of which focuses on the significance of his Venetian
works. Latin Americans are far from neglected, with articles on Roldán and
García Caturla in addition to commentaries on Carlos Chávez, Silvestre
Revueltas and Villa-Lobos, whose music is discussed in seven articles that
include a short interview. The death of a number of important figures during
the 1950s and 1960s gave rise to various commemorative articles including on
Schoenberg, Constant Lambert, Prokofiev, Ives, Honegger, Poulenc,
Hindemith and the Cuban composer Ernesto Lecuona. Carpentier also
wrote on the subject of Bartók to mark the tenth anniversary of his death,
reflecting on his influence and the place of his music in the repertoire.
Commentaries on various aspects of French music remained conspicuous in
Carpentier’s critical output. In addition to reassessing his views about
Poulenc, he ponders the issue of what constitutes ‘authentic’ French music,
explores the influence of Rameau and Machaut on twentieth-century French
composers and considers the position of Debussy and Ravel within the inter-
national post-war musical milieu. In debating the transience of musical mod-
ernism, he argues that Baudelaire and Mallarmé remain as important for
French composers of the 1950s, particularly Boulez, as they were for
41
See Alejo Carpentier, ‘Pierre Boulez en Caracas’ and ‘Un músico habla’, El nacional (June 1958),
reproduced in Ese músico que llevo dentro, vol. 1, pp. 359–63.
Debussy at the turn of the twentieth century. He also questions the signifi-
cance of the Prix de Rome, pointing out that its absence from the biographies
of Ravel and Messiaen as well as of Poulenc, Milhaud and Boulez suggests its
role as a career-making award had long passed, French composers having long
preferred to remain in the hub of activities in Paris rather than endure
enforced creative exile in Rome.
Conclusion
While much of Carpentier’s music criticism informed his development as
a writer of literature, his advocacies reveal how the Parisian avant-garde
could be engaged critically to provide a model for the progressive among
the Latin American vanguardia. His critical writings achieved their intended
objective during what Europeans term the interwar years through stimulating
not only the founding of new music journals but also the performance of new
music, the promotion of which had a clear political dimension as a means of
countering the predominant cultural tastes of Cuba’s ruling elite of the time.
Shedding valuable light on the activities of the Parisian musical milieu,
Carpentier’s early criticism in particular reveals much about the interconnect-
edness of musical, literary and artistic circles, as well as his unusual position as
both creative participant and critical observer. Yet his writings are also con-
tentious in their selectivity and in their projection of an internationalist vision
that was designed to appeal to his Latin American readership. Most impor-
tantly, his writings bear witness to the quest for a distinctive Latin American
identity that paradoxically was built upon contemplation of innovations in
Europe. When, in 1939, Carpentier returned from a Europe already prophe-
sied as a civilisation in decline and about to descend into the catastrophe of
the Second World War, he rediscovered his homeland with new eyes, his
prolonged absence enabling him to define what it is to be Latin American.
. 26 .
Writing about Popular Music

SIMON FRITH
Introduction
In a twenty-year period, between 1966 and 1986, a new way of writing about
music was established in European and North American journalism. ‘Rock
critic’ became a recognisable title, initially in the alternative, bohemian and
underground press, then in specialist music outlets and fanzines, and even-
tually in mainstream newspapers and magazines too.
Rock criticism was culturally significant for a number of reasons. It
described a new kind of popular music aesthetic that shaped public under-
standing of a new kind of popular music, rock. It challenged taken-for-granted
arts page distinctions between high and low culture and fed into the creation
of a new academic field, popular music studies. It thus changed the terrain of
music criticism generally.
Take, for example, the London Times. When, in 1963, the paper’s chief
music critic, William Mann, devoted his round-up of the year’s music to the
Beatles, he caused something of a furore simply because the paper’s arts pages
did not usually cover pop music.1 Within twenty years however the paper was
routinely reviewing rock albums and concerts and was as likely to run respect-
ful features on popular as on classical musicians.2
Statistical surveys of music coverage in the wider European and North
American media confirm this transformation of the upmarket press’s arts
pages. In their 2010 survey of ‘representations of music in European news-
papers between 1960 and 2000’, Klaus Bruhn Jensen and Peter Larsen
discovered:
This essay has benefitted from my reading of unpublished work by Maud Berthomier, Sarah Hill and Mark
Sinker. My thanks to them.
1
William Mann, ‘What Songs the Beatles Sang’, The Times (27 December 1963).
2
See Simon Frith, ‘Going Critical: Writing about Recordings’, in Nicholas Cook, Eric Clarke,
Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and John Rink (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music (Cambridge:
[502]
Writing about Popular Music 503
The 1960s–70s were a period of particular flux, as the emerging youth culture
contributed to significant changes in attitudes towards popular culture,
including music. Several forms that were considered subaltern at the begin-
ning of the period – varieties of jazz, rock and folk music – became accepted, if
not as ‘high’, then as a legitimate presence within the socio-musical field. In
subsequent decades, newspapers have participated in the redefinition and
negotiation of music as a cultural practice.3
A study of the coverage of popular music since 1955 in the United States,
France, Germany and the Netherlands similarly supports the idea that
the emergence of rock criticism in the 1960s had a profound effect on sub-
sequent media discourse about popular music. Although its impact took
longer to become apparent in the European countries in our study, the
amount of space given to popular music, as well as the shift toward a more
critical and evaluative approach, suggests that the style of writing about rock
music became more generally adopted by elite newspapers.4
The history of rock criticism has been the subject of both academic and non-
academic attention5 and includes studies of specific publications (such as
Rolling Stone and New Musical Express)6 and writers (such as Lester Bangs and
Robert Christgau).7 In this chapter, while drawing on this documentary
work, I will approach rock criticism from the perspective of the sociology of
knowledge, as a musical discourse that came into play in particular cultural
circumstances and with particular cultural effects. The institutional factors
that mattered were not just the changing conditions of popular music produc-
tion but also the changing conditions of the production of journalism.
In examining the relations between popular music and journalism I will
focus on the UK and the United States and examine how rock-writing
3
Klaus Bruhn Jensen and Peter Larsen, ‘The Sounds of Change: Representations of Music in European
Newspapers 1960–2000’, in Jostein Gripsrud and Lennart Weibull (eds.), Media Markets and Public Spheres:
European Media at the Crossroads (Bristol: Intellect Press, 2010), p. 262.
4
Vaughn Schmutz, Alex van Venrooij, Susanne Janssen and Marc Verboord, ‘Change and Continuity in
Newspaper Coverage of Popular Music Since 1955: Evidence from the United States, France, Germany,
and the Netherlands’, Popular Music and Society, 33/4 (2010), 513.
5
The fullest academic account is Ulf Lindberg, Hans Weisethaunet, Morten Michelsen and
Gestur Guðmundsson, Rock Criticism from the Beginning: Amusers, Bruisers and Cool-Headed Cruisers
(New York: Peter Lang, 2005). For documentation of writers’ self-aggrandisement, see Paul Gorman, In
Their Own Write: Adventures in the Music Press (London: Sanctuary, 2001).
6
Robert Draper, The Rolling Stone Story (New York: Doubleday, 1990); Pat Long, The History of the NME:
High Times and Low Lives at the World’s Most Famous Music Magazine (London: Portico, 2012).
7
Jim DeRogatis, Let it Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, America’s Greatest Rock Critic (New York:
Broadway Books, 2000); Tom Carson, Kit Rachlis and Jeff Salamon (eds.), Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough:
Essays in Honor of Robert Christgau (Austin: Nortex Press, 2002). The best sources of historical information
on Anglo-American rock criticism are the websites rocksbackpages.com (‘the ultimate archive of music
journalism . . . by the finest music writers of the last 50 years’), and rockcritics.com (‘rock critics talk to,
about, and with each other’). As well as articles and reviews, rocksbackpages contains brief biographies of
more than 500 writers and the magazines they wrote for.
504 SIMON FRITH
communities were constructed in each country both discursively and as social

networks. I begin with an outline history of rock writing, from its origins in
the 1960s to the present day, while considering what made the emergence and
subsequent dominance of a new kind of music writing possible. I then con-
sider how rock writers drew attention to – and attempted to resolve – the
contradictions facing all contemporary music critics: on the one hand, jour-
nalistic writing about music is tied into the business of promoting performers
and performances, marketing concert tours and recordings, as well as by the
need to make a living; on the other hand, critics see their task as explaining the
value of a particular artist or piece of music in aesthetic rather than commer-
cial terms, thus preserving their autonomy as journalists.8
The Story of Rock Criticism

People were writing about pop records long before the emergence of rock
music.9 From the early days of the recording industry, magazines employed
writers to inform and service record producers, retailers and consumers. The
British trade paper Talking Machine News (aimed at record dealers) was pub-
lishing record reviews (comparing and rating different recorded versions of
the same song) from 1913. Gramophone, launched in 1923 and aimed at record
buyers, was primarily concerned with classical releases but also included brief
comments on popular and dance records from the start. In the United States,
the Music Lovers’ Guide, first published in 1926 as the Phonograph Monthly
Review, applied stars to the records reviewed in its popular music section,
‘In the Popular Vein’, an approach taken up by Gramophone in its reviews of
jazz and swing records from 1936.10
These early popular music record reviews functioned unashamedly as con-
sumer guides, part of the process by which new songs or dance numbers were
marketed; their writers provided basic descriptive information, noting
a particular track’s catchiness or novelty. Writing about popular music was
taken to be quite a different sort of thing from writing about classical music:
the latter was lasting art, the former transitory entertainment. For a more self-
conscious approach to popular music, or at least to some kinds of popular
music, one has to look at magazines for and/or about musicians, such as
8
See Gemma Harries and Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, ‘The Culture of Arts Journalists: Elites, Saviors or
Manic Depressives?’, Journalism, 8/6 (2007), 619–39.
9
There was also popular music coverage before recording. The music hall in the UK and vaudeville in the
United States had their own trade papers; established music hall stars and interesting new acts were
written about in both national and local papers. Such writing is, though, better placed in the history of
theatre than music criticism.
10
Frith, ‘Going Critical: Writing about Recordings’, pp. 268–9.
Melody Maker (founded in Britain in 1926), Downbeat (founded in the United

States in 1934), and Jazz Hot (founded in France in 1935), in which the first
considered form of popular music writing, jazz criticism, took shape.11
Jazz writers were, from early on, concerned with ideological questions:
how could jazz be distinguished from other forms of dance music and enter-
tainment? What was the significance of race in jazz meaning and value? How
could jazz develop as an art rather than as commerce? These were questions
that would continue to concern rock critics thirty years later, and I will return
to them. For most journalists covering popular record releases, however, the
issue was how best to respond to changing public tastes and marketing
opportunities. The most significant of these changes happened in the 1950s.
The reorganisation of music retail around vinyl albums and singles led to
a much larger and more committed demand for pop records, and the emer-
gence of an economically significant youth market meant new kinds of record-
ing star.
In Britain, for example, a new trade paper, Record Retailer, was launched in
1959 (it changed its name to Music Week in 1972); in the United States,
Billboard, founded in 1894 as a trade paper for the bill posting industry and
developing over the following decades to report on all sorts of entertainment
business, began to focus on recorded music, changing its name to Billboard
Music Week in 1961.
At the same time a spate of new publications aimed at young record
consumers appeared. In Britain, there were music papers such as New
Musical Express (launched in 1952), initially a general pop paper but soon
competing for teenage readers with Record Mirror (1954) and Disc (1958).
And there were magazines aimed at teenage girls and featuring pictures of
and stories about teenage recording stars such as Marilyn (1955), Boyfriend
(1959), Marty (1960), Jackie (1964), Fabulous (1964) and Rave (1964). In the
United States, there were no equivalents to the UK’s pop music papers, but
magazines such as Seventeen (the first ever magazine for teenage girls, launched
in 1944), 16 Magazine (1957) and Tiger Beat (1965) increasingly featured pop
stars in their appeal to their market, while Hit Parader (1942), which began by
publishing the latest hit song lyrics for pop fans generally, also shifted focus to
the records that appealed particularly to teen music fans in the 1950s.
11
Michael Denning suggests that the first two writers to write regular reviews of ‘vernacular phonograph
records’ were Abbe Niles in the United States (who started reviewing ‘popular music’ in a column in The
Bookman from 1928), and Rodney Gallop (who began reviewing ‘vernacular gramophone music’ from
a variety of European countries in The Gramophone in the same year). Both writers came from (amateur)
folklorist backgrounds. See Michael Denning, Noise Uprising (London: Verso, 2015), pp. 123–6.
506 SIMON FRITH
These titles created a way of writing about pop music that was new to
consumer magazines. They were organised around recording stars, aimed at
youth and developed a fan discourse based on intimate knowledge of perfor-
mers. This was the initial journalistic context for writing about rock ‘n’ roll
and the new pop music of the mid-1960s; these were the magazines in which
the Beatles and Rolling Stones, for example, were initially covered.12
In Britain new ways of writing about popular music were also developed
within the music weeklies, if under the constraint of the papers’ editorial
conventions and readership. In the United States, the lack of a pop music press
meant that writers wanting to write about rock music had to find space in
non-music publications. On both sides of the Atlantic, writers felt the need for
specialist music outlets. Models for such magazines did exist. In the UK, the
Journal of the Folk-Song Society was launched in 1899, and the Journal of the
English Folk-Dance Society in 1914. In the United States, Sing Out (which
emerged from the post-war People’s Song Newsletter) has been published as
a magazine for leftist folk music performers, songwriters and audiences since
1950, and the subsequent folk revival was marked by the publication of
numerous local folk titles, such as Paul Nelson’s Little Sandy Review, published
out of Minnesota University from 1959. The most influential of these was
probably Broadside, published in New York from 1962 as a magazine for
performers, with an emphasis on new songs and songwriters and as a site
for debates about folk rock and folk commerce that would be important for
rock critics.
By contrast, the English magazines Blues Unlimited (a fanzine started by
Mike Leadbitter and Simon Napier in 1963) and the glossier Blues and Soul
(launched in May 1966 and initially called Home of the Blues) were aimed at
record buyers and collectors, and quickly became important titles for the
marketing of blues and soul music in Britain. Beat Instrumental, meanwhile,
founded in 1963 (under the title, Beat Monthly), was aimed more specifically at
musicians and would-be musicians in the new British beat scene, with cover-
age of instruments and technology, while Mersey Beat, launched a couple of
years earlier, in 1961, was essentially a way of promoting the emerging
Liverpool Scene.
If such specialist music magazines provided one model for would-be rock
writers, the changes in musical culture to which they were responding were
also a matter of interest to already established reporters and cultural
12
Kate Mossman interviewed some of these magazines’ writers for the BBC radio documentary, The
Women Who Wrote Rock, BBC Radio 4 (broadcast 22 March 2016), available at www.bbc.co.uk/pro
grammes/b07428bt (accessed 10 May 2018).
commentators. The unprecedented commercial and cultural impact of the

Beatles in both Britain and the United States, and the emergence of Bob Dylan
from the folk world and of British blues-based beat groups from the jazz
scene, became matters of news interest to a variety of reporters. In the United
States, these included the entertainment reporter Jane Scott of the Cleveland
Plain Dealer, who started writing the paper’s teen page in 1964, and Lillian
Roxon, New York correspondent of the Sydney Morning Herald from 1962; in
Britain, the Evening Standard’s Maureen Cleave wrote a column called ‘Disc
Date’ from the early 1960s, coming to national fame through her interviews
with the Beatles. All three of these writers helped to develop a new journalistic
stance, that youth pop might be more than just transient fun.
A similar argument, more portentously expressed, came from intellectuals
too.13 In Britain, cultural commentators with a sociological bent found
a space for writing about popular music in New Society, which launched in
1962 and included among its regular contributors Colin MacInnes, George
Melly and Ray Gosling, who were all interested – albeit from different
perspectives – in what was happening to youth culture. New Society’s influence
can clearly be seen on the first of the three journalists who can most feasibly
lay claim to being Britain’s earliest rock writers (without ever developing
careers as rock critics): Geoffrey Cannon, Tony Palmer and Nik Cohn.
Cannon, who has claimed to be ‘first ever regular rock critic for a UK daily
national newspaper’, wrote a weekly column for the Guardian between 1968
and 1972. He started writing about popular culture as arts and music editor of
New Society from 1962, moving on to the BBC magazine, The Listener, while
working on cultural/music documentaries for Granada television.14 Palmer
had a similar trajectory, going from Cambridge University straight into the
BBC (working on arts programmes and musical documentaries), while being
employed as a regular music critic for the Observer from 1967 to 1974. He was
part of the classical team but his brief was to cover the new and the avant-
garde, and he was quick to cover progressive rock under this label; from 1969
to 1974 he also wrote a column, ‘Notes from the Underground’, for the
Spectator. Cohn arrived in London as a would-be writer in the early 1960s
and by 1964, aged 18, was employed as an expert commentator on the London
youth scene by the Observer and Queen, a long-established magazine for the
13
One of the more interesting early sources of serious writing about popular music was Axle Quarterly,
published from 1962 to 1963 by Alan Blaikley, Ken Howard and Paul Overy. Axle also published
pamphlets, which included Gavin Millar’s Pop! Hit or Miss? Howard and Blaikley went on to have
a successful pop music career as a singer/songwriter/management partnership, Overy became
a distinguished art critic and historian, and Millar a film critic and TV and film director.
14
Geoffrey Cannon, ‘A Life in Pop Writing’, Rock’s Backpages (April 2012), available at rocksbackpages
.com.
508 SIMON FRITH
upper classes that was now being aimed at the younger hipper London
establishment (Queen was, among other things, financially and managerially
involved with the newly launched pirate radio station, Radio Caroline). As
a writer, Cohn was the nearest thing Britain then had to a US-style ‘new
journalist’, though he seemed more interested in fiction than non-fiction. His
first music book, about P. J. Proby, I am the Greatest, says Johnny Angelo (1967),
was a novel, though his greatest impact on British music writing was made by
his rock ’n’ roll history, Pop from the Beginning (1969), a book which made clear
Cohn’s disdain for rock’s attempt to mark itself off from pop while modelling
a way of writing about music that was hugely influential on rock writing.15
While these writers were important for what developed as rock criticism (I
read all of them avidly), they lacked the particular self-consciousness and sense
of community that were needed to establish a new music writing culture. In
developing a distinct way of approaching music, rock critics wrote not in
order to further their writing, reporting or broadcasting careers but because
they felt the need, in Richard Goldstein’s words, ‘to write about what I saw,
heard and felt about something I loved’.16. The feminist rock critic Jaan
Uhelszki elaborates:
[I] was a fan of the first order and soon came to realize that just seeing the
bands was no longer enough – my fanaticism required expression. Maybe
I needed evidence that I was there . . . I don’t think it was real to me until
I wrote about it, and it was always better the second time around.17
Rock writers wrote not about fans or even primarily for fans but, rather, as
fans. And there were two ways they could do this: by creating a new role in
existing publications (like Richard Goldstein in the Village Voice) or by start-
ing a new publication (like Paul Williams with Crawdaddy). In practice, many
rock writers developed their careers by doing both.
In New York in the mid to late 1960s there were a variety of existing
magazines open to such rock coverage. Richard Goldstein started his ‘Pop
Eye’ column in the Village Voice in 1966; Robert Christgau took over as the
Voice’s rock columnist from 1969, having previously written about music for
Esquire (from 1967); Ellen Willis became the first ever pop music critic for the
New Yorker in 1968, recruited after writing an essay on Bob Dylan for
Commentary. Other news and general cultural magazines were also at this
15
Nik Cohn, I am the Greatest, says Johnny Angelo (London: Secker and Warburg, 1967); Nik Cohn: Pop
from the Beginning (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969).
16
Richard Goldstein, Another Little Piece of My Heart: My Life in Rock and Revolution in the ’60s (London:
Bloomsbury Circus, 2015), pp. 36–7.
17
Quoted in Daphne A. Brooks, ‘The Write to Rock: Racial Mythologies, Feminist Theories and the
Pleasures of Rock Criticism’, Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, 12 (2008), 60.
time beginning to commission rock coverage, while established columnists

(such as Al Aronowitz in the New York Post) and critics (such as the jazz writer,
Ralph J. Gleason in the San Francisco Chronicle and the folk writer, Robert
Shelton, in the New York Times) were broadening their music reviewing beat.18
Short-lived pop-oriented lifestyle monthly magazines also came and went,
like Cheetah (1967–8), for which Willis, Christgau and Goldstein all wrote.
In other US cities, specific rock magazines began to be established. In
Boston, Crawdaddy emerged from the Swarthmore campus in 1966 and
Robert Somma’s Fusion was launched in 1967 (Jon Landau, Richard Meltzer
and Ed Ward were among the writers in this Boston rock scene). Barry
Kramer’s Creem, edited first by Dave Marsh and later by Lester Bangs and
Susan Whitall, was published in Birmingham, Michigan from 1968. In San
Francisco, Greg Shaw’s Mojo Navigator and Rock’n’Roll News first appeared in
1966, and Jan Wenner launched Rolling Stone in November 1967 (having
previously worked on Berkeley’s student newspaper, the Daily Californian),
recruiting among other writers Greil Marcus.19 Greg Shaw soon moved to Los
Angeles, launching Who Put the Bomp in 1970 while also being associated with
Phonogram Record, which started the same year.
All these magazines could be treated as part of the much longer history of
specialist music publications emerging to serve new taste groups and record
markets, but there were also other influences on how these rock magazines
were conceived and published: science fiction’s fanzine culture (both Paul
Williams and Greg Shaw started out in the sci-fi fan world) and the under-
ground papers that began to spring up in every big or campus American city,
beginning in 1964 with the Berkeley Barb and the LA Free Press. Greil Marcus’s
early writing, for example, appeared in the underground paper San Francisco
Express Times, which was launched in January 1968 by Marvin Garson, who
had previously edited Wooden Shoe (the newsletter of Berkeley’s Free Speech
Movement). By 1969, the Underground Press Syndicate, which formed in
1967, was claiming 125 member papers in continuous publication (including
two British titles, Oz and IT) and 200 other titles appearing ‘erratically’.20
Local rock magazines thus articulated both a sense of fan community and
a political and cultural agenda, which had something of the radicalism
18
For Aronowitz, see Al Aronowitz, Bob Dylan and the Beatles: Volume One of the Best of the Blacklisted
Journalist (Bloomington: AuthorHouse, 2004); for Shelton, see Dave Laing ‘Taste-Making and
Trend-Spotting: The Folk Revival Journalism of Robert Shelton’, Popular Music History, 1/3 (2004),
307–28; for Gleason, see Dom Armstrong and Jessica Armstrong, ‘Dispatches from the Front: The Life
and Writings of Ralph J. Gleason’, Rock Music Studies, 1/1 (2014), 3–35.
19
Although it was Rolling Stone that was to become by far the most successful of these new rock
magazines, it is worth noting that the first unashamedly commercial rock title was Gerald Rothberg’s
Hullabaloo, published out of New York from 1966; it changed its name to Circus in 1969.
20
See Simon Frith, The Sociology of Rock (London: Constable, l978), pp. 143–4.
510 SIMON FRITH
previously articulated in folk magazines like Sing Out but with two important
differences. First, rock writers were also pop fans, were looking elsewhere
than folk ideology for the meaning of musical authenticity. Second, these
were pop fans who were self-conscious about being writers. As Robert
Christgau puts it,
It was, of course, the ’60s. The New Journalism was in the air, along with loose
talk of freedom, revolution and astrology. None of us was getting paid much,
and few had actual jobs or believed we needed them. There was a world of
necessity out there, and before long it would step on our necks; in the mean-
time, however, rock criticism was a literary haven.21
The emergence of rock criticism in Britain follows much the same routes as
early rock writing in the United States.22 Here too we can point to the
influence of the underground press – such newspapers as the International
Times (IT), launched in 1966, Oz (1967), and Frendz (1969)23 – and to the
publication of new rock-oriented music magazines, such as Pete Frame’s
fanzine-like ZigZag (1969), or more commercially produced titles such as
Cream (1971–3) and Let It Rock (1972–5), the brainchild of Charlie Gillett
and its first editor, Dave Laing. There was even a new weekly pop music
paper, Sounds, founded in 1970 by a breakaway group of writers/editors from
Melody Maker who spotted a gap in the market for a magazine for teenage rock
fans who wanted gossip and pictures alongside informed and opinionated
concert and record reviews.24 In Britain, too, rock writers came from a pop as
well as an alternative writing background. Penny Valentine, for example,
started her journalism career in 1959, as a sixteen-year-old cub reporter for
the Uxbridge News, before joining first Boyfriend and then Disc. In 1970 she was
recruited to the newly launched Sounds.
21
Robert Christgau, ‘A History of Rock Criticism’, in Andras Szanto (ed.), Reporting the Arts I I
(New York: National Arts Journalism Program, 2003), pp. 140–1.
22
For parallel histories of rock writing in other countries, see Ulf Lindberg, Gestur Guðmundsson,
Morten Michelsen and Hans Weisethaunet, ‘Critical Negotiations: Rock Criticism in the Nordic
Countries’, Popular Music History, 1/3 (2004), 241–62 for Denmark, Iceland, Norway and Sweden;
Larry Portis, French Frenzies: A Social History of Pop Music in France (College Station: Virtualbookworm.
com, 2004) for France; Simone Varriale, ‘Bourdieu and the Sociology of Cultural Evaluation: Lessons from
the Italian Popular Music Press’, Rassegna italiani di sociologia, 1 (2014), 121–48 for Italy; Simon Warner,
‘In Print and on Screen: The Changing Character of Popular Music Journalism’, in Andy Bennett and
Steve Waksman (eds.), The Sage Handbook of Popular Music (Los Angeles: Sage, 2015) for a global survey also
covering Japan and Germany.
23
Frendz was at first called Friends. Its core editorial/writing staff came together to put out the UK edition
of Rolling Stone but fell out with Jann Wenner and so, as ‘friends of Rolling Stone’, started their own paper.
24
Another group of MM writers thought there was also a market for lengthier and more serious jazz and
rock criticism and, under MM auspices, launched a monthly magazine, Music Maker. This turned out not to
be commercially viable and was closed; one member of the team, Bob Houston, left to start Cream; see
Dave Laing, ‘“The World’s Best Rock Read”: Let It Rock’, Popular Music and Society, 33/4 (2010), 451.
The major difference between the history of rock writing in Britain and the
United States is that in the 1960s Britain already had a significant national
music press. Its most successful weekly titles, Melody Maker and New Musical
Express, had much bigger readerships than any of the specialist or alternative
music magazines: throughout the 1960s their joint circulation was around
300,000 and by 1973 it was more than 400,000.25 Rock writing, however,
developed in the two papers rather differently. This is brought out well in
Richard Williams’s account of his way into rock criticism:
I read a lot, I always did. I read Rolling Stone and Creem, but I also read The
New Yorker from the age of 16, Downbeat and Jazz Journal, but I had also read
the underground press since 1966 – Village Voice, East Village Other, IT, Friends,
and so on – but I actually have to say that at that point I was too busy to think
about the quality of my writing. I was too busy writing to think about it very
much. I think that’s why a lot of British pop writing of the time does not
compare very well with American pop writing, because the Americans were
very much aware of themselves as literary figures and became even more so. To
begin with, we weren’t at all. We were writing for weekly papers which were
demanding. We would have to write every day, sometimes, 10,000, 20,000
words a week – a lot of words every day: words, words, words. And you did, in
a kind of benign way, see yourself as a propagandist, trying to get people to
listen to good stuff, so of course you had to write persuasively but the
persuasiveness was more a function of enthusiasm than of literary polish.26
Williams had started his career as a reporter on the local paper in his home-
town of Nottingham, with responsibility, among other things, for writing for
the paper’s youth pages, which gave him a chance to build a portfolio of record
reviews and music features. He joined Melody Maker in 1969.
Most of the Melody Maker writers were from a background like mine – local
journalism – so they had journalistic imperatives . . .27 So we had that back-
ground and we also had the Melody Maker’s tradition of dealing with musicians
as musicians rather than, as I suppose they’d be called today, style icons.
Whereas the NME re-made itself, it came from a completely different direc-
tion, by getting people in – very talented people from the underground press28
. . . it secured a patch that was more aware than we were of music as fashion, or
more interested in exploring it, a bit more aware. We were aware of it, but
they were also able to operate without the consciousness of the sort of
25
Frith, Sociology of Rock, p. 141.
26
Simon Warner, ‘Out of His Pen: The Words of Richard Williams’, rockcritics.com (22 September 2002).
27
Other such writers were Chris Welch, Mick Watts and Colin Irwin.
28
The key ‘underground’ writers at NME were Charles Shaar Murray, who started his writing career at
Oz, Nick Kent, who came from Frendz, and Mick Farren, who came from International Times.
512 SIMON FRITH
progressive rock dimension. They did not have to be nice about Emerson,
Lake and Palmer or Yes.29
In 1972, Charlie Gillett published an article in Rock File for would-be rock
’n’ roll writers. This reads interestingly now not just as a summary of the then
available outlets for rock journalists in both Britain and the United States but
also for capturing a moment of transition, a time when rock writing was
seesawing on an axis between the consumer weeklies (MM, NME, Record
Mirror, Disc and Sounds) which, in Gillett’s words, ‘appear to accept
a position as a vanity press for the record business’, and the more idiosyncratic
monthly magazines which published, in Gillett’s view, more thoughtful,
historically knowledgeable and properly researched articles, reviews and
interviews.30 By 1976 the landscape Gillett described in 1972 had changed.
Many of the new magazines he listed had vanished (Let it Rock, for example,
ceased publication in 1975), leaving to flourish new kinds of consumer maga-
zine, like Rolling Stone and Time Out. At the same time, in Britain, the music
weeklies were now the most important setting for ‘serious’ rock writing and
reading (in 1975 the combined circulation of Britain’s music weeklies was
getting on for 700,000).31
The weeklies’ writers certainly had a key role to play in the production,
marketing and sale of rock records, and benefitted accordingly (with
a continuous supply of free records, concert tickets and access to the stars)
but the music papers could no longer be thought of simply as the record
industry’s vanity press. This was most obvious at NME, where the writers
recruited from alternative and underground publications helped NME’s sales
figures to overtake and then pull away from Melody Maker’s precisely by
bringing their disdain for rock commerce with them. What was clear to
everyone was that writing about music had become central to the way in
which new cultural attitudes were established and commercialised.32
This became evident in the making of punk rock as a musical movement in
the mid-1970s. Sniffin’ Glue (1976) was just the best known of hundreds of
punk fanzines that were published around Britain. The US fanzine equivalent
was Punk, published in New York from 1975, although the boom in local US
29
Simon Warner, ‘Out of His Pen’. From a reader’s perspective this meant that while MM writers
provided detailed descriptions of rock tracks, technologies and techniques, NME writers mocked musi-
cians, their music and their sales trappings alike, and valued artists rather for what they stood for.
30
Charlie Gillett, ‘So You Wanna Be A Rock ’n’ Roll Writer (Keep a Carbon!)’, in Charlie Gillett (ed.),
Rock File (London: New English Library, 1972), p. 64.
31
Frith, Sociology of Rock, p. 141.
32
Both men’s and women’s consumer magazines thus now felt the need for their own pop/rock
columnists. When Cosmopolitan launched its UK edition in 1972, for example, it employed Anne
Nightingale in this role; she had previously written for Petticoat, while in the later 1970s I (like other
UK writers, I assume) was invited to be rock columnist for an about-to-be-launched softcore porn mag.
fanzines came later, with the hardcore punk movement. The longest lasting of
these magazines was Maximumrocknroll, published in San Francisco from 1982,
while two other New York magazines, Trouser Press, which started in 1974 as
‘America’s only British rock magazine’, and New York Rocker, devoted from its
first issue in 1976 to covering the New York indie music scene, were, for
a while, punk magazines by default.
At the same time, from a publisher’s point of view, it was apparent now that
to like music was to like reading about music: popular music fans of all sorts –
not just teenage girls or obsessive male record collectors – made up
a significant segment of the magazine market. Each new musical genre was
thus a potential source of magazine sales for sharp-eared publishing entrepre-
neurs, while the major magazine publishing companies each now assumed
that they needed their own titles to compete for what was a continuously
growing and increasingly market-researched readership. The history of pop-
ular music and its audience can thus be traced from the 1970s to the early
1990s through the continuous appearance of new magazines and in the career
of a publishing entrepreneur like David Hepworth.33 In Britain, Black Music
(1973) and Black Echoes (1976), Smash Hits (1978), Southern Rag (1979) which
became Folk Roots (1985), Record Collector (1979),34 Kerrang (1981), The Wire
(1982), Mixmag (1983) and Boy’s Own (1986) were aimed at the very different
fan constituencies of, respectively, Northern Soul, reggae and African music,
new romantic new pop, folk, roots and world music, pre-punk pop and rock,
heavy metal, jazz and the rock avant-garde, disco and acid house.35 By the
mid-1980s publishers in both Britain and the United States had decided that
Rolling Stone and NME/Melody Maker’s dominance of the mainstream rock-
reading public could be challenged by glossier, younger and/or less self-
important consumer guides (particularly following the arrival of the CD),
such as Spin (1985) and the more eclectic Option (1985) in the United States;
and Q (1986), Select (1990) and Vox (1990) in the UK.36 The commercial
success of rap in the 1980s lead to the publication from 1988 of the British
Hip Hop Connection, edited by ex-fanzine editor Chris Hunt, and the American
title The Source, initially the newsletter/fanzine of a Harvard radio show.
33
After writing for NME and Sounds and editing Smash Hits, Hepworth founded Just Seventeen, Looks, Q,
More, Empire, Mojo, Heat and The Word.
34
This was the British equivalent of the US music collectables magazine Goldmine, founded in 1974.
35
For the history of DJ/club/dance magazines in Britain, see Simon Morrison, ‘“Surely People Who Go
Clubbing Don’t Read”: Dispatches from the Dancefloor and Clubland in Print’, IASPM@Journal, 4/2
(2014), available at iaspmjournal.net.
36
Option emerged from the demise of my favourite fanzine OP, published from 1979 to 1984 out of
Olympia, Washington. Each of its issues was devoted to bands, artists or movements beginning with
a single letter of the alphabet (there were therefore just twenty-six issues).
514 SIMON FRITH
The magazines launched in the late 1970s and during the 1980s worked in
a different journalistic context than those launched in the 1960s and early
1970s. As Robert Christgau puts it: ‘[we moved] from a Beatlemania that went
without significant critical consideration in the daily press to an embattled
megabusiness that attracts locally generated reviews and features from the
Portland Press Herald to The Fresno Bee’.37 He explained further: ‘With Rolling
Stone a beacon, editors and publishers slowly climbed aboard. Rock’s com-
mercial juggernaut became impossible to ignore, as did the actual existing
interests of working journalists.’38
In short, from the early 1970s it became normal for newspapers in both
Britain and the United States to cover rock as part of their day-to-day arts and
cultural coverage; the rock critic was now a necessary journalist role.39 And in
local and national newspapers, which were necessarily aimed at a general
readership, such a critic was expected to write about all sorts of popular
music. The ideal rock writer was informed across a range of genres, and was
expected to be an enthusiast but with a critical detachment, to both educate
readers and to confirm the validity of their tastes. Not surprisingly, then, the
next generations of influential rock critics, the people who took up or influ-
enced newspaper music coverage, were recruited through the established rock
press (rather than from fanzines): in the United States, from Rolling Stone
(Mikal Gilmore, David Fricke, Rob Sheffield) and the Village Voice (Nelson
George, Greg Tate, Ann Powers, Eric Weisbard, Chuck Eddy); in the UK,
from NME, Sounds and Melody Maker (Jon Savage, Paul Morley, Vivien
Goldman, Lucy O’Brien, Barney Hoskyns, Ian Penman, Simon Reynolds).
The last chapter of the history of rock writing begins in the mid-1990s,
although, paradoxically, the 1990s had opened with a new burst of punk-style
fanzines, inspired by the Riot Grrrl scene and important as a source of
feminist music writing.40 From the perspective of the publishing industry,
though, neither these feminist fanzines nor new retro titles like Mojo, which
started publication in Britain in 1993 as a response to the increasing economic
clout of ageing rock consumers, were as significant as the first appearance of
37
Christgau, ‘A History of Rock Criticism’, pp. 141–2. 38
Ibid., p. 142.
39
Robert Hillburn became rock and pop critic for the LA Times in 1970; John Rockwell, as a classical
music critic at the New York Times, started reviewing rock for the paper from 1974, though Robert Palmer,
a musician who had written for Rolling Stone, was the paper’s first dedicated rock and pop critic, in the role
from 1981 to 1988. He was replaced by Jon Pareles, who had a music degree but also a background writing
for Crawdaddy, Rolling Stone and the Village Voice. Pareles started writing for the New York Times in 1982,
the same year I joined the Sunday Times as its first rock critic (Derek Jewell had previously written
occasionally about rock acts in his role as jazz and pop reviewer).
40
Titles emerging from this movement included the musician-aimed Rock Grl, created by Carla de Santis
in San Mateo, California, Punk Planet, launched in Chicago in the same year, 1994, and Ablaze!, first
published in Manchester in 1987, which focused on Riot Grrrl acts from1993.
successful digital magazines. In 1994, for example, senior Rolling Stone writer
Michael Goldberg launched an online music magazine, Addicted to Noise; in
1995 New York fanzine writer Jason Gross launched the online Perfect Sound
Forever; the same year in Minneapolis, Ryan Schreiber started Turntable, an
online indie fanzine that in 1996 was renamed Pitchfork, moving to Chicago in
1999, which was also when Sarah Zupko launched the online Pop Matters.41
Sean Adams’s British music site Drowned in Sound was launched in 2000 (its
origins were the 1998 emailed fanzine, The Last Resort). By the turn of the
century, the most interesting rock writing was appearing in online rather than
print magazines, and the blogosphere had become a significant outlet for
established rock writers, as the space in print outlets was steadily reduced
(Melody Maker ceased publication in 2000; NME became an online-only pub-
lication in 2018).42
In the twentieth-first century the context of music writing thus changed in
two ways. First, the digital transformation of information storage and dis-
tribution put an end to the publishing model that had sustained (and made
mutually beneficial) the print and recorded music industries. As record sales
and record company incomes fell so did the resources for advertising, star
building and tour support; music publications lost advertising income at the
same time as their own sales figures declined. And the fragmentation of the
music market, which was both a cause and an effect of new digital music
services, meant that rock criticism had less significance anyway.43 People no
longer had to hear or read about music that didn’t immediately interest them;
taste groups and fan communities could now be established virtually, through
social media and file sharing. The ideological role of the rock critic as a musical
authority with exclusive access to both information and a public platform
from which to air their views became redundant. Consumer guidance, it
seems, could now be performed by an algorithm.44
41
One other publication that could be mentioned in this digital context is Blender, which was launched in
the United States in 1994 as a CD-ROM magazine. It moved online in 1997 but after being taken over by
the UK-based Dennis Publications was also, from 1999, aggressively marketed (in the end not very
successfully) in a print format.
42
The most engaging such sites are Richard Williams’s thebluemoment.com and Simon Reynolds’s blissblog.
43
Howard Hampton suggests that such fragmentation preceded digital music marketing; see his ‘70’s
Rock: The Bad Vibes Continue’, New York Times (14 January 2001), Arts and Leisure Section, 3. The best
summary account of the effects of the digital revolution on music and newspaper and magazine publishing
is Don McLeese, ‘Straddling the Cultural Chasm: The Great Divide Between Music Criticism and Popular
Consumption’, Popular Music and Society, 33/4 (2010), 433–47.
44
One of the more significant ‘tastemakers’ in this digital world is Sean Parker (co-founder of the first
music-sharing site, Napster, and ex-president of Facebook), who produces the Hipster International
playlist for Spotify. Parker plays the role of rock critic as consumer guide, but his playlist depends as much
on calculus as personal obsession.
516 SIMON FRITH
The Contradictions of Rock Music Criticism

The rock-writing career I know most about is my own, which, while not
untypical, has undoubtedly shaped my understanding of how rock criticism
works.45 Its original impulse was radical and anti-establishment but already,
by 1967, rock was, in Richard Goldstein’s words, ‘a billion-dollar baby’; he
felt the need to introduce ‘Weird Scenes in the Gold Mine’ into his Voice
column as a way of discussing ‘the machinations of the recording industry’.46
From almost the very beginning, then, the rock critic was both a self-
proclaimed journalistic outsider and an essential cog in a rapidly expanding
global music sales machine.47 The resulting financial relationship between
record companies and music magazines was sometimes direct: Rolling Stone
was, for a while, supported by Warner Records and ZigZag by Chrysalis
Records, just as Gramophone had been, for a while, supported by EMI. But in
the popular music world, as in the classical music world, record companies
quickly understood that the most effective promotional support came from
writers who were thought by their readers to make independent judgements
and from publications that were clearly concerned with their own markets.
Music papers and writers were indeed dependent on record companies for
financial survival, but indirectly, through advertising income and free access
to the music being written about. Rock criticism thus developed as a way of
writing about music in which critics asserted their aesthetic autonomy while
accepting that their livelihoods depended on their value to both recording and
publishing commerce. The resulting tensions were articulated in rock critics’
uneasy and inconsistent attitudes towards both low and high culture.
In the 1950s, youth pop, rock ’n’ roll, was commonly regarded as lower-
class music. To take such music seriously, as writers began to in the 1960s,
thus suggested a new social sensibility. Richard Goldstein recalls this shift:
I don’t know when rock ’n’ roll became rock. I started using the term in 1966,
though it seemed arbitrary to make a distinction between the ‘trash’ of my
youth and the ‘serious’ stuff. I thought it had more to do with class than music.
Rock went to college; rock ’n’ roll was a high school dropout.48
45
Don McLeese’s offers a comparable summary of a career as a music writer in the United States
(McLeese, ‘Straddling the Cultural Chasm’, 435).
46
Goldstein, Another Little Piece of My Heart, p. 78.
47
The relationship was celebrated in 1973 by Ardent Records, which organised the first (and only) Rock
Writers Convention, supposedly to establish a kind of rock critics’ professional union, but in fact as part of
a PR campaign to support Big Star’s forthcoming Radio City album. See Barney Hoskyns, ‘The Great Lig in
the Sky: The Legendary, First-and-Last Rock Writer’s Convention’, rocksbackpages.com (June 2006).
48
Goldstein, Another Little Piece of My Heart, p. 37.
To put this another way, the new approach to pop was not simply an effect
of the music itself becoming more ambitious – ‘songs that blasted through the
traditional formula of pop’, in Goldstein’s words – but, as importantly, of
a new way of thinking about it. Rock writers started out as intellectuals; this is
why they treated popular music ‘as something worthy of serious intellectual
scrutiny’.49 And if it has always been difficult to distinguish ‘pop’ from ‘rock’
according to any clear musical criteria, that is because, when it comes to it,
‘rock’ can only be defined as ‘the music that rock critics write about’. After all,
any form of popular music can be of intellectual interest.
Sociologically, it is certainly the case that the first generation of American
rock writers were almost all college graduates (many of the early rock maga-
zines originated in university publications or friendship groups), while in the
UK the major difference between the writers in, say, Melody Maker and Let It
Rock in the early 1970s was that the new, self-conscious rock writers in the
latter had mostly been to university and the local newspaper-trained journal-
ists at the former had not. In educational terms, the profile of rock writers ever
since has been much like that of any other group of high-cultural journalists;
hence the significant number of rock writers in Britain who have come
through Oxbridge.50 In the early days what set these writers apart from
high music critics was that the musicians they wrote about (and most highly
valued) did not usually come from the same cultural world, though their
readers increasingly did.51 As Simon Reynolds wrote in 1990, music paper
readers were ‘largely students, ex-students and those destined to be
students’.52 And by then the same could be said of rock musicians, too.
In 1976, Robert Christgau described ‘a Rock-Critic Establishment’, a group
of critics who ‘all live in New York, work for influential publications, and are
very close socially’.53 His piece was a response to Bruce Springsteen’s appar-
ent rise to fame through critical acclaim rather than mass sales, but his article
addressed the more general issue of critical consensus. If rock writing was
premised on the individual sensibility, style and voice of a particular writer, if
self-expression was the essence of rock criticism (hence the phenomenon of
49
See Devon Powers, Writing the Record: The Village Voice and the Birth of Rock Criticism (Amherst:
University of Massachusetts Press, 2013), pp. 9–17.
50
For example, Charlie Gillett, Ian Macdonald, Jon Savage, Mary Harron, Mark Ellen, Barney Hoskyns,
Simon Reynolds and Alexis Petridis, long-time chief rock critic of the Guardian. I graduated from Oxford.
51
A pattern that continued for some genres. Chris Atton notes that Scotland’s first punk fanzine, Hanging
Around, was put together by students at the University of Edinburgh ( Chris Atton, ‘Popular Music
Fanzines: Genres, Aesthetics and the “Democratic Conversation”’, Popular Music and Society, 33/4
(2010), 520).
52
Quoted in Jason Toynbee, ‘Policing Bohemia, Pinning Up the Grunge: The Music Press and Generic
Change in British Pop and Rock’, Popular Music, 12/3 (1993), 296–7.
53
Robert Christgau, ‘Yes, There Is a Rock-Critic Establishment (But Is That Bad for Rock?)’, Village Voice
(26 January 1976), 128.
518 SIMON FRITH
rock writer-as-star), how was the rock canon (already obvious by then)
established?54 One aspect of this is institutional. As Christgau suggests, rock
writers quickly established networks and hierarchies that could be ostenta-
tiously exclusive (a point often made about 1970s and 1980s NME writers, for
example).55 In a profession that was largely freelance, such contacts were what
enabled one to get commissions, assignments and retainers; my own rock-
writing career certainly depended on the friendship groups of which I was
a member, in both Britain and the United States (as a full-time academic I was
not really part of a professional network). Argument and agreement in such
groups were essential to the development of shared critical judgements. Such
consensus, though, also ensured the continuing importance of fanzines, in
which new writers could sound an individual voice against the common
critical view. Fanzines thus remained a constant source of new rock writers
throughout the 1970s and 1980s, though to sustain a career such writers had
quickly to become professional, to join or form a critical establishment
themselves.56 As Simon Reynolds wrote in 1984, in the first issue of his own
fanzine, Monitor, ‘fanzines are really a submerged but functional part of the
pop media, the system by which talent (musical and journalistic) is defined,
noticed, and rises’.57
While fanzines, particularly punk and post-punk fanzines, celebrated DIY,
their writers were, as Reynolds suggests, still essentially elitist. The sugges-
tion that anyone could be a rock critic was coupled with the assumption that
most of the people who did write about music, and especially most of those
who were paid to, were clueless hacks, dupes of the music industry. As fanzine
writers became professionals themselves (and Monitor’s writers were all soon
working for Melody Maker) the distinction between the critic and the hack had
to be maintained in the context of professional practice, the former expressing
their independent individual views in the review section, the latter complicit
with record companies’ star-making process in the provision of artist features,
on-the-road tour reports and interviews.
This distinction between different kinds of music journalism was familiar
from early on. In his 1976 account of the Rock-Critic Establishment, Robert
54
Lester Bangs and Nick Kent are probably the rock writers who have been most obviously treated as
rock stars, but many rock critics have been thought to have big enough names to support book collections
of their work.
55
Christgau, ‘Yes, There Is a Rock-Critic Establishment’, 128. At some point in the 1970s, I went with
members of the New York rock critic establishment to a club gig (we began the evening by having dinner
together). On arrival we discovered that the prime reviewers’ table was occupied by lesser rock critics.
After some discussion with the club manager, they were moved and we took their seats.
56
See Chris Atton, ‘“Living in the Past”? Value Discourses in Progressive Rock Fanzines’, Popular Music,
20/1 (January 2001), 29–46.
57
Simon Reynolds, ‘Fanzines: The Lost Movement’, Monitor, 1 (1984), [n.p.].
Christgau distinguished the ‘pop intellectual’ from ‘an eloquent groupie like
Rolling Stone puff king Ben Fong-Torres’, but in professional practice most
pop intellectuals have also had to do their share of star puffery and musician
interviews.58 Besides, as Christgau also makes clear (his article was, after all,
about the selling of Bruce Springsteen), the fan impulse that drives rock
writers means the public championing of the sounds and acts with which
one is obsessed. Fans become rock critics because they want to develop the
persuasive writing skills needed to sell the music they like to their readers;
such a fan sensibility is what gives them credibility as critics. At the same time,
and for just this reason, it is also important to make clear that this is their
judgement, that they are not being manipulated by record company press
campaigns.59 It is thus quite possible for well-respected rock writers to move
into record company employment (such as Richard Williams at Island and
Paul Nelson at Mercury) and back again, as well as to take on the work of
writing record sleeve and concert programme notes, ghosting musician bio-
graphies and compiling music collections for record labels (work that is
routine for jazz and classical music writers too).60
It is also clear, after fifty years of rock criticism, that the continuing attempt
to mark off ‘real’ criticism from commercially driven hackery is also an effect
of critics getting older. The suggestion that rock criticism is dead has been
around since rock criticism was born: Richard Goldstein, for example, seems
to have decided that rock criticism was no longer possible in 1968, and articles
asking ‘where have all the rock critics gone?’ have been a staple of music papers
since at least the late 1970s.61 Such a sense of loss, though, has been as much an
effect of generational change as of corporate corruption. As Tom Carson
suggested in a 2002 interview:
58
Christgau, ‘Yes, There Is a Rock-Critic Establishment’, 142. A selection of Fong-Torres’s Rolling Stone
pieces can be found in Ben Fong-Torres, Not Fade Away: A Backstage Pass to 20 Years of Rock & Roll (London:
Backbeat Books, 1999). The best rock star interviews in this period appeared in Musician magazine, a US
monthly that ran from 1976 to 1999. As its subtitle (‘The Art, Business and Technology of Making Music’)
indicated, it was less interested in musicians’ personalities than in their music-making practices. For the
general role of musical instrument magazines in establishing a musical (as against critical) community, see
Paul Théberge, Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology (Hanover: Wesleyan
59
For a good discussion of the complex relationship between the music press and record company PR
personnel, see Eamonn Forde, ‘Conflict and Collaboration: The Press Office/Journalist Nexus in the
British Music Press of the Late 1990s’, Popular Music History, 1/3 (2004), 285–306. For an overview of the
relationship between music writers and the music industry, see Dave Laing, ‘Anglo-American Journalism’,
in Andy Bennett, Barry Shank and Jason Toynbee (eds.), The Popular Music Studies Reader (London:
Routledge, 2007).
60
The biggest fee I ever earned was from the Pet Shop Boys for the right to reprint a piece I’d written
about them in their tour programme.
61
See Goldstein, Another Little Piece of My Heart, p. 134; Frith, ‘Going Critical’, pp. 267–8.
520 SIMON FRITH
About 15 years ago the whole ballgame changed. The stuff that had made rock
and roll seem consequential enough to devote your life to it just obviously
didn’t work that way anymore, and even though what replaced it is just as
consequential, it involves all these different vocabularies and attitudes and
guiding premises. I mean, I thought it was very funny, in a wishful sort of way,
when critics started saying ‘transgressive’ instead of ‘subversive’. It’s like new,
improved Dr Pepper. But it’s just ridiculous to treat upsetting the apple cart as
a central value in music now, certainly if your basic orientation is toward
white-guy guitar bands – which I think it was at the outset for pretty much all
the critics in my age group. Kurt Cobain really was the end of the line and also
sort of a fluke, and I think it didn’t make his life any easier that he was smart
enough to know it and just be bedeviled [sic] by it. Ever since Madonna, unless
you’re reviewing hip-hop, you’ve had to learn to take pop phenomenons [sic]
seriously in a way critics didn’t back then. I dunno, should we really have
thought long and hard about Olivia Newton-John? Probably.62
Carson is raising questions here about the source of rock critics’ authority.
Unlike their classical colleagues, writers about popular music have no formal
qualifications in musical analysis and make no claims about their own musical
skills (musical literacy, for example, is not a prerequisite). Why, then, should
anyone take any notice of what they write?
When writers started taking popular music seriously their critical model
was clearly jazz writing, which had established that a music critic was not
bound by the technical language or aesthetic sensibility of the classical world.
Richard Goldstein thus called his college magazine music column
‘The Second Jazz Age’,63 and my first articles for my college magazine, inter-
views with the Animals and Manfred Mann, were pitched to a sceptical arts
editor as examining the influence of jazz on British beat music (at that time
Isis, the University of Oxford’s student magazine, had a jazz critic but rarely
published anything on pop). Lindberg et al. suggest that ‘In many respects the
rock criticism emerging at Melody Maker from 1964 onward was not so much
a break with the traditions of jazz criticism as a prolongation of it.’64 And, as
Matt Brennan notes, in the mid-1960s Downbeat was the bestselling popular
music magazine in the United States, and duly took account of the emergence
of the new music and its audiences in its news and reviews.65 In the end, ‘rock’
and ‘jazz’ were established as different kinds of label for different kinds of
music, but this was not inevitable. Different editorial and marketing decisions
62
Tom Carson, ‘Sorry Ma, Forgot to Bring in the Trash: Tom Carson Talks Straight to Scott Woods and
Steven Ward’, rockcritics.com (April 2002).
63 64
Powers, Writing the Record, p. 64. Lindberg, et al., Rock Criticism from the Beginning, p. 88.
65
Matt Brennan, When Genres Collide: Downbeat, Rolling Stone and the Struggle between Jazz and Rock
(New York: Bloomsbury, 2017).
at Downbeat could have established much of the music that became rock as
a subcategory of jazz. Certainly, early rock critics like Robert Christgau and
Lester Bangs included jazz musicians among the artists in whom they were
interested, while the established jazz critic Ralph J. Gleason was a key figure
in starting and shaping Rolling Stone, which regularly covered jazz in its early
days.
There were two related reasons why this music became written about as
a new genre, rock, rather than as a new way of making an existing kind of
popular music, jazz. First, the music writers most interested in the new music
identified themselves as fans; they wrote as and for music consumers rather
than music-makers. In Melody Maker, for example, there was a clear tension
between the older and younger writers as to their significant readers and the
differences here determined how the music was written about. Second, rock
writers were less concerned than jazz writers with musical skill and technique
and more concerned with musicians’ ability to articulate the communal values
of their fans. In this respect they drew on critical approaches to folk music
rather than to jazz.66
Rock writers’ authority, in short, comes not from their musical qualifica-
tions or experiences but from their authenticity as listeners. They are not
practitioners in the making of the music they review but in the processes in
which it is heard and understood. Music doesn’t have to be described using
shared musical language (a language which is, in any case, unlikely to be
available). One result, as New York Times rock critic, Sasha Frere-Jones puts
it, is that such criticism is ‘unsupervised’: anything goes.67 Another is that pop
and rock critics’ authority is inextricably tied up with the idea of authenticity.
In a detailed content analysis of all music features and reviews published in
Edinburgh’s and Glasgow’s broadsheet newspapers and corresponding eve-
ning tabloids in a three-month period (1 October–31 December 2004),
Frances Boyson found:
The notion of authenticity in popular music pervades discourses within all the
papers, and especially within reviews. The multiple uses of the term and the
many concepts that underlie it are often contradictory, despite being referred
66
See Simon Frith, ‘“The Magic That Can Set You Free”: The Ideology of Folk and the Myth of the Rock
Community’, Popular Music, 1 (January 1981), 159–68. One consequence of this has been the dominance of
rock writing by the interests and sensibilities of white boys/men. This was a further difference between
jazz and rock writing: the former drew on African American writing about popular music; the latter did
not (see Brooks, ‘The Write to Rock’). Further, as Brooks shows, this sense of male community has also
meant that women rock writers have had to fight to be heard. For a British account of this issue see
Caroline Sullivan, ‘The Joy of Hacking: Women Rock Critics’, Sarah Cooper (ed.) Girls! Girls! Girls! Essays
on Women and Music (London: Cassell 1995), pp. 138–45.
67
Sasha Frere-Jones, ‘Subject/Object. Firsthand Knowledge in Criticism’, in Andras Szanto (ed.),
Reporting the Arts I I (New York: National Arts Journalism Program, 2003), pp. 144–5.
522 SIMON FRITH
to as fixed and objective. Instead, authenticity can be shown to be a subjective

label, attributed to artists whom, at that moment, lead the writer to perceive
certain qualities pertaining to the means by which the music has been created,
produced and consumed.68
Weisethaunet and Lindberg have suggested that what’s at stake here is as

much the authenticity of the writer as of the music and musicians being
written about:
Within rock criticism, there is no doubt that the new-intellectuals-become-

critics in the 1960s experienced performances as ‘authentic’ although rock was
‘mass culture’. But, as they set out to communicate this experience, it was
displaced from the inner-subjective sphere and essentialized as a quality
inherent in the music (as well as other constituent elements of rock culture).69
Take, as an example of this point, Tom Carson’s review of U2 in the Village

Voice in 1988. Among other things, he writes:
Even punks who manifestly didn’t know how to play let you know they knew
how to listen, but U2 have never given the impression that they spent their
youth turned on by records or obsessed with records, or even noticing records
particularly – or humming much.70
If knowing how to listen and being obsessed with records is an aspect of

performers’ claims to be making authentic rock ‘n’ roll, it is because it is also
central to a critic’s claims to be able to determine such authenticity. In her
study of everyday rock journalism in Philadelphia (based on extensive inter-
views with fifteen local practitioners), Bethany Klein usefully illustrates the
issues involved here.71 Her interviewees were well aware of the difficulty of
establishing their credentials to write about music when they had no formal
qualifications for the task. In particular, how can one distinguish a good from
a bad rock critic? The consensus view was that ‘popular music critics should be
proficient writers, should have a breadth of knowledge, and should be able to
make studied judgements regardless of personal preferences’.72 The problem
was that readers could well claim these qualities too (and might be far more
knowledgeable about the artists they really liked). The good critic should
therefore be a general rather than a ‘super fan’, but their knowledge should
68
Frances Boyson, ‘Music Journalism in the Scottish Daily Press’, unpublished BMus dissertation,
University of Edinburgh (2006), 42.
69
Hans Weisethaunet and Ulf Lindberg, ‘Authenticity Revisited: The Rock Critic and the Changing
Real’, Popular Music and Society, 33/4 (2010), 481.
70
Tom Carson, ‘Elvis is Alive’, Village Voice (15 November 1988), 75.
71
Bethany Klein, ‘Dancing about Architecture: Popular Music Criticism and the Negotiation of
Authority’, Popular Communication 3/1 (2005), 1–20.
72
Ibid., 5.
come from their own listening (rather from reading press packs). Klein’s
interviewees were therefore anxious when writing about music that they
hadn’t grow up with because, in their view, ‘authoritative’ knowledge came
from the authenticity of their own musical experience. Where writers-as-fans
differed from readers-as-fans was that the critic had to translate taste (their
likes and dislikes) into value (an assertion of what is good or bad).
What is involved here is what I have called elsewhere, in a discussion of the
work of Greil Marcus, ‘pragmatic romanticism’:
From this perspective rock is a music that articulates an individual sense of

being which – mysteriously – resonates with both history and audience; the
critic’s task is both to sense this mystery and to account for it, to show how it
happens, in the collaborative and often accidental processes of music making
and music listening.73
If musicians’ articulation of self necessarily involves collaboration and acci-

dent, the effects of commercial as well as aesthetic decision-making, so wri-
ters’ claims to autonomy, the romantic ideal of being true to their feelings,
come up in practice against the realities of writing for a living and being
subject both to editorial (and sub-editorial) quirks and reader expectations.
The critics interviewed by Klein in Philadelphia were well aware that their
need to express themselves as music writers constantly came up against the
needs of their editors and readers for consumer guidance, and that the writer’s
basic tool, the space for their words, was not under their control. At the same
time, their role as professional journalists also protected them from market
pressures in the ongoing negotiations with record company press officers for
access to new music.
From this perspective the different power of different critics has more to do
with the reach and reputation of their publication than their writing. But
a further point here is that, as I have already suggested, critics don’t write
alone, as it were, but operate in conjunction with all the other critics writing
about the same records and performances in all the other outlets (the
Philadelphia writers describe the ‘rock critic huddle’ that forms at local
concerts).74 As Jason Toynbee puts it, critics work to create ‘an interpretative
community’.75 In Klein’s words, ‘There is recognition among popular music
critics that the majority opinion is the one that will be remembered and will be
73
Simon Frith, ‘The Place of the Producer in the Discourse of Rock’, Simon Frith and Simon Zagorsky-
Thomas (eds.), The Art of Record Production (Farnham: Ashgate, 2012), pp. 220–1.
74
Klein, ‘Dancing about Architecture’, 17.
75
Toynbee, ‘Policing Bohemia, Pinning Up the Grunge’, 299.
524 SIMON FRITH
archived in the rock ’n’ roll history books, unless the critical community later
revaluates the work (which still would require consensus).’76
For these critics, then, self-expression needs to be distinguished from self-
indulgence, and rebellion against the mainstream from the dismissal of music
just for being popular. Toynbee suggests that historically the result has been
an ongoing dialectic, as each new generation of critics excoriates the existing
critical consensus as outdated and establishes a new one.77 But this also
illustrates the uneasy relationship pop and rock critics have with the issue of
popularity itself. For twenty-five years I chaired the judges of the Mercury
Music prize, which is one way in which rock critical values have been institu-
tionalised. Commentary on our shortlists and winners never changes: our
judgement has either been too populist or not populist enough. As Alexis
Petridis wrote in the Guardian about the 2015 Prize:
The predominance of artists of relatively obscure stature on this year’s short-

list had already attracted criticism from people keen to invoke the famously
watertight argument that the best music is invariably the most commercially
successful; among them heavyweight musical theorist Dan Wooton, of the
Sun’s Bizarre column, who decried the list of nominees as ‘another snobfest
from arrogant music industry luvvies who do not give a damn what the
majority of the country listen to’.78
This is to return to the Philadelphia critics’ anxiety: why should anyone

read them? They are either praising records which few people like or knocking
those that many people do. The paradox, as Andrew Goodwin once suggested,
is that
Like most people you love to hate, music critics are actually very popular.
Why? Because you can’t get by without them. It isn’t just that pop writers
might help you select which music you will listen to, and perhaps buy. Even
more important, the words that describe music influence the way you hear it.
You can’t consume music direct like some kind of intravenous drug. Even if
you believe you can, there’s no way to discuss the experience or make it
meaningful that avoids the use of words. Pop writing helps us decode its
sounds and visions. Words speak louder than music.79
Rhetorically, rock critics’ uneasy relationship with the popular means, as

Toynbee shows, a constant interplay between the ‘didactic’ and the ‘confron-
tational’, between persuasive and scoffing prose; the critic is either explaining
76
Klein, ‘Dancing about Architecture’, 17.
77
Toynbee, ‘Policing Bohemia, Pinning Up the Grunge’, 292.
78
Alexis Petridis, ‘Their Darling Clementine: Mercury Prize Judges Opt for Obscure Artist’, Guardian
Music Blog, guardian.com (20 November 2015).
79
Andrew Goodwin, ‘Words Speak Louder than Music’, Calendar Magazine (June 1987), 8.
to readers why they should like something or why they shouldn’t.80 And,
necessarily in this context, it is the obscure acts that need talking up, the
successful ones that need talking down. Toynbee himself provides an excel-
lent analysis of Charles Shaar Murray’s writing from this perspective, showing
how skilfully Murray mixes high and low cultural terms in his changes of
register, but the most pithy deployment of the instructive and the insulting
has long been found in Robert Christgau’s ‘Consumer Guide’, capsule reviews
of new releases that he has been writing since 1969.81 The success of such
writing, whether measured as a way of making a living or in terms of its effect
on popular taste, depends, of course, on finding readers who want to be
educated and confronted (and are willing to pay for this). It has been a moot
question in the last decade whether such a readership can be sustained.
I don’t want to end, though, by sounding like every other music writer and
bemoaning the end of a critical golden age. I’m sure that people will go on
engaging with popular music and that such engagement will involve writing
and reading about music. I am also sure that as one way of doing this, rock
criticism, becomes steadily less significant it is likely to be supplanted by other
sorts of criticism, involving new ways of doing both music and journalism.
One question can still be asked however: in its fifty-year history, what have
been rock criticism’s effects?
To answer this fully, one would need to look at rock writing’s influence on
music marketing, on the commercial understanding of pop, in terms of both
genre and desire. Over the years, rock writers have, I think, given record
companies an idea of what record buyers and concert-goers wanted their
music for, while providing accounts of artistic creativity that became key to
the star-making process. And one could look, too, at the way in which rock
critics brought popular music into the cultural mainstream, making popular
music a normal topic for discussion in the broadsheet press or for public
service broadcasters while also, consequently, making such music interesting
to cultural policy makers and arts councils.
But here I will just note the influence of journalistic writing about popular
music on academic writing about popular music, on popular music studies.
Rock journalists preceded academics in taking popular music seriously. The
first scholarly book on pop that I read was Dave Laing’s The Sound of Our Time,
which deployed a number of scholarly approaches to the meaning of music but
was, nevertheless, written by a journalist who wouldn’t have an academic post
80
Toynbee, ‘Policing Bohemia, Pinning Up the Grunge’, 299. This is true for all critics who see their task
as giving shape to a potential taste community.
81
These can be found at www.robertchristgau.com/cg.php.
526 SIMON FRITH
for many years to come.82 More generally, as Weisethaunet and Lindberg

point out,
The history of popular music has, to a considerable extent, been written by

music journalists rather than by music scholars. The self-understanding of the
popular music studies field therefore, to a large extent, reflects the doxa of
popular music criticism, in which some of the most central concepts – with
‘authenticity’ as, perhaps, a paradigmatic example – tend to be harnessed to
mythologies cultivated in the journalistic field.83
The terms and conditions of academic popular music studies, in other

words, have their unquestioned sources in the archives of the music press.
In this field, the academy doesn’t provide an alternative critical or detached
way of thinking about popular music but simply adapts both the discourse and
authorial stance that is already out there.
82
Dave Laing, The Sound of Our Time (London: Sheed and Ward, 1969).
83
Weisethaunet and Lindberg, ‘Authenticity Revisited’, 467. See also Toynbee, ‘Policing Bohemia,
Pinning Up the Grunge’, 299.
. 27 .
Working in the Cool Capitalism Complex:

The Role of Critics in the World Music Field
TIMOTHY D. TAYLOR
Introduction: Criticism and Fields of Cultural Production

This chapter considers world music criticism, broadly understood.* What we
now call ‘world music’ is a category created by a cadre of critics, DJs, retailers
in the late 1980s, but, of course, the folk and traditional musics that were
placed in that category have existed as long as there has been music. The
beginning of this chapter examines the rise of music as a ‘genre’ in the Anglo-
American music industry1 and its genrefication constructed and maintained,
in part, by critics, who play important roles.
The significant functions played by critics in the construction and main-
tenance of world music as a ‘genre’ is no different than in any other field of
cultural production, and by way of an introduction I want to assert that world
music, whatever its status as a ‘genre’ (which is an effect of the Anglo-
American music industry’s attempt to categorise this music, as it does with
all musics) is, as a genre, no different from any other ‘genre’ and is therefore
subject to analysis as a field of cultural production.2
Briefly, even though, according to Bourdieu, it is fields of cultural produc-
tion that produce genres, world music as a category – and later, genre – was
imposed on musicians around the world by the music industry beginning in
the 1980s. Only then did it begin to develop as a field of cultural production,
though positions, position-takings and forms of capital in this field were
already circulating, available to be captured by musicians for use. I won’t go
into these positions and position-takings at length,3 except to note for the
*
I would like to thank Sherry B. Ortner for helpful comments in the writing of this chapter.
1
See Timothy D. Taylor, ‘World Music Today’, in Bob W. White (ed.), Music and Globalization: Critical
Encounters (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012).
2
Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randal Johnson (New York: Columbia University
Press, 1993) and The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan Emanuel (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 1995).
3
See Timothy D. Taylor, ‘Fields, Genres, Brands’, in Music in the World: Selected Essays (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2017).
[527]
528 TIMOTHY D. TAYLOR
time being that what critics and others conceptualise and discuss as ‘authen-
ticity’ is a complex of positions taken and forms and volumes of capital
possessed by the musician. One position is the musician’s willingness to
adopt popular music sounds from Anglo-America, another’s refusal to do so,
preferring to sound ‘traditional’, whatever that may mean in a particular
context. The other major position concerns whether or not to sing in
English, but I won’t consider that here. ‘Authenticity’ can also take the
form of a capital in the world music field based on a musician’s place of origin,
upbringing in poverty or other form of oppression, coming from a lineage of
famous musicians, studying with a famous teacher, and other such qualities.
Musicians, however, can compromise or enhance a form of capital depending
on a position they take. A world music artist who, for example, possesses
a large amount of capital as a result of being, say, a descendant in a line of West
African griots (heredity bardic musician/poets) can decide to adopt western
popular music sounds, thus taking that position instead of a ‘traditional’ one.
Positions and forms of capital can thus inflect each other in complicated
ways.4
World music as a field of cultural production is extremely complex.
A musician could take as a position membership in the world music field
instead of some other field; or (more common in this field) a musician can be
placed in it by the music industry despite her desire to be in a different field,
a bigger one, a more prestigious one. The great Beninoise singer Angélique
Kidjo (1960–), for example, was marketed for a time as an R&B singer by her
record label, which seems to have made no difference as far as the broader
music industry is concerned – she is still in the world music field.5 World
music as a field depends in large part on the Anglo-American music industry’s
ongoing and extensive efforts to contain world music as a ‘genre’, which has
implications and ramifications for it as a field.
In his conception of the sociology of art and literature, Bourdieu argues
that one must attend not only to works, ‘but also the symbolic production of
the work, i.e. the production of the value of the work or, which amounts of
the same thing, of belief in the value of the work’.6 Thus, a sociology of art
must consider ‘the producers of the meaning and value of the work’, including
critics.7 Critics in every field of cultural production play an important role in
not only shaping that field, Bourdieu says, but also, I would add, defining
4
For more on popular music as a field of cultural production, see David Hesmondhalgh, ‘Bourdieu, the
Media and Cultural Production’, Media, Culture and Society, 28/2 (2006), 211–31.
5
See Elena Oumano, ‘Island Targets R&B Market with New Album from Kidjo’, Billboard (23 May 1998),
1; Timothy D. Taylor, Global Pop: World Music, World Markets (New York: Routledge, 1997).
6 7
Bourdieu, Field of Cultural Production, p. 37. Ibid.
Working in the Cool Capitalism Complex 529
positions, defending them, attacking them, as well as defending or criticising

the forms of capital, and amounts of it, possessed by musicians. Loïc
Wacquant was quite right to characterise fields in general (not just fields of
cultural production) as battlefields in Bourdieu’s thinking, sites of constant
contestation over positions and forms and volumes of capital. Sometimes
critics can play a role in defining positions or forms of capital against what
musicians themselves believe, as I will discuss. The music industry, and its
efforts, depends no less on the role played by critics.
And critics’ roles increasingly depend on the cultural industries’ search for
the hip and the cool, the edgy, the trendy. The search for the cool, or to
manufacture the cool, increasingly suffuses and drives the cultural industries –
and thus, the culture.8 Critics have an important role to play in this enterprise,
which, broadly put, is part of what I will call the Cool Capitalism Complex:
finding and making what is thought to be cool.
The Rise of World Music

Before the selection of the term ‘world music’ to contain all non-Western
musics (and many traditional Western musics), there was, occasionally, a song
or two that entered the mainstream. These were almost invariably curated or
brokered by an American or European musician, or they were Western or
Westernised musics that were tonal and thus approachable by mainstream
American and European listeners. Most of these songs or musics were ephem-
eral fads, though some would come in periodic waves, such as ‘Latin’ musics of
various kinds.9
Historically, one can also trace the European craze for the tango in Paris
and then other European cities;10 the US interest in ukuleles and Hawai’ian
music after the United States annexed the islands in the early twentieth
century, an interest that lasted into the 1920s; the fad for calypso,
a Trinidadian folk music that became more commercialised by the mid-
twentieth century and was popularised beginning with Harry Belafonte
with his album Calypso (1956); and other fascinations for no-Western (or
8
See Timothy D. Taylor, ‘Advertising and the Conquest of Culture’, Social Semiotics, 19/4 (2009),
405–25; ‘The Hip, the Cool, and the Edgy, or the Dominant Cultural Logic of Neoliberal Capitalism’,
Rivista di analisi e teoria musicale, 22/1–2 (2016), 105–24; and Music and Capitalism: A History of the Present
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016); Sherry B. Ortner, Not Hollywood: Independent Film at the
Twilight of the American Dream (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013).
9
See Kariann Goldschmitt, Bossa Mundo: Brazilian Music in the Global Culture Industries (in preparation);
John Storm Roberts, The Latin Tinge: The Impact of Latin American Music on the United States, 2nd ed.
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1999; first published 1979).
10
See Marta E. Savigliano, Tango and the Political Economy of Passion (Boulder: Westview Press, 1995).
marginal Western) genres as precursors to what became known as world

music.
Individual musicians and songs have occasionally entered the mainstream.
South African popular musics registered with everyday listeners songs such as
‘The Lion Sleeps Tonight’ (or ‘Wimba Way’ or ‘Wimoweh’), a song originally
recorded by Solomon Linda with the Evening Birds in 1939, popularised in
the 1950s by many folk and popular artists such as The Weavers, Miriam
Makeba and the Kingston Trio. It became a huge hit for the doo-wop group
The Tokens in 1961.11 Makeba (1932–2008) helped popularise South African
musics beginning in the 1950s with songs such as ‘Pata Pata’, recorded in 1957
(though not released in the United States until a decade later).
Closer chronologically and stylistically to what would become known as
‘world music’ is the Cameroonian Manu Dibango’s track ‘Soul Makossa’,
released in 1972. It was largely unknown in the United States until played
prominently by a New York City DJ, prompting Atlantic Records to license
the original recording from its French label and release it as a single. This
version reached number 35 on Billboard magazine’s ‘Hot 100’ chart in 1973
and was widely covered by groups around the world. ‘Soul Makossa’ is quite
danceable and is viewed by some as an early disco recording.12 Another key
recording was Le Mystère des voix bulgares, released in 1975 and re-released in
1986 in the UK. It was an early world music success, popularising Bulgarian
women’s chorus around the world.13
For most listeners, recognition of what was to become best known as
‘world music’ was prompted by the release in 1986 of Paul Simon’s
Graceland, which employed musicians from South Africa and elsewhere on
the African continent. The release of this album and its success (it won the
Grammy Award for Record of the Year in 1987) increased interest in world
music to the extent that some consumers (never very many, for world music
sales are quite small compared to most other popular musics) began to seek
out sounds similar to the African musics heard on Simon’s album.
Afropop of many kinds, Bulgarian women’s choruses, Indian film music and
other kinds of musics from around the world did not fit in the usual
‘International’ sections of record stores, which might have once held
German polkas or Irish sing-along music (though sometimes the latter could
11
See Rian Malan, ‘Where Does the Lion Sleep Tonight?’, Rolling Stone (25 May 2004), 54–66, 84–5.
12
See for example Peter Shapiro, Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco (New York: Faber and
Faber, 2005).
13
See Timothy Rice, May It Fill Your Soul: Experiencing Bulgarian Music (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 1994).
be classified as ‘folk’). The influential British DJ Charlie Gillett recalled that

moment in the UK:
We had a very simple, small ambition. It was all geared to record shops, that
was the only thing we were thinking about. In America, King Sunny Adé
(from Nigeria) was being filed under reggae. That was the only place shops
could think of to put him. In Britain they didn’t know where to put this
music – I think Adé was just lost in the alphabet, next to Abba. In 1985 [sic]
Paul Simon did Graceland and that burst everything wide open, because he
created an interest in South African music. People were going into shops
saying: ‘I want some of that stuff’ and there wasn’t anywhere for them to
look.14
Following this, world music charts appeared in Billboard magazine (the main
chronicle of the music industry in the United States) beginning in 1990, and
awards were created to recognise world music recordings and artists such as
the Grammy Award, starting in 1991.
The rise of world music and its (continuing) genrefication and fieldification
was thus the result of a series of processes of the industrialisation and manage-
ment of the world musics by the international music industry. The rise of
specialty labels, specialty magazines and websites, the rise of a system of charts
and awards, were all part of this institutionalisation. Criticism had and con-
tinues to have an important role to play in all of these processes, as it does with
any field of cultural production.
In addition to the rise of world music criticism occurring in existing news-
papers and magazines, the rise of world music also brought with it a couple of
specialty magazines, Songlines in the UK, beginning in 1999, and, around the
same time, Rhythm Music Magazines (later RMM) in the United States (now
defunct).15 Songlines began as a semi-serious publication, with articles longer
than the average popular press magazine. Its shape and size were also that of
a scholarly journal, not a popular magazine. This did not last, however, the
editors presumably finding that greater sales could be achieved by changing
the magazine’s appearance and content to attract a broader audience; today, it
is a slick and glossy affair. Songlines began to offer world music awards in 2003;
in 2008, BBC Radio 3 cancelled its Awards for World Music. Songlines inau-
gurated a digital version in 2009 (www.songlines.co.uk).
It was interesting to note that those magazines that covered folk music,
such as Folk Roots in the UK (which had begun as Southern Rag in 1979) and
14
Robin Denselow, ‘We Created World Music’, The Guardian (29 June 2004), 10.
15
It has been difficult to find information on this magazine, to which I once subscribed. I no longer have
any of my old copies.
Dirty Linen in the United States, retooled themselves to include world music.
Folk Roots changed its name to fRoots in 1998. Dirty Linen began as Fairport
Fanatics in 1983 (a publication for fans of the band Fairport Convention),
changing its name in 1987. The magazine ceased publication in 2010. Both
magazines were originally devoted mainly to folk musics (Folk Roots mainly in
the UK and Ireland, Dirty Linen mainly in the United States) but both increas-
ingly covered world music with the rise of that ‘genre’. Much the same
reorganisation was found in retailers, at least in the United States. The
‘Folk’ category was evacuated of anything other than American folk music
(e.g., Ramblin’ Jack Elliott and so forth), and everything else was placed in
‘World Music’ or ‘International’.
World music was initially treated by the music industry and critics as
something fresh, new and different, employing language harking back to the
beginning of modernity in the sixteenth century, as Europeans romanticised
native Americans living freely, without the ills of modern civilisation.16 Wrote
one critic in a guidebook to world music recordings,
Nowadays the music you play needs to be sophisticated but not obtrusive,
easy to take but not at all bland, unfamiliar without being patronizing.
World music gives the American listener a sense of freedom from the
constraints of standardized Anglo-American pop . . . World music is both
entertaining and different. It takes the listener to a place where the world’s
various cultures meet happily and in the spirit of festival. It is a force for
understanding and goodwill in an increasingly dark world.17
Spencer went on to write that he would exclude from consideration in his

book ‘anything that sounds too familiar’.18 Another author wrote in the liner
notes to The Virgin Directory of World Music recording:
The collection of songs . . . hopefully demonstrates that at a time when rock

has become far too responsible to drop its trousers and most jazz couldn’t be
further from the ‘sound of surprise’, a whole lot of stuff the marketeers confine
to the World Music rack has at least one common denominator: its sheer
freshness. If young people have been walking around into record stores and
buying armfuls of Salif Keita and Milton Nascimento albums, then it’s prob-
ably because they want to hear something NEW.19
16
See Timothy D. Taylor, Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World (Durham: Duke University Press,
2007).
17
Peter Spencer, World Beat: A Listener’s Guide to Contemporary World Music on CD (Pennington: A Cappella
Books, 1992), pp. 2–3. Since this author’s title refers to ‘world beat’, let me explain briefly that in the early
days of world music, the term ‘world beat’ was frequently employed to refer to more popular-sounding
music, but the generic and all-encompassing term ‘world music’ is far more common now.
18
Spencer, World Beat, p. 4.
19
Simon Hopkins, Booklet to The Virgin Directory of World Music, Virgin Records, VDWMI (1991).
Authenticities
But ‘NEW’ didn’t mean – and has never meant – so new that the music was
completely unfamiliar. With the rise of ‘world music’, there was an immediate
rise of expectations and discourses about authenticity, but this didn’t mean,
say, ethnographic recordings of traditional musics. Early critical receptions of
world music were much the same in that Western critics expected, even
demanded, that world music artists – particularly those from the African
continent – sound ‘authentic’. There was little consensus about what this
meant, and I suspect that most western critics didn’t actually have sounds in
their ears that they knew were ‘authentic’ or that someone truly knowledge-
able about a particular music would characterise as authentic. Generally,
‘authenticity’ seems to have been a sense that the non-West, Africa in parti-
cular, wasn’t modern, and therefore popular musics from the non-West
couldn’t sound modern, couldn’t sound as though they had had been influ-
enced by western popular musics. But, of course, non-Western musicians had
heard Western music for decades, since the Western music industry had
a presence around the globe almost from its inception.
African musicians bristled at these expectations for some time. Angélique
Kidjo said:
There is a kind of cultural racism going on where people think that African
musicians have to make a certain kind of music. No one asks Paul Simon, ‘Why
did you use black African musicians [on Graceland]? Why don’t you use
Americans? Why don’t you make your music?’ What is the music that Paul
Simon is supposed to do?20
Around the same time, Kidjo said,
I won’t do my music different to please some people who want to see some-
thing very traditional. The music I write is me. It’s how I feel. If you want to
see traditional music and exoticism, take a plane to Africa. They play that
music on the streets. I’m not going to play traditional drums and dress like
bush people. I’m not going to show my ass for any fucking white man. If they
want to see it, they can go outside. I’m not here for that. I don’t ask Americans
to play country music.21
Also around the same time, Youssou N’Dour, faced with the same kind of
expectations and desires of his sound commented on those expectations and
desires in a way that was probably more tactful and diplomatic than he felt: ‘I
think Americans are more and more interested in Africa but they have a long
20
Ty Burr, ‘From Africa, Three Female Rebels with a Cause’, New York Times (10 July 1994), §H, 26.
21
Brooke Wentz, ‘No Kid Stuff’, Beat (1993), 43.
way to go. The day that people in the West understand how much we under-
stand about the workings of the rest of the planet will be a happy day for us’.22
Nonetheless, despite attempts by Kidjo, N’Dour and other musicians to
educate Western fans and critics, some critics continued to complain about
Western influences on world music, especially African popular musics. Some
critics wrote of their preference of Kidjo’s earliest recordings, saying by the mid-
1990s that recordings released in that period sounded too much like Western
pop. Kidjo’s album Ayé from 1994 was written about by one author thus:
In ‘Ayé’ [1994], the Beninoise funk diva more or less dispensed with the
quirkier style of songs that made her earlier CDs, ‘Logozo’ [1991] and parti-
cularly the first, ‘Parakou’ [1989], interesting. On ‘Parakou’, the songs range
from driving dance numbers to sepia-toned laments and a cappella and there’s
a huge wealth of dramatic and intriguing percussion. By comparison, ‘Ayé’ is
straight funk-rock, slickly packaged by a [Western] pop producer [Will
Mowatt, famous for producing Soul II Soul, and David Z, who worked with
The Fine Young Cannibals and Prince], whichever way you look at it – not
necessarily with any purist inflection – the songs on it are less engaging.23
Despite claims against demanding the authentic-as-pure, that is clearly what

this author desired but did not receive with Ayé.
But, after such criticisms in the 1990s of Kidjo’s and many others’ recordings,
the critical discourse quickly, and remarkably, shifted towards greater acceptance
of such recordings under the rubric of ‘hybridity’, or the authentic-as-hybrid.
Kidjo’s long career and the fact that she is a woman in a sexist industry provides
a good way to examine critical discourse, for it was rather astonishing to witness
a critical about-face only a few years after the above disapprobations were
published. The critical response to Kidjo’s Oremi (1998), for example, continues
the Western discourse of the construction of its Others as pre-modern and
untechnological, but this time writing approvingly of Kidjo’s use of modern
musical and production technologies, noting how Oremi ‘balances the electronic
and organic’, evoking modern and pre-modern, Western and African, masculine
and feminine, and other long-familiar binary oppositions.24 A different reviewer
wrote, ‘though Kidjo employs many elements familiar to techno fans, she makes
that genre sound utterly sterile next to her funky, thoroughly organic hybrid’.25
The discourse of hybridity, the rise of the ideology of hybridity-as-authenticity,
22
Sheila Rule, ‘An African Superstar Sings Out to the World’, New York Times (5 September 1992), 11.
23
Simon Broughton, Richard Trillo and Mark Ellingham (eds.), World Music: The Rough Guide (London:
Rough Guides, 1994), p. 298.
24
Paul Robicheau, ‘Listening to History’, Boston Globe (25 September 1998), §D, 15.
25
Unsigned, ‘Kidjo’s “Oremi” Is Heavenly’, Boston Herald (25 September 1998), S25. See Taylor, Beyond
Exoticism for more on the issue of hybridity.
was thus simply a new way of talking about the same old thing, keeping the
West’s Others in the savage slot,26 this time attempting to do so in a more
celebratory way, while at the same time retaining the romanticisation of the pre-
modern, now juxtaposed with the modern as represented by new digital tech-
nologies. But the older discourse of authenticity-as-pure didn’t disappear.
A reviewer of Kidjo’s Oyaya! (2004) praised the album for ‘strip[ping] away the
Europop affections and return[ing] . . . to a rootsier sound’.27 Thus, one regime of
authenticity in critical (or other) discourse doesn’t necessarily give way to
another; they can co-exist, though there are historical moments, some are domi-
nant, some residual and some emergent.28
I would posit two reasons for this critical shift. First, I think it was critics who,
upon listening to more ‘authentic’ recordings such as field recordings by ethno-
musicologists (some of which were released in the famous Nonesuch Explorer
series from 1967 to 1984, including recordings from the African continent),
found such ‘authentic’ music to be less than satisfying, and so abandoned or
attenuated demands for the authentic-as-pure for the authentic-as-hybrid.
Perhaps more significantly, it was also the case for quite some time after the
advent of the world music category that critics and fans seemed to single out for
special praise recordings that featured collaborations between Western stars and
world music artists, as in the case of Graceland.29 In addition to that album, Ry
Cooder (1947–) made several recordings with non-Western musicians that were
hailed by critics for their collaborative nature and were lavished with Grammy
awards. Cooder’s recordings with Indian instrumentalist V. M. Bhatt (A Meeting
by the River, 1993) and Malian guitarist Ali Farka Touré (Talking Timbuktu, 1994)
were both well received by critics; both also won Grammy Awards for Best World
Music Album. Cooder scored even greater popular and critical success with Buena
Vista Social Club (1997), a recording with elderly Cuban musicians. This recording
also won a Grammy Award. In cases such as this, the Anglo-American star is
normally praised by critics for his discernment, his connoisseurship and, tacitly,
his brokering of esoteric or even vaguely dangerous musicians so that they are
rendered palatable for Western cosmopolitan tastes.30
26
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, ‘Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics of Otherness’, in
Richard G. Fox (ed.), Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present (Santa Fe: School of American
Research Press, 1991).
27
Unsigned, ‘Angélique Kidjo “Oyaya!”’, Washington Post (18 June 2004), T07.
28
Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977).
29
The characterisation of Graceland as a collaboration is a complex issue; see Louise Meintjes, ‘Paul
Simon’s Graceland, South Africa, and the Mediation of Musical Meaning’, Ethnomusicology, 34/1 (Winter
1990), 37–73; Taylor, Beyond Exoticism.
30
For more on Buena Vista Social Club, see Ariana Hernández-Reguant, ‘World Music Producers and the
Cuban Frontier’, in Bob W. White (ed.), Music and Globalization: Critical Encounters (Bloomington: Indiana
Cooder’s recording with V. M. Bhatt, for example, was hailed by one critic
thus: ‘“A Meeting by The River” is the musical convergence of the Mississippi
and the Ganges in a series of long, meditative tunes that weave a splendid
spell.’31 Cooder’s next album, with Touré, received much more attention,
however, with both artists praised for their collaborations and give-and-take
musical attitudes. One critic wrote in The Independent:
Ali Farka Touré and Ry Cooder are the joint stars of a new record, Talking
Timbuktu, which is already creating a considerable buzz in the first week of its
release: deservedly, because, discounting jazz, it constitutes an instant mem-
ber of the minuscule list of truly interesting record collaborations between
Africa and American musicians.32
Another wrote, ‘Touré’s sound is the real African thing, modal and moody,
ageless blues. Yet his collaboration with American guitarist Ry Cooder is
a natural. Both are thoughtful guitarists, respectful artists and musical
purists.’33 Many reviews of the album noted Cooder’s longtime collaborative
work.
It was the album Buena Vista Social Club that received the most attention of
all of Cooder’s collaborations, however, with many critics, again, noting the
collaborative nature of the work (other salient discourses concerned Cooder’s
connoisseurship and the supposed lost-in-time nature of his elderly collabora-
tors). One critic who interviewed Cooder noted that ‘“Connecting” is the
word he uses most often – his attempt to find common ground with far-flung
collaborators.’34
It is perhaps in part the result of collaborations such as these (and those by
Peter Gabriel and David Byrne, among others), and greater familiarity with
recordings that could be more justifiably referred to as ‘authentic’, that critical
passion began to move away from the defence of the authentic-as-pure and
towards the authentic-as-hybrid.
World Music Criticism Today

After the first attempts to categorise and genrefy world music and the early
infatuations with the authentic-as-pure, followed surprisingly quickly by the
authentic-as-hybrid, the world music industry began to shift. Perhaps most
notable was the slow incorporation of world music and musicians into the
31
Brian Wise, ‘R. P. M.’, [Melbourne] Sunday Age (3 October 1993), §Agenda, 7.
32
Philip Sweeney, ‘Notes from the Global Village’, The Independent (31 March 1994), 28.
33
Danile Feist, ‘Ali Farka Touré Weaves an Intricate Tapestry of Serenity’, [Montreal] Gazette (23 April
1994), §E, 7.
34
Eric Siblin, ‘Ry Cooder Goes to Cuba’, [Montreal] Gazette (20 November 1997), §C, 1.
realm – and norms – of Western concerts and concert-going behaviours. In the

late 1980s or early 1990s, if one wanted to hear a major singer such as Youssou
N’Dour in concert, one would have had to go to a club and hope that N’Dour
appeared before midnight (which would have been rare). Now, N’Dour and
other world music artists routinely appear in university and other concert
series and festivals, making it much easier for mainstream audiences to hear
them, and thus more likely that critics will hear them as well.
While the earlier critical and reception discourses concerning authenticity
can still be found, along with both the original celebratory and anxious
narratives about world music that Steven Feld has explicated,35 today’s
world music critics can be more knowledgeable than they were in the past,
more willing to write in somewhat pedagogical modes to educate their read-
ers, and more likely to review performers and performances as performers and
performances rather than as (imagined) representatives of their cultures or
races or ethnicities. Also, with the rise of world music stars such as N’Dour,
Kidjo, Salif Keita and Oumou Sangere from Mali, and others, critics – at least
those in major metropoles where they can hear such major musicians rela-
tively easily and with some frequency – can judge these and other musicians
based on their previous experiences of them, as well as their recordings, rather
than viewing them as a kind of aberration in the normal course of their work
reviewing pop or rock or jazz or other musics.
And it is easier to find interviews with and profiles of major musicians than
in the past. Major newspapers review world music artists more frequently
than previously, and there are more venues, especially online ones such as
Global Rhythm (www.globalrhythm.net), RootsWorld magazine (www
.rootsworld.com/rw), World Music Central (worldmusiccentral.org) and still
others.
The growing familiarity of world music, both because listeners have simply
heard more of it over the years and because an increasing number of musicians
strive to make music that will sell on the international market (a quick look at
the world music charts on iTunes or Billboard or the world music selections
offered by airlines on the flights gives an idea of this), has sent some critics
seeking, if not the authentic, at least something that doesn’t strike them as
bland, just as in the late 1980s. Today, there are countless non-Western
knock-offs of Western pop, rock, EDM, country and other genres of popular
music, sometimes sung in English. There are also, of course, plenty of world
music artists making original music.
35
Steven Feld, ‘A Sweet Lullaby for World Music’, Public Culture, 12/1 (2002), 145–71.
This increasing blandification of what is deposited in the world music

category (emanating from both the ‘new age’ genre and various east Asian
pop musics, long excluded from the world music ‘genre’), and the music
industry promotion of world music that will sell, rather than world music
that might represent musical originality, perhaps explains, in part, the rise of
what David Novak has called ‘World Music 2.0’,36 the re-release of obscure
local recordings of popular music by local musicians outside of the West. This
is another way of bringing back the authentic-as-pure, but this time, purity is
measured not by faithfulness to traditional sounds but by scarcity and obscur-
ity. Connoisseurs seek out little-known recordings of popular musics from
around the world in order to re-release them on Western labels. Critics review
them in order to demonstrate their knowledge of the esoteric, the hip and
cool. World music in this sense is becoming increasingly like many other
forms of popular music in a consumer culture, in which a small number of fans
and critics can congratulate themselves on their perspicacity, but, once the
object of their fandom becomes more widely known or popular, these critics
and fans move on, seeking not the Next Big Thing but the next hidden talent,
a well-known dynamic in the consumption of popular cultural forms.37
Another development has been the extension of the ideology of the brand
into the realm of world music (where it had already been in the popular music
field). Branding is a complex process that has been extensively written about
in the world of advertising and marketing,38 and, increasingly, in the academic
realm as well.39 Those in the business of branding attempt to make a product
or a commodity more than just a product or a commodity, but a trusted entity
that enjoys complex relationships with consumers, involving memories of
past experiences of pleasure, community with others, feelings of satisfaction
and self-satisfaction, membership in a special club of consumers, and much
more. Workers in the commercial world strive to make brands cool, as cool as
the coolest rock star or actor or other celebrity. Some of these meanings and
feelings are designed and promulgated by the advertising industry40 and
critics.
36
David Novak, ‘The Sublime Frequencies of New Old Media’, Public Culture, 23/3 (2011), 603–34.
37
For two examples see Guy Dixon, ‘Will Music-Industry Godzillas Reduce Individual Choice?’
[Toronto] Globe and Mail (2 August 2004), §R, 3; and Carl Wilson, ‘World Music That Scares
Starbucks’, [Toronto] Globe and Mail (5 March 2005), §R, 12.
38
See Douglas Holt, How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding (Boston: Harvard
Business School Press, 2004); and Alina Wheeler, Designing Brand Identity: An Essential Guide for the
Whole Branding Team, 3rd ed. (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2009).
39
See Sarah Banet-Weiser, AuthenticTM: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (New York: New York
University Press, 2012); Melissa Aroncyzyk and Devon Powers (eds.), Blowing Up the Brand: Critical
Perspectives on Promotional Culture (New York: Peter Lang, 2012).
40
Adam Arvidsson, Brands: Meaning and Value in Media Culture (New York: Routledge, 2006);
Marcel Danesi, Brands (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2006).
I have written elsewhere of world music as a kind of ‘brand warehouse’

(though with some traits of being a brand itself) that houses musico-generic
‘brands’ such as ‘Celtic’ or ‘gypsy’ music.41 This ideology has not avoided
musicians and, even, genres of music. It is routine to hear major stars dis-
cussed and characterised as ‘brands’, both in and out of the advertising and
marketing industries. While world music stars have not (yet) been constructed
thus, at least in the West, some musics have. Celtic music, for example, is
frequently represented on album covers and elsewhere with images of stand-
ing stones, faux Gaelic fonts, Celtic knot patterns, Celtic crosses, the colour
green, classic scenes of Ireland and sometimes more, all as a way of conferring
the imprimatur of the Celtic brand on that recording. ‘Celtic’ is a brand/genre
category that is never employed by the music industry to label traditional
musics and musicians from Ireland, Wales, Brittany, Cornwall or the Isle of
Man (the ancient Celtic nations), but, rather, to new-age-inflected music that
may have no, or only a loose, connection to these places.42 In the category of
‘gypsy’ music, some of the most famous musicians in this category are not
Roma people.43
With the branding of certain kinds of music such as Celtic, the (battle)field
of positions and forms of capital – and their relationships to each other – can
shift. A form of capital camouflaged or construed as a type of ‘authenticity’
could give way to another form of authenticity or another position to be
taken. Critics and fans could desire and expect musicians to conform to norms
and expectations of the musical brand in which they are categorised, or
confined, rather than their (sub)genre. Some listeners, including critics, for
example, might feel (I use this word purposely, since it is the intention of
those who brand to insinuate ideas about brands into people’s psyches) that
‘Celtic’ music isn’t ‘Celtic’ unless it has the sound of a tin whistle or employs
lyrics in an unintelligible language, as is the case with the bestselling Enya,
who has done much to shape the Celtic ‘brand’ with her dreamy, new-agey
songs sung in the Irish language. Or, fans and critics could be put off by the
sound of the tin whistle (or something else) as a sign that the musician or
group has succumbed to the pressures of branding, since the sound of the tin
41
Taylor, ‘Fields, Genres, Brands’.
42
There has long been a rather uneasy relationship between new-age music and world music, since both
historically have relied on ideologies and discourses that construct these musics as somehow premodern
or apart from the vagaries of modern life. And there has been a good deal of slippage between more
spiritual world music genres and new-age. It is thus perhaps not a surprise that Billboard magazine began
its world music and new-age charts at the same time and they were managed by the same person (Taylor,
Global Pop).
43
See Carol Silverman, Romani Routes: Cultural Politics and Balkan Music in Diaspora (New York: Oxford
whistle has become practically metonymic for Irish traditional music, and
‘Celtic music’ more generally.
Critics as Workers in the World Music Fields

Since critics always play a role in any field of cultural production, it is no
surprise that they were significant in shaping the category of ‘world music’
both as a field and a genre, as well as a brand, at least with respect to certain
types of world music. What is more unusual in the world music case is the
relatively recent emergence of this ‘genre’ and the role played by critics in
naming it.
But critics, whatever unusual function they may perform, are an important
part of the cultural industries and fields of cultural production. By and large,
they are part of what Bourdieu called the ‘new petite bourgeoisie’,44 whose
occupations include those in fields such as music criticism (this is not one of
Bourdieu’s examples, though I would certainly include it). Critics serve as
‘presenters’; in his terms, popularisers. They do not carry the same cultural
prestige as authors, so must create for themselves a role that might none-
theless garner them some prestige and cultural authority.45 They can do this,
in the realm of world music, by displaying a greater degree of knowledge than
other critics (not to mention their audiences), but also by finding the out-of-
the-way, either among current musicians or those of the past re-released and
re-presented as World Music 2.0. But, as I have argued elsewhere,46 with the
success of the new petite bourgeoisie in the realm of advertising and the
promulgation of the ideology of the hip and the cool, the edgy, the trendy,
across the culture at large, in a real sense, those members of the new petite
bourgeoisie who find and promote the new and different framed as hip, cool,
edgy, play an increasingly important function, perhaps even gaining inroads
on the bourgeoisie itself in terms of cultural authority.
Another way that world music critics play an important function that is
somewhat different from many other critics is that their role as mediators and/
or brokers is more salient and thought to be more necessary. Since world
music is a vast collection of musics from around the world, world musicians
therefore can come from every walk of life – peasants in remote villages,
middle-class urbanites, poor urbanites, kin of world music royalty (such as
Anoushka Shankar, daughter of the legendary sitarist Ravi Shankar) and
44
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1984).
45
Bourdieu, Distinction, p. 326. 46
Taylor, ‘Advertising and the Conquest of Culture’.
others. World music critics mediate and broker between a more heteroge-
neous collection of individuals and social groups than most music critics,
though they mediate and broker them to a quite homogenous Western
audience of educated, middle-class people.47 These critics’ role in what one
could call the Cool Capitalism Complex is thus an important one, since they,
and others who discover or create and promote the hip, cool, edgy, trendy, are
slowly destabilising cultural hierarchies in the West and, perhaps especially, in
the United States, as cultural capital as defined by knowledge of the fine arts
declines in importance as a way of displaying and maintaining cultural super-
iority and dominance. Such knowledge is increasingly replaced by knowledge
of the hip and the cool, a new form of capital measured by one’s familiarity
with the latest indie rock album or independent film, and even, sometimes,
knowledge of an obscure world music artist. And with this knowledge
increasingly comes cultural capital in the neoliberal world.48 What this
means, as I hinted at above, is that the new petite bourgeoisie, through its
location of, presentation of and promulgation of the hip, cool, edgy, may be
challenging the bourgeoisie for cultural hegemony. The well-known Military
Industrial Complex is frequently decried for making far too many people far
too much money in the United States and promoting endless war, but its
cultural analogue, the Cool Capitalism Complex, is no less pernicious in its
promotion of musicians thought to be cool, or potentially cool, and its
discarding or ignorance of many other musicians, musicians who might have
something valuable to sing and whose messages could be championed and
diffused by critics.
47
See Taylor, ‘World Music Today’. 48
See Taylor, ‘Advertising and the Conquest of Culture’.
. 28 .
Cultural Anxieties, Aspirational Cosmopolitanism

and Capacity Building: Music Criticism
in Singapore
SHZR EE TAN
A Contentious Review
This chapter by a journalist-turned-ethnomusicologist begins with a personal
anecdote, channelling critic Tim Quirk’s indictment of academia and journal-
ism’s shared and ambivalent reliance on maintaining ‘dysfunctional relation-
ships with the truth’.1 Where subjectivities have recently become the focus of
writings about music,2 an autoethnographic account of a moment in history
in Southeast Asia could usefully open a narrative about musical narratives.
And so a version of ‘the truth’ begins: in 1998, a music graduate freshly
returned from the UK (this writer) joined the lifestyle section of a national
newspaper and was dispatched to review the debut of a Singaporean violinist.
The performer, sixteen years old, had been studying with a celebrated peda-
gogue in the United States. Self-hailing as Singapore’s biggest hope yet for
a classical star, she attempted to prove herself with a double concerto bill,
comprising Henryk Wieniawski’s Second Violin Concerto and Vivaldi’s
Concerto for Four Violins. The concert, however, had a dual purpose: it was
also a fund-raising effort administered by the National Arts Council to pur-
chase a S$1.5 million (USD 900,000 in 1998) Guarneri violin for the violinist’s
personal use.3 Any ensuing reviews of the event, thus, would constitute
unofficial evaluation of the musician’s investment potential.
As it turned out, the critic was impressed, but not ecstatic. The Wieniawski
was found to be ‘executed with more than practised ease but . . . lacking in
heart and soul’. The violinist’s interactions with her younger peers in the
1
Tim Quirk and Jason Toynbee, ‘Going through the Motions: Popular Music Performance in Journalism
and in Academic Discourse’, Popular Music, 24/3 (2005), 399–413.
2
Eric Clarke, ‘Music Space and Subjectivity’, in Georgina Born (ed.), Music, Sound and Space:
Transformations of Public and Private Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013); ‘Lost
and Found in Music: Music, Consciousness and Subjectivity’, Musicae Scientae, 18 (2014), 354–68.
3
Shzr Ee Tan, ‘$1.5m Will Let Her Calm the Ears’, The Straits Times Life! (13 March 1998).
[542]
Cultural Anxieties: Music Criticism in Singapore 543
Vivaldi Concerto saw her coax a ‘focused, rich tone from her instrument,
proving that she could command good rapport with fellow players’. A 555-
word review was published in The Straits Times with the headline ‘Perfect
Harmony under the Right Circumstances’.4
This lukewarm account proved disagreeable in some quarters, not least to
the violinist’s mother, a remisier turned full-time manager of her daughter’s
career. Through connections – including access to members of the financial
and political worlds in Singapore, and no less than the then-President of
Singapore Ong Teng Cheong – the self-titled ‘violin mum’ filed an official
complaint against the critic. A fax from the violinist’s supporters was sent, via
the Presidential Office, to the newspaper involved, querying the reviewer’s
credentials, charging her with destroying a young musician’s career and
confidence. The journalist was called up by her superiors and questioned.
After some deliberation, the editors decided to stand by the review, refraining
from retracting the article. In months to come, the violinist would recover
from the setback, raising funds through a public institution to purchase her
violin. She returned to her studies and went on to give successful perfor-
mances, some of which were sponsored by major banks. The journalist stayed
on with the newspaper for another six years, working as an arts correspondent
before joining academia.
Nearly twenty years on, questions first asked of this storm in a teacup can be
revisited. Was the review too harsh? Was the ‘violin mum’ heavy-handed? Did
the President himself attend the concert and if so what did he think of it?
Should newspaper editors have sent a more seasoned reviewer? What links
between the Singaporean state, the private sector and a not-so-free-press did
the President’s involvement demonstrate? Each question implicates smaller,
literal and narrow axes of judgement, where notions of objectivity are cate-
gorically equated with unattainable moral and circumstantial ‘truths’.
Larger issues surrounding the 1998 anecdote underpin the shaping of music
criticism in Singapore. The critic operated not alone but within several over-
lapping communities of performers, agents, record companies, listeners, edu-
cators, students and institutional patrons. It was within a broader cultural
ecology that music journalism resided: critics functioned through ‘double
dependency’ – upon institutions ‘which . . . facilitate access to the subject
materials (artists, records, concerts)’, and upon ‘readers who produce the sales
of the title in which they write’.5 At the same time, critics were also cultural
4
Shzr Ee Tan, ‘Perfect Harmony under the Right Circumstances’, The Straits Times Life! (19 March 1998).
5
Pedro Nunes, ‘Good Samaritans and Oblivious Cheerleaders: Ideologies of Portuguese Music
Journalists towards Portuguese Music’, Popular Music, 29 (2010), 43.
544 SHZR EE TAN
producers. As Atton states, ‘musicians may also be writers and, of course,

readers . . . this fluidity of roles and their ensuing interdependence suggest
a community of cultural agents in close relationship with one another’.6 In
Singapore, similar groups collectively determined changing standards of taste
and value, which became ventriloquised as criteria of objectivity and truth.
These in turn functioned within larger ecosystems operating beyond
immediate arts communities. For this writer at least, the ‘Presidential’ bap-
tism by fire conveyed a lesson of circumspection in airing opinions on behalf
of a scene densely networked into various state and socio-economic interests.
Singapore was a young, postcolonial nation eager to produce its first classical
star as evidence of cultural coming of age on the arena of Western art music,
chosen for its very international prestige. Embedded into the young nation’s
cultural landscape were patrons in the financial world who bought into the
shine of corporate social responsibility that supporting a prodigy could bring.
Self-described classical connoisseurs ensconced in seats of power in such
political and economic worlds were aplenty; many of these individuals also
sat on the boards of musical institutions.
What, then, were the credentials of this critic? A respectable degree from
a reputable UK music department seemed appropriate for the newspaper’s
editors. However, the reviewer was also a fresh graduate who had recently
returned from three years of regular exposure to performers playing on
London’s stages. Previously, the newspaper had hired freelance reviewers,
each variously entrenched in Singapore’s classical communities either as
serious amateur performer or teacher. Determining a playing field, then,
became a critical point vis-à-vis the young violinist’s birth over claims of
pedagogical lineage and international potential. Should she be judged on
local standards or measured against the global platform she explicitly tar-
geted? Was there a difference between the two, and what did this say about
where Western art music stood within the aspirational cultural milieu of
Singapore? Were there other Singaporean violinists of similar talent? Why
were they ignored by the newspaper and arts council?
As public debate continued, critics in the parallel Singaporean scenes of
Anglo-American rock and Asian pop looked on, bemused by judgements of
‘local’, ‘foreign’ and ‘international’ worth. Some wondered if the President
would come to the rescue of a badly reviewed local indie band. Others saw the
debacle as a silly skirmish over musical egos, because it broke on the allegedly
‘soft’ arena of the arts: after all, this controversy was some distance away from
6
Chris Atton, ‘Writing about Listening: Alternative Discourses in Rock Journalism’, Popular Music, 28/1
(2009), 56.
the closely watched terrains of politics, religion and race – three proverbial no-
go areas the reviewer herself had been briefed to avoid as a matter of editorial
policy. And yet, enough stakes were at play here to have necessitated a state
response to a music review.
Returning to the wider aims of this chapter, this writer seeks to understand
music criticism in Singapore not as an isolated phenomenon concerned only
with text or analysis. Instead, working from the debates around this opening
incident, this chapter surveys the subject as a negotiation of subjectivities
governed by bigger ecosystems of musical, cultural, socio-economic and
political activity. Going beyond dualistic consideration of the opposition
between industry and critic,7 this writer posits music criticism within ‘con-
nections, symbiosis, feedback loops, and flows of people, product, ideas and
money’.8 In disentangling these flows, providing historical context to
Singapore’s multicultural existence in Southeast Asia is key. Similarly, an
interrogation of Singapore’s media and policies is essential.
Scenes and Genres: Asymmetries in Performers and Listeners

Bennett and Peterson define music scenes as ‘clusters of musicians, producers,
and fans which collectively share their common musical tastes and . . . distin-
guish themselves from others’.9 The term has been used in ‘journalist dis-
course, functioning as a cultural resource for fans to forge expressions of
“underground” or “alternative” identities’.10 In Singapore, the term can
similarly be used. Here, however, there is less of a single mainstream against
which alternatives rise. Rather, political and socio-economic factors overlap in
the making of local and translocal identities, creating several cultural doxa.
These are in turn impacted by Singapore’s claims to postcolonial as well as
desired cosmopolitan membership in regional, transnational and interna-
tional platforms.
Much has been written about Singapore’s history. Its founding in 1819 by
Stamford Raffles, followed by more than a century of British rule, led to the
ascendance of the English language and European culture. Rapid local
re-population of the island, via migration from South China and South
India, paved the way for its multicultural society. Since independence in
7
See Roy Shuker, Understanding Popular Music (London: Routledge, 2001); and Keith Negus, Producing
Pop: Culture and Conflict in the Popular Music Industry (London: Arnold, 1992).
8
John Holden, The Ecology of Culture: A Report Commissioned by the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s
Cultural Value Project (Arts and Humanities Research Council UK, 2015), 3.
9
Richard A. Peterson and Andy Bennett, ‘Introducing Musical Scenes’, in Bennett and Peterson (eds.),
Music Scenes: Local, Translocal, and Virtual. (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004), p. 1.
10
Ibid., p. 2.
546 SHZR EE TAN
1965, Singapore has retained the primary use of English, not only as the
language of finance, but also for its neutral value over mother tongues of the
island’s Chinese, Indian and Malay population.11 English also functioned as
a class marker, remaining in extensive usage among early Western-educated
Chinese elites, descendants of whom continue to govern the nation. Indeed,
scholars view English-language-led multiculturalism in Singapore as a form of
social engineering, with the state playing the ‘neutral’ umpire.12 Such deter-
mining of doxa demonstrates Straubhaar’s cultural proximity rule.13 In the
performing arts, and in the wake of globalisation, it is not surprising that
Anglo-American pop/rock has taken on dominance among Singapore’s listen-
ers, with Mandopop in second place, if more recently also contested by
transnational K-pop. Western art music, nonetheless, formed the postcolonial
backbone of formal music education across the island.
Cultural categorisations alone, however, form an incomplete aggrega-
tion of Singapore’s music scenes. As Brennan writes, the press acts out
genre labelling in co-operation with industries.14 From the perspective
of this ex-journalist with The Straits Times, music criticism operated on
two separate but intersecting paradigms: first, in an identity trope pit-
ting the local against international, and secondly, in terms of genre
classification.
Over this writer’s six-year (and thereafter freelance) employment with The
Straits Times, writers were engaged to cover the four main genres of Anglo-
American Pop/Rock, Chinese/Asian Pop, Classical Music (both Western
European and Chinese Conservatory), and Jazz and World Music. Local and
international activity was surveyed. In-house reporters provided previews,
interviews and news stories, while mostly freelance writers (excepting this
writer) wrote reviews. In-house reporters worked under the arts sub-unit of
the newspaper’s lifestyle section and often deputised for each other, requiring
familiarity with multiple scenes.
While each critic’s ‘beat’ was clearly staked out and demarcated in cultural
categories by division of labour, this did not provide for parities of coverage in
terms of story angle or column inches. To begin with, state powers still
loomed in any publishing of cultural discourse, precluding any discussion of
11
See S. Gopinathan, ‘Singapore’s Language Policies: Strategies for a Plural Society’, Southeast Asian
Affairs (1979), 280–95.
12
Beng Huat Chua, ‘Multiculturalism in Singapore: An Instrument of Social Control’, Race and Class, 44/
3 (2003), 71–3.
13
Joseph Straubhaar, ‘Beyond Media Imperialism: Asymmetrical Interdependence and Cultural
Proximity’, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 8 (1991), 39–59.
14
Matt Brennan, ‘The Rough Guide to Critics: Musicians Discuss the Role of the Music Press’, Popular
Music, 25/ 2 (2006), 224.
subjects touching on race, politics and religion.15 In the 1980s, original lyrics
of revolutionary works by mainland Chinese composers performed by local
choirs were altered in performance and censored in reportage. In recent years,
the issue of media censorship itself has been the focus of outcry by members of
Singapore’s arts community. This has been an interesting development, given
the traditional view from within the press that its lifestyle section – not least
its music critics – dealt with ‘soft news reportage’ and courted less contro-
versy than its ‘hard news’ sections of the home and political desks. Press
freedom in Singapore has suffered a lacklustre image on global (if Western-
administered) industry metrics, making the rank of 149 out of 179 countries
on Reporters Without Borders’ Press Freedom Index. The restrictive nature
of Singapore’s media has been highlighted in scholarly publications and
lampooned in social media and local and transnational satirical platforms.16
Of interest to the music critic here is how politics in music-making was
often naively appraised within many music scenes as irrelevant to loftier
aesthetic concerns. This was in opposition to the local theatre, literary and
visual arts scenes, where articulate activists made their views known not only
on matters of censorship but also on social inequality, immigration and
LGBTQ+ debates. That is not to say that music scenes in Singapore were
not political by nature; indeed, this entire chapter argues otherwise. What is
crucial is how the idea of music-making as apolitical in Singapore was reflec-
tive of the larger, tacit politics of the state and economy at play. This was to an
extent caused by an eclipsing of local context by music critics for an imagined
egalitarian playing field and listenership/readership deemed ‘international’ in
its hope of attaining an assumed ‘global’ standard. For this Singaporean state
of, paradoxically, optimistic anxiety over the future determination of global
citizenship via negotiation of a bona fide position on international cultural
maps, I specifically ascribe the term ‘aspirational cosmopolitanism’. By this,
I also refer to how projections of the city-state of Singapore as a key node on
networks of global cultural production – ultimately made achievable through
political capital, in the context of socio-economic privilege – allows one to
imagine Singaporean artists, musicians and music-lovers as full and equal
members of the global cultural elite who would have as good a claim on
determining tastes over Western art music and Anglo-American pop, as any
urbanite in London, New York or Paris.
15
See Cherian George, Contentious Journalism and the Internet: Towards Democratic Discourse in Malaysia and
Singapore (Washington: University of Washington Press, 2006).
16
Scholarly publications include ibid.; and Tsun Hang Tey, ‘Confining the Freedom of the Press in
Singapore: A “Pragmatic” Press for “Nation-Building”?’, Human Rights Quarterly, 3/4 (2008), 876–905.
548 SHZR EE TAN
Anglo-American versus Local Pop/Rock

Returning to the field of music criticism, this meant that pop and rock reviewers
in Singapore wrote, for example, about the releases of FKA Twigs and Justin
Bieber from aspirational perspectives of would-be colleagues at Billboard or NME.
They targeted their words at a local readership which took Anglo-American pop/
rock for granted as a mainstream ‘superculture’ rather than a foreign import.17
Indeed, the genre remains enmeshed firmly within Singapore’s urban life, filling
soundscapes in shopping centres, cafes, on television, social media and Spotify
accounts. Here, Anglo-American genres were both translocal and international.
In reportage, critics worked with local agents of international record companies
for regular supplies of albums to review (and promote) while tapping into net-
works of local listeners replugged into global conglomerates of distribution and
consumption via multinational media companies and the Internet. The scene’s
sprawl brings to mind Negus’s ascription of specific tropes to an urban, globa-
lised music journalism, with routine print acknowledgement of artist names by
way of lineages, genres and labels.18 The critic’s complex relationship with
record labels has long been documented.19 Singapore’s exceptionality can be
found in its doubly translocal and international nature.
Writing for The Straits Times, pop critic Yeow Kai Chai, for example, used
language rich with insider references, evidenced in his relation of ‘American
overachiever’ Sufjan Stevens going into an ‘existentialist funk’ in All Delighted
People, ‘an unexpected feminist heart-thumper’.20 In his same review of
Polica’s Give You the Ghost, Channy Leaneagh’s ‘folkie croon’ is ‘auto-tuned
to a glacial sheen . . . in a dub-spacey haven . . . Think The XX but amplified for
a midnight cruising for bruising’.21 Yeow’s connoisseurial approach belied the
description by Guðmundsson, et al. of the ‘enlightened fan’22 turned critic as
guardian of musical taste23 and discoverer of talent.24 Not surprisingly,
17
Mark Slobin, Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1993;
reissued with new Preface 2000).
18
Keith Negus, Popular Music in Theory: An Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1996), pp. 99–135.
19
See Jon Stratton, ‘What Is “Popular Music”?’, The Sociological Review, 31/2 (1983), 293–309; Negus,
Producing Pop; Steve Jones, ‘Popular Music, Criticism, Advertising and the Music Industry’, Journal of
Popular Music Studies, 5 (1993), 79–91; Jason Toynbee, ‘Policing Bohemia, Pinning up the Grunge: The
Music Press and Generic Change in British Pop and Rock’, Popular Music, 12/3 (1993), 289–300.
20
Yeow Kai Chai, ‘Indie Comeback Kid Sufjan Stevens Is Back’, The Straits Times Life! (3 September 2010).
21
Yeow Kai Chai, ‘Sound Bites’, The Straits Times Life! (1 November 2012).
22
Gestur Guðmundsson, Ulf Lindberg, Morton Michelsen and Hans Weisethaunet, ‘Brit Crit: Turning
Points in British Rock Criticism, 1960–1990’, in Steve Jones (ed.), Pop Music and the Press (Philadelphia:
Temple University Press 2002), p. 60.
23
See Jason Toynbee, ‘Policing Bohemia’; and Ulf Lindberg, Hans Weisethaunet, Morten Michelsen and
Gestur Guðmundsson, Rock Criticism from the Beginning: Amusers, Bruisers & Cool-headed Cruisers
(New York: Peter Lang, 2005).
24
Raymond Kendall, ‘Critics Trained for Role as Educators at University of Southern California’, Music
Educators Journal, 56/7 (1970), 61–3.
Anglo-American indie music acts made the party pieces of pop critics writing
in Singapore, co-existing alongside reviews of other broad-appeal Anglo-
American acts. This echoes Nunes’ observation of Portuguese critics who
measure their work against Anglophone writing,25 taking American history
as starting point.26
This positioning of Anglo-American pop/rock in Singapore however, func-
tioned only in the realm of recorded music. In contrast, local and live activity
has been harder to define. Liew and Tan write of the deliberately ‘ungloba-
lised’ nature of Singaporean pop/rock musicians in Singapore, reflecting on
their societal labelling as indie by default, bypassing the nomenclaturally non-
existent category of a local mainstream.27 They also hint at the lack of
representation of local bands in the national consciousness beyond rare news-
paper interviews and fanzine articles.28 While critics in the mainstream press
have reported on Singaporean acts such as The Observatory, Concave Scream,
The Boredphucks, Humpback Oak, Electrico, The Sam Willows and Gentle
Bones, discourses harked at their marginal statuses as struggling voices in
underground venues. Writing on local Portuguese versus foreign musicians,
Nunes describes how one camp of journalists directly attributed issues of
quality to asymmetries in local versus international standards, devaluing local
pop. Another camp, however, understood journalists themselves as playing
‘an active part in the evolution (and solving) of any such problem, prioritizing
local musicians’.29 Singapore’s critics occasionally took the latter position but
were often besieged by bigger newsroom interventions that minimised review
space for the local performing arts in favour of stories on celebrities. With the
exception of punk artist Chris Ho, who penned a column for The Straits Times
in the 1990s and 2000s, any potentially subversive value of local Indie/pop
artists’ contributions has been critiqued as detached from politics. In print,
controversial references were usually made within the generic struggles of life
and love.
Such depoliticised criticism in Singapore was often rooted in the avowedly
apolitical starting points of the bands themselves. Occasionally, media have
telescoped the modus operandi and aesthetics of local acts with that of inter-
national artists, focusing on aspirational journeys of hitting stardom.
However, the categories of foreign musicians (both mainstream and Indie)
25
Nunes, ‘Good Samaritans and Oblivious Cheerleaders’, 43.
26
Simon Frith, Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure and the Politics of Rock ’n’ Roll (New York: Pantheon, 1981),
p. 10.
27
Kai Khiun Liew and Shzr Ee Tan, ‘An Unlocalized and Unglobalized Subculture: English Language
Independent Music in Singapore’, in Anthony Y. H. Fung (ed.), Asian Popular Culture: The Global (Dis)
continuity (London and New York: Routledge, 2013), p. 113.
28
Ibid., p. 125. 29
Nunes, ‘Good Samaritans and Oblivious Cheerleaders’, 56.
550 SHZR EE TAN
and local (Indie by default) inhabited different sociopolitical worlds. To be

sure, in the past decade Singapore’s live scene enjoyed some success over the
Mosaic Music Festival held at the Esplanade national arts centre. Launched in
2005, the annual event showcased budding local and international talent.
However, the festival closed in 2014, following poor attendance. XY (name
anonymised), a programmer, explained: ‘It’s hard to say if there’s music scene
in Singapore; people just go for the entertainment or to be seen by others.
They’re not real fans. After the first few years, the novelty wore out.’30
Classical Music and Class

Where a bricks-and-mortar scene with significant funding was concerned,
classical music played a bigger role. Here, politico-economics, alongside
aesthetic concerns, was key to editorial justification of music criticism and
coverage. Research on Western art music in Singapore, particularly in relation
to national orchestras and the institutionalisation of classical music education,
has yielded insights into state reinforcement of the genre’s elite status via
policy and funding.31 While classical music by no means enjoyed a mainstream
existence in the way that Anglo-American pop/rock constituted public and
private soundscapes, it remained a ‘superculture’ too,32 through its prevalent
appearance as a musical doxa that fitted well with the agenda of an aspiration-
ally cosmopolitan state. Here, echoing the observations of Pierre Bourdieu on
the production of taste,33 value and class issues influenced state policy in
terms of how Western art music came to be equated with cultural attainment
and was invested in extensively as a national concern.34
Music critics were expected to respond correspondingly and support the
genre. These champions of the genre turned guardians of taste comprised
aficionados and semi-professional performers who hailed from the middle-to-
upper classes of Singapore. Supplementing this writer’s stint at The Straits
Times (1997–2004) in the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s were freelance critics who
held full-time jobs in the medical, legal and banking professions. A number of
30
XY (name anonymised), personal communication with author (5 March 2014).
31
See Shzr Ee Tan, ‘State Orchestras and Multiculturalism in Singapore’, in Tina K. Ramnarine (ed.),
Global Perspectives on Orchestras: Collective Creativity and Social Agency (New York: Oxford University Press,
2018); and Ming Yen Phan, ‘Music in Empire: Western Music in Nineteenth-Century Singapore through
a Study of Selected Texts’, unpublished MA dissertation, National Institute of Education (2004). The state
is the biggest funder of the Singapore Symphony Orchestra, which in turn is also the highest-funded arts
institution nationally.
32
Slobin, Subcultural Sounds.
33
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (London and
New York: Routledge, 1984).
34
Tan, ‘State Orchestras and Multiculturalism’, pp. 261–81.
them also sat on the directorial boards, sponsorship and programming com-
mittees of the national orchestra and/or state conservatory. The scene com-
prised an ecosystem held together by closely forged political, cultural and
economic interests. In The Straits Times, performances of the Singapore
Symphony Orchestra were critiqued as a matter of public duty.
Unlike with the world of pop/rock, bifurcations of activity between com-
munities of listening and practice were less distinct. Collectors of classical
music recordings were also – through links in the corporate world – often
sponsors of local and visiting symphony orchestras. Audiences were usually
also highly skilled amateur performers. The semi-professional scene thrived:
apart from the state-supported Singapore Symphony Orchestra, start-up
groups such as the Metropolitan Orchestra and the Orchestra of Music
Players have sprung up in recent years. Staffed largely by highly educated
amateurs and musicians recently graduated from the Yong Siew Toh
Conservatory (launched in 2001) and individuals returning from overseas
music colleges, these ensembles consisted of performers who were looking
to expand their musical career beyond teaching jobs. The ensembles func-
tioned on a part-time basis, funding themselves through small grants and
sponsors, or taking on hired work at pop concerts. A number of performers
in this semi-professional scene have also taken to online journalism, actively
contributing opinions, articles and tweets on blogs and social media.
It was into this small but densely knit community that the classical critic in
Singapore became enmeshed. Reviews impacted on both an individual musi-
cian’s ego and the community at large. At the highest level, as seen by this
article’s opening anecdote, the state itself could directly interfere with criti-
cism. Commercial interests were also quietly active behind public discoursing
of classical music in Singapore: major concert sponsors who bought adver-
tisements in newspapers asked for these to be published alongside comple-
mentary editorial features or reviews. Within such a cultural ecology, critics
unwittingly found themselves becoming de facto cheerleaders of the industry,
echoing Nunes and Klein.35
To be fair, apart from her Presidential baptism by fire recounted at the
beginning of this chapter, this writer’s experience in The Straits Times rarely
involved further editorial intervention from corporate or government enti-
ties. Still, all media operated on the basis of support for national institutions,
on motivation of capacity building. The relatively small size of the classical
35
Nunes, ‘Good Samaritans and Oblivious Cheerleaders’; and Bethany Klein, ‘Dancing About
Architecture: Popular Music Criticism and the Negotiation of Authority’, Popular Communication, 3/1
(2005), 1–20.
552 SHZR EE TAN
music community and the density of its ecosystem effectively meant that
constantly negative reviews would result in stalled relations with potentially
aggrieved key players in the scene curtailing engagement with a critic alto-
gether, or the calling-in of higher, closely connected powers to apply pressure
behind the scenes. At the same time, while good contact with frontline
workers, such as public relations officers, and genuine personal relationships
forged with musicians themselves were crucial, overt praise lessened the
reviewer’s credibility. The critic played a delicate game of negotiation. She
acted less as a free agent than as an individual, deeply contextualised voice
held culpable for the collective imagination of the local scene’s general health.
This writer’s six-year stint with The Straits Times was unusual in that she was
also employed in-house as a lifestyle writer in addition to critic, which latter
job usually went to freelancers. The dual role meant that contacts, friends and
colleagues who featured ‘objectively’ in previews later became subjects of
critique in reviews. Such a remit allowed for clearly demarcated engagement
with different facets of discoursing: preview articles functioned as platforms
for investigations into micro and macro contexts including the highly politi-
cised agenda of classical music itself; concert and CD reviews could then be
freed to focus on textual, musical or performative matters.
The tight-knit community of classical music stakeholders within which
reviewers operated has led some critics to assume important positions on
the boards of Singapore’s music institutions. Yet other reviewers, as would-be
gatekeepers of taste, have been invited to curate local festivals. On occasion,
conflicts of interest have arisen, as with the recent case of The Straits Times
current chief critic Chang Tou Liang – a former board member of the
Singapore Symphony Orchestra whose track record of positive reviews para-
doxically resulted in the orchestra’s counterintuitive decision to invite
a different ‘embedded journalist’ (perceived by the newspaper-reading public
as less biased towards the orchestra) to join its 2014 European tour.
To be sure, such interdependence of agents working within a scene can be
easily observed in any cosmopolitan city: critics are often invited to write
programme notes on behalf of the very musical organisations they review, or
to accompany ensembles on tours. For the city-state of Singapore, cultural
diplomacy is called into operation. The above-mentioned Chang’s endorse-
ment of Singaporean artists for example was rooted in his unabashed decision
to ‘support local musicians as far as I can’.36 True to an aspirationally cosmo-
politan ethos, he was also interested in boosting the international reputation
of the city as a focal point for the arts: ‘If it’s a lousy concert, whether local or
36
Chang Tou Liang, unpublished personal interview with author, Singapore (6 August 2014).
foreign, I’d rather not review.’37 Such an agenda was not necessarily born of
a uniquely nationalist stance taken by an individual critic. By dint of the
geographical viability of a small island’s tightly run socio-economic and
political life, any discoursing of a subject at the local scale immediately
invoked discourses on the national and regional levels.
Chang’s reviews spoke to members of the local classical community who, by
default, were also members of wider national/transnational organisations and
Singapore’s ruling class. His calibration of tone belied the approach of an
erudite, aspirational cosmopolitan who sought, through a somewhat postco-
lonial need, to ratify national musical taste with imagined international stan-
dards – whether by positively evaluating local musicians on national stages
now projected as international platforms, or by critiquing foreign artists
according to a personal bar that telescoped the Singaporean and international.
Chang’s style is adjective-rich and specialist, with opinions restricted to
matters of text and performance rather than context, echoing Muller’s asser-
tion of writers’ regard for the ‘conceits of the autonomy of the musical
work’.38 His critique of Mariangela Vacatello’s rendition of Liszt’s
Transcendental Etudes for example makes reference to an assumed industry
standard asked of a work whose value is unquestioned: ‘prestidigitation and
power may be the pre-requisites but there are also tender moments . . . one
still needs feathery lightness and rapier reflexes for a silky-smooth “Feux
Follets”’.39 A subscriber to International Piano Quarterly and Gramophone,
Chang also spoke from an aspirational position in ‘wanting to improve my
own writing skills’, attending music criticism workshops in the UK held by
journalists he held in regard as ‘experts in the international business . . . people
like Neil Fisher of The Times’.40
Chang’s envisioning of his connoisseur’s craft and his readers as cosmopoli-
tan belies the transnational nature of Singapore’s classical music scene. The
local symphony orchestra embarks on regular overseas tours and rosters inter-
national artists as a matter of course while carving out an ‘Asian’ niche through
limited focus on contemporary Chinese composers. Its audiences are well-
travelled and tapped into global industries that see European and American
orchestras visit Singapore each year. Many classical enthusiasts are also armchair
critics at home who chalk up listener credits with state-of-the-art home enter-
tainment systems designed to mediate the best experiences of Mahler on CD,
37
Ibid.
38
Stephanus J. v. Z. Muller, ‘Music Criticism and Adorno’, International Review of the Aesthetics and
Sociology of Music (2005), 104.
39
Chang Tou Liang, ‘Liszt Transcendental Studies’, The Straits Times Life! (16 March 2012).
40
Chang Tou Liang, personal interview with author (6 August 2014).
554 SHZR EE TAN
even as they fly around the world, catching the New York Philharmonic on the
back of business trips to Manhattan.
Wherefore Asian, Multicultural and World Music(s)?

The aspirationally cosmopolitan standpoints from which classical and pop/
rock music journalists operated have relegated the discussion of non-
mainstream genres to marginalised fora. This has intersected with a state-
mandated multicultural policy enforced through engineering of Singapore’s
population into constructed Chinese, Malay, Indian and ‘Other’ cultures. In
the newsroom, reportage of music outside Anglo-American pop/rock and
Western art music took place under the collective guise of secondary ‘beats’,
with genres taxonomised along class-based hierarchies of listenership and
ethnic-based categorisations of ‘other’ musics. While the press acted out
genre labelling in tandem with local industries and state mandates,41 any
notion of a unified music scene was ultimately imperfect: many subcultural
scenes abounded beyond the two mainstreams, and today remain in various
stages of development.
The word subcultural itself is problematic, given the unique postcolonial
politics of Singapore that has seen its Chinese-dominant society – until
recently largely Chinese-educated – move towards an age of globalised and
postcolonial Anglo-American influence. This situation reverse-mirrors
Atton’s recalibration of Bourdieu’s field theory applied to alternative scenes
in rock journalism:
Within popular music production there are numerous avant-gardes that con-
found the dichotomy of restricted and large-scale sectors . . . They are elite in
the sense of small numbers of creators and audiences, and the need for
specialist knowledge to ‘appreciate’ the music. They are popular in that
their cultural practices have developed from popular and inclusive forms . . .
their economic practices (such as record production) are drawn from the
practices of large-scale cultural production.42
In obverse example, Mandopop (and more recently, K-pop) in Singapore

confounded dichotomy by being widely enjoyed, drawing upon transnational
economies of scale in cultural production, but also distinctly non-mainstream.
Such disjunctures in music criticism played out across intersectional ethnic,
class and generational divides.
41
On genre labelling, see Brennan, ‘The Rough Guide to Critics’, 224.
42
Atton, ‘Writing about Listening’, 56.
In terms of listenership, Mandopop, Cantopop, K-pop and J-pop staked the

places after Anglo-American pop/rock. Here, the historical presence of East
Asian music distributors has led to the import not only of records in stores but
also of touring shows by artists from the transnational ‘gangtai’ (Taiwan-
Hong Kong) – and more recently, mainland Chinese and K-pop – networks.
Operating on the same arena was also a thriving karaoke scene, catering largely
to East Asian pop consumers. Beyond this, niche markets existed for jazz,
Latin and world music. While audiences for the last three scenes were limited,
they saw themselves as part of regional networks alongside local ones. Many
jazz and world music listeners were also fans of local Indie bands, Malay mat-
rock acts, punk groups and experimental musicians.
Alongside the record-dominated genres, a range of state-designated ‘multi-
cultural’ or ‘traditional’ music scenes also existed. These comprised large
Chinese ensembles, including the national institution of the Singapore
Chinese Orchestra, plus the smaller folk-derived orchestral acts of the
Orkestra Melayu and Singapore Indian Orchestra and Choir. Malay Wedding
bands, Carnatic and Hindustani ensembles of private academies and temples,
Chinese chamber groups, and folk dance troupes and bands of Peranakan and
Eurasian communities were also part of the broader Singaporean music scene.
Until recently, the role of the music critic in negotiating these subcultural
spheres functioned according to genre hierarchisation by cultural politics
within the arts section of the newsroom. As a national institution, the
Singapore Chinese Orchestra claimed a greater share of review columns over
the next-favoured categories of jazz, Asian pop and world music – the last of
which included traditional classical and folk artists. Such carving up of repor-
tage was asymmetrical to actual demographic construction of actual scenes.
This was partly because of the split between performers and listeners: Chinese
orchestral ensembles in Singapore – particularly in schools – proliferated
more than live pop or rock bands, although listeners of pop and rock acts
were a larger demographic across the island. However, state or classist agenda
could trump potential readership: an editor could privilege print space for
a national ensemble over a small community group, or tokenistically highlight
projects operating under the nation-building banner of multicultural perfor-
mance. They could also make space for connoisseur jazz reviews in order to lift
the newspaper’s cultural ‘tone’.
From an editor’s perspective, non-aesthetic considerations relating to the
‘newsworthiness’ of a story were also critical. Quite apart from parity issues of
column inches corresponding to the representation of genre diversity, editors
favoured articles that were likely to garner more readers, usually on the
grounds of news-based topicality or of the fame/notoriety of the subject.
556 SHZR EE TAN
Echoing Frith’s indictment of rock critics as mythologists43 and Ray’s con-

cept of ‘overcomprehension’, which embraced the inclination ‘to praise every-
thing, because anything could be the next Elvis’,44 hype featured strongly in
many Singaporean newspapers’ valuing of immediacy in documentation and
judgement. The fetishisation of new blood often fed into the agenda for local
capacity building, although the backlash against quick, early praise was also
vociferous, not least for The Straits Times, which suffered from a reputation
among arts practitioners for being the state’s propaganda machine.
Trendiness was relative and always political; this was compounded by the
uneven rate of development of different scenes vis-à-vis listeners and their
proclivities for certain types of journalistic content. Additionally, different
language media of publications vis-à-vis assumed cultural-linguistic back-
grounds and knowledge required of critics further unlevelled playing fields.
For example, not all fans of Mandopop and K-pop in Singapore would
expect the same aesthetic evaluation from music critics in both the Chinese
and English press, which English-speaking reviewers of, for example, Björk,
might provide. Instead, content might include short pieces of gossip on
costume or backstage antics espoused by the likes of transnational Chinese-
language publication Apple Daily. This latter approach reflected the larger
transmedia machinery of idol-making and fandom in the East Asian pop
world that emphasised visual image and celebrity tropes, calling to mind
Moskowitz’s illustration of the Taiwanese press as articulating distinct values
in its judgement of pop:
Even when Western scholars do not dismiss Taiwan’s pop quite so readily,
their analysis has its own set of cultural biases . . . Robinson et al. correctly
attempt to problematize the idea of Western cultural domination as a one-way
flow ‘From the West to the Rest’. Yet if their stated goal is to undermine
concepts of Western hegemony, the underlying logic is that the worth of
music lies in the degree to which it enters the Western market.45
Another example can be found in this writer’s experiences with The Straits
Times. Locating specialist critics for a Malay folk act or a Carnatic recital
performance could be a challenge, not because of a lack of bilingual writers
but because they also had to be ‘appropriately insider’ and to negotiate
performances in translation. This writer’s negative review of an experimental
performance of a Mozart symphony transcribed for the Singapore Indian
43
Frith, Sound Effects, p. 10.
44
Robert B. Ray, ‘Critical Senility vs Overcomprehension: Rock Criticism and the Lesson of the Avant-
Garde’, in Jones (ed.) Pop Music and the Press, p. 76.
45
Marc Moskowitz, ‘Mandopop under Siege: Culturally Bound Criticisms of Taiwan’s Pop Music’,
Popular Music, 28/1 (2009), 72.
Orchestra in 2002 was a case in point: in the eyes of the group, her lack of
credentials in appreciating neo-traditional South Indian music and her limited
enthusiasm for aesthetic decisions governed by the state multicultural agenda
weighed against broader critiques of cultural ghetto-ing and mistranslation.46
Here was a case of misaligned expectations between critic, practitioner and
different sub-groups of audiences.
And yet, it is often in the subcultural arena that critics exercise their
roles as trendsetters, meaning-makers, educators and activist-advocates.47
They promote acts ahead of the curve of current taste-making, and advo-
cate for musicians who are slipping through in between the cracks of
marketing campaigns. This writer’s early interest in ethnomusicology,
for example, resulted in frequent expositions on intercultural politics
behind folk acts, traditional groups and national institutions on behalf
of The Straits Times during the early 2000s. Other writers in the same paper
became local champions of Southeast Asian punk bands and Indie rock.48
In recent years, commentaries on the paradoxes of musical nostalgia have
appeared alongside the revival of folk genres amid revisionist discourses
on national identity, led by new generations of thinkers and activists. The
effect has led to the thrusting of traditional music into a more politically
transparent spotlight.
Media in Singapore: The Straits Times as Local, National

and International
If a framework for locating the critic has so far centred on Singapore’s musical
ecologies, consideration could next be given to journalism on the island. For
the most part, this chapter has considered criticism from the perspective of
The Straits Times. As the city-state’s national newspaper, the daily broadsheet
commanded its largest readership (1.43 million).49 Twelve other newspapers
also operated in the country, but all but one remain owned by the state-
connected Singapore Press Holdings (SPH). Close relationships existed
between SPH and the government, as attested by George and Chua,50 the
46
Shzr Ee Tan, ‘Experiment Gone Very Wrong’, The Straits Times Life! (17 June 2002).
47
See, respectively, Atton, ‘Writing about Listening’, 54; Edwin Safford, ‘Critics Must Take on
Responsibility to Spur Reform of Music’, Music Educators Journal, 56/7 (1970), 64; Patricia K. Shehan,
‘Music Critic’, Music Educators Journal, 69/2 (1982), 56.
48
These include Yeow Kai Chai, Chris Ho/X Ho and Paul Zach.
49
Information from ‘The Straits Times Customer Care’, available at www.straitstimes.com/customercare/
customercare.html (accessed 1 June 2015).
50
George, Contentious Journalism and the Internet; Chua, ‘Multiculturalism in Singapore’.
558 SHZR EE TAN
latter of whom described editors to ‘have all been groomed as pro-government

supporters . . . reporting of local events adhere closely to the official line’.51
Censorship of Singapore’s media is a well-documented issue. With the
unstoppable expansion of internet communications alongside desired eco-
nomic growth, giving rise to citizen journalism on flourishing social media,
the government also adopted a narrow-cast approach towards media control,
focusing its efforts on curtailing reportage on race, religion and politics.52 As
part of the 2002 Media 21 strategy, the government also took steps to ‘inter-
nationalize Singapore media enterprises’ and establish the city as a regional
communications hub.53 This strategy – if inconsistent with the official stance –
impacted on the uneven development of media reportage by scene.
Here, music journalism was not regarded as potentially contentious,
although the broader cultural ecosystem within which arts critics operated
involved engagement with the wider tentacles of the state, positioned to
encourage support of national agenda for capacity building and state branding
via cultural diplomacy. Consequently, competition between different outlets
was minimal, leaving The Straits Times the biggest player against the much
smaller English dailies, the Business Times, The New Paper and Today.
An important point can be made in relation to The Straits Times’ de facto role
as the paper of everyman (or everywoman). It ventriloquised the voice of
a projected ‘average’, multicultural English-/Singlish-speaking Singaporean.
Thus, its music critics functioned under different state agendas and restric-
tions, in opposition to writers at the Business Times, Chinese-language daily
Lianhe Zaobao or Malay-language newspaper Berita Harian.
Zaobao and Berita Harian targeted readers in particular language sectors,
with corresponding reportage on music tailored to the aesthetics of Chinese
and Malay communities. Zaobao’s music coverage emphasised East Asian pop,
focusing on previews over reviews. Interestingly, its classical critics here bore
the weight of Chinese intellectualism handed down from earlier generations54
and could exercise the poetics of language further than critics at The Straits
Times, especially while simultaneously staking variously marginalised political
identities. Old-guard reviewer of classical Chinese and Western music Yew
Hongren, for example, championed the paper’s Chinese identity in triumphal
51
‘Journalists Frustrated by Press Controls’, viewing cable 09SINGAPORE61, Wikileaks, available at
wikileaks.org/cable/2009/01/09SINGAPORE61.html (accessed 1 June 2015).
52
Gary Rodan, ‘The Internet and Political Control in Singapore’, Political Science Quarterly, 113/1
(1998), 81.
53
See ‘Media 21: Transforming Singapore into a Global Media City’, Media Development Authority
Singapore, available at mn.gov/mnddc/asd-employment/pdf/03-M21-MDA.pdf (accessed 1 June 2015).
54
See Sy Ren Quah, ‘Imagining Malaya, Practising Multiculturalism: The Malayan Consciousness of
Singapore Chinese Intellectuals in the 1950s’, trans. Eng Hao Teo, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 16/1 (2015),
96–112.
and flowery reviews of local musicians and Chinese composers. Younger

writers instead affirmed the transnational modernity of Chinese popular
culture through invocations of K-pop cultural references in their prose. In
comparison, music coverage at Berita Harian and Tamil Murasu, where it
existed, defaulted to news features rather than criticism. Often, general-beat
reporters deputised for music reviewers, covering performances from
a community angle.
Returning to The Straits Times, such carving up of the media scene effectively
situated the broadsheet in a multi-functioning role. It served several audi-
ences, working at multicultural, local, national, regional and international
levels. The geopolitics and cultural loci of Singapore’s successful postcolonial
and Chinese population-dominated modernity (vis-à-vis the rest of Southeast
Asia) have left its arts critics in a position of having to constantly negotiate
scalar shifts between the micro and macro.55 Who, really, were The Straits
Times’ readers? In how many nesting circles of identity did critics contextua-
lise themselves and the musicians they reviewed? Was it possible to affect an
authoritative linguistic style of insider ‘knowingness’ without being con-
scripted by the state’s staking of membership in ‘world-class’ city-hood via
chest-thumping music reports?
The Music Critic’s Juggling Act

In some ways, the critic in Singapore was no different from his or her counter-
part in any other metropolis. In the newsroom, the music journalist – often
multitasking as a general reporter reflecting Anderson’s description of
American press56 – pitches her story among a throng of competitive news
and feature ideas. Historically, reviewers at The Straits Times have been free-
lancers, recruited from elite English-educated communities of amateur per-
formers. With the maturing of scenes and development of arts criticism
alongside the cosmopolitanisation of musical life, in-house writers provided
judgement on performers and performances, focusing on issues of originality,
long-standing value versus potential and, occasionally, policy and politics.
Today, the critic in Singapore, echoing the default position of newsworkers
around the world, plies his or her trade as a purveyor of information first and
fan of music second. The onus to document subjects in socially and aestheti-
cally meaningful ways is balanced against editorial prioritisation of reader
55
Anna Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (New Jersey: Princeton University Press,
2005), 12–15.
56
William Anderson, ‘Magazine/Book Editor’, Music Educators Journal, 69/2 (1982), 53.
560 SHZR EE TAN
habits. Good writers perfect their storytelling via attention-holding introduc-

tory hooks. The writer’s task bifurcates into reportage versus criticism. In
reportage, the journalist becomes cheerleader to musicians; in criticism, the
loop is closed – or regenerated – through judgement and feedback.
In practice, criticism and reportage blur into each other at the level of the
editorial pitch, with the journalist justifying a story on its socio-aesthetic
worth, invoking value judgements. Some writers engage with context and
discourse directly in the presentation of previews and reviews; a preview may
pose questions that a review answers. This author, among others, has in her
past career as a reviewer attempted to engage in meta-criticism, honing not
only an individual voice but also weighing in with perspectives on, for
example, cultural diplomacy underpinning a world premiere,57 power asym-
metries in intercultural collaborations,58 national agenda behind a state
conservatory59 or the societal cost of a heavily funded extravaganza.60
With many reviewers – particularly classical and jazz freelancers – meta-
criticism is often sidestepped. Writers slip into the convention of reviewing
‘textually’ within the canon and assessing a performance on the assumption of
a work’s unassailable integrity. This sweeping aside of context reflects
a narrowcasting of readership within an exclusive, ‘knowing’ sector of each
paper’s readership. It also takes for granted assertions of cosmopolitan musical
identity, where aspirational politics invoke would-be international standards of
critical appreciation through the use of jargon, insinuated as commensurate with
the sophisticated Singaporean musicophile’s expanding vocabulary. Such gloss-
ing reflects a circumvention of any discussion of postcolonial historicity and class
(heavily implicated in the political and elite nature of Singapore’s classical scene),
so that readers can focus on potentially loftier concerns of ‘art for art’s sake’.
Scale-Making Projects, Cultural Anxieties

and New Frontiers
And yet a popular criticism of The Straits Times is its allegedly low standard of
writing, understood as a by-product of its function as state mouthpiece.
Within the institution, this image is less refuted than seen by jaded reporters
as the paper’s policy of writing to the lowest common denominator of
a ‘secondary four student’.61 This is in accordance with the publication’s
57
Shzr Ee Tan, ‘When Kitsch Meets Craftmanship’, The Straits Times Life! (28 October 2002).
58
Shzr Ee Tan, ‘A Myth Sees the Light; Too Flat? Too Beautiful?’, The Straits Times Life! (15 March 2004).
59
Shzr Ee Tan, ‘Tuned for Success?’, The Straits Times Life! (2 August 2003).
60
Boon Chan ‘Sodagreen Still Cool’, The Straits Times Life! (1 September 2014).
61
Equivalent to year 11 in the British school system.
broader public communicatory role as information-purveyor to the ‘average’

Singaporean. However, writers in the paper’s lifestyle section are given more
leeway and expected to target more sophisticated readers.
This exception has led to occasional differences between newsdesk and
feature reporting, leading to parallel, contradictory voices. At the 2000
Singapore Arts Festival, theatre director Robert Wilson’s multimedia produc-
tion Hot Water received a positive review from the paper’s theatre and music
critics Clarissa Oon and Lionel Choi. However, it drew a response of fru-
strated confoundedness from the paper’s deputy night editor Alan John: ‘a
lone male dancer appeared, doing the strangest things, with props that went
from weird to weirder . . . I couldn’t wait to get out.’ In the local theatre
community, John’s response was bemoaned as symptomatic of the paper’s
deliberate anti-intellectualist stance and viewed as a step backwards in the
discoursing of avant-garde performance.62
John’s defence was that the arts council’s S$1.5m budget for the production
necessitated a contestation of its value on behalf of the ‘average’ Singaporean
taxpayer. Of interest here was that in the specific arena of music, John did not
query an equally expensive concert by a visiting symphony orchestra at the
same festival. A reason lay in the long-institutionalised standing of Western
art music in Singapore, which made its exclusivity and potential opacity to
a layman (the main bugbear behind John’s reaction to Wilson) the very reason
for its critical untouchability. Indeed, classical and jazz reviewers at The Straits
Times, although often bewailed by editors for their pomposity and jargon, are
given relatively free rein to invoke technical vocabulary, if only because levels
of appreciation expected of specific readers were imagined as higher.
And yet, such sophistication reserved for music criticism – particularly of
classical music – was itself contested territory. A simplistic explanation could
be found in the fact that different editors had different policies on tone and
writing.63 Digging deeper, however, one might argue that the crux lay again
in the reality of The Straits Times functioning on quadruple accounts as a local,
national, regional and international newspaper, echoing Singapore’s unique
politics as a village-sized but overpopulated postcolonial city that was a state
as well as a regional and international hub. Music criticism reflected the
cultural anxieties of moving across such projects of scale-making, in turn
intersecting across other scales of readership, individual writers’ voices, com-
munity and government agenda, and aspirations to taste, class and ‘interna-
tional’ status. Here, Neveling and Wergin’s analysis of scaling in the context
62
Alan John, ‘Baffled by the Big One at the Arts Fest’, The Straits Times (21 June 2000).
63
562 SHZR EE TAN
of tourism can be applied. He writes of how it is ‘not one large structure

impeding on a smaller one but a network of alliances . . . A thorough analysis of
the historical emergence and alterations of these alliances is necessary in order
to avoid “conflations” that would summarize these diverse and contested
arenas of power into one frame’.64
Paraphrasing Neveling and Wergin, the constant remaking of these alli-
ances and recalibration of relationships, judgements and the field itself go
beyond simple dichotomies of the individual versus collective, local versus
global, micro versus macro, or centre versus periphery. The local intersects at
many points with the global; phenomena on the micro scale can simulta-
neously function on the macro, with distance between centre and periphery
becoming a purely contextual issue. On the arena of music criticism in
Singapore, rescaling is seen in the superficial ‘messiness’ and cultural anxiety
pervading articulations stemming from apparently non-contiguous standards
of judgement employed, diversity in tone of reportage, lack of parity across
coverage of scenes or varying evaluations of historical or sociopolitical
significance.
On an individual-meets-macro level, for example, this writer’s experience
on the arts desk – necessitating engagement with colleagues covering theatre,
literary and visual arts (where wider discourses about cultural orphanage and
postcolonial coming of age ensued) – helped hone an awareness of parallel
issues on the music beat. The charge that The Straits Times was a government
mouthpiece was often counterweighed by the argument that ‘we’re all in the
same family’: arts groups themselves were often complicit in receiving fund-
ing from the state even as they criticised it through their performance work.
Critics were sometimes personal friends, and at other times state enemies.
At the intersectional point of capacity building and state agenda for inter-
national platforming, these same narratives have been created with simulta-
neously different intentions. This writer’s articles in The Straits Times on
Robert Wilson’s intercultural premiere I La Galigo at the Esplanade in 2004,
for example, were intended to communicate a postcolonial coming of age in
the positioning of the island as an international brokerage centre for
Southeast Asian art. However, it was later picked up by academic commenta-
tors for privileging the culturally anxious stance of national aggrandisement
in the global arena.65 Such discoursing presents interesting perspectives on
the superficially translocal but ultimately Western-centric nexus of English-
64
Patrick Neveling and Carsten Wergin, ‘Projects of Scale-Making: New Perspectives for the
Anthropology of Tourism’, Etnográfica, 13/2 (2009), 326.
65
Jennifer Lindsay, ‘Intercultural Expectations: I La Galigo in Singapore’, TDR: The Drama Review, 51/2
(2007), 68.
language criticism of itself, vis-à-vis the eventual transnational existence of

Wilson’s Southeast Asian project that went on to tour Europe and the United
States. The published criticisms also implicated aspirationally cosmopolitan
narratives about Singapore’s role in spearheading an Asia-Pacific production
here, on the debatable claims of being geographically Southeast Asian while
remaining culturally and economically ‘Western’.
Any insights derived from the criticism of I La Galigo – a project whose
idealistic interculturalism was underpinned by global asymmetries – present
themselves more starkly in Western art music in Singapore. Returning to
a discussion of calibration of standards, it can be argued that classical
reviewers in Singapore – in the words of Atton – have been ‘dominated by
a particular ideology of universal critical values and only briefly challenged by
experiments in relativized “cultural studies” journalism’.66 On the one hand,
the presentation of Western art music as ‘universal’ in Singapore operates on
the back of an unquestioning stance of its classical reviewers; they are unwill-
ing to confront the postcolonial implications of the genre’s widespread
entrenchment across the island as shorthand for any kind of formal music
education. On the other hand, this seeming historico-cultural amnesia might
well be reunderstood as an unashamed declaration of successful Asian post-
coloniality in the twenty-first century: why fixate over justifying the presence
of any ‘foreign’ musical genre, if listeners and critics on the island were
cosmopolitan enough to stake appreciatory claims on it in the name of
egalitarianism? Writing to ‘insiders’ in a style that privileged textual, con-
noisseurial and genre exclusivity, The Straits Times’ classical critics Chang Tou
Liang, Mervin Beng and Lionel Choi defaulted to this nonplussed stance,
staking any regionally specific Singaporean/Asian take on the West as post-
cultural non-issues.
Occasionally, however, contextual challenges emerged when the alleged
‘universal’ values of Western art music’s were applied cross-culturally. For
example, Chang gave a less-than-glowing review of the Singapore Chinese
Orchestra in 2014, describing composer Tang Ni’s The Story of Small Town as
‘the answer to Strauss’ Voices of Spring’.67 This snide remark had piqued read-
ers who picked a bone with his alleged misunderstanding of Chinese instru-
mental genres, and his imposition of Western-honed criteria in judgement.68
Returning to the analysis of criticism along the rhetoric of scale-making, this
ensuing controversy could be understood in terms of what Schiller, Çaglar
66
67
Chang Tou Liang, ‘Festive Start to Spring’, The Straits Times Life! (13 January 2014).
68
Irene Yeo, ‘Wrong Measure for Chinese Works’, The Straits Times Life! (18 January 2014).
564 SHZR EE TAN
and Guldbrandsen call ‘city scales’.69 Here, aspiring cosmopolitans struggle

against national and cultural fault-lines even as rescaling occurs along nation-
ally and culturally disintegrated nodes. Instead, locational factors functioning
within the borderless hub of the city become crucial to the creation of artistic
value. Arguing in Chang’s defence, it could be said that his judgement of the
Chinese Orchestra did not necessarily rest on notions of the performance or
work’s ‘Chineseness’, or even that of Chang’s musical education. Rather, it
was the invented lineage of the ensemble as ‘symphonic ethnic’ – harking back
to musical experiments in China made several decades ago on behalf of
modernisation – that was at stake here.
The Internet: A Not-So-Alternative Model After All?

A concluding note on the question of scale in music criticism can be made
when considering the final frontier: the Internet. Indeed, the broader cultural
ecologies invoked in this chapter exist beyond landscapes of geographical,
social, economic and political hierarchies, and are closely integrated into the
technologies of virtual media. In the past decade, digital mediascapes in
Singapore have provided platforms for the articulation of narratives counter
to state discourses upheld by traditional media.70 At the same time, main-
stream media themselves have capitalised on new platforms and established
their own social media arms, unlevelling the playing field. Still, independent
satirical sites such as The Real Singapore, Mothership.sg, The States Times, The
Online Citizen and Yawning Bread have proliferated as alternative channels for
citizen journalism. These co-opt social media already widely used in
Singapore (Facebook, Twitter and Vine) and harness augmented reality
technologies.
There are dangers in taking an overly optimistic approach to the digital,
however. In classical music criticism, internet mediation is less an issue of
providing counternarratives than of reinforcing tributaries of mainstream
criticism. The Straits Times’ Chang Tou Liang, for example, runs his own
blog Pianomania, where his print articles reappear alongside other musings.
Chang says his site was created ‘in the interests of the wider community –
someone should document what’s going on’.71
Running in complement to Chang’s blog are the Singapore-based The Flying
Inkpot and the opera blog The Mad Scene. Established as a classical music site in
69
Nina Glick Schiller, Ayşe Çaglar and Thaddeus C. Guldbrandsen, ‘Beyond the Ethnic Lens: Locality,
Globality, and Born-Again Incorporation’, American Ethnologist, 33/4 (2006), 612.
70
George, Contentious Journalism and the Internet.
71
Chang Tou Liang, personal interview with author (6 August 2014).
1997, Inkpot has expanded to include reviews of documentaries, books and

theatre. Voices on Inkpot are more varied than The Straits Times in tone and
content. Articles vary in approach and length. Subjects have ranged from
technical analyses of a single concert to impressionistic surveys and outright
promotion of specific artists. The Mad Scene is run as a community forum
moderated by four opera singers who write reviews as fans.
Inkpot and The Mad Scene’s internet-only platforms put them in particular
relational dynamics to mainstream media. One would be tempted to see
virtual sites as providing uncensored criticism of music in parallel with
other citizen journalist sites. However, the closely networked nature of the
classical music community in Singapore has meant that any alternative dis-
courses these platforms provide still function within the broader conserva-
tism of the scene itself. At most, grumblings are heard about the technicalities
of lacklustre performances; commentaries rarely critique cultural impetuses
or political implications of creativity. In contrast, on the pop arena, voices
active on alternative media such as Chris Ho, Martyn See and Thatboyhuman
raise pressing cultural issues about musical activity. Discussions on these
platforms have ranged from the banning of music videos owing to issues of
alleged LGBTQ+ agenda,72 to the promotion of propaganda in national
songs,73 to scandals over the multiple state purchases of Steinway pianos for
national music campaigns.74
Also interesting in left-field development of music criticism is the rise of ad
hoc and crowd-facilitated opinion-making, enabled through social media. The
original loci of these scattershot, edited reposts – as quickly assembled as they
are disassembled – are often promotional websites for venues, artists and
record companies. As opposed to full-length reviews, critical dimensions of
these articulations emphasise interactive, off-the-cuff voices and judgements.
These micro-evaluations cumulate into broader discussions and memes, and
reintegrate into global music-sharing platforms such as YouTube,
SoundCloud and Bandcamp. Here, content that can be considered criticism
by any marginal definition is woven between general musings on life, work,
news and translocal gossip. Commentaries are often anonymous, even as
opinions are built on distinctive personality cults. Any invoking of music
criticism is deeply entangled with life-writing, café gossip, marketing and self-
promotion.
72
‘Jolin Tsai’s Same-Sex-Marriage Music Video’, Mothership.sg, available at https://mothership.sg
(accessed 1 June 2015).
73
‘Singapore’s National Songs 2014’, available at thatboyhuman.com (accessed 1 June 2015).
74
‘6 Ways Buying 50 Steinway-Designed Lang Lang Pianos for S$1.3 Million Will Make Children in
S’pore Love Music’, Mothership.sg, available at https://mothership.sg (accessed 1 June 2015).
566 SHZR EE TAN
With regard to new media and music criticism, Singapore can offer per-
spectives on the aforementioned making of scale alongside Michael Wesch’s
‘context-collapse’ and Henry Jenkins’ ‘convergence culture’.75 A telescoped
scaling of criticism also moves discourse-making from a centre-periphery
approach to a focus on the act of transition itself – across spaces, places, fields,
temporal loci and ideas. For example, violinist Yoong Han Chan of the
Singapore Symphony Orchestra, an active social media user, raves about
a rare recording by Accademia Bizantina Ottavio Dantone via a YouTube
video embedded in his Facebook site, in between posting promotional mate-
rial for local concerts and subsequent reviews of them by both The Straits Times
and The Business Times. The content sits happily alongside photos and accom-
panying comments on a rehearsal with visiting violinist Cho-Liang Lin, amid
a rally of posts of Technicolor sunsets and his children’s gymnastic feats.
Transnational, international, local and cosmopolitan references are interwo-
ven, offering glimpses of music content and incidental, offhand critique across
arbitrary contexts connected through the unifying theme of Chan’s life
curated on Facebook.
Outside classical music, social media has become a ripe field for the
dilettante critic – intentional and unintentional, buffered by edited posts
of globally circulating music videos, advertisements, and accompanying
rants and raves. They are translocal and transnational, revolving around
event-promotion sites, production houses, music databases or fan pages
such as bandwagon.sg, ffurious.com and musicmatterslive.com. Ad hoc or
commissioned writing that can be categorised as criticism – from the review
of a radio show in the Philippines76 to a round-up of pop songs banned in
Singapore77 or a Facebook page on Singapore rock history78 – function on
a blog-based journalistic approach. They offer piecemeal opinions designed
to promote products and events within specifically groomed communities.
New models for media production have developed through the interactive
novelty of first-wave digitisation to the second-wave consideration of politi-
cally inflected demographics of web publication.79 Currently, with third-wave
reflection on the humanisation of technology, music criticism in Singapore
75
Michael Wesch, ‘An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube’, talk delivered at the Library of
Congress (23 June 2008), available on Michael Welsch’s YouTube channel at www.youtube.com (accessed
1 June 2015); Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture.
76
Francis Reyes, ‘A Caffeine Boost’, Bandwagon.asia, available at editorial.bandwagon.sg/a-caffeine-boost
-of-indie-music-jam-88–3-s-fresh-filter-live-at-satchmi (accessed 1 June 2015).
77
Bandwagon, ‘5 Songs Previously Banned’, Bandwagon.asia, available at editorial.bandwagon.sg/5-son
gs-previously-banned-in-singapore (accessed 1 June 2015.
78
So Happy Sg, available at www.facebook.com/groups/sohappysg.
79
Nick Prior, ‘Music Consumption as an Assemblage’, Creativity and Technology Workshop, University
of Cambridge (5 April 2015).
has become a challenging territory to navigate. On the one hand, existing

politico-economic ecologies still govern structures that create a false sense of
democracy in levelling playing fields for internet journalism. But has a level
playing field always been desired? Naysayers such as Andrew Keen speak of
the dangerous uneducated amateur in the age of blogs.80 And yet the post-
digital realities of Singapore’s music scenes have seen technology become less
of a sudden game-changer in the enablement of wider public platforms for
isolated critical voices than a deeply humanised and built-in aspect of everyday
communication. These are now taken for granted in the making of personal,
communitarian and public sentiment. It is in this cultural ecology encom-
passed by new media that music criticism in Singapore will continue to
operate.
80
Andrew Keen, The Cult of the Amateur: How Blogs, MySpace, YouTube and the Rest of Today’s User-Generated
Media Are Destroying Our Economy, Our Culture, and Our Values (New York: Doubleday, 2007).
· PART VI ·
DEVELOPMENTS SINCE
THE SECOND WORLD WAR
. 29 .
Music Criticism in the USSR from Asafyev to

Cherednichenko
PETER J. SCHMELZ
The history of Soviet music is inextricably tied to the history of Soviet music
criticism. The memorable inflection points of Soviet music history – political,
social and musical – were usually spurred on or accompanied, often loudly, by
published criticism. The most representative and notorious example is the official
reaction to Dmitri Shostakovich’s opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. An
article titled ‘Muddle Instead of Music’ [Sumbur vmesto muzyki] appeared in
Pravda on 28 January 1936, signalling a stark shift in the fortunes of both work and
composer. The criticism coincided with the worst moments of the Great Terror of
1936 and 1937 and encapsulated a new, harder line on artistic products.1 It set the
precedent for future criticism. The Resolution of the Central Committee of the
All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of 10 February 1948 was supplemented
by vituperative criticism in the press.2 In 1962, the high-water mark of the post-
Stalin Thaw, Nikita Khrushchev unleashed his anger at an exhibit of avant-garde
Soviet visual art, and articles condemning music (often just versions of speeches
delivered at official gatherings) soon appeared in publications musical and
otherwise.3 And perhaps the biggest inflection point of all arrived in the late
1980s, when suddenly anyone could publish anything. Soon ‘official’ publication
lost its meaning. But an arguably greater change in music criticism in the last two
decades of the USSR arrived without a momentous sign, and often at variance
with official demands: the growth of popular music criticism. Publications slowly
appeared, in both samizdat and in various official periodicals, to grapple with the
new music now attracting large, avid audiences.
1
As historian Karl Schögel wrote, ‘1937 really began in music as early as the start of 1936’; Karl Schlögel,
Moscow, 1937, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Malden: Polity, 2012), p. 439.
2
See Alexander Werth, Musical Uproar in Moscow (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1977; first published
London: Turnstile Press, 1949). Documents surrounding the 1948 Resolution were published in
Sovetskaia muzyka, 1 (January and February 1948).
3
See for example, Vano Muradeli, ‘Za narodnost’ muzyki’, Pravda (17 December 1962), 3; and
Leonid Il’ichev, ‘Sily molodezhi—na sluzhbu velikim idealam. Rech’ Sekretaria TsK KPSS L. Il’icheva’,
Literaturnaia gazeta, 34/5 (10 January 1963), 1–3. See also Priscilla Johnson McMillan, Khrushchev and the
Arts: The Politics of Soviet Culture, 1962–1964 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1964).
[571]
572 PETER J. SCHMELZ
Yet these points when published music criticism and official dictate
responded one to the other tell only part of the story. The chief problem of
discussing music criticism in the Soviet Union lies in the sheer pervasiveness
of criticism in the USSR. Nearly everything was or could become a form of
criticism, particularly in the pages of the main music periodical in the USSR,
Sovetskaia muzyka. Delineating ‘normal’ criticism – reviews of performances or
recordings – is anachronistic, if not impossible. Everything carried a political
charge, even if some articles had less voltage than others. Like most, if not all,
aspects of life in the USSR, music criticism offered a range of reactions to
official sentiment: it could echo and amplify; it could softly refine, if not
criticise; and it could try to ignore. There was no freedom of the press in
the USSR, but options, however slight, were still available. The official press
included bland, often false commentary but also allowed for perceptive
insights into music-making.
Music criticism in the USSR had an unusual relationship to power and also
to musicology and academic writing. Many of the most noted music critics
from the Soviet period were not full-time journalists. Instead, they were
academics or composers who either wrote music criticism as a complement
to their academic or creative activities or, in the case of musicologists, treated
their academic writing as a type of criticism, incorporating one into the other.
There was a decided lack of daily newspaper criticism in the USSR.4 The
leading party and government organs Pravda and Izvestiia carried few reports
about music. Rather, specialist journals or newspapers usually published such
pieces. In music there were two such journals: first Sovetskaia muzyka and,
later, Muzykal’naia zhizn’. Other publications for a more general audience,
among them the youth-oriented Krugozor, also prominently included discus-
sions of both classical and popular music. And, as in Europe or America, some
of the most important music criticism appeared in book form, as either
monographs or collections of essays.
The music criticism that appeared in the USSR is among the most memor-
able of the twentieth century. Below I discuss representative critics and
representative examples as well as central points of contention: among them
issues of authority, censorship and authenticity. The criticism that stands out
is the negative criticism that carried political import – the cutting rebukes –
but I also highlight less flamboyant criticism worthy of comment. Criticism
does not tell a different story about the Soviet period, but it complicates and
adds texture to the familiar tale.
4
See Boris Schwarz, Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia, 1917–1981 (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1983), pp. 222–3.
Music Criticism in the USSR: Asafyev to Cherednichenko 573
1920s and 1930s: From Free-for-All to Control

Music criticism in the 1920s reflected Soviet life more broadly: in equal
measure tumultuous and uncertain, revolutionary and reactionary. The dec-
ade stands out for the sheer number of music-related periodicals that both
launched and sank within its boundaries. Many publications lasted for only
a volume or two, among them Muzyka i Oktiabr [Music and October], pub-
lished for one year (1926) by the Russian Association of Proletarian Musicians,
RAPM. Others were slightly longer-lived, including Sovremennaia muzyka
[Contemporary Music]. Published from 1924 to 1929, it was edited by
Viktor Belyayev (1888–1968) and published by RAPM’s ideological opposite,
the Association of Contemporary Music (ASM, in its Russian acronym) and
the State Academy of the History of the Arts, in Moscow.5 Another central
journal in the 1920s was Muzyka i revoliutsiia [Music and Revolution], pub-
lished by the Organisation of Revolutionary Composers (ORK, in its Russian
acronym) from 1926 to 1929.6
Music criticism from the revolution to 1932 wrestled with new thoughts
and new impulses on many levels. The party was already placing a high
premium on criticism. The Resolution of the Central Committee of the
Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) from 18 June 1925, ‘On the Politics
of the Party in Literature’ [O politike partii v oblasti khudozhestvennoi
literatury], declared criticism to be ‘one of the main educational weapons in
the hands of the party’.7 Critics thus engaged with the new audiences, namely
workers and other non-elites, who were now being actively encouraged to
attend cultural events. Accounts of performances became accounts of their
audiences’ reactions rather than evaluations of the musicians on the stage.8
Critics also took notice of new attempts to write appropriately ‘Soviet’ music:
symphonies of sirens, Shostakovich’s new works, mass songs. Older compo-
sers were evaluated in new ways, and critics also engaged with the new types
of music wending their way into the USSR, including modernist music from
western Europe and new modes of popular music, chief among them jazz.
Sovremennaia muzyka, in particular, often included accounts of contemporary
5
See Amy Nelson, Music for the Revolution: Musicians and Power in Early Soviet Russia (University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), pp. 53–4; Neil Edmunds, The Soviet Proletarian Music Movement
(Oxford: Peter Lang, 2000); and Olga Panteleeva, ‘Formation of Russian Musicology from Sacchetti to
Asafyev, 1885–1931’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley (2015).
6
Nelson, Music for the Revolution, pp. 92–3.
7
Quoted in Iurii Keldysh, ‘Kritika muzykal’naia’, Muzykal’naia entsiklopediia, vol. 3 (Moscow: Sovetskaia
entsiklopediia, 1973–82), p. 59.
8
See for example, N. Petrov, ‘Opera i novyi zritel’ [Opera and Its New Audience], Artist-muzykant, 2
(1918), 5; quoted in Marina Frolova-Walker and Jonathan Walker (eds.), Music and Soviet Power,
1917–1932 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2012), pp. 13–14.
Western European composers, dedicating special issues, for example, to Paul

Hindemith and Béla Bartók (1924, no. 1 and 1925, no. 7, respectively).9
One of the shorter-run publications from the early Soviet years was Melos,
edited by a journalist named Igor Glebov in Petrograd, which lasted for all of
two volumes, from 1917 to 1918. Glebov, it turned out, was a fiction.
A powerful critic, he was the nom de plume of Boris Asafyev (1884–1949),
a musical jack-of-all trades: composer, musicologist, theorist, critic. While
working at the Mariinsky and Mikhailovsky Theaters, he started writing
criticism under the pen name Glebov. He contributed to both Sovremennaia
muzyka and Muzyka i revoliutsiia and, in a pair of classic essays in the former,
exhorted Soviet composers to engage with a wider audience, ‘to grab and
attract the attention not only of a narrow circle, calling forth the cold-blooded
interest of specialists, but a greater and greater mass of the population’.10 He
called for music ‘that would be understandable to each and everyone, songs
which would be sung both in the streets and in the fields’. One of Asafyev’s
most notable contributions was a book-length study of Igor Stravinsky from
1929, called simply A Book about Stravinsky.11 It was subsequently translated
into several languages – among the only works of music criticism from the
USSR for which this is the case. Asafyev also became noted for his more
academic work – on the theory of intonations for example, which became
a staple not only of academic musicography in the USSR, but also filtered into
music criticism.12
Ivan Sollertinsky (1902–44), another leading music critic, was active from
the late 1920s until his death. A close friend of Shostakovich, the extremely
erudite Sollertinsky – who claimed to know more than twenty-one languages –
wrote about theatre, ballet, opera and concert music for a variety of period-
icals: Krasnaia gazeta, Leningradskaia pravda, Sovetskoe iskusstvo, Izvestiia, Zhizn’
iskusstva, Rabochii i teatr, Iskusstvo i zhizn’, Teatr and Sovetskaia muzyka.13 He
addressed both the known – Beethoven, Gluck, Mozart and the nineteenth-
9
For a survey of representative examples of music criticism from 1917 to 1932, see Frolova-Walker and
Walker (eds.), Music and Soviet Power, 1917–1932; and Pauline Fairclough, Classics for the Masses: Shaping
Soviet Musical Identity under Lenin and Stalin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016).
10
Igor Glebov, ‘Krizis lichnogo tvorchestva’, Sovremennaia muzyka, 4 (1924), 99–106; excerpted in B.
V. Asaf’ev, Izbrannye Trudy, vol. 5 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo akademii nauk SSSR, 1957), pp. 23. See also
Igor Glebov, ‘Kompozitory, pospeshite!’, Sovremennaia muzyka, 6 (1924), 145–8; English trans. Frolova-
Walker and Walker (eds.), Music and Soviet Power, pp. 124–7.
11
B. Asaf’ev, Kniga o Stravinskom (Leningrad: Muzyka, 1977; first published Leningrad: Triton, 1929);
English trans. Boris Asaf’yev, A Book about Stravinsky, trans. Richard F. French (Ann Arbor: UMI Research
Press, 1982).
12
Malcolm Hamrick Brown, ‘The Soviet Russian Concepts of “Intonazia” and “Musical Imagery”’,
Musical Quarterly, 60 (1974), 557–67.
13
Liudmila Kovnatskaia, ‘Introduction to D. D. Shostakovich’, Pis’ma I. I. Sollertinskomu (Saint
Petersburg: Kompozitor, 2006), p. 5; and M. Druskin, ‘I. I. Sollertinskii – Kritik’, in I. Sollertinskii,
Kriticheskie stat’i, ed. I. Beletskii (Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe muzykal’noe izdatel’stvo, 1963), p. 6.
century Russian standards – and the less known (for Soviet listeners) – Mahler,
Bruckner and Schoenberg.14 Drawn to the grotesque and the off-kilter, the
‘contradictions of life’, Sollertinsky once quoted the following lines by poet
Alexander Blok: ‘The new is always alarming and disturbing. One who grasps
that the meaning of human life lies in being disturbed and alarmed will cease
being a philistine.’15 Sollertinsky appraised key works by Shostakovich,
among them his opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District,16 and the premiere
of his wartime Symphony No. 7: ‘Never has a single musical work . . . been
born in such an unusual atmosphere – intense, harsh, and dreadful’.17 He also
reviewed such canonical Soviet compositions as Ivan Dzerzhinsky’s Quiet
Flows the Don [Tikhii Don], Dmitri Kabalevsky’s Colas Breugnon [Kola Briun’en]
and Asafyev’s Flames of Paris [Plamia Parizha] and contributed to mid-1930s
discussions concerning the place of the symphony in the USSR.18
In the 1920s prominent figures, Asafyev among them, struggled to estab-
lish musicology as a discipline,19 with tense questions arising: was musicol-
ogy a mere adjunct to practical music training or was it a discipline in its own
right that should influence the course of composition and performance?
These foundational questions, together with the changing status of musi-
cologists themselves (only just becoming professionalised) and the Soviet
emphasis on publitsistika (or writing on publicly accessible topics for a larger
audience), had ripple effects on music criticism, helping reinforce the over-
lap between musicology and criticism that became so characteristic of the
Soviet period.
The upheavals of the 1920s in music, and specifically the battles between
factions aligned with RAPM and those allied with ASM, were largely silenced
by the 1932 resolution ‘liquidating’ the proletariat arts organisations and
establishing single creative unions in their place for architects, writers and
composers (and musicologists).20 Local unions soon were formed in Moscow
and Leningrad, and a central music journal, Sovetskaia muzyka, began
14
Representative examples in: I. I. Sollertinskii, Muzykal’no istorichekie etiudy, ed. M. Druskin (Leningrad:
Gosudarstvennoe muzykal’noe izdatel’stvo, 1956); Sollertinskii, Kriticheskie stat’i; and Liudmila Mikheeva
(ed.), Pamiati I. I. Sollertinskogo: Vospominaniia, materialy, issledovaniia, 2nd expanded ed. (Leningrad and
Moscow: Sovetskii kompozitor, 1978). See also Pauline Fairclough, ‘Mahler Reconstructed: Sollertinsky
and the Soviet Symphony’, Musical Quarterly, 85/2 (2001), 367–90.
15
Druskin, ‘I. I. Sollertinskii – Kritik’, pp. 9, 4.
16
Ivan Sollertinskii, ‘“Ledi Makbet Mtsenskogo Uezda”’, Rabochii i teatr, 4 (1934); reprinted in
Sollertinskii, Kriticheskie stat’i, pp. 72–6.
17
Ivan Sollertinskii, ‘Sed’maia simfoniia Shostakovicha’, Sovetskaia Sibir’ (16 July 1942); reprinted in
Mikheeva (ed.), Pamiati I. I. Sollertinskogo, pp. 190–1.
18
See Sollertinskii, Kriticheskie stat’i, pp. 76–9 (Dzerzhinsky) and pp. 79–86 (Kabalevsky); and Mikheeva
(ed.), Pamiati I.I. Sollertinskogo, pp. 195–201 (Asafyev).
19
See especially Panteleeva, ‘Formation of Russian Musicology’.
20
‘On the Restructuring of Literary and Artistic Organizations’, in Frolova-Walker and Walker (eds.),
Music and Soviet Power, pp. 324–5; and Fairclough, Classics for the Masses, pp. 101–7.
publication in 1933.21 It held a place of pre-eminence in Soviet musicography

through the very end of the USSR (when it was reborn and rebranded as
Muzykal’naia akademiia). In his mid-1970s encyclopedia account of Soviet
music criticism, Yuri Keldysh singled out the 1932 resolution for its salient
effect on music criticism, because ‘music critics were united with composers
in the Union of Composers.’22
Surely Keldysh did not have in mind the most famous article conjoining
critic and composer to emerge from the USSR, the anonymous 1936 denun-
ciation of Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District. This review hit
the high points of official Soviet critical histrionics and most readers probably
have at least glancing familiarity with its overblown rhetoric. The criticism
has forever entered the annals of music history; pick any passage at random
and it still shocks: ‘All of this is coarse, primitive, and vulgar. The music
quacks, grunts, and growls, and suffocates itself, in order to express the
amatory scenes as naturalistically as possible. And “love” is smeared all over
the opera in the most vulgar manner’.23 This moment follows the article’s
central, chilling warning: ‘It is a game of clever ingenuity that may end very
badly’. The review represented Soviet criticism in a nutshell: it inveighed
against dissonance, confusion, ‘naturalistic’ depictions of sex and violence
and formalism (a catch-all epithet condemning all of the above), and it threa-
tened violence to the author himself if his creative deficiencies were not
remedied.
But the targets were wider than any single author: Soviet criticism aimed to
model future behaviour for all creators. Musical socialist realism relied on an
approved canon of texts, musical works that had been praised publicly, but
this approval process was founded on an approved body of critical texts, chief
among them ‘Muddle Instead of Music’.24 Yet the dangers of treating criticism
as a form of public humiliation were clear to all creators. Author Maxim Gorky
drafted a letter to Stalin shortly after the denunciation of Shostakovich,
complaining, ‘Critics should give a technical assessment of Shostakovich’s
music. But what the Pravda article did was to authorise hundreds of talentless
people, hacks of all kinds, to persecute Shostakovich’.25 Yet this was exactly
21
Kiril Tomoff, Creative Union: The Professional Organization of Soviet Composers, 1939–1953 (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2006), pp. 18–19, 21.
22
Keldysh, ‘Kritika muzykal’naia’, p. 61.
23
‘Sumbur vmesto muzyki’; English trans., ‘Chaos Instead of Music (1936)’, in Robert P. Morgan (ed.),
Strunk’s Source Readings in Music History, revised ed., vol. 7 (New York: Norton, 1998), pp. 1398.
24
Katerina Clark, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, 3rd ed. (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana
University Press, 2000), pp. 3–4. See also Marina Frolova-Walker, Stalin’s Music Prize: Soviet Culture and
Politics (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016), pp. 286, 292.
25
M. Gorkii, ‘Dva pis’ma Stalinu’, Literaturnaia gazeta (10 March 1993), 6; quoted in Laurel Fay,
Shostakovich: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 91.
what was wanted: an attack on the elites in the name of the (anonymous)
masses. It aimed to instil fear from all directions. As historical novelist
Vladimir Karpov (1922–2010) wrote about the Stalin period: ‘a good deal of
writing was intended to destroy people, most often honest people who were
unable to defend themselves against hired loudmouths’.26 The anonymity of
the critique was key, and a key characteristic of some of the most famous
examples of Soviet music criticism. Its authorship long swathed in myth and
speculation, only recently has the true writer of ‘Muddle Instead of Music’
been identified: a low-level journalist named David Zaslavsky (1880–1965).
But this truth feels like an afterthought, the damage already long done.27
As would happen countless times over the course of the USSR, discussions
about proper musical composition quickly turned into discussions about
proper criticism. An article from 4 September 1938 in Sovetskoe iskusstvo by
musicologist Alexander Shaverdyan (1903–54) objected to recent debates
about Soviet opera in the wake of the Lady Macbeth controversy for being
too one-sided.28 He pointed to the similar format of all the articles and the
similar language their critics used, even when discussing ostensibly different
works by different composers. But amid the public denunciations and private
disappearances, was not uniformity to be expected?
In early 1941, Kabalevsky reported on a spring 1939 conference about
music criticism organised by the Union of Composers USSR.29 Kabalevsky
had the pleasure of announcing the positive shifts in both Soviet composition
and criticism over the intervening year. The earlier critiques had achieved
their desired effects, and both criticism and composition were engaged in
a ‘process of mutual influence: the successes of composers helped to raise the
level of criticism that in turn influenced further creative development’.30
Critics had raised their standards and were not now praising works of ‘low
artistic worth’, as they had two or three years previous. No longer ‘passive’,
they were now adopting a more active ‘educational’ role. But, as was so
common in these official proclamations, Kabalevsky warned that the work
was not yet done: the ‘gap between musicology and publitsistika still remains’.
And he provided recent examples of such insufficient, dilettantish works by
Dmitri Rogal’-Levitskiy and Yuri Kremlev. In the end, Kabalevsky raised the
26
Vladimir Karpov, ‘Literature’s Contribution to Perestroika’, in Yevgeni Dugin (ed.), Perestroika and
Development of Culture (Literature, Theatre and Cinema) (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers Private Limited,
1989), pp. 26–7.
27
See Evgenii Efimov, Sumbur vokrug ‘sumbura’ i odnogo malen’kogo zhurnalista (Moscow: Flinta, 2006); and
S. Gedroits, Review of Evgenii Efimov, Sumbur vokrug ‘sumbura’ i odnogo ‘malen’kogo zhurnalista, Zvezda, 5
(2007), available at magazines.russ.ru/zvezda/2007/5/ge20.html (accessed 1 November 2016).
28
A. Shaverdian, ‘Prava i obiazannosti muzykal’nogo kritika’, Sovetskoe iskusstvo (4 September 1938).
29
Dm. Kabalevskii, ‘O muzykal’noi kritike’, Sovetskaia muzyka, 1 (1941), 4–17. 30
Ibid., 16.
stakes for music criticism: ‘Indeed the truly great critic, pointing the way
forward for creative work, should stand even higher than the artist.’31 He took
aim at musicologists and theorists who remained concerned only with ques-
tions of the past, for he wanted music writers to be concerned with the
‘practical questions of building our great government’. Such demands had
immense force during the Second World War, and they did not diminish after
its end. Yet, scholars increasingly concentrated on more ‘positivistic’ enter-
prises – compiling and collating scores, letters and other historical source
documents without editorialising, without criticism.
The 1948 Resolution, Thaw and Stagnation

The next direct intervention in musical life, the infamous Resolution of the
Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of
10 February 1948, devoted portions of its wrath toward musical criticism,
decrying the ‘altogether intolerable situation in Soviet music criticism’.32 The
criticisms of criticism were familiar, a return to the talking points of
Shaverdyan and Kabalevsky from a decade previous: ‘Instead of combating
the harmful views and theories alien to the principles of socialist realism,
music critics promote them, hailing the composers who share these false
artistic concepts as the advance guard in art.’33 As a result, the resolution
declared:
Musical criticism has ceased to express the opinion of Soviet society, the
opinion of the nation, and has become a mouthpiece of individual composers.
Some music critics, instead of writing objective criticisms, have begun,
because of personal friendship, to fawn upon this or that musical leader,
glorifying their works in every conceivable way.34
But such misguided criticism stemmed not only from personal connections; it
also arose from imported ‘bourgeois ideology’, the ‘influence of contempor-
ary decadent western European and American music’. The new head of the
Soviet Union of Composers, Tikhon Khrennikov, singled out Sovetskoe
iskusstvo and Sovetskaia muzyka for ‘[lending] their pages to apologists for the
formalist movement’.35 In 1949 and 1950, the fallout from the 1948 resolu-
tion continued, as musicologists and critics were further rebuked.36
31
Ibid., 17.
32
‘Resolution of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party (Bolsheviks) of
10 February 1948’, in Nicolas Slonimsky, Music since 1900, updated by Laura Diane Kuhn, 6th ed.
(New York: Schirmer Reference, 2001), pp. 942–3.
33 34 35
Ibid. Ibid. Ibid., 947.
36
Schwarz, Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia, pp. 249–58.
Collections of music criticism were published in 1953 and 1955 that

responded directly to the 1948 Resolution: they aimed to embody the cri-
tiques of that document. Published in the series Soviet Musical Criticism
[Sovetskaia muzykal’naia kritika], the articles in each volume serve as an
official canon of Soviet music criticism, a collection of its greatest hits. The
stated subjects of the collection were Soviet opera (1953) and Soviet sym-
phonism (1955), but the topics ranged widely and including obvious classics,
such as ‘Muddle Instead of Music’ in the opera volume and, in the symphonic
volume, Asafyev’s ‘The Great Tradition of Russian Music’, Aleksei Tolstoy’s
account of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5, as well as Shostakovich on his
own Symphony No. 7.37
Although both volumes were obviously polemical, the opera volume tilted
more heavily in that direction, and comprised post-1948 exhortations about
the proper course of Soviet opera as well as reviews of ‘little-known works
that have played a positive role in the history of Soviet opera’.38 Notably, the
collection specifically omitted any discussion of operas from the 1940s, when,
its editor declared, Soviet work suffered from the ‘harmful influences of
bourgeois formalism’.39 The heated discussions of opera between 1938 and
1940, filled with ‘mistaken judgments’, were similarly left out of the book.40
The symphonic volume reveals a capacious definition of criticism, ranging
from general surveys of new works (Tsukkerman’s ‘New Instrumental
Concertos’ and Mikhail Chulaki’s ‘Soviet Music in 1951’) to discussions of
specific works or composers (Izrail Nest’ev’s ‘The Path of Sergei Prokofiev’
and Boris Yarustovsky’s ‘On the Tenth Symphony of Dmitri Shostakovich’).
As this brief accounting of its contents suggests, Shostakovich and Prokofiev
served as anchors for much Soviet criticism. Yarustovsky’s article on
Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 10 illustrates several general tendencies: it
traces the form and main themes of the symphony (including the well-
known DSCH motto, or Shostakovich’s initials rendered in musical form:
D–E[–C–B\), and it also suggests an interpretation of the composition’s
narrative.41 For example, according to Yarustovsky, the second movement
of the symphony ‘is an image of evil forces, revealed in close-up. Its connec-
tion with the Faust motive [at the beginning of the symphony] is obvious’.42
37
M. Grinberg and N. Poliakova (eds.), Sovetskaia opera: Sbornik kriticheskikh statei, Sovetskaia
Muzykal’naia Kritika (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe muzykal’noe izdatel’stvo, 1953); M. A. Grinberg (ed.),
Sovetskaia simfonicheskaia muzyka: sbornik statei, Sovetskaia Muzykal’naia Kritika (Moscow:
Gosudarstvennoe Muzykal’noe Izdatel’stvo, 1955).
38 39 40
Grinberg and Poliakova (eds.), Sovetskaia opera, p. 7. Ibid., p. 7. Ibid., pp. 7–8.
41
Boris Iarustovskii, ‘O desiatoi simfonii D. Shostakovicha’, in Grinberg (ed.), Sovetskaia simfonicheskaia
muzyka, p. 498. See also Frolova-Walker, Stalin’s Music Prize, pp. 270–6.
42
Ibid.
The entire work thus involves a conflict between good and evil, culminating
‘only at the very end of the work’ when a ‘cheerful khorovod, bright and naïve,
enchants the hero’. The sources of the articles in the two collections of
criticism are instructive as well: articles from the 1920s come from
Vecherniaia Krasnaia gazeta and Zhizn’ iskusstva; articles from the 1930s come
from Pravda, Izvestiia and Sovetskoe iskusstvo; but in the 1940s and 1950s, the
primary source was Sovetskaia muzyka (and the bulk of the essays in both
collections were from this period). Relative diversity had finally ceded to
centralised control.
As the excerpts cited above – from Shaverdyan, Kabalevsky, the various
official resolutions and even Yarustovsky’s article on Shostakovich – reveal,
Soviet criticism relied heavily on formulas, buzzwords and clichés.
A contribution by Kabalevsky to the 1955 symphonism volume, titled simply
‘On Mastery’, is rife with such passages. To pick one among many:
Mastery of realism begins with the ability of a composer to delve deeply into
life, to study and understand it, with the ability to properly form the idea
content of his work, that is, to arrive at a significant and progressive idea,
realizing it to its full potential as the basis for a thoughtful composition,
finding for it a convincing, vivid expression.43
Kabalevsky says very little as he hits the high points of Soviet musical aes-
thetics, especially realism, or a properly formed idea content based on delving
deeply into life and expressed in music that is progressive, convincing and
vivid. The crux of such passages was the ambiguous adjectives and adverbs
that allowed criticism to persist: compositions could always be deemed insuf-
ficiently deep, proper, significant, full, thoughtful, convincing or vivid.
Criticism employing such language persisted up to the final days of the
Soviet Union. It lends much Soviet writing a lifeless, homogeneous quality,
further bolstered by another aspect of much Soviet criticism: its length.
Sovetskaia muzyka in particular is filled with seemingly endless, dutiful
accountings of official events (conferences, concerts discussions), of new
works, of younger composers and of composers from the various national
republics, sometimes all in the same article.
The timing of the 1953 and 1955 volumes is worth noting. The first arrived in
the year of Stalin’s death, and the second came one year before Khrushchev’s
‘Secret Speech’ at the Twentieth Party Congress that repudiated Stalin’s cult of
personality and ushered in the beginnings of the so-called Thaw. Two years
43
Dm. Kabalevskii, ‘O masterstve’, in Grinberg (ed.), Sovetskaia simfonicheskaia muzyka, p. 110, originally
in Sovetskaia muzyka, 3 (1952). ‘Mastery’ also played a key role in his 1941 overview of criticism:
Kabalevskii, ‘O muzykal’noi kritike’, 13–14.
later, in 1958, the 1948 Resolution was finally, belatedly, ‘amended and
cancelled’.44 Through the late 1950s and 1960s, authorities made repeated
pronouncements about music criticism, and as they did so the practice
solidified.45 Yet during this period, and up to the end of the USSR, the goals
for Soviet criticism, and especially its tone and tenor, remained essentially
unchanged. A 1984 collection of essays on music criticism still declared the
role of musical criticism to be ‘to actively propagandise the principles of
socialist art and the achievements of Soviet musical culture’.46
In 1957 Georgi Khubov, then editor-in-chief of Sovetskaia muzyka, spoke of
the need to follow ‘not the letter, but the spirit’ of the 1948 Resolution.47
Nonetheless, criticism and creativity and criticism and scholarship remained
inseparable. Referring to the work of nineteenth-century Russian critic
Vissarion Belinsky (1811–48), Khubov declared:
For to separate criticism from scholarship means castrating and debasing

criticism, leading it to a banal (or temporary) imposition of taste [vkusov-
shchina]. For it is clear that if a professional music critic does not base his
judgments and conclusions on serious scholarly analysis and deep aesthetic
synthesis, he will cease to be a critic.48
By the same token, musicologists needed a ‘critical spirit, a critical relation-

ship’ to their topic of study, in order to avoid producing a ‘dry enumeration or
a pedantic nomenclature of facts’49 or, in the worst, most solipsistic cases,
Khubov warned, becoming grist only for future scholarly work. Therefore, he
concluded, ‘it follows: music criticism and musicology have equivalent under-
standings of their content’. (Similar debates about the balance between criti-
cism and scholarship later roiled Anglo-American musicology, starting in the
1960s and reaching a peak in the 1980s after the publication of Joseph
Kerman’s influential and controversial Contemplating Music.)50
44
‘Declaration of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Amending and
Canceling the Resolution of 10 February 1948 and Restoring the Dignity and Integrity of Soviet
Composers Attacked in that Resolution’, in Slonimsky (ed.), Music since 1900, pp. 952–3. See also Frolova-
Walker, Stalin’s Music Prize, pp. 256–7.
45
See for example, G. Khubov, ‘Kritika i tvorchestvo’, Sovetskaia muzyka, 6 (1957), 29–56; and
Iurii Keldysh, ‘Za boevuiu printsipial’nuiu kritiku’, Sovetskaia muzyka, 7 (1958).
46
L. G. Dan’ko, Muzykal’naia kritika (teoriia i metodika): sbornik nauchnykh trudov (Leningrad: Ministry of
Culture RSFSR and Leningrad Conservatory, 1984), p. 4.
47
Khubov, ‘Kritika i tvorchestvo’, 31. 48
Ibid. 49
Ibid.
50
See Joseph Kerman, ‘A Profile for American Musicology’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 18
(1965), 61–9; reprinted in Write All These Down: Essays on Music (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1994), pp. 3–11; and Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology [published in the UK as
Musicology] (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985). See also Margaret Bent, ‘Fact and Value in
Contemporary Scholarship’, Musical Times, 127/1716 (1986), 85–9; and Leo Treitler, ‘The Power of
Positivist Thinking’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 42 (1989), 375–402.
In order to expand the range of periodicals devoted to music, and to push

criticism away from ‘dry enumeration’ and ‘pedantic nomenclature’, a more
general-interest music publication, Muzykal’nia zhizn’ [Musical Life], was
founded in 1957.51 As composer Leonid Desyatnikov later remarked, the
conventional wisdom separated the two journals as ‘the respectable
Sovetskaia muzyka . . . and the more democratic Muzykal’naia zhizn’.52
Direct, sometimes anonymous attacks on composers still occurred in the
post-Stalin period. Andrei Volkonsky’s Musica Stricta for piano (1956–57) was
greeted by the anonymous critique of ‘a listener’ after its premiere in 1961;
the 1963 premiere of his Suite of Mirrors for soprano and instrumental ensem-
ble (1960), based on texts of Federico García Lorca, was also anonymously
reviewed.53 Edison Denisov was rebuked by ‘a journalist’ for the 1970s pub-
lication of an interview he gave to a West German journal in 1968.54
Composers were not the only targets. In the anonymous 1963 review of
Volkonsky’s Suite of Mirrors, details about the listeners at his concerts emerge:
the ‘clamorous, fashionable girls and boys, enthusiastically demanding
encores’.55 The tastes of these girls and boys needed to be properly moulded
by the critic.
Official critics reacted with particular hostility in the 1960s to new moder-
nist music from the West and its advocates both at home and abroad. The
clearest voicing of those views arrived in Grigori Shneerson’s On Music Living
and Dead (1960 and 1964); the stark binary opposition of the title alone
signalled the tenor of the volume’s assault.56 The bourgeois West continued
to threaten Soviet creative life. In 1963 Nest’ev took to task several European
and American musicologists and critics (Boris Schwarz, Colin Mason,
Bogusław Schaeffer, Fred Prieberg, Hans Stuckenschmidt, André Hodeir
and Antoine Goléa) for their misrepresentations of Soviet music and their
influence, again, on younger Soviet musicians and listeners.57 Similarly, in
November 1979, Khrennikov criticised the organisers of a new music festival
51
Keldysh, ‘Za boevuiu printsipial’nuiu kritiku’.
52
Leonid Desiatnikov, ‘Apologiia tolstopuzogo nasmeshnika’, in Ol’ga Manul’kina and
Pavel Gershenzon (eds.), Novaia Russkaia muzykal’naia kritika, 1993–2003. V trekh tomakh. Vol. 1: Opera
(Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2015), p. 7.
53
Slushatel’ [a listener], ‘Na kontserte M. Iudinoi’, Sovetskaia muzyka, 7 (1961), 89–90; and Unsigned,
‘Glavnoe prizvanie sovetskogo iskusstva’, Sovetskaia muzyka, 2 (1963), 6–9; see also Peter J. Schmelz, Such
Freedom, If Only Musical: Unofficial Soviet Music during the Thaw (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009),
pp. 94–6 and 111–12.
54
Zhurnalist’ [a journalist], ‘Replika: po povodu odnogo interv’iu’, Sovetskaia muzyka, 10 (1970), 44–6;
see also Schmelz, Such Freedom, If Only Musical, pp. 278–81.
55
Slushatel’ [a listener], ‘Na kontserte M. Iudinoi’, 89–90.
56
Grigorii Shneerson, O muzyke, zhivoi i mertvoi (Moscow: Sovetskii kompozitor, 1960 and 1964). See also
Schmelz, Such Freedom, If Only Musical, pp. 41–2.
57
Izrail’ Nest’ev, ‘S pozitsii ‘kholodnoi voiny’’’, Sovetskaia muzyka, 10 (1963), 125–30.
held earlier that year in Cologne, Germany for focusing on younger ‘unoffi-
cial’ Soviet composers (he called out seven by name) instead of the central
figures in Soviet musical life: Prokofiev, Myaskovsky, Khachaturyan, Kara
Karaev, Rodion Shchedrin, Andrey Eshpay, Boris Tchaikovsky and Giya
Kancheli.58 (The seven composers, known popularly as the ‘Khrennikov
Seven’ comprised Denisov and several of his students as well as Gubaidulina.)
Critical reprimands continued throughout the entire Soviet period and forced
listeners, readers and critics into a constant state of defensiveness. But such
examples present a one-sided picture of critical engagement with music, parti-
cularly during the final decades of the USSR (and after). Almost every musicol-
ogist and theorist wrote criticism, including Lev Mazel, Mikhail Tarakanov,
Mark Aranovsky and Svetlana Savenko, to name but a few respected authors.
A prominent critic from the post-Stalin period worth singling out is Mikhail
Druskin (1905–91). His book about Stravinsky from 1979 offered one of the first
comprehensive posthumous accounts of the composer’s life and works anywhere
and, like Asafyev’s, has been translated into English and several other
languages.59 Druskin was also central, alongside musicologists Arnold Sokhor
(1924–77) and Larisa Danko (1931–), in founding the department of musical
criticism at the Leningrad Conservatory, the first of its kind in the USSR.60
The ‘dialectical unity’ that Soviet critics posited between criticism and art
transformed both (as a dialectical relationship should): composers often wrote
about music, their own and that of others.61 They played crucial roles as
critics – supporters, opponents or interested observers – of their colleagues.
Among late-Soviet composers, Alfred Schnittke stands out for the range of his
critical engagement. His entries into day-to-day music criticism were few but
noteworthy. In a review of a 1973 all-Mozart concert by pianist Alexei
Lyubimov (1944–), he praised the younger performer, a noted champion of
new music in the USSR.62 In his ‘romantically expressive and classically
balanced’ performance, Schnittke also heard the ‘incredibly refined dynamic
timbral shadings of Webern’.63 Schnittke added, polemically, ‘Lyubimov
58
See Tikhon Khrennikov, ‘Velikaia missiia sovetskoi muzyki’, Sovetskaia muzyka, 1 (1980), 14.
59
M. Druskin, Igor’ Stravinskii: Lichnost’, tvorchestvo, vzgliady, 2nd ed. (Leningrad: Sovetskii kompozitor,
1979); English trans.: Mikhail Druskin, Igor Stravinsky: His Life, Works, and Views, trans. Martin Cooper
60
Anastasiia Aleksandrova, ‘U istokov kafedry muzykal’noi kritiki: Arnol’d Naumovich Sokhor’,
Maloizvestnye stranitsy istorii Konservatorii, vol. 5 (St Petersburg Conservatory, n.d.), pp. 24–7, old
.conservatory.ru/files/alm_05_06_aleksandrova.pdf.
61
The quoted phrase is from Khubov, ‘Kritika i tvorchestvo’, 29.
62
Al’fred Shnitke, ‘Sub’ektivnye zametki ob ob’ektivnom ispolnenii’, Sovetskaia muzyka, 2 (1974), 63–5;
English trans. Alfred Schnittke, ‘Subjective Notes on an Objective Performance (On Alexei Liubimov)’, in
A Schnittke Reader, ed. Alexander Ivashkin, trans. John Goodliffe (Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana
63
Ibid.
would undoubtedly have played Mozart less well had he not in recent years
played and replayed so many works from the Second Viennese School.’ Rather
than weakening or distracting performers, Schnittke argued, familiarity with
avant-garde music could help refine their performances of the familiar classics.
Schnittke’s other writings on music were more technical in nature, and
many of them remained unpublished until after his death,64 but his memorial
appraisals of Shostakovich and Stravinsky are exceptional. In these writings,
Schnittke’s reflections on another composer reflect his own preoccupations,
as in statements like this from his description of Shostakovich’s creative
personality:
It may be that the unique quality of an artist reveals itself most clearly in the
fearless way he opens himself to alien influences, when he makes everything
coming from outside his own, as he absorbs it into the immeasurable and
unidentifiable substance of his own individual genius, which adorns every-
thing it touches. In the twentieth century only Stravinsky had the same
magical power to make his own everything that came into his field of vision.65
The leading proponent of polystylism in the USSR viewed the elder Soviet
musical statesman – and the looming emigré master – as powerful precedents.
Schnittke’s engagement with Shostakovich was typical, for he played an
outsize role in Soviet criticism, particularly for younger composers.
Shostakovich became a yardstick against which they were measured. In
1959 composer Sergei Aksiuk took to task the thirty-four-year-old Veniamin
Basner (1925–96) for his Symphony No. 1 (1958) because he, like many others,
was merely ‘blindly, like a student, repeating the forms and outlines already
overcome by Shostakovich himself’.66
Sometimes, sympathetic critics helped younger composers, using the
highly evocative, narrative-driven language of Soviet criticism to their benefit.
A memorable example comes in a 1966 review of an early twelve-tone com-
position by Arvo Pärt, his Perpetuum Mobile (1963):
Perpetuum makes a great impact on listeners. At first you conceive only some
noisy process. But as the work unfolds, a multitude of associations emerge. It
seems as if during those four minutes a busy port is stirring to life in the
morning, as if you are meeting two satellites in space, as if at night a supersonic
64
English translation available in Schnittke, A Schnittke Reader; and Russian in Al’fred Shnitke, Stat’i
o muzyke (Moscow: Kompozitor, 2004). Denisov also wrote a number of notable theoretical essays:
Edison Denisov, Sovremennaia muzyka i problem. Evoliutsii kompozitorskoi tekhniki (Moscow: Sovetskii
kompozitor, 1986).
65
Alfred Schnittke, ‘On Shostakovich: Circles of Influence (1975)’, in A Schnittke Reader, p. 59; originally
published in Grigorii Shneerson (ed.), D. Shostakovich: Stat’i i materialy (Moscow: Sovetskii kompozitor,
1976), p. 223; also in Shnitke, Stat’i o muzyke, p. 163.
66
Sergei Aksiuk, ‘Mysli kompozitora’, Sovetskaia muzyka, 1 (1959), 27.
airplane flies over the city, as if . . . And when the work ends, after an involun-
tary feeling of amazement, you are suddenly sorry that the sonic mass has
dissipated, vanished.67
As with most criticism in the USSR, this was politically motivated: it attempted
to make palatable a challenging work in an unfamiliar, potentially ‘formalist’
language. The younger of the review’s two authors, Marina Nestyeva, was
a musicologist sympathetic to new musical trends, and she later wrote informed
criticism devoted to Ukrainian composer Valentin Silvestrov.68
Yet such praise was infrequent. Almost all of the younger Soviet composers
from the 1950s to the 1970s received critical, that is to say negative, treatment
in Sovetskaia muzyka. Just as often, reviews would alternately praise and con-
demn or damn with faint praise.69 Thus for every negative criticism, by an
elder statesman, of a new musical work there would be some informed
criticism from the supporting side. Such commentary usually appeared in
counterpoint, as in the ‘discussions’ that often appeared in Sovetskaia muzyka,
most prominently of Denisov’s Sun of the Incas, Rodion Shchedrin’s experi-
mental Poetoriya and Schnittke’s Symphony No. 1.70 Another tactic was to
grant a voice of official authority the final word. Thus when Savenko pub-
lished a groundbreaking overview of Schnittke’s career in 1981, her article
was accompanied by a paternalistic afterword by Sovetskaia muzyka’s then
editor, Yuri Korev, in which he countered Savenko’s observations point by
point. These approaches provided the illusion of tolerance, of spontaneous,
open debate, despite the routine, thorough vetting of everything in advance.71
Popular Music Criticism

The criticism published in Sovetskaia muzyka and Muzykal’naia zhizn’ formed
only part of late-Soviet musicography. The history of popular music criticism,
including that of jazz and particularly that of rock, understandably traced
67
Marina Nest’eva and Yurii Fortunatov, ‘Molodezh’ ishchet, somnevaetsia, nakhodit’, Sovetskaia
muzyka, 3 (1966), 20.
68
Marina Nest’eva, Valentin Sil’vestrov: Muzyka – eto penie mira o samom sebe . . . Sokrovenny razgovory
i vzgliady so storony: Besedy, stat’i, pis’ma (Kiev: n.p., 2004).
69
Many of these were written by Kabalevsky. See for example: Dmitrii Kabalevskii, ‘Tvorchestvo
molodykh kompozitorov Moskvy’, Sovetskaia muzyka, 1 (1957), 3–17; ‘Tvorchestvo molodykh’,
Sovetskaia muzyka, 12 (1958), 3–15; and ‘Kompozitor – prezhde vsego grazhdanin’, Sovetskaia muzyka, 2
(1959), 13–20.
70
‘Kogda sobiraetsia sekretariat . . .’, Sovetskaia muzyka, 1 (1966), 29–32; ‘Obsuzhdaem “Poetoriiu”
R. Shchedrina’, Sovetskaia muzyka, 11 (1969), 18–32; and ‘Obsuzhdaem Simfoniiu A. Shnitke’, Sovetskaia
muzyka, 10 (1974), 12–26.
71
Svetlana Savenko, ‘Portret khudozhnika v zrelosti’, Sovetskaia muzyka, 9 (1981), 35–46 (Korev’s after-
word appears on 43–6). See also Peter J. Schmelz, ‘Selling Schnittke: Late Soviet Censorship in the Cold
War Marketplace’, in Patricia Hall (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Musical Censorship (Oxford: Oxford
different contours from art music or folk music. The course of critical
responses to avant-garde (as distinct from ‘classical’) music during the Thaw
in the USSR (from roughly the mid-1950s to the early 1970s) might be
comparable: appearing in official publications first as a negative example, it
slowly gained respectability, positive mentions and eventually acceptance.
Jazz held to the margins of Soviet music criticism for decades.72 Key ‘discus-
sions’ began to emerge in the 1960s, and official publications first appeared in
the 1970s. In all of these cases, established art music composers vouched for
the quality of the music, often citing jazz as a type of folk music, a common
approach to the style from art music composers; Dvořák did the same when he
first encountered African American spirituals in the United States in the
1890s.73 Among jazz critics in the USSR, Alexei Batashev takes pride of
place for his history of Soviet jazz, the first of its kind, published in 1972,
but musicologist Alexander Medvedev was not far behind, and the collection
of essays on Soviet jazz he edited with his wife a decade later is another
landmark in the official accreditation of the genre in the USSR.74
(Medvedev also edited Batashev’s earlier volume.) Medvedev and his wife’s
1987 volume included contributions from a wide range of Soviet critics and
composers, among them Prokofiev, Eshchpai, Shchedrin, Schnittke, Evgenii
Barban, Georgi Garanyan, Yuri Saul’ski, Batashev and many others. Its con-
tents reveal the unfamiliar status of jazz for general readers in the USSR at the
time: it included a glossary of jazz terms, reviews of books on jazz, and
a discography of Soviet jazz.
Popular music also began to be addressed officially by the youth-oriented
periodical Krugozor, first published in 1964. It offered brief discussions of
a wide variety of musics, foreign and domestic, including classical, popular
and folk. Most significantly, each short issue contained a number of flexible
minidiscs containing music and spoken-word excerpts related to the articles
within. The offerings were generally tame, but each number usually featured
at least one or two examples of popular music, including such leading Soviet
artists as Alla Pugachova, international figures such as Edith Piaf, Joan Baez,
Tom Jones, Oscar Peterson, Ray Coniff and Dave Brubeck, or, by the late
72
See Gleb Tsipursky, ‘Jazz, Power, and Soviet Youth in the Early Cold War, 1948–1953’, Journal of
Musicology, 33/3 (2016), 332–61; and Tsipursky, Socialist Fun: Youth Consumption and State-Sponsored Popular
Culture in the Soviet Union, 1964–1970 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016).
73
See for example, ‘Pesni, simfoniia, dzhaz’, Molodaia gvardiia, 7 (1964), especially 312, 314–15; and the
section ‘Sem’ monologov o dzhaze’, in Aleksandr Medvedev and Ol’ga Medvedeva (eds.), Sovetskii dzhaz.
Problemy. Sobytiia. Mastera. Sbornik statei (Moscow: Sovetskii kompozitor, 1987). First published as
Aleksandr Medvedev, ‘Shest’ monologov o dzhaze’, Sovetskaia muzyka, 8 (1984), 50–9.
74
Aleksei Batashev, Sovetskii dzhaz. Istoricheskii ocherk, ed. A. B. Medvedev (Moscow: Muzyka, 1972);
Medvedev and Medvedeva (eds.), Sovetskii dzhaz.
1980s, the Scorpians and Madonna, as well as samples of estrada (or variety
stage music) from around the world.75
Neither new music nor jazz critics reverted to samizdat to the degree
pop music did. Unofficial magazines – or, better, ’zines – flourished
across the USSR from the late 1960s through the end of the Soviet
period. A 1994 ‘encyclopedia of rock samizdat’ offers a window into
this vibrant phenomenon of popular criticism.76 As might be expected,
even as their number boomed both just before and just after the fall of
the USSR, most of the publications it lists were short-lived. Their names
punned, appropriated and mocked: Muppet show (original in English),
Rock-salad [‘Rock salat’; Leningrad], POPstore [POPmagazin], Anarchy
[Anarkhiia] and Zombie [Zombi] are typical.77 Roksi from Leningrad was
one of the longest-running (fifteen numbers produced between
October 1977 and autumn 1990) and one of the most influential, arriving
as it did from a leading rock centre in the USSR during a peak period of
activity.78 As Polly McMichael has shown, Roksi played a central role in
the accreditation of Soviet rock music.79 Artemy Troitsky became one of
the leading Soviet rock critics, a Russian equivalent of noted American
writer Greil Marcus. His history of rock in Russia was the first of its kind
and immediately made an international splash.80 Really a book of criti-
cism and first-hand reporting, it had no peers in Russia.
Conclusion: From Free-for-All to Control (Redux)

Perhaps a more representative example of the new freedoms and new influ-
ences affecting late-Soviet and post-Soviet music criticism is the work of
musicologist Tatyana Cherednichenko, author of a remarkable series of
books and articles tackling the pressing issues of late-twentieth-century
music worldwide, not just in Russia or the former USSR.81 Her writings
address the intersections and clashes of high and low as well as the impact of
the marketplace on music-making, traditional outgrowths and amplifications
75
For an online archive of the journal see www.krugozor-kolobok.ru (accessed 2 November 2016).
76
A. Kushnir (ed.), Zolotoe podpol’e: polnaia illiustrirovannaia entsiklopediia rok-samizdata, 1967–1994
(Nizhnii Novgorod: Dekom, 1994).
77 78
Ibid., pp. 72, 62, 136, 190, 102. Ibid., p. 55.
79
Polly McMichael, ‘“After All, You’re a Rock and Roll Star (At Least, That’s What They Say)”: Roksi and
the Creation of the Soviet Rock Musician’, Slavic and East European Review, 83/4 (2005), 664–84.
80
Artemy Troitsky, Back in the USSR: The True Story of Rock in Russia (London and New York: Omnibus,
1987).
81
Tat’iana Cherednichenko, Krizis obshchestva-krizis iskusstva: Muzykal’nyi ‘avangard’ v sisteme burzhuaznoi
ideologii (Moscow: Muzyka, 1985); Mezhdu ‘Brezhnevym’ i ‘Pugachovoi’: Tipologiia sovetskoi massovoi kul’tury
(Moscow: Kul’tura, 1994); Muzyka v istorii kul’tury: Posobie dlia studentov nemuzykal’nykh VUZov i vsekh, kto
interesuetsia muzykal’nym iskusstvom (Bishkek: Aibek, 1996).
of standard concerns for Marxist-informed Soviet criticism. Her activities

spanned disciplines from history to criticism: one of her listed professions
was ‘culturologist’. Well versed in contemporary thinking in the West, she
incorporated English and German scholarship into her work. She also hosted
an ambitious television show during the 1990s that asked questions about past
and present, trying to provide a ‘new analysis of the cultural-historical
picture’.82 Her stated goal for the programme, ‘an archeological excavation
of the present’, betrays her familiarity with and reliance on Western literary
theory, especially the work of Michel Foucault.83 Its guests included an
impressive array of contemporary Russian thinkers, among them composer
Vladimir Martynov and music theorist Yuri Kholopov. Cherednichenko’s final
book, Musical Stock [Muzykal’nyi zapas], is among her best – a synthesis of
previous writings, it surveys the foibles and achievements of late-Soviet art
music. Possessed of a memorable prose style, her writings, witty, acerbic and
fiercely intelligent, have the verve and punch that other music criticism from
the Soviet Union often lacked, unless directed at a juicy, officially sanctioned
target.84
After the collapse of the USSR, criticism greatly expanded its reach.
The host of newly established independent publications quickly began to
include the type of daily arts criticism absent in the Soviet period.
Kommersant and Segodnia in particular featured critics Aleksei Parin and
Pyotr Pospelov addressing opera productions. The style shifted from the
formalities of the past to a looser, less musicologically encumbered
style.85 Yet as the Yeltsin era has been eclipsed by Putin’s reign, this
moment of freedom has become almost mythical. The Internet has
greatly expanded critical responses by fans to musical performances,86
and websites devoted to daily arts criticism have blossomed, yet
unsavoury commands to self-censor have returned.87 Music remains
82
Tat’iana Cherednichenko, Rossiia 90-kh v sloganakh, reitingakh, imidzhakh: aktual’nyi leksikon istorii
kul’tury (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1999), p. 12.
83
Ibid., p. 16.
84
Tat’iana Cherednichenko, Muzykal’nyi zapas: 70-e. Problemy. Portrety. Sluchai (Moscow: Novoe litera-
turnoe obozrenie, 2002).
85
See Ol’ga Manul’kina and Pavel Gershenzon (eds.), Novaia Russkaia muzykal’naia kritika, 1993–2003, 3
vols. 1. Opera, 2. Ballet, 3. Concerts (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2015).
86
See Emily Erken, ‘Constructing the Russian Moral Project through the Classics: Reflections of
Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, 1833–2014’, unpubished PhD dissertation, Ohio State University (2015).
87
One of the more notable arts websites is www.colta.ru, founded in 2013. For remarkable conversations
between editors and writers about self-censorship under Putin, see the following stories from the online
site Meduza (medusa.io): Aleksandr Gorbachev, ‘“I’m not going to write about Putin’s daughters’: An
Interview with Esquire’s New Chief Editor, Ksenia Sokolova’, Meduza (9 August 2016); ‘Censorship in
Russia Explained’, Meduza (5 February 2015); and ‘This Is What Losing Your Newsroom Looks Like in
Russia: The Reporters at “RBC” Meet Their New Bosses (Full transcript)’, Meduza (11 July 2016).
a crucial battleground, as recent disputations over Tchaikovsky’s homo-

sexuality to say nothing of Pussy Riot’s notorious protest songs,
reveal.88 Now that power again encroaches on thought, art has gained
new potency, even as the power of critics (if not criticism) has both
spread and fractured.
88
For a recent summary of these disputes, see Richard Taruskin, Russian Music at Home and Abroad: New
Essays (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016), pp. 4–9; and Simon Morrison, ‘Waist-Deep: In the
Mire of Russian and Western Debates about Tchaikovsky’, Times Literary Supplement (1 May 2015), 14–15.
. 30 .
The Feuilleton and Beyond: Criticism in the Federal

Republic of Germany and Austria after the Second
World War
MARK BERRY
Towards a History: First Steps and Thoughts

A common plaint heard from German-speaking English newspaper readers
concerns the superiority of arts coverage, especially music coverage, in their
German counterparts. German arts supplements still maintain a degree of
serious criticism as opposed to mere journalism, even as German critics worry
that their platform and, of course, their employment are falling under ‘Anglo-
Saxon’ threat. The term Feuilleton retains its currency in Germany – in Poland
too – although, except in historical usage, it now in French generally denotes
a soap opera, a distinction which may or may not be relevant in itself.
Musical criticism of course extends beyond newspapers and always has.
Whatever some on either side may wish to claim, there is no absolute dividing
line between such criticism and its more academic cousin; moreover, there have
long been journals that cater to educated general readers, radio stations too,
although again music’s standing, even within erstwhile havens such as the
Südwestfunk (South-West Broadcasting) has become seriously endangered.
That state of affairs has been witnessed in recent years by the roundly con-
demned amalgamation of the network’s orchestras of Stuttgart and Baden-
Baden/Freiburg. A furious campaign came to nothing, notwithstanding world-
wide support and the involvement of musicians as venerable as Michael Gielen
and Pierre Boulez. A 2012 Protestaktion by composer Johannes Kreidler,
destroying a violin and cello onstage at the Donaueschingen Festival – ‘That
is no work of art: likewise the merger of two historically evolved orchestras’ –
dramatised the fury felt by many musicians, and was widely reported.1 Yet it
was left to Eleonore Büning in the Feuilleton of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
(FAZ) to mark the end of the road with resignation that seemed to speak as
1
Alexander Dick, ‘Komponist zerstört Instrumente – Protest gegen Orchester-Fusion’, Badische Zeitung
(22 October 2012).
[590]
The Feuilleton and Beyond 591
much of criticism’s plight as the orchestra’s, offering less than warm words for
Peter Eötvös in taking on the first concert of the merged orchestra forced into
existence by austerity-mongering management.2
It is certainly difficult to imagine Theodor Adorno finding himself so
welcome on today’s German airwaves as he was during the years following
the Second World War. Jürgen Habermas, Adorno’s Frankfurt School suc-
cessor, may retain the status of, and fulfil the role of, public intellectual, but
his public sphere is not that of musical criticism. It is, however, only fair to say
that Adorno was always unusual: enlightening in so many respects, yet hardly
the most typical German ‘music critic’, even when, during the Weimar period,
he had been writing some more conventional music criticism. Whilst it would
be tempting, not least for one who has written before on Adorno, to explore
his role further, I intend instead to look at less well trodden ground.
What I have to say should only be regarded as some work towards
a preliminary understanding of German-speaking music criticism after
the Second World War. I say that not out of false modesty but because the
subject would really require intensive research from a host of scholars before
we could really begin to speak of the construction of a true history, as opposed
to historical treatment. To that end, I shall not attempt a survey. All manner of
topics have had to be omitted on account of space. Criticism on subjects
I considered for inclusion, such as Herbert von Karajan, Hans Werner
Henze, the premieres (concert and staged) of Schoenberg’s Moses und Aron,
the rise of ‘early music’, the Boulez–Chéreau ‘Centenary’ Ring at Bayreuth:
those and many more must wait for another day.
Instead, I shall try to offer some degree of context for reading German-
language criticism, saying a little about the nature of post-war newspapers
more generally in occupied Germany and Austria, and later in the Federal
Republic of Germany and the Republic of Austria. (The German Democratic
Republic is beyond the scope of this chapter; German-speaking Switzerland
must also, alas, wait for another day, notwithstanding the contribution to
European cultural criticism of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung in particular.)
Particular examples, often although not exclusively related to rightist reac-
tions, both conservative and radical, to Schoenbergian modernism and, in the
final section, similarly to so-called Regietheater, will mostly be drawn from the
1940s and 1950s, concluding closer to the present day. That is not because
I think there is nothing to say about what happened in between; I have had to
make impossible choices.
2
Eleonore Büning, ‘SWR-Orchester: “Fusionsdirigent”’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (25 March 2015).
592 MARK BERRY
Another problem, touched on above, presents itself: what sort of material

should be included? If, say, we were considering the first staging of Moses und
Aron, in Zurich in 1957, should we discard pieces, billed as reviews, because
they appeared in the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik?3 Hardly. Although it may fall
under the heading of ‘academic journal’ – a categorisation latterly complicated
by its publication by the music publisher, Schott – the NZfM is a continuation
of Schumann’s journal, which would certainly find its place in discussion of
nineteenth-century criticism. It continues to trumpet, not unreasonably, its
status as a journal of ‘contemporary music’. (The English-language version of
the website says ‘magazine’, which may or may not be intended as a direct
translation.) Why that and not another scholarly journal? There are no defi-
nitive answers, any more than there would be in English. It may well be the
case that a neo-Aristotelian impulse to categorise is not only not the point, but
that its not being the point is in itself an important point; that seems to hold,
perhaps surprisingly, despite the absolute distinction made in German uni-
versities between ‘practical’ and ‘musicological’ study of music.
Year Zero
Where to begin? Perhaps at the beginning. But what is the beginning? Thomas
Nipperdey opened his great history of nineteenth-century Germany with the
words, ‘In the beginning was Napoleon’.4 For our history, it is difficult not to
respond with, ‘In the beginning was Hitler’; or with, following the collapse of
the National Socialist regime, ‘in the beginning was the Federal Republic of
Germany’– except that would, like any starting point, mislead. There has been
much myth-making, cultural at least as much as political, about ruptures in
twentieth-century German history. Hans-Ulrich Wehler suffered a barrage of
criticism for his provocative claim that the German Kaiserreich of 1871–1918
had formed the antechamber to the Third Reich and that a principal reason for
studying it was to understand its role in the origins of Nazism.5 Every period,
however, has its antechambers. How much we explore them in order to
understand our particular object of enquiry will, to a certain extent, prove
a matter of taste, yet also of particular circumstances.
In the case of German-speaking countries and German-speaking culture,
there can, however, be little doubt: the ‘German catastrophe’, as Friedrich
3
Heinz Joachim, ‘Ein Mysterienspiel für die Bühne: Schönbergs “Moses und Aron” überwaltigte in
Zürich’, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 118/7–8 (1957), 426–7.
4
Thomas Nipperdey, Deutsche Geschichte, Vol. 1: 1800–1866: Bürgerwelt und starker Staat, 3 vols. (Munich:
C. H. Beck, 1998), p. 11.
5
Hans-Ulrich Wehler, Das Deutsche Kaiserreich, 1871–1918 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1973).
Meinecke called it in 1946, cast and continues to cast a long shadow.6 Or

rather ‘shadows’ in the plural, for different groups and, of course, different
individuals would interpret them differently. It was, for instance, the
American authorities in post-war Berlin who were strongest, most vocal, in
their opposition to Wilhelm Furtwängler’s return to the Philharmonic,
rooted in and imitating vehement opposition to the conductor in the
USA (which would subsequently cost him the post he had accepted at the
Chicago Symphony Orchestra). By contrast, and indeed in response,
the Soviet-licensed press in 1946 increasingly vociferously demanded
Furtwängler’s return; an open letter, signed by a host of those Berlin cultural
figures who remained, appeared in the Berliner Zeitung and declared, ‘after the
barbaric regression of National Socialism, we need a great symbol of artistic
perfection as a wake-up call for our German self-awareness. We need, and
Germany needs, the artist Wilhelm Furtwängler.’7 Occasionally, the problem
might even be to escape those shadows, so that the particularities of what
comes after are not overwhelmed; but more often, the shadows are as neces-
sary as their presence is unarguable.
The Year Zero, or ‘Stunde Null’ of 1945 has proved an abiding myth in
German, Austrian and, to a certain extent, broader European history. The
defeat of National Socialism left the Allied Powers in political and military
control of most of the continent’s German-speaking lands – those that
remained after expulsions such as Czechoslovakia’s Beneš Decrees – and, in
many respects, in cultural control too. Germany’s division into two, the
Federal Republic in the West and the German Democratic Republic in the
East, was formalised in 1949, whereas Austria would have to wait until 1955
for its State Treaty, the price for withdrawal being neutrality and particular-
ism (that is, no second Anschluss). Bismarck’s Prussian division of Germany,
cleverly concealed under the rubric of ‘unification’, was thus reinforced with
respect to Austria and extended with respect to the new opposition of East
and West.
How, then, did the idea of a fresh start, a tabula rasa, influence musical
criticism? And in what senses was it irrelevant? In what ways did that change
over time, both during what we might in problematical shorthand call the
Cold War, and following the fall of the ‘people’s democracies’, the reunifica-
tion of Germany (not, of course, a Großdeutschland involving Austria) and the
6
Friedrich Meinecke, Die deutsche Katastrophe: Betrachtungen und Erinnerungen (Wiesbaden: Brackhaus,
1946).
7
‘Berlin ruft Wilhelm Furtwängler’, Berliner Zeitung, 2/39 (16 February 1946), 1, 3. I borrow here the
exemplary translation in Elizabeth Janik, ‘“The Golden Hunger Years”: Music and Superpower Rivalry in
Occupied Berlin’, German History, 22 (2004), 90. See also Anne Hartman and Wolfram Eggeling, Sowjetische
Präsenz im kulturellen Leben der SBZ und frühen DDR 1945–1953 (Berlin: Akademie, 1998), p. 153.
594 MARK BERRY
re-emergence of a Mitteleuropa in which Austria, or perhaps better Vienna,

might once again reclaim its ‘historic’ position at the heart of Europe and,
perhaps, the centre of European musical life? There is not space explicitly to
engage with all of those questions; let us at least bear them in mind.
Years of Occupation
Several German newspapers and journals were founded between ‘Year Zero’
and the founding of the Federal Republic, or shortly after: Die Welt, the
Süddeutsche Zeitung and the FAZ; Der Spiegel, Die Zeit, Stern and Quick.8 The
FAZ might be regarded as the West German newspaper par excellence. Its first
edition was published on 1 November 1949, just a few months after the
Federal Republic’s creation on 23 May. Many considered it a resurrection of
the former Frankfurter Zeitung, its Feuilleton home to many of the most sig-
nificant cultural commentators of the Weimar Republic, among them
Adorno, Walter Benjamin, the Manns (Heinrich and Thomas) and Stefan
Zweig. The newspaper had eventually closed in 1943, following its degenera-
tion into a Nazi propaganda organ, presented to Hitler in 1939 as a birthday
gift.9 A good number of journalists wrote for both. Nevertheless, the first
edition editorial insisted:
From the fact that some of our editorial staff also belonged to the editorial
staff of the Frankfurter Zeitung, it has often been inferred that an attempt is
being made here to act as successor to that newspaper. Such an assumption
misjudges our intentions. Like everyone, we marvel at the high quality of that
paper; that the occupying powers did not permit its reappearance immediately
after the ceasefire will remain an indicator of their ignorance of German
circumstances. However, respect . . . does not entail the wish to copy.10
Having one’s cake and eating it? If so, that makes it all the more typical of
early West German navigations between past – whether Nazi, Weimar or
earlier still – and present, with the hope remaining that public life might
succumb, like Siegfried, to Gutrune’s potion of forgetfulness. That news-
paper’s general centre-right orientation politically has not really extended to
its Feuilleton, a common situation, and not just with respect to German
8
Sigurd Hess, ‘German Intelligence Organizations and the Media’, Journal of Intelligence History, 9 (2009),
9–10. For a general study of German press history, see Rudolf Stöber, Deutsche Pressegeschichte: Von den
Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart, 3rd ed. (Konstanz and Munich: UVK, 2014).
9
Richard J. Evans, The Third Reich in Power, 1933–39: How the Nazis Won Over the Hearts and Minds of
a Nation (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2006), pp. 143–4.
10
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung (1 November 1949); on the FAZ more generally, see Rüdiger Dohrendorf,
Zum publizistischen Profil der Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung: Computerunterstützte Inhaltsanalyse von
Kommentaren der FAZ (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1990).
newspapers. Correlation between general editorial content and arts coverage

is a complicated affair. One might justly argue that it would be rare and
surprising if there were none; yet, by the same token, writers on music and
the arts more generally will probably be freer than their ‘political’ colleagues
to pursue independent lines, if only because their subject matter is often likely
to be of lesser concern to proprietors and, often, to their most ‘important’
readers.
Much the same might be said of other newspapers and journals, ‘founded’,
with varying strength of roots in earlier journalistic activity, during the period
immediately following the Second World War, with varying degrees (and neces-
sities) of accommodationism with the occupying powers. For instance, the
weekly journal Der Spiegel – few scholars of post-war operatic culture will forget
Pierre Boulez’s often misquoted interview in that journal, suggesting that incin-
eration of opera houses might prove the ‘most elegant solution’ – had its first
issue published on 4 January 1947.11 Its precursor, Diese Woche, founded the
previous year, had fallen into disfavour with the British military authorities,
which had therefore granted a licence for Der Spiegel instead.12 The 1949 Spiegel
statute – the coincidence with the founding of the Federal Republic is no ‘mere’
coincidence – stressed the highest of journalistic standards, almost as if to negate
a perceived murkiness of origins. Such times were difficult, even well-nigh
impossible. There is no need to make too much of them, yet it is not unimportant
to remember that institutions, let alone individual writers, had histories, which,
even if they were concealed, were not necessarily entirely erased.
Having begun, then, at one alleged beginning, we should probably take at
least one step further back. Wilmont Haacke had written a compendious
history of Feuilletons during the Second World War, subsequently republished
shorn of its most egregious anti-Semitism.13 That perhaps gave weight to the
idea, Minerva’s owl spreading its wings at dusk, that the golden age was
passed; now, it seemed, a more circumscribed future awaited, just as in
politics, and perhaps that was no bad thing for those who had read Thomas
Mann’s recently published Doktor Faustus (1947), with its ‘imaginative
exploration of the role of music in German culture, as a probing, unsparing,
and challenging examination of the nexus between German history and its
most highly prized cultural commodity’.14 Meinecke’s ‘German catastrophe’
11
Felix Schmidt and Jürgen Hohmeyer, Interview with Pierre Boulez, ‘Sprengt die Opernhäuser in die
Luft!’, Der Spiegel, 40 (25 September 1967), 166–74.
12
See Hess, ‘German Intelligence Organizations and the Media’, 76.
13
Wilmont Haacke, Feuilletonkunde: Das Feuilleton als literarische und jounalistische Gattung, 2 vols. (Leipzig:
Hiersemann, 1943–4); Haacke, Handbuch des Feuilletons, 3 vols. (Emsdetten: Lechte, 1951–3).
14
Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Vintage, 1999); Hans R. Vaget,
‘National and Universal: Thomas Mann and the Paradox of “German” Music’, in Celia Applegate and
596 MARK BERRY
seemed to demand that a different path be taken, or be seen to be taken. If

Haacke’s history were also to have a future, the line here in culture, as well as
in politics, must be carefully trod.
There were periodicals too, of course, as well as newspapers. The English-
language Encounter was the most celebrated of CIA-founded and -funded
journals, but there were publications in other languages too: via the
Congress for Cultural Freedom, for instance, the West Berlin-based Der
Monat (issued monthly, as its name suggests). Music was not a primary interest
of the latter, although it did cover Doktor Faustus, both an extract and two
articles, in its first issue of 1949 (that year again). It extended coverage of the
novel later in the year, including publication of Schoenberg’s angry letter
accusing Mann of intellectual theft. Der Monat also occasionally included other
overtly musical articles, for instance Felix Weltsch on Beethoven’s ‘Immortal
Beloved’, as well as other cultural writing in which music necessarily played
some part.15 Even in apparently ‘non-musical’ publications, then, the name of
the once entartet composer had begun to surface again in contemporary and
not just historical terms. Initially licensed by the American occupying forces
in 1947, the music journal, Stimmen, was one such outlet for (old) New Music.
Founded by a former Schoenberg student, Josef Rufer, and by veteran music
critic, music administrator and soon-to-be Schoenberg biographer, Hans
Heinz Stuckenschmidt, it published an article by Schoenberg himself, as
well as pieces by other prominent figures such as Copland, Messiaen,
Antheil and Nicolas Nabokov.16 If Nazi ghosts were far from dead, the same
might be said of those of ‘Weimar’, including Schoenberg himself. It escaped
no one’s attention, whether in the ‘East’ or beyond, that, for better or worse,
post-Zhdanov, ‘socialist realist’ Russia was taking a different route, even
though that has too often been exaggerated at the expense of common
ground. Stuckenschmidt, for instance, helped organise concerts in both the
American and Soviet zones of Berlin, the music of Schoenberg and many other
composers heard in both cases.17
Pamela Potter (eds.), Music and German National Identity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), pp.
176–7.
15
Klaus Pringsheim, ‘Der Tonsetzer Adrian Leverkühn: Ein Musiker über Thomas Manns Roman’, Der
Monat, 4 (1949), 84–91; Hellmut Jaesrich, ‘Dr Faustus in Amerika’, Der Monat, 4 (1949), 92–4;
Arnold Schoenberg and Thomas Mann, ‘Der “Eingentliche”: Die Dissonanzen zwischen Arnold
Schönberg und Thomas Mann’, Der Monat, 6 (1949), 76–8; Felix Weltsch, ‘Beethovens unsterbliche
Geliebte: Ein neuer Beitrag zu ihrer Enträtselung’, Der Monat, 66 (1954), 635–8.
16
Janik, ‘“Berlin’s Hunger Years”’, 94. 17
Janik, ‘“Berlin’s Hunger Years”’, 95.
Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw in West Germany

A particular Schoenbergian example I shall consider, in the light of Joy
H. Calico’s recent study of the reception of A Survivor from Warsaw in post-
war Europe, is that of the first German performance of Schoenberg’s late
work, on 20 August 1950.18 The ‘return’ of Schoenberg to German-speaking
countries was, of course, a particularly fraught issue, historically and cultu-
rally. Whilst it is a ‘Year Zero’ myth to claim that there had been no oppor-
tunities for Germans after 1933 to acquaint themselves with Schoenberg’s
music, such opportunities had not been widespread and there had certainly
not been public performances. So far as the ‘general public’ at least was
concerned, the music of the Second Viennese School had long been a closed
book. As for Schoenberg himself, was he ‘German’, ‘Austrian’, ‘Jewish’, an
‘exile’, all of the above? Was he a ‘modernist’ or a ‘Romantic’ relic, ‘dead’, in
Boulez’s celebrated claim?19 In the later 1940s and 1950s, such issues were
inevitably part, overtly or covertly, of the discourse of musical criticism.
Wolfgang Steinecke, founder of the Darmstadt Summer School, also
worked as a music critic during the 1930s and 1940s: for the Rheinisch-
Westfälische Zeitung, based in Steinecke’s home city, Essen; for the Berlin
edition of the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung; and for Der Mittag, another
Rhenish newspaper, based in Düsseldorf. He had also written reports for
periodicals such as Die Musik and Deutsche Musikkultur, published from 1936
to 1944. A wartime piece for the latter had considered ‘Prague as German
city of music’. There were other potentially contentious subjects – at least
from a post-war standpoint – to accompany that, not least his pair of reports
on the notorious Düsseldorf ‘Entartete Musik’ exhibition of 1938 for the
Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung.20 Steinecke’s position was thus one to be envied
by many critics; he was one of the lucky few who could programme the music
he advocated. Yet he was typical in having to navigate the difficulties pre-
sented by the patent fiction of a ‘Year Zero’; as with others working in early
West Germany, he had been born earlier than 1945.21 Although the atten-
tion of many ‘Darmstadt’ composers would later shift from Schoenberg to
Webern, Steinecke did a great deal for the former, not least this Darmstadt
premiere under Hermann Scherchen, even though he personally seems to
18
Joy H. Calico, Arnold Schoenberg’s ‘A Survivor from Warsaw’ in Postwar Europe (Berkeley, Los Angeles and
London: University of California Press, 2014).
19
Pierre Boulez, ‘Schoenberg Is Dead’, The Score, 6 (1952), 18–22.
20
Wolfgang Steinecke, ‘Prag als deutsche Musikstadt’, Deutsche Musikkultur, 4 (1941–2), 123–4;
Michael Custodis, ‘“unter Auswertung meiner Erfahrungen aktiv mitgestaltend”: Zum Wirken von
Wolfgang Steinecke bis 1950’, in Albrecht Riethmüller (ed.), Deutsche Leitkultur Musik: Zur
Musikgeschichte nach dem Holocaust (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2006), p. 146.
21
See Custodis, ‘“unter Auswertung meiner Erfahrungen aktiv mitgestaltend”’, pp. 145–62.
598 MARK BERRY
have preferred Stravinsky’s music. As their correspondence and other evi-

dence reveals, Steinecke was determined to bring Schoenberg to Darmstadt,
although, in the event, the composer’s ill health meant that he would never
return to Europe.22
The concert received considerable press coverage, which seems to have
reflected mixed views of work and performance (although we should remem-
ber that most, although not all, of our sources are the press coverage, and thus
retain some scepticism concerning circularity). Holger Hagen, critic for Die
Neue Zeitung (Frankfurt), had served as an American music officer from 1945
to 1948. He proved, as Calico has shown, most vocal in his criticism of
resistance to the necessity not only of performing Schoenberg’s work in
Germany but of the process of re-education that such performance would
entail. The text was toned down, for instance omitting the word Gaskammer
(gas chamber) in favour of an open-ended, undesignated ‘deliverance’ of the
Jews. Nevertheless, the narrator, Hans Olaf Heidemann remained so con-
sumed with distaste for the work as publicly to parade his distaste, eliciting
the rebuke from Hagen: ‘That a professional performing artist has the nerve to
resist participating as the Speaker, and then to take part only (in his words)
under moral pressure . . . that is unspeakably shameful.’23 Willy Werner
Göttig, writing for another Frankfurt newspaper, Die Abendpost, also referred
to the disquiet, ‘even before the performance’, in ‘certain circles that have not
yet been completely denazified’.24 Yet, at the same time, and despite severe
musical obstacles – many chorus members seem to have declined to partici-
pate, viewing the work as anti-German (!) – there were reports that, depleted
forces notwithstanding, the performance could be judged a ‘gigantic success,
of particular worth from both a musical and an ethical standpoint’. It is
interesting, though, that those words came from a French-Romanian writer,
Antoine Goléa, writing for Steinecke’s old newspaper, Der Mittag.25
Worse was to come later in the work’s performance history, when, in 1956,
the music critic, Hans Schnoor, writing for Bielefeld’s Westfalen-Blatt, would,
as part of his general anti-modernist ‘bully pulpit’, condemn a forthcoming
radio broadcast: ‘Next Thursday, the Bremen station will broadcast
Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, that disagreeable piece that must strike
22
See Friedrich Hommel, ‘“Die Sache interessiert mich sehr . . .”: Arnold Schönbergs Briefwechsel mit
Wolfgang Steinecke’, Österreichische Musikzeitschrift, 39/6 (1984), 314–22.
23
Review from Die Neue Zeitung (23 August 1950); cited in Calico, A Survivor from Warsaw, pp. 26–8, and
in Kerstin Sicking, Holocaust-Kompositionen als Medien der Erinnerung: Die Entwicklung eines musikwissenschaf-
tlichen Gedächtniskonzepts (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2008), pp. 276–7.
24
Review from Abendpost (25 August 1950); cited in Calico, A Survivor from Warsaw, p. 28; and in Sicking,
Holocaust-Kompositionen, p. 278. Translation slightly modified.
25
Antoine Goléa, ‘Hermann Scherchen dirigierte in Darmstadt’, Der Mittag (24 August 1950); cited in
Calico, ‘A Survivor from Warsaw’, p. 29.
all decent Germans [anständigen Deutschen, a phrase favoured by Hitler] as

a mockery.’26 The column received wider attention than it would have done
otherwise, on account of Schnoor’s participation a few days later in
a conference on ‘The Intelligent Person and the Radio’, organised by the
FAZ. Winfried Zillig (himself not without a chequered National Socialist past,
most notably as a conductor in occupied Poland) refused to engage with his
fellow panellist, having read out Schnoor’s piece. The uproar was reported in
the FAZ by Walter Dirks, and a very public controversy, various lawsuits
included, ensued. The details cannot, sadly, be considered here; Calico gives
an excellent account.27 However, as well as notable, horrifying, fascinating in
itself, the affair is noteworthy, in her words, as a ‘counterbalance to the
persistent image of the FRG [Federal Republic of Germany] as the post-war
utopia of modernist music under the auspices of federally funded radio and
festivals: retrenchment in the form of a former Nazi music critic, rehabilitated
in name only, resisting the Allied-led, modernist musical remigration with the
familiar rhetoric of National Socialist journalism’.28
By the same token, however, we should remember that those with ‘pasts’,
such as Steinecke and Zillig, were also to be found on the ‘other’ side; if the
Federal Republic were to have excluded their like, there would have been very
few left. Musical performance and indeed criticism could play a role not only
in rehabilitation but in Vergangengheitsbewältigung, the necessary struggle to
come to terms with the past. The study of that struggle is not the least of the
areas in which historical treatment of music criticism, and perhaps eventually
a more thoroughgoing history of post-war German music criticism can play an
important role. As Adorno, an ardent although far from uncritical advocate for
Schoenberg, would observe in a 1962 article:
Newspapers and magazines of the radical Right constantly stir up indignation

against what is unnatural, over-intellectual, morbid and decadent: they know
their readers. The insights of social psychology into the authoritarian person-
ality confirm them. The basic features of this type include conformism, respect
for a petrified facade of opinion and society, and resistance to impulses that
disturb its order or evoke inner elements of the unconscious that cannot be
admitted.29
Adorno went on to mention campaigns against staging of Brecht’s plays in

West Germany but could equally well have mentioned campaigns against
performance and broadcasting of Schoenberg’s music.30 That ‘radical Right’
26
Calico, ‘A Survivor from Warsaw’, pp. 31–2. 27
Ibid., pp. 31–40. 28
Ibid., p. 40.
29
Theodor Wiesengrund Adorno, ‘Commitment’, Aesthetics and Politics, trans. Francis McDonagh, ed.
Ronald Taylor (London: New Left Books, 1977), p. 179.
30
Adorno, ‘Commitment’, p. 179.
600 MARK BERRY
was – is – larger than many would allow, whether in West Germany or

elsewhere. It could, can and will be found in newspapers and magazines not
necessarily ‘of the radical Right’, yet which will grant it a voice.
‘Pergolesi in the Pentagon’

Not, of course, that that is the only story; it is certainly not even the only story
with respect to the post-war period and relations between Germany and the
occupying powers. There were many happy musical examples; I shall confine
myself to one. In an interesting self-published memoir from a former American
soldier stationed in Frankfurt, we read of James A. Bowman and a fellow soldier,
David Dekker, a tenor and budding opera director, offering adaptations of
Pergolesi, initially for army audiences, performances subsequently extended to
German audiences, albeit in English, as part of America’s Cold War cultural
effort to keep West Germany on side. Positive reviews from German newspapers
heartened not only Bowman and Dekker, but also the US Army.
In one instance, both the Frankfurter Rundschau and the Frankfurter Neue
Presse sent reviewers, the glowing write-up in the former suggesting that such
cultural diplomacy was working rather well – which is not to impute insin-
cerity on either side, however questionable some of the claims to be read
below and indeed the claim of Pergolesi’s authorship might have been:
Many things have been said about the North American’s relationship to opera.
[Yet] the vast country without an operatic tradition . . . [has helped] . . . various
attempts to bring the opera to life again. . . . if Germany has the most operatic
institutions, then America offers as a counterpart the most attempts to renew
the operatic form itself.
A living example of that and of the imagination employed . . . was to be seen
in the Studentenhaus in Frankfurt. A few American opera enthusiasts, for the
most part United States soldiers, interested themselves in Pergolesi’s half-
forgotten opera, Il Maestro di Musica, adapted this 200-year old opera some-
what freely, translated it, and added a prologue . . .
. . . if it was self-made, it was by no means plain or dull. On the contrary, it
was as fresh and lively as the idea itself, and by striving to leap over some of the
venerability of old operatic productions, still paid full tribute to them.31
Bowman recalls: ‘We may not have knocked off any Russian tanks, but
a review like that was the equivalent of Beethoven complimenting a piano
composition by a young American conservatory student.’32
31
James A. Bowman, Pergolesi in the Pentagon: Life at the Front Lines of the Cultural Cold War (Bloomington:
XLibris, 2014), pp. 79–80, translation of the Rundschau article slightly modified.
32
Bowman, Pergolesi in the Pentagon, p. 80.
What does such a story tell us? Perhaps not very much, or perhaps it has the
potential to suggest more than we might immediately suspect about the
position of the American military, German music criticism, and reception
by local populations, even perhaps something about the Pergolesi – or
‘Pergolesi, attributed’ – revival. Time will tell; we are not short of material.
Surviving Warsaw in Vienna

We should now, however, turn to the other major German-speaking country
under consideration, Austria. For comparison, I shall again consider A Survivor
from Warsaw, again starting from Calico’s study, so as to build upon previous
scholarship. A difference here is that Austria remained under occupation until
1955. The chronology is therefore reversed: first, consideration of the national
Schoenberg premiere, and then a brief consideration of music criticism fol-
lowing the signing of the Austrian State Treaty.
Schoenberg was, of course, a Viennese, and considered himself an
Austrian – except that, following the dissolution of Austria-Hungary, he
had officially, owing to his father’s Slovakian Jewish heritage, been
a Czechoslovak citizen and had later become an American citizen.33 His
music, then, might have been understood to be returning home, albeit in
anything but straightforward fashion. The Austrian press, of whatever poli-
tical complexion, was determined that the country should reassert itself as
a cultural nation. Given the importance of Mahler’s music for that project,
Schoenberg might have had some opportunity to benefit too. Austria
remained, however, a nation with deep-seated anti-Semitism, not least in
musical circles. Of the 117 musicians in the Vienna Philharmonic, forty-five
were Nazi Party members, and half of them had joined before the 1938
Anschluss; two were members of the SS.34 When Scherchen conducted the
1951 national premiere, then, Schoenberg was in a sense returning to an
Austria and to a Vienna only too familiar to him. Anti-modernism and anti-
Semitism did not necessarily go together, sometimes quite the contrary, yet
often they did.
33
See Sabine Feisst, Schoenberg’s New World: The American Years (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011),
p. 45.
34
By contrast, only eight of the 110 members of the Berlin Philharmonic were party members.
Otto Karner, ‘Kulturpolitische Rahmenbedingungen in Österreich am Beginn der Zweiten Republik’,
in Markus Grassl, Reinhard Kapp and Eike Rathgeber (eds.), Österreichs Neue Musik nach 1945: Karl Schiske
(Vienna, Cologne, Weimar: Böhlau, 2008), p. 32. Calico may have misread these statistics; for instance,
when citing Karner’s chapter, she writes that 45 per cent of the VPO musicians were party members
(A Survivor from Warsaw, p. 48.)
602 MARK BERRY
As Calico argues, the language used to identify Schoenberg in reviews of the

concert, as well as that identifying victims and perpetrators of the events to
which A Survivor referred, ‘reveals much about a divided, occupied city in
which each faction is represented by its own media presence’.35 The Soviet
Österreischische Zeitung boycotted the festival of which the concert was part,
declaring it ‘cosmopolitan’ rather than truly international.36 Although Calico
does not make the point, the anti-Semitic resonance of ‘cosmopolitan’ would
surely have been lost on few; Stalinism and (post-)Nazism had their points in
common. The Wiener Kurier, newspaper of the US Army Group Press, by
contrast, allowed the composer both Austrian and American glory, its
reviewer praising ‘the creative power of the old master of the Vienna School
(who is highly respected in America)’.37 What was perhaps most striking
about all the reviews was that the Nazis were never named; the closest one,
and only one came, was a reference to the Hitler-Zeit, ‘but he does not assign
culpability’; the ambivalence the ailing composer himself felt ‘about symbolic
remigration to Vienna in the form of A Survivor was well founded’.38
Austria: Cosy Reinvention of a Nation and a Culture

That celebrated Viennese Gemütlichkeit (cosiness, comfortableness) continued,
then, to cover a multitude of sins, both past and present. Such would be the
case not only through the 1950s, but in many respects, as we shall see in
conclusion, unto the present day. The Austrian State Treaty was signed by the
four occupying powers, the United States, the United Kingdom, the USSR
and France, on 15 May 1955. Although it had been by no means certain over
the previous ten years that Austria would escape a German-style Cold War
division, it did; a declaration of neutrality followed in October. The fitting-
ness – perhaps too fitting – of the reopening in November of that same year of
the Vienna State Opera, which had been performing elsewhere following its
near destruction by Allied bombing in 1945, did not go unnoticed; likewise,
the fittingness of Fidelio, perhaps the ultimate, unsullied musical instantiation
of bourgeois freedom, for that reopening. Whether Karl Böhm, whatever his
undoubted musical credentials, were the right figure, as Musical Director, to
present a new Vienna, a new Austria to the world was a different question,
having already served from 1943 to 1945; a further question was whether
35
Calico, ‘Survivor from Warsaw’, p. 60.
36
L .N., ‘Weder international noch festlich . . . Schlußbilanz des Wiener Internationalen Musikfestes’,
Österreichische Zeitung (21 April 1951); cited in Calico, A Survivor from Warsaw, p. 64.
37
P. L., ‘Gestern beim Musikfest: Pioniere von gestern – heute Meister: Hermann Scherchen dirigierte
die Wiener Symphoniker’, Wiener Kurier (11 April 1951); cited in Calico, A Survivor from Warsaw, p. 60.
38
Ibid., pp. 64–5.
Vienna and Austria wished to present themselves in a new light. (Karajan,

hardly an uncompromised figure himself, would soon succeed the caretaker
Böhm.) The fiction that had, at least in part, enabled the Austrian State Treaty
and had prevented the fall of at least part of Austria to the Eastern Bloc was
that of Austria as the first victim of National Socialism, invaded(!) by Germany
and then liberated by the Allies. ‘New’ arrangements were those of the
National Socialist period. For instance, Mödling, where Schoenberg had
lived outside Vienna, had been incorporated under Nazism; it now returned
to Lower Austria. But to what should Austria return politically? Before the
alleged ‘invasion’, Austrofascism had been the order of the day. And to what
should Austria return artistically?
There is certainly a parallel, strongly related unanimity in the welcomes
afforded both Republic and Opera. The Arbeiter-Zeitung, the ‘central organ’ of
the Socialist Party, which traced itself proudly back to 1889, had been as
fervent as anyone else in its 15 May rejoicing: ‘What we have waited ten years
for: Austria finally becomes free.’39 (The experience of occupation had won
the USSR no friends.) In November, Die Presse judged the ideological mood
perfectly, Böhm’s Fidelio greeted as ‘Das große Freiheitsfest der Musikstadt
Wien’.40 The ‘city of music, Vienna’, regained its ‘freedom’ in this ‘festival’.
What could be more Beethovenian? Was not Beethoven himself an adoptive
Viennese, even if his home town of Bonn were now the capital of West
Germany? Fidelio, the sub-headline read, fulfilled its ‘mission of binding
people together’. The article, continued to extol the historic occasion, the
clearly held communal belief that Vienna had witnessed the reopening of the
greatest opera house in the world.41 That is not to say that there was no
musical criticism to be heard at all; the Neue Merkur at least contrasted the
‘magnificent’ performance of Martha Mödl in the title role with the well sung
Florestan of Anton Dermota, which nevertheless ‘lacked personality’.42 Yet
that was a rare, gingerly made reservation – perhaps unsurprisingly, given the
nature of the occasion. Would, however, normal service resume? Or was this,
for many, normal service in the ‘city of music’?
The mythology – and as with all mythologies, there is some truth in it – is
that, in the words of the inaugural Erasmus Prize of 1958, given to ‘the people
of Austria’:
39
Front-page headline, Arbeiter-Zeitung (15 May 1955).
40
Front-page headline, Die Presse (6 November 1955).
41
C. F. Z., first-page article, Die Presse (6 November 1955).
42
‘Die Wiedereröffnung der Wiener Staatsoper 1955: Glanz und Elend der Austrian Coronation’, Neue
Merkur, republished at der-neue-merker.eu/wien-die-wiedereroeffnung-der-wiener-staatsoper-1955
(accessed 25 April 2016).
604 MARK BERRY
Amid political, economic and social circumstances, and confronted with an

immense cultural reorientation, Austria did not lose itself in nostalgic long-
ings for a glorious past but set itself the aim of not merely accepting its cultural
heritage but of securing it, renewing it and integrating it within a European
perspective. Thus Austria, with its capital Vienna, has become the shining
example of a positive mentality, of courage, energy and confidence in the
future of Europe, by the way in which as a ‘minorité créatrice’ it opened paths
for the free nations of Europe to follow.43
The claim of not having lost itself ‘in nostalgic longings for a glorious past’ is
the most extraordinary, given an official climate – not enforced, yet more
powerful for relative subtlety of officialdom – which almost made Strauss and
Hofmannsthal’s Rosenkavalier longing for an invented eighteenth-century
Vienna appear the height of avant-gardism. The imperative to secure, to
renew and, to a certain extent, to integrate, seems closer to the mark, and is
understandable – up to a point. After all, much of the more serious German re-
examination was yet to come; the difference is more that it would come, never
uncontested, but nevertheless with a vengeance. Austrian voices have been
lonelier, nowhere more so than in musical criticism.
Regietheater and Accommodationism: To the Present Day

To conclude, I should like to travel forward to some aspects of reception of so-
called Regietheater in opera, and specifically towards opposition to it, both in
‘official’ criticism and the burgeoning world of more ‘unofficial’ criticism. The
Meyerbeer scholar Sieghart Döhring described Regietheater, with considerable
justification, as the German Feuilletons’ ‘favourite word’.44 If the word has
now become more or less meaningless – what does it mean if it includes almost
all but the most creaking revivals and consciously reactionary new stagings? –
it has served an important purpose in reshaping musical drama as theatrical
drama and musical criticism has played an important role in dissemination and
communication as well as in flouncing opposition, perhaps particularly,
unsurprisingly, in Vienna, and not least on increasingly vocal websites.
Die Presse, which, having been founded during the ‘liberal’ period of the
1848 revolutions, has long trumpeted its almost classically liberal credentials –
one might think of the narrow ideology whose eclipse Carl Schorske traces in
his Fin-de-Siècle Vienna – had been refounded (as successor to the schismatic
43
Praemium Erasmianum Foundation: Erasmus Prize: Former Laureates: The Austrian People, 1958,
available at www.erasmusprijs.org (accessed 4 February 2016).
44
Sieghart Döhring, ‘Gedanken zum Regietheater’, in Jürgen Kühnel, Ulrich Müller and Oswald Panagle
(eds.), ‘Regietheater’: Konzeption und Praxis am Beispiel der Bühnenwerke Mozarts. Mit einem Anhang zu Franz
Schrekers ‘Die Gezeichneten’ (Anif/Salzburg: Mueller-Speiser, 2007), p. 31.
Neue Freue Presse, 1864–1939) in 1946.45 The motto ‘frei seit 1848’ thus
conceals, even if one were to pass over the CIA work of Otto Schulmeister,
its long-term editor-in-chief and publisher.46 Whereas the FAZ, as we have
seen, erred more in the direction of exaggerating its novelty, the new-old
Presse claimed – and claims – to ‘build upon [the] tradition’ of the ‘liberal
Bürgertum’. That explicitly included – and includes – its Feuilleton.47
Its long-term music critic, Wilhelm Sinkovicz, offers an interesting case.
With the newspaper since his early 20s, his influential – in Viennese circles, at
least – writing has tended to be almost comically conformist, accommodating
itself to whatever the official line of the institutions whose work he is
employed to criticise might happen to be at the time. The Musikverein and
perhaps still more the Vienna State Opera have had their conservatism not
only trumpeted but lavishly, embarrassingly praised. For instance, he exalted
to the skies the ultra-reactionary Otto Schenk’s most recent production for
the Opera, The Cunning Little Vixen, and not only for its apparent ability to have
one ‘almost smell the forest’, that is, for its hyper-naturalism. In a swipe at
anything any of the more interesting opera directors since Richard Wagner
might have attempted, he also lauded Schenk’s staging for its resistance to
treating the ‘theatre-goer’ as a ‘seminarian’ in political science or
psychoanalysis.48 Never has Janáček sounded so unmediated, even uninter-
esting; the theatre-goer might be forgiven for feeling more than a little
patronised.
Might one draw connections with Die Presse’s worship of the free market,
the ‘normal’ opera-goer knowing best? Perhaps, although it should be re-
emphasised that such connections tend to be more elusive, if they exist at all,
than in political reporting. More important, however, seems to be an almost
patriotic line – Austria here quite different from, even more or less diame-
trically opposed to, Germany – of supporting what is as what should be, and
possibly even personal advantage. Sinkovicz’s advocacy was eagerly or wear-
ily anticipated from all quarters in a climate of dissatisfaction, at least in
many external quarters, with the Intendancy of Dominique Meyer. The
firebrand erstwhile impresario of the Salzburg Festival and Paris Opéra,
Gerard Mortier, had, in a doubtless calculated intervention of the
previous year, described Meyer as ‘a nice man’ but someone who, artistically,
threatened to make his ‘old-fashioned’ predecessor, Ioan Holender, seem
45
Carl E. Schorske, Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1980).
46
Christa Zöchling, ‘Ex-“Presse”-Chef im Dienste der CIA: Otto Schulmeister agierte für den
Geheimdienst’, Profil (18 April 2009).
47
See ‘Die Neugründung nach dem Zweiten Weltkrieg’, Die Presse, available at diepresse.com/unterneh
men/geschichte/unternehmen/geschichte/10765/index.do (accessed 25 April 2016).
48
Wilhelm Sinkovicz, ‘Staatsoper: Der schlauen Füchsin später Wien-Besuch’, Die Presse (19 June 2014).
606 MARK BERRY
‘almost avant-gardist’.49 It may or may not be irrelevant here that Sinkovicz

and his wife, Michaela Schlögl (also of Die Presse, as well as more specialist
music magazines, such as Opernglas and Opernwelt), have developed a good
line in popular ghost-writing and conversation books. Schlögl’s writing of
Meyer’s autobiography indeed offers a hagiography to end hagiography,
Sinkovicz’s published conversations with Franz Welser-Möst, Music
Director prior to a very public falling-out with Meyer, an awkward reminder
of alliances past.50
Gemütlichkeit has generally been preferred over the ‘nest-fouling’ of those
who would criticise, even mention, such comfortable relations, the most
internationally famous, and nationally reviled, of such critics in more general
terms being the playwrights (and renowned or reviled Nestbeschmutzer)
Thomas Bernhard and Elfriede Jelinek.51 The tabloid treatment of such
writers in the Kronen Zeitung, a supporter of Kurt Waldheim’s presidential
candidacy, stand as a warning to those who would engage in more socially-
critical artistic creation – but also to those who would engage in similar
criticism, and still more so in the allegedly ‘un-political’ music of the historical
Heimat than in its literature. To say more, one would require not only
a detailed prosopographical study but a new Karl Kraus.
Meyer’s State Opera, it might be noted, is still staging the Tosca that was
new for Karajan and Renata Tebaldi in 1957; I hesitate to describe it as
Margarethe Wallmann’s production, since there can hardly be anything left
of it beyond the recently ‘restored’ designs. But there is a little method in such
apparent madness: the set designs are easily packed away on site, and the
Opera thus has a ‘flat-pack’ production in case of emergencies. Sinkovicz,
however, seems not to have understood the practical reason for keeping the
production on the books, thus proving significantly plus royaliste que le roi. In
2013, we find him banging a drum against ‘discussion’. The ‘great classics’
should not be available ‘for discussion’, he wrote in 2013: ‘in Tosca, for
example, there is nothing to discuss’. Such, then, is the unceremonious end
of Puccini studies. Instead, it should merely be a vehicle for singing, in this
case by Angela Gheorghiu, Marcelo Álvarez und Željko Lučić: ‘On the playbill
49
Barbara Petsch, ‘Mortier: “Ich bin Parsifal und Sisyphos!”’, Die Presse (27 April 2013). It is only fair to
note that Mortier’s interview was actually with Die Presse, although certainly not with Sinkovicz. Meyer’s
radio-broadcast (ORF) response, in an interview with Florian Kobler (‘He is a specialist in such declara-
tions. I leave to him his specialism’), made accusations of sour grapes; it may be found at wien.orf.at/news/
stories/2600458/, 29 August 2013 (accessed 25 April 2016).
50
Dominique Meyer, Szenenwechsel Wiener Staatsoper, ed. Michaela Schlögl (Vienna: Styria, 2010);
Franz Welser-Möst, Kadenzen: Notizen und Gespräche, ed. Wilhelm Sinkovicz (Vienna: Styria, 2013).
51
See for example, Pia Janke, et al. (eds.), Die Nestbeschmutzerin: Jelinek und Österreich (Salzburg: Jung und
Jung, 2002); Dagmar Lorenz, ‘The Established Outsider: Thomas Bernhard’, in Matthias Konzett (ed.),
A Companion to the Works of Thomas Bernhard (Rochester and Woodbridge: Camden House, 2002).
was Tosca; on the stage, one sees – Tosca.’52 Directing opera was as easy, or
rather as non-existent, a task as that.
The claim was more or less indistinguishable from the cries of an increas-
ingly vocal Facebook group, ‘Against Modern Opera Productions’, three years
later, concerning the same production: ‘Timeless productions like these
remain fascinating and attractive even after 59 years. Regietheater crap is
outdated even at the first night.’53 Such are the ways in which one lauds a non-
production (which, I hasten to reiterate, is in no sense a comment upon the
‘original’, long-since vanished). What, however, has that to do with German-
speaking criticism? On the face of it, not very much. Look a little closer,
however, and one will discover that ‘AMOP’, as it calls itself, is the English-
speaking, relatively sanitised version of a German group, ‘Gegen Regietheater
in der Oper’. Both frequently contain far-right material and language, not
least racial and homophobic slurs upon performers, but the harder-core
material is often only to be found in German, semi-free from prying
Anglophone eyes. What seems to be a slight misquotation from the late
Viennese dramaturge, Marcel Prawy – ‘Regietheater is to opera what AIDS is
to the human body’ – has been posted approvingly on more than one
occasion.54
Perhaps more alarmingly still, the Viennese bass-baritone, Bernd Weikl,
a renowned Hans Sachs of his day, has written a book couched in not dissim-
ilar terms. Arguing, almost incredibly, that non-‘traditional’ productions of
Wagner should meet with criminal prosecution, Weikl favours the hoary old
chestnut of Werktreue, allegedly ‘the recreation of a work that exists and is
cohesive, and thus has already been created’, calling for a reversal of a period of
‘definite decadence in German theaters, . . . already visible in the practice of
the arts during the decline of the Roman Empire’.55
Whilst we should remain on our guard against too-easy identification of
reactionary and/or Radical Right aesthetics and politics, there are, then,
strong indications that there would be much to learn from further study of
such connections. That, again, would have to be a story for another day. For
52
Wilhelm Sinkovicz, ‘Genau so muss ein Tosca sein’, Die Presse (7 September 2013).
53
Against Modern Opera Productions Facebook group, available at www.facebook.com/Against-
Modern-Opera-Productions-146292958770872/?fref=ts (accessed 25 April 2016).
54
For instance, Facebook discussion on 13 July 2015, www.facebook.com/permalink.php?story_fbi
d=994931667213251&id=510344335671989 (accessed 23 March 2016). See Peter Dusek and
Christoph Wagner-Trenkwitz (eds.), Marcel Prawy erzählt aus seinem Leben (Vienna: Kremayr &
Scheriau, 2001), cited in, ‘Marcel Prawy über . . .’, Wiener Zeitung (25 February 2003).
55
Bernd Weikl, Swastikas on Stage: Trends in the Productions of Richard Wagner’s Operas in German Theaters
Today, trans. Susan Salms-Moss (Berlin: Pro-Business, 2015), pp. 79–80. Weikl’s book was originally
published in German as Warum Richard Wagner in Deutschland verboten muss (Leipzig: Leipziger
Universitätsverlag, 2014).
608 MARK BERRY
the moment, however, we might remind ourselves why conservative aesthetic

stances are long likely to prove more problematic in Germany and Austria
than in many other countries, and ask where German-language music criti-
cism had most notoriously heard such claims before. One notorious example
would be Goebbels’s insistence that performances be described and not dis-
cussed, that they be entertainment (Unterhaltung), not politically explorative.
Fair enough, one might think, for an internet Facebook group, but what
a peculiar, self-denying ordinance for a critic such as Sinkovicz to utter. And
yet, even in Vienna, things might, just might, be changing; the word in the
coffee houses, more interesting and perhaps still more reliable than the
Internet, is that, following the announcement of Meyer’s departure, Die
Presse has been enlisting more freelance music writers.
. 31 .
Music Criticism in Italy in the Twentieth Century

RAFFAELE POZZI
Both the concept and practice of what is called ‘music criticism’ underwent
profound changes and transformations in the course of the twentieth century.
At the beginning of the century, there was an accelerated demographic
growth and urban expansion in many Italian cities such as Genoa, Naples,
Milan, Rome and Turin. The publishing market expanded, and at the same
time the circulation of newspapers and magazines increased.
Driven by new technologies, methods and communication media, criticism
became a vast, multiform and pluralistic field of discourse about music. Under
that name, in fact, are gathered different metatexts and practices concerning
cultural mediation and reflection, be they written, oral or visual, that have
music as their subject. These can be traced backed to news and news report-
ing, to literary works, to analysis and critical-hermeneutics evaluation from
a historical musicology stance, as well as scholarly research and aesthetic-
philosophical reflection.
In this sense, compared to the nineteenth century, in Italy twentieth-
century music criticism significantly expanded its ambit and ramifications in
terms of the genre of message conveyed. Functions of commercial promotion,
media information and new musicological criticism co-exist. A myriad of
media now also began to transmit these varying discourses about music.
Originally, at the beginning of the century, there were merely printed
books, newspapers and periodicals. Then, over the century, came radio, tele-
vision, vinyl records, CDs and finally the Internet, with its audio-visual-verbal
synthesis. This meant that, throughout the century, the multifaceted intellec-
tual activity that we call ‘music criticism’ gradually introduced new dimen-
sions and developments that varied according to the content, critical methods,
communication channels and styles used.
The figure of the critic also underwent an evolution comparable to that of
music criticism in the span of the twentieth century. In the first half of the
nineteenth century the critic was mainly a writer, often a librettist linked
[609]
610 RAFFAELE POZZI
essentially to the theatrical world. In the following century such figures

became, in Italy, a minority and largely disappeared. There was constant
demand for new capabilities from the second half of the nineteenth century
onwards, as critics began to occupy a more autonomous and clearly defined
operative area than had been the case in the eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries.
The trend towards a proliferation of musical genres and the differing role of
the critic demanded by the various media has favoured fragmentation in the
work done by music critics, whose profile and status are still only poorly
defined, so that they may often be responsible for organising artistic events.
Working in this ambit are reporters and journalists with varying, and often
inadequate, levels of expertise, together with librarians, scholars and music
historians, but also composers and musicians, as well as writers, philosophers
and, with the advent of the Internet, the new figure of the blogger-critic.
For much of the first half of the twentieth century, after an earlier phase in
a positivist mould that was fuelled by the newly emerging discipline of
musicology, Italian music criticism was strongly influenced by the aesthetic-
philosophical thought of Benedetto Croce. Croce’s influence meant in fact
that criticism was exercised only with regard to the practice of music, to its
performance, in a position of inferiority compared to philosophical specula-
tion about music. Moreover, in one strand of Italian criticism, one senses
a transposition of philosophical language and use of concepts that are often
trivialised and rarely reach the deductive depth of Croce’s inspiring model.
Following the fall of fascism and the end of the Second World War,
a profound change in the cultural climate occurred. After 1945, in the ensuing
context of socio-historical and cultural reconstruction, the renewal of lan-
guage brought about by new music coincided with a renewal of criticism
which, at least for the more discerning and aware protagonists, tended to
embrace the technical and formal aspects of music considered irrelevant on
the previous idealistic-spiritualistic approach. Following a series of global
transformations and the advent of a new cultural relativism and intercultural
sensitivity, an ethnocentric approach to music was gradually abandoned
throughout the second half of the twentieth century, and music criticism
opened up to genres that had been excluded from the traditional Western
canon. Avant-garde music, jazz (which had been banned by fascism), film and
applied music, pop, rock and a multitude of contemporary musical genres
proffered by the new media and the Internet broadened and enlivened critical
debate.
In the final years of the twentieth century, the older print media entered
into crisis. In Italy, at the beginning of the 2000s, the economic crisis and the
Music Criticism in Italy in the Twentieth Century 611
fall of the daily newspaper market limited the space given to music criticism.
Furthermore, people urgently questioned the very function of music criti-
cism, almost sensing the beginning of a historic decline. In reality, rather than
dying out, the manifold discourses on music are being transformed, today
adopting new forms and languages, both problematic and ambiguous, which
criticism itself must evaluate case by case. Taking into consideration the close
relationship that was established from the very outset between critical reflec-
tion and wide-ranging historical and aesthetic issues, the evolution of music
criticism is reconstructed in this article by touching on some tangles, trends
and querelles that left their mark on the broader span of history of Italian music
in the twentieth century.
Positivism, Idealism, Nationalism, Modernism

In the new economic-industrial and historic-cultural climate that followed the
unification of Italy in 1861, publishing and printing entered a phase of
accelerated development. Alongside local papers emerged the first national
newspapers such as Il secolo and Corriere della sera, both published in Milan. It
was during this heightened period of cultural, social and editorial dynamism
in post-unification Italy that Italian music criticism acquired borders that
were qualitatively more sharply defined, while also becoming more significant
in quantity. The new ‘miscellaneous newspapers’ were increasingly successful
with readers and had greater appeal for their editors.1
During the late nineteenth century, authoritative figures such as Abramo
Basevi, Girolamo Alessandro Biaggi, Francesco D’Arcais and Filippo Filippi
gradually left the scene, and a new generation of music critics emerged,
including Arrigo Boito, Giuseppe Depanis, Amintore Galli, Gino Monaldi,
Aldo Noseda, Enrico Panzacchi, Alfredo Soffredini and Ippolito Franchi
Verney (the pseudonym of Ippolito Valetta), who would then become key
figures in this new phase of musical information.2 In the 1890s, there were
also some noteworthy signs of evolution and breakthrough, with the emer-
gence of substantive issues and directions that would engage Italian music
criticism throughout the twentieth century. First of all, more and more
questions were being asked about the operative profile of critics, their func-
tion and their social referent. In an 1894 article written in Turin, entitled ‘La
critica musicale nei giornali politici’ and published in the Gazzetta musicale di
1
See Paolo Murialdi, Storia del giornalismo in Italia. Dalle gazzette a Internet (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1996), pp.
91, 103.
2
See Marco Capra, ‘La stampa ritrovata: duecento anni di periodici musicali’, in Alessandro Rigolli (ed.),
La divulgazione musicale in Italia oggi (Turin: EDT, 2005), pp. 72–3.
612 RAFFAELE POZZI
Milano (the historic and authoritative weekly newspaper published by

Ricordi), Luigi Locati touched on some fundamental aspects of the critical
activity exercised by a daily newspaper. The critic must in fact write his article
quickly while the iron was still ‘hot’; he must have specific and appropriate
technical, musical and cultural skills, and he must maintain independence of
judgement; lastly, since his point of reference was an audience of non-
specialist readers, he should avoid an unsuitable display of erudition when
writing in a mainstream newspaper.3
Also in 1894, the publisher Giuseppe Bocca founded the Rivista musicale
italiana in Turin, the most iconic journal of that time. It adopted the principles
of positivism and those relating to scientific and historical-philological
research as applied to the study of early music. The influence of end-of-
century German Musikwissenschaft can be clearly perceived in the orientation
of this new publication. In the initial period, a group of scholars and savants,
among them Oscar Chilesotti, Nicola D’Arienzo, Romualdo Giani, Giovanni
Tebaldini, Luigi Torchi and Luigi Torri, collaborated on the periodical,
animating debate on the emerging Italian musicology movement.4
The themes that animated critical debate in Italy in the period between the
end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century – both in the
press, which followed and wrote reviews on performances, and in the histor-
ical musicology field that fuelled the research – coagulated around a few core
areas: opera, instrumental music, and sacred music. A strong sense of nation-
alism united critical reflection in these fields, with only a few exceptions who
looked further afield to transalpine models.
Torchi was responsible for an article published in the Rivista musicale italiana
in 1899 entitled ‘La musica istrumentale in Italia nei secoli XVI, XVII e XVIII’,
in which can be found the origin of the so-called rinascita dell’antico,
a celebration of the glorious past of Italian instrumental and vocal early
music. This ideological position, a cultural expression of nationalism of the
post-unification Italy, was connected very often with research studies on
ancient music carried out by Oscar Chilesotti and other contributors to the
Rivista musicale italiana.
3
See Luigi Locati, ‘La critica musicale nei giornali politici’, Gazzetta musicale di Milano, X L I X /52
(30 December 1894), 823–4.
4
For an overview of Italian musicology and music criticism between the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, see Giorgio Pestelli, ‘La Generazione dell’Ottanta e la resistibile ascesa della musico-
logia italiana’, in Fiamma Nicolodi (ed.), Musica italiana del primo Novecento: La Generazione dell’Ottanta
(Florence: Oslchki, 1981); Marco Capra, ‘Periodici e critica musicale tra Ottocento e Novecento: dal
Censore universale dei teatri alla Rassegna musicale’, in Marco Capra and Fiamma Nicolodi (eds.), La critica
musicale in Italia nella prima metà del Novecento (Parma: Marsilio, 2011). For an English-language overview,
see Alexandra Wilson’s ‘Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Century Italy’, Chapter 10 in this volume.
The interest in early music, particularly Gregorian chant and sacred vocal
polyphony, was tied to issues regarding the liturgical reform of Catholic
church music in Italy. This ideal of the Cecilian movement was well received
by Pius X in his 1903 Motu proprio, but had been preceded by lively critical
debate in some periodicals dedicated to religious music, which had even
involved interventions from Franz Liszt.5 In 1877, father Guerrino Amelli
founded the periodical Musica sacra, and in 1899, Santa Cecilia was first
published, followed in 1905 by the Bollettino ceciliano. The focus on pre-
nineteenth century and ancient instrumental music, as well as on piano
didactics, is reflected in the publication of Domenico Scarlatti’s Opere complete
per clavicembalo and the magazine L’arte pianistica (1914), both edited by
Alessandro Longo.
With the new century, the positivist critical approach dominant in the
Rivista musicale italiana – which gave rise, among other things, to a specific
revelatory article by Oscar Chilesotti in 1898 entitled ‘L’evoluzione nella
musica: appunti sulla teoria di Herbert Spencer’6 – was contrasted by anti-
positivist currents with a spiritualistic bent that recalled, often only vaguely,
the romantic philosophy and the philosophical neo-idealism of Benedetto
Croce.
From the beginning of the century, a large part of the Italian music criticism
that appeared in specialised magazines made an attempt (which lasted until
the period after the Second World War and beyond) to elaborate a theoretical
and practical model of music criticism inspired by the authoritative aesthetics
of Croce, who published his Estetica come scienza dell’espressione e linguistica
generale in 1902. From 1907 onwards, this new cultural trend was manifested
through the appointment of Fausto Torrefranca to the Rivista musicale italiana.
Torrefranca’s spiritualism, together with his research activity, heralded
a softening of the positivist critical orientation that had dominated the first
phase of the periodical’s foundation. Torchi’s Germanism and Wagnerism
gave way to Torrefranca’s strong sense of nationalism, a sentiment common to
often conflicting critical positions and that was strongly felt in the years
before and after the First World War.
5
On the Cecilian movement and the debate about the reform of Catholic liturgy in Italy, see
Raffaele Pozzi, ‘L’immagine ottocentesca del Palestrina nel rapporto tra Liszt e il movimento ceciliano’,
in Lino Bianchi and Giancarlo Rostirolla (eds.), Atti del ii Convegno internazionale di studi palestriniani
(Palestrina: Fondazione Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina/Centro di Studi Palestriniani, 1991); and
Raffaele Pozzi, ‘Il mito dell’antico tra restaurazione e modernità. Su alcune intonazioni dell’Ave Maria
e del Tantum Ergo nel secondo Ottocento’, in Mauro Casadei Turroni Monti and Cesarino Ruini (eds.),
Aspetti del cecilianesimo nella cultura musicale italiana dell’Ottocento (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana,
2004).
6
See Oscar Chilesotti, ‘L’evoluzione nella musica: appunti sulla teoria di Herbert Spencer’, Rivista
musicale italiana, V /3 (1898), 559–73.
614 RAFFAELE POZZI
In the early twentieth century, the number of periodicals grew. In addition

to the Giornale dei musicisti (1907), we should mention the Riforma musicale
(1913) and, above all, Harmonia. Rivista italiana di musica (1913), to which many
prominent musicians contributed, such as Ferruccio Busoni, Ildebrando
Pizzetti and Ottorino Respighi, as well as Domenico Alaleona and Vincenzo
Tommasini. An important role was played in the spread of nationalistic and
anti-positivist ideas by the Florentine circle. Periodicals of remarkable cul-
tural and political significance were produced in the period between the first
and second decades of the century, such as Il marzocco, Leonardo and La voce.
The latter, an authoritative literary review founded in 1908 by Giuseppe
Prezzolini, saw the collaboration of Giannotto Bastianelli, Fausto
Torrefranca and Ildebrando Pizzetti with articles on music. An exemplary
case of the nationalistic climate that was influencing critical debate on opera
was the controversial querelle between Alfredo Casella and Ildebrando Pizzetti
in 1913, centenary of the birth of Giuseppe Verdi. Casella, under the influence
of the French critical milieu, wrote an article in which he criticised nineteenth-
century Italian opera and Verismo. Pizzetti responded, defending the Italian
opera, and proposed the need to enhance the national music tradition.7 In
these same years, periodicals dedicated specifically to music were published in
Florence, further adding to the cultural upheaval: La nuova musica, already
founded in 1896, and later La critica musicale, which in 1918 began to be
published under the editorship of Luigi Parigi.
In twentieth-century Italy, as elsewhere in Europe, the figure of the com-
poser-critic gained greater importance and significance. The aesthetic and
linguistic battles, the disputes of modernity and the clash between conserva-
tion and artistic innovation fostered by the avant-garde movements pushed
composers towards criticism and essay-writing.8 A significant example of this
phenomenon is the journal Ars nova, which Alfredo Casella began to publish
after his return to Italy from Paris in 1917. It offered an overview on con-
temporary artistic debate that was open to visual and plastic arts and the
literature of that time.
A similarly innovative cultural line, open to modern music and the world of
international music, was taken by Il pianoforte, founded in 1920 by Guido
Maggiorino Gatti. The journal originally contributed to the reflection on
piano didactics like other journals, such as Santa Cecilia, Musica d’oggi, La
critica musicale and L’arte pianistica. In the following years, the topics
7
On the nationalistic climate and the querelle between Casella and Pizzetti, see Raffaele Pozzi, ‘Jeunesse
et indépendance: Alfredo Casella e la Société Musicale Indépendante’, Musica e Storia, I V (1996), 325–48.
8
See Fiamma Nicolodi, ‘Su alcune querelles dei compositori-critici del Novecento’, in Capra and Nicolodi
(eds.), La critica musicale in Italia.
broadened to meditations on modern music, an open-mindedness that con-

tinued and was one of the principal features of the journal during the years
when fascism seized power in Italy.
Music Criticism and the Thought of Benedetto

Croce in Fascist Italy
In the early twentieth century, the conflict between positivism and idealism
was gradually settled in favour of the latter. Neo-idealism became the domi-
nant philosophical horizon in Italy between the First and Second World Wars
and during the fascist period. Benedetto Croce and Giovanni Gentile were the
figures of reference for neo-idealism. While Gentile’s work dealt mainly with
theoretical subjects, engaged in political activity and became the intellectual
for the regime by drafting the 1925 Manifesto degli intellettuali fascisti, Croce
wrote widely about history and literature, as well as philosophy, profoundly
influencing art criticism in the first half of the twentieth century.
There is no specific reflection upon music in Croce’s aesthetic philosophy.
The fundamental conceptual premise of his vision, which had already been
expressed in Estetica in 1902, was art viewed as intuition and an expression of
the Spirit. The concept of unity of the arts and the consequent external and
marginal role reserved for artistic techniques and genres was based on this
foundation.9 Furthermore, the spread of Croce’s thought found favourable
ground in fascism’s opposition to positivist theories and in the regime’s
sympathy for all forms of spiritualism with an idealistic cast.
In the period stretching from the twenties to the forties, music criticism in
Italy attempted to transpose Croce’s vision into reflections on music, though
not without contradictions and conceptual aporia, since his critical-aesthetic
model focused so strongly on verbal and literary communication. Traces can
be perceived, even if they are often vague and lexical rather than philosophi-
cally developed, in the premises and language of musical criticism.
In an editorial that marked the founding of the journal La critica musicale in
1918, for example, Luigi Parigi stressed the need to promote the culture of
fine arts, reaching a meditative, and not merely technical-professional or
material-industrial awareness of music. Francesco Vatielli echoed this concept
in 1922, in the periodical La cultura musicale, imagining a way of exercising
9
See the chapter on L’estetica crociana e la critica musicale in Enrico Fubini, Musica e linguaggio nell’estetica
contemporanea (Turin: Einaudi, 1973); and Olga Visentini, ‘La critica musicale italiana fra le due guerre:
l’influenza di Croce’, and ‘La critica musicale italiana fra le due guerre: l’impasse idealistica’, Nuova
Antologia, 2142 and 2143 (1982), 219–45 and 246–76.
616 RAFFAELE POZZI
criticism that did not withdraw into erudition and specialist technicalities but
would bring out the spiritual substance and thought of musical works.10
The most wide-ranging and lively critical debate developed between the
thirties and forties in the journal La Rassegna musicale, which Guido
Maggiorino Gatti founded in 1928 in the wake of the closure of Il pianoforte.
In addition to Gatti, among the contributors to La Rassegna musicale were
some of the most outstanding figures in Italian criticism between the two
wars, namely Ferdinando Ballo, Attilio Cimbro, Fedele d’Amico, Andrea della
Corte, Alberto Mantelli, Massimo Mila, Guido Pannain, Alfredo Parente,
Gino Roncaglia, Luigi Rognoni, Luigi Ronga and Gastone Rossi-Doria.
Composer-performer-critics such as Alfredo Casella, Gianandrea Gavazzeni
and Gian Francesco Malipiero also contributed articles. It was precisely this
enlightened cultural and musical openness, this plurality of voices, that would
give space to varying positions in La Rassegna musicale, including those who
supported Italian and European modern music and were hence contested in
conservative circles.
The theme of how to translate Benedetto Croce’s aesthetic-philosophical
model and transpose it into music criticism was among the most debated in La
Rassegna musicale, directly affecting the concept of art and the status of musical
interpretation and performance. In Aesthetica in nuce, written in 1928, Croce
reiterated his fundamental concept of a unity of the arts founded on
a synthesis of intuition and expression.11 Art was precisely that union of
intuition and expression that occurred in the inner life of the individual
creator. Technique, transmission and interpretation belonged instead to the
material sphere of practical communication, secondary when compared to the
single essential moment of pure intuition-expression that characterised art.
Taxonomies and artistic-literary genres were similarly marginal to Croce. For
the philosopher, they were descriptive abstractions that mislaid the essential
nucleus of art, and positivistic criticism had given them improper weight.
Despite common reference to the philosopher, one of the most debated,
controversial and often contradictory points concerning the adaptation of
Croce’s thought to the field of aesthetics and music criticism regarded the
issue of interpretation. The debate was given space in the new journal, La
Rassegna musicale, and engaged some authoritative critics, but also composers
like Casella, writing in the early thirties.12
10
See Capra and Nicolodi (eds.), La critica musicale in Italia, pp. 26–7.
11
See Benedetto Croce, Aesthetica in nuce (Naples: Cooperativa Tipografica Sanitaria, 1929).
12
For the debate on the issue of interpretation and Casella’s article, see Luigi Pestalozza (ed.), La Rassegna
musicale: Antologia (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1966), pp. 485–91, 109–30, 514–19.
Between the twenties and thirties, as happens frequently in the history of

music criticism, critical consistency or expression of partisan positions were
missing from journalism. The provocative and unsystematic journalism of
Bruno Barilli in the columns of Il tempo or Il Tevere deviated from the plethora
of croniqueurs.13 In 1933, the first session of the International Music Congress
in Florence, an initiative linked to the first edition of the Maggio Musicale
festival, was dedicated to music criticism. While the speakers Guido Pannain
and Luigi Ronga essentially explored aesthetic-philosophical and musicologi-
cal terrain, the discourse by Gaetano Cesari, already a critic for the newspapers
Il secolo and Corriere della sera, focused on militant criticism. Cesari, in his
articulate intervention, evoked the distinction that had already surfaced in the
debate in Italy between journalistic and musicological criticism.14
The question of language and new trends in composition, particularly in
relation to the reception and acceptance of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone techni-
que in Italy, became increasingly important in critical debate between the late
thirties and early forties, revealing a strong ideological component which
coincided with the downward spiral of fascism. The dispute was inflamed
both by the transferral of Croce’s eminently literary and logocentric concep-
tion into music criticism and by the refusal of the Croce movement to give an
aesthetically significant role to the technical-linguistic dimension of music.
One such example was the controversy between Luigi Dallapiccola and
Luigi Parente, a strict interpreter of Croce’s thought. In 1939, Parente
rebuffed atonality as being the result of material technicism, lacking in lyrical
intuition and true spiritual inspiration. The identification of atonality with
bad music pushed Luigi Dallapiccola to a polemic reply. The conflict was not
accidental. The need for linguistic and formal renewal advocated by twenti-
eth-century modernism actually conflicted with the trend in idealistic envir-
onments towards a retrospective view, which had its point of reference in
romantic music, creating conservative if not reactionary positions, as seen in
the 1932 Manifesto di musicisti italiani per la tradizione dell’arte romantica
dell’Ottocento.15
The signs of cultural opposition to the regime, which was in evident crisis,
can be detected in the founding of the periodical Corrente, created by the
painter Ernesto Treccani in 1938. Luigi Rognoni, a young musicologist and
music critic from Milan raised in Antonio Banfi’s philosophical circle, was
13
On Italian music criticism in the first half of the twentieth century, see Andrea della Corte, La critica
musicale e i critici (Turin: Utet, 1961), pp. 649–68.
14
See Gaetano Cesari, ‘Le funzioni, i metodi, gli scopi della critica musicale’, in Atti del primo congresso
internazionale di musica Firenze, 30 aprile–4 maggio 1933 (Florence: Felice Le Monnier, 1935).
15
On the dispute between Dallapiccola and Parente, see Pestalozza (ed.), La Rassegna musicale: Antologia,
pp. 377–84.
618 RAFFAELE POZZI
writing about music for Corrente. Rognoni, and the fact is significant, would
become one of the leading scholars and popularisers of Schoenberg’s music
and the Vienna School, in the climate of political, cultural and musical renewal
in Italy after 1945.
Liberation, the Rise of New Music and the Development

of Music Criticism between the 1950s and 1980s
With the fall of fascism in 1943, the Liberation and end of the Second World
War in 1945, and finally, the following year, the end of the monarchy and
birth of the Republic in Italy, there were clear signs of a strong desire to
reconstruct and renew the cultural climate. This recovery, however, occurred
gradually in a country that was still emerging from a dictatorship and devas-
tating war. In the years following the Liberation, there began a process of
democratically organising information, through the mass media and culture.
With the return of press freedom and the relaunching of publications, there
were soon purges and trials of the editorial boards, journalists and collabora-
tors who had been compromised by fascism. The two main periodicals of the
first half of the century, the Rivista musicale italiana and La Rassegna musicale,
began to be published again. The Rivista musicale italiana would cease publica-
tion in 1955, and La Rassegna musicale in 1962. New magazines emerged, some
of which combined reflection on music with literature, science and the arts.
In 1945, following the initiative of Alessandro Bonsanti, the fortnightly Il
mondo was published in Florence. It united critics, musicologists, composers
and creators on widely diffused terrain, which also included dance. Edoardo
Cavallini, Fedele d’Amico, Andrea della Corte, Guido Maggiorino Gatti,
Gianandrea Gavazzeni, Federico Ghisi, Giorgio Graziosi, Vittorio Gui,
Aurel M. Milloss and Goffredo Petrassi all wrote in this periodical. The
collapse of fascism and the end of the war clearly engaged music criticism in
a project involving the institutional rebuilding and restructuring of artistic
activities. The need for a general renewal of music criticism, both at an ethical-
political level and in terms of specific skills, was put forward by Luigi
Dallapiccola in December 1944, while the last battles of war were being
fought, in an article entitled ‘Della critica musicale sui quotidiani’, published
by the newspaper Corriere del mattino in Florence.16
Among the new, often short-lived, periodicals devoted specifically to the
music of that period were Il mondo musicale, founded in 1944 by Raffaello de
16
See Luigi Dallapiccola, ‘Della critica musicale sui quotidiani’, Corriere del mattino, I /94 (9 December
1944), 2.
Rensis (a musicologist and already the music critic for Il messaggero and Il
giornale d’Italia in Rome) and Musica, an international journal founded by
Matteo Glinski in 1945. The latter, in particular, welcomed contributions and
reflections on contemporary music with remarkable openness towards the
international scene. Composers became particularly active in the field and
process of critical thinking. This activity was also an opportunity to distance
themselves from the political and cultural climate of the regime in which
many had been involved. Goffredo Petrassi, who had made his name on the
national and international stage in the thirties, also published numerous
articles in various periodicals such as Il cosmopolita, Il mondo, Teatro and
Musica in the two-year period from 1945 to 1946.17 Composer-critics and
interpreter-critics also frequently wrote in periodicals dealing with literature
and arts that were not specialised in music. Thanks to their training and main
activity, they were able to develop a discourse that tended to focus on the
concrete reality of musical sound and structure, and therefore tended to go
beyond the logocentric and speculative-abstract approach of idealistic
criticism.
In 1946, Petrassi reviewed the ninth Festival internazionale di musica,
Venice for Il Mercurio, where he reported the explosion of controversy
between supporters and opponents of twelve-tone music. In the same year,
the Ferienkurse began in Darmstadt, Germany, the epicentre of new music in
Europe. The theme of new music and of the theory, practice and meaning of
the avant-garde became one of the recurring subjects of Italian music criticism
from the period following the Second World War until the 1980s. The
question of musical language, in the framework of a structuralist approach
to the musical work, became a dominant topic, albeit a controversial one and
the source of spirited querelles.
In post-war Italy, a relationship came to be established between new music,
the quest for a new language and the transformation of society. In fact, the
renewed political and social order in Italy coincided with a change in the
aesthetic paradigm: the ideology of neoclassicism, often associated with
nationalism, declined and avant-garde ideology emerged.18 In this context,
Diapason: Centro Internazionale della Musica was established in Milan in
1948, with the aim of promoting modern music through a series of concerts.
Between 1950 and 1956, the Centre also published a new monthly periodical
Il diapason. It dedicated a single issue to twelve-tone music in 1952, following
17
See Goffredo Petrassi, Scritti e interviste, ed. Raffaele Pozzi (Milan: Suvini Zerboni, 2009), pp. 33–93.
18
For an interpretation of neoclassicism as ideology, see Raffaele Pozzi, ‘L’ideologia neoclassica’, in Jean-
Jacques Nattiez (ed.), Enciclopedia della Musica, i: Il Novecento (Turin: Einaudi, 2001).
620 RAFFAELE POZZI
the death of Arnold Schoenberg in 1951, with articles by, among others,
Massimo Mila and Roman Vlad. Articles were also published by Luciano
Berio and another composer, Giacomo Manzoni, who would later (from
1958 to 1966) practise militant criticism at L’Unità, the daily newspaper
published by the Italian Communist Party. Luigi Rognoni, who had already
been actively involved before the war in Corrente, the journal of opposition to
the regime, proffered a wide-ranging reflection on modern and contemporary
German musicians, from Kurt Weill to Hans Werner Henze. Other figures on
the music criticism scene who worked on the editorial board of Il diapason and
published articles included Herbert Fleischer, Piero Santi and Luigi
Pestalozza, a Marxist critic first writing for the newspaper of the Italian
Socialist Party, Avanti! The latter was also in charge, from 1962 to 1988, of
the music column of Rinascita (1944), the political and cultural monthly
published by the Italian Communist Party.
In the sphere of critical discourse linked to new music, the brief existence of
Incontri musicali: quaderni internazionali di musica contemporanea founded by
Luciano Berio in Milan in 1956 should also be recalled. Published sporadically
until 1960, Incontri musicali, in the four issues that came out, offered author-
itative and crucial articles on numerous issues ranging from electronic music,
aleatory music serialism and the relationship between poetry and music that
were debated in the world of avant-garde and radical music in those years. In
its last issue in 1960, Incontri musicali also hosted a lively exchange between
Fedele d’Amico and Umberto Eco on the concept of opera aperta. In this
dialogue, one can clearly evince the distance between Eco’s theoretical posi-
tion close to the avant-garde, and the vision of d’Amico who, while defending
the reasons of musical pluralism and the works of contemporary music based
on a traditional language, preconfigured his postmodern conception of the
twentieth century.19 In this way, the critical approach proposed by Fedele
d’Amico differed from that of Massimo Mila. This openness and interest were
well expounded in Mila’s critical essay, ‘La linea Nono’, published in La
Rassegna musicale in 1960.20
In 1966, a new journal, Lo spettatore musicale, was founded. Published on an
irregular basis until 1972, and co-edited by Mario Bortolotto and Duilio
19
See Fedele d’Amico, ‘Dell’opera aperta, ossia dell’avanguardia’ and Umberto Eco, ‘Risposta a d’Amico’,
Incontri musicali, 4 (1960), 89–104 and 105–12. On the music criticism of Fedele d’Amico, see Raffaele
Pozzi, ‘Il Novecento musicale postmoderno di Fedele d’Amico’, in I casi della musica. Fedele d’Amico
vent’anni dopo (Convegno di studi, Rome: Accademia nazionale di Santa Cecilia, forthcoming).
20
See Massimo Mila, ‘La linea Nono (a proposito de Il canto sospeso)’, La Rassegna musicale, 4 (1960),
297–311. On Massimo Mila, see articles in Talia Pecker Berio (ed.), Intorno a Massimo Mila. Studi sul teatro
e il Novecento musicale (Florence: Olschki, 1994), p. 216; and Paolo Gallarati, ‘Gli esordi di Massimo Mila e il
suo rapporto con la critica crociana’, in Capra and Nicolodi (eds.), La critica musicale in Italia.
Courir, it introduced an innovative format that focused on contemporaneity

and published writings by Theodor Adorno, who played an important role in
the renovation of music criticism in Italy. The new journal also published
several articles by, among others, Diego Bertocchi, Beniamino Dal Fabbro,
Piero Dallamano, Célestin Deliège, Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi, Heinz-Klaus
Metzger, Gustavo Marchesi, Alberto Pironti, Angelo Sguerzi and Gianfranco
Zaccaro. The cultural openness of Lo spettatore musicale was also witnessed in
contributions by literary critic like Ezio Raimondi and, on a regular basis, by
writer-music critics such as Giorgio Vigolo and Eugenio Montale, the winner
of the 1975 Nobel Prize for Literature.21
On the journalism front, from 1945 onwards, criticism that involved
reviews of concerts and music theatre began a long period of ascent and
consolidation. In the fifties, some new weekly magazines dealing with poli-
tics, culture and current events became well established, for example,
L’Europeo (1945), Il mondo (1949) and L’Espresso (1955). In some of these,
music criticism found a stable and authoritative setting. The music column
in L’Espresso was headed, for example, by Massimo Mila and later by Fedele
d’Amico and Giovanni Carli Ballola.
Between the fifties and eighties, the massive rise in the number of live
performances and the creation of local newsrooms for national newspapers
broadened the spaces dedicated to music criticism. This process coincided
with a general increase in the spread of daily newspapers in Italy during the
decade 1980–1990, reaching a peak in 1991 with sales of 6.6 million copies
a day.22 This growth of the spread of the press in Italy was accompanied by
a concurrent growth of music criticism in the Italian press in the second half of
the twentieth century. Franco Abbiati wrote in the Corriere della sera in Milan
from 1934, followed by Duilio Courir, Paolo Isotta and in Rome by Luigi
Bellingardi and Mya Tannenbaum. At La stampa, Andrea della Corte began his
collaboration in 1919. Later came Massimo Mila, Giorgio Pestelli, Paolo
Gallarati and Sandro Cappelletto.
In 1976, Eugenio Scalfari, previously editor of the weekly magazine
L’Espresso, founded La repubblica in Rome, a daily newspaper which gave
a great deal of space to music news, for which Michelangelo Zurletti, Dino
Villatico and Landa Ketoff worked in Rome, Angelo Foletto in Milan and
Marcello de Angelis in Florence. The music editorial board at Il messaggero in
Rome was also extensive, consisting of Teodoro Celli, Alfredo Gasponi and
21
For the music criticism of the two writers, see Giorgio Vigolo, Mille e una sera all’opera e al concerto
(Florence: Sansoni, 1971), p. 743; and Eugenio Montale, Prime alla Scala (Milan: Mondadori, 1981), p. 526.
22
See Murialdi, Storia del giornalismo in Italia, p. 321.
622 RAFFAELE POZZI
Guido Barbieri. There were noteworthy cases of long and constant critical
activity too, by figures such as Guido Pannain at Il tempo in Rome, Lorenzo
Arruga at Il giorno in Milan and also at the weekly magazine of political
information, Panorama, Leonardo Pinzauti at La nazione in Florence and
Mario Messinis at Il gazzettino in Venice. Foremost among the political party
newspapers was L’Unità. Actively involved in the editorial boards were
Erasmo Valente, Giacomo Manzoni, Paolo Petazzi and Rubens Tedeschi.
The economic newspaper Il sole 24 ore dedicated a remarkable amount of
space to music from 1983 onwards, with articles by Quirino Principe,
Armando Torno and Carla Moreni.
From the sixties onwards, music journals also underwent a phase of renewal
and development. Among the new publications can be mentioned in chron-
ological order Rivista italiana di musicologia (1966), Nuova rivista musicale itali-
ana (1967), Studi musicali (1972), Musica/Realtà (1980) and Il saggiatore musicale
(1994). The field of musical analysis also developed and produced two period-
icals: Analisi: Rivista di Teoria e Pedagogia musicale (1990) and Bollettino del
Gruppo di Analisi e Teoria della Musica (1993). The first specialised periodicals
geared towards musicians, performers or amateurs had already appeared in the
first half of the twentieth century: Il plettro (1911), L’arte pianistica (1914) and
La Scala (1949). This phenomenon spread in the second half of the twentieth
century with, among others, Il flauto dolce (1972), Il Fronimo (1972) and Syrinx
(1989). In the field of musical education came Musica domani (1971), Bequadro
(1981), La cartellina (1977) and Laboratorio musica (1979), an innovative review
edited by Luigi Nono, while 1985 La musica (1985) was mainly devoted to
contemporary art music. The lively blossoming during the second half of
twentieth century of magazines can be testified by Musica (1963), Musica viva
(1977), Il giornale della musica (1985), Musica e Dossier (1986), Piano Time (1983)
and Amadeus (1989).
The expansion of music criticism and of the media that gave it space
between the sixties and eighties was a sign of the growing consideration
given to music in the evolution of Italian society. Music education became
a school subject, at first optional, with the reform of the Middle School in
1962–3 and subsequently, with the reform of 1977–9, compulsory.
Between 1969 and 1990, the number of conservatories of music doubled,
rising from thirty-five to sixty-nine institutes. Music courses in Italian
universities also followed a slow but constant upward trend. The conver-
gence of these phenomena in the eighties is one of the keys to explaining
the general expansion and growth of music criticism at the time and the
vigour of musical publishing, which would, however, show the first signs
of decline during the nineties.
Radio and Television, Traditional Folk Music, Jazz

and Popular Music Criticism
At the end of the Second World War, the profound historical and cultural
transformations in progress were accompanied by a growing interest in new
musical genres, a general change in the ways of broadcasting and commu-
nicating music and, in the following decades, by an ongoing pluralistic broad-
ening of discourses on music. First of all, radio played a new role in the mass
media compared to the past. In the schedules of the EIAR (Ente Italiano per le
Audizioni Radiofoniche), founded under fascism in 1927, there had been
a great deal of music, but as sound essentially, without critical comment.
Nevertheless, in Mussolini’s vision, the printed press continued to maintain
its primacy over radio. With the foundation in 1944 of the public service
broadcaster, RAI (Radio Audizioni Italiane), a new phase began in which
interest in the radio and its diffusion grew steadily. Between 1947 and 1953,
the number of subscribers rose from around two million to about 4.8 million,
an increase of about 240 per cent. Polls showed that listeners requested more
light music, which coincided with the birth in 1951 of the Sanremo Music
Festival, dedicated to Italian pop music, an event which owed much of its
successful development to radio and later to television.23
The Terzo Programma was founded in 1950. This cultural channel dedi-
cated a considerable amount of space to music, and contributions by music
critics and musicologists were regularly made to the programmes. Among the
various programmes broadcast, L’Approdo held a key position. Originally
created in 1944, it continued under the editorship of the new Terzo
Programma, which was initially directed by the music critic Alberto
Mantelli and later by the composer Guido Turchi. It became the periodical
L’Approdo musicale, founded by Mantelli in 1958.24 With the end of the state
monopoly in broadcasting, the liberalisation of private and commercial broad-
casters, and the RAI reform in 1975, the Terzo Programma was renamed
Radio 3. In the long period that followed, Radio 3 offered a permanent place
at its microphones to Italian music criticism, proposing news, comment and
introductions on listening to various music genres. Between the seventies and
nineties, Radio 3 broadcast long-standing programmes such as Concerto del
mattino, broadcast in the morning and initially dedicated to classical music; La
barcaccia, dedicated to opera; and Radio 3 Suite, a lengthy cultural programme
that also incorporated music. The use of live coverage spread, favouring
23
On the history of radio and television in Italy and for the data quoted, see Franco Monteleone, Storia
della radio e della televisione in Italia (Venice: Marsilio, 1992), pp. 249–51.
24
See Alberto Mantelli, ‘Editoriale’, L’Approdo musicale, I (1958), 3–4.
624 RAFFAELE POZZI
a colloquial nature of communication and tending to distance itself from the

more rigid modalities of fifties programmes that were dominated by a form of
verbal communication based on written texts. This change, coming from the
radio, had an important influence on the language of music criticism that, also
in the press, began to be less formal and literary. Space was also given to
criticism in presentations, both from microphones and through programme
notes, during the concert seasons played by RAI’s national orchestras. RAI’s
first orchestra was founded in Turin in 1931 and, over the years, the orchestras
of Rome, Milan and Naples were added. In 1994, the closure of three orches-
tras, reduced to one sole orchestra in Turin, was a sign of RAI’s progressive
withdrawal from the field of promoting and broadcasting art music, even for
educational purposes.
After the birth of television, which began broadcasting in 1954, prompting
the state broadcaster to change name from Radio Audizioni Italiane to
Radiotelevisione Italiana (RAI), the new medium spread rapidly and, over
time, contributed to Italy’s sociocultural transformation. From being preva-
lently agricultural, the country became industrial, entering a period of eco-
nomic boom and consumer affluence, whose symbol was to some extent the
possession of a car, household appliances and a television. Radio had pre-
viously stolen the monopoly in communication and information from the
printed press, but in only a few years the advent of television ousted the radio.
In 1965, television overtook the radio, with five million subscriptions, and
grew constantly over the following years with the addition, in the second half
of the seventies, of private broadcasters.25
Perhaps because of the visual identity of the new medium, or maybe due to the
cultural policy pursued by RAI, which with the liberalisation of the airwaves
suffered competition from commercial television, the space given to non-
commercial music or critical discourse on music was generally marginal and
sporadic in Italian television compared to radio. The presence of music criticism
on Italian television was limited to a few cases. During the sixties and seventies,
this included Roman Vlad’s 1962 critical introductions to the performances of
the pianist Arturo Benedetti Michelangeli; the broadcast Specchio sonoro edited by
Vlad in 1964; and the twelve broadcasts entitled C’è musica & musica curated by
Berio in 1972, at a time when public television had not yet abandoned pro-
grammes aimed at educating and disseminating information.26
25
For the statistics, see the report, ISTAT, Sommario di statistiche storiche, 1926–1985 (Rome, 1986),
28–99.
26
Raffaele Pozzi, ‘Remembering C’è musica e musica di Luciano Berio: considerazioni attuali su tele-
visione e musica d’oggi’, La musica negli occhi, International Congress, Il saggiatore musicale, Bologna
(22–24 October 2010).
The highly original and innovative nature of C’è musica & musica was based
on an open, pluralistic, critical and also ‘theatrical’ and ironic presentation of
the contemporary music scene, as recounted by the protagonists: composers
and musicians, but also musicologists and music critics such as Diego
Carpitella, Mila, Santi and Vlad. The pluralistic approach of Berio influenced
the TV programme Tutto è musica (1980–81) run by Gianluigi Gelmetti. Music
criticism was partially present in the cultural broadcast Sapere (1967–71), in
L’amore è un dardo (1993) run by Alessandro Baricco and in All’Opera! (1999)
curated by Antonio Lubrano, both broadcasts devoted to opera.
The specificity of television was naturally attuned to the multimedia and
audio-visual unity existing in some of the popular music trends of the eighties.
In this field, RAI produced a broadcast titled Mister fantasy from 1981 to 1984,
an extensive cycle of programmes, curated by the rock music critic Carlo
Massarini, which for the first time in Italy was entirely dedicated to the
presentation of contemporary rock videos.
Turning to the field of critical reflection on non-classical music, distinct
areas emerged in Italy in the twentieth century. Starting from traditional folk
music, research into nineteenth-century folk traditions was followed up by
the first generation of Italian scholars to study this area: the so-called etnofonia,
which included Alberto Favara and Giulio Fara. The latter was a contributor
to the Rivista musicale italiana. Between the wars, numerous scholars, includ-
ing Francesco Balilla Pratella and Giorgio Nataletti, published articles and
critical reflections on national folklore in the periodical Rassegna dorica.27
It was in the antifascist climate and in the post-war renewal that the concept
of popolare shed the populist-nationalist component that had been fuelled by
fascism and assumed the traits of an alternative and politically antagonistic
way of thinking in opposition to the cultural hegemony of the ruling classes.
Antonio Gramsci’s political thought, the Italian neorealist literature and
cinema of, among others, Primo Levi, Italo Calvino, Roberto Rossellini and
Vittorio de Sica witness the social and cultural change. Building on this new
vision and influenced by the writings of the ethnologist Ernesto de Martino,
ethnomusicology in Italy laid new scientific foundations through field
research on music of oral tradition conducted from 1954 to 1955 by Diego
Carpitella and Alan Lomax on the one hand, and by Roberto Leydi on the
other. It should also be noted that this new vision and study of ethnic music
would converge significantly with the rise of new music in Italy during the
27
On folk and ethnic music criticism in the first half of the twentieth century, see Ignazio Macchiarella,
‘Tracce di pratiche musicali dell’oralità nelle riviste demologiche dei primi decenni del Novecento’, in
Capra and Nicolodi (eds.), La critica musicale in Italia.
626 RAFFAELE POZZI
post-war period.28 Critical and, broadly speaking, anthropological reflection

on ethnic music of oral tradition had been covered in numerous periodicals,
including the journal Lares (1912), Il cantastorie (1963), La ricerca folklorica
(1980), I giorni cantati (1981) and Culture musicali (1982).
Jazz in Italy also began to spread widely with the liberation from fascism,
which had opposed it for being a despicable form of North American ‘negri-
tude’. In 1945, on the initiative of Giancarlo Testoni, the review Musica Jazz
was founded in Milan. In 1938, together with Ezio Levi, Testoni had already
published a book entitled Introduzione alla vera musica Jazz, which can be
considered the first attempt in Italy to create a valid synthetic reflection on
the genre.29 Working on the editorial board of the review (by far the longest-
lived in this field and still published today) was a group of critics who helped
to promote jazz in Italy in the second half of the twentieth century. Among
these was Arrigo Polillo, a music critic who would head the magazine without
interruption from 1965 to 1984. Other magazines were Tempo di Jazz (1962)
and, more recently, Jazzit (1997).
The flourishing and important presence of periodicals devoted to sound
recording and music reproduction across period must also be mentioned.
Foremost in this field were Il disco (1933), Musica e dischi (1945), Discoteca
(1960), Suono stereo hi-fi (1971) and Stereoplay (1972).30 In parallel with the
mass consumption of popular music in the late twentieth century, which was
based on a variegated galaxy of music, from the songs produced by Italian
light music to international pop and rock, there emerged a wide range of
publications essentially addressing a young audience – namely, Il musichiere
(1959), Tuttamusica (1962), Ciao 2001 (1969) or Muzak (1973), and Gong
(1974) – that proposed a new and ironic critical language.
The phenomenon of periodicals specialising in different genres also affected
popular music. Two examples devoted to alternative rock are Rockerilla (1978)
and Rumore (1992).31 The importance of pop and rock music led to an expan-
sion of the editorial boards of the major national newspapers between the
seventies and eighties. Classical music critics increasingly worked alongside
new critics who were experts in pop and jazz music. Limiting the overview to
the main national newspapers, we see that Mario Luzzatto Fegiz and Vittorio
28
See Diego Carpitella, ‘Convergenze fra indagine etnomusicologica e ricerche espressive
contemporanee’, La Rassegna musicale, X X X I /4 (1961), 390–6; and Roberto Leydi, ‘George Gershwin e il
Porgy and Bess’, Il diapason, V (1955), 15–23.
29
See Gian Carlo Testoni and Ezio Levi, Introduzione alla vera musica Jazz (Milan: Magazzino Musicale,
1938), pp. 115.
30
See Capra, ‘La stampa ritrovata’, p. 81.
31
For an overview on the popular music magazines, see Federico Capitoni, La critica musicale (Rome:
Carocci, 2015), pp. 50, 72–3.
Franchini wrote for the Corriere della sera, Giulio Cesare Romana and Franco
Fayenz for Il giornale, Marco Mangiarotti and Pino Candini for Il giorno, Gino
Castaldo and Ernesto Assante for La repubblica, Marinella Venegoni and
Mimmo Candito for La stampa, and Fabrizio Zampa, Dario Salvatori and
Marco Molendini for Il messaggero. From the eighties onwards, the success
of popular music in Italy, and its growing relevance in wider culture, pro-
duced a specific criticism which has peculiar communicative and linguistic
modalities based on more participant observation to the object and more
complicity with the reader than the traditional music criticism. Particular
attention was paid to popular music by the periodical Musica/Realtà, for which
Roberto Agostini, Franco Fabbri, Luca Marconi and Paolo Prato wrote,
among others.
In the last years of the twentieth century, with the growing supremacy of
television superseded by the widespread and global use of the Internet, the
methods of producing, communicating and consuming music changed dra-
matically, and the same happened to the discourses on music. The web
transformed the world and the modalities of the information and commu-
nication which, at the beginning of the twentieth century, were dominated
only by the printed press. Music criticism, and even the identifying profile of
the critic, were deeply affected by these changes, and this led to a crisis fraught
with questions and reflections on the state of criticism and its future during
the nineties.
The issue emerged in an article, ‘La critica musicale italiana: un autori-
tratto’, based on a questionnaire, edited by Giuseppina La Face Bianconi,
addressed to several Italian music critics published in the Rivista italiana di
musicologia. A lively roundtable held in Latina in 1991 was also organised by
Raffaele Pozzi, titled Critica musicale e musicologia: quale rapporto? Critics and
musicologists such as Giovanni Carli Ballola, Duilio Courir, Francesco
Degrada, Giuseppina La Face Bianconi, Giorgio Pestelli, Agostino Ziino and
Michelangelo Zurletti took part in it.32 The theme of the crisis in music
criticism in the daily press was addressed by Leonardo Pinzauti, in the wake
of an article of the journalist Alberto Papuzzi written in 1994 for the monthly
I concerti dell’Unione musicale, printed in Turin. Pinzauti collected and com-
mented on the responses by Giorgio Pestelli, Alessandro Baricco, Giovanni
Carli Ballola and Paolo Gallarati to Alberto Papuzzi’s article by writing
another article entitled ‘Ma è proprio vero che è morta la critica musicale sui
32
See Giuseppina La Face Bianconi (ed.), ‘La critica musicale italiana: un autoritratto’, Rivista italiana di
musicologia, X X V I /1 (1991), 117–35; Raffaele Pozzi (chair), Critica musicale e musicologia: quale rapporto?
Società e Rivista italiana di musicologia e Associazione nazionale critici musicali, Latina, Palazzo della
Cultura (27 September 1991).
628 RAFFAELE POZZI
giornali?’ published in the Nuova rivista musicale italiana in 1995.33 The cause of
the crisis in music criticism, according to Papuzzi’s article, could be blamed
on the inability to rouse interest in readers due to a lack of the communication
skills that he said characterised the best articles by d’Amico or Mila. In the
newspaper reviews dedicated to music, there was also an excess of information
that was, so to speak, ‘academic’ or of a literary nature.
In his reply, Giorgio Pestelli advocated, on the contrary, the literary nature
of journalistic music criticism, closely bound to the medium of writing, whose
task was to convey opinions and not irritate the reader with narratives and
controversies that were unrelated to the subject. For Pestelli, the focus of
critical reflection for the critic was and must remain the performance of the
musical work. The different positions expressed by Patuzzi and Pestelli were
significant in that they were a prime example of two different conceptions of
criticism in the face of changes that were occurring in the communication
modalities of music and music discourse at the end of the twentieth century.
Today, in fact, communication tends to be empathic, emotional and influ-
enced by the fast and adrenaline-charged audio-visual language of the
Internet, by the synthetic and provocative speed of the blogger messages
rather than the slow and pondered rhythms of the written word in splendid
literary guise.
Pestelli’s hope for music criticism was that of a communicative model,
faithful to the etymology, which would competently mirror, distinguish and
formulate opinions, and then motivate them with a stylistically controlled and
rational use of words that would inevitably be elitist. This model essentially
corresponded to the traditional historical method of music criticism practised
by the press, which largely typified the twentieth century. In Patuzzi’s posi-
tion, on the other hand, one catches sight of a concept that aspires, through
the process of music criticism, to evoke an empathic reaction in the reader,
implicitly miming the dominant interactive and participative model of mass
communication conveyed by the Internet, with which the twentieth century
came to a close.
33
For the debate, see Leonardo Pinzauti (ed.), ‘Ma è proprio vero che è morta la critica musicale sui
giornali?’, Nuova rivista musicale italiana, X X I X /1 (1995), 49–60.
. 32 .
Wider Still and Wider: British Music Criticism since

the Second World War
CHRISTOPHER DINGLE
The story of British music criticism since the Second World War is straight-
forward and disheartening. At least, it is straightforward to the various fellow
academics, critics, musicians, promoters and assorted music cognoscenti who
have kindly (and sometimes not so kindly) shared their views on the matter
with me over the past decade. It is a story of a long golden age, in which
venerable figures were given unlimited acres of space to espouse their great
wisdom, followed by a precipitous decline in both quantity and quality. It is
a perception that echoes a generally nuanced 2001 editorial by Marc Bridle for
Seen & Heard: ‘Since then [the 1980s], critics have lost their influence as
movers and shakers, in part due to philistinism among arts editors and
decreased critical coverage in newspapers. Moreover, the decline of classical
music is irrevocably linked to the rise of popular music – and the nefarious
(and probably incorrect) belief that this is what readers want.’1 As will become
apparent, this widely and sincerely held perception of post-war music criti-
cism in Britain is, at the very least, questionable, if not demonstrably flawed in
key respects. It is not that this view is necessarily entirely wrong, but it is
certainly simplistic and usually based purely on anecdotal evidence.
Throughout the period in question, and especially the decades at each end,
the health of British music criticism is more complex and surprising.
Moreover, the story told in any history depends on the outlook of the teller
and it is a conceit of many of those subscribing to the perspective given above
that music criticism means classical music criticism. Popular music criticism
does not count in this view; the ‘philistinism’ and ‘decreased critical coverage’
is in relation to classical music as written about in traditional media. Popular
music criticism tends to be framed as a threat, often in terms uncannily
resonant of those used by opponents of immigration. While individual critics
or specific articles may be viewed as decent, criticism of popular music is
Various aspects of this chapter draw on research undertaken jointly with Laura Hamer. I am also grateful
to Sophie Redfern for assorted bits of useful ferreting.
1
Marc Bridle, ‘The Art of Critics and Criticism?’, Seen & Heard (November 2001), online, available at
www.musicweb-international.com (accessed 15 May 2018).
[629]
a discipline that is generalised as being an interloper, bringing its uncivilised

ways and stealing ‘our’ reviewing space. And yet, popular music shares the
same challenges, as is clear from Simon Frith’s observations in Chapter 26 of
this book:
By the turn of the century, the most interesting rock writing was appearing in
online rather than print magazines, and the blogosphere had become
a significant outlet for established rock writers, as the space in print outlets
was steadily reduced . . . the fragmentation of the music market, which was
both a cause and an effect of new digital music services, meant that rock
criticism had less significance anyway.
There are certainly challenges for criticism of all types of music (and other
fields) in twenty-first-century Britain, and there has been a discernible decline
in some respects, but the prime causes and location of these are not always as
commonly supposed, and the resulting picture is more tangled than that
produced by simplified nostalgia for a bygone and often misremembered era.
This chapter falls broadly into two parts. The first considers the main body
of the period since the Second World War primarily in terms of the tastes and
practices of some notable figures in British music criticism. The second part of
the chapter then looks beyond these to consider the context for the British
press, notably in the immediate post-war period and then the 1980s, in the
hope of providing a deeper perspective for the ensuing discussion of more
recent history.
The Post-War Perspective 1: Figures of Varying Quality

In the decade immediately after the Second World War, key positions in the
British newspapers and journals were filled by men who were already well
established as critics in the 1930s. Like many in their generation, they exhib-
ited in their different ways a broad conservatism suggesting an understand-
able desire to re-establish the norms that had existed before the war. Ernest
Newman continued to make ex cathedra pronouncements at The Sunday Times
and showed no sign of retiring, much to the chagrin of Neville Cardus, who
briefly joined the newspaper in 1948 as a cricket writer on his return from
spending the war years in Australia writing for the Sydney Morning Herald.2
After a brief spell at the Evening Standard and a short period back in Australia,
Cardus eventually settled in London, where his heart-on-sleeve superior
eloquence returned to the pages of The Manchester Guardian.3 To these titans
2
Robin Daniels, Cardus: Celebrant of Beauty (Lancaster: Palatine, 2009), p. 270.
3
The Manchester Guardian became The Guardian in 1959.
Wider Still and Wider: British Music Criticism 631
can be added Richard Capell, long-standing critic of The Daily Telegraph, and
Frank Howes, who had taken over from H. C. Colles as chief music critic at
The Times in 1943. John Amis later described them as being ‘like Canutes
trying to stem the tide of modernism’.4 That is not to say that there was a lack
of insight from the old guard, even if the views often now seem dated. For
instance, in a broadly sceptical review of the first British concert performance
of Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie in 1954, Cardus notes that ‘In the first
“Chant d’amour” a sentimental strain on the strings reminded me of the
saying that if you scratch any contemporary French composer you will find
Massenet.’5 While the comparison may have seemed humorous, even provo-
cative, in the mid-1950s, Messiaen did indeed feel kinship with Massenet,
recent research revealing that his admiration extended to various
borrowings.6
As the grand old man of British music criticism, Newman remained com-
pulsive reading, and his continued advocacy of Wagner in the post-war years
was telling. He rarely covered live events, preferring to write about musical
issues of the day. That he now belonged to a different age, though, was
apparent from his comments in 1958 about the BBC radio programme
Desert Island Discs. Having described it in one article as ‘the most comically
lunatic of all the BBC’s inventions’,7 a further column a fortnight later was
devoted to responding to the resulting postbag, suggesting that ‘the castaway
might have saved a few of his scores from the wreck’ and suggesting that ‘any
ordinarily intelligent musician’ would prefer losing hearing to sight.8
Newman eventually stepped down as chief music critic at The Sunday Times
in 1958, a year before his death aged ninety. To a degree, Cardus took over his
mantle and was similarly feted, even becoming, in 1966, the first music critic
to receive a knighthood (though his cricket writing may have been more
instrumental, given Prince Philip’s enthusiasm for the sport). Perhaps most
tellingly, he repeatedly used his ‘survey’ articles during the 1950s to promote
the cause of Mahler’s music, still a niche area in Britain at that time.
Alongside these older figures, a younger generation soon emerged, many of
whom, such as Andrew Porter, Desmond Shawe-Taylor and William Mann,
were advocates for new music of all kinds and change in all sorts of aspects of
4
John Amis, ‘Critical Pastmasters’, John Amis Online (16 December 2011), available at johnamismusic
.blogspot.co.uk (accessed 15 May 2018).
5
Neville Cardus, ‘Messiaen’s Turangalila [sic]: Love Song in Ten Movements’, Manchester Guardian
(14 April 1954), 5.
6
Yves Balmer, Thomas Lacôte and Christopher Brent Murray, ‘“Un cri de passion ne s’analyse pas”:
Messiaen’s Harmonic Borrowings from Massenet’, Twentieth-Century Music, 13/2 (September 2016),
233–60.
7
Ernest Newman, ‘The Mad World of the Diskers [sic]’, Sunday Times (22 June 1958), 10.
8
Ernest Newman, ‘The Ultimate Things’, Sunday Times (6 July 1958), 8.
musical life. The South African-born Porter wrote for various newspapers,
including The Times, The Telegraph and The Express, before joining the
Financial Times as it introduced music criticism to its pages. Wide-
ranging in taste, Porter was allowed an unusually generous amount of
space and latitude by the Financial Times for his discursive style. His
particular enthusiasm for opera and new music also helped reinvigorate
The Musical Times, which he edited from 1960 to 1967. Shawe-Taylor
established his credentials as critic for The New Statesman, where he was
an articulate supporter of new music and a major authority on the voice,
before being appointed in 1958 to the daunting position of successor to
Ernest Newman as chief music critic for The Sunday Times. Not that The
Sunday Times had been entirely devoid of fresh blood, for Felix
Aprahamian had been appointed as Newman’s deputy a decade earlier in
1948. As all who met him will testify, Aprahamian was a larger than life
character, neatly encapsulated by John Amis’s fond recollection that ‘if
Felix were put into a book his character would seem overwritten. No one
could be at the same time like something out of Proust and something out
of P. G. Wodehouse. But he was.’9 Aprahamian’s innate flamboyance was
disciplined in his writing by adopting Newman’s strict precision and
professed objectivity. Crucially, as a friend of both Poulenc and
Messiaen, among numerous others, Aprahamian was closely acquainted
with the radical musical developments of the new generation of compo-
sers in Paris and beyond, even if he was not untempered in admiration for
them. Similarly, when William Mann joined the music staff of The Times in
1948, aged just twenty-four, his writings acted as a progressive counter-
weight to Frank Howes, who, despite having been a keen champion of
British composers such as Walton and Vaughan Williams between the
wars, struggled with Britten and Tippett, never mind the continental
avant-garde. A staunch advocate of opera in English, Howes also believed
strongly in the policy of The Times that criticism should be anonymous.
Howes’s retirement came in 1960, and it was entirely apt that Mann
should replace him as chief music critic on the cusp of a decade charac-
terised as looking forwards rather than back.
The figure straddling the generations was William Glock, who had written
for The Telegraph in the early 1930s and long advocated engaging with the
various new compositional paths being forged. After The Telegraph, Glock
wrote for The Observer until October 1945, when the editor, Ivor Brown,
reportedly exclaimed that ‘one more article about Britten, Tippett, Bartók
9
John Amis, Amiscellany: My Life, My Music (London: Faber, 1985), pp. 67–8.
and co., and I’ll fire you’. The following Sunday, Glock wrote about Bartók
and was duly sacked.10 Brown was profoundly mistaken, though, if he
thought that would stem the modernist tide. Glock would go on to become
arguably the most influential figure in British music, with his appointment in
1959 as Controller of Music at the BBC, the Proms being added to his
portfolio the following year, giving him free rein to implement his conviction
that new music and new areas must be explored. The ground was laid for the
resulting revolution in both broadcast and concert programming, not just by
Glock’s writings – after The Observer he was briefly a critic for The Scotsman
then The New Statesman as well as founding and editing the journal The Score –
but also those of the more progressively minded post-war generation, such as
Porter, Shawe-Taylor and Mann.
Glock’s move from critic to taking charge of what is now BBC Radio 3 and
the BBC Proms was repeated three decades later by Nicholas Kenyon, who
(presumably coincidentally) also wrote for The Observer beforehand.11 Such
movement between the role of critic and that of administrator or promoter
was not unusual. Aprahamian’s multifarious activities, for instance, included
a period as de facto promoter for various French performers, being employed
as a consultant for United Music Publishers (UK distributors for almost all
French publishers), an advisor representing the Delius Trust and a leading
voice in various organ societies. All of this was at the same time as writing for
The Sunday Times.12 Similarly, John Amis, London critic of The Scotsman after
Glock, was Sir Thomas Beecham’s manager for a time, worked for the London
Philharmonic Orchestra and was administrative director of Dartington
Summer Music School. These diverse activities reflect, perhaps, the fact
that, even in the 1950s and 1960s, what would now be termed portfolio
careers were the norm for anyone working in the arts. It was usual for critics
to be active participants in the musical world, advocates from within, rather
than dispassionate observers. That Aprahamian would review an organ con-
cert given at the Royal Festival Hall for which he had written the programme
notes, and sometimes advised on the music, or a French performer whose
engagements he had arranged, was not seen by him, nor many others, as
problematic. Similarly, Amis admitted that, in the post-war period, the anon-
ymity of reviews in several newspapers meant that critics could cover for each
10
Amis, ‘Critical Pastmasters’. Glock’s last review for The Observer appeared on 28 October 1945 and
discussed interesting aspects of upcoming concerts, including works by Bartók and Tippett in Liverpool,
and Stravinsky, Prokofiev and Britten in London.
11
Kenyon became Controller of BBC Radio 3 in 1992 and became director of the BBC Proms in 1996. He
left the BBC in 2007 to become Managing Director of the Barbican Centre in London.
12
For an enjoyable insight into the range of Aprahamian’s activities, see Felix Aprahamian, A Life in Music
and Criticism, eds. Lewis Foreman and Susan Foreman (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2015).
other, sometimes even writing two reviews of the same event with differing
perspectives.13
Aprahamian and Amis lacked formal musical training, bringing the enthu-
siasm and inquisitiveness of the autodidact, as did in their differing ways
Edward Greenfield and Michael Kennedy. While not born into such abject
poverty as his esteemed Manchester Guardian colleague Neville Cardus,
Greenfield was from a working-class background. Having done his national
service and then studied languages and law at Cambridge, he served a similar
apprenticeship at the newspaper to that of his older colleague, working first as
a filing clerk, and then as a lobby correspondent, before getting the chance to
write about music as a record critic.14 Similarly, Kennedy started at the
Manchester office of The Telegraph as a tea boy in 1941 aged just fifteen,
returning as a night editor, following service in the Royal Navy. He started
writing about music for the newspaper in 1948 and became a staff critic in
1950.
Despite such self-taught figures, there was marked rise in the number of
musicologist-critics who not only had university music degrees, doctorates in
some cases, but also continued scholarly research alongside their criticism. As
Andrew Porter noted, ‘in England, a line between musicology and musical
journalism is not strictly drawn’,15 and it was not uncommon for critics to
hold posts in universities or music colleges before, after or even alongside
their newspaper careers. While Newman led the way, notably with his work
on Wagner, Michael Cooper, Winton Dean, Joan Chissell, Stanley Sadie,
Stephen Walsh and Barry Millington among the following critical cohorts
made telling contributions in both spheres. In particular, Cooper, who wrote
for The Telegraph gave insight into French repertoire at a time when, despite
the two World Wars, Germanic thought and culture still predominated, while
several decades later Millington addressed issues of anti-Semitism in Wagner.
A specialist in Schumann, Joan Chissell taught at the Royal College of Music,
Oxford University and University of London in the 1940s, before tempering
the male hegemony of the critical world by joining The Times in 1948 (the
same year as William Mann) as its first female critic. Stanley Sadie joined The
Times a generation later, in 1964, moving in 1981 to the Financial Times, by
which time he had overseen the first of edition of The New Grove Dictionary of
Music and Musicians and was already working on various supplementary
volumes as well as being editor of The Musical Times.
13
Amis, Amiscellany, p. 165.
14
Stephen Walsh, ‘Portrait of a Guardian Music Critic’, The Spectator (8 February 2014), available at www
.spectator.co.uk (accessed 15 May 2018).
15
Andrew Porter, Music of Three Seasons 1974–1977 (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1978), p. ix.
The presence of active scholars among the critics meant that there was informed
debate, from some quarters at least, as research was put into practice. In particular,
as the push for historically informed performance gained increasing traction from
the 1960s onwards, there were critics aware of the scholarship underpinning what
were often viewed initially as cranky attempts at musical archaeology.
People have begun to realize that style in performance is no abstract thing, and
that it cannot be dissociated from instruments themselves . . . During 1968
I also heard, in the Purcell Room, Couperin on a harpsichord of authentic size
and specification, and Mozart on a contemporary fortepiano: in each case use
of the proper means gives sharper insight on the composer’s ends.16
Not that there was an un-nuanced welcome for all such experiments, as is clear
from a 1974 round-up of recordings by Sadie, where Jean-Claude Malgoire’s
approach to Handel reminded him ‘that authenticity may have its painful
side’, going on to observe that it would be preferable for performers ‘to think
in terms of a composer’s ideal rather than some possible, disagreeable actu-
ality’. By contrast, the same round-up enthuses about a Mozart horn concerto
‘on a natural horn, whose patchiness of tone – expected, of course, by
Mozart – puts phrase after phrase in a new light’.17
While what would later come to be termed Historically Informed
Performance increasingly challenged the hegemony of the late-Romantic
approach to performance in the 1970s, Glock’s encouragement of new (and
old) music at the BBC was reinforced by critics such as Bayan Northcott and
Paul Griffiths who were thoroughly immersed in the various strands of con-
temporary experimentation. Neither Northcott nor Griffiths trained initially
in music. Griffiths studied biochemistry and microbiology but immediately
started a career in music writing, editing articles on twentieth-century music
for The New Grove.18 He started writing for The Times as a freelancer in 1973,
rapidly being recognised as an authority on new currents in music with
fluency of word and thought in areas often thought difficult. He became
chief music critic at The Times for a decade from 1982 and also wrote articles
for numerous journals, as well as books on key figures such as Barraqué,
Boulez, Cage, Ligeti, Maxwell Davies, Messiaen and Stravinsky, along with
several influential overviews of new music.19 Having read English at Oxford,
16
Stanley Sadie, ‘Sound as a Clue to Style’, The Times (Friday 17 January 1969), 12.
17
Standley Sadie, ‘The Sound of Authenticity’, The Times (Saturday 15 June 1974), 11.
18
Rosemary Williamson, ‘Griffiths, Paul’ Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, available at
www.oxfordmusiconline.com (accessed 17 January 2017).
19
Notably, Modern Music: A Concise History from Debussy to Boulez (London: Thames and Hudson, 1978);
Modern Music: The Avant Garde since 1945 (London: Dent, 1981); Modern Music and After: Directions since
1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995).
Northcott spent much of the 1960s working as a teacher, but his developing
interest in composition turned at the end of the decade to formal study at
Southampton with Alexander Goehr and Jonathan Harvey. He became music
critic for the New Statesman in 1973, and then The Sunday Telegraph in 1976,
writing primarily about new music.20 Northcott joined The Independent as
chief music critic when it launched in 1986. As Fiona Maddocks, the first
classical music editor, recalls, ‘the Saturday music page every week had a big
article from Bayan on really quite tricky subjects and they were not commer-
cial subjects at all, they were entirely music driven’.21
As a new national broadsheet, The Independent shook up arts coverage in
British newspapers, with much more explicit delineation of different types of
music being reviewed, such as a specific music page with a feature at the top
and usually three reviews below.22 It also attempted to break the London-
centric critical focus. Whereas one of the contracted critics from other news-
papers would, in the words of Maddocks, ‘be sent to Manchester or to
Birmingham or Liverpool or to Glasgow or Edinburgh to sort of look around,
report, and come back again’, The Independent would use local voices such as
Raymond Monelle.23 Unsurprisingly, the influence of The Independent on the
way that newspaper criticism was undertaken was at its height in the early
years of its existence, for its rivals soon adopted aspects of its approach.
There were, of course, other outlets for music criticism aside from news-
papers, notably various magazines and journals. Indeed, for much of the
period covered by this chapter, magazines and fanzines were generally the
prime, if not the only outlet for written criticism of popular music and jazz.
Many of these were led by consideration of reviewing recordings, while, in the
classical sphere, Gramophone was the enduring survivor, with no sustained
competition until the 1990s. Broadcasting also provided new opportunities,
with radio programmes such as ‘Musical Magazine’ on the BBC’s Home
Service having periodic reviews of events, recordings and books on music.24
BBC Radio 3’s long-running Record Review dates itself back to 1949 on the
Third Programme and 1957 as a regular slot, though the Light Programme25
featured a weekly programme with the same name from 1945 to 1946, usually
20
Rosemary Williamson, ‘Northcott, Bayan’ Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, available at
www.oxfordmusiconline.com (accessed 17 January 2017).
21
Jennifer Skellington, ‘Transforming Music Criticism? An Examination of Changes in Music Journalism
in the English Broadsheet Press from 1981 to 1991’, unpublished PhD thesis, Oxford Brookes University
(2010), 439.
22 23
Ibid., 440. Ibid., 438.
24
Details of individual programmes can be found by searching the BBC Genome Project website,
genome.ch.bbc.co.uk.
25
The Third Programme and Light Programmes were the names of BBC radio stations, not individual
programmes.
presented by Christopher Stone, The Gramophone’s London editor. Not that

such opportunities necessarily represented a broadening of the pool of critics,
as, throughout the period of this chapter, many of those writing for national
newspapers also contributed to The Gramophone and appeared on BBC
programmes.
Closely related to BBC output was the magazine The Listener. Originally set
up in 1929 to publish scripts and transcripts of talks on BBC programmes, it
soon featured previews and reviews as well as essays. Aimed at an intelligent
readership, with relatively long essays that sometimes stopped only a little
way short of musicological, its eventual demise in January 1991 was much
lamented in some quarters. In musical circles it is sometimes described as
having being replaced by BBC Music Magazine, which launched the
following year. However, this can only be partially accurate, as music formed
a relatively small portion of The Listener’s content, which also encompassed
areas as diverse as drama, gardening and chess. In fact, BBC Music Magazine was
more of a rival to Gramophone, though it was actually a general music title,
with recordings forming just part of its remit. Having played a crucial role at
The Independent, Fiona Maddocks was engaged as the founding editor of BBC
Music Magazine, with the thinking behind the new glossy being in part to
attract the new potential audience for classical music revealed by the success
of The Three Tenors.26 In September 1992, just after the first issue of BBC Music
Magazine appeared, a new radio station, Classic FM, started broadcasting and
itself soon launched a magazine. Marked as it is by such new ventures, which
had parallels in other musical genres, as well as the arrival of The Independent
and a general expansion of overall coverage, this period may be viewed as
representing a high-water mark in terms of music criticism in its traditional
print formats. However, in order to put recent developments into perspec-
tive, it is necessary to consider the broader context of newspaper publishing,
not just in the new millennium, but across the period as a whole.
The Post-War Perspective 2: Figures of Varying Quantity

Just as with other aspects of life, the Second World War had a discernible
impact on music criticism in Britain for years after the end of fighting in the
summer of 1945. The outbreak of war saw the British government use emer-
gency powers to impose rationing on newsprint, controlling not just the
number of pages in newspapers and magazines, but also pegging their circula-
tions at their 1939 levels. As the war continued, the restrictions on the
26
Skellington, ‘Transforming Music Criticism?’, 443–4.
number of pages tightened. In 1939, ‘full sheet’ or ‘broadsheet’ daily news-

papers averaged sixteen to twenty-four pages. By 1945, this had fallen to four
pages for most papers, notable exceptions being The Times with eight to ten
pages, The Manchester Guardian with six to eight pages and The Telegraph with
four to six pages.27 The situation was similar for magazines, with The Listener
dropping from a pre-war size of fifty-two pages to twenty-eight pages. This
had an obvious effect on every aspect of newspaper content, with the number
and length of music reviews and news pieces falling dramatically.
Such a situation during the war is not so surprising. However, as with food,
clothing and fuel, the severely damaged infrastructure, combined with an
economy bankrupted and distorted by fighting the war, meant that rationing
continued until well into the 1950s. In 1954, the United Kingdom’s supply of
paper was still only two-thirds of pre-war levels,28 reflected by the fact that
The Times, which had twenty pages on 1 September 1939 and a mere ten on
1 September 1945, had just twelve pages on 1 September 1954. Even when the
supply of paper became more plentiful, the newspapers were in no rush for
the restrictions to be lifted. In marked contrast to the cutthroat world of the
1930s (and the present day), which saw numerous titles come and mostly go,
the government controls of the 1940s and 1950s provided an absolutely
predictable business model in which significant growth in newspaper size or
circulation was impossible without government approval, while decline was
unlikely. The situation was neatly summarised by Lord Beaverbrook, who
ironically observed that the government had given the press freedom in four
respects: freedom from competition, advertising revenue, newsprint and
enterprise.29
What this meant in practical terms is that, from the outbreak of the war
until the late 1950s, the amount of writing about music in newspapers and
journals was significantly less than before the war. For example, in the week
beginning 6 June 1946, The Times carried seven live reviews of around 300
words and one record review (see Table 32.1), while The Manchester Guardian
published just four reviews. By the mid-1960s, the number of reviews in The
Times had more than doubled and, while some were barely 230 words, others
were closer to 650 words. In terms of classical content, there was a slight dip
in the number of concert reviews in 1988, but this was offset by a long review
of records. Moreover, there was now also popular music content, with one
article, one review and a ‘rock’ round-up of recordings, while jazz also had
27
Figures from J. Edward Gerald, The British Press under Government Economic Controls (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1956), p. 201.
28 29
Gerald, The British Press, p. 31. Gerald, The British Press, p. 34.
Table 32.1 Samples of music content in The Times
Year (all
6–11 June) Concert reviews Record reviews Articles
1946 7 1 0
1966 17 0 2
1988 16 (13 classical, 1 3 (1 classical, 1 (popular)
popular, 1 jazz) 1 rock, 1 jazz)
2011 18 (10 classical, 7 11 (3 classical, 6 (1 general, 2 classical,
popular, 1 jazz) 6 popular, 3 popular) plus
1 jazz) 3 obituaries
(2 popular,
1 classical)
two gig reviews as well as a record review. Far from a drastic decline, the
equivalent week in 2011 saw an expansion of coverage. Popular content had
increased significantly and, although there are slightly fewer classical concert
reviews, this is more than balanced by the articles, one of which, ‘When
Barenboim met Boulez’, is over 1,500 words and was also advertised in
a banner on the newspaper’s front page.
While there are naturally variants, the figures in Table 32.1 broadly reflect
those for further sampling. What becomes clear is that when reviews of ‘rock’
events appeared on a more frequent and regular basis in The Times from the
1980s, any consequent reduction in classical coverage was slight, as overall
music coverage increased, at least until the mid-2010s. In other words, pop-
ular music was part of the expansion of British newspapers in size and scope
that occurred in the latter part of the twentieth century, with much larger
sections for sport and areas such as cookery, motoring or holidays on a more
regular basis.
Such figures are given greater nuance for a specific period in Jennifer
Skellington’s commendably detailed study of changes in music coverage in
British broadsheets between 1981 and 1991, one strand of which sampled
three daily newspapers and three Sunday titles in each year of the decade. She
found, for instance, that the number of words devoted to classical coverage in
The Guardian stayed broadly steady, peaking in 1988; the figure for The Times
in this decade declined, yet there was a notable increase in The Sunday Times
towards the end of the decade. In terms of rock and pop, there was a slight
increase in The Guardian and a significant one in The Times, while the Sunday
Times actually saw a fall. Even this is simplifying, for the figures for The
Guardian show a fall for rock and pop at the end of the period and a rise for the
number of words given to classical music.30 Skellington’s study finds slightly
different experiences within each newspaper and, if repeated for the following
decade, might find significantly different results. For instance, while the
period covered by her study partially supports the notion of classical coverage
in The Times being squeezed by popular music, Graham Stewart is clear that
classical reporting strengthened at the end of the decade with the appoint-
ment of Richard Morrison as arts editor and ‘during the nineties coverage
increased again’.31
Alongside such quantitative matters, there has also been a significant qua-
litative change in the nature of British newspapers over the last half century,
prompted initially by the rise of broadcast media, especially the advent of
rolling news channels towards the end of the last century. This transformation
might be characterised rather simplistically as moving from reporting what
has happened to commenting on it or on what might happen as
a consequence. Given that they are expected to convey views, much of what
critics wrote already anticipated this transformation. Even so, reviews that
pre-date it have a much greater sense of straightforward provision of informa-
tion. Critics were also responsible for brief news items that would now be
regarded as too mundane without contextualisation or comment. The follow-
ing punctilious announcement in The Times is a typical unmediated regurgita-
tion of a press release:
COVENT GARDEN OPERA

A change in the cast of Mr. Benjamin Britten’s opera Gloriana at the Royal
Opera House to-morrow night will see Miss Constance Shacklock in the part
of Queen Elizabeth I and Mr. John Lanigan in that of Essex. These two singers
will also perform these parts on July 9. On Friday the Convent Garden Opera
Company will give the first of four performances of Die Meistersinger under
Mr. Clemens Krauss. All of them will be sung in German, and in the cast will
be Mr. Frederick Dalberg, Mr. Murray Dickie, Mr. Richard Holm, Mr. Hans
Hopf, Mr. Karl Kamann, Mr. Benno Kusche, Mr. Paul Schoeffler,
Miss Elizabeth Schwarzkopf, and Miss Shacklock.32
While critics were generally adroit at grabbing their readers’ attention at the
opening of reviews, it was not uncommon for them to open in a similarly
prosaic manner: ‘Mr David Oistrakh played two concertos with the
Philharmonia Orchestra at the Albert Hall last night before a large audience –
30
Jennifer Skellington, ‘Transforming Music Criticism?’, 74–80.
31
Graham Stewart, The History of The Times: The Murdoch Years (London: HarperCollins, 2005), pp.
447–52.
32
Unsigned, ‘Covent Garden Opera’, The Times (29 June 1953), 11.
Brahms’s, which was conducted by Mr. Norman Del Mar, and Khachaturian’s,
conducted by the composer, who is here with the party of artists and scientists
now on a visit from Russia to this country.’33
The shift in approach by newspapers, from which music coverage was not
immune, was most marked in the 1980s. Profound changes in technology
with the introduction of computer typesetting and new forms of printing
went hand in hand with the greater emphasis on comment and a more image-
led approach to page construction. Skellington summarises the effects of this
transformation on music criticism as follows:
At the beginning of the period, music-related writing typically appeared on

a single arts page, comprising a series of overnight concert reviews predomi-
nantly associated with classical music, alongside an occasional small black and
white photographic accompaniment, with written material most often sup-
plied by long-standing music specialists employed directly by the newspaper,
although in some cases by editors or staff writers from other areas of the
newspaper who possessed an interest in music. However, by the end of the
period examined newspapers had dramatically expanded in size and music
coverage was often placed not only on the arts pages but also within the many
different component parts of the newspaper, including supplementary maga-
zines; music coverage was frequently accompanied by large pictorial illustra-
tions, which were increasingly printed in colour, and music writing was more
often provided by an increased number of freelance music journalists. By the
end of the period examined, the broadsheet press appears to have shifted its
stance to one which readily embraced popular music coverage, to the extent
that the former dominance of classical music was being challenged, and over-
night concert reviewing was diminishing in favour of feature writing, an
approach preoccupied with personalities and celebrity rather than the music
itself.34
This qualitative change in the nature of newspapers underlines the fact that
they are very different beasts today from thirty-five or seventy years ago,
a point that is conveyed succinctly by considering a little more quantitative
data. While the pagination of The Times had increased in the late 1950s to its
pre-war proportions of around twenty-four pages and grown to around
thirty-two pages by the 1980s, the move away from hot metal to computer-
based printing in that decade presaged a vast expansion so that editions in the
2010s regularly comprised substantially more than 100 pages. A whole host of
caveats needs to be made with such comparisons, not least that the page size
was smaller and the font size and number of columns changed at various
33
Unsigned, ‘Mr David Oistrakh: Two Concertos’, The Times (26 November 1954), 5.
34
Jennifer Skellington, ‘Transforming Music Criticism?’, 14.
points over the period in question. Even charting word counts can be mis-
leading, since modern newspapers use images to a far greater extent, so that
a piece with fewer words may have much greater prominence on the page. In
essence, a British newspaper from the 2010s bears as much resemblance to its
counterpart from sixty years ago as an out-of-town supermarket does to
a 1950s corner store, containing many things that were simply not thought
part of their remit before.35 This is obvious at a glance since, in the post-war
period, the front pages of The Times and The Manchester Guardian did not carry
news but were filled with classified advertisements. While most lower-brow
newspapers had the now-familiar front-page headlines from early in the
century, and most broadsheets changed during the war, The Manchester
Guardian only adopted what many regarded as an uncouth American trait in
September 1952, and The Times did not relent until May 1966.
In terms of where music fits into these changes, it is dangerous to
generalise, and all sorts of factors can distort the picture. An extreme
instance comes from the fact that there was no musical content at all in
The Times for nearly a year as an industrial dispute caused the paper to cease
production from 1 December 1978 to 12 November 1979. Many of the
figures provided in this chapter have come from The Times, but other titles
will show a different ebb and flow. These are caused not just by major
external factors, but also matters as local as the character of the editor and
owner of each newspaper, who will each have their own preferences. For
instance, coverage of music in The Telegraph contracted significantly in the
first decade-and-a-half of the new century. Conversely, music content at The
Guardian suffered no worse than other areas of the newspaper (which is not
to say it did not suffer) in the various rounds of belt-tightening in the
2000s, possibly a reflection of the fact that the editor was the classical
music-loving Alan Rusbridger. It is too early to tell the extent or nature
of change prompted by his departure at the end of 2015, but initial signs
suggest a discernible contraction of coverage.
Among critics themselves, there was much disquiet in the new century, as
typified by comments made in 2006 by Tom Sutcliffe, deputy arts editor at The
Guardian until 1985:36
35
For more on the methodological challenges of charting changes in newspaper coverage of music
criticism, see Christopher Dingle and Laura Hamer, ‘False Memories and Dissonant Truths: Digital
Newspaper Archives as a Catalyst for a New Approach to Music Reception Studies’, in Clare Mills,
Michael Pidd and Esther Ward (eds.), Proceedings of the Digital Humanities Congress 2012. Studies in the
Digital Humanities (Sheffield: HRI Online Publications, 2014), 1–22. Skellington’s excellent thesis takes
a mixed approach to charting developments across a single decade.
36
Not to be confused with his namesake who, among other things, was the first arts editor at The
Independent.
As we’ve got towards the year 2000 . . . editors don’t really see any distinction
between the different forms of music . . . They feel that classical music doesn’t
have as a large an audience, isn’t as interesting to their readers, their young
readers in particular . . . so they feel they are still doing a perfectly good job
even though the perception among classical music critics of the Critics’
Circle,37 of which I’m Chairman, is that in fact the situation is a complete
disaster.38
Sutcliffe goes on to bemoan the coverage of culture as entertainment, which is

‘simply to provide people with a useful consumer guide’.39 It is a sentiment
that echoes Charles Kensington Salaman’s observation about the general state
of music and criticism that ‘We are living in a utilitarian, not an artistic or
poetic age. This is the “golden age” of royalties and advertisements! From the
dignity of a profession, music appears to be fast descending to a trade.’ Except
that Salaman was speaking in the nineteenth century.40 Closer to Sutcliffe’s
time, and with his newspaper in mind, Cardus referred to the subeditors’
room at The Guardian as ‘the abattoir’ for their lack of sensitivity to the
subject, acting ‘like a butcher cutting a weekend joint’.41
Despite this, the fact that there are many precedents for Sutcliffe’s remarks
does not necessarily invalidate them. The move away from reporting to
commenting, along with a greater concentration on images, made it harder
to justify chronicling events that were neither part of a series nor had repeat
performances. In other words, the issue was not the amount of space given to
various genres of music, but the change in sensibility of newspapers. Hilary
Finch, one of the staff critics for The Times, is clear that classical coverage in the
1980s ‘wasn’t so much elbowed out by the other genres of music as by
features’, noting that ‘once you got a great big feature at the top with
a great big photo . . . it halved your space for reviews’.42 Such observations
are an important corrective to the view of popular and classical music as being
in competition, opposition even. This easy fallacy reflects the anxieties and
prejudices of both camps (or, rather, those who view themselves as belonging
to a camp, regardless of which it is). In terms of British outlets, while there are
numerous variations from time to time and newspaper to newspaper, total
coverage for music expanded dramatically from the 1980s until well into the
2000s, sometimes dramatically. Even in the less frivolous tabloids, what might
be called the semi-serious press, the evidence can be surprising. Eric Mason,
37
A kind of society for arts critics, though many are not members.
38
Jennifer Skellington, ‘Transforming Music Criticism?’, 493. 39
Ibid.
40
Charles Kensington Salaman, ‘On Musical Criticism’, Proceedings of the Musical Association, Second
Session (1875–76), 7.
41
Christopher Brookes, His Own Man: The Life of Neville Cardus (London: Methuen, 1985), p. 257.
42
Jennifer Skellington, ‘Transforming Music Criticism?’, p. 401.
the Daily Mail music critic in the 1960s generally had around 130 words,
sometimes much less, to convey his thoughts. In the 2000s, there was con-
siderable coverage of popular music, but classical music had not disappeared,
and Mason’s successor, David Gillard, generally had around 380 words to play
with. Moreover, it is also important to remember that newspapers going
defunct is not a new phenomenon. For instance, younger composers in the
post-war years found a keen advocate in Scott Goddard until his newspaper,
the liberal-minded News Chronicle, was absorbed by Mason’s employers at the
right-wing Daily Mail.
One consequence of popular music and other genres taking a regular place
alongside criticism of classical music in newspapers was a greater demarcation
of music into subcategories. When William Mann wrote his famed article
about The Beatles in The Times in 1963, the surprise, outrage for some, was
that he viewed the music worthy of discussion. The notion that this would
need a distinct kind of critical coverage did not occur. Music critics in news-
papers wrote about any music that was deemed of interest, whether
Beethoven or The Beatles, jazz, folk or Chinese opera. Classical music domi-
nated, but other genres did get discussed. When Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club
Band was released in 1967, it was reviewed in The Guardian by Edward
Greenfield as part of his ‘Gramophone Records’ column alongside releases
of music by Copland and Penderecki, Greenfield musing that ‘In intention
and even in execution they [Aaron Copland and Krzysztof Penderecki] do not
strike me as very different from some of the way-out sounds on the Beatles’
latest LP . . . There is no longer any need, thank goodness, to apologise for
talking seriously about Beatles music.’43
As they came to be more regular features, newspapers started to delineate
between types of music in their layout. By the end of the century, it was
commonplace to have separate columns or sections variously for classical, pop
or rock, jazz, folk and/or world music, each with their own specialist critics.
By the 2010s, on newspaper websites such as theguardian.com, arts coverage
was now within a ‘Culture’ section, ‘Music’ primarily referring to various
forms of popular music, while ‘Classical’ was a distinct category. As such
demarcations became more common in the 1980s, critics within each field
were often wide-ranging. For instance, Richard Williams’s 1983 ‘rock’ col-
umns included artists as diverse as Luther Vandross, Elkie Brookes, Culture
Club, Nile Rodgers, Joni Mitchell, New Order and Eddy Grant. In terms of
criticism, the term ‘rock’ was largely synonymous with ‘popular’, but denoted
a seriousness of intent by the writer. This is similar to the way that most of
43
Edward Greenfield, ‘Gramophone Records’, The Guardian (Monday 12 June 1967), 7.
those writing about classical music for newspapers and magazines tended to
describe themselves as critics rather than journalists.44 It is also worth noting
that the prestige attached to criticism in a given publication varied according
to the genre, Matt Brennan observing that:
This press hierarchy for the independent rock field finds glossy music maga-
zines at the top and broadsheets roughly at the bottom of the list. But this
hierarchy is reversed in the jazz sector: quality dailies become the most
desirable form of coverage, while jazz magazines are relegated to the
bottom.45
Told from the perspective of popular music, the notion that there has been
a persistent expansion of coverage from the 1950s onwards lacks nuance. It is
possible to cite the appearance of magazines, such as New Musical Express
(NME) in 1952, and the equally significant shift in various newspapers towards
a much more populist approach, the gradual appearance of rock criticism in
broadsheet newspapers and successive waves of new magazines. However,
brief consideration of an iconic title like Melody Maker is instructive. It started
in 1926 essentially as a jazz journal, and the 1950s saw coverage of pop and
jazz side-by-side, but by the 1960s its coverage was almost exclusively pop in
orientation.46 This gradual transformation was significant for the develop-
ment of rock criticism, but was doubtless mourned by the Melody Maker’s jazz
aficionados. Despite numerous competitors, the magazine thrived in its new
guise, though, as noted by Simon Frith in Chapter 26 in this volume, a group
of its writers left in 1970 to form a new magazine, Sounds, and an injection of
new blood from the underground press at NME left Melody Maker trailing
behind the circulation of its principal rival. New competition came in the
1980s and 1990s, initially from new teen-oriented titles such as Smash Hits on
the populist side and The Wire for more searching readers, then glossies like
Q and Uncut that also encompassed an older readership. Despite these new-
comers, Melody Maker retained its reputation as the musician’s paper, covering
indie and alternative rock. As the new millennium approached, its circulation
dropped from its 1970s high of 200,000 to 32,50047 and the magazine folded
in 2000. According to Dave Laing, it was a failure to engage with the emerging
dance music of the 1980s that was ultimately the principal factor in the closure
44
Readily noticed anecdotally, this trait is one of the emerging strands in Gemma Harries and
Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, ‘The Culture of Arts Journalists: Elitists, Saviors or Manic Depressives?’,
Journalism, 8/6 (2007), 619–39.
45
Matt Brennan, ‘The Rough Guide to Critics: Musicians Discuss the Role of the Music Press’, Popular
Music, 25/2 (2006), 225.
46
Barney Hoskyns, ‘Melody Maker, 1926–2000, RIP’, Rock’s Backpages (15 December 2000), available at
www.rocksbackpages.com (accessed 15 May 2018).
47
Ibid.
of Melody Maker.48 However, the establishment of rock criticism and more

extensive coverage of popular music in newspapers and non-music magazines
may also have been a factor. As Caroline Sullivan observed, ‘suddenly every-
one from broadsheets to fashion magazines were [sic] covering the antics of
Oasis and Blur . . . Melody Maker should have been ideally placed to benefit, but
when the Gallaghers began turning up in Vogue there was no need to read an
inky weekly.’49 The hard-won success of rock criticism within the mainstream
may have undermined the utility of some specialist titles.
What this brief digest of the existence of the Melody Maker underlines is the
fact that the fortunes of newspapers and magazines of all types, even iconic
titles, have always fluctuated and been inherently unpredictable. While the
UK saw a vast expansion of outlets for popular music criticism in the latter
half of the twentieth century, with it becoming a standard feature of the
broadsheet press from the late-1980s onwards, rock criticism also saw its
high-profile casualties. Smash Hits folded in 2006, and though NME may
have sustained a higher circulation than Melody Maker, ultimately outlasting
its rival, it ceased hard-copy publication and became a purely online entity in
2018.
The British experience in the new century has been that, where coverage of
classical music has declined, this has generally reflected an existential chal-
lenge for the newspaper in question, with numerous other areas, including
aspects of news reporting, also being severely cut back in the face of competi-
tion from the Internet and the effects of the 2008 financial crash. Even before
the latter, the commercial context for all types of music had changed signifi-
cantly. In 2006, Matt Brennan noted substantial shifts in retail markets, with
the majority of records being sold in supermarkets, while, beyond their
limited selection, just five chains of record stores accounted for 75 per cent
of the sales of jazz records.50 In terms of the press, while the long waning of
a national title like The Independent was especially visible, the regional and local
newspapers saw the most dramatic changes. London’s Evening Standard
became a freesheet in 2009 as part of a new financial model. Outside of the
capital, local papers either disappeared or changed from daily to weekly
publication, with the Birmingham Post even ceasing to pay for music coverage
since the end of 2017, the critics being expected to work for no fee. With the
national press remaining preponderantly London-centric in its coverage, the
48
Dave Laing, ‘Anglo-American Music Journalism: Texts and Contexts’, in Andy Bennett, Barry Shank
and Jason Toynbee (eds.), The Popular Music Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 335.
49
Caroline Sullivan, ‘Magazine No Longer in Tune with Tastes of Teenagers’, The Guardian
(15 December 2000), 7.
50
Matt Brennan, ‘The Rough Guide to Critics’, 223–4.
decline of local newspapers saw the most substantial drop in dedicated cover-
age of music.
In the 2010s, overall music content in The Times and The Guardian was still
higher than thirty years before, with classical coverage broadly holding steady
even if the number of critics and amount of reviewing had fallen. There were
signs of a contraction at The Guardian from the middle of the decade. Similarly,
music coverage at The Telegraph had shrunk considerably by this point, with
no content at all on some days each week, but classical reviews were generally
predominant in what remained.
Nonetheless, even though the ongoing challenges for newspapers resulted
in a reduction of music content in some titles, this was countered by the
proliferation and expansion of magazines and specialist journals as well as the
appearance and growth of internet journals and websites such as Seen & Heard
International, MusicWeb International, MusicalCriticism.com, Drowned in Sound,
The Arts Desk and Bachtrack, as well as numerous individual blogs. These have
often enabled much lengthier, more detailed writing than has ever tended to
be possible in the daily press. Within the classical sphere, coverage was still
strong in the first decade-and-a-half of the new century and roamed far wider
in terms of repertoire and musical approach than in the post-war period, and
British critics remained predominant in two of the magazines with the widest
international readership, BBC Music Magazine and Gramophone. British music
criticism in the decade after the Second World War was restricted in terms of
quantity by rationing, but was also dominated by voices that were broadly
conservative in outlook. This coincided with a period of unprecedented
stability in the British press afforded by government paper controls. After
that time, there was a vast increase in the amount of writing and range of
genres covered, resulting in a diversity of style, scope and subject matter that
was simply unimaginable in 1945. The new century saw immense change,
with external factors causing the future of many of the existing structures for
music criticism to be uncertain, with the traditional media arguably facing
existential challenges. And yet, amid the profound instability, new outlets for
criticism were created, with greater scope for new voices, repertoires and
approaches. The story of British music criticism since the Second World War
is neither straightforward nor necessarily disheartening.
. 33 .
Music Criticism in France since the Second

World War
CHRISTOPHER BRENT MURRAY
The following chapter is devoted to music criticism in France1 from the

Occupation (1940) to the present day, embracing some seventy-five years of
writing in the general, non-academic press. Explicitly philosophical criticism
destined for specialised, intellectual readerships is not addressed, but this
chapter does broach the place of other writing on music. Indeed, critics
during this period also played a broader journalistic role, writing editorial
pieces, reporting on musical life and conducting interviews.
The categories of media producing music criticism in France rapidly diver-
sified during the second half of the twentieth century. While the rise of
television, the golden age of the magazine and the advent of the Internet are
of course worldwide phenomena, factors such as France’s strong centralisa-
tion, its unique geopolitical role during the Second World War and the Cold
War, and the enduring ties between the nation’s government and its media
have led to local variations of universal media trends that have affected music
criticism. These include the spectacular post-war boom (and bust) of new
daily newspapers, the creation of unique French monthly news magazines and
the heyday of the Minitel, among others.2 Although, for practical reasons, this
chapter is limited to the written word, future projects will surely focus on the
ways in which broadcast and digital media have complemented, intersected
with and, at times, surpassed the impact of written music criticism.
Media diversification brought changes to the critic’s role, presence and
channels of distribution. Many, if not most, of this period’s prominent critics
in print journalism also garnered influence and income from radio and televi-
sion programmes devoted to music. Take for instance the activities of Bernard
Gavoty, head critic at Le Figaro from 1945 to 1981. In 1952, Gavoty’s article
‘La musique contemporaine est-elle condamnée?’ for the Journal musical
1
The choice to focus on France and, by extension, principally Parisian-based publications, should not
obscure the fact that other regions of France as well as Francophone Belgium, Switzerland, Canada and
France’s former colonies have or once had significant traditions of Francophone music criticism.
2
The Minitel was a French ancestor of the web with dial-up access and home terminals that became
common in French households during the 1980s.
[648]
Music Criticism in France since the Second World War 649
français inaugurated a series exploring contemporary music in terms of

a perceived divide between composers and the audiences of traditional classi-
cal concerts.3 These articles were transformed into a 1954–55 radio pro-
gramme Pour ou contre la musique moderne? co-hosted by Gavoty and the
composer-administrator Daniel-Lesur. In turn, the scripts of the radio pro-
gramme were adapted for publication as a book. Not only had Gavoty suc-
ceeded in dictating the terms of a perennial post-war polemic (in which he had
taken a clearly conservative position), he kept the ball in the air for a number
of years, fluidly steering his forum from print to broadcast media and back
again.
The second half of the twentieth century also saw the rising popularity and
increasing intellectual legitimacy of rock and other popular genres in France.
Although rock became the object of specialised magazines shortly after arriv-
ing in France in the 1960s, critical attention for it and other new, popular
genres only seeped into national dailies between the 1970s and 1990s, sweep-
ing from left to right and joining the ranks of articles on classical music, jazz
and chanson present in those sources since before the war. The diversification
of genres addressed by the print media was also concomitant with the shift in
the function of music journalism. Speaking to a broader range of tastes and
operating under new economic constraints, critics in non-specialised publica-
tions could no longer limit themselves to reviews of single concerts. They
focused more energy on preparing readers for upcoming events, conducting
interviews or writing profiles of musicians.
At present, articles on music in French periodicals are dominated by pre-
event profiles or previews (sometimes referred to in French as an avant-première,
a term more often associated with film previews), often based on press releases
intended for the promotion of concerts, tours or recordings. This sort of article
existed well before 1940, but was not as prevalent as it has become. Concert
reviews began to vanish from daily papers in the 1970s and 1980s. Today,
traditional reviews still exist, notably of landmark events, such as new opera
productions, but the review’s domination of music journalism in the printed
press has passed. The causes of this change likely lie in the intertwined com-
mercial interests of the entertainment and media industries. Former critic for Le
Monde, Jacques Lonchampt, suggested that the replacement of traditional
reviews by avant-premières was due to the rise of the weekly magazine. In trying
to scoop the post-concert coverage of dailies by printing film previews, maga-
zines pushed newspapers to follow suit, in both cinema and the other arts.
3
Yves Balmer, ‘Portrait de Daniel-Lesur en critique musical: pour ou contre la musique moderne?’, in
Cécile Auzolle (ed.), Regards sur Daniel-Lesur (Paris: PUF-PUPS, 2009).
650 CHRISTOPHER BRENT MURRAY
Lonchampt explained that once a story was run, editors were less likely to run
a second piece reviewing the event.4 Previews also better suit the needs of
agents and record companies, who, for evident reasons, prefer promotional
profiles to the risk of a bad review.
Periods of political tension or change may provide convenient historical
signposts, but considered alone they fail to frame the history of music
adequately, let alone musical criticism. While the period covered by this
chapter saw a number of dramatic events (the Second World War; the end
of a colonial empire marked by bloody conflicts in French Indochina
(1946–54) and Algeria (1954–62); the tensions of the Cold War; the creation
of the Fourth and Fifth Republics), not to mention a number of influential
political figures from de Gaulle to Robert Schuman to André Malraux, none
of these events or leaders mark distinct shifts in practices or objects of
music criticism. Political and social movements do of course have an
influence upon musical life. The student uprisings of May 1968 or the
election of François Mitterrand may not have had an immediately identifi-
able impact upon music criticism, but these events marked the collective
memory and have come to evoke the tone of particular periods in the
cultural history of France.
The following article is organised in loosely chronological order and is
framed in terms of major historical events, major publications and major
critics. The period of the Occupation created dramatically different condi-
tions for French musical life and is therefore addressed in three subsections:
first the state of media and criticism in general, and then on L’Information
musicale and Comœdia, two important sources of criticism for the period. After
a brief overview of the changed media landscape that accompanied the period
now known as the Liberation, there follows a survey of news dailies, weeklies
and specialised cultural newspapers that were born in the aftermath of the
war. The following section deals with the rise of the magazine and discusses
a number of specialised magazines that were born in the 1950s and 1960s,
often devoted to particular genres. Shifts in French society that led to or
resulted from the events of May 1968 can be linked to the birth of new
publications and their evolution into the Mitterrand years – be it in relation
to the rise of new popular genres (Rock & Folk) or new perspectives in the daily
news media (Libération). The chapter closes with an overview of recently
developed sources of French music criticism both online and in the free press.
4
Bruno Serrou and Jacques Lonchampt, ‘Chapitre 100, Éthique’, in Musique et mémoires, Jacques
Lonchampt, filmed interview (Paris: INA-SACEM, year not indicated), available at entretiens.ina.fr/con
sulter/Musique (accessed 2 October 2014).
Music Criticism in Occupied France

The events of the Second World War were a breaking point for many French
periodicals. Long-standing institutions fell victim to the pressures of the
Occupation, and were later penalised for political compromises or succumbed
to the material instability of the conflict. Following the German invasion of
France in May 1940, a number of specialised publications like Le Ménestrel, Le
Guide du concert and La Revue musicale suspended publication. Other titles took
refuge in the Unoccupied Zone, where they resumed operation as best they
could. For example, Paris-Soir, one of the most popular pre-war daily news-
papers, returned to activity in Lyon and Marseille. Meanwhile, in Paris, the
German occupiers usurped the title in hopes of winning over the paper’s pre-
war readership. For a time, there were two separate newspapers titled Paris-
Soir and employing different critics in the Occupied and Unoccupied Zones.
Nazi propaganda sought to establish a sense of continuity in French cul-
tural life to mask the long-term goal of dismantling France’s cultural prestige
and establishing German cultural domination.5 Music critics in officially
sanctioned papers contributed towards this project, knowingly or unwit-
tingly, by lauding the cultural initiatives of the occupiers, or, more frequently,
by merely furnishing reassuring descriptions of the latest concerts and musical
attractions, an ostensible harbinger of the return to normal daily life.6 The
tribune held by prominent critics made them a tempting and, at times, willing
target of Nazi propaganda. For example, eleven of the twenty-two French
invitees who responded favourably to an invitation by the German authorities
to attend the Vienna Mozart Week of 1941 were critics. They effectively
participated in a luxurious press junket and later wrote flattering accounts
of the initiative upon their return.7
Although journalists in the Unoccupied Zone had slightly broader margins
for manoeuvre, whether supervised by the Propaganda Abteilung or the
puppet government of Vichy, newspapers were reorganised, tightly con-
trolled, subject to censorship and often told what stories to run.8
Ultimately, the propagandistic abuse of newspapers discredited print media
and contributed towards the emergence of radio as a preferred news source.
On the other hand, by 1941, resistant-printed clandestine tracts and
5
Karine Le Bail, La Musique au pas. Être musicien sous l’Occupation (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2016), pp. 77–90.
6
Sara Iglesias, ‘“L’âme, le cœur et toute l’aspiration d’un peuple”: La Critique musicale française, relais
de la politique de collaboration?’, in Myriam Chimènes and Yannick Simon (eds.), La Musique à Paris sous
l’Occupation (Paris: Fayard, 2013).
7
Marie-Hélène Benoit-Otis and Cécile Quesney, ‘A Nazi Pilgrimage to Vienna? The French Delegation at
the 1941 “Mozart Week of the German Reich”’, Musical Quarterly, 99/1 (March 2016), 6–59.
8
Pierre Albert, Histoire de la presse, 11th ed. (Paris: PUF, 2010), pp. 104–5.
newspapers like Musiciens d’aujourd’hui were denouncing the collaboration of

certain actors in French musical life in print. This is a rather different category
of criticism that should also be factored into considerations of writing on
music during the war.
The beginning of the Occupation saw rising newspaper circulation stimu-
lated by a population eager for news on rationing, prisoners of war and
movement on the fronts. This initial boom in popular dailies was followed
by a decline from the autumn of 1940 until 1942. From then on, the number of
periodicals in print remained relatively stable to the end of the Occupation,
although paper shortages caused formats to shrink dramatically in late 1943
and 1944.9 Even with the war over, supplies continued to be scarce: and most
dailies were limited to a single, small recto–verso page until the lifting of
paper restrictions in June 1946.10
The space regularly devoted to music criticism in the best-circulated pop-
ular news dailies (Paris-Soir, Le Petit Parisien, Le Matin and L’Œuvre) was
minimal. Although a few feuilleton-length columns persisted at the beginning
of the war, notably in L’Œuvre, dailies generally dedicated a few short para-
graphs to each review, giving marked preference to the genres of chanson and
music hall, followed by opera, operetta and ballet. Reviews of symphonic or
chamber music concerts were scarce, and these were often devoted to special
German-organised events. Critics at popular dailies included Georges Pioch
and Marcel Brunel11 at L’Œuvre; Alain Borchard at Le Petit Parisien; and Louis
Blanquie, Paul Le Flem and Charles Quinel at Le Matin. Other daily and weekly
newspapers also published music criticism, such as Marcel Delannoy and
Robert Bernard’s columns for Les Nouveaux temps,12 Emile Vuillermoz’s writ-
ing for Candide and José Bruyr’s column for Tout et tout. Music criticism could
also be found in weekly and monthly literary and cultural papers printed
during the Occupation, such as the Cahiers franco-allemands or La Nouvelle
revue française.13 Beyond these general sources, two specialised revues pub-
lished during the Occupation merit further note here: L’Information musicale
and Comœdia.
9
Jean-François Picard, ‘Tableaux des tirages de la presse nationale de 1803 à 1944’, in Pierre Albert,
Gilles Feyel and Jean-François Picard (eds.), Documents pour l’histoire de la presse nationale aux XIXe et XXe
siècles (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 1973).
10
Yves-Marc Ajchenbaum, Combat 1941–1974. Une utopie de la Résistance, une aventure de presse, new ed.
(Paris: Gallimard, 2013), p. 287.
11
Pseudonym of Marcel Emile Blondel.
12
Cécile Quesney, ‘Compositeurs français à l’heure allemande (1940–1944): le cas de Marcel Delannoy’,
unpublished PhD dissertation, Université Paris-Sorbonne/Université de Montréal (2014), 213–29, 330–7.
13
Sara Iglesias, Musicologie et Occupation. Science, musique et politique dans la France des “années noires”
(Paris: Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2014), pp. 80–3.
L’Information musicale
The composer and critic Robert Bernard, long associated with the suspended
La Revue musicale, published the first issue of a new weekly music magazine,
L’Information musicale, on 22 November 1940. L’Information musicale was vir-
tually the only specialised music publication of significance that appeared
during the Occupation, and featured a weekly concert agenda accompanied
by numerous short reviews. Although Bernard turned to many of La Revue
musicale’s former contributors to create L’Information musicale, he pragmati-
cally chose to occupy the former niche of the suspended Le Guide du concert in
terms of its function, tone and target audience.14 Bernard had initially
announced in-depth articles on music history for L’Information musicale, but
these were soon abandoned as paper restrictions caused the magazine to
shrink from thirty-two pages in 1940 to four in 1944. A host of critics and
composers active both before and after the war contributed articles and
reviews to L’Information musicale. Although editorial secretary Guy Ferchault
and other contributors praised the cultural policies of Alfred Cortot and the
German occupiers, much of L’Information musicale was given over to concert
announcements and reviews of a relatively independent tone.15 It is a valuable
resource to researchers on musical life during the Occupation.
Comœdia
Comœdia was a Paris-based cultural newspaper that existed as a daily from
1907 to 1937, apart from during the First World War. Reappearing as
a weekly on 21 June 1941 and printed at 30,000 to 46,000 copies per
week,16 the wartime version of Comœdia chronicled theatre, literature, fine
arts and fashion and was illustrated on nearly all of its six to eight pages until
its final issue on 5 August 1944. Comœdia became available by subscription in
the Unoccupied Zone beginning in the fall of 1941 and also regularly featured
stories on musical life in provincial cities.
Recent scholarship has presented contrasting portraits of Comœdia. Olivier
Gouranton suggests that the wartime politics of Comœdia’s director, René
Delange, were ambiguous, underlines the revue’s editorial freedom and
14
Myriam Chimènes, ‘L’Information musicale: “parenthèse” de La Revue musicale?’, La Revue des revues, 24
(1997), 91–110; Yannick Simon, ‘Les périodiques musicaux français pendant la Seconde Guerre mondiale’,
Fontes artis musicae, 49/1–2 (2002), 73.
15
Chimènes, ‘L’information musicale’, 93–4.
16
Olivier Gouranton, ‘Comœdia. Un journal sous influences’, La Revue des revues, 24 (1997), 111; Picard,
‘Tableaux des tirages’, 78. Both sources base their information on data found in the Archives de la
Préfecture de Police de Paris, B/A 1713.
remarks upon the broad range of intellectuals from Le Corbusier to Jean-Louis

Barrault that contributed to the revue.17 Yannick Simon presents a more critical
reading, noting that the new Comœdia was founded in a ‘collaborationist per-
spective’ with the participation of the Institut Allemand. Indeed, each issue
featured a page of articles celebrating the spirit of a ‘New Europe’ (‘Connaître
l’Europe’) in conformance with the policies of the German occupiers. Sara
Iglesias confirms that Comœdia’s reappearance corresponded to the German
strategy of Tarnung, or camouflage, in which a previously renowned French
publication was revived under French editors but controlled by German inter-
ests – offering the revue Beaux-Arts as another example of this strategy.18
Arthur Honegger was the most prominent among Comœdia’s wartime
music critics, and perhaps the best-known living composer in France at that
time.19 His articles are marked by frequent harangues against unimaginative
concert programmes and repeated calls for the revival of works by French
composers he considered undeservedly neglected.20 The political implications
of Honegger’s critical writing, compounded with his general visibility during
the war and his participation in the Vienna Mozart Week, likely caused the dip
in his popularity during the political account settling that followed the
Liberation.21 Nevertheless, Honegger was an undeniably privileged observer
of musical life during the Occupation. Unwilling to abandon technical musical
vocabulary, his reviews preserve a composer’s vision of the works they discuss,
from repertory warhorses to his praise for the latest works of Olivier
Messiaen.
Other regular contributors of music criticism to Comœdia included Gustave
Fréjaville, primarily writing on music hall and cabaret; Pierre Leroi, a frequent
chronicler of concerts and recitals, but also author of propaganda for the
‘Connaître l’Europe’ page of the paper; the multifaceted composer Arthur
Hoérée, writing articles on musical life, operetta, record reviews and, espe-
cially, extensive film reviews which devoted a special place to music; and the
composer Tony Aubin, who began writing a regular column on musical
premieres in 1942.
A New Beginning?
As France was liberated, a series of rulings known as the Ordonnances de 1944
were issued by the free French between May and November 1944 to assure the
17
Gouranton, ‘Comœdia’, 111–12. 18
Iglesias, Musicologie et Occupation, pp. 79–80.
19 20
Yannick Simon, Composer sous Vichy (Lyon: Symétrie, 2009), pp. 262–83. Ibid., pp. 278–9.
21
Ibid., pp. 264–98; Leslie Sprout, The Musical Legacy of Wartime France (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2013), pp. 38–79.
political plurality and purification or purge (épuration) of the nation’s press.

Periodicals that had promoted political collaboration with the occupiers or
that had been directly under German control were eliminated, and their
infrastructures were transferred to new enterprises, frequently the new, pub-
lic versions of formerly clandestine Resistance publications.22 The years
immediately following the war saw an impressive multiplication of new
daily titles that reached an unsustainable high-water mark in 1946 before
dropping sharply into the 1950s. The decline in the number of titles printed
in France has continued, albeit at a slower rate, ever since.23
In the wake of the war, journalists, critics, composers and musicians sus-
pected of collaborationist activities were often tried before multiple civil and
professional tribunals in divisive hearings. Some felt their professions were
unfairly targeted for their extreme visibility, while others held that the courts
were too indulgent.24 Beginning in the fall of 1944, a debate on the severity of
the épuration raged between François Mauriac at Le Figaro and Albert Camus at
Combat.25 Some journalists were executed and others were sentenced to hard
labour, while others received little or no punishment. Professional tribunals
approved new press credentials and could effectively prevent journalists from
working. In both music and journalism, severe retribution was reserved for
a symbolic few – although one could be banned from the profession for life,
the vast majority of probations lasted from six months to two years. Many
music critics active during the war soon returned to their former occupations,
and none were disciplined for their writing on music alone, an activity many
claimed was necessary to earning a living.26 Le Monde critic René Dumesnil
painted an optimistic and consolatory vision of the recent past in an article on
wartime musical life in France, translated for Anglophone readers, in which he
claimed that ‘resistance to German oppression’ had ‘existed in every French
heart’.27 This sort of whitewashing reflected a relatively widespread desire in
certain sectors of French society, one encouraged by the politics of General de
Gaulle, to move beyond the divisive years of the épuration and present a unified
and honourable image of France as the nation moved forward within the new
geopolitical constellations of the Cold War. Leslie Sprout has traced the
complex debates and political tensions of the post-war years as they
22
Albert, Histoire de la presse, p. 118.
23
Jean-Marie Charon, La Presse en France de 1945 à nos jours (Paris: Seuil, 1991), p. 94; Albert, Histoire de la
presse, p. 119.
24
Christian Delporte, ‘L’Épuration des journalistes: polémiques, mythes, réalités’, Matériaux pour l’his-
toire de notre temps, 39–40 (1995), 28–31.
25
Pierre Assouline, L’épuration des intellectuels (Brussels: Complexe, 1996), p. 28.
26
Quesney, ‘Compositeurs français à l’heure allemande’, 215–16.
27
René Dumesnil, ‘French Music During the Years of War’, The American Society Legion of Honor Magazine,
17/2 (1946), 369–90, notably 374.
manifested themselves in Paris’ concert halls and newspapers, focusing on

how critical polemics on the aesthetic future of new French music, although
polarised around the figures of Stravinsky and Messiaen, were also ‘ostensibly
trading insinuations about collaboration and wartime guilt’.28
The 1944–45 musical season may have been artistically intense, but there
was little space for criticism in the reduced format of news dailies and week-
lies. Moreover, specialised musical publications did not immediately return to
newsstands. In February of 1946, Claude Rostand noted that the government
had seen fit to grant paper to musical periodicals a full year after the Liberation
and in the wake of concessions to ‘crosswords, papers for fishermen and boules
players, fashion albums, suggestive publications and a number of poetic
revues of prolix obscurity’.29 Still, Rostand applauded the return of pre-war
titles like Le Guide du concert30 and the Revue musicale, as well as the creation of
new publications like La Revue des Jeunesses musicales de France, Contrepoints,
Images musicales and Opéra.31 The same month, La Revue musicale published
a list of music critics working for some fourteen Parisian dailies, sixteen
weekly newspapers or magazines and mentioning Musique et Radio,32 Radio
46 and L’Éducation musicale in addition to the titles cited by Rostand.33
The Decline of the Composer-Critic?

The Occupation marked the end of an era for the composer-critic. Although
a handful of composers, including Honegger, continued work as critics in the
years following the Second World War, their numbers dropped sharply
following the Liberation and would dwindle into the 1950s and 1960s.
Valérie Dufour posits that the reasons for this decline include the possibility
of other, more stable and intellectually prestigious sources of income offered
to composers by institutional teaching positions. She also points out that
young composers of the avant-garde increasingly wrote on subjects too tech-
nical to interest the average reader.34 Dufour singles out Pierre Boulez as an
example of this increasing specialisation in the profession and of the changing
28
Sprout, The Musical Legacy, pp. 151–84, notably p. 156.
29
Claude Rostand, ‘Regard sur la presse musicale’, Carrefour (7 February 1946), 7.
30
Le Guide de Concert reappeared on newsstands under the direction of Gabriel Bender in
November 1945. This reliable source of short and varied reviews of French musical life continued to
exist into the 1970s.
31
Rostand, ‘Regard sur la presse musicale’, 7.
32
A publication that existed before, during, and after the war, Eric Sarnette’s Musique et Radio (1939–64)
deserves further scholarly attention for its rarely cited in-depth reviews of books, recordings, new musical
editions and premieres.
33
Supplement, ‘La Vie musicale. Échos et nouvelles’ to La Revue musicale, 198 (1946), v.
34
Valérie Dufour, ‘Compositeur et critique musical: De la coïncidence des deux activités. Le Cas de
Florent Schmitt’, Bulletin de la classe des Beaux-Arts, [Belgium], 18/7–12 (2007), 319.
relation of composers to the domain of traditional classical music in general.

A few French music critics active since the war have also been composers, for
instance, Pierre Petit, but none have been prominent as composers and
journalists in the image of Paul Dukas, Reynaldo Hahn, Florent Schmitt or
Arthur Honegger. In his Traité de la critique musicale, published in 1946,
Armand Machabey argued that composers, with their strong personal opi-
nions, did not make the sort of impartial critics that the educated public
deserved. Machabey also decried a decline in the music journalism of daily
papers since the turn of the century and placed his hopes in the ‘haute
musicographie’ of publications like the Revue musicale.35
After the war, composer-critics were gradually supplanted by professional
music journalists who made their living writing for multiple publications,
sometimes also working for radio, and later, television. Composers continued
to be solicited for their opinions on cultural life in interviews and profiles, but
they were no longer the central players in enterprises of music journalism. In
early 1950, when Combat interviewed major figures of France’s musical com-
munity on the state of French opera, its interlocutors, placed on a plane of
equal importance, were largely composers or critics, not both. Those in the
latter category included Le Monde’s literary critic Robert Kemp (Robert
Dezarnaux), the same paper’s music critic, René Dumesnil, Carrefour’s
Claude Rostand, Paris-Inter’s Gérard Michel and Le Figaro’s Bernard Gavoty.
Critics also came to play an important role in political decisions. When André
Malraux created a committee to evaluate the state of French musical life in
1962, the critics René Dumesnil, Robert Siohan and Claude Rostand figured
on the committee alongside prominent composers and administrators.36
Combat
Appearing in its new format in August 1944, Combat was one of several new
Parisian dailies that first existed as a clandestine Resistance newspaper. It
would last much longer than most of its peers, continuing to appear until
1974. In spite of space restrictions, Combat included cultural content shortly
after it first appeared, with the first weekly column on music by Roland-
Manuel (the pen name of Roland Alexis Manuel Lévy) printed on Saturday,
4 November 1944. Yves-Marc Ajchenbaum’s study of Combat portrays
Roland-Manuel’s music writing as a sort of respite from the social tensions
35
Armand Machabey, Traité de la critique musicale (Paris: Richard-Masse, 1946), pp. 125–34, 199–203.
36
Eric Drott, Music and the Elusive Revolution: Cultural Politics and Political Culture in France, 1968–1981
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), p. 213.
that dominated the paper’s content, but closer reading reveals otherwise.37
Already in November 1944, Roland-Manuel described the political tensions
that surfaced in audiences of Parisian concerts. Not unlike Honegger before
him, he called upon Parisian symphonic societies (which he likened to aristo-
cratic émigrés of the French Revolution, remembering all of their wartime
suffering, but learning nothing from the experience) to strive for greater
variety and venture beyond Ravel, Debussy and Dukas when programming
French music. He pointed out that the average twenty-year-old in 1944 knew
only the music that the Propaganda-Staffel had allowed them to hear.38 In
debates spawned by the Stravinsky Festival of 1945 (six concerts played by the
Orchestre national from January to July), Roland-Manuel defended
Stravinsky, whose neo-classical works were interrupted by protests from the
young students of Messiaen, including Boulez and Serge Nigg.39 Roland-
Manuel only wrote for Combat for a few years before moving on to teach at
the Paris Conservatoire and work in cultural administration.
Social tension marked the France of the late 1940s. The nation was rocked by
massive strikes, and torn between the American-orchestrated Marshall Plan and
the programme of the French Communist Party (at the height of its power and
still closely aligned with central policy-making in the Soviet Union). Serge
Nigg’s political convictions led him to abandon twelve-tone techniques and
adhere to the Prague Manifesto of 1948 as a member of the Association inter-
nationale de musiciens progressistes.40 Nigg’s political engagement, like that of
several of his colleagues, would ultimately extend beyond his creative work to
take the form of writing on music for the public forum, notably in publications
associated with the Communist Party like Les lettres françaises.41 Such alliances
marked new dividing lines in the musical landscape that further complicated
aesthetic and political divisions created during the Occupation and épuration.
These became apparent in the face of anti-Communist initiatives like the Œuvre
du XXe siècle, a cultural festival organised by the United States in Paris in 1952.
Contrepoints and Polyphonie

The post-war years also saw the birth of two specialised, rather more intellec-
tual music journals – Contrepoints (1946–53) and Polyphonie (1947–56) – that
37
Ajchenbaum, Combat 1941–1974, p. 297.
38
Roland-Manuel, ‘La Musique’, Combat (11 November 1944), 2.
39
Sprout, The Musical Legacy, pp. 151–84, particularly, pp. 166–72.
40
Mark Carroll, Music and Ideology in Cold War Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003),
pp. 37–58; Michèle Alten, Musiciens français dans la guerre froide (1945–1956) (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2000),
pp. 75–94.
41
Sprout, The Musical Legacy, pp. 179–80.
marked, each in its own way, a rebirth in thinking and writing on music in
post-war France.42 In spite of their comparatively small readerships, they had
a significant impact on the musical community at large, comparable to that of
the later Musique en jeu in the 1970s.43 The title of Contrepoints, founded by
Fred Goldbeck in 1946, made reference to the diversity of subjects and
opinions that Goldbeck intended to present.44 Contrepoints’ range of authors
and subject matter marked a stark contrast with Occupation-era publications,
notably the landmark article ‘La Propagande allemande et la musique’, written
by Marc Pincherle, also a critic for Le Progrès and Les Nouvelles littéraires, and
one of the rare musicologists who chose to stop writing during the war.45
Later issues of Contrepoints included contributions from a range of figures
including John Cage, Pierre Boulez, Virgil Thomson and Pierre Souvtchinsky.
Polyphonie, founded by André Souris, focused more explicitly on exploring
diverse currents of contemporary music. Although the review had its origins
in much earlier projects, Cécile Quesney indicates it was quite likely inspired
by the success of Contrepoints.46 Polyphonie, like later issues of Contrepoints,
immediately adapted the practice of organising its issues around a central
theme. Contributors to Polyphonie included a mix of influential thinkers and
composers who would mark the second half of the twentieth century, includ-
ing Boris de Schloezer, Pierre Boulez, René Leibowitz and Luigi Dallapiccola.
Opéra
Emile Vuillermoz was already an established influential critic and author on
subjects relating to music and cinema well before the Second World War.
Although his association with collaborationist enterprises tarnished his repu-
tation following the Liberation,47 after a hiatus he later wrote for Opéra,
a weekly cultural newspaper clandestinely founded by Jacques Chabannes
during the war, which would be renamed Arts Spectacles in 1952. Opéra’s
earlier contributors included Louis Aubert and Louis Beydts (both composers
of a certain age), but also the younger Marcel Landowski and Jean Barreyre
42
Cécile Quesney, ‘Les Revues d’après-guerre: notes sur Contrepoints et Polyphonie’, in Laurent Feneyrou
and Alain Poirier (eds.), De la Libération au Domaine musical: Dix ans de musique en France (1944–1954) (Paris:
Vrin, 2019).
43
On the importance of Musique en jeu, a quarterly journal founded by Dominique Jameux, published
from 1970 to 1978, see Nicolas Donin, ‘Le Moment Musique en jeu’, Circuit: musiques contemporaines, 20/1–2
(2010), 25–31.
44
Already a prominent critic in France between the wars, Goldbeck’s Jewish origins led him to take
refuge in Spain during the war; see Iglesias, Musicologie et Occupation, p. 359.
45
Iglesias, Musicologie et Occupation, pp. 359, 363.
46
Quesney, ‘Les Revues d’après-guerre’, forthcoming.
47
Iglesias, Musicologie et Occupation, pp. 302, 335, 372; Le Bail, La Musique au pas, pp. 99, 194.
(writing on music hall and cabaret), not to mention occasional pieces from
Antoine Goléa, Bernard Gavoty and René Dumesnil. By 1950, Opéra featured
a full page of music criticism, with Vuillermoz’s feuilleton-length tribune and
regular columns by Bernard Gavoty, Jacques Bourgeois and Pierre Guitton.
Among the younger generation of contributors to Opéra’s continuation as Arts
Spectacles were the ubiquitous Boris Vian, writing on jazz, and Henry-Louis de
La Grange.
Carrefour
Carrefour (subtitled La semaine en France et dans le monde) was a weekly paper
devoted to news and cultural issues that was published from 1944 to 1977.
The paper’s diverting content and numerous political cartoons likened it to
satirical papers such as Le Canard enchaîné. The entertaining and opinionated
Claude Rostand served as one of Carrefour’s first music critics. Rostand proved
sceptical of any sort of paratextual ‘propaganda’ that might accompany
music – dismissing as superfluous the programmes and notes associated
with the music of composers from Messiaen to Shostakovich.
Christian Mégret wrote on chanson, variétés and other popular genres for
Carrefour for nearly the entire length of its existence. The progressive
Antoine Goléa, in many ways a sort of anti-Gavoty, was appointed critic at
Carrefour in 1958. Goléa was also a radio host and wrote for a number of other
publications including Témoignage chrétien and Diapason. Today he is best
remembered for his interest in contemporary music, his interviews with
composers and for his writing on opera and vocal repertoires.
Survivors: Le Figaro and Le Monde

Although Le Figaro and Le Temps were certainly not France’s most popular
newspapers between the wars, they were the major daily papers read by the
elite of the Third Republic. With L’Humanité, they are among the few French
national dailies reborn after the war that have remained in print to the
present day, persisting in the case of Le Figaro and metamorphosing in the
case of Le Temps, which became Le Monde.
Le Figaro has been published with relative continuity since the nineteenth
century. Although the paper continued to be printed during the Occupation,
it was able to continue using its title when it reappeared in 1944 because its
staff had fled Paris for the Unoccupied Zone, where it worked under the
jurisdiction of the Vichy puppet government rather than being directly con-
trolled by the German occupiers. When the German army occupied the whole
of France in November 1942, Le Figaro’s director Pierre Brisson chose to

scuttle the paper instead of submitting to German control.48 By contrast, Le
Monde’s ancestor, the austere diplomatic paper Le Temps, the prestige of which
de Gaulle wished to salvage, had to undergo a post-war makeover.49 The
format and content of Le Monde were extremely similar to those of the former
Le Temps and represented both a continuation of the old institution’s prestige
and a political renewal under the new direction of Hubert Beuve-Méry.
Today, Le Monde is France’s centre-left newspaper of record. In recent years,
the paper’s editorial line has perceptibly shifted leftward, whereas Le Figaro
has moved from a traditionalist centre-right to become a more sharply defined
mouthpiece for Les Républicains, the political party of former president
Nicolas Sarkozy (formerly known as the UMP). The increasing political
polarisation of France’s two major national dailies results from their need
for outside sources of revenue and from the politics of their investors. In the
seventy years since the war, both papers have devoted significant space to
music criticism.
Before the war, both papers consolidated music criticism into weekly or bi-
weekly feuilletons compiled by respected senior composers born in the early
days of the Third Republic: Reynaldo Hahn at Le Figaro and Florent Schmitt
at Le Temps. Following the war, the profile of the papers’ lead critics changed –
the relatively young Bernard Gavoty took over at Le Figaro and the rather
more senior critic and literary expert René Dumesnil took over at Le Monde.
While not composers, both men were public intellectual figures in their own
right. Although they occasionally printed longer feuilletons, they also main-
tained a frequent presence in their papers by writing shorter reviews of
concerts and recordings alongside other less prominently featured critics,
often specialists of genres other than classical music. Since the end of these
critics’ respective reigns, the former dominance of classical music in the pages
they once directed has subsided.
Bernard Gavoty and His Successors at Le Figaro

When Le Figaro reappeared after the Liberation, Reynaldo Hahn, knowing he
would soon become director of the Paris Opera, passed the torch to the to the
young, Jesuit-educated organist Bernard Gavoty, whose first review appeared
48
The symbolic verb choice of ‘scuttle’ (saborder) to describe the shuttering of papers printed in the
Unoccupied Zone upon the extension of the German occupation in 1942 is linked by metaphor with
Vichy’s choice to scuttle the French fleet in the harbour of Toulon on 27 November 1942.
49
Jean-Noël Jeanneney, Les Grandes heures de la presse qui ont fait l’histoire (Paris: Flammarion, 2013), pp.
126–8.
five days later. Gavoty had caught Hahn’s attention during the interwar years,
but only began working regularly as a critic during the Occupation, writing
reviews for L’Information musicale and becoming involved as a lecturer for the
hugely influential Jeunesses musicales de France.50 Gavoty recalled that Hahn
closely supervised his progress and served as a mentor during his first year at
Le Figaro, and although he would use his real name when writing for other
publications, he signed his columns for Le Figaro as ‘Clarendon’ until his death
in 1981, perhaps in deference to Hahn, who had chosen his pseudonym.51
In 1948, just a few years after beginning at Figaro, Gavoty began creating
programmes on classical music for French radio and later, television. Through
his work in broadcast media, notably on the television shows Les grands
interprètes and Au cœur de la musique, he was the privileged interviewer of
celebrated performers such as Maria Callas, Arthur Rubinstein and Mstislav
Rostropovitch. Gavoty also wrote for other publications including Images
musicales and Opéra. Today he is perhaps best known for launching the post-
war debate on the music of Messiaen, which came to be known by the subtitle
of his polemical article: ‘Le Cas Messiaen’.52 A sceptical, antagonistic attitude
towards the more progressive musical styles that emerged in the post-war
years, notably that of Boulez and other post-Webernian serialists, came to be
a trademark of Gavoty’s critical writing.
Before Gavoty’s death in 1981, the traditionalist composer Pierre Petit,
who had built a successful career hosting programmes for French radio and
television, began working as a classical music critic for Le Figaro in 1975.
Jacques Doucelin (classical) and Georges Tabet (rock, jazz) also wrote on
music for Figaro during the 1970s. It is worth noting that, during this period,
reviews of non-classical genres were comparatively rare and often devoted to
old and even deceased figures in their fields: a sample from 1975 yields only
very short pieces on Duke Ellington’s orchestra playing at the Salle Pleyel and
Chuck Berry in concert at the Olympia.53 But even the conservative Figaro
gradually evolved, with reviews of popular genres by Jean-Luc Wachthausen
appearing more frequently in the 1980s. More recently, Christian Merlin and
Bertrand Dicale have written for Le Figaro on classical and other genres,
respectively.
50
Chimènes, ‘L’Information musicale’, 97. Although there is not room to examine it in detail here, it is
important to underline the impact of criticism in the various publications of Jeunesses Musicales de France
(Journal musical français, etc.) towards educating a new generation of classical concert-goers in the post-war
years.
51
Bernard Gavoty, Anicroches (Paris: Buchet/ Chastel, 1979), pp. 19–21.
52
Bernard Gavoty, ‘Musique et mystique. Le “Cas” Messiaen’, Etudes (October 1945), 21–37.
53
Georges Tabet, ‘Rock. Chuck Berry l’inventeur’, Le Figaro (26 February 1975), 24; Georges Tabet,
‘L’Orchestre de Duke Ellington’, Le Figaro (27 February 1975), 25.
René Dumesnil and His Successors at Le Monde

René Dumesnil began writing for Le Monde directly after the war in a familiar,
traditional style connected to the past. His feuilleton on the first Prix de Rome
since the Liberation is a veritable chestnut that reads like similar columns
penned between the wars, with no reflection on the competition’s ever-
increasing obsolescence.54 By 1950, and in addition to his feuilleton,
Dumesnil was also signing about ten shorter concert, record and book reviews
per month. These were complemented by Pierre Drouin’s reviews of record-
ings, jazz music and radio broadcasts. Drouin was essentially an economics
reporter. As his importance at Le Monde grew, he came to sign his reviews of jazz
and classical recordings ‘Philidor’. Drouin wrote knowledgeably about the jazz
landscape in France, crafting his reviews not for the devoted fan, but to the
average Le Monde reader who might be interested in learning more about jazz –
a tone rather different from that of specialised publications like Jazz Hot.55 Also
of note in the Le Monde during the 1960s, are the early articles by cultural
reporter Yvonne Baby and her reviews of popular music.56 The examples of
Drouin and Baby show that while classical music criticism in the French media
often remained the domain of specialists, it was felt that jazz and popular genres
could be attributed to journalists with a broader range of experiences and
whose relationship to music was often that of the passionate amateur.
Jacques Lonchampt worked as a classical music critic for Le Monde from
1961 to 1991,57 taking over from Dumesnil as head critic in 1965. He later
looked back upon his life as a critic and remarked that he had always fought to
maintain an open mind when faced with new music so that he could identify
works of interest and transmit the news to his readers.58 An example of such
openness can be read in his 1986 review of Steve Reich’s The Desert Music at the
Rencontres de Metz. In spite of the work’s mixed reception and a certain dose
of scepticism, Lonchampt recognised its merit and called for ‘scores of this
quality’ from American ‘compositeurs répétitifs’ to be included on traditional
symphonic programmes.59 Classical critics active at Le Monde since the time of
Lonchampt have included Gérard Condé, Alain Lompech, Anne Rey and,
more recently, Renaud Machart, Marie-Aude Roux and Pierre Gervasoni.60
54
René Dumesnil, ‘La Musique. Les Prix de Rome’, Le Monde (30 September/1 October 1945), 2.
55
See for example Pierre Drouin, ‘Les Disques. Jazz 1949’, Le Monde (7 January 1950), 7.
56
Xavier Ternisien, ‘Disparitions. Journaliste. Pierre Drouin’, Le Monde (12–13 September 2010), 25.
57
Serrou and Lonchampt, filmed interview, Musique et Mémoires, Jacques Lonchampt.
58
Jacques Lonchampt, Le Bon plaisir. Journal de musique contemporaine (Paris: Plume, 1994), pp. 15–16.
59
Jacques Lonchampt, “Les Déserts fourmillants de Steve Reich”, Le Monde (25 November 1986), 16.
60
Although there is not room for a complete profile here, Le Monde de la musique merits mention as an
important monthly musical chronicle that was a joint venture between Le Monde and Télérama
(1979–2009).
Claude Fléouter wrote on rock, chanson and other non-classical genres for Le
Monde from the mid-1960s to the 1980s. His obituary of Janice Joplin shows
that even the staid Le Monde,61 though referring to Joplin as a ‘jazz singer’ in
the title, was aware that an icon had passed.62 Fléouter may not have had the
word counts and bylines of Lonchampt, but his articles demonstrate that the
hierarchy of genres had weakened considerably since the war. Cahiers du jazz
founder Lucien Malson also wrote on jazz for Le Monde from the 1940s and
contributed articles on popular music in general, including an anthropologi-
cally toned piece on the rise of nightclubs and the difficulties of being a DJ
(explaining the new term for Le Monde’s readers).63 Francis Marmande has
been a regular contributor on jazz to Le Monde since the 1980s.
The Rise of the Magazine

Although illustrated news magazines were popular in France from the begin-
ning of the century, as a media market distinct from the newspaper, French
magazines began to diversify in the 1930s, truly took off following the
Liberation and peaked in the 1960s and 1970s as advertisers came to prefer
them to newspapers.64 The heyday of weekly news magazines such as
L’Express, Le Nouvel observateur and Le Point also contributed to the decline
of the newspaper. The same period saw the birth of specialised magazines
devoted to popular musical genres. With a number of publications already
devoted to classical music in general and the popularity of the new long-
playing records on the rise, publishers turned to special niche magazines
devoted to monthly criticism of recordings aimed at the record collector,
most notably Diapason (1954–) and Harmonie (1964–80). Diapason continues to
be an influential publication within the evolving world of classical music
recordings, thanks in part to its comprehensive review of new classical
music releases in France. Handsomely illustrated, issues of Harmonie were
bound like little square paperback books and featured work by critics who
would prove influential over the following decades, including Gilles
Cantagrel, Harry Halbreich and Claude Samuel. Weekly television guides
became popular in the 1950s, and Télérama, which still exists today, has long
61
Only in the past twenty-five years, for example, has Le Monde taken to regularly illustrating its articles
with photographs and political cartoons.
62
Claude Fléouter, ‘Mort de la chanteuse de jazz Janis Joplin’, Le Monde (6 November 1970), 28.
63
Lucien Malson, ‘Dans des centaines de discothèques pop’ [sic] on achève aussi les jockeys’, Le Monde
(8 October 1970), 17.
64
Jean-Marie Charon, La Presse magazine (Paris: La Découverte, 2008), pp. 11, 74. Charon also cites a 2007
study showing that 84 per cent of the French population regularly read magazines, but only 7 per cent
regularly read magazines specifically devoted to cultural topics such as music.
been a useful source of cultural criticism. In more recent years, there has also
been a trend towards magazine publications aimed at increasingly specific
markets, devoted fan bases of specific genres such as Dreamwest, Metallian,
Obsküre Magazine, Tsugi and others.65 A selection of French music magazines
is examined below.
Musica
Musica was a monthly magazine on classical music (1954–66) that adopted the
title of a previous illustrated publication that had had some success before the
First World War (1902–14) and would come to be associated with the publica-
tions of the Jeunesses musicales de France youth movement. Handsomely illu-
strated with colour images but still affordable, Musica was written by a who’s
who of music criticism in mid-century France (Bruyr, Dumesnil, Goléa,
Lonchampt, Machabey, Rostand and Vuillermoz, among others). The magazine
published articles on music history, composer profiles and lightweight analyses
of music (nevertheless illustrated with musical examples). Although Musica
devoted a limited space to music criticism, the magazine frequently printed
metacritical debates between its regular contributors. Beginning in 1954,
Figure 33.1 Duelling critics Antoine Goléa (left) and Bernard Gavoty (right)
in an uncredited photomontage for Musica magazine, December 1956.
65
Fabien Hein, ‘The Issue of Musical Genres in France’, in Hugh Dauncey and Philippe Le Guern (eds.),
Stereo: Comparative Perspectives on the Sociological Study of Popular Music in France and Britain (Farnham:
Ashgate, 2011).
Armand Machabey and Jacques Feschotte crossed swords over the role of the
critic. The dénouement of these exchanges in turn opened the door for Antoine
Goléa and Bernard Gavoty to disagree about whether contemporary music
needed to be a continually innovating reflection of its time.66
Jazz Hot and Writing on Jazz

Jazz Hot, founded by Hugues Panassié and Charles Delaunay in 1935, was the
‘official organ of the Hot Club de France’ and is one of the earliest and longest-
running specialised publications on jazz in France and indeed, the world (it
continues to be produced in a free, online format).67 Reappearing after the
war in October 1945, Jazz Hot was soon joined by a host of competing
publications, including the Bulletin du Hot Club de France, La Revue du Jazz
and, in 1954, Jazz Magazine, among others.
One of Jazz Hot’s frequent contributors, Boris Vian, is perhaps best known
as the author of the enormously popular novel L’Écume des jours and songs like
‘Le Déserteur’ or ‘Je suis snob’. Not only a legendary author and musician,
Vian was a veritable graphomaniac. He churned out serious, perceptive jazz
criticism between 1945 and his death in 1959 that now occupies three
volumes of his complete works. Vian would contribute to Jazz Hot for twelve
years – not only as an author of texts, but also of photos, caricatures and gossip
from the jazz world. Vian also published texts in dozens of other periodicals,
and was a true monument of mid-century French music criticism.68
Although the standing of jazz as a popular genre was eroded by the arrival of
bebop as well as American-style rock and pop in the late 1950s and early
1960s, fans and experts continued to cover and debate jazz’s many subgenres,
often in increasingly intellectualised terms borrowed from philosophy and
literary theory.69 In studying associations between free jazz and the events of
May 1968, Eric Drott has described how French jazz publications hailed the
arrival of free jazz in 1965. Discussion of the jazz avant-garde spread from
specialised publications like Jazz Hot and Jazz Magazine (whose critical posi-
tions were often heatedly opposed) to general news sources like Le Monde and
Le Nouvel Observateur.70 Drott observes that the defence of new jazz subgenres
allowed new critics to establish careers in an already occupied field, and he
likens this renewal to that of the post-war defenders of bebop who had
66
See Musica (November 1954, August 1955, August 1956, September 1956 and December 1956).
67
Martin Guerpin, ‘Une histoire oubliée: la presse jazz en France (1929–2011)’, in Danièle Pistone (ed.),
Recherches sur la presse musicale française (Paris: Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2011).
68
Boris Vian, Œuvres. Tome huitième, ed. Claude Rameil (Paris: Fayard, 2001), pp. 423–37.
69 70
Drott, Music and the Elusive Revolution, p. 122. Ibid., pp. 111–23.
similarly defined themselves in terms of an opposition with the past.71

A comparable phenomenon had occurred in classical music, with figures like
Antoine Goléa emerging partly thanks to their reputation as defenders of
progressive contemporary music.
Writing on Rock and Other Popular Genres

Although rock began to infiltrate France in the late 1950s, early reviews of the
genre in Jazz Hot reveal that it was first met with critical incomprehension.72
Into the vacuum arrived the fan magazine Salut les copains (1962–76). Named
after a popular radio show, the tremendously popular and colourful star-
oriented content of the magazine was an innovation in French music
publications.73 Salut les copains was followed by Rock & Folk (1966–) and Best
(1968–95). According to Marc Savev, Rock & Folk can be understood as
a critical reaction to the less objective fan magazine content of Salut les copains,
a return to a more traditional critical distance with the musical object.74 In
January 1968, Rock & Folk made it clear that it intended to cover all popular
genres, adding the words ‘Pop Music, Rhythm and Blues et Jazz’ underneath
its title.
Rock & Folk was initially dominated by the American and British acts that
had taken France by storm. Reporting on French rock only emerged well after
the 1968 uprisings, in the early 1970s.75 Early contributors included Philippe
Koechlin (who also wrote for Rock & Folk’s parent magazine Jazz Hot and the
news weekly Nouvel Observateur), but also rock criticism pioneers François
Jouffa and Jacques Barsamian, who had created a news and music programme
called Campus in the midst of the 1968 uprisings, as well as Alain Dister,
Philippe Constantin and Philippe Garnier.76 Since the creation of Rock & Folk,
other journalistic ventures have aimed to renew the popular music press and
have marked the generations that were teenagers at the time of their creation,
notably Les Inrockuptibles (1986–) and Technikart (1991–).
71
Ibid., p. 119.
72
Gilles Verlant (ed.), Le Rock et La Plume. Une histoire du rock par les meilleurs journalistes français 1960–1975
(Paris: Éditions Hors Collection, 2000), pp. 11–13.
73
On Salut les copains and its predecessors see Matthew Pires, ‘The Popular Music Press’, in
Hugh Dauncey and Steve Cannon (eds.), Popular Music in France from Chanson to Techno (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2003).
74
Marc Savev, ‘Deux exemples de presse musicale jeune en France, de 1966 à 1969: Salut Les Copains et
Rock & Folk’, Volume! 3/1 (2004), 5–28, notably 7.
75
Drott, Music and the Elusive Revolution, pp. 167–78. See also Philippe Teillet, ‘Rock and Culture in
France: Ways, Processes and Conditions of Integration’, in Dauncey and Cannon (eds.), Popular Music in
France.
76
Unattributed, ‘Campus sur Europe’, Rock & Folk (May 1968), 8. See also Drott, Music and the Elusive
Revolution, p. 164.
Libération
As its title indicates, Libération, the successful daily paper of the new left in the
Mitterrandian 1980s, was born out of the 1968 student movement, and was
founded as a leftist alternative news daily in 1973, at a time when publications
like Combat and Carrefour were fading. Liberated it was, more so than any
French daily paper of a national scope had been before. Employing a casual
language, the paper’s pages included sexually explicit cartoons, free personal
ads and film reviews by Simone de Beauvoir. The Libération of the 1970s only
printed occasional write-ups of concerts or recordings, and these were domi-
nated by alternative, popular genres favoured by the paper’s readers. The
young newspaper’s critics (Alain Dister, Alain Leiblang, Philippe Conrath,
Pierre Goldman, Alain Pacadis) had atypical profiles and wrote pieces that
covered a range of cultural issues, including groundbreaking accounts on
subjects like the punk scene and gay nightlife.
In an effort to become a viable national daily (and attain financial stability),
Libération’s director Serge July relaunched the paper on 13 May 1981, three
days after the election of Mitterrand. This move led to a considerable modera-
tion of the paper’s tone. Although many of Libération’s writers and editors
remained the same, the emphasis of its content shifted from political activism
to social and cultural reporting. Improvements in circulation followed
Liberation’s refoundation, mounting from 40,000 in 1980 to 192,000 in
1988.77 The pages of Libération in the 1980s saw the triumph of the interview
as the preferred format for music reporting. The paper itself also occasionally
played a very active role in crafting musical tastes, tracking down and re-
editing, for example, recordings of neglected but influential (according to
Bayon) French rocker Ronnie Bird.78 Since the 1980s, Libération has drifted
even further from its leftist roots. Its music columns have become less focused
on unearthing new trends, while classical music reporting, virtually absent in
the paper’s first two decades, has taken a place alongside pieces on other
genres.
Perspectives
The landscape of music criticism in contemporary France is no longer domi-
nated by newspapers and magazines as it was in the decades following
the Second World War, but rather has been diluted across a broad spectrum
77
Patrick Eveno, Histoire de la Presse Française de Théophrase Renaudot à la révolution numérique (Paris:
Flammarion, 2012), pp. 254–5.
78
Bayon [Bruno Taravant], ‘Ronnie Bird, la compulsion’, Libération (8 April 1985), 23.
of media that include the Internet and free print media. In France as through-
out the world, much of the population has turned to online sources for its
news and cultural reporting. In a 2013 study concerning internet usage in
France, 78 per cent of those surveyed had internet access in their homes,
compared with 54 per cent in 2007 and only 12 per cent in 2000.79 In the same
survey, although 75 per cent of the French population reported having used
the Internet within the past three months, only about 30 per cent of this
group reported using the Internet to read online newspapers and magazines.
This latter figure reflects a trend that began long before the arrival of the
Internet – and seems to confirm the domination broadcast media over print
news sources.80 A dwindling minority of the French population continues to
receive its news via the written word, whether in print or online, a decline that
spans and defines the period covered here.
Online publications include alternative webzines, blogs and interactive for-
ums, and provide critical content from authors with a broad range of qualifica-
tions, from trained journalists to amateurs and trolls. The Médiathèque of the
Cité de la Musique maintains an up-to-date list of active online resources, many
of which include criticism and reporting on musical life (blogs, websites of print
publications, independent webzines).81 Recent but influential online subscrip-
tion-based alternative newspapers like Rue89 [sic] include cultural reporting in
their offers. An example of traditional criticism within this new format is the
column of former Le Monde de la musique editor Nathalie Krafft. ‘Drôles de
gammes’ takes the form of a blog housed by the larger online presence of the
newspaper Rue89, and publishes a range of cultural reporting, from criticism to
avant-premières to obituaries.
Since the first free newspapers were distributed in the Paris Métro in
2002,82 free print media have come to surpass greatly the circulation of
traditional paid formats. Titles like Métro, 20 Minutes, À Nous Paris and Le
Bonbon are aimed at local urban readerships and propose activities and pas-
times in the form of short blurbs. More considerable in scope and content, free
cultural papers such as Cadences and La Terrasse – often distributed to specta-
tors entering theatres and concert halls or left in stands outside of these
establishments – publish signed reviews, profiles and interviews alongside
concert calendars and paid advertising related to local cultural life.
79
Vincent Gombault and Xavier Reif, ‘L’Internet de plus en plus prisé, l’internaute de plus en plus
mobile’, Insee Première, 1452 (2013), available at www.insee.fr (accessed 3 February 2017).
80
Olivier Donnat and Denis Cogneau, Les Pratiques culturelles des Français 1973–1989 (Paris: La
Découverte/La Documentation Française, 1990).
81
Available at mediatheque.cite-musique.fr (accessed 3 February 2017).
82
Jean-Marie Charon, La Presse quotidienne, 3rd ed. (Paris: La Découverte, 2013), pp. 22, 47–8.
Although the status, authors and media of information on French musical

life have dramatically transformed over the past seventy-five years, it would be
inaccurate to say that music criticism is dying.83 Based on current trends, it
seems safe to predict that the future of music criticism in France will be
increasingly online, interactive, multimedia and international.
83
Moreover, in musicological research, French music criticism is an increasingly popular object of study
for groups in France and abroad. These include CELLAM (Université Rennes 2), IReMus (Université
Paris-Sorbonne), LaM (Université libre de Bruxelles) and OICRM (Université de Montréal).
. 34 .
Old Divisions and New Debates: Music Criticism

in Post-War America
SOPHIE REDFERN
‘I do not believe that any mechanical device will put it out of business’, wrote
the veteran Sunday editor of the New York Times, Lester Markel, on the fate of
the daily newspaper in 1946.1 Radio had failed to curb America’s appetite for
the daily, and Markel was confident that television, then the latest curiosity,
would not do so either. Of course, the impact of technological change would,
despite Markel’s scepticism, be one of the major factors affecting post-war
music criticism in the United States. Television changed the nation’s habits,
particularly in terms of news coverage, while newspapers merged and faltered.
In the digital age, the entire print journalism model has been transformed as
new platforms emerge and open up opportunities. These changes have com-
bined with the major social and cultural shifts that effectively shattered
former boundaries and hierarchies about what music gets criticised. As jazz,
pop and rock grew in dominance over the century, whole new spheres of
criticism developed and became established. These genres claimed the main-
stream, leaving classical music an increasingly marginalised interest.2
The vagaries of the press have dictated the careers of many critics, and so
inevitably the newspaper business forms much of the backdrop to this chap-
ter. More generally, the aim has been to highlight some of the principal
figures, major points of contention and odd events that shed light on the
culture and direction of classical music criticism in America. The primary
focus is on New York, and as such it does little to challenge existing accounts,
which are dominated by a handful of critics holding leading positions at the
city’s major publications. Still, despite the geographical limitation, there are
some sound reasons for attention to be concentrated here. New York has
a unique position at the forefront of not only US but worldwide artistic
activity. It is a city that has often set the artistic agenda, both in terms of
what is new and what is prestigious. At the same time, it has long been home
to some of the country’s most august musical institutions – the Metropolitan
1
David R. Davies, The Postwar Decline of American Newspapers, 1945–1965 (Westport: Praeger, 2006), p. 4.
2
This chapter reflects the common usage of certain phrases: America for the United States, classical music
for Western art music, New York for New York City.
[671]
672 SOPHIE REDFERN
Opera House, the New York Philharmonic, Juilliard, Carnegie Hall – and has
been a major draw for international artists and companies since the nineteenth
century. Moreover, while there is no national press, New York newspapers
have the widest circulation nationally.3 Given all these conditions, it is under-
standable that critics based at its most prominent publications have an out-
sized position in the musical story of the country. Nevertheless, while this
chapter continues to concentrate attention on New York, it does so with a full
understanding that any history of music criticism in New York is far from the
sum of music criticism in North America. There is considerable scope for
research on regional centres that may well challenge, add nuance to and
reconfigure the current narrative, nor should it be forgotten that criticism
in Canada has its own distinct history.
The Past
In 1946, as the world reckoned with the aftermath of war, the United Nations
General Assembly met for the first time, the atomic bomb was tested under-
water at Bikini Atoll and Winston Churchill gave his famous ‘Iron Curtain’
speech. Within the world of American music criticism, two events seem to
herald a time of change: on 21 July the respected critic Paul Rosenfeld died,
and in autumn the final issue of Modern Music was published. These can seem
small – the death of a critic who never wrote for a major daily and the closure
of a specialist music magazine – but both had supported and promoted
a whole generation of composers who came of age in the 1920s and 30s and
were integral components in the new music scene.
Rosenfeld (1890–1946) had no formal musical background but, according
to Aaron Copland, ‘believed passionately in the emergence of an important
school of contemporary American composers’.4 Writing for magazines
including The Seven Arts, Nation, New Republic, The Dial and Vanity Fair, he
was considered essential reading for anyone interested in new music in
the twenties (Copland notes how it was in Rosenfeld articles that he
first became aware of Ernest Bloch, Roger Sessions and Stravinsky).5 Up-
and-coming composers championed by Rosenfeld included Carlos Chávez,
Lukas Foss, Roy Harris, Leo Ornstein and Copland, while his critical
gaze also looked to re-establish a place for maligned artists like Charles
3
As a guide, the six biggest daily newspapers by circulation in 2013 were Wall Street Journal, New York
Times, USA Today (Virginia), Los Angeles Times, New York Daily News and New York Post; see ‘Top 25 US
Newspapers for March 2013’, Alliance for Audited Media (30 April 2013), available at auditedmedia.com
(accessed 1 August 2018).
4
Aaron Copland, ‘Memorial to Paul Rosenfeld’, Notes, 4/2 (1947), 148.
5
Aaron Copland and Vivian Perlis, Copland: 1900 through 1942 (London: Faber and Faber, 1984), p. 101.
Old Divisions and New Debates in Post-War America 673
Ives.6 Today, Rosenfeld’s writings can seem somewhat flowery, but Mark
N. Grant has noted how he was the first critic to write respectfully about
new currents in music.7 Furthermore, immersed in the artistic world he
documented, he acted as part critic, part patron and part agent, sometimes
financially supporting the young composers he wrote about (in a move at
odds with current ethical practices). Rosenfeld was a critic, but he was also
a powerbroker for those on the contemporary scene.
It was through Rosenfeld that Copland first met Minna Lederman (1896–
1995), the ‘brand-new editor of the brand-new magazine The League of
Composers’ Review’, founded in 1924.8 Lederman presided over the magazine,
which changed its name to Modern Music in 1925, for its entire twenty-three-
volume, eighty-nine-issue run.9 Dominated by contributions from compo-
sers, it was a formidable forum for the discussion of new music, as even
a snapshot of those who wrote for it indicates: Antheil, Auric, Berg, Bartók,
Bernstein, Cage, Carter, Chávez, Copland, Cowell, Roy Harris, Lou Harrison,
Krenek, McPhee, Milhaud, Martinů, Prokofiev, Sessions, Schoenberg,
Shostakovich, Thomson and Weill all contributed reviews, commentaries
and composer profiles. The focus was on the latest musical ideas in the
Americas and Europe, and battle lines were regularly drawn, with provoca-
tions from one writer often rebutted in a barbed letter from another.
Nevertheless, while there was plenty of critical fire and internecine warfare
within its covers, the reason for Modern Music’s existence at all is notable.
It grew out of a need identified by the newly established League of
Composers: its concerts were either purposely overlooked by the press or
critiqued by those ignorant or inherently hostile to contemporary music.10
European publications dedicated to documenting and debating new music
had been eagerly consumed in New York in the early 1920s, and they showed
the level of critical insight and status afforded contemporary music outside of
America.11 Modern Music was an attempt at a response, a space for the serious
6
See Copland, ‘Memorial to Paul Rosenfeld’, 147–51.
7
Mark N. Grant, Maestros of the Pen: A History of Classical Music Criticism in America (Boston: Northeastern
8
Copland and Perlis, Copland: 1900 through 1942, p. 102.
9
Key sources on Modern Music include Lederman’s own The Life and Death of a Small Magazine (Modern
Music, 1924–1946), ISAM Monographs 18 (New York: Institute for Studies in American Music, 1983);
Wayne D. Shirley, Modern Music: An Analytical Index, eds. William and Carolyn Lichtenwanger (New York:
AMS Press, 1976); and Carol Oja (ed.), Stravinsky in Modern Music (1924–1946) (New York: Da Capo Press,
1982).
10
The League of Composers was established for the promotion of new music in 1923. See David Metzer,
‘The League of Composers: The Initial Years’, American Music, 15/1 (1997), 45–69.
11
Lederman lists La Revue musicale, Die Musik, La Rassegna musicale, Schrifttanz, Musikblätter des Anbruch
and Querschnitt as the ‘imposing European magazines’ reaching composers and art dealers in New York
(Life and Death of a Small Magazine, p. 3).
674 SOPHIE REDFERN
and considered discussion of new developments in music, and a much-

needed platform for its promotion. No school or approach was promoted
above any other, but notably absent was any discussion of performers. The
stars of the day dominated classical music coverage in the mainstream press,
and for Lederman, barring a ‘few illustrious examples’, their reliance on
standard repertoire and aversion to new music meant they were ‘beyond
the pale’.12
Financial pressures eventually caused Modern Music’s closure and left those
within its orbit in mourning, as Virgil Thomson’s obituary in the New York
Herald Tribune testifies: ‘Musicians and laymen who are part of the contem-
porary musical movement will of necessity be moved by this announcement,
because Modern Music has been for them all a Bible and a new organ, a forum,
a source of world information, and a defender of their faith.’13 Of course
Thomson (1896–1989), composer and critic, was a regular contributor.
However, through the praise he lavished on it, he revealed an understanding
of both its central value for the future, and also something about his views on
composer-critics:
Its twenty-three volumes are history written by the men who made it. For the
history of music in any epoch is the story of its composers and of their
compositions. Nobody ever tells the story right but the composers
themselves . . . Thanks to Modern Music the last quarter century has probably
a better chance of being written up convincingly than any other, save possibly
those years between 1820 and 1845, when Schumann, Berlioz, Liszt, Weber
and Jean-Paul Richter all wrote voluminously about their contemporaries.14
Thomson stated in 1947 what Lederman later also stressed, and it is

certainly because of its composer-critics that Modern Music is seen as so
remarkable.15 But while its readership at the time was small (3,000 by 1946),
Lederman thought it ‘helped erode the then-solid resistance of the American
press to what was new and changing in the world of art’.16 Mainstream
newspaper critics were supposedly the enemy of new music – Elliott Carter
in 1939 wrote of how ‘critics are not well-informed about American music.
12
Ibid., p. 5.
13
Virgil Thomson, ‘A War’s End’, New York Herald Tribune (12 January 1947); reprinted in Virgil Thomson:
Music Chronicles 1940–1954, ed. Tim Page (New York: The Library of America, 2014). Quotations from
Music Chronicles are from the unpaginated e-book edition.
14
Ibid.
15
Lederman, Life and Death of a Small Magazine, p. 205. For a reflection from 1964, see Eric Salzman,
‘Modern Music in Retrospect’, Perspectives on New Music, 2/2 (1964), 14–20.
16
Lederman, Life and Death of a Small Magazine, pp. 9, 5. Olin Downes described its closure as ‘distressing
news’, but also noted that it was prone to ‘inbreeding and mutual admiration between individuals and
cliques of composers’. Downes, ‘Magazine Folding: Modern Music, Voice of Composers, to Quit’, New York
Times (12 January 1947), 7.
How could they be? They do not cover concerts devoted to it’17 – and so
further specialised publications attempted to fill the gap left by Modern
Music.18 However, new music had become more prominent in the press
following the appointment of Thomson to the chief music critic position at
the New York Herald Tribune. Since 1940, one of Modern Music’s own composer-
critics had been ensconced in the world of the daily.
Downes, Thomson and the New York Dailies

In the years immediately following the war, the newspaper industry in
America briefly flourished; circulation went up and the number of daily
newspapers increased too.19 In New York there were seven dailies that
included music criticism: the Brooklyn Eagle, New York Herald Tribune,
New York Journal-American, New York Post, New York Sun, New York Times
and New York World-Telegram.20 (By the late 1960s, only the Times and Post
remained.) The most respected were the New York Herald Tribune, known
for its literary style and lively arts coverage, and the New York Times, which
had a bigger circulation but a drier tone (it prided itself on its comprehen-
siveness). Thomson’s tenure at the Herald Tribune coincided with the final
period of the long career of the Times chief critic Olin Downes (1886–1955),
a newspaper veteran who joined the Times in 1924 after nearly two decades
at the Boston Post (he started in 1906). Both in position before America
entered the war, they were the two most prominent daily critics document-
ing the New York scene until the mid-1950s; Thomson left the Herald
Tribune in 1954, while Downes remained at the Times until his death in
1955.
Downes is now best remembered for his crucial role in establishing
Sibelius’s reputation in America. The composer was, in his words, ‘the tower-
ing symphonic master of today and the prophet of tomorrow’, a view in direct
opposition to many of those appraising the Finn’s music in Europe.21
Downes’s championing of Sibelius and coolness towards neoclassicism and
serialism – in 1942 he condemned Stravinsky’s latest scores as ‘sterile, feeble,
17
Quoted in Suzanne Robinson, ‘“A Ping, Qualified by a Thud”: Music Criticism in Manhattan and the
Case of Cage (1943–58)’, Journal of the Society for American Music, 1/1 (2007), 79.
18
For example, the League of Composers founded the Composer’s News Record in 1947. It ceased
publication in 1949.
19
Davies, Postwar Decline, p. 3.
20
Robinson, ‘“A Ping, Qualified by a Thud”’, 79. These were the ones with music criticism, not the only
dailies (other dailies include the Daily News and Mirror). There was also PM, in print 1940–48.
21
Olin Downes, ‘Classic Master’, New York Times (3 December 1950), X7. For more, see Glenda
Dawn Goss, Jean Sibelius and Olin Downes: Music, Friendship, Criticism (Boston: Northeastern University
Press, 1995).
676 SOPHIE REDFERN
melodically commonplace creations’22 – has seen him labelled as against new

developments in music, though the reality is more nuanced.23 What his
writings do show is him prizing emotion and rallying against objectivity or
compositional method being revered as musical qualities in themselves.
It was, for example, on the basis of emotion that in 1952 Downes revised his
view of Honegger’s Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher, going from considering it an
accomplished but superficial work to claiming it to be a work of ‘profound
feeling as well as dramatic power’.24 Of a performance of Berg’s Violin
Concerto, his dislike of the composer’s approach was tempered by the expres-
sive effect of the score: it was ‘in at least the greater part, most poignant and
intensely beautiful emotional music’.25 That Downes felt at odds with con-
temporary thought on valuing emotion is apparent from the quips he slotted
into his reviews. In a critique of Leonard Bernstein’s Second Symphony, The
Age of Anxiety, he noted, ‘One must be careful in calling for emotion today in
music, or he may earn the horrible name of a romanticist.’26 A similar wry
comment can be found in a glowing review of Prokofiev’s Fifth Symphony.27
To understand the role of Times chief critic at the time, it is important to
note some practicalities. Downes was head critic of the newspaper with the
largest music desk in New York (in the late 1940s, Ross Parmenter, Carter
Harman and Howard Taubman were all on staff, while stringers28 added to
their number). Furthermore, while Downes was seen to have considerable
influence, his status was unusual. Grant has written of how Downes was ‘the
first Times man in whom that power devolved’, and the reason was simply the
nature of the newspaper business.29 As newspapers folded, there were fewer
music critics, meaning greater authority was placed on those who remained.30
Of course, whatever power Downes had, the realities of writing to a deadline
must never be forgotten. The TV journalist Daniel Schorr remembered vividly
the time he met the critic:
22
Olin Downes, ‘Neo-Classicism’, New York Times (3 February 1942), X7; reprinted as ‘The “Neo-
Classicism” of the Bright Boys’, in Olin Downes, Olin Downes on Music, ed. Irene Downes (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1957), p. 306.
23
Downes would not have considered himself against new music and wrote about his responsibility to
composers and new music. See Olin Downes, ‘Native Composers and Critics’, New York Times (4 March
1934), X6.
24
Olin Downes, ‘Philadelphia Orchestra, 2 Choirs Join in Joan of Arc at the Stake’, New York Times
(19 November 1952), 36; reprinted as ‘A Frank Change of Mind about Honegger’s Jeanne d’Arc au
bûcher’, in Downes on Music, p. 408.
25
Olin Downes, ‘Szigeti Is Soloist for Philharmonic’, New York Times (16 December 1949), 37.
26
Olin Downes, ‘Bernstein Offers His Own Symphony’, New York Times (24 February 1950), 26; reprinted
in Downes on Music, p. 387.
27
Olin Downes, ‘Prokofieff’s Fifth Played Here Again’, New York Times (14 February 1946), 33; reprinted
as ‘The Finest Russian Symphony in Twenty-Five Years: Prokofieff’s Fifth’, in Downes on Music, p. 338.
28 29 30
Freelance journalists. Grant, Maestros of the Pen, p. 267. Ibid.
Once I was invited to meet with Olin Downes, the most famous critic of his
time. In the subway on the way to Times Square, I read a Downes review of
a Carnegie Hall performance by the violinist Josef Szigeti. Downes had
written that Szigeti’s tone was fine, but that the ‘profile of his tone’ left
something to be desired. Awed by the dimension of musical understanding
that this indicated, I asked Downes what the line meant. Cheerfully he said,
‘Don’t give it a second thought. That’s just the kind of bullshit you put down
when you’re up against a deadline’.31
Schorr made a call there and then: ‘being a music critic was not an honourable
profession’.32
While few now would look to Downes’s writing style in admiration (it
stands firmly as a testament to its time and the Times),33 his counterpart Virgil
Thomson would be quite different.34 Thomson joined the Herald Tribune,
a ‘gentleman’s paper’, in 1940 and remembered his response to being offered
the post: ‘I replied that the general standard of music reviewing in New York
had sunk so far that almost any change might bring improvement.’35 With
a savvy sense of the music business, he also saw an opportunity: ‘I thought
perhaps my presence in a post so prominent might stimulate performance of
my works.’36
Thomson was a major composer by this stage. One of the generation of
American composers for whom France held the key to music’s future, he
studied with Nadia Boulanger, lived in Paris from 1925 to 1940 and had
been immersed in the modernist artistic life of that city (befriending
Gertrude Stein there and collaborating with her on the operas Four Saints in
Three Acts and later The Mother of Us All). His own music, which ranged from
piano sonatas to film scores, showed broad influences including his church
background in Kansas City, Missouri and the musical approach of Satie
(whom he particularly admired). Before joining the Herald Tribune he had
written articles for Modern Music and Vanity Fair, though he was most known
for his strident 1939 book The State of Music.37 And so, apart from never having
written to a deadline, Thomson was a known quantity when he was
31 32
Daniel Schorr, Staying Tuned: A Life in Journalism (New York: Pocket Books, 2001), p. 8. Ibid.
33
What now seem dated style policies were strictly enforced until well into the 1970s. See Joseph
Horowitz, ‘Reflections on the Times’, ARTicles (2002), available at josephhorowitz.com (accessed
1 August 2018).
34
Tim Page has said, ‘There isn’t a critic out there who will not learn something from reading Virgil
Thomson and I would say the same thing about anybody who is really serious about music.’ Page
interview, ‘Critical Condition: Revisiting Composer Virgil Thomson’s Masterful Prose’, NPR Music
(15 September 2016), available at www.npr.org (accessed 1 August 2018).
35
Virgil Thomson, Virgil Thomson (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967), pp. 321–2.
36
Ibid., p. 321.
37
Virgil Thomson, The State of Music (New York: William Morrow, 1939); reprinted in Virgil Thomson: The
State of Music and Other Writings, ed. Tim Page (New York: The Library of America, 2016).
678 SOPHIE REDFERN
appointed: a forthright and irreverent musical insider who knew both the
history of music and its most recent developments. He was also a hugely
engaging writer; he described his style as ‘at once sassy and classy’.38
Despite the prominence he would gain as a critic, Thomson never
wavered in his assertion that he was a composer who wrote criticism
and not a critic who composed. He also never wavered in his views on
the authority of composers as critics, repeating to an interviewer in 1985
what he had set out in his Modern Music obituary: ‘the best critics have
always been the composers’.39 Being a composer obviously coloured what
he chose to feature, and the sheer volume of new music that the Herald
Tribune covered during his tenure is testament to this. He reportedly told
those who worked for him to cover ‘every experimental, off-beat, or novel
idiom that prepares music for going forward in new ways’.40 And it did
have an effect. In a revealing study, Suzanne Robinson has shown the
impact of Thomson and those he employed on the reception of John
Cage’s music in New York between 1943 and 1958.41 Not only were
Thomson and his coterie responsible for writing more than a third of
the 150 reviews of Cage’s music published during this period, there was
a marked decline in how favourably Cage’s music was covered after
Thomson left his post.42
If those perceived to be propelling music forward gained his approval, the
business of classical music in New York was a constant target of his ire.
Attacking everything from the stolid nineteenth-century Austro-German
fare that formed the diet of the major orchestras to the racketeering he
witnessed being played out by behind-the-scenes executives – Arthur
Judson, business manager of the Philharmonic and Columbia Artists, was
a particular bête noire43 – his position afforded him a platform to champion
and lampoon. In his first column he took on the Philharmonic: ‘The menu was
routine, the playing ditto.’44 With a sweeping dismissal of Sibelius’s Second
Symphony included too, Thomson simultaneously took aim at one of
New York’s most prestigious organisations and the musical taste of
38
Virgil Thomson, ‘Preface’ to From Music Reviewed 1940–1954; reprinted in Music Chronicles.
39
Virgil Thomson, interview with Bruce Duffie (1985), available at www.bruceduffie.com/vt.html
40
Quoted in Robinson, ‘“A Ping, Qualified by a Thud”’, 80.
41
Ibid. For more on the Thomson and Cage relationship, see Anthony Tommasini, Virgil Thomson:
Composer on the Aisle (New York and London: Norton, 1997), pp. 440–50.
42
Robinson, ‘“A Ping, Qualified by a Thud”’.
43
Thomson, ‘The Philharmonic Crisis’, New York Herald Tribune (9 February 1947); reprinted in Music
Chronicles. Judson at one point threatened to pull advertising from the paper unless Thomson was
removed (see Tommasini, Virgil Thomson, pp. 343–5).
44
Virgil Thomson, ‘Covering the Orchestras’, New York Herald Tribune (11 October 1940); reprinted in
Music Chronicles.
Downes.45 Unsurprisingly, celebrated performers fared little better (follow-

ing the Modern Music stance). Their role in perpetuating the miserable state of
programming and desire to dazzle the public with their technical wares
seemed to cause both amusement and frustration. Vladimir Horowitz’s play-
ing gave the impression that ‘Brahms was a sort of flippant Gershwin who had
worked in a high-class night club’, while Jascha Heifetz, who ‘can fiddle’,
seemed to define himself by his polish: ‘To ask anything else of him is like
asking tenderness of the ocelot.’46 Thomson wrote his own headlines; the
Heifetz review was titled ‘Silk-Underwear Music’.
As to what extent Thomson’s own agenda affected his judgement, he always
claimed an air of objectivity, stressing that his job was to describe an event for
his readers (some of his reviews see him address them directly).47 The
reviewer’s opinion would come through he claimed, but ultimately descrip-
tion was ‘more important than the estimate of value’.48 Despite this,
Thomson’s biases were often barely concealed. There were conflicts of inter-
est at every turn and he did little to minimise them, instead exploiting and
revelling in his platform. He would lavish warm praise on his friends’ music
and on those who performed or commissioned his music, while pouring scorn
on those he had a spat with. He also consistently demonstrated his preference
for French and American music over Germanic.49
Thomson’s views and approach were passed on to those he recruited, and an
important, if unsurprising, aspect of his tenure was that he only employed
composer-critics. Over the years a formidable roster of ex-Modern Music con-
tributors including Arthur Berger, Paul Bowles, Peggy Glanville-Hicks, Lou
Harrison and Lester Trimble wrote for the newspaper (Carter and Cage
contributed occasional articles too).50 They all reviewed each other’s music,
so the question of bias looms large. As for their place at the Herald Tribune,
critic Timothy Mangan, who has collected the writing of Paul Bowles
(1910–99), describes the Bowles’s role as one of a ‘critical infantryman’,
45
Thomson described the symphony as ‘vulgar, self-indulgent and provincial beyond all description’;
ibid.
46
Virgil Thomson, ‘Master of Distortion and Exaggeration’, New York Herald Tribune (26 October 1942),
and ‘Silk-Underwear Music’, New York Herald Tribune (31 October 1940); both reprinted in Music
Chronicles.
47
See Thomson’s reference to ‘my readers’ in ‘More Beecham’ (14 April 1941), ‘Levant Tough and
Tender’ (18 February 1942), and ‘Mélisande’ (30 January 1944), all New York Herald Tribune; reprinted
in Music Chronicles.
48
Virgil Thomson, ‘The Music Reviewer and His Assignment’, Proceedings of the American Academy of
Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1954); reprinted in Music Chronicles.
49
See Karen L. Carter, ‘Virgil Thomson on Modern Music: Critical Writings in the New York Herald
Tribune’, unpublished MA thesis, McMaster University (1990).
50
Robinson, ‘“A Ping, Qualified by a Thud”’, 87 n. 34. See also the recently released CD Composer-Critics
of the New York Herald Tribune, Other Minds Records, OM 1024-2 (2017). It features remastered recordings
drawn from a series of LPs Thomson coordinated in the 1950s for Columbia Records.
680 SOPHIE REDFERN
often ‘relegated to a peculiar kind of critical hell, reviewing the concerts of

wannabes, hopefuls, and has-beens attempting to make their names with
a New York recital’.51 Thomson rarely intervened on articles, but Bowles
did remember him impressing his philosophy:
What you’re doing is reporting on an event, like a fire in the Bronx or

something . . . you don’t say, ‘I didn’t like the color of the fire. I don’t like
the smell of the burning rubber.’ Don’t tell what you like or what you don’t
like because no one cares.52
The extent to which Thomson followed his own advice is debatable.

Another member of Thomson’s infantry was the Australian-born compo-
ser Glanville-Hicks (1912–90).53 She was hired after writing on Bowles for
Music & Letters in 1945 and publishing commentaries on the 1947
International Society for Contemporary Music Festival in Copenhagen for
the Musical Courier and Composer’s News Record.54 Over the next eight years
she wrote hundreds of reviews for the Herald Tribune and became increas-
ingly in demand elsewhere, with her writings on modern music appearing
in publications ranging from mainstream magazines like Cue and Vogue to
the rather more highbrow Juilliard Review.55 Her work as a composer was
even directly affected by her role at the newspaper: in 1949 she composed
Thomsoniana, a birthday present for Thomson in which she set some of his
reviews for voice, horn and piano. Though she was a stringer at the paper,
Glanville-Hicks lobbied for a permanent position in 1953 and also put
herself forward to replace Thomson when he retired.56 Overlooked, she
believed her sex played a part.57 In the end, the Columbia musicologist Paul
Henry Lang, a man whose tastes ranged far from Thomson’s (one friend
claimed Lang believed ‘music ceased to exist at the death of Schubert’),
would be his successor.58
51
Timothy Mangan, ‘Introduction’ to Paul Bowles, Paul Bowles on Music, eds. Timothy Mangan and
Irene Herrmann (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003), xvi.
52
Bowles, Paul Bowles on Music, p. 265.
53
Thomson’s view is in Thomson, Virgil Thomson, pp. 344–5. He describes her as an ‘indispensable
colleague’, but there is more than a hint of sexism.
54
The Musical Courier, known for its coverage of musical instrument developments, was published
between 1880 and 1962. See Peter H. Adams, An Annotated Index to Selected Articles from the Musical
Courier, 1880–1940, 2 vols. (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2009).
55
See Victoria Rogers, The Music of Peggy Glanville-Hicks (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009), pp. 81–4. For the
Juilliard Review, see Liesbeth Hoedemaeker, ‘The Juilliard Review’, Retrospective Index to Music
Periodicals (RIPM), available at ripm.org (accessed 1 August 2018).
56
Rogers, The Music of Peggy Glanville-Hicks, p. 84; Tommasini, Virgil Thomson, pp. 428–9.
57
Karen L. Carter-Schwendler has written on the change in Thomson’s language when commenting on
female composers in ‘Virgil Thomson’s Herald Tribune Writings: Fulfilling the “Cultural Obligation”
Selectively’, IAWM Journal (June 1995), 12–15.
58
Tommasini, Virgil Thomson, p. 428.
Critics Unite
While it is easy to position critics as isolated ideologues, there are also many
instances of critics coming together to organise activities and reflect on the
profession. A look at some of these activities reveals critics to be congenial (at
least at times), and also highlights the place of women critics and African
American critics within the wider community. One remarkable event in the
immediate post-war period was a symposium on music criticism that took
place at Harvard on 1–3 May 1947.59 Ambitious in nature, it featured talks,
roundtables and concerts of newly commissioned music written by major
figures like Copland, Hindemith Martinů and Schoenberg. Those invited to
speak addressed topics that recur time and again as preoccupations: Roger
Sessions focused on ‘The Scope of Music Criticism’, Olga Samaroff on ‘The
Performer as Critic’ and Thomson on ‘The Art of Judging Music’; proceedings
opened with a lecture by E. M. Forster titled ‘The Raison d’Être of Criticism
in the Arts’.60 Downes chaired one of the meetings and wrote an extensive
column on the three-day conference, which he reported had over one hundred
critics in attendance and ‘brought a degree of attention to a little understood
and a generally undervalued art which cannot fail [to be] of great cultural
benefit to press and public’.61
Of those presenting, Sessions and Thomson were composer-critics, but
Texas-born Olga Samaroff (1882–1948) represented a different background:
she was a performer-critic.62 A Paris Conservatoire-trained pianist and influ-
ential teacher, Samaroff’s time as a critic was short but important: she was the
first female music critic at a major daily, holding the chief position at the
New York Post in 1926 and 1927 (one of many firsts she achieved).63 While she
was a critic who understood the power of showmanship –‘the brilliantly
censorious critic is the virtuoso of the profession’64 – she was judicious in
59
Overview and schedule in ‘Music Symposium Ticket Allotment Starts this Afternoon at Paine Hall’,
The Harvard Crimson (29 April 1947), available at www.thecrimson.com (1 August 2018).
60
The contributions were published as Richard French (ed.), Music and Criticism: A Symposium
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948). Sessions, Thomson and Forster also in Sessions, Roger
Sessions on Music: Collected Essays, ed. Edward T. Cone (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979);
Thomson, The Art of Judging Music (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948) (and Music Chronicles); and Forster,
Two Cheers for Democracy (London: Arnold; New York: Harcourt Brace, 1951).
61
Olin Downes, ‘Composer and Critic’, New York Times (18 May 1947), X7.
62
Lucy Hickenlooper changed her name to Samaroff when her career as a pianist took off. See Olga
Samaroff Stokowski, An American Musician’s Story (New York: W. W. Norton, 1939).
63
Samaroff was the first American female pianist to enter the piano class at the Paris Conservatoire, to
debut at Carnegie Hall and to perform the thirty-two Beethoven sonatas. She was also the first American-
born pianist on the piano faculty at Juilliard; see Donna Staley Kline, An American Virtuoso on the World
Stage: Olga Samaroff Stokowski (Texas: Texas A&M University Press, 1996).
64
Quoted in Robert D. Schick, Classical Music Criticism (New York and London: Garland Publishing,
1996), p. 56.
682 SOPHIE REDFERN
her own use of it and a particular feature of her tenure was her refusal to
review performances she considered inadequate due to the impact it could
have on a musician’s career. If the composer-critics supported new music and
focused on the future of music, Samaroff’s attention was on supporting (or at
least not damaging) any performer’s. Amusingly, despite his own biases,
Thomson was particularly scathing on performer-critics: they were, he
claimed, ‘very dangerous’.65
Samaroff was one of a handful of female music critics who held a newspaper
position during the early- and mid-twentieth century.66 In Chicago, Claudia
Cassidy (1899–1996) had a particularly esteemed career from the 1920s to the
1960s, while in New York, the most prominent after Samaroff was Harriett
Johnson (?1908–87).67 Johnson had studied piano with Samaroff and would
follow her teacher by becoming chief music critic at the Post. Unlike Samaroff,
however, Johnson’s tenure lasted an impressive forty-three years (1943–86),
with her obituary in the Times describing her as a popular and respected
presence in the opera house.68 Johnson’s primary interest was reportedly
vocal music, but she wrote on dance (as her appearances in Martha Graham’s
scrapbooks testify) and also composed music for children (William Warfield
was the narrator in the premiere of her 1953 work Chuggy and the Blue
Caboose).69 Despite her accomplishments, as of 2018 she has no entry in
Grove and appears only sporadically in footnotes. Nevertheless, she is an
example (along with Samaroff, Cassidy and Glanville-Hicks) of women for-
ging careers in the mainstream press. In contrast, black critics operated out-
side of it, documenting the music scene largely for African American
newspapers and magazines.
Commentary on classical music began to appear in the African American
press in the early years of the twentieth century. Newspapers such as the Afro-
American, Chicago Defender, Chicago New Crusader, Indianapolis Freeman,
New York Age, New York Amsterdam News and Pittsburgh Courier all featured
articles on the classical music scene and therefore, as Doris Evans McGinty has
65
Thomson, interview with Bruce Duffie.
66
See Barbara Jepson, ‘Women Critics in the United States’, in Judith Lang Zaimont,
Catherine Overhauser and Jane Gottlieb (eds.), The Musical Woman: An International Perspective
(Westport: Greenwood Press, 1983).
67
Cassidy wrote for the Chicago Journal of Commerce (1925–41), Chicago Sun (1941–2) and Chicago Tribune
(1942–65). She also hosted ‘Critic’s Choice’ on Chicago radio. Thomas Willis, ‘Claudia Cassidy’, Grove
Music Online, Oxford Music Online, available at www.oxfordmusiconline.com (accessed
1 September 2018).
68
Unsigned, ‘Harriett Johnson, 79, A New York Post Critic’, New York Times (2 July 1987), 9.
69
Pat Padua, ‘Pic of the Week: Critical Edition’, In the Music: Performing Arts Blog, Library of Congress
(2 May 2012), available at blogs.loc.gov (accessed 1 August 2018); ‘Warfield to Sing New Musical Score’,
Jet, 4/13 (6 August 1953), 59. Chuggy reviewed in the Times: R. P. [Ross Parmenter], ‘Narrative Music of
Critic Played’, New York Times (17 January 1954), 82.
highlighted, performed an important function in growing an audience for

classical music within the black community.70 Those who wrote for these
publications were black critics writing for a black readership, with Sylvester
Russell (Chicago Defender) and Cleveland Allen (New York Age, Chicago
Defender and Indianapolis Freeman) respected figures within the field.71
Allen also wrote for Musical America, signifying that while most day-to-day
activities divided those writing for African American-owned and white-
owned publications, there were exceptions. Furthermore, black critics
were very much part of the wider music critics community, as George
Garner III’s presence at the 1947 Harvard symposium shows. In
a photograph from the event – which would still be a remarkably diverse
image of music critics today72 – Garner III (of the African American-owned
Los Angeles Sentinel) is joking with Samaroff, who in turn is seated next to
Thomson and Hilmar Grondahl (Portland Oregonian).73
Perhaps the most remarkable critic writing for the African American press
in the early to mid-twentieth century was Nora Douglas Holt (1885–1974),
who in 1945 was invited by Thomson to join the Music Critics’ Circle of
New York. She was its first black member.74 Previous to this she had had been
the first African American to gain a Master’s in composition and she played
a major role in organising musical activity for black musicians.75 Her career as
a critic saw her write first for the Chicago Defender and later, after a period in
Europe (which included studying with Nadia Boulanger at Fontainebleau),
return to New York and take up a post at the New York Amsterdam News.76
Among her other pioneering work, in 1921 she established the magazine
Music and Poetry which, despite a limited run, has the distinction of being
70
Doris Evans McGinty, ‘“As Large as She Can Make It”: The Role of Black Women Activists in Music,
1880–1945’, in Ralph P. Locke and Cyrilla Barr (eds.), Cultivating Music in America: Women Patrons and
Activists Since 1860 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), p. 227.
71
Brief overview in Grant, Maestros of the Pen, pp. 319–20. For a list of critics (no distinction made on
classical critics), see Philip McGuire, ‘Black Music Critics and the Classic Blues Singers’, The Black
Perspective in Music, 14/2 (1986), 108.
72
A 2005 survey showed the profession to be 92 per cent white; see ‘The Classical Music Critic: A Survey
of Music Critics at General-Interest and Specialized New Publications in America’, Music Critics
Association of North American and the National Arts Journal Program at Columbia University (2005),
14, available at www.mcana.org (accessed 1 August 2018).
73
Grant, Maestros of the Pen, unpaginated illustrations after p. 194.
74
McGinty, ‘“As Large as She Can Make It”’, p. 227.
75
Her role as an organiser and educator is discussed in relation to the ideology of racial uplift in
Lawrence Schenbeck, Racial Uplift and American Music, 1878–1943 (Jackson: University Press of
Mississippi, 2012), pp. 171–208.
76
Precise dates are not agreed between secondary sources: c. 1917–21/23 (and 1938–43?) at the Defender,
and from c. 1943/4 on at the New York Amsterdam News. See McGinty, ‘“As Large as She Can Make It”’, p.
227; Helen Walker-Hill, From Spirituals to Symphonies: African-American Women Composers and their Music
(Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007), p. 27; Unsigned, ‘Nora Holt Dead; Music Critic
89’, New York Times (30 January 1974), 38; Karen M. Bryan, ‘Nora Holt’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music
Online, available at www.oxfordmusiconline.com (1 August 2018).
684 SOPHIE REDFERN
the second magazine on music published by an African American.77 In the

light of her considerable role as composer, performer, critic and activist,
Thomson’s 1945 invitation to join the Critics’ Circle can be seen as over due
recognition of her place in the cultural fabric of New York at the time.
As an organisation, the Critics’ Circle had been founded by Downes and
Thomson in 1941. The aim was to bring together critics to ‘promote a better
understanding between writers on music and those concerned with the pre-
sentation of music’.78 It was a new idea. The Critics’ Circle would bestow
awards, and significantly the awards were to be presented for American
composers and works.79 Here were American critics trying to support living
composers and build an American repertory. For most of its life there were
about thirty members of the Critic’ Circle and it remained active until the
1960s, at which point it became part of the Music Critics Association of North
America (MCANA).80 Founded in 1956 and still in existence today, MCANA’s
stated mission is ‘to strengthen the profession of classical musical
journalism’.81 As the only association for professional classical music critics
in America, it demonstrates the continued tradition of US critics finding ways
to support and reflect on both the profession and the musical activity they
document. In an echo of the Critics’ Circle awards founded decades earlier, in
2017 MCANA even established an annual award for best new opera.
Mid-Century Divisions and Developments

With the reign of Downes and Thomson ending in the mid-1950s, the
prominent posts at the two major New York dailies would be occupied by
new voices. At the Herald Tribune the Hungarian-born Lang, who had been an
assistant at the Revue musicale as a young man in Paris, brought his vast
knowledge of music history to the newspaper from 1954 to 1964 while
pursuing musicological interests elsewhere (as editor of the Musical Quarterly
and a founder of the American Musicological Society). Alan Rich (1924–2010)
took up the post after him, having moved briefly from the Boston Herald to the
New York Times beforehand. Rich’s tenure would be cut short as botched
mergers with the World-Telegram and Journal-American failed to prolong the
life of the once esteemed Herald Tribune; it ceased publication in 1966. This
was a significant loss of serious and comprehensive criticism in the city,
though its demise did little to dent Rich’s career. He would play a pivotal
77
McGinty, ‘“As Large as She Can Make It”’, p. 227. 78
Tommasini, Virgil Thomson, pp. 342–3.
79
Ibid. 80
‘Notes’, in Music Chronicles.
81
‘History of MCANA’, available at www.mcana.org/historyofmcana.html (accessed 1 August 2018).
role in the developing Los Angeles classical music scene and go on to write for
a host of notable newspapers and magazines on both the east and west
coasts.82
If the Herald Tribune succumbed to the turmoil engulfing the newspaper
business, the Times was far more stable. Howard Taubman (1907–96) led the
musical conversation from 1955 to 1960 before an arts desk shuffle resulted in
him taking up the prestigious chief theatre critic position (after the retirement
of Brooks Atkinson, who had occupied the post for four decades). Harold
C. Schonberg (1915–2003) then took over as senior music critic from 1960 to
1980. The first music critic to win a Pulitzer Prize (he was awarded it in 1971),
Schonberg had an impressive background writing on music, having contrib-
uted to the Musical Advance, American Music Lover (later American Record Guide),
Musical Courier, Musical Digest and the New York Sun, before joining the Times as
record editor.83 He was particularly knowledgeable on nineteenth-century
repertoire and piano music.
Stories of Schonberg rattling off his reviews in forty-five minutes while his
wife waited in a taxi outside the Times building do not do justice to a man who
took his role very seriously.84 The ethical questions that hovered around the
Herald Tribune were anathema to him: ‘Virgil Thomson once said that he could
review his own grandmother and it would make no difference. I was skeptical
about that statement then and I remain skeptical now.’85 He was clear that
being friends with a musician was not acceptable and stressed that no Times
critic should be a performer, composer or someone who writes for any pub-
lication that may hint at a conflict of interest.86 As for his aims, while
Thomson’s stated approach was to report and describe for readers,
Schonberg claimed to ‘write for no audience’: ‘I write for myself: I have
been stimulated, or bored, or excited, or repelled, and I put my feeling
down on paper.’87 He certainly did not believe in the authority of composers,
and the idea of a music critic wielding power seemed faintly ridiculous: ‘There
is no case in history where a great piece of music or a great performer has been
mortally wounded by a negative or stupid review. Critics don’t make careers.
Artists do.’88 He supported this statement with reference to the consistent
disdain he showed for Leonard Bernstein’s conducting: ‘What difference did
an unfavourable review make to him except bruise his ego?’89 He had a point.
82
Writings from the 1980s onwards are on Rich’s blog, available at www.soiveheard.com (accessed
1 August 2018). See also Alan Rich, So I’ve Heard: Notes of a Migratory Music Critic (Pompton Plains:
Amadeus Press, 2006).
83
For his own recollections see Harold Schonberg, Facing the Music (New York: Schirmer, 1981).
84
Allan Kozinn, ‘Harold C. Schonberg, 87, Dies’, New York Times (27 July 2003).
85
Harold C. Schonberg, ‘A Lifetime of Listening’, New York Times (8 February 1981), 40.
86 87 88 89
Ibid., 41. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid.
686 SOPHIE REDFERN
Bernstein’s antics on the podium also fell foul of Winthrop Sargeant at the
New Yorker, who remarked that Bernstein’s movements during a concert of
Mahler in 1961 saw him ‘fencing, hula-dancing and calling upon the heavens
to witness his agonies. I care about Mahler’s agonies, but I do not care a bit
about Mr. Bernstein’s.’90 Sargeant had been an orchestral violinist but moved
to criticism in 1937, writing for Musical America, the Brooklyn Eagle, New York
American, Time magazine and Life, before joining the New Yorker in the late
1940s. There for over two decades he advocated for jazz and praised the music
of Gian Carlo Menotti, Carlisle Floyd and Vittorio Giannini.91 Of the more
forward-looking music emerging at the time, he had little positive to say. This
positioned him in direct opposition to those who championed the avant-
garde, like Eric Salzman (1933–), a composer-critic who had studied with
Babbitt, attended Darmstadt and contributed to the Times and Herald Tribune
(as well as magazines like High Fidelity and Stereo Review) from the late 1950s.92
The old dividing lines that separated critics on whether they supported
contemporary developments were as well-drawn in the twentieth century as
in any other.
Two books published in the mid-1950s exemplify this: Nicolas Slonimsky’s
Lexicon of Musical Invective: Critical Assaults on Composers since Beethoven’s Time
(1953) and Henry Pleasant’s The Agony of Modern Music (1955), the latter
described by Grant as ‘possibly the most notorious volume in twentieth-
century American music criticism’.93 In his Lexicon, Slonimsky (1894–1995) –
a lexicographer, pianist, composer and conductor who had been a staunch
advocate for new music since the 1930s – gathered together ‘biased, unfair, ill-
tempered, and singularly unprophetic judgements’ hurled at major composers
and their works upon first hearing.94 A much-loved source for programme
annotators everywhere, it is fundamentally a polemical book, with Slonimsky
stating how his intention was ‘to demonstrate that music is an art in progress,
and that objections levelled at every musical innovator are all derived from the
same psychological inhibition, which may be described as Non-Acceptance of
the Unfamiliar’.95 The Lexicon was a balm for all those who feared that the
latest musical experiments would forever be greeted with derision. It pro-
mised a bright future for contemporary composers by arguing that, given
90
Humphrey Burton, Leonard Bernstein (London: Faber and Faber, 1994), p. 321.
91
For a broader discussion of Sargeant, see Grant, Maestros of the Pen, pp. 302–6.
92
Salzman has an extensive website detailing his activities, available at www.ericsalzman.com (accessed
1 August 2018).
93
Nicolas Slonimsky, Lexicon of Musical Invective: Critical Assaults on Composer since Beethoven’s Time (Seattle
and London: University of Washington Press, 1953); Henry Pleasants, The Agony of Modern Music
(New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955); Grant, Maestros of the Pen, p. 295.
94 95
Slonimsky, Lexicon, p. 3. Ibid.
time, what was once horrifying can be declared not only acceptable, but
a masterpiece.96
In contrast, Henry Pleasants (1910–2000), a Curtis-trained pianist, singer,
composer and critic, believed contemporary music had lost all cultural valid-
ity. Before his wartime service in the army, Pleasants was a reviewer for the
Philadelphia Evening Bulletin (between 1930 and 1942) and contributed to the
Times and Modern Music (after the war he moved to Europe, where he com-
bined a career as a spy with extensive writing on music).97 Given his early
career saw him specialise in reviewing and reporting on new music, he was an
unlikely candidate to rally against the cause, but by 1955 he had come to view
new art music as a failure; the future lay in jazz and popular music. This is
what he set out in The Agony of Modern Music.
As the title indicates, Pleasants delighted in being provocative: ‘Modern
music is not modern and is rarely music,’ he wrote as the first point in his
summary, before declaring serious music a ‘dead art’.98 Confrontational,
inflammatory and entertaining, Pleasants covered aspects ranging from the
relationship between composer and audience to the musical materials itself.
He positioned the contemporary composer as a figure disdainful of perfor-
mers, audiences, and anything regarded as popular, highlighting how jazz
musicians had no such failings. As for Slonimsky’s argument, Pleasants
addressed him head-on. Dismissing the evolutionist theory of continued
musical progress he saw espoused in the Lexicon, Pleasants sought to counter
the ‘fable’ of the misunderstood composer creating art in a world not yet able
to understand it.99 He considered this a dangerous and hack version of history
which had skewed and distorted public perception, and so he rebutted it by
quoting some of the grandest praise lavished on composers.100 Pleasants’s
point was clear: audiences and critics have often been right. It was all ammu-
nition in support of his central thesis: jazz and popular genres were in fact the
real modern music (an argument he expanded in two further books).101
With Winthrop Sargeant and Henry Pleasants, the classical avant-garde was
denounced while jazz was celebrated, but as the twentieth century wore on,
new dividing lines emerged. Classical music continued to fracture: old orga-
nisations and institutions continued on as they had before, while composers,
96
Ibid., p. 19.
97
Pleasants was in the Foreign Service. He wrote for the New York Times, High Fidelity, HiFi Stereo Review,
Jazz Quarterly and eventually, after settling in London, the International Herald Tribune (where he was
London critic from 1967 to 1997).
98
Pleasants, Agony of Modern Music, p. 3 and back cover. The book prompted responses for and against.
See ‘Publisher’s Note’, in the second paperback ed. (1965), pp. v–vi.
99 100
Pleasants, Agony of Modern Music, pp. 47–82. Ibid., pp. 62–82.
101
Henry Pleasants, Death of a Music? The Decline of the European Tradition and the Rise of Jazz (London:
Victor Gollancz, 1961); and Serious Music – and All That Jazz! (London: Victor Gollancz, 1969).
688 SOPHIE REDFERN
schools and collectives experimented in ever new ways for, it seems, ever more
niche audiences. At the same time, popular music continued to grow, and
though it dominated the mainstream, it too shattered into new genres and
subgenres with unique identities and followings. All of this activity was
documented and debated.
In many ways critics became more specialised, often working within the
confines of a particular subgenre, and yet this was also the point when critics
broke the mould and opened up their musical horizons by working across
boundaries. John Rockwell (1940–), the first Times critic to write on classical
and popular music (with the newspaper from 1972), is seen as a pioneer in this
regard.102 For Rockwell, a ‘“music critic” had no business excluding entire
traditions that most of the world thought of as “music” just because they
didn’t conform to his own cultural prejudices’.103 But as all critics must have
their opposite, Rockwell’s pluralistic approach was denounced by Samuel
Lipman (1934–94), a concert pianist who called for the preservation, and re-
establishment in many cases, of high culture and elite music in his books and
criticism (he wrote for Commentary from 1976 and co-founded the politically
conservative and culturally high-minded magazine the New Criterion in 1982).
The fundamentals of criticism changed very little as critics and cultural
commentators fought personal battles in print, much as they always had. In
establishing a magazine as a platform to espouse his views and reach the right
readers, Lipman followed many who had come before. Every publication had
its own audience, its own tone and its own outlook. And as the cultural life of
the city changed, so too did the newspapers, magazines and journals that
documented it.
The Alternative Press

In 1955 Dan Wolf, Ed Fancher and Norman Mailer responded to the societal
shifts they witnessed around them and founded the Village Voice, America’s
first alt-weekly (alternative weekly newspaper). From the start, the arts,
particularly underground and alternative scenes, were a focus; the Voice was
a space for the vibrant downtown cultural world to be reported. Composer
and critic Kyle Gann (1955–), who wrote for the Voice from 1986 to 2005, has
set out the importance of understanding that the Voice was a downtown
102
Rockwell wrote for the Oakland Tribune and Los Angeles Times before starting at the Times in 1972. He
wrote for the Times until 2006 (brief hiatus 1994–98), and has held classical, pop, dance and broader
cultural and editorial positions. For a selection of his writings, see John Rockwell, Outsider: John Rockwell
on the Arts, 1967–2006 (Pompton Plains: Limelight Editions, 2006).
103
John Rockwell, All American Music: Composition in the Late Twentieth Century (New York: Da Capo Press,
1997), p. ix; reprinted in Grant, Maestros of the Pen, pp. 308–9.
publication.104 It meant that the music reviewed was downtown music, which
existed within a distinct scene to that of so-called uptown music:
The Uptowners, such as Milton Babbitt and Jacob Druckman, wrote compli-
cated music in European genres, heavily dominated at that time by Arnold
Schoenberg’s 12-tone thinking and its derivatives. Downtown music was
simpler and less pretentious, drawing on the nature- and accident-accepting
philosophy of John Cage. Conceptualism and minimalism were, then, the two
primary Downtown movements; artrock and free improvisation would soon
join them.105
Gann’s position as a composer-critic embedded within the downtown scene

at the Voice is worth remembering when he states it was ‘the only newspaper
in America to cover new music, Downtown music, on a regular basis’.106 But
as he points to those who preceded him and established the direction of the
music coverage – namely Leighton Kerner, Carman Moore, Tom Johnson and
Greg Sandow – he effectively highlights those who defined, and documented,
a scene beyond the day-to-day remit of critics elsewhere. Of Tom Johnson
(1939–), the Voice’s ‘first real new-music critic’, Gann is quick to stress how he
provided ‘insightful coverage to hundreds of premieres in Downtown lofts,
churches, and other unconventional spaces’.107 Clearly the venues were
important in defining this as non-mainstream, and it shows a striking resem-
blance to Thomson’s statement about finding new music in unusual places in
previous decades.
As an example of coverage, to read Johnson’s reviews now is to be plunged
into the exploratory and visceral world of the 1970s minimalist scene. At the
forefront of documenting the latest experiments for the Voice between 1972
and 1982, Johnson was a minimalist composer himself, and in the early
seventies he had a predilection for its most extreme strands (‘when someone
would play the same gong for an hour, or repeat a few verbal phrases for a long
time’), though his view later softened.108 Still, whatever personal preferences
he had, his reviews and writings mostly demonstrate his desire to elucidate
what was trying to be achieved. Even when he writes of the aims of those
immersed in the scene with hindsight, the vitality and single-mindedness of
104
Kyle Gann, Music Downtown: Writings from the Village Voice (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 2006), xiii. Gann wrote weekly between 1989 and 1997, and more sporadically from 1997
to 2005.
105
Ibid., xiii.
106
Ibid., xv. Gann notes here that the first serious reviews he read of Terry Riley and Philip Glass were in
Playboy.
107
Ibid.
108
Tom Johnson, ‘Introduction’ to The Voice of New Music: New York City 1972–82 (Stichting: Het
Apollohius, 1989); available as a digital ed. at www.tvonm.editions75.com (accessed 1 August 2018).
690 SOPHIE REDFERN
that moment in musical history materialises: ‘The search for total stasis, for
the beauty of absolute zero, was a search for a mirage. But what an exciting
mirage, and how essential it was for us!’109
The downtown scene then was highly specific. Within it, the term ‘new
music’ was not vague and all-encompassing; it had distinct parameters relating
to the approaches advocated and adopted.110 Moreover, it had its own view of
musical history, with Gann pointing to the continued inspiration provided by
the ‘fount of American experimentalism flowing from Charles Ives, Henry
Cowell, Harry Partch, John Cage, Conlon Nancarrow, Pauline Oliveros and
other great figures disdained by the classical music establishment.’111 This is
the lineage of downtown music, with its own list of ‘great’ composers and
figures who existed outside of the so-called establishment. There is a sense
that those documenting, celebrating, advocating and critiquing it also identi-
fied themselves as outsiders (though they were ‘insiders’ in relation to the
scene). The parallels with Simon Frith’s observations in Chapter 26 of this
volume on rock music critics and the culture and identity surrounding them
seems acute.
For much of the Voice’s existence, the latest developments in new music were
a feature, but by the early 2000s coverage decreased. This foreshadowed a period
of decline. In 2013 the Voice’s circulation was 144,203 (the highest of all the
country’s alt-weeklies), but by 2015 this had halved to 70,394 (dropping it down
to fourth in terms of circulation).112 Even as the most historic and iconic alt-
weekly, it was unable to adapt sufficiently to survive. On 21 September 2017 its
last print edition was published, and on 31 August 2018 the remaining digital
arm closed for good. In an opinion piece for the Times, the former Voice columnist
Tricia Romano highlighted how the alternative culture documented by the Voice
had moved online. There is no need for a critic to recommend an unusual band or
arthouse film in the age of Spotify and Netflix: ‘The Voice was once a lodestar to
freaks and geeks everywhere. Now the lodestar is both nowhere and
everywhere.’113
Tumultuous Times
As of 2018, the American classical music critic working in traditional media
lives in a time of uncertainty. Alex Ross, who has been the New Yorker’s chief
109 110 111

Ibid. Gann, Music Downtown, p. xvi. Ibid.
112
Monica Anderson, ‘5 Facts about Alternative Weeklies’, Fact Tank Blog, Pew Research Center
(11 July 2014); and Elisa Shearer, ‘Alternative Weeklies: Fact Sheet’, in State of the New Media, Pew
Research Center (June 2016), 95, both available at www.pewresearch.org (1 August 2018).
113
Tricia Romano, ‘Last Rites for the Village Voice, a Bohemian Who Stayed on Too Long’, New York
Times (5 September 2018), available at www.nytimes.com (accessed 1 August 2018).
music critic since 1996 and is a prominent voice within the profession,
summed up the picture in March 2017:
In 1992, when I moved to New York and began to write about classical music,
every major city newspaper had at least one writer covering the field, some-
times several writers. I would see knots of critics at performances, gaggles of
them at big premieres. In the intervening years, the ranks of the profession
have steadily dwindled, to the point where fewer than ten American papers
have full-time classical critics on staff. Longtime colleagues have taken
buyouts . . . It’s like being in an exceedingly dull, slow version of Agatha
Christie’s And Then There Were None.114
While Ross went with Agatha Christie, Joseph Carman, writing for the
online San Francisco Classical Voice a few months later, likened the situa-
tion to Haydn’s ‘Farewell’ Symphony: ‘the players, snuffing out their
candles, slowly exit the stage one by one’.115 It has led to considerable
reflection.
At the turn of the twenty-first century, Scott Cantrell – then chief classical
music critic of the Dallas Morning News – surveyed the profession and noted
that full-time critics had been lost from Time and Newsweek, while the maga-
zines High Fidelity, Musical America, Ovation, Classical and Opus were also
a thing of the past.116 The concern then was that cities were becoming ‘one-
paper towns’, meaning the opinion of a single critic was the only record of
events.117 By 2015 the conversation was about the loss of that single critic.
Cantrell himself took a buyout from his post at the Morning News that year,
leaving no full-time classical critic in the state of Texas. Across the country,
arts desks were decimated: only two full-time dance critics remained, while
the figures for classical music hovered around twelve, down from nearer sixty-
five in the 1990s.118 But as Douglas McLennan, founder of the arts coverage
amalgamator Arts Journal (artsjournal.com), has stated, ‘Let’s not equate the
golden age of criticism with the situation twenty years ago.’119 He remem-
bered a lot of newspaper journalism being poor, and has highlighted the high
quality of coverage and comment now available online.
114
Alex Ross, ‘The Fate of the Critic in the Clickbait Age’, New Yorker (13 March 2017), available at www
.newyorker.com (accessed 1 August 2018).
115
Joseph Carman, ‘Diminuendo: Is Classical Music Journalism Fading to Silence?’, San Francisco Classical
Voice (11 July 2017), available at www.sfcv.org (accessed 1 August 2018).
116
Scott Cantrell, ‘Classical Music Criticism’, in James R. Heintze and Michael Saffle (eds.) Reflections on
American Music: The Twentieth Century and the New Millennium (Hillside: Pendragon Press, 2000), pp. 82–3.
117
Ibid.
118
Madison Mainwaring, ‘The Death of the American Dance Critic’, The Atlantic (6 August 2015), avail-
able at www.theatlantic.com; ‘As Newspapers Cut Music Critics, a Dark Times for the Arts or Dawn of
a New Age?’, WQXR (11 August 2015), available at www.wqxr.org (accessed 1 August 2018).
119
Ibid.
692 SOPHIE REDFERN
In 2005, MCANA and the National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia

University produced a state of the profession report based on a survey of 181
working classical music critics.120 The timing of its publication is significant:
social media was in its infancy, and so the report now stands as a valuable
source, a record of a profession on the brink of change. Since then, a seemingly
infinite number of websites, blogs and forums have been established for the
discussion of music. Responsive to this new environment, professional critics
have carved out spaces, with their online pronouncements given increased
weight by their offline status (Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise blog is a prominent
example). Organisations have also been proactive: MCANA created an online
journal, Classical Voice America (classicalvoiceamerica.org), as a counter to the
decline in print opportunities in 2013.121 But the digital world is not just for
professionals, and any individual is now able to be part of, and add to, the
musical conversation.
Today, criticism has become democratised in a way unthinkable at any
previous point. Editors, publishers and institutions are no longer the sole
gatekeepers to the profession. The result is that while the full-time critic may
be a rare breed, critical commentary on classical music is more extensive than
it has ever been. And if history reveals anything, it is that whatever the
platform, old debates will continue to rage as new dividing lines open up.
The future of American music criticism is secure, even if it is uncertain.
120
‘The Classical Music Critic: A Survey’.
121
See Barbara Jepson, ‘Coming Soon: Classical Voice North America, a New Online Music Journal’,
Classical Voice America, available at classicalvoiceamerica.org (accessed 30 July 2018).
· POSTLUDE ·
. 35 .
Stop the Press? The Changing Media

of Music Criticism
CHRISTOPHER DINGLE AND DOMINIC MCHUGH
Writing in BBC Music Magazine in July 1999, editor Helen Wallace remarked
on the rapid decline in space allocated to classical music criticism in British
newspapers, notably in The Times, The Independent, The Guardian and Financial
Times, all of which had previously provided extensive, important coverage.
‘Concert reports provide the very oxygen needed to keep a flourishing musical
scene alive’, she noted, and ‘[if] an event is ignored, it is as if it did not exist.’
However, she perceived a ‘ray of hope’ in the Internet, which ‘has no space
restriction: maybe the dawn of a new era is nigh . . .’.1 Twenty years later,
Wallace’s comments seem prescient. Newspapers now operate regularly
updated websites as a matter of course, and many of them offer additional
content that is not made available in print editions. Online content has helped
to sustain the viability of newspapers in the digital age, capitalising on the
tantalising opportunity to report news – and post reviews – instantly. There
has also been a proliferation of e-zines devoted to music criticism, starting
with titles such as Seen and Heard and Classical Source, allowing amateur
enthusiasts to fill the gap left by shrinking column inches by providing
reviews of a much wider range of events, such as complete coverage of the
BBC Proms by Classical Source; the success of these ventures has led to other
sites such as The Arts Desk, whose reviews are written mainly by professional
journalists. Yet Wallace’s prediction for the future missed one crucial and
unexpected component: the advent of Facebook and, particularly, Twitter has
taken criticism out of its privileged domain as a specialist activity and enabled
the general public to give individual responses to performances based on
personal experience rather than perceived qualification. This chapter exam-
ines this shift from the primacy of professional music critics in the twentieth
century to the impact of the Internet on how music criticism is generated,
disseminated and consumed within the context of earlier developments in the
media of criticism and the consequent changing relationship between the
critic and those in receipt of their insights. The potential democratisation of
1
Helen Wallace, ‘A Critical Point’, BBC Music Magazine (July 1999), 5.
[695]
696 CHRISTOPHER DINGLE AND DOMINIC MCHUGH
the process of reporting on concerts in the twenty-first century could be seen

as a positive move, reflecting the subjectivity of individual responses to music,
but at what cost to expertise, clarity and accuracy?
Of course, it had taken many centuries for music criticism to evolve to its
twentieth-century format. The earliest types of criticism were undoubtedly
part of oral cultures and traditions, just like the music they would have been
discussing. When theories about music began to be preserved in written form
on clay and papyrus, they will have been preceded (and succeeded) by ques-
tions, discussion and debate. The comprehensive systems of musical theory
and philosophy that emerged in ancient China and ancient Greece, to name
but two, could not have arisen without such a hinterland, and the same was
true in the Western European tradition as it became codified. Given the
intertwining in ancient Chinese theory and practice of music and the proper
functioning of state,2 those that might now be regarded in some form as
practising music criticism are likely to have been government officials.
Whatever their societal status elsewhere, various treatises and other theore-
tical writings provide much of the existent evidence of the practice of music
criticism before the modern era. Nonetheless, as is made clear by Christopher
Page in Chapter 1 of this volume, evidence of musical criticism and debate
about plainchant can be gleaned not just from treatises, but also other literary
sources, including letters, chronicles, Lives of saints and catalogues of notable
figures. A few centuries later, as noted in Carrie Churnside’s contribution to
this volume, Chapter 3, to these might be added travel journals or diaries.
Such apparently restricted and personal items often provide insight into
broader discussion.
Nonetheless, it was with the ever-increasing prevalence of published books,
pamphlets and polemics that resulted from the invention of the printing press,
as well as the subsequent rise in literacy, that music criticism became
a relationship between an individual and a potentially broad swathe of their
society. As journals and newspapers began to appear in the eighteenth cen-
tury, various forms of critical writing developed that, in their essence, are
familiar today, from reviews, previews and news pieces about performances
and works to more reflective articles and longer essays. To these could be
added the French ‘feuilleton’, a genre developed by the pioneering French
critic Julien-Louis Geoffroy (1743–1814). Literally meaning ‘little page’, the
term originally meant a part-page, usually a bottom quarter, with a thick black
2
Alan R. Thrasher, ‘China, People’s Republic of: §I . Introduction: Historical, Regional and Study
Perspectives; 3. Sources and Perspectives: i) The Imperial Period’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music
Online, available at www.oxfordmusiconline.com (accessed 15 May 2018).
Stop the Press? The Changing Media of Music Criticism 697
line delineating that it was distinct from news reporting. A term soon adopted
by journals in other languages, the feuilleton quickly came to denote
a sometimes lengthy, discursive essay, extending across part or all of several
pages, in later usage even denoting a distinct publication. Often prompted by
a specific performance or work, but ranging more broadly in the manner of
what today might be termed a review article, they tended to be marked by
their witty and vibrant language.
As well as the types of format, the proliferation of specialist titles devoted to
specific repertoires, genres or instruments naturally resulted in criticism
tailored to the respective readerships, with the use of technical or niche
terminology not appropriate in newspapers or general musical journals. In
essence, criticism of recordings merely added another set of specialist jour-
nals, as did the development of criticism in areas such as jazz, popular, folk,
world music and so on. However, broadcasting enabled an entirely new
medium for criticism. Prime examples on radio would be the long-running
Record Review on BBC Radio 3 or the French La Tribune des critiques de disques,3
while the BBC’s Juke Box Jury was a prominent example of television criticism.
More recently, publications such as BBC Music Magazine experimented with
monthly podcasts where various editorial staff discussed a selection of discs.
Once criticism in the form of reviews and articles started to be published,
the writers needed to decide how to sign it, with approaches varying from
outlet to outlet and policy changing within each publication from period to
period, making it difficult to generalise for any historical area. However, there
are five broad approaches to the authorship of a review: the critic’s name, the
critic’s initials, a pseudonym, signed by role and unsigned. Broadly speaking,
the straightforward use of the critic’s name increasingly became the norm
during the course of the twentieth century, but was not uncommon in earlier
times, and was by no means universally adopted early in the twenty-first
century. It implies a direct personal responsibility by the critic for the views
being expressed, emphasising that the review has been written by an indivi-
dual, even though, in reality, it may have been cut or even changed by editors.
The use of initials may simply be a device either to save space or avoid needless
repetition, with an index providing full names, an approach that was used by
Gramophone for many years. The critic is readily identifiable, though the lack of
a name does create a degree of detachment. In other situations, initials may be
used without any identifier, making them akin to a pseudonym. Few readers
3
Several editions of La Tribune des critiques de disques are available on YouTube by searching the
programme title, including a filmed edition from the INA archive featuring a classic panel of critics, as
well as Peter Ustinov’s witty parody of the programme. I am grateful to Julian Anderson for drawing the
latter two to my attention [CD].
outside the business would have known that, for instance, ‘N. C.’ of the
Manchester Guardian was Neville Cardus, especially in his early years, and
even fewer would have realised that he was also ‘Cricketer’ for the same
newspaper. Pseudonyms have persisted in various guises throughout printed
history, ranging from ‘A Ghost’, ‘Peregrine Puff’, ‘Criticus’ and ‘Harmonicus’
in the early days of The Times,4 via the multiple characters of Schumann’s
‘Davidsbund’, George Bernard Shaw’s ‘Corno di Bassetto’, Debussy’s
‘Monsieur Croche’ and ‘Musœus’ (the still unidentified critic for the
New York American),5 to their prevalence as user names for many contributors
to blogs. The use of the pseudonym is often another form of anonymity for the
general reader, but one that has some sense of a character attached to it. In
many cases, the identity of the reviewer is known to musical insiders, meaning
that the anonymity does not tend to extend to those affected most directly,
but the mask adopted with a pseudonym can also imply a degree of distance.
Like a fiction writer, the opinions expressed are those of the character and not
necessarily shared by the author.
While the choice of a pseudonym is usually that of the individual critic,
other approaches are often dictated by the current house style of the
newspaper or journal in question. Although relatively rare in print
media these days, it was commonplace until the mid-twentieth century
for arts reviews (and other content) in newspapers and journals in some
countries either to be completely unsigned or identified with formulas
such as ‘from our Music Critic’ or ‘from our Special Correspondent’. The
anonymity of reviews that were either unsigned or simply gave the role
often emphasised that, while they written by individuals, the views were
expressed on behalf of the newspaper as a whole. This is reflected in the
language used. Critics have often avoided the first person altogether, an
approach that not only adds authority to the prose, presenting the pro-
nouncements as fact, but is also usually more succinct. However, in those
newspapers where, in keeping with other content, reviews and articles
were unsigned or attributed to a role, any use of first person was in the
plural, emphasising that the views were corporate, as in this 1921 review
of Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps: ‘we must be content to remain
outside the movement and to confess that a great deal of the ballet was
for us merely a tedious posturing in sight and sound . . . we left wondering
what on earth all the fuss and fury was about’.6
4
Sarah J. Wynn, The Emergence of the Music Critic in Late 18th Century London: Composers, Performers,
Reporters (Memphis: Langford & Associates, 2001), p. 12.
5
See Mark McKnight’s contribution to this volume, Chapter 15, for more information about ‘Musœus’.
6
Unsigned, ‘“Le Sacre du Printemps” – Russian Ballet at the Princes’, The Times (28 June 1921), 8.
By the end of the twentieth century, many newspapers and magazines had
moved to encouraging their critics to include instances of first person singular
within their reviews and articles, emphasising the individuality of the per-
spective proffered. At the same time as the traditional press had switched
more or less wholesale to what might be termed full critical transparency,
some weblogs and internet sites were emerging where reviews were either
published anonymously or under a pseudonym. Blogs in particular normally
lack editorial oversight, thereby rendering the lack of transparency caused by
anonymity even more problematic when criticism is unbalanced, inaccurate or
extreme.
Alongside the medium of the review, it is also important to consider the
changing rhythm in the practice of the critic. While deadlines in journals, with
their less frequent publication, have always been relatively leisurely, the
competition between newspapers led to a desire to be, if not first, then not
behind their rivals in any aspect of reporting. With the invention of the
telegraph and then the telephone, the practice emerged of posting reviews
the same evening as the concert so that the review could appear in the news-
paper the following day. With print deadlines around midnight, this meant
that critics needed to be swift writers, drafting their reviews in the interval or
while the music was still playing. This inevitably meant that the first half of
a concert usually had prime importance in the formulation of a review.
Moreover, if a concert ran late, the critic might leave early in order to ensure
the review appeared in the early edition of the newspaper, as reflected in
Andrew Porter’s remark that ‘the critics of The Guardian and The Telegraph
seldom saw the last act of a long opera’.7 In order to submit their reviews,
critics needed the specialist skills of the journalist for dictating copy over the
telephone. The increasing use of computers and email communication in the
1990s actually coincided with many newspapers starting to take a more
relaxed approach to getting concert reviews into print. At more or less the
same time, and despite the complete lack of any print deadline, online reviews
often appeared the same evening. The rise of social media added to the
imperative for swift posting, with the first review published being likely to
be tagged in promoters’ Twitter feeds and shared by audience members, who
might also add their comments. As a consequence, it was not uncommon for
a review to appear on a newspaper website a day or two before it appeared in
print.
In addition to the media of the criticism, it is useful also to note the variety
of objects of review. For the most part, the chapters in this volume have
7
Andrew Porter, Music of Three Seasons 1974–1977 (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1978), p. xiii.
discussed criticism as it pertains either to musical works or to the perfor-

mances of musical works, in both cases primarily either in concerts or on
recordings. However, some areas have barely arisen or, if they have, this has
been implicit rather than explicit. Chief among these is the criticism of
musical scores. This is not to fault the contributors to the volume. For
periods when scores were the focus, this is so obvious that explicit mention
either seems superfluous or does not occur to the writer, while, for those
dealing with more recent times, the almost complete absence of such
reviewing in any but the most specialised journals means that, again, it
does not arise. It is only with the longer view that a substantive shift
becomes apparent. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, much of
the criticism of musical works, possibly the majority in many areas and
situations, would be made from reading and playing scores rather than
hearing the work in performance. A significant amount of the discussion
of music was not in terms of whether to go and hear a particular work, and
not, of course, about buying a recording. Rather, it was about whether the
reader would wish to purchase a copy of the music for their personal library
in order to play it themselves.
Far from disappearing with the advent of recording, there was, if anything,
an increase of the sale of scores and consequent critical discussion as signifi-
cant numbers of the resulting new audience for music invested in scores to
follow while listening to their records. However, the latter half of the twen-
tieth century saw a marked decline in the sale of musical scores, along with
a concurrent disappearance of music shops from many high streets. The
reasons for this significant change, which started long before the appearance
of the Internet, are not entirely clear. One unsurprising result, though, has
been that the notion of reviewing scores has gradually disappeared from most
areas of music criticism. Even in 1969, Hans W. Heinsheimer, director of
publications at G. Schirmer, was bemoaning the disappearance of music
reviewing from a host of music journals:
Once in a while one thinks nostalgically of the prewar European situation,

when musical magazines such as Die Musik, Signale für die musikalische Welt,
La Revue musicale, Musica d’Oggi, and a considerable number of similar
publications in Austria, Scandinavia, Holland, Czechoslovakia, and Poland
reviewed every important new score . . . All this is gone, though some
regular reviewing of printed music is still done in England, particularly in
the Musical Times.8
8
Hans W. Heinsheimer, ‘A Music Publisher’s View on Reviewing’, Notes Second Series, 26/2 (December
1969), 229.
By the end of the century, reviews of music had also disappeared from journals
such as Tempo and Musical Times. With the notable exception of Notes, reviews
of scores now tend to appear primarily in magazines devoted to specific
instruments or instrumental families. Heinsheimer also observed that, while
book publishers spent as much as 10 per cent of their promotional budget on
review copies, the number of outlets was so small for music publishers that
review copies were often not even included in calculations, accounting for
around 0.1 per cent of the budget.9 In the UK, music publishers will often set
aside just half-a-dozen promotional copies, and even that seems generous in
many cases.
Another area of music criticism that is easy to overlook is reviewing books
about music. Although rare, music book reviews are not entirely absent from
newspaper columns even today, and are regular features of magazines such as
Gramophone, Opera and BBC Music Magazine as well as scholarly journals. On
occasion, music books have even won generalist literary awards, relatively
recent examples being the second volume of David Cairns’s Berlioz biography
(Samuel Johnson Prize and best biography in The Whitbread Book Awards)
and Alex Ross’s The Rest is Noise (Guardian First Book Award). It should also be
remembered that there are objects of review where the music is often thought
of as secondary. Opera will be reviewed by a music critic, but ballet and dance
critics will not be primarily musical in their training. Similarly, musical
theatre will usually be reviewed by theatre critics. In each of these areas,
though, it is not unheard of for a music critic to review them, sometimes
even in addition to the dance or theatre critic. For example, when English
National Opera includes a Broadway musical in its season, the music critics
who would normally review the company’s work usually attend that produc-
tion too. A consequence of this is that they often project negativity into their
assessments, perhaps because of their own discomfort about the assignment
or impatience at the displacement of art music by a popular genre; the assess-
ment of a theatre critic, accustomed to reviewing musicals regularly in both
the West End and the subsidised sector, may be quite different. By contrast, it
is extremely unlikely that any film, television programme or computer game
would be covered by a music critic unless the subject matter itself was musical.
Nonetheless, these are all areas of significant musical activity that increasingly
attract scholarly investigation, but are largely overlooked in terms of critical
attention, unless the music is divorced from its usual medium and placed in
a concert setting.
9
Ibid., 226.
Furthermore, while reviewing recordings is now part of the critical furni-

ture, it is rare that broadcasts are considered, whether on radio or television. It
may seem obvious that this should be the case, since it is surely better to have
a review from a critic who actually attended an event, but it could also be
argued that the critic might benefit from reviewing from the perspective that
the event is experienced by the overwhelming majority of its audience,
numbering many times that in the hall or opera house. In 2010, the website
Musical Pointers reviewed a number of that year’s BBC Proms from the broad-
cast or using the ‘listen again’ function, while a quotation from a 2009 review
of the HD cinema broadcast of the Metropolitan Opera’s production of Aida,
published on the site Musical Criticism, was used for promotional purposes on
the Blu-ray release of the same broadcast by Decca, hinting at a shift towards
the legitimisation both of the broadcast as the subject of a review and of online
criticism as a marketing tool by a major record label.
Online criticism has been shown to have numerous benefits: speed of
delivery to the reader, limitless space, the ability to provide hyperlinks
between related articles and the provision of a forum for voices – both artists
and critics – that might not otherwise have the opportunity to be heard or
represented. For a time in the 2010s, The Guardian and Sunday Times would
print additional reviews to those appearing in the print version of the news-
paper, proving that the Internet can enhance and complement print publica-
tions rather than automatically supplanting them. But with this scope comes
a variety of dangers. The pressure to provide reviews as quickly as possible can
lead to mistakes and a lack of reflection (though this was also a pitfall of the old
practice of phoning in reviews the same night). The lack of a word limit can
encourage writers to lose focus and concision, instead providing a stream of
consciousness and endless minutiae; by contrast, print critics are typically
skilled in getting to the point and summarising overall impact within a set
word limit. Reliability is a further problem, where the plethora of opinions
expressed between the many print, website and blog reviews for a major
concert or production can obscure a sense of recording an event. On the
other hand, arts organisations are encouraging the general public to bypass
critics when the reviews might not be quotable for marketing purposes. For
example, email advertising for the 2018 revival of Carmen at Covent Garden
used positive audience tweets rather than newspaper quotations to encourage
ticket sales, and each of the company’s productions now has an official Twitter
hashtag (starting #ROH) to encourage ‘trending’ and make the performances
noteworthy events regardless of traditional media coverage.
To some degree, therefore, everyone’s a critic in the digital age, and there
can be a healthy aspect to enabling open debate rather than relying on a small
coterie of critics from a limited demographic (one that may well not represent
the whole audience adequately). One example of this is the scope for the
readers of a review then to engage immediately in critique of the critic,
often through comments facilities on the site in question. While the dangers
of intemperate comment rapidly became apparent, leading many sites either
to remove such comments or add moderation facilities, when working well
this enables the review to become a starting point for what at times can
become a dynamic debate. In some cases, the critic will engage with such
comments, either to rebut a point, clarify a misunderstanding, acknowledge
an error or oversight, or simply to make further points in what has become an
intriguing discussion. Whatever the quality of the comments, this personal
engagement between critic and readership marked a substantial shift from the
anonymously published review with response only being by a letter, which
was unlikely to make it into print. The irony is that, while the critics for
newspapers and magazines are now named, those making comments are
frequently either anonymous or go by a username that is essentially
a pseudonym.
This freedom can also lead to criticism being replaced by fandom, which has
the potential to facilitate nuance and detail but also obsession. Online criti-
cism is often used to shape personal identity, such as in parterre box, which was
published in print form (with the subtitle the queer opera zine) from
1993–2001, but has taken on a much more popular and influential role as
a website in news/blog format that actively encourages reader interaction.
The Barihunks blog similarly addresses a mainly queer audience, but its focus
on the visual signals an arguably negative trend in classical music criticism of
a greater emphasis on image at the expense of the music.10 This may be
a reflection of how art music has gravitated towards elements of marketing
and even production similar to popular music, where imagery and iconogra-
phy are of prime importance; in recent years, classical music albums have
similarly often featured the products of elaborate photo shoots and perfor-
mers are more heavily styled than before. Many classical artists now have
a significant online presence, especially when they are signed to a major record
label, and the links between online reviews, artist websites and album down-
loads can be vital in selling records. Yet websites run by fans of performers can
arguably lead to invasive levels of detail about the artists’ whereabouts and
activities. One such site devoted to the baritone Simon Keenlyside provides
a calendar disclosing all his performances, allowing readers to know where he
is in the world at any point, while more pernicious examples are increasingly
10
The site does, however, produce a charity calendar annually to support young artists.
prevalent. Meanwhile, more serious attempts at online criticism can encoun-

ter difficulties in obtaining press accreditation to gain access not only to
tickets and recordings, but also the artists themselves. The interviews given
to the traditional press to preview concerts and opera productions have often
proved vital to understanding and framing those performances, so the need
for online journalists to have this kind of access to write previews can be vital,
if not always forthcoming.
Whatever the relative merits and challenges for music criticism and critics
in the daily newspapers and online, there is one key difference. Writing about
music on a reviewing website or, for that matter, a music magazine, is for
a readership that already has a degree of interest or enthusiasm. No such
assumption can be made with newspapers (though it frequently is). People do
not generally buy newspapers for music alone, but to be informed about
everything from politics to literature to cookery. Each person will have
their own preferred elements within their preferred newspaper, but will
often also at least glance at other things to see if they are of interest. In
other words, print newspapers have a much greater degree of passing trade
not available to the specialist journal or website. The latter are generally
preaching to the converted within a ghetto.
Given the nature of this book, it is worth considering the possible implica-
tions of all this for those studying music criticism. It is already clear that
developments of recent times, notably broadcasts and electronic media, will
pose substantial challenges to future historians. On the one hand, the perma-
nence and means of preserving such media are still far from clear. It is too soon
to be certain of the extent to which the vast amount of material on the
Internet, in particular, will be maintained, curated and conserved in
a practicable way for future generations of scholars. Even the most secure
and well-established sites are barely two decades old and computer coding has
changed significantly in that relatively brief time. On the other hand, if all the
newspaper, magazine and reviewing sites, personal blogs, podcasts and even
individual emails are archived in some way, along with the increased avail-
ability of existing historical sources, the amount of material to traverse and
filter in order to make any kind of historical sense of even a narrow area of
music criticism will be overwhelming. Nevertheless, there are issues even
with the archiving of traditional print media, for many newspapers printed
several editions each day, meaning that a review submitted late may not
appear in a morning or early afternoon edition. Since digital archives only
preserve one edition, it is far from certain that all content has been archived.
Moreover, there are also new possibilities with electronic media, notably the
rise of computer-aided approaches such as corpus linguistics, in which the
prevalence of key words can be charted across vast amounts of material in

order to perceive developing trends.
Concerns about the decline in the quality and/or quantity of criticism may
be almost as old as regularly published criticism itself, and from the earliest
days part of the impetus of criticism has been concern about broader musical,
cultural or national decline. This may make such voices analogous to the Gauls
in Goscinny’s Astérix books, whose recurrent anxiety is the sky falling on
their heads. Norman Lebrecht’s Who Killed Classical Music concludes that the
field of music and thus, presumably, musical writing is already dead, implying
his subsequent remarkably robust career – including overseeing a popular
website, Slipped Disc – is a form of literary necrophilia.11 Nonetheless, the
mere fact that critics have cried wolf about the decline of their profession on
numerous previous occasions does not of itself mean that the existential
concerns of some at present are necessarily unfounded. The expansion in
the quantity and scope of music criticism in the nineteenth and twentieth
centuries outlined in many of the preceding chapters was relatively rapid in
historical terms. It is possible that it could contract with equal swiftness.
Barring extraordinary societal changes, this is unlikely to be across the board,
but it is certainly conceivable that one or a combination of types of critical
format, criticism of particular genres, or critics in a particular region may
suffer a precipitous decline. Indeed, that has arguably happened already in
some areas. Certainly the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have
seen significant cultural changes in many countries, while there is an ongoing
transformation of the news media due to television and the Internet. The
developments of recent years may have the whiff of the Wild West about
them, in that there is seemingly unregulated opportunity in remarkable new
areas of activity, but also sharp practice. The situation was similar when
newspapers and journals were first appearing, and for some time after.
It is tempting to say that whether the arrival of the Internet and subsequent
upheavals in the printed press are regarded as disastrous or as creating new
opportunities merely reflects whether the observer is a pessimist or optimist,
seeing the glass as either half-empty or half-full. However, it is more pertinent
to remember that wine was previously drunk out of pewter, clay or leather
goblets, cups and tankards. Moreover, as generations of students will testify, if
the glass breaks, another receptacle will be found. One lesson of this volume
has been that whenever and wherever music is made, in whatever genre, there
will be those who wish to discuss, describe and debate it, argue, attack or
11
It is, of course, debatable whether what Lebrecht means by classical music corresponds to others’
understanding.
advocate it, read, reflect and write about it in whatever medium is available.
They may or may not be paid or labelled a music critic, they may or may not
write or speak eloquently, and they may or may not be perceptive and
insightful, but, whether on paper, on the airwaves, on a computer screen or
some medium not yet conceived, music criticism will continue.
Bibliography
Aasen, Ivar and Terje Aarset, Det norske Folkesprogs Grammatik, vol. I (Volda: Høgskulen
i Volda, 1996).
A. B., ‘Le Concert Pasdeloup’, La Liberté, (1 November 1870).
Abendroth, Walter, ‘Ein Beispiel deutschen Kritikertums: Paul Zschorlich zum 60.
Geburtstag am 8. April 1936’, Zeitschrift für Musik, 103/5 (May 1936).
Abraham, Gerald, ‘Introduction’ in Vladimir Stasov’, Selected Essays on Music, trans.
Florence Jonas (London: Barrie & Rockliff, The Cresset Press, 1968).
Ábrányi Sr, Kornél, A magyar dal és zene sajátságai, nyelvi, zöngidomi, harmoniai s műformai
szempontból [The Characteristics of Hungarian Song and Music from the Viewpoint
of Language, Tone Profiles, Harmony and Genre] (Budapest: A Magyar Királyi
Egyetemi Nyomda, 1877).
Acker, L. van (ed.), Agobardi Lugdunensis Opera Omnia, Corpus Christianorum
Continuatio Medievalis 52 (Turnhout: Brepols, 1981).
Acta Sanctorum, 68 vols. (Brussels and Antwerp, 1643–1940).
Adams, Byron (ed.), Edward Elgar and His World (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
2007).
Adams, Peter H., An Annotated Index to Selected Articles from the Musical Courier,
1880–1940, 2 vols. (Lanham: Scarecrow Press, 2009).
Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund, ‘Commitment’, Aesthetics and Politics, trans. Francis
McDonagh, ed. Ronald Taylor (London: New Left Books, 1977).
Ahle, Johann Georg, Musikalisches Frühlings-Gespräche (Mühlhausen, 1695).
Aïssé, Charlotte-Élisabeth, Lettres de Mademoiselle Aïssé à Madame Calandrini, ed.
Jules Ravenel, 5th ed. (Paris: Gerdès, 1846).
Aitken, Shelagh, ‘Music and the Popular Press: Music Criticism in Paris during the First
Empire’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Northwestern University (1987).
Ajchenbaum, Yves-Marc, Combat 1941–1974. Une utopie de la Résistance, une aventure de
presse, new ed. (Paris: Gallimard, 2013).
Aksiuk, Sergei, ‘Mysli kompozitora’, Sovetskaia muzyka, 1 (1959), 27.
Albert, Pierre, Histoire de la presse, 11th ed. (Paris: PUF, 2010).
Albert, Pierre, Gilles Feyel and Jean-François Picard (eds.), Documents pour l’histoire de la
presse nationale aux XIXe et XXe siècles (Paris: CNRS Éditions, 1973).
Aleksandrova, Anastasiia, ‘U istokov kafedry muzykal’noi kritiki: Arnol’d Naumovich
Sokhor’, Maloizvestnye stranitsy istorii Konservatorii, vol. 5 (St Petersburg:
St Petersburg Conservatory, n.d.).
Alkyer, Frank, 60 Years of Jazz (Milwaukee: Hal Leonard, 1995).
[707]
708 Bibliography
Allen, Aaron S., ‘Beethoven’s Music in Nineteenth-Century Italy: A Critical Review of

Its Reception through the Early 1860s’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Harvard
University (2006).
Allen, James Smith, In the Public Eye: A History of Reading in Modern France, 1800–1940
Allis, Michael, ‘Elgar, Lytton, and the Piano Quintet, Op. 84’, Music & Letters, 85 (2004),
198–238.
Allsop, Peter, Arcangelo Corelli: New Orpheus of Our Times (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1999).
Alten, Michèle, Musiciens français dans la guerre froide (1945–1956) (Paris: L’Harmattan,
2000).
Altenburg, Detlef (ed.), Liszt und die Neudeutscher Schule (Laaber: Laaber Verlag, 2006).
Altick, Richard D., The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public,
1800–1900 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957).
Alves, Ricardo António and Teresa Cascudo (eds.), Fernando Lopes Graça e a Presença
(Cascais: Câmara Municipal de Cascais/Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, Casa da Moeda,
2013).
Ammetto, Fabrizio (ed.), La ‘ópera’ como punto de cohésion entre las artes (Guanajuato:
Universidad de Guanajuato, 2015).
Amis, John, Amiscellany: My Life, My Music (London: Faber, 1985).
Amis, John, ‘Critical Pastmasters’, John Amis Online (16 December 2011), available at
johnamismusic.blogspot.co.uk (accessed 15 May 2018).
Anderson, Benedict, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism, revised ed. (London: Verso, 2006).
Anderson, Monica, ‘5 Facts about Alternative Weeklies’, Fact Tank Blog, Pew Research
Center (11 July 2014), available at www.pewresearch.org (accessed 1 August 2018).
Anderson, William, ‘Magazine/Book Editor’, Music Educators Journal, 69/2 (1982), 53–4.
Anderson, William Robert [W. R. A], ‘Second Reviews’, The Gramophone (May
1937), 525.
Andrade, Isabel Maria Freire de, ‘Edições periódicas de música e periódicos musicais
em Portugal’, Boletim da APEM, 62 (July–September 1989), 47–50.
Andrin, Muriel, Laurence Brogniez, et al. (eds.), Femmes et critique(s): lettres, arts, cinéma
(Namur: Presses Universitaires de Namur, 2009).
Anon., A Letter to a Friend in the Country, Concerning the Use of Instrumental Musick in the
Worship of God (London, 1698).
Anon., An Examination of the Oratorios which have been Performed this Season at Covent-
Garden Theatre (London, 1763).
Anon., [presumed to be Tancredi Mantovani], Cronaca musicale, 1/1 (18 February
1896), 1.
Anon., ‘La Orquesta Nacional, en Lisboa’, Arriba (3 April 1943), 7.
Anon., ‘Lettre de M. *** à Mlle *** sur l’origine de la musique’, Mercure de France (May
1734), 861–70.
Anon., London Musical World (31 October 1846), reprinted in the Boston Musical Gazette
(4 January 1847), quoted in Mark N. Grant, Maestros of the Pen: A History of Classical
Music Criticism in America (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998).
Anon., ‘Nouvelles diverses’, L’Art musical (25 December 1873), 415.
Anon., The Holy Harmony: Or, A Plea for the Abolishing of Organs (London, 1643).
Bibliography 709
Anon., The Praise of Musicke (Oxford, 1586).

Anon., The Touch-Stone: or, Historical, Critical, Political, Moral, Philosophical and Theological
Essays upon the Reigning Diversions of the Town (London, 1728).
Anon., ‘Translatio Sancti Viviani Episcopi’, Analecta Bollandiana, 8 (1889), 256–77.
Anon., [Heinrich Klein], ‘Über die Nationaltänze der Ungarn’, Allgemeine musikalische
Zeitung, 2/35 (28 May 1800), cols. 609–16.
Antonicek, Theophil, Gernot Gruber and Christoph Landerer (eds.), Eduard Hanslicks
Gedenken. Bericht des Symposions zum Anlass seines 100. Todestages (Tutzing, 2010).
Appel, Bernhard R., ‘Schumanns Davidsbund. Geistes- und sozialgeschichtliche
Voraussetzungen einer romantischen Idee’, Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, 38
(1981), 1–23.
Applegate, Celia, Bach in Berlin: Nation and Culture in Mendelssohn’s Revival of the St
Matthew Passion (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2005).
Applegate, Celia and Pamela Potter, ‘Germans as the “People of Music”: Genealogy of
an Identity’, in Applegate and Potter (eds.), Music and German National Identity.
Applegate, Celia and Pamela Potter (eds.), Music and German National Identity (Chicago
and London: University of Chicago Press, 2002).
Aprahamian, Felix, A Life in Music and Criticism, eds. Lewis Foreman and Susan Foreman
(Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2015).
Aprahamian, Felix (ed.), Essays from the World of Music (London: John Calder, 1956).
Arlt, Wulf, Ernst Lichtenhahn and Hans Oesch (eds.), Gattungen der Musik in
Einzeldarstellungen: Gedenkschrift Leo Schrade (Munich: Francke, 1973).
Armstrong, Dom and Jessica Armstrong, ‘Dispatches from the Front: The Life and
Writings of Ralph J. Gleason’, Rock Music Studies, 1/1 (2014), 3–35.
Aroncyzyk, Melissa and Devon Powers (eds.), Blowing Up the Brand: Critical Perspectives
on Promotional Culture (New York: Peter Lang, 2012).
Aronowitz, Al, Bob Dylan and the Beatles: Volume One of the Best of the Blacklisted Journalist
(Bloomington: AuthorHouse, 2004).
Aretz, Isabel (ed.), América Latina en su música (Havana: UNESCO Oficina regional de
cultura para América Latina y el Caribe, Centre de documentación, 1975).
Artiaga, Maria José, ‘Continuity and Change in Three Decades of Portuguese Musical
Life 1870–1900’, unpublished PhD thesis, Royal Holloway, University of London
(2007).
Arvidsson, Adam, Brands: Meaning and Value in Media Culture (New York: Routledge,
2006).
Asaf’ev, Boris, Izbrannye Trudy, vol. 5 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo akademii nauk SSSR,
1957).
Asaf’ev, Boris, Kniga o Stravinskom (Leningrad: Muzyka, 1977; 1st ed., Leningrad:
Triton, 1929); English version, A Book about Stravinsky, trans. Richard F. French
(Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1982).
Asquith, Mark S., ‘Francis Hueffer and the Early Reception of Richard Wagner’s
Aesthetics in England’, in Rademacher (ed.), Modernism and the Individual Talent.
Assouline, Pierre, L’épuration des intellectuels (Brussels: Complexe, 1996).
Atton, Chris, ‘“Living in the Past”? Value Discourses in Progressive Rock Fanzines’,
Popular Music, 20/1 (January 2001), 29–46.
Atton, Chris, ‘Popular Music Fanzines: Genres, Aesthetics and the “Democratic
Conversation”’, Popular Music and Society, 33/4 (2010), 517–31.
710 Bibliography
Atton, Chris, ‘Writing about Listening: Alternative Discourses in Rock Journalism’,

Popular Music, 28/1 (2009), 53–67.
Auer, Stefan, Liberal Nationalism in Central Europe (London: Routledge, 2004).
Auerbach, Erich, Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, trans.
Willard R. Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1953).
Austern, Linda Phyllis, ‘Domestic Song and the Circulation of Masculine Social Energy
in Early Modern England’, in Dunn and Larson (eds.), Gender and Song in Early Modern
England.
Austern, Linda Phyllis, ‘“Lo Here I Burn”: Musical Figurations and Fantasies of Male
Desire in Early Modern England’, in Blackburn and Stras (eds.), Eroticism in Early
Modern Music.
Austern, Linda Phyllis, ‘“Sing Againe Syren”: The Female Musician and Sexual
Enchantment in Elizabethan Life and Literature’, Renaissance Quarterly, 42 (1989),
420–48.
Austern, Linda Phyllis, Candace Bailey and Amanda Eubanks Winkler (eds.), Beyond
Boundaries: Rethinking Music Circulation in Early Modern England (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 2017).
Auzolle, Cécile (ed.), Regards sur Daniel-Lesur (Paris: PUF-PUPS, 2009).
Aviñoa, Xosé, ‘La crítica musical: donde el oficio absorbe la función’, in Cascudo and
Palacios (eds.), Los señores de la crítica.
Avison, Charles, An Essay on Musical Expression (London, 1752).
Avison, Charles, An Essay on Musical Expression … Second Edition, with Alterations and
Large Additions (London, 1753).
Avison, Charles, A Reply to the Author of Remarks on His Essay on Musical Expression
(London, 1753).
Avison, Charles, ‘Remarks on the Psalms of Marcello’, in The First Fifty Psalms Set to
Music, by Benedetto Marcello (London, 1757).
‘B.’, ‘Introduzione delle attuali condizioni delle arti musicali in Italia’, Gazzetta musicale
di Milano, 1 (2 January 1842), 1.
Bach, David Josef, ‘Die Kunststelle’, Kunst und Volk: Eine Festgabe der Kunststelle zur
1000. Theateraufführung, ed. David Josef Bach (Vienna: Verlag Leopold Heidrich,
1923).
Bach, David Josef, ‘Die Schiller-Feier der Wiener Arbeiterschaft’, Arbeiter-Zeitung
(9 May 1905); cited in Koehler, ‘“Soul is but Harmony”’.
Bach, David Josef, ‘Fünfundzwanzig Jahre Arbeiter-Sinfonie-Konzert’, Kunst und
Volk: Mitteilungen des Vereines Sozialdemokratische Kunststelle, 4/2 (October
1929), 41–3.
Bach, David Josef, ‘Mahlers Dritte’, Arbeiter-Zeitung (20 December 1904), 1–2, quoted
in Koehler, ‘“Soul is but Harmony”’.
Bach, David Josef, ‘Max Kalbeck zur Erinnerung’, Der Merker, 12/10 (15 May 1921), 228–31.
Bach, David Josef, ‘Programm für das Jahr 1927–28’, Kunst und Volk, 2/6 (September
1927), 1–3.
Bach, David Josef, ‘Sozialismus und Kunst’, Kunst und Volk, 5/5 (July 1931), 92.
Bach, David Josef, ‘Symphoniekonzerte der Wiener Arbeiterschaft’, Arbeiter-Zeitung
(12 December 1905), 7–8, quoted in Koehler, ‘“Soul is but Harmony”’.
[Bailey Seymour, Charles C.], New York Times (10 February 1853), quoted in Vera
Brodsky Lawrence, Strong on Music: The New York Scene in the Days of George
Bibliography 711
Templeton Strong, 1836–1875, Volume I I : Reverberations, 1850–1856 (Chicago:

Balliett, Whitney, ‘Demi-Centennial’, American Musicians I I : Seventy-One Portraits in Jazz
(Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005).
Balmer, Yves, ‘Portrait de Daniel-Lesur en critique musical: pour ou contre la musique
moderne?’, in Auzolle (ed.), Regards sur Daniel-Lesur.
Balmer, Yves, Thomas Lacôte and Christopher Brent Murray, ‘“Un cri de passion ne
s’analyse pas”: Messiaen’s Harmonic Borrowings from Massenet’, Twentieth-Century
Music, 13/2 (September 2016), 233–60.
Bandwagon, ‘5 Songs Previously Banned in Singapore’, Bandwagon.asia, available at edi
torial.bandwagon.sg/5-songs-previously-banned-in-singapore (accessed 1 June 2015).
Banet-Weiser, Sarah, AuthenticTM: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture
(New York: New York University Press, 2012).
Barce, Ramón, ‘Adolfo Salazar. La obra y el hombre’, Índice, 20 (1958), 23.
Barna, István, ‘Erkel Ferenc első operái az egykorú sajtó tükrében’ [Ferenc Erkel’s First
Operas in the Mirror of the Press of the Time], in Szabolcsi and Bartha (eds.),
Zenetudományi tanulmányok I I .
Barna, István, ‘Erkel nagy művei és a kritika’ [Erkel’s Great Works and Criticism], in
Szabolcsi and Bartha (eds.), Zenetudományi tanulmányok I V .
Bartók, Béla, ‘Liszt Problems’, in Béla Bartók Essays, ed. Benjamin Suchoff (New York:
St Martin’s Press, 1976).
Bartoli, Cosimo, Ragionamenti accademici sopra alcuni luoghi difficili di Dante (Venice:
Francesco de’ Franceschini, 1567).
Bar-Yoshafat, Yonatan, ‘Kenner und Liebhaber – Yet Another Look’, International Review
of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, 44 (2013), 19–47.
Barz, Gregory F. and Timothy J. Cooley (eds.), Shadows in the Field: New Perspectives for
Fieldwork in Ethnomusicology (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997).
Basevi, Abramo, The Operas of Giuseppe Verdi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
2013).
Bashford, Christina, ‘The Late Beethoven Quartets and the London Press, 1836–ca.
1850’, Musical Quarterly, 84 (2000), 84–122.
Batashev, Aleksei, Sovetskii dzhaz. Istoricheskii ocherk, ed. A. B. Medvedev (Moscow:
Muzyka, 1972).
Bate, Jonathan, ‘Hazlitt, William’, in Matthew and Harrison (eds.), Oxford Dictionary of
National Biography.
Bauman, Richard and Charles L. Briggs, Voices of Modernity: Language Ideologies and the
Politics of Inequality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Bauman, Thomas, ‘The Music Reviews in the Allgemeine deutsche Bibliothek’, Acta
Musicologica, 49 (1977), 69–85.
Bayon [Bruno Taravant], ‘Ronnie Bird, la compulsion’, Libération (8 April 1985), 23.
Bayreuther, Rainer (ed.), Musicalische Norm um 1700 (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2010).
Beard, David and Kenneth Gloag, Musicology: The Key Concepts (London and New York:
Routledge, 2005).
Beasley, Rebecca and Philip Ross Bullock (eds.), Russia in Britain, 1880–1940: From
Melodrama to Modernism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).
Beattie, James, Essays on Poetry and Music as They Affect the Mind (Edinburgh,
1776).
712 Bibliography
Beckerman, Michael, ‘In Search of Czechness in Music’, 19th-Century Music, 10/1

(Summer 1986), 61–73.
Beckerman, Michael (ed.), Janáček and His World (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2003).
Beckerman, Michael and Glen Bauer (eds.), Janáček and Czech Music: Proceedings of the
International Conference (Saint Louis, 1988), Studies in Czech Music, 1 (Stuyvesant:
Pendragon, 1995).
Beckwith, John and Frederick A. Hall (eds.), Musical Canada: Words and Music Honouring
Helmut Kallmann (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988).
Bekker, Paul, Beethoven (Berlin: Schuster and Loeffler, 1911); English trans. by M. M.
Bozman (London: J. M. Dent, 1925).
Bedford, Arthur, The Temple Musick (London, 1706).
Beer, Johann, Musicalische Discurse (Nuremberg, 1719).
Beer, Johann, Sein Leben, von ihm selbst erzählt, ed. Adolf Schmiedecke (Göttingen:
Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1965).
Béhague, Gerard, ‘Latin America’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, available at
www.oxfordmusiconline (accessed 1 June 2018).
Béjar Bartolo, Alejandra and Fabrizio Ammetto, ‘Documentos inéditos de un cantante
y compositor de ópera de finales del siglo X V I I ’, in Ammetto (ed.), La ‘ópera’ como
punto de cohésion entre las artes.
Bellaigue, Camille, ‘Pelléas et Mélisande’, Revue des deux mondes (15 May 1902).
Bellanger, Claude, Jacques Godechot, Pierre Guiral and Fernand Terrou (eds.), Histoire
générale de la presse française, tome 3: de 1871 à 1940 (Paris: Presses universitaires de
France, 1972).
Beller, Steven (ed.), Rethinking Vienna 1900 (New York and Oxford: Berghahn,
2001).
Bene, Zoltán, ‘Az újságíró és könyvtáros Mátray Gábor’, unpublished MA thesis,
University of Szeged (2002).
Benevides, Francisco da Fonseca, Memórias 1883–1902 (Lisbon: Ricardo de Sousa
e Sales, 1902).
Benevides, Francisco da Fonseca, O Real Teatro de S. Carlos de Lisboa. Desde a sua
fundação em 1793 até à actualidade. Estudo histórico (Lisbon: Castro Irmão,
1883).
Bennett, Andy and Richard A. Peterson (eds.), Music Scenes: Local, Translocal, and Virtual
(Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2004).
Bennett, Andy and Steve Waksman (eds.), The Sage Handbook of Popular Music (Los
Angeles: Sage, 2015).
Bennett, Andy, Barry Shank and Jason Toynbee (eds.), The Popular Music Studies Reader
(London: Routledge, 2007).
Bennett, James Gordon, [Editorial], New-York Morning Herald (19 August 1836), quoted
in Grant, Mark N., Maestros of the Pen: A History of Classical Music Criticism in America
(Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998).
Bennett, Joseph, Forty Years of Music, 1865–1905 (London: Methuen, 1908).
Benoit-Otis, Marie-Hélène and Cécile Quesney, ‘A Nazi Pilgrimage to Vienna? The
French Delegation at the 1941 “Mozart Week of the German Reich”’, Musical
Quarterly, 99/1 (March 2016), 6–59.
Bibliography 713
Bent, Ian (ed.), Music Analysis in the Nineteenth Century, Volume I I : Hermeneutic Approaches
Bent, Ian (ed.), Music Theory in the Age of Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge
Bent, Margaret, ‘Fact and Value in Contemporary Scholarship’, Musical Times, 127/1716
(1986), 85–9.
Bent, Margaret, ‘On False Concords in Late Fifteenth-Century Music: Yet Another Look
at Tinctoris’, in Ceulemans and Blackburn (eds.), Music Theory and Analysis, 1450–1600.
Berghahn, Klaus, ‘From Classicist to Classical Literary Criticism, 1730–1806’, in
Hohendahl (ed.), A History of German Literary Criticism.
Berio, Talia Pecker (ed.), Intorno a Massimo Mila. Studi sul teatro e il Novecento musicale
(Florence: Olschki, 1994).
Berl, Heinrich, Das Judentum in der Musik (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1926).
Berlin, Isaiah, ‘A Remarkable Decade’, in Russian Thinkers (New York: Penguin Books,
1979).
Berlioz, Hector, La Critique musicale, 1823–1863, eds. H. Robert Cohen, Yves Gérard,
Anne Bongrain and Marie-Hélène Coudroy-Saghaï (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 1996).
Berlioz, Hector, The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz, ed. and trans. David Cairns (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 2002).
Bernard, Claude, Victor Cousin, ou, La religion de la philosophie (Toulouse: Presses uni-
versitaires du Mirail, 1991).
Bernard, Élisabeth, ‘Jules Pasdeloup et les Concerts Populaires’, Revue de musicologie,
57/2 (1971), 150–78.
Bernardo de Lima, Francisco, Gazeta literária ou Notícia exacta dos principais escritos, que
modernamente se vão publicando na Europa. Conforme a análisis, que deles fazem os melhores
críticos, e diaristas das nações mais civilizadas (Porto: Na Oficina de Francisco Mendes
Lima, 1761).
Berschin, Walter (ed. and trans.), Ekkehard I : Vita Sanctae Wiboradae (St Gallen:
Historischer Verein des Kantons St Gallen, 1983).
Bertrand, Gustave, ‘Opéra-Comique: Hérold, 1000e représentation du Pré au Clercs’,
Le Ménestrel (15 October 1870–1).
Besterman, Theodore (ed.), Voltaire’s Correspondence, 135 vols. (Geneva: Institute et
musée Voltaire, 1953–77).
Besutti, Paola, ‘Buzzoleni, Giovanni’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, avail-
able at www.oxfordmusiconline.com (accessed 15 May 2018).
Besutti, Paola, ‘Nicola, Paris’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, available at
Betz, Siegmund, ‘The Operatic Criticism of the Tatler and Spectator’, Musical Quarterly,
31/3 (1945), 318–30.
Bevir, Mark, ‘The Long Nineteenth Century in Intellectual History’, Journal of Victorian
Culture, 6 (2001), 313–35.
Bianchi, Lino and Giancarlo Rostirolla (eds.), Atti del I I Convegno internazionale di studi
palestriniani (Palestrina: Fondazione Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina/Centro di Studi
Palestriniani, 1991).
Bianconi, Giuseppina La Face (ed.), ‘La critica musicale italiana: un autoritratto’, Rivista
italiana di musicologia, 26/1 (1991), 117–35.
714 Bibliography
Bianconi, Lorenzo and Thomas Walker, ‘Production, Consumption and Political

Function of Seventeenth-Century Opera’, Early Music History, 4 (1984), 277–9.
Bianconi, Lorenzo and Giorgio Pestelli (eds.), Opera Production and Its Resources
(Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1998).
Biblioteca Geral da Universidade de Coimbra, Publicações periódicas portuguesas exis-
tentes na Biblioteca Geral da Universidade de Coimbra, 3 vols. (Coimbra: Biblioteca Geral
da Universidade, 1983/1991/2001).
Biblioteca Nacional Portugal, Verdi em Portugal 1843–2001: exposição comemorativa do
centenário da morte do compositor: catálogo, exhibition catalogue (Lisbon: Biblioteca
Nacional, Teatro Nacional de S. Carlos, 2001).
Biddle, Ian D. and Kirsten Gibson (eds.), Masculinity and Western Musical Practice
Binns, J. W., ‘John Case and “The Praise of Musicke”’, Music & Letters, 55 (1974),
444–53.
Bischoff, Bodo, Monument für Beethoven: Die Entwicklung der Beethoven-Rezeption Robert
Schumann (Cologne: Dohr, 1994).
Blackall, Eric A., The Emergence of German as a Literary Language, 1700–1775
Blackburn, Bonnie J., Edward E. Lowinsky and Clement A. Miller (eds.),
A Correspondence of Renaissance Musicians (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991).
Blackburn, Bonnie J. and Laurie Stras (eds.), Eroticism in Early Modern Music (Farnham:
Ashgate, 2015).
Blackman, Robert D., Composition and Style: A Handbook for Literary Students, 5th ed.
(London: C. W. Deacon and Co., 1885).
Blažeković, Zdravko and Barbara Dobbs Mackenzie (eds.), Music’s Intellectual History,
RILM Perspectives 1 (New York: Répertoire International de la Littérature
Musicale, 2009).
Bledsoe, Robert, ‘Chorley, Henry Fothergill’, in Matthew and Harrison (eds.), Oxford
Dictionary of National Biography.
Bledsoe, Robert Terrell, Henry Fothergill Chorley: Victorian Journalist (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 1998).
Blesh, Rudi, Shining Trumpets: A History of Jazz (New York: Da Capo, 1986; 1st ed. Alfred
A. Knopf, 1946).
Blessinger, Karl, Die musikalischen Probleme der Gegenwart und ihre Lösung (Stuttgart:
Kunstverlag Benno Filser, 1919).
Bloom, Howard, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (London:
Macmillan, 1994).
Bloom, Peter, ‘François-Joseph Fétis and the Revue musicale (1827–1835)’, unpublished
PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania (1972).
Bloom, Peter (ed.), Music in Paris in the Eighteen-Thirties/La musique à Paris dans les années
mil huit cent trente (Stuyvesant: Pendragon, 1987).
Bloom, Peter (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Berlioz (Cambridge: Cambridge
Bödeker, Hans Erich, Patrice Veit and Michael Werner (eds.), Le Concert et son public:
mutations de la vie musicale en Europe de 1780 à 1914 (France, Allemagne, Angleterre)
(Paris: Les Éditions de la Maison des Sciences de l’homme, 2002).
Bibliography 715
Bohlman, Philip V., ‘Fieldwork in the Ethnomusicological Past’, in Barz and Cooley
(eds.), Shadows in the Field.
Bohlman, Philip V. and Goffredo Plastino (eds.), Jazz Worlds/World Jazz (Chicago:
Chicago University Press, 2016).
Boisits, Barbara (ed.), Musik und Revolution. Die Produktion von Identität und Raum durch
Musik in Zentraleuropa, 1848/49 (Vienna: Hollitzer, 2013).
[Bollioud-Mermet, Louis], De la corruption du goust dans la musique françoise (Lyon: Aimé
Delaroche, 1746).
Bonds, Mark Evan, Absolute Music: The History of an Idea (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2014).
Bonds, Mark Evan, Music as Thought: Listening to the Symphony in the Age of Beethoven
Bongrain, Anne, Yves Gérard and Marie-Hélène Coudroy-Saghai (eds.), Le Conservatoire de
Paris: des Menus-Plaisirs à la Cité de la Musique, 1795–1995 (Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1996).
Bónis, Ferenc, ‘Mátray, Gábor’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, available at
Bónis, Ferenc, ‘Szabolcsi, Bence’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online available at
Bónis, Ferenc, ‘Tóth, Aladár’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, available at
Born, Georgina (ed.), Music, Sound and Space: Transformations of Public and Private
Experience (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
Borthwick, Stuart and Ron Moy, Popular Music Genres (New York and London:
Routledge, 2004).
Botstein, Leon, ‘Listening through Reading: Musical Literacy and the Concert
Audience’, 19th-Century Music, 16/2 (Autumn 1992), 129–45.
Botstein, Leon, ‘The Cultural Politics of Language and Music: Max Brod and Leoš
Janáček’, in Beckerman (ed.), Janáček and His World.
Boulez, Pierre, ‘Schoenberg Is Dead’, The Score, 6 (1952), 18–22.
Bourdieu, Pierre, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard
Nice (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1984).
Bourdieu, Pierre, The Field of Cultural Production, ed. Randal Johnson (New York:
Columbia University Press, 1993).
Bourdieu, Pierre, The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field, trans. Susan
Emanuel (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995).
Bower, Calvin M., ‘The Grammatical Model of Musical Understanding in the Middle
Ages’, in Gallacher and Damico (eds.), Hermeneutics and Medieval Culture.
Bowles, Paul, Paul Bowles on Music, eds. Timothy Mangan and Irene Herrmann
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003).
Bowman, James A., Pergolesi in the Pentagon: Life at the Front Lines of the Cultural Cold War
(Bloomington: XLibris, 2014).
Boyd, Malcolm, ‘John Hughes on Opera’, Music & Letters, 52 (1971), 383–6.
Boyd, Morrison Comegys, Elizabethan Music and Musical Criticism, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1962).
Boyson, Frances, ‘Music Journalism in the Scottish Daily Press’, unpublished BMus
dissertation, University of Edinburgh (2006).
716 Bibliography
Bozó, Péter, ‘Piszkos partitúrák, szennyes szólamok avagy Az eleven ördög és a magyar
operett nem teljesen szeplőtlen fogantatása’ [Dirty Scores, Dusty Parts, or, The Living
Devil and the Not-So-Immaculate Conception of Hungarian Operetta], Magyar zene,
52/3 (August 2014), 318–33.
Bradford, Jacob, ‘Musical Criticism and Critics’, Westminster Review (November 1984),
530–6.
Bragard, Roger (ed.), Jacobi Leodiensis Speculum musicae, bk 7 (Rome: American Institute
of Musicology, 1973).
Branco, Luís de Freitas, ‘A hora do pensamento latino’, Arte musical, 3/97 (10 September
1933), 2.
Branco, Luís de Freitas, ‘A música e o pensamento latino’, De música, 1/2 (August
1930), 1–3.
Branger, Jean-Christophe, ‘Les compositeurs français et l’opéra italien: la crise de
1910’, in Ramaut (ed.), Le Naturalisme sur la scène lyrique.
Brazill, William, The Young Hegelians (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970).
Brendel, Franz, ‘Robert Schumann with Reference to Mendelssohn-Bartholdy and the
Development of Modern Music in General [1845]’, trans. Jürgen Thym, in Todd
(ed.), Schumann and His World.
Brennan, Matt, ‘The Rough Guide to Critics: Musicians Discuss the Role of the Music
Press’, Popular Music, 25/2 (2006), 221–34.
Brennan, Matt, When Genres Collide: Downbeat, Rolling Stone and the Struggle between Jazz
and Rock (New York: Bloomsbury, 2017).
Brett, Ursula, Music and Ideas in Seventeenth-Century Italy: The Cazzati–Arresti Polemic, 2
vols. (New York and London: Garland, 1989).
Breuilly, John (ed.), 19th-Century Germany: Politics, Culture and Society 1780–1918
(New York and London: Arnold/Oxford University Press, 1997/2001).
Bréville, Pierre de, ‘Musique’, Mercure de France (July 1898), 270–78.
Bridle, Marc, ‘The Art of Critics and Criticism?’, Seen & Heard (November 2001),
online, available at www.musicweb-international.com (accessed 15 May 2018).
Britten, Benjamin, ‘On Receiving the First Aspen Award’, speech given on 31 July 1964
at Aspen Music Festival, Colorado, available at www.aspenmusicfestival.com/benja
min-britten (accessed 30 September 2017).
Brito, Manuel Carlos de, Opera in Portugal in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Brito, Manuel Carlos de and David Cranmer, Crónicas da vida musical portuguesa
na primeira metade do século X I X (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, Casa da Moeda,
1990).
Brodbeck, David, Defining Deutschthum: Politics, Ideology, German Identity, and Music-
Critical Discourse in Liberal Vienna (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).
Bronner, François, François Antoine Habeneck (1781–1849): Biographie (Paris: Hermann
Editions, 2014).
Brookbank, Joseph, The Well-Tuned Organ, or, an Exercitation (London, 1660).
Brookes, Christopher, His Own Man: The Life of Neville Cardus (London: Methuen,
1985).
Brooks, Daphne A., ‘The Write to Rock: Racial Mythologies, Feminist Theories and
the Pleasures of Rock Criticism’, Women and Music: A Journal of Gender and Culture, 12
(2008), 54–62.
Bibliography 717
Broughton, Simon, Richard Trillo and Mark Ellingham (eds.), World Music: The Rough
Guide (London: Rough Guides, 1994).
Brown, John, A Dissertation on the Rise, Union, and Power, the Progressions, Separations and
Corruptions of Poetry and Music (London, 1763).
Brown, John, Letters upon the Poetry and Music of the Italian Opera (Edinburgh, 1789).
Brown, Lucy, Victorian News and Newspapers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985).
Brown, Malcolm Hamrick, ‘The Soviet Russian Concepts of “Intonazia” and “Musical
Imagery”’, Musical Quarterly, 60 (1974), 557–67.
Brown, Thomas Alan, The Aesthetics of Robert Schumann (London: Peter Owen, 1969).
Bruckner-Bigenwald, Martha, Die Anfänge der Leipziger Allgemeinen musikalischen Zeitung
(Hilversum: Frits A. M. Knuf, 1965).
Brunstetter, Scott, ‘Escaping History: The Expulsion of Sudeten Germans as
a Leitmotif in German–Czech Relations’, in Várdy and Tooley (eds.), Ethnic
Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe.
Bryan, Karen M., ‘Nora Holt’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, available at
www.oxfordmusiconline.com (accessed 1 August 2018).
Bryce, Judith, Cosimo Bartoli (1503–1572): The Career of a Florentine Polymath (Geneva:
Librairie Droz, 1983).
Budday, Wolfgang and Heinrich Deppert (eds.), Musiktheorie: Festschrift für Heinrich
Deppert zum 65. Geburtstag (Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 2000).
Bull, George, ‘Introduction’, in Baldassare Castiglione, The Book of the Courtier, trans.
George Bull (London: Penguin, 1976).
Bullock, Philip Ross, Rosa Newmarch and Russian Music in Late Nineteenth and Early
Twentieth-Century Britain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2009).
Bullock, Philip Ross, ‘Tsar’s Hall: Russian Music in London, 1895–1926’, in Beasley
and Bullock (eds.), Russia in Britain, 1880–1940.
Büning, Eleonore, ‘SWR-Orchester: “Fusionsdirigent”’, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
(25 March 2015).
Burden, Michael, ‘The Lure of Aria, Procession and Spectacle: Opera in Eighteenth-
Century London’, in Keefe (ed.), Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Music.
Bürger, Christa, Peter Bürger and Jochen Schulte-Sasse (eds.), Aufklärung und literarische
Öffentlichkeit (Frankfurt am Main: Edition Suhrkamp, 1980).
Burk, John N. (ed.), Philip Hale’s Boston Symphony Programme Notes: Historical, Critical,
and Descriptive Comment on Music and Composers (Garden City: Doubleday, Doran &
Co., 1936).
Burke, Edmund, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and the
Beautiful (London, 1757).
Burlas, Ladislav, ‘7. Slovak Music of the 20th Century’, in Elschek and Burlas (eds.),
A History of Slovak Music.
Burney, Charles, A General History of Music, from the Earliest Ages to the Present Period, 4
vols. (London, 1776–89).
Burney, Charles, The Present State of Music in France and Italy: Or, The Journal of a Tour
through Those Countries, Undertaken to Collect Materials for A General History of Music
(London, 1771).
Burney, Charles, The Present State of Music in Germany, The Netherlands, and United
Provinces (London, 1773).
Burnham, Scott, Beethoven Hero (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995).
718 Bibliography
Burnham, Scott, ‘Criticism, Faith, and the “Idee”: A. B. Marx’s Early Reception of
Beethoven’, 19th-Century Music, 13/3 (Spring 1990), 183–92.
Burnham, Scott, Sounding Values: Selected Essays (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010).
Burr, Ty, ‘From Africa, Three Female Rebels with a Cause’, New York Times (10 July
1994), §H, 26.
Burton, Humphrey, Leonard Bernstein (London: Faber and Faber, 1994).
Bury, Mariane and Hélène Laplace-Claverie (eds.), Le Miel et le fiel: La critique théâtrale en
France au XIXe siècle (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, 2008).
Busi, Leonardo, Il padre G. B. Martini: musicista-letterato del secolo 18 (Bologna:
Zanichelli, 1891).
Butler, Charles, The Principles of Musik in Singing and Setting (London, 1636).
Cáceres-Piñuel, María, ‘“Una posturita estética que no representa sino un frenazo”: El
discurso crítico de Subirá en torno al neoclasicismo (1929–1936)’, in Cascudo and
Caddy, Davinia, The Ballets Russes and Beyond: Music and Dance in Belle-Époque Paris
Caesar, Ann Hallamore, Gabriella Romani and Jennifer Burns (eds.), The Printed Media
in Fin-de-Siècle Italy: Publishers, Writers, and Readers (London: Legenda, 2011).
Calico, Joy H., Arnold Schoenberg’s ‘A Survivor from Warsaw’ in Postwar Europe (Berkeley,
Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2014).
Calvocoressi, Michel-Dimitri, ‘Can Musical Criticism Be Taught?’, Musical Times (1 May
1911), 300–2.
Calvocoressi, Michel-Dimitri, ‘De la critique musicale’, Revue française de musique, 8
(1 February 1913), 317–30.
Calvocoressi, Michel-Dimitri, ‘La Critique musicale’, Le Courrier musical
(1 November 1910).
Calvocoressi, Michel-Dimitri, The Principles and Methods of Musical Criticism (Oxford:
Oxford University Press; London: Humphrey Milford, 1923).
Campbell, James Stuart, V. F. Odoyevsky and the Formation of Russian Musical Taste in the
Nineteenth Century (New York and London: Garland, 1989).
Campbell, James Stuart (ed.), Russians on Russian Music, 1830–1880: An Anthology
(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
Campbell, James Stuart (ed.), Russians on Russian Music, 1880–1917: An Anthology
(Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003).
Campo-Bowen, Christopher, ‘Bohemian Rhapsodist: Antonín Dvořák’s Píseň
bohatýrská and the Historiography of Czech Music’, 19th-Century Music, 40/2 (Fall
2016), 159–81.
Campos, Rémy, François-Joseph Fétis: Musicographe (Geneva: Librairie Droz, 2013).
Cannon, Geoffrey, ‘A Life in Pop Writing’, Rock’s Backpages (April 2012), available at
rocksbackpages.com.
Cannone, Belinda, La réception des opéras de Mozart dans la presse parisienne, 1793–1829
(Paris: Klincksieck, 1991).
Cannone, Belinda, Philosophies de la musique (1752–1780) (Paris: Klinckseick, 1990).
Cantrell, Scott, ‘Classical Music Criticism’, in Heintze and Saffle (eds.) Reflections on
American Music.
Canudo, Ricciotto, ‘La Troisième guerre des Bouffons’, Comœdia (18 February 1910).
Capitoni, Federico, La critica musicale (Rome: Carocci, 2015).
Bibliography 719
Capra, Carlo, Valerio Castronovo and Giuseppe Ricuperati (eds.), La stampa italiana dal
cinquecento all’ottocento (Rome: Laterza, 1986).
Capra, Marco, ‘Alla ricerca dei periodici musicali: in margine alla pubblicazione del
catalogo dei periodici musicali delle biblioteche della Campania’, Rivista italiana di
musicologia, 32/2 (1997), 367–82.
Capra, Marco, ‘Criticism: Italy: 1890–1945’, in Sadie and Tyrrell (eds.), The New Grove
Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vol. 6.
Capra, Marco, ‘Filippi, Filippo’, in Roberta Montemorra Marvin (ed.), The Cambridge
Verdi Encyclopedia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
Capra, Marco, ‘La Casa Editrice Sonzogno tra giornalismo e impresariato’, in Morini,
Ostali and Ostali (eds.), Casa musicale Sonzogno.
Capra, Marco, ‘La stampa ritrovata: duecento anni di periodici musicali’, in Rigolli
(ed.), La divulgazione musicale in Italia oggi.
Capra, Marco, ‘Periodici e critica musicale tra Ottocento e Novecento: dal Censore
universale dei teatri alla Rassegna musicale’, in Capra and Nicolodi (eds.), La critica
musicale in Italia nella prima metà del Novecento.
Capra, Marco and Fiamma Nicolodi (eds.), La critica musicale in Italia nella prima metà del
Novecento (Parma: Marsilio, 2011).
Cardus, Neville, Autobiography (London: Collins, 1947).
Cardus, Neville, ‘Bantock and Style in Art’, Musical Opinion, 40 (1916–17), 158–9.
Cardus, Neville, ‘Messiaen’s Turangalila [sic]: Love Song in Ten Movements’,
Manchester Guardian (14 April 1954), 5.
Carman Joseph, ‘Diminuendo: Is Classical Music Journalism Fading to Silence?’, San
Francisco Classical Voice (11 July 2017), available at www.sfcv.org (accessed
1 August 2018).
Carpentier, Alejo, ‘Amadeo Roldán – Alejandro García Caturla’, in Music in Cuba, ed.
Timothy Brennan, trans. Alan West-Durán (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2002).
Carpentier, Alejo, ‘América Latina en la confluencia de coordenadas históricas y su
repercusión en la música’, in Isabel Aretz (ed.), América Latina en su música (Havana:
UNESCO Oficina regional de cultura para América Latina y el Caribe, Centre de
documentación, 1975), 7–19, reproduced in Ese músico que llevo dentro, vol. 3.
Carpentier, Alejo, ‘Arthur Honegger y el rey Pausole’, Social, 16/5 (June 1931), in
Crónicas, vol. 1.
Carpentier, Alejo, Chroniques, ed. with an introduction by Carmen Vásquez, trans. René
L. F. Durand (Paris: Gallimard, 1983).
Carpentier, Alejo, Crónicas, 2 vols. (Havana: Editorial Arte y Literatura, 1975–76).
Carpentier, Alejo, ‘Del folklorisme musical’, in Tientos y differencias: ensayos (Mexico
City: Mexico Universidad autónoma, 1964).
Carpentier, Alejo, ‘Edgar [sic] Varèse escribe para el teatro’, Social, 16/4 (April 1931), in
Crónicas, vol. 1.
Carpentier, Alejo, ‘Edgar [sic] Varèse vivant’, Le Nouveau Commerce, 10 (Autumn/Winter
1967), 13–28.
Carpentier, Alejo, ‘El ángel de las maracas’, Entrevista de Salvador del Río, Revista Mexicana
de Cultura, 305 (8 December 1974), reproduced in Ese músico que llevo dentro, vol. 3.
Carpentier, Alejo, ‘El folklorismo musical’ [1957], reproduced in Letra y solfa.
Carpentier, Alejo, Ensayos americanos (Caracas: Imprenta Nacional, 1949).
720 Bibliography
Carpentier, Alejo, Ese músico que llevo dentro, ed. Zoila Gómez, 3 vols. (Havana: Editorial
Letras Cubanas, 1980).
Carpentier, Alejo, ‘Honegger y el canto a la velocidad’, Social, 12/8 (August 1927), in
Crónicas, vol. 1.
Carpentier, Alejo, Letra y solfa (Caracas: Síntetis Dosmil, 1975).
Carpentier, Alejo, Letra y solfa: Vision de America (Buenos Aires: Ediciones Nemont,
1976).
Carpentier, Alejo, ‘Los problemas del compositor latinoamericano’ [1946], reproduced
in Letra y solfa and Ese músico que llevo dentro, vol. 3.
Carpentier, Alejo, ‘Marius-François Gaillard y su labor multiple’, Social (February
1929), 89.
Carpentier, Alejo, Obras completes de Alejo Carpentier, ed. Anhelo Hernández, vols. 8–12
(Mexico City: Siglo Veintiuno, 1985–7).
Carpentier, Alejo, ‘Origines de la música y la música primitiva’ [c. 1944/1946], repro-
duced in Chornik, Alejo Carpentier and the Musical Text.
Carpentier, Alejo, ‘Panorama de la música en Cuba. La música contemporanéa’, Revista
musical chilena (Santiago de Chile, December 1947), reproduced in Ese músico que llevo
dentro, vol. 3.
Carpentier, Alejo, ‘Temas de la lira y el bongó’, Carteles (April 1929), in Ese músico que
llevo dentro, vol. 2.
Carpentier, Alejo, Tientos y differencias (Montevideo: Arca, 1967).
Carpentier, Alejo, ‘Un gran compositor latinoamericano: Heitor Villa-Lobos’, Gaceta
musical (July–August, 1928), reproduced in Ese músico que llevo dentro, vol. 1, Obras
completas de Alejo Carpentier, vol. 10.
Carpentier, Alejo, ‘Una fuerza musical de América – Hector Villa-Lobos’, Social, 14/8
(1929), in Crónicas, vol. 1.
Carpitella, Diego, ‘Convergenze fra indagine etnomusicologica e ricerche espressive
contemporanee’, La Rassegna musicale, 31/4 (1961), 390–6.
Carredano, Consuelo, ‘Danzas de conquista: herencia y celebración de Adolfo Salazar’,
in Nagore, Sánchez de Andrés and Torres (eds.), Música y cultura en la Edad de Plata
1915–1939.
Carroll, Mark, Music and Ideology in Cold War Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2003).
Carruthers, Mary, ‘Sweetness’, Speculum, 81 (2006), 999–1013.
Carruthers, Mary, The Experience of Beauty in the Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2013).
Carson, Tom, ‘Elvis is Alive’, Village Voice (15 November 1988), 75.
Carson, Tom ‘Sorry Ma, Forgot to Bring in the Trash: Tom Carson Talks Straight to
Scott Woods and Steven Ward’, rockcritics.com (April 2002).
Carson, Tom, Kit Rachlis and Jeff Salamon (eds.), Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough: Essays
in Honor of Robert Christgau (Austin: Nortex Press, 2002).
Carter, Karen L., ‘Virgil Thomson on Modern Music: Critical Writings in the New York
Herald Tribune’, unpublished MA thesis, McMaster University (1990).
Carter, Stephanie, ‘“Yong Beginners, who live in the Countrey”: John Playford and the
Printed Music Market in Seventeenth-Century England’, Early Music History, 35
(2016), 95–129.
Bibliography 721
Carter-Schwendler, Karen L., ‘Virgil Thomson’s Herald Tribune Writings: Fulfilling

the “Cultural Obligation” Selectively’, IAWM Journal (June 1995), 12–15.
Carvalho, Mário Vieira de, Eça de Queirós e Offenbach. A ácida gargalhada de Mefistófeles
(Lisbon: Colibri, 1999).
Carvalho, Mário Vieira de, Pensar a música, mudar o mundo: Fernando Lopes-Graça (Porto:
Campo das Letras, 2006).
Carvalho, Mário Vieira de, Pensar é morrer ou O Teatro de São Carlos na mudança de sistemas
sociocomunicativos desde fins do séc. X V I I I aos nossos dias (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional,
Casa da Moeda, 1993).
Casares Rodicio, Emilio, ‘La crítica musical en el X I X español: Panorama general’, in
Casares Rodicio and Alonso (eds.), La música española en el siglo XIX.
Casares Rodicio, Emilio, ‘La música española hasta 1939, o la restauración musical’, in
Casares Rodicio, Fernández de la Cuesta and López Calo (eds.), España en la música de
Occidente, vol. I .
Casares Rodicio, Emilio, ‘Música y músicos de la Generación del 27’, in Casares
Rodicio (ed.), La música en la Generación del 27.
Casares Rodicio, Emilio (ed.), La música en la Generación del 27: Homenaje a Lorca
1915–1939 (Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura/INAEM, 1986).
Casares Rodicio, Emilio and Celsa Alonso (eds.), La música española en el siglo X I X
(Oviedo: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Oviedo, 1995).
Casares Rodicio, Emilio, Ismael Fernández de la Cuesta and José López Calo (eds.),
España en la música de Occidente, 2 vols. (Madrid: Instituto Nacional de Artes Escénicas
y de la Música, 1987).
Cascudo, Teresa, A tradição como problema na obra do compositor Fernando Lopes-Graça: Um
estudo no contexto português (Seville: Doble J, 2012).
Cascudo, Teresa and María Palacios (eds.), Los señores de la crítica Periodismo musical
e ideología del modernismo en Madrid (1900–1950) (Seville: Doble J., 2011).
Castelo-Branco, Salwa, et al., ‘Periódicos de música’, in Castelo-Branco (ed.),
Enciclopédia da música em Portugal no século X X , vol. I I I .
Castelo-Branco, Salwa (ed.), Enciclopédia da música em Portugal no século X X , vol. I I I
(Lisbon: Temas e Debates, Círculo de Leitores, 2010).
Castelvecchi, Stefano, ‘Introduction’, in Abramo Basevi, The Operas of Giuseppe Verdi
Castiglione, Baldessar, The Book of the Courtier, trans. George Bull (London: Penguin, 1976).
Castiglione, Baldessar, The Courtyer, trans. Thomas Hoby (London, 1561).
Castil-Blaze [François-Henri Joseph Blaze], Journal des débats (19 February 1821), 2,
quoted in Gíslason, Donald G., ‘Castil-Blaze, De l’opéra en France and the Feuilletons
of the Journal des Débats (1820–1832)’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of
British Columbia (1992), 69.
Castro, Paulo Ferreira de, ‘O que fazer com o século X I X ? Um olhar sobre a historiografia
musical portuguesa’, Revista portuguesa de musicologia, 2 (1992), 171–83.
Castro, Paulo Ferreira de, ‘Sobre os primórdios da crítica musical em Portugal’,
in Manuel Pedro Ferreira and Teresa Cascudo (eds.), Música e história: Estudos em
homenagem a Manuel Carlos de Brito (Lisboa: CESEM/Colibri, 2017).
Castro, Paulo Ferreira de, ‘Wagnerism at the Edge: Some Aspects of Richard Wagner’s
Impact on Portuguese Fin-de-siècle Culture’, in Sala (ed.), The Legacy of Richard Wagner.
722 Bibliography
Cavallo, Guglielmo and Roger Chartier (eds.), A History of Reading in the West, trans.
Lydia G. Cochrane (Cambridge: Polity, 1999).
Caves, Richard E., Creative Industries: Contracts between Art and Commerce (Cambridge:
Celenza, Anna Harwell, ‘Imagined Communities Made Real: The Impact of
Robert Schumann’s Neue Zeitschrift für Musik on the Formation of Music
Communities in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Musicological Research,
24/1 (2005), 1–26.
Cellier, Alex, ‘Il y a une musique française’, Le Ménestrel (22, 29 March and 5 April
1940), 49–50.
Censer, Jack R., The French Press in the Age of Enlightenment (London: Routledge, 1994).
Cesari, Gaetano, ‘Le funzioni, i metodi, gli scopi della critica musicale’, in Atti del primo
congresso internazionale di musica, Firenze, 30 aprile–4 maggio 1933 (Florence: Felice Le
Monnier, 1935).
Ceulemans, Anne-Emmanuelle and Bonnie J. Blackburn (eds.), Music Theory and
Analysis, 1450–1600 (Louvain-la-Neuve: Départment d’histoire de l’art et
d’archéologie, 2001).
Chabanon, Michel Paul Guy de, Éloge de M. Rameau (Paris: M. Lambert, 1764).
Chai, Yeow Kai, ‘Indie Comeback Kid Sufjan Stevens Is Back’, The Straits Times Life!
(3 September 2010).
Chai, Yeow Kai, ‘Sound Bites’, The Straits Times Life! (1 November 2012).
Chaĭkovskiĭ, Petr Il’ich, Muzykal’no-kriticheskie stat’i, ed. V. V. Iakovlev (Moscow: Muzgiz,
1953).
Chambers, Deborah, Linda Steiner and Carole Fleming, Women and Journalism (London
and New York: Routledge, 2004).
Chan, Boon, ‘Sodagreen Still Cool’, The Straits Times Life! (1 September 2014).
Chantler, Abigail, E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Aesthetics (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006).
Chantler, Abigail, ‘Revisiting E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Hermeneutics’, International
Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, 33/1 (2002), 3–30.
Chapin, Keith, ‘Bach’s Silence, Mattheson’s Words: Professional and Humanist Ways
of Speaking of Music’, in Chapin and Clark (eds.), Speaking of Music.
Chapin, Keith, ‘Scheibe’s Mistake: Sublime Simplicity and the Criteria of Classicism’,
Eighteenth-Century Music, 5 (2008), 165–77.
Chapin, Keith and Andrew H. Clark (eds.), Speaking of Music: Addressing the Sonorous
(New York: Fordham University Press, 2013).
Charle, Christophe, Le Siècle de la presse, 1830–1939 (Paris: Le Seuil, 2004).
Charlton, David, Opera in the Age of Rousseau: Music, Confrontation, Realism (Cambridge:
Charlton, David, John Trevitt and Guy Gosselin, ‘Paris’, in Sadie and Tyrrell (eds.), The
New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vol. 19.
Charlton, David (ed.), E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Musical Writings: ‘Kreisleriana’, ‘The Poet and
Composer’, Music Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Charon, Jean-Marie, La Presse en France de 1945 à nos jours (Paris: Seuil, 1991).
Charon, Jean-Marie, La Presse magazine (Paris: La Découverte, 2008).
Charon, Jean-Marie, La Presse quotidienne, 3rd ed. (Paris: La Découverte, 2013).
Chászár, Edward, ‘Ethnic Cleansing in Slovakia’, in Várdy and Tooley (eds.), Ethnic
Cleansing in Twentieth-Century Europe.
Bibliography 723
Cherednichenko, Tat’iana, Krizis obshchestva-krizis iskusstva: Muzykal’nyi ‘avangard’

v sisteme burzhuaznoi ideologii (Moscow: Muzyka, 1985).
Cherednichenko, Tat’iana, Mezhdu ‘Brezhnevym’ i ‘Pugachovoi’: Tipologiia sovetskoi mas-
sovoi kul’tury (Moscow: Kul’tura, 1994).
Cherednichenko, Tat’iana, Muzyka v istorii kul’tury: Posobie dlia studentov nemuzykal’nykh
VUZov i vsekh, kto interesuetsia muzykal’nym iskusstvom (Bishkek: Aibek, 1996).
Cherednichenko, Tat’iana, Muzykal’nyi zapas: 70-e. Problemy. Portrety. Sluchai (Moscow:
Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2002).
Cherednichenko, Tat’iana, Rossiia 90-kh v sloganakh, reitingakh, imidzhakh: aktual’nyi
leksikon istorii kul’tury (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 1999).
Chernyshevsky, Nikolai, ‘The Aesthetic Relation of Art to Reality’, in Selected
Philosophical Essays (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1953).
Chilesotti, Oscar, ‘L’evoluzione nella musica: appunti sulla teoria di Herbert Spencer’,
Rivista musicale italiana, 5/3 (1898), 559–73.
Chimènes, Myriam, ‘L’Information musicale: “parenthèse” de La Revue musicale?’,
La Revue des revues, 24 (1997), 91–110.
Chimènes, Myriam and Yannick Simon (eds.), La Musique à Paris sous l’Occupation (Paris:
Fayard, 2013).
Chornik, Katia, Alejo Carpentier and the Musical Text (Oxford: Legenda, 2015).
Christensen, Thomas (ed.), The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory (Cambridge:
Christgau, Robert, ‘A History of Rock Criticism’, in Szanto (ed.), Reporting the Arts I I .
Christgau, Robert, ‘Yes, There Is a Rock-Critic Establishment (But Is That Bad for
Rock?)’, Village Voice (26 January 1976).
Chua, Beng Huat, ‘Multiculturalism in Singapore: An Instrument of Social Control’,
Race and Class, 44/3 (2003), 58–77.
Ciliberti, Galliano, ‘Rigor and Spirituality in the De revisione cantus of St Bernard of
Clairvaux’, Benedictina, 39 (1992), 199–213.
Citron, Marcia J., Gender and the Musical Canon, 2nd revised ed. (Urbana and Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 2000).
Citron, Marcia J., ‘Gender, Professionalism and the Musical Canon’, Journal of
Musicology, 8/1 (Winter 1990), 102–17.
Clark, Katerina, The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual, 3rd ed. (Bloomington and
Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000).
Clark, Maribeth, ‘Bodies at the Opéra: Art and the Hermaphrodite in the Dance
Criticism of Théophile Gautier’, in Parker and Smart (eds.), Reading Critics Reading.
Clarke, Eric, ‘Lost and Found in Music: Music, Consciousness and Subjectivity’,
Musicae Scientae, 18 (2014), 354–68.
Clarke, Eric, ‘Music Space and Subjectivity’, in Born (ed.), Music, Sound and Space.
Clough, Cecil H. (ed.), Cultural Aspects of the Italian Renaissance: Essays in Honour of Paul
Oskar Kristeller (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1976).
Cocteau, Jean, ‘The Cock and the Harlequin’, in A Call to Order, trans. Rollo Myers
(London: Faber and Gwyer, 1926).
Coeuroy, André, Wagner et l’esprit romantique: Wagner et la France, le Wagnérisme
littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1965).
Cohn, Nik, I am the Greatest, says Johnny Angelo (London: Secker and Warburg, 1967).
Cohn, Nik, Pop from the Beginning (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1969).
724 Bibliography
Cole, Suzanne, ‘A Tale of Two Wagnerites: G. W. L. Marshall-Hall and John

F. Runciman’, Context, 39 (2014), 57–67.
Colette, ‘Claudine and Annie’, in The Complete Colette, trans. Antonia White (New York:
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2001).
[Colette], ‘Claudine au Concert’, Gil Blas (12 January, 2 and 23 February 1903).
Collins, Sarah (ed.), Composing the Liberal Subject: Liberalism and Victorian Music Culture
Cone, Edward T. (ed.), Berlioz: Fantastic Symphony (New York: W. W. Norton, 1971).
Congdon, Charles T., Reminiscences of a Journalist (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1880).
Contreras, Igor, ‘El “empeño apostólico-literario” de Federico Sopeña: sueños, lec-
turas y reivindicaciones musicales’, in Cascudo and Palacios (eds.), Los señores de la
crítica.
Cook, Elisabeth A., ‘Challenging the Ancien Régime: The Hidden Politics of the
“Querelle des Bouffons”’, in Fabiano (ed.), La Querelle des bouffons.
Cook, Nicholas, The Schenker Project: Culture, Race, and Music Theory (New York: Oxford
Cook, Nicholas and Mark Everist (eds.), Rethinking Music (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1999).
Cook, Nicholas, Eric Clarke, Daniel Leech-Wilksinon and John Rink (eds.), The
Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009).
Cooke, George Willis, John Sullivan Dwight: Brook-Farmer, Editor, and Critic of Music
(New York: Da Capo Press, 1969; first published Boston: Small, Maynard, & Co.,
1898).
Cooper, Jeffrey, The Rise of Instrumental Music and Concert Series in Paris, 1828–1871 (Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1983).
Cooper, Sarah (ed.), Girls! Girls! Girls! Essays on Women and Music (New York: New York
Copland, Aaron, ‘Memorial to Paul Rosenfeld’, Notes, 4/2 (1947), 147–51.
Copland, Aaron and Vivian Perlis, Copland: 1900 through 1942 (London: Faber and
Faber, 1984).
Corneilson, Paul (ed.), The Science and Art of Renaissance Music (Princeton: Princeton
Cornwell, Neil, The Life, Times, and Milieu of V. F. Odoyevsky (Athens: Ohio University
Press, 1986).
Cowart, Georgia J., ‘Sense and Sensibility in Eighteenth-Century Musical Thought’,
Acta musicologica, 56 (1984), 251–66.
Cowart, Georgia J., The Origins of Modern Musical Criticism: French and Italian Music,
1600–1750 (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1981).
Cowart, Georgia J., The Triumph of Pleasure: Louis XIV and the Politics of Spectacle
Crawford, Richard, America’s Musical Life (New York: W. W. Norton, 2001).
Criscione, Caterina, Luigi Torchi: un musicologo italiano tra Otto e Novecento (Imola:
Editrice La Mandragora, 1997).
Croce, Benedetto, Aesthetica in nuce (Naples: Cooperativa Tipografica Sanitaria, 1929).
Crocker, Richard L., An Introduction to Gregorian Chant (New Haven and London: Yale
Bibliography 725
Cross, Nigel, The Common Writer: Life in Nineteenth-Century Grub Street (Cambridge:
Cross, Nigel, The Royal Literary Fund, 1790–1918: An Introduction to the Fund’s
History and Archives with an Index of Applicants (London: World Microfilms
Publications, 1984).
Crouch, Stanley, Considering Genius (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2006).
Crouse, Timothy, ‘Joni Mitchell: Blue’, Rolling Stone (5 August 1971), available at www
Cui, César, La Musique en Russie (Leipzig: Zentralantiquariat der DDR, 1974).
Cui, César, ‘Notes on Music – Eugene Onegin’, in Campbell (ed.), Russians on Russian
Music, 1880–1917.
Cui, César, ‘Sadko, Opera/Heroic Ballad (Opera-Bïlina) by Mr Rimsky-Korsakov’, in
Campbell (ed.), Russians on Russian Music, 1880–1917.
Custodis, Michael, ‘“unter Auswertung meiner Erfahrungen aktiv mitgestaltend”:
Zum Wirken von Wolfgang Steinecke bis 1950’, in Albrecht Riethmüller (ed.),
Deutsche Leitkultur Musik: Zur Musikgeschichte nach dem Holocaust (Stuttgart: Franz
Steiner, 2006).
Cymbron, Luísa, Olhares sobre a música em Portugal no século X I X : Ópera, virtuosismo
e música doméstica (Lisbon: Colibri, 2012).
Dahl, Hand Frederick, NRK i fred og krig: kringkastingen i Norge 1920–1945 (Oslo:
Universitetsforlaget, 1991).
Dahl, Per, Music and Knowledge: A Performer’s Perspective (Rotterdam: Sense Publishers,
2017).
Dahlhaus, Carl, ‘E. T. A. Hoffmanns Beethoven-Kritik und die Aesthetik des
Erhabenen’, Archiv für Musikwissenschaft, 38/2 (1981), 79–92.
Dahlhaus, Carl, Nineteenth-Century Music, trans. J. Bradford Robinson (Berkeley:
Dallapiccola, Luigi, ‘Della critica musicale sui quotidiani’, Corriere del mattino, 1/94
(9 December 1944), 2.
d’Amico, Fedele, ‘Dell’opera aperta, ossia dell’avanguardia’, Incontri musicali, 4 (1960),
89–104.
Dan’ko, Larisa G., Muzykal’naia kritika (teoriia i metodika): sbornik nauchnykh
trudov (Leningrad: Ministry of Culture RSFSR and Leningrad Conservatory,
1984).
Danesi, Marcel, Brands (New York: Taylor and Francis, 2006).
Daniels, Robin, Cardus: Celebrant of Beauty (Lancaster: Palatine, 2009).
Daniels, Robin, Conversations with Cardus (London: Victor Gollancz, 1976).
Darnton, Robert, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (Cambridge: Harvard
Dauncey, Hugh and Steve Cannon (eds.), Popular Music in France from Chanson to Techno
(Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003).
Dauncey, Hugh and Philippe Le Guern (eds.), Stereo: Comparative Perspectives on the
Sociological Study of Popular Music in France and Britain (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011).
Daverio, John, ‘Piano Works I : A World of Images’, in Perrey (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to Schumann.
David, Hans T., Arthur Mendel and Christoph Wolff (eds.), The New Bach Reader
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1998).
726 Bibliography
Davies, David R., The Postwar Decline of American Newspapers, 1945–1965 (Westport:
Praeger, 2006).
Davis, Francis, Bebop and Nothingness: Jazz and Pop at the End of the Century (New York:
Schirmer Books 1996).
Davis, Francis, Jazz and its Discontents: A Francis Davis Reader (New York: Da Capo Press
2004).
Davis, Frank Marshall, ‘No Secret – White Bands Copy Negroes’, Downbeat (June
1938), 5.
Davis, John, ‘Media, Markets and Modernity: The Italian Case, 1870–1915’, in Caesar,
Romani and Burns (eds.), The Printed Media in Fin-de-Siècle Italy.
Davison, Henry, comp., Music during the Victorian Era: From Mendelssohn to Wagner, being
the Memoirs of J. W. Davison (London: Wm Reeves, 1912).
Davison, J. W., ‘Lohengrin’, The Times (10 May 1875), 12.
Davison, J. W., ‘Philharmonic Concerts’, The Times (31 May 1864), 14.
Dawson, John, Practical Journalism: How to Enter Thereon and Succeed: A Manual for
Beginners and Amateurs (London: L. Upcott Gill, 1885).
Dean, Winton, Handel’s Dramatic Oratorios and Masques (London: Oxford University
Press, 1959).
Dean, Winton and John Rosselli, ‘Pellegrini, Valeriano’, Grove Music Online, Oxford
Music Online, available at www.oxfordmusiconline.com (accessed 15 May 2018).
Deaville, James, ‘Organizing German Musical Life at Midcentury: Brendel, Schumann
and the Leipzig Tonkünstlerversammlungen and Tonkünstlerverein’, in Kok and
Tunbridge (eds.), Rethinking Schumann.
Debussy, Claude, ‘À la Schola Cantorum’, Gil Blas (2 February 1903); translated in
Debussy on Music.
Debussy, Claude, Debussy on Music: The Critical Writings of the Great French Composer
Claude Debussy, collected by François Lesure, ed. and trans. Richard Langham Smith
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1977).
Debussy, Claude, La Revue blanche (1 April 1901); translated in Debussy on Music.
Decleva, Enrico, ‘Un panorama in evoluzione’, in Turi (ed.), Storia dell’editoria nell’Italia
contemporanea.
Degrada, Francesco, et al., Music, Musicians, Publishing: 175 Years of Casa Ricordi,
1808–1983 (Milan: Ricordi, 1983).
DeJean, Joan, Ancients against Moderns: Culture Wars and the Making of a Fin de Siècle
Dekkers, Odin, J. M. Robertson: Rationalist and Literary Critic (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1998).
Delgado, Alexandre, Ana Telles and Nuno Bettencourt Mendes (eds.), Luís de Freitas
Branco (Lisbon: Caminho, 2007).
dell’Antonio, Andrew, Listening as Spiritual Practice in Early Modern Italy (Berkeley:
Dellaborra, Maria Teresa, ‘Nardini, Pietro’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online,
della Corte, Andrea, La critica musicale e i critici (Turin: Unione Tipografico-Editrice
Torinese, 1961).
Delporte, Christian, ‘L’Épuration des journalistes: polémiques, mythes, réalités’,
Matériaux pour l’histoire de notre temps, 39–40 (1995), 28–31.
Bibliography 727
Denisov, Edison, Sovremennaia muzyka i problem. Evoliutsii kompozitorskoi tekhniki

(Moscow: Sovetskii kompozitor, 1986).
Denning, Michael, Noise Uprising (London: Verso, 2015).
Dennis, John, An Essay on the Opera’s [sic] after the Italian Manner, Which Are About to Be
Establish’d on the English Stage (London, 1706).
DeNora, Tia, Beethoven and the Construction of Genius: Musical Politics in Vienna
1792–1803 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997).
Denselow, Robin, ‘We Created World Music’, The Guardian (29 June 2004), 10.
Dentice, Luigi, Duo dialoghi della musica (Rome: Vincenzo Lucrino, 1553; repr. Lucca:
LIM, 1998).
DeRogatis, Jim, Let it Blurt: The Life and Times of Lester Bangs, America’s Greatest Rock
Critic (New York: Broadway Books, 2000).
Des Granges, Charles-Marc, Geoffroy et la critique dramatique sous le Consulat et l’Empire,
1800–1814 (Paris: Hachette, 1897).
Desiatnikov, Leonid, ‘Apologiia tolstopuzogo nasmeshnika’, in Manul’kina and
Gershenzon (eds.), Novaia Russkaia muzykal’naia kritika.
d’Estrée, Paul, ‘Les Origines du Chansonnier de Maurepas’, Révue d’histoire littéraire de
la France, 3 (1896), 332–45.
Dibble, Jeremy and Julian Horton (eds.), British Musical Criticism and Intellectual Thought,
1850–1950 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2018).
Dick, Alexander, ‘Komponist zerstört Instrumente – Protest gegen Orchester-Fusion’,
Badische Zeitung (22 October 2012).
Dickins, Tom, ‘Names of the Czech-Speaking Lands, Their Peoples and Contact
Communities: Titles, Names, and Ethnonyms’, The Slavonic and East European
Review, 89/3 (2011), 401–54.
Diego, Gerardo, Joaquín Rodrigo and Federico Sopeña, Diez años de música en España.
Musicología, intérpretes, compositors (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1949).
Digeon, Claude, La Crise allemande de la pensée française (1870–1914) (Paris: Presses
universitaires de France, 1959).
d’Indy, Vincent, ‘Musique française et musique allemande’, La Renaissance politique,
littéraire et artistique (12 June 1915), 1–8.
Dingle, Christopher, ‘Players and Pianos: An Overview of Early Recorded Resources
for the French Piano Repertoire’, in McCarrey and Wright (eds.), Perspectives on the
Performance of French Piano Music.
Dingle, Christopher and Laura Hamer, ‘False Memories and Dissonant Truths: Digital
Newspaper Archives as a Catalyst for a New Approach to Music Reception Studies’,
in Clare Mills, Michael Pidd and Esther Ward (eds.), Proceedings of the Digital
Humanities Congress 2012. Studies in the Digital Humanities (Sheffield: HRI Online
Publications, 2014).
Dixon, Guy, ‘Will Music-Industry Godzillas Reduce Individual Choice?’ [Toronto]
Globe and Mail (2 August 2004), §R, 3.
Dodge, Roger Pryor, Hot Jazz and Jazz Dance (New York: Oxford University Press,
1995).
Dohrendorf, Rüdiger, Zum publizistischen Profil der Frankfurter Allgemeinen Zeitung:
Computerunterstützte Inhaltsanalyse von Kommentaren der FAZ (Frankfurt: Peter Lang,
1990).
728 Bibliography
Döhring, Sieghart, ‘Gedanken zum Regietheater’, in Kühnel, Müller and Panagle

(eds.), ‘Regietheater’.
Donin, Nicolas, ‘Le Moment Musique en jeu’, Circuit: musiques contemporaines, 20/1–2
(2010), 25–31.
Donnat, Olivier and Denis Cogneau, Les Pratiques culturelles des Français 1973–1989
(Paris: La Découverte/La Documentation française, 1990).
Donnellon, Déirdre, ‘Debussy as Musician and Critic’, in Trezise (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to Debussy.
Donnellon, Déirdre, ‘Debussy, Satie and the Parisian Critical Press (1890–1925)’,
unpublished PhD thesis, University of Liverpool (2000).
Dooley, Brendan and Sabrina A. Baron (eds.), The Politics of Information in Early Modern
Europe (London and New York: Routledge, 2001).
Dooley, James E., ‘Introduction’ to Thomas Hastings, Dissertation on Musical Taste
(New York: Da Capo Press, 1974).
Dörffel, Alfred, ‘Breitkopf & Härtel’, Signale für die musikalische Welt, 25/12
(12 February 1867), 189.
Downes, Olin, ‘Bernstein Offers His Own Symphony’, New York Times (24 February
1950), 26; reprinted in Olin Downes on Music.
Downes, Olin, ‘Classic Master’, New York Times (3 December 1950), X7.
Downes, Olin, ‘Composer and Critic’, New York Times (18 May 1947), X7.
Downes, Olin, ‘Native Composers and Critics’, New York Times (4 March 1934), X6.
Downes, Olin, ‘Neo-Classicism’, New York Times (3 February 1942), X7; reprinted as
‘The “Neo-Classicism” of the Bright Boys’, in Olin Downes on Music.
Downes, Olin, Olin Downes on Music, ed. Irene Downes (New York: Simon & Schuster,
1957).
Downes, Olin, ‘Philadelphia Orchestra, 2 Choirs Join in Joan of Arc at the Stake’,
New York Times (19 November 1952), 36; reprinted as ‘A Frank Change of Mind
about Honegger’s Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher’, in Olin Downes on Music.
Downes, Olin, ‘Prokofieff’s Fifth Played Here Again’, New York Times (14 February
1946), 33; reprinted as ‘The Finest Russian Symphony in Twenty-Five Years:
Prokofieff’s Fifth’, in Olin Downes on Music.
Downes, Olin, ‘Schoenberg’s Five Pieces for Orchestra in Boston’, in Olin Downes on Music.
Downes, Olin, ‘Stravinsky Visits America at Forty-Three’, in Olin Downes on Music.
Downes, Olin, ‘Szigeti Is Soloist for Philharmonic’, New York Times (16 December
1949), 37.
Downes, Stephen (ed.) Aesthetics of Music: Musicological Perspectives (New York:
Routledge, 2014).
Draper, Robert, The Rolling Stone Story (New York: Doubleday, 1990).
Drott, Eric, Music and the Elusive Revolution: Cultural Politics and Political Culture in France,
1968–1981 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011).
Drouin, Pierre, ‘Les Disques. Jazz 1949’, Le Monde (7 January 1950), 7.
Druskin, Mikhail, Igor’ Stravinskii: Lichnost’, tvorchestvo, vzgliady, 2nd ed. (Leningrad:
Sovetskiy kompozitor, 1979); English version Igor Stravinsky: His Life, Works, and
Views, trans. Martin Cooper (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).
Druskin, Mikhail, ‘I. I. Sollertinskii—Kritik’, in Sollertinskii, Kriticheskie stat’i.
Dryden, John, Albion and Albanius: An Opera (London, 1685).
Dryden, John, Albion and Albanius: An Opera (London, 1691).
Bibliography 729
Dubois, Pierre, ‘“Music . . . is like a Conversation among Friends, Where the Few
Are of One Mind”: Charles Avison’s Moral Philosophy’, in Roz Southey and
Eric Cross (eds.), Charles Avison in Context.
Dubois, Pierre (ed.), Charles Avison’s Essay on Musical Expression, with Related Writings
by William Hayes and Charles Avison (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004).
Duchesneau, Michel, ‘French Musicology and the Musical Press (1900–14): The Case of
La Revue musicale, Le Mercure musical and La Revue musicale SIM’, trans. Kimberly
White, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 140/2 (2015), 243–72.
d’Udine, Jean, ‘L’école des amateurs I I ’, Le Courrier musical (15 October 1905), 561–66.
Dufour, Valérie, ‘Compositeur et critique musical: De la coïncidence des deux activités.
Le Cas de Florent Schmitt’, Bulletin de la classe des Beaux-Arts, [Belgium], 18/7–12
(2007), 313–26.
Dugin, Yevgeni (ed.), Perestroika and Development of Culture (Literature, Theatre and
Cinema) (New Delhi: Sterling Publishers Private Limited, 1989).
Dumesnil, René, ‘French Music During the Years of War’, The American Society Legion of
Honor Magazine, 17/2 (1946), 369–90.
Dumesnil, René, ‘La Musique. Les Prix de Rome’, Le Monde (30 September/1 October
1945), 2.
Dunbar, Julie C., Women, Music, Culture: An Introduction (New York and London:
Routledge, 2011).
Dunn, Leslie C. and Katherine R. Larson (eds.), Gender and Song in Early Modern England,
Women and Gender in the Early Modern World (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014).
Dusek, Peter and Christoph Wagner-Trenkwitz (eds.), Marcel Prawy erzählt aus seinem
Leben (Vienna: Kremayr & Scheriau, 2001).
[Dwight, John Sullivan], ‘Introductory’, Dwight’s Journal of Music, 1/1 (10 April
1852), 4.
[Dwight, John Sullivan], ‘Negro Folk Songs’, Dwight’s Journal of Music, 32/26 (5 April
1873), 411–12.
[Dwight, John Sullivan], ‘Valedictory’, Dwight’s Journal of Music, 41/1051 (3 September
1881), 123–4.
Dyer, Joseph, ‘Singing with Proper Refinement from “De modo bene cantandi”
(1474)’, Early Music, 6 (1978), 207–27.
Early, Gerald, Tuxedo Junction (Hopewell: Ecco Press, 1989).
Eccles, Solomon, A Musick-Lector: or, The Art of Musick (that is so much vindicated in
Christendome) (London, 1667).
Eckart, Dietrich, ‘Das Judentum in und ausser uns’, Auf Gut Deutsch: Wochenschrift für
Ordnung und Recht, 1/2 (10 January 1919), 28–31; 1/3 (17 January 1919), 45–8; 1/4
(24 January 1919), 61–4; 1/5 (31 January 1919), 79–80; 1/6 (7 February 1919), 95–6;
1/7 (14 February 1919), 109–12.
Eco, Umberto, Art and Beauty in the Middle Ages, trans. Hugh Bredin (New Haven: Yale
Eco, Umberto, ‘Risposta a d’Amico’, Incontri musicali, 4 (1960), 105–12.
Edmunds, Neil, The Soviet Proletarian Music Movement (Oxford: Peter Lang, 2000).
Efimov, Evgenii, Sumbur vokrug ‘sumbura’ i odnogo malen’kogo zhurnalista (Moscow:
Flinta, 2006).
Eggebrecht, Hans Heinrich and Frieder Zaminer, Ad organum faciendum: Lehrschriften
der Mehrstimmigkeit in nachguidonischer Zeit (Mainz: B. Schott’s Söhne, 1970).
730 Bibliography
Ellis, Katharine, ‘A Dilettante at the Opera: Issues in the Criticism of Julien-Louis

Geoffroy, 1800–1814’, in Parker and Smart (eds.), Reading Critics Reading.
Ellis, Katharine, ‘Female Pianists and Their Male Critics in Nineteenth-Century Paris’,
Journal of the American Musicological Society, 50 (Summer–Autumn, 1997), 153–85.
Ellis, Katharine, ‘How to Make Wagner Normal: Lohengrin’s “Tour de France” of 1891/
2’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 25/2 (2013), 121–37.
Ellis, Katharine, Interpreting the Musical Past: Early Music in Nineteenth-Century France
(New York: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Ellis, Katharine, ‘Mireille’s Homecoming? Gounod, Mistral and the Midi’, Journal of the
American Musicological Society, 65 (2012), 463–509.
Ellis, Katharine, Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Century France: La Revue et Gazette musicale
de Paris, 1834–1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Ellis, Katharine, ‘The Criticism’, in Bloom (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Berlioz.
Ellis, Katharine, ‘Wagnerism and Anti-Wagnerism in the Paris Periodical Press, 1852–
1870’, in Fauser and Schwartz (eds.), Von Wagner zum Wagnérisme: Musik, Literatur,
Kunst, Politik.
Ellison, Ralph, Shadow and Act (New York: Random House, 1964).
Elschek, Oskár, ‘I I . Traditional Music’, in Richard Rybarič, et al., ‘Slovakia’, Grove Music
Online, Oxford Music Online, available at www.oxfordmusiconline.com (accessed
22 April 2017).
Elschek, Oskár, and Ladislav Burlas (eds.), A History of Slovak Music: From the Earliest
Times to the Present, trans. Martin Styan (Bratislava: Institute of Musicology of the
Slovak Academy of Sciences, 2003).
Engel, Carl, ‘Views and Reviews’, Musical Quarterly, 13/4 (October 1927), 646–62.
Erken, Emily, ‘Constructing the Russian Moral Project through the Classics:
Reflections of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin, 1833–2014’, unpublished PhD dissertation,
Ohio State University (2015).
Ersoy, Ahmet, Macie Górny and Vangelis Kechriotis (eds.), Discourses of Collective
Identity in Central and Southeastern Europe (1770–1945): Texts and Commentaries, vol.
I I I /1 of Modernism and the Creation of Nation-States (Budapest: Central European
Esposito, Francesco, ‘Lisbona 1822: La vita musicale attraverso la stampa periodica’,
Revista portuguesa de musicologia, 10 (2000), 31–81.
Esposito, Francesco, ‘Os primeiros passos em direcção à crítica musical: Algumas
considerações sobre a presença da música na imprensa da Lisboa liberal (1822–
1855)’, in Manuel Pedro Ferreira and Teresa Cascudo (eds.), Música e história:
Estudos em homenagem a Manuel Carlos de Brito (Lisboa: CESEM/Colibri, 2017).
Evans, Edwin, ‘Objectivity in Contemporary Criticism’, Musical Times, 66/990 (1925),
692–5.
Evans, Richard J., The Third Reich in Power, 1933–39: How the Nazis Won Over the Hearts
and Minds of a Nation (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 2006).
Eveno, Patrick, Histoire de la Presse Française de Théophrase Renaudot à la révolution
numérique (Paris: Flammarion, 2012).
Everist, Mark, ‘Gluck, Berlioz, and Castil-Blaze: The Poetics and Reception of French
Opera’, in Parker and Smart (eds.), Reading Critics Reading.
Everist, Mark, ‘Reception Theories, Canonic Discourses, and Musical Value’, in Cook
and Everist (eds.), Rethinking Music.
Bibliography 731
Fabbri, Mario, Alessandro Scarlatti e il Principe Ferdinando de’ Medici (Florence: Olschki, 1961).
Fabiano, Andrea (ed.), La Querelle des bouffons dans la vie culturelle française du X V I I I e siècle
(Paris: CNRS Éditions, 2005).
Fader, Don, ‘Philippe II d’Orléans’s “Chanteurs italiens”’, the Italian Cantata and the
goûts-réunis under Louis XIV’, Early Music, 35/2 (2007), 237–49.
Fairclough, Pauline, Classics for the Masses: Shaping Soviet Musical Identity under Lenin and
Stalin (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2016).
Fairclough, Pauline, ‘Mahler Reconstructed: Sollertinsky and the Soviet Symphony’,
Falconer, Keith, ‘The Modes before the Modes: Antiphon and Differentia in Western
Chant’, in Jeffrey (ed.), The Study of Medieval Chant.
Fallows, David, ‘The “Contenance Angloise”: English Influence on Continental
Composers of the Fifteenth Century’, Renaissance Studies, 1 (1987), 189–208.
Faludi, Susan, Backlash: The Undeclared War against Women (London: Vintage, 1992).
Fassler, Margot E. and Rebecca A. Baltzer (eds.), The Divine Office in the Latin Middle Ages
Fauser, Annegret, ‘Gendering the Nations: The Ideologies of French Discourse on Music
(1870–1914)’, in White and Murphy (eds.), Musical Constructions of Nationalism.
Fauser, Annegret and Manuela Schwartz (eds.), Von Wagner zum Wagnérisme: Musik,
Literatur, Kunst, Politik (Leipzig: Leipziger Universitätsverlag, 1999).
Fay, Laurel, Shostakovich: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000).
Feather, Leonard, Inside Jazz (New York: Da Capo Press, 1976; first published as Inside
Bebop, J. J. Robbins, 1949).
Feather, Leonard, The Encyclopedia of Jazz (New York: Horizon Press, 1955).
Feisst, Sabine, Schoenberg’s New World: The American Years (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2011).
Feist, Danile, ‘Ali Farka Touré Weaves an Intricate Tapestry of Serenity’, [Montreal]
Gazette (23 April 1994), §E, 7.
Feld, Steven, ‘A Sweet Lullaby for World Music’, Public Culture, 12/1 (2002), 145–71.
Fend, Michael ‘“Es versteht sich von Selbst, daß ich von der Oper spreche, die der
Deutsche und Franzose will”: Zum Verhältnis von Opéra comique und deutscher
romantischer Oper’, in Herbert Scheider and Nicole Wild (eds.), Die Opéra comique
und ihr Einfluß auf das europäische Musiktheater im 19. Jahrhundert (Hildesheim: Georg
Olms, 1994).
Fend, Michael, ‘Cosimo Bartoli and the Language of Musical Experience in Sixteenth-
Century Italy’, in Fiore and Lamberini (eds.), Cosimo Bartoli.
Feneyrou, Laurent and Alain Poirier (eds.), De la Libération au Domaine musical: Dix ans
de musique en France (1944–1954) (Paris: Vrin, 2019).
Fenlon, Iain and Inga Mai Groote (eds.), Heinrich Glarean’s Books: The Intellectual World of
a Sixteenth Century Musical Humanist (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
Ferreira, José Maria de Andrade, ‘O arco de Santana’, repr. in Literatura, música e belas-
artes, I I (Lisbon: Rolland e Semiond, 1872).
Ferreira, Manuel Pedro and Teresa Cascudo (eds.), Música e história: Estudos em home-
nagem a Manuel Carlos de Brito (Lisbon: CESEM/Colibri, 2017).
Fétis, François-Joseph, Biographie universelle des musiciens et bibliographie générale de la
musique (Paris: H. Fournier, 1835–1844).
Fétis, François-Joseph, Esquisse de l’histoire de l’harmonie (Paris, 1840).
732 Bibliography
Fétis, François-Joseph, Histoire générale de la musique (Paris, 1869–76).

Fétis, François-Joseph, ‘Utilité d’un journal de musique et plan de celui-ci’, Revue
musicale, 1 (February 1827), 1–2, quoted and trans. in Peter Bloom, ‘François-
Joseph Fétis and the Revue musicale (1827–1835)’, unpublished PhD dissertation,
University of Pennsylvania (1972).
Fiore, Francesco Paolo and Daniela Lamberini (eds.), Cosimo Bartoli (1503–1572): Atti
del convegno internazionale Mantova, 18–19 novembre, Firenze, 20 novembre 2009
Fischer, Kurt von, ‘Zu einigen Wertkriterien in der Musik des 14. und 15.
Jahrhunderts’, Die Musikforschung, 30 (1977), 289–92.
Flaubert, Gustave, Dictionnaire des idées reçues (Paris: L. Conard, 1913).
Fleckno, Richard, Ariadne Deserted by Theseus, and Found and Courted by Bacchus
(London, 1654).
Fléouter, Claude, ‘Mort de la chanteuse de jazz Janis Joplin’, Le Monde (6 November
1970), 28.
Flisfeder, Matthew and Louis-Paul Willis (eds.), Žižek and Media Studies: A Reader
(New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
Fong-Torres, Ben, Not Fade Away: A Backstage Pass to 20 Years of Rock & Roll (London:
Backbeat Books, 1999).
Forde, Eamonn, ‘Conflict and Collaboration: The Press Office/Journalist Nexus in the
British Music Press of the Late 1990s’, Popular Music History, 1/3 (2004), 285–306.
Forgacs, David, Italian Culture in the Industrial Era, 1880–1980 (Manchester: University
of Manchester Press, 1990).
Forkel, Johann Nicolaus, Allgemeine Geschichte der Musik. Erster Band (Leipzig, 1788).
Forstner, August, ‘Die Transportarbeiter im ersten Arbeiter-Sinfoniekonzert’, Kunst
und Volk, 3 (1928/1929), 1–4.
Fortune, Nigel, ‘Sprezzatura’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, available at
Foss, Michael, Man of Wit to Man of Business: The Arts and Changing Patronage, 1660–1750
(Bristol: Bristol Classic Press, 1988); first published as The Age of Patronage (London:
Hamish Hamilton, 1971).
Foulloy, Hugo of, ‘De dissolution in choro’, bk 2, chapter 21 of De claustro animae.
Forster, E. M., Two Cheers for Democracy (London: Arnold; New York: Harcourt Brace,
1951).
Fox, Richard G. (ed.), Recapturing Anthropology: Working in the Present (Santa Fe: School
of American Research Press, 1991).
Franco, Enrique, ‘Crítica creadora’, Arriba (7 October 1958), 29.
Freifeld, Alice, Nationalism and the Crowd in Liberal Hungary, 1848–1914 (Washington:
The Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2000).
French, Richard (ed.), Music and Criticism: A Symposium (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1948).
Frere-Jones, Sasha, ‘Subject/Object. Firsthand Knowledge in Criticism’, in
Andras Szanto (ed.), Reporting the Arts I I (New York: National Arts Journalism
Program, 2003).
Frigyesi, Judit, Béla Bartók and Turn-of-the-Century Budapest (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
Bibliography 733
Frith, Simon, ‘Going Critical: Writing about Recordings’, in Cook, Clarke, Leech-
Wilkinson and Rink (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Recorded Music.
Frith, Simon, Sound Effects: Youth, Leisure and the Politics of Rock ’n’ Roll (New York:
Pantheon, 1981).
Frith, Simon, ‘“The Magic That Can Set You Free”: The Ideology of Folk and the Myth
of the Rock Community’, Popular Music, 1 (January 1981), 159–68.
Frith, Simon, ‘The Place of the Producer in the Discourse of Rock’, in Frith and
Zagorsky-Thomas (eds.), The Art of Record Production.
Frith, Simon, The Sociology of Rock (London: Constable, l978).
Frith, Simon and Simon Zagorsky-Thomas (eds.), The Art of Record Production (Farnham:
Ashgate, 2012).
Frobenius, Wolf, Johannes Boens Musica und seine Konsonanzenlehre (Stuttgart:
Musikwissenschaftliche Verlags-Gesellschaft, 1971).
Frolova-Walker, Marina, ‘Constructing the Russian National Character: Literature and
Music’, in Russian Music and Nationalism from Glinka to Stalin (New Haven: Yale
Frolova-Walker, Marina, Stalin’s Music Prize: Soviet Culture and Politics (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 2016).
Frolova-Walker, Marina and Jonathan Walker (eds.), Music and Soviet Power, 1917–1932
(Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2012).
Fry, Andy, Paris Blues: African American Music and French Popular Culture, 1920–1960
Fry, Kathy, ‘Music and Character in the Victorian Reception of Wagner: Conducting
the Philharmonic ca. 1855’, in Collins (ed.), Composing the Liberal Subject.
Fry, Kenneth G., ‘Lives Remembered: Joan Chissell’, The Times (23 February 2007),
available at www.thetimes.co.uk (accessed 25 October 2015).
Fry, William Henry, ‘Mr Fry’s Letter to Mr Willis (New York Tribune Office:
January 10th, 1854)’, Musical World and New York Musical Times (21 January 1854),
reprinted in Dwight’s Journal of Music, 4/18 (4 February 1854), 138–40.
Fryer, Paul (ed.), Women in the Arts in the Belle Époque: Essays on Influential Artists, Writers
and Performers (Jefferson and London: McFarland, 2012).
Fubini, Enrico, Musica e linguaggio nell’estetica contemporanea (Turin: Einaudi, 1973).
Fuchs, Johanne W. and Olga Weijers (eds.), Lexicon Latinitatis Nederlandicae Medii Aevi
(Leiden: Brill, 1977–2005).
Fuller, Sarah, ‘Defending the Dodecachordon: Ideological Currents in Glarean’s Modal
Theory’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 49 (1996), 191–224.
Fuller, Sarah, ‘“Delectabatur in hoc auris”: Some Fourteenth-Century Perspectives on
Aural Perception’, Musical Quarterly, 82/3–4 (1998), 466–81.
Fuller Maitland, J. A., English Music in the X I X th Century (London: Grant Richards, 1902).
Fung, Anthony Y. H. (ed.), Asian Popular Culture: The Global (Dis)continuity (London and
New York: Routledge, 2013).
Gábry, György (ed.), A muzsikának közönséges története és egyéb írások (Budapest:
Magvető, 1984).
Galand-Hallyn, Perrine and Fernand Hallyn (eds.), Poétiques de la Renaissance: Le Modèle
italien, le monde franco-bourguignon et leur héritage en France au X V I e siècle (Geneva:
Droz, 2001).
734 Bibliography
Gallacher, Patrick J. and Helen Damico (eds.), Hermeneutics and Medieval Culture
(Albany: State University of New York Press, 1989).
Gallagher, Catherine, Review of Nigel Cross, The Common Writer, American Historical
Review, 92 (1987), 662–4.
Gallagher, Sean, Johannes Regis (Turnhout: Brepols, 2010).
Gallarati, Paolo, ‘Gli esordi di Massimo Mila e il suo rapporto con la critica
crociana’, in Capra and Nicolodi (eds.), La critica musicale in Italia nella prima
metà del Novecento.
Gallicus, Johannes, Ritus canendi vetustissimus et novus, ed. Albert Seay (Colorado
Springs: Colorado College Music Press, 1981).
Gann, Kyle, Music Downtown: Writings from the Village Voice (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
Gan Quesada, Germán, ‘A la altura de las circunstancias . . . Continuidad y pautas de
renovación en la música española’, in González Lapuente (ed.), Historia de la música en
España e Hispanoamérica.
Gara, Eugenio (ed.), Carteggi Pucciniani (Milan: Ricordi, 1958).
Garratt, James, Music, Culture, and Social Reform in the Age of Wagner (Cambridge:
Garratt, James, ‘Values and Judgements’, in Downes (ed.) Aesthetics of Music.
Gauntlett, Henry John, Characteristics of Beethoven’, Musical World, 1 (1836), 21–5,
53–8, 117–22, 197–202.
Gautier, Théophile, ‘Feuilleton de La Presse’, La Presse (17 September 1838), 1, quoted
and trans. in Michael Spencer, ‘Théophile Gautier: Music Critic’, Music & Letters, 49/
1 (January 1968), 8–9.
Gautier, Théophile, Histoire du romantisme (Paris: Charpentier, 1874).
Gautier, Théophile, Obituary of Berlioz, Journal officiel de la République Française
(16 March 1869).
Gavoty, Bernard, Anicroches (Paris: Buchet/Chastel, 1979).
Gavoty, Bernard, ‘Musique et mystique. Le “Cas” Messiaen’, Études (October 1945), 21–37.
Gedroits, S., ‘Review of Evgenii Efimov, Sumbur vokrug ‘sumbura’ i odnogo
‘malen’kogo zhurnalista’ Zvezda, 5 (2007), available at magazines.russ.ru/zvez
da/2007/5/ge20.html (accessed 1 November 2016).
Geissler, Friedrich Adolf, Leipziger Tagblatt (1 July 1907), clipping from the Arnold
Schönberg Center, Vienna.
Gennari, John, Blowin’ Hot and Cold: Jazz and its Critics (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2006).
Geoffroy, Julien-Louis, Journal des débats [i.e. Journal de l’Empire] (22 November 1809),
quoted in Des Granges, Geoffroy et la critique dramatique.
Geoffroy, Julien-Louis, ‘Review of Don Giovanni’, Journal des débats [i.e. Journal de
l’Empire] (19 September 1805), 2.
Geoffroy, Julien-Louis, ‘Review of Œdipe à Colone’ Journal des débats (10 brumaire an
13/1 November 1804), 3, quoted and trans. in Ellis, Music Criticism in Nineteenth-
Century France.
George, Cherian, Contentious Journalism and the Internet: Towards Democratic Discourse in
Malaysia and Singapore (Washington: University of Washington Press, 2006).
Gerald, J. Edward, The British Press under Government Economic Controls (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1956).
Bibliography 735
Gerbert, Martin (ed.), Scriptores Ecclesiastici de Musica Sacra Potissimum ex Variis Codicibus
Manuscriptis Collecti, 3 vols. (St Blasien, 1784; repr. Milan: Bollettino Bibliografico
Musicale, 1931).
Gerhard, Anselm, The Urbanization of Opera: Music Theater in Paris in the Nineteenth
Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998).
Gershenzon, Pavel (ed.), Novaya Russkaya muzïkal’naya kritika, 1993–2003. V trekh
tomakh. Vol. 1: Opera (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2015).
Gianturco, Carolyn, ‘Musicology, §I I I , [2]: National Traditions: Italy’, in Sadie and
Tyrrell (eds.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vol. 17.
Gianturco, Carolyn, ‘Nuove considerazioni su il tedio del recitativo delle prime opere
romane’, Rivista italiana di musicologia, 18 (1982), 212–39.
Gibson, Kirsten, ‘Age, Masculinity and Music in Early Modern England’, in Haworth
and Colton (ed.), Gender, Age and Musical Creativity.
Gibson, Kirsten, ‘Music, Melancholy and Masculinity in Early Modern England’, in
Biddle and Gibson (eds.), Masculinity and Western Musical Practice.
Giddins, Gary, Rhythm-a-ning (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).
Giddins, Gary, Visions of Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).
Gildon, Charles, The Complete Art of Poetry. In Six Parts, 2 vols. (London, 1718).
Gillett, Charlie, ‘So You Wanna Be A Rock ’n’ Roll Writer (Keep a Carbon!)’, in Gillett
(ed.), Rock File (London: New English Library, 1972).
Gillett, Charlie (ed.), Rock File (London: New English Library, 1972).
Gilliam, Bryan, ‘The Two Versions of Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony’, 19th-Century
Music 16/1 (Summer 1992), 59–69.
Giorgi, Paolo (ed.), Maurizio Cazzati (1616–1678) Musico Guastallese: Nuovi studi
e prospettive metodologiche (Guastalla: Associazione ‘Giuseppe Serassi’, 2009).
Giron-Panel, Caroline and Anne-Madeleine Goulet (eds.), La musique à Rome au XVIIe
siècle (Rome: École française de Rome, 2012).
Gíslason, Donald G., ‘Castil-Blaze, De l’opéra en France and the Feuilletons of the Journal
des Débats (1820–1832)’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of British
Columbia (1992).
Giustiniani, Vincenzo, Discorso sopra la musica, trans. Carol MacClintock, Musicological
Studies and Documents 9 ([n.p.]: American Institute of Musicology, 1962).
Glare, P. G. W. (ed.), Oxford Latin Dictionary, 2nd ed., 2 vols. (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2012).
Glarean, Heinrich, Dodecachordon (Basle, 1547; facsimile ed. (New York: Broude
Brothers, 1967); English trans. and ed. Clement A. Miller, 2 vols. ([n.p.]: American
Institute of Musicology, 1965).
Glauert, Amanda, ‘The Reception of Wagner in Vienna, 1860–1900’, in Millington and
Spencer (eds.), Wagner in Performance.
Glebov, Igor, ‘Kompozitory, pospeshite!’, Sovremennaia muzyka, 6 (1924), 145–8;
English version Frolova-Walker and Walker (eds.), Music and Soviet Power.
Glebov, Igor, ‘Krizis lichnogo tvorchestva’, Sovremennaia muzyka, 4 (1924), 99–106;
excerpted in B. V. Asaf’ev, Izbrannye Trudy, vol. 5 (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo akademii
nauk SSSR, 1957).
Goléa, Antoine, ‘Hermann Scherchen dirigierte in Darmstadt’, Der Mittag (24 August
1950); cited in Joy H. Calico, Arnold Schoenberg’s ‘A Survivor from Warsaw’.
Goffin, Robert, Aux frontières du jazz (Paris: Édition du Sagittaire, 1932).
736 Bibliography
Goldstein, Richard, Another Little Piece of My Heart: My Life in Rock and Revolution in the
’60s (London: Bloomsbury Circus, 2015).
Gombault, Vincent and Xavier Reif, ‘L’Internet de plus en plus prisé, l’internaute de
plus en plus mobile’, Insee Première, 1452 (2013), available at www.insee.fr (accessed
3 February 2017).
Gómez, Julio, ‘Comentarios del presente y del pasado’, Harmonía (October–December
1958), 5.
González Echevarría, Roberto, Alejo Carpentier: The Pilgrim at Home (Ithaca: Cornell
González Echevarría, Roberto and Enrique Pupo-Walker (eds.), The Cambridge History
of Latin American Literature, vol. 2, The Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge
González Lapuente, Alberto (ed.), Historia de la música en España e Hispanoamérica:
La música en España en el siglo X X (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2012).
Goodwin, Andrew, ‘Words Speak Louder than Music’, Calendar Magazine (June
1987), 8.
Gooley, Dana, ‘Hanslick and the Institution of Criticism’, Journal of Musicology, 28/3
(2011), 289–324.
Gooley, Dana, The Virtuoso Liszt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004).
Gopinathan, S., ‘Singapore’s Language Policies: Strategies for a Plural Society’,
Southeast Asian Affairs (1979), 280–95.
Gorbachev, Aleksandr, ‘Censorship in Russia Explained’, Meduza (5 February 2015),
available at meduza.io.
Gorbachev, Aleksandr, ‘“I’m not going to write about Putin’s daughters’: An Interview
with Esquire’s New Chief Editor, Ksenia Sokolova’, Meduza (9 August 2016), avail-
able at meduza.io.
Gorbachev, Aleksandr, ‘This Is What Losing Your Newsroom Looks Like in Russia:
The Reporters at “RBC” Meet Their New Bosses (Full transcript)’, Meduza (11 July
2016), available at meduza.io.
Gorkii, M., ‘Dva pis’ma Stalinu’, Literaturnaia gazeta (10 March 1993), 6; quoted in
Fay, Shostakovich: A Life.
Gorman, Paul, In Their Own Write: Adventures in the Music Press (London: Sanctuary,
2001).
Goss, Glenda Dawn, Jean Sibelius and Olin Downes: Music, Friendship, Criticism (Boston:
Northeastern University Press, 1995).
Goubault, Christian, ‘Colette et Debussy: “Compagnons de chaîne” au Gil Blas en
1903’, Revue international de la musique française, 17 (June 1985), 75–86.
Goubault, Christian, La Critique musicale dans la presse française de 1870 à 1914 (Geneva:
Slatkine, 1984).
Gouk, Penelope, ‘Music, Melancholy and Medical Spirits in Early Modern Thought’, in
Horden (ed.), Music as Medicine.
Gouranton, Olivier, ‘Comœdia. Un journal sous influences’, La Revue des revues, 24
(1997), 111–19.
Grabo, Carrol, ‘The Practical Aesthetics of Thomas Busby’s Music Reviews’, Journal of
Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 25/1 (1966), 37–45.
Graça, Fernando Lopes, ‘A música portuguesa no século X I X ’, in A música portuguesa e os
seus problemas, vol. I (Lisbon: Caminho, 1989).
Bibliography 737
Graça, Fernando Lopes, ‘Criação e crítica na música portuguesa’, in A música portuguesa

e os seus problemas, vol. I (Lisbon: Caminho, 1989).
Graça, Fernando Lopes, Páginas escolhidas de crítica e estética musical (Lisbon: Prelo, n.d.).
Graça, Fernando Lopes, Talia, Euterpe e Terpsicore (Lisbon: Caminho, 1990).
Gramit, David, ‘Selling the Serious: The Commodification of Music and Resistance to
It in Germany, circa 1800’, in Weber (ed.), The Musician as Entrepreneur.
Grant, Kerry S., Dr Burney as Critic and Historian of Music (Ann Arbor: UMI Research
Press, 1983).
Grant, Mark N., Maestros of the Pen: A History of Classical Music Criticism in America
(Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998).
Grassl, Markus, Reinhard Kapp and Eike Rathgeber (eds.), Österreichs Neue Musik nach
1945: Karl Schiske (Vienna, Cologne, Weimar: Böhlau, 2008).
Green, Edward, ‘The Impact of Rousseau on the Histories of Burney and Hawkins:
A Study in the Ethics of Musicology’, in Blažeković and Mackenzie (eds.), Music’s
Intellectual History.
Greenfield, Edward, ‘Gramophone Records’, The Guardian (Monday 12 June 1967), 7.
Greenfield, Edward, Ivan March, Robert Layton and Denis Stevens, The Stereo Record
Guide, 9 vols. (Blackpool: Long Playing Record Library, 1960–74).
Greer, David, Manuscript Inscriptions in English Printed Music, Music and Material Culture
Grey, Thomas S., ‘Brendel, (Karl) Franz’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online,
Grey, Thomas S. (ed.), Richard Wagner and His World (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 2009).
Griffiths, Paul, Modern Music: A Concise History from Debussy to Boulez (London: Thames
and Hudson, 1978).
Griffiths, Paul, Modern Music and After: Directions since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1995).
Griffiths, Paul, Modern Music: The Avant Garde since 1945 (London: Dent, 1981).
Grimes, Nicole, Siobhán Donovan and Wolfgang Marx (eds.), Rethinking Hanslick:
Music, Formalism, and Expression (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2013).
Grimm, Friedrich Melchior, Lettre de M. Grimm sur Omphale ([n.p.]: 1752).
Grinberg, M. (ed.), Sovetskaia simfonicheskaia muzyka: sbornik statei, Sovetskaia
Muzykal’naia Kritika (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe Muzykal’noe Izdatel’stvo,
1955).
Grinberg, M. and N. Poliakova (eds.), Sovetskaia opera: Sbornik kriticheskikh statei,
Sovetskaia Muzykal’naia Kritika (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe muzykal’noe izda-
tel’stvo, 1953).
Grinde, Nils, Halfdan Kjerulf: nordmann og europeer: en komponist og hans tid (Oslo:
Musikk-husets forlag, 2003).
Gripsrud, Jostein and Lennart Weibull (eds.), Media Markets and Public Spheres: European
Media at the Crossroads (Bristol: Intellect Press, 2010).
Grossmann-Vendrey, Susanna (ed.), Bayreuth in der deutschen Presse. Beiträge zur
Rezeptionsgeschichte Richard Wagners und seiner Festspiele, vols. I and I I (Regensburg:
Gustav Bosse, 1977).
Guentner, Wendelin (ed.), Women Art Critics in Nineteenth-Century France: Vanishing Acts
(Lanham: University of Delaware Press, 2013).
738 Bibliography
Guerpin, Martin, ‘Une histoire oubliée: la presse jazz en France (1929–2011)’, in

Pistone (ed.), Recherches sur la presse musicale française.
Gudmundsson, Gert, Ulf Lindberg, Morton Michelsen and Hans Weisethaunet, ‘Brit
Crit: Turning Points in British Rock Criticism, 1960–1990’, in Jones (ed.), Pop Music
and the Press.
Gulyásné Somogyi, Klára, ‘“. . . Szükséges a Pest-Budai Zenedének a dolgok élére
állani . . .” Mosonyi Mihály cikksorozata a magyar zenei műveltség felemeléséért’
[‘The Pest-Buda Music School Should Stand at the Forefront of Things . . .’ Mihály
Mosonyi’s Article Series about the Elevation of Hungarian Musical Cultivation],
Magyar zene, 54/3 (2016), 317–23.
Gushee, Lawrence, ‘Questions of Genre in Medieval Treatises on Music’, in Arlt,
Lichtenhahn and Oesch (eds.), Gattungen der Musik in Einzeldarstellungen.
Gushee, Lawrence (ed.), Aureliani Reomensis Musica Disciplina, Corpus Scriptorum de
Musica 21 (Rome: American Institute of Musicology, 1975).
Gutiérrez, José Antonio, ‘La labor crítica de Joaquín Rodrigo en el diario Pueblo
(1940–1946)’, in Suárez-Pajares (ed.), Joaquín Rodrigo.
Haacke, Wilmont, Feuilletonkunde: Das Feuilleton als literarische und jounalistische Gattung,
2 vols. (Leipzig: Hiersemann, 1943–4).
Haacke, Wilmont, Handbuch des Feuilletons, 3 vols. (Emsdetten: Lechte, 1951–3).
Haar, James, ‘A Sixteenth-Century Attempt at Music Criticism’, in Corneilson (ed.),
The Science and Art of Renaissance Music.
Haar, James, ‘Cosimo Bartoli on Music’, in Corneilson (ed.), The Science and Art of
Renaissance Music.
Haar, James, ‘The Courtier as Musician’, in Corneilson (ed.), The Science and Art of
Renaissance Music.
Haar, James, ‘Value Judgments in Music of the Renaissance’, in Knighton and Fallows
(eds.), Companion to Medieval and Renaissance Music.
Habermas, Jürgen, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into
a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger with the assistance of
Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge: Polity, 1989); paperback ed. (Cambridge: MIT
Press, 1991).
Hagen, Trever, ‘Converging on Generation: Musicking in Normalized
Czechoslovakia’, East Central Europe, 38 (2011), 307–35.
Haggh, Barbara, ‘Ciconia Nova musica: A Work for Singers in Renaissance Padua’, in
João Pedro d’Alvarenga and Manuel Pedro Ferreira (eds.), New Music 1400–1600:
Papers from an International Colloquium on the Theory, Authorship and Transmission of
Music in the Age of the Renaissance (Lisbon-Évora, 27–29 May 2003) (Lisbon and Évora:
Editora Casa do Sul, 2009).
Hailey, Christopher, ‘The Paul Bekker Collection in the Yale University Library’, Notes,
51 (1994), 13–21.
Halffter, Cristóbal, ‘Guía de la música española’, Arriba (7 October 1958), 29.
Halffter, Rodolfo, ‘Manuel de Falla y los compositores del Grupo de Madrid de la
Generación del 27’, in Iglesias (ed.), Rodolfo Halffter.
Hall, Patricia (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Musical Censorship (Oxford: Oxford
Hamer, Laura, ‘Armande de Polignac: An Aristocratic Compositrice in Fin-de-Siècle
Paris’, in Fryer (ed.), Women in the Arts in the Belle Époque.
Bibliography 739
Hampton, Howard, ‘70’s Rock: The Bad Vibes Continue’, New York Times (14 January
2001), Arts and Leisure Section, 3.
Hampton, Mark, Visions of the Press in Britain, 1850–1950 (Urbana: University of Illinois
Press, 2004).
Hanslick, Eduard, Music Criticism 1846–99, ed. and trans. Henry Pleasants (London:
Penguin Books, 1950).
Harbinson, Denis (ed.), Willehelmi Hirsaugensis Musica, Corpus Scriptorum de
Musica 23 (Rome: American Institute of Musicology, 1975).
Harries, Gemma and Karin Wahl-Jorgensen, ‘The Culture of Arts Journalists: Elitists,
Saviors or Manic Depressives?’, Journalism, 8/6 (2007), 619–39.
Harris, James, ‘A Discourse on Music, Painting, and Poetry’, in Three Treatises, 2nd ed.
(London, 1765; first published 1744).
Harris, Ruth, Dreyfus: Politics, Emotion, and the Scandal of the Century (New York: Henry
Holt, 2010).
Hart, Brian, ‘The Symphony and National Identity in Early Twentieth-Century
France’, in Kelly (ed.), French Music, Culture, and National Identity.
Harth, Erica, Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old
Regime (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).
Hartman, Anne and Wolfram Eggeling, Sowjetische Präsenz im kulturellen Leben der SBZ
und frühen DDR 1945–1953 (Berlin: Akademie, 1998).
Harvey, Sally, Carpentier’s Proustian Fiction: The Influence of Marcel Proust on Alejo
Carpentier (London: Tamesis, 1994).
Hass, Ole, ‘Introduction to the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, Retrospective Index to
Music Periodicals (RIPM)’, available at www.ripm.org.
[Hassard, John R. G.], ‘The Opera: La figlia del reggimento’, New York Tribune (8 October
1874), 6, quoted in Mark McKnight, ‘Music Criticism in the New York Times and the
New York Tribune, 1851–1876’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Louisiana State
University (1980).
Hassard, John R. G., ‘Wagner at Bayreuth’, New York Tribune (23 August 1876), 1–2,
quoted in Mark McKnight, ‘Music Criticism in the New York Times and the New York
Tribune, 1851–1876’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Louisiana State University
(1980).
Hassard, John R. G., ‘Wagner’s Lohengrin’, New York Tribune (23 March 1874), 7,
quoted in Mark McKnight, ‘Music Criticism in the New York Times and the
New York Tribune, 1851–1876’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Louisiana State
University (1980).
Hastings, Thomas, Dissertation on Musical Taste (Albany: Websters and Skinners, 1822;
revised 1853).
Hauvette, Henri, Mélanges de philologie d’histoire et de littérature offerts à Henri Hauvette
(Paris: Les presses français, 1934, facsimile ed., Geneva: Slatkine, 1972).
Hawkins, John, An Account of the Institution and Progress of the Academy of Ancient Music
(London, 1770).
Hawkins, John, A General History of the Science and Practice of Music, 5 vols. (London,
1776).
Haworth, Catherine and Lisa Colton (eds.), Gender, Age and Musical Creativity (Farnham:
Ashgate, 2015).
[Hayes, William], Remarks on Mr Avison’s Essay on Musical Expression (London, 1753).
740 Bibliography
Heartz, Daniel, Music in European Capitals: The Galant Style, 1720–1780 (London:
W. W. Norton, 2003).
Heidlberger, Frank, Carl Maria von Weber und Hector Berlioz: Studien zur französischen
Weber-Rezeption (Tützing: Hans Schneider, 1994).
Hein, Fabien, ‘The Issue of Musical Genres in France’, in Dauncey and Le Guern (eds.),
Stereo: Comparative Perspectives on the Sociological Study of Popular Music in France and
Britain.
Heine, Christiane, ‘La crítica musical de Salvador Bacarisse en Crisol y Luz
(1931–1934)’, in Cascudo and Palacios (eds.), Los señores de la crítica.
Heinemann, Michael, ‘Korrespondenz aus Danzig: Eine Stadt im Spiege der
Berichterstattung der Neuen Zeitschrift für Musik’, in Krassowski and Woźniak
(eds.), Musica Baltica.
Heinsheimer, Hans W., ‘A Music Publisher’s View on Reviewing’, Notes, Second Series,
26/2 (December 1969), 226–30.
Heintze, James R. and Michael Saffle (eds.) Reflections on American Music: The Twentieth
Century and the New Millennium (Hillside: Pendragon Press, 2000).
Helmers, Rutger, ‘A Life for the Tsar and Bel Canto Opera’, in Not Russian Enough?
Nationalism and Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century Russian Opera (Rochester:
University of Rochester Press, 2014).
Hempel, Dirk, ‘Der Vernünfftler – Johann Mattheson und der british-deutsche
Kulturtransfer in der Frühaufklärung’, in Hirschmann and Jahn (eds.), Johann
Mattheson als Vermittler und Initiator.
Hentschel, Frank, Sinnlichkeit und Vernunft in der mittelalterlichen Musiktheorie:
Strategien der Konsonanzwertung und der Gegenstand der Musica Sonora um 1300,
Beihefte zum Archiv für Musikwissenschaft 47 (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag,
2000).
Hentschel, Frank, ‘The Sensuous Music Aesthetics of the Middle Ages: The Case of
Augustine, Jacques de Liège and Guido of Arezzo’, Plainsong and Medieval Music, 20
(2011), 1–29.
Hernández-Reguant, Ariana, ‘World Music Producers and the Cuban Frontier’, in
White (ed.), Music and Globalisation.
Herissone, Rebecca, Musical Creativity in Restoration England (Cambridge: Cambridge
Herissone, Rebecca, ‘Playford, Purcell, and the Functions of Music Publishing in
Restoration England’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 63 (2010), 246–90.
Herresthal, Harald, Ole Bull: Vidunderbarnet erobrer verden: 1810–1837, vol. I (Oslo:
Unipub, 2006).
Herresthal, Harald, Ole Bull: Republikaner blant konger og keisere 1837–1848, vol. I I
(Oslo: Unipub, 2007).
Herresthal, Harald, Ole Bull: Teaterdirektør, koloniherre og norskdomsmann 1848–1862,
vol. I I I (Oslo: Unipub, 2009).
Herresthal, Harald, Ole Bull: Drømmen om udødelighet 1862–1880, vol. I V (Oslo: Unipub,
2010).
Herresthal, Harald and Ladislav Reznicek, Rhapsodie norvégienne: Norsk musikk
i Frankrike på Edvard Griegs tid. (Oslo: Norsk musikforlag, 1994).
Hervey, Arthur, ‘Concerning Musical Criticism’, Musical Times, 52 (1911), 373–5.
Bibliography 741
Hesmondhalgh, David, ‘Bourdieu, the Media and Cultural Production’, Media, Culture
and Society, 28/2 (2006), 211–31.
Hess, Carol. A., Manuel de Falla and Modernism in Spain (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2001).
Hess, Sigurd, ‘German Intelligence Organizations and the Media’, Journal of Intelligence
History, 9 (2009), 75–87.
Hewitt, Martin, The Dawn of the Cheap Press in Victorian Britain: The End of the ‘Taxes on
Knowledge’, 1849–1869 (London: Bloomsbury, 2013).
Heyer, John Hajdu (ed.), Jean-Baptiste Lully and the Music of the French Baroque: Essays in
Honor of James R. Anthony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Hiley, David, Gregorian Chant (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009).
Hiley, David, ‘The Historia of St Julian of Le Mans by Létald of Micy: Some Comments
and Questions about a North French Office of the Early Eleventh Century’, in Fassler
and Baltzer (eds.), The Divine Office in the Latin Middle Ages.
Hiller, Mary Ruth, ‘The Identification of Authors: The Great Victorian Enigma’, in
Vann and VanArsdel (eds.), Victorian Periodicals: A Guide to Research (New York:
Modern Language Association, 1978).
Hinrichsen, Hans-Joachim and Laurenz Lütteken, Bruckner-Brahms: Urbanes Milieu
als kompositorische Lebenswelt im Wien der Gründerzeit – Symposien zu den Zürcher
Festspielen 2003 und 2005. Schweizer Beiträge zur Musikforschung V (Bärenreiter,
2006).
Hirschmann, Wolfgang, ‘“Musicus ecclecticus”. Überlegungen zu Nachahmung, Norm
und Individualisierung um 1700’, in Bayreuther (ed.), Musicalische Norm um 1700.
Hirschmann, Wolfgang and Bernhard Jahn (eds.), Johann Mattheson als Vermittler und
Initiator. Wissenstransfer und die Etablierung neuer Diskurse in der ersten Hälfte des 18.
Jahrhunderts (Hildesheim: Olms, 2010).
Hodeir, André, Jazz: its Evolution and Essence, trans. David Noakes (New York: Black
Cat, 1961; first published New York: Grove Press, 1956).
Hohendahl, Peter Uwe, ‘Literary Criticism in the Epoch of Liberalism, 1820–1870’, in
Hohendahl (ed.), A History of German Literary Criticism.
Hohendahl, Peter Uwe (ed.), A History of German Literary Criticism (Lincoln: University
of Nebraska Press, 1988).
Hohendahl, Peter Uwe (ed.), Patriotism, Cosmopolitanism, and National Culture: Public
Culture in Hamburg 1700–1933 (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2003).
Holden, John, The Ecology of Culture: A Report Commissioned by the Arts and Humanities Research
Council’s Cultural Value Project (Arts and Humanities Research Council UK, 2015).
Holmes, Edward, ‘A First Impression of the Genius of Hector Berlioz’, Atlas
(12 February 1848).
Holmes, Edward, ‘Hector Berlioz’, Fraser’s Magazine, 38 (1848), 421–7.
Holmes, Edward, ‘Her Majesty’s Theatre’, Atlas (6 March 1847), 179.
Holoman, D. Kern, Berlioz (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).
Holoman, D. Kern, Catalogue of the Works of Hector Berlioz (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1987).
Holsinger, Bruce W., Music, Body, and Desire in Medieval Culture: Hildegard of Bingen to
Chaucer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001).
Holt, Douglas, How Brands Become Icons: The Principles of Cultural Branding (Boston:
Harvard Business School Press, 2004).
742 Bibliography
Holzer, Robert Rau, ‘“Sono d’altro garbo … le canzonette che si cantano oggi”: Pietro
della Valle on Music and Modernity in the Seventeenth Century’, Studi musicali, 21
(1992), 253–306.
Hölzl, Anton, ‘Ich hab’ kein Gelt!’ Kunst und Volk, 1/1 (1926), 1.
Hommel, Friedrich, ‘“Die Sache interessiert mich sehr . . .”: Arnold Schönbergs
Briefwechsel mit Wolfgang Steinecke’, Österreichische Musikzeitschrift, 39/6 (1984),
314–22.
Hooker, Lynn M., Redefining Hungarian Music from Liszt to Bartók (New York: Oxford
Horden, Peregrine (ed.), Music as Medicine: The History of Music Therapy since Antiquity
Horowitz, Joseph, Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall (New York:
W. W. Norton, 2005).
Horowitz, Joseph, ‘Reflections on the Times’, ARTicles (2002), available at josephhoro
witz.com (accessed 1 August 2018).
Hoskyns, Barney, ‘The Great Lig in the Sky: The Legendary, First-and-Last Rock
Writer’s Convention’, Rock’s Backpages (June 2006), available at rocksbackpages
.com (accessed 15 May 2018).
Hoskyns, Barney, ‘Melody Maker, 1926–2000, RIP’, Rock’s Backpages (15 December
2000), available at www.rocksbackpages.com (accessed 15 May 2018).
Hosler, Bellamy, Changing Aesthetic Views of Instrumental Music in Eighteenth-Century
Germany (Ann Arbor: UMI, 1978).
Hostinský, Otakar, Z hudebních bojů let sedmdesátých a osmdesátých [From the Musical
Fights of the ’70s and ’80s] (Prague: Editio Supraphon, 1986).
Houghton, Walter E. (ed.), The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824–1900, 5 vols.
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1966–89).
Houston, R. A., ‘The Development of Literacy: Northern England, 1640–1750’,
Economic History Review, New Series, 35/2 (May 1982), 199–216.
Howie, Crawford, Anton Bruckner: A Documentary Biography (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen
Press, 2002).
Hrčková, Naďa, Tradícia, modernosť a slovenská hudobná kultúra 1918–1948 [Tradition,
Modernity, and Slovak Musical Culture] (Bratislava: Litera, 1996).
Huebner, Steven, French Opera at the Fin de Siècle: Wagnerism, Nationalism, and Style
Huebner, Steven and Federico Lazzaro (eds.), Artistic Migration and Identity: Paris
1870–1940 (University of Rochester Press, in press).
Huff, Jay A. (ed. and trans.), Ad organum faciendum et Item de organo (Brooklyn: Institute
of Mediaeval Music, 1970).
Hughes, John, Calypso and Telemachus. An Opera (London, 1712).
Hughes, Meirion, The English Musical Renaissance and the Press, 1850–1914: Watchmen of
Music (Burlington: Ashgate, 2002).
Hughes, William, Remarks upon Church Musick. To Which Are Added Several Observations
upon Some of Handel’s Oratorio’s [sic], 2nd ed. (Worcester, 1763).
Huglo, Michel, ‘Der Prolog des Odo zugeschriebenen Dialogus de Musica’, Archiv für
Musikwissenschaft, 28 (1971), 134–46.
Huglo, Michel, ‘Les remaniements de l’antiphonaire grégorien au IXe siècle:
Hélisachar, Agobard, Amalaire’, in Culto Cristiano: Politica Imperiale Carolingia,
Bibliography 743
Convegni del centro di studi sulla spiritualità medievale, X V I I I (Todi: Università

degli studi di Perugia, 1979).
Huneker, James, Steeplejack (New York: C. Scribner’s, 1920).
Hüschen, Heinrich, Das Cantuagium des Heinrich Eger von Kalkar, Beiträge zur rhei-
nischen Musikgeschichte, vol. I I (Cologne: Staufen-Verlag, 1952).
Iarustovskii, Boris, ‘O desiatoi simfonii D. Shostakovicha’, in Grinberg (ed.), Sovetskaia
simfonicheskaia muzyka.
Iglesias, Antonio (ed.), Rodolfo Halffter: Tema, nueve décadas y final (Madrid: Fundación
Banco Exterior, 1991).
Iglesias, Sara, ‘“L’âme, le cœur et toute l’aspiration d’un peuple”: La Critique musicale
française, relais de la politique de collaboration?’, in Chimènes and Simon (eds.), La
musique à Paris sous l’Occupation.
Iglesias, Sara, Musicologie et Occupation. Science, musique et politique dans la France des
“années noires” (Paris: Maison des sciences de l’homme, 2014).
Il’ichev, Leonid, ‘Sily molodezhi—na sluzhbu velikim idealam. Rech’ Sekretaria TsK
KPSS L. Il’icheva’, Literaturnaia gazeta, 34/5 (10 January 1963), 1–3.
Irving, Howard, Ancients and Moderns: William Crotch and the Development of Classical
Music (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999).
Irving, Howard, ‘John Marsh and the Ancient–Modern Polemic’, Studies in Eighteenth-
Century Culture, 31 (2002), 215–36.
Isherwood, Robert M., Farce and Fantasy: Popular Entertainment in Eighteenth-Century
Paris (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986).
Isherwood, Robert M., Music in the Service of the King: France in the Seventeenth Century
ISTAT, Sommario di statistiche storiche, 1926–1985 (Roma, 1986).
Jaesrich, Hellmut, ‘Dr Faustus in Amerika’, Der Monat, 4 (1949), 92–4.
Janik, Elizabeth, ‘“The Golden Hunger Years”: Music and Superpower Rivalry in
Occupied Berlin’, German History, 22 (2004), 76–100.
Janke, Pia, et al. (eds.), Die Nestbeschmutzerin: Jelinek und Österreich (Salzburg: Jung und
Jung, 2002).
Jeanneney, Jean-Noël, Les Grandes heures de la presse qui ont fait l’histoire (Paris:
Flammarion, 2013).
Jeffery, Peter, ‘The Earliest Oktōēchoi: The Role of Jerusalem and Palestine in the
Beginnings of Modal Ordering’, in Jeffery (ed.), The Study of Medieval Chant.
Jeffery, Peter (ed.), The Study of Medieval Chant: Paths and Bridges, East and West. In
Honour of Kenneth Levy (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2001).
Jenkins, Henry, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York:
New York University Press, 2008).
Jensen, Klaus Bruhn and Peter Larsen, ‘The Sounds of Change: Representations of
Music in European Newspapers 1960–2000’, in Gripsrud and Weibull (eds.), Media
Markets and Public Spheres.
Jepson, Barbara, ‘Coming Soon: Classical Voice North America, a New Online Music
Journal’, Classical Voice America, available at classicalvoiceamerica.org (accessed
30 July 2018).
Jepson, Barbara, ‘Women Critics in the United States’, in Zaimont, Overhauser and
Gottlieb (eds.), The Musical Woman.
744 Bibliography
Joachim, Heinz, ‘Ein Mysterienspiel für die Bühne: Schönbergs “Moses und Aron”
überwaltigte in Zürich’, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 118/7–8 (1957), 426–7.
John, Alan, ‘Baffled by the Big One at the Arts Fest’, The Straits Times (21 June 2000).
Johnson, Axel B., ‘Editorial’, The Phonograph Monthly Review, 1/3 (December
1926), 99.
Johnson, Bruce (ed.), Jazz and Totalitarianism (New York: Routledge, 2016).
Johnson, Harriett, ‘Warfield to Sing New Musical Score’, Jet, 4/13 (6 August 1953), 59.
Johnson, James H., Listening in Paris: A Cultural History (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1995).
Johnson, James H., ‘Musical Experience and the Formation of a French Musical Public’,
Journal of Modern History, 64/2 (January 1992), 191–226.
Johnson, Samuel, A Dictionary of the English Language, 2 vols. (London: W. Strahan,
1755).
Johnson, Tom, The Voice of New Music: New York City 1972–82 (Stichting: Het
Apollohuis, 1989).
Johnson, Victoria, Backstage at the Revolution: How the Royal Paris Opera Survived the End
of the Old Regime (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009).
Johnstone, Harry Diack (ed.), The Eighteenth Century, The Blackwell History of Music in
Britain, vol. IV (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986).
Jolivet, Hilda, Varèse (Paris: Hachette, 1973).
Jones, LeRoi [Amiri Baraka], Black Music (New York: William Morrow, 1967).
Jones, LeRoi [Amiri Baraka], Blues People: Negro Music in White America (New York:
William Morrow, 1963).
Jones, Steve, ‘Popular Music, Criticism, Advertising and the Music Industry’, Journal of
Popular Music Studies, 5 (1993), 79–91.
Jones, Steve (ed.), Pop Music and the Press (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2002).
Jones, William, ‘On the Arts, Commonly Called Imitative’, in Poems, Consisting Chiefly of
Translation from the Asiatick Languages (London, 1772).
Jordan, Matthew F., Le Jazz: Jazz and French Cultural Identity (Urbana: University of
Illinois Press, 2010).
Jost, Ekkehard, Free Jazz (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994; first published Universal
Edition, 1974).
Joubert, Estelle, ‘Maria Antonia of Saxony and the Emergence of Music Analysis in
Opera Criticism’, Cambridge Opera Journal, 25 (2013), 37–73.
Jouvin, Benoît, ‘Chronique musicale’, Le Figaro (27 June 1871).
Judson, Pieter, Exclusive Revolutionaries: Liberal Politics, Social Experience, and National
Identity in the Austrian Empire, 1848–1914 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan of
Press, 1996).
Judson, Pieter, ‘Rethinking the Liberal Legacy’, in Beller (ed.), Rethinking Vienna 1900.
Judson, Pieter and Marsha L. Rozenblit (eds.), Constructing Nationalities in East Central
Europe (New York: Berghahn, 2005).
Jůzl, Miloš, ‘Music and the Totalitarian Regime’, International Review of the Aesthetics of
Sociology of Music, 27/1 (1996), 31–51.
Kabalevskii, Dmitrii, ‘Kompozitor – prezhde vsego grazhdanin’, Sovetskaia muzyka, 2
(1959), 13–20.
Kabalevskii, Dmitrii, ‘O muzykal’noi kritike’, Sovetskaia muzyka, 1 (1941), 4–17.
Kabalevskii, Dmitrii, ‘Tvorchestvo molodykh’, Sovetskaia muzyka, 12 (1958), 3–15.
Bibliography 745
Kabalevskii, Dmitrii, ‘Tvorchestvo molodykh kompozitorov Moskvy’, Sovetskaia

muzyka, 1 (1957), 3–17.
Karner, Otto, ‘Kulturpolitische Rahmenbedingungen in Österreich am Beginn der
Zweiten Republik’, in Grassl, Kapp and Rathgeber (eds.), Österreichs Neue Musik
nach 1945.
Karnes, Kevin C., Music, Criticism, and the Challenge of History: Shaping Modern Musical
Thought in Late Nineteenth-Century Vienna (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008).
Karnes, Kevin C., ‘Inventing Eastern Europe in the Ear of the Enlightenment’, Journal
of the American Musicological Society 71 (2018), 75–108.
Kárpáti, János (ed.), Zenészeti közlöny (1882), Zenevilág (1890–1891), Zeneirodalmi
szemle–Művészeti lapok (1894–1896) [Index], Répertoire international de la presse
musicale (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1996).
Kárpáti, János (ed.), Zenészeti lapok (1860–1876) [Index], Répertoire international de la
presse musicale (Baltimore: NISC, 2005).
Karpov, Vladimir, ‘Literature’s Contribution to Perestroika’, in Dugin (ed.), Perestroika
and Development of Culture.
Kassler, Michael, A. F. C. Kollmann’s Quarterly Musical Register (1812): An Annotated
Edition with an Introduction to his Life and Works (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).
Katz, Derek, ‘A Turk and a Moravian in Prague: Janáček’s Brouček and the Perils of
Musical Patriotism in Prague’, in Beckerman (ed.), Janáček and His World.
Katz, Mark, Capturing Sound: How Technology Has Changed Music (Berkeley and Los
Angeles: University of California Press, 2004).
Kaufold, Claudia, Nicole K. Strohmann and Colin Timms (eds.), Agostino Steffani:
Europäischer Komponist, hannoverscher Diplomat und Bischof der Leibniz-Zeit
(Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2017).
Keefe, Simon (ed.), The Cambridge History of Eighteenth-Century Music (Cambridge:
Keen, Andrew, The Cult of the Amateur: How Blogs, MySpace, YouTube and the Rest of
Today’s User-Generated Media Are Destroying Our Economy, Our Culture, and Our Values
(New York: Doubleday, 2007).
Keillor, Elaine, ‘Musical Activity in Canada’s New Capital City in the 1870s’, in
Beckwith and Hall (eds.), Musical Canada.
Keldysh, Iurii, ‘Za boevuiu printsipial’nuiu kritiku’, Sovetskaia muzyka, 7 (1958).
Keldysh, Iurii, ‘Kritika muzykal’naia’, in Muzykal’naia entsiklopediia, vol. I I I (Moscow:
Sovetskaia entsiklopediia, 1973–82).
Kelly, Barbara L., ‘Debussy and the Making of a musicien français: Pelléas, the Press and
World War I ’, in Kelly (ed.), French Music, Culture, and National Identity.
Kelly, Barbara L., Music and Ultra-Modernism in France: A Fragile Consensus, 1913–1939
(Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2013).
Kelly, Barbara L., ‘Remembering Debussy in Interwar France: Authority, Musicology,
and Legacy’, Music & Letters, 93 (2012), 374–93.
Kelly, Barbara L. (ed.), French Music, Culture, and National Identity, 1870–1939
(Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2008).
Kelly, Barbara L. and Christopher Moore (eds.), Music Criticism in France, 1918–1939:
Authority, Advocacy, Legacy (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2018).
Kemp, Walter H., ‘Some Notes on Music in Castiglione’s Il libro del cortegiano’, in
Clough (ed.), Cultural Aspects of the Italian Renaissance.
746 Bibliography
Kendall, Raymond, ‘The Music Critic: Critics Trained for Role as Educators at
University of Southern California’, Music Educators Journal, 56/7 (1970), 61–3.
Kent, Christopher, ‘Critics of Drama, Music and Art, 1830–1914: A Preliminary List’,
Victorian Periodicals Review, 13 (1980), 31–55.
Kent, Christopher, ‘More Critics of Drama, Music and Art’, Victorian Periodicals Review,
19 (1986), 99–105.
Kenyeres, Ágnes (ed.), ‘Verseghy Ferenc’, Magyar életrajzi lexikon, revised ed. (Budapest:
Arcanum Adatbázis Kft, 2001), available at http://mek.oszk.hu/00300/00355/html
(accessed 22 January 2017).
Kerman, Joseph, ‘A Few Canonic Variations’, Critical Inquiry, 10 (1983), 107–25.
Kerman, Joseph, ‘A Profile for American Musicology’, Journal of the American
Musicological Society, 18 (1965), 61–9.
Kerman, Joseph, Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology [published in the UK as
Musicology] (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1985).
Kerman, Joseph, Write All These Down: Essays on Music (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
Khrennikov, Tikhon, ‘Velikaia missiia sovetskoi muzyki’, Sovetskaia muzyka, 1
(1980), 14.
Khubov, Iurii, ‘Kritika i tvorchestvo’, Sovetskaia muzyka, 6 (1957), 29–56.
Knighton, Tess and David Fallows (eds.), Companion to Medieval and Renaissance Music
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987).
Kiesewetter, Raphael Georg, Geschichte der europäisch-abendländischen oder unsrer heuti-
gen Musik (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1846).
Kimbell, David, Italian Opera (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991).
King, Andrew, Alexis Easley and John Morton (eds.), The Routledge Handbook to
Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers (London: Routledge, 2016).
King, John, ‘The Boom of the Latin American Novel’, in Kristal (ed.), The Cambridge
Companion to the Latin American Novel.
Kintzler, Catherine, Jean-Philippe Rameau: Splendeur et naufrage de l’esthétique du plaisir à
l’âge classique, 3rd ed. (Paris: Minerve, 2011).
Kirchner, Joachim, Das deutsche Zeitschriftenwesen: seine Geschichte und seine Probleme, 2
vols. (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1958–62).
Kirkendale, Warren, The Court Musicians in Florence During the Principate of the Medici
Kirschbaum, Scott, ‘Whither Slovak Historiography after 1993?’, Canadian Slavonic
Papers, 53/1 (2011), 45–63.
Kiui, Tsesar, Izbrannye stat’i, ed. I. L. Gusin (Leningrad: Gosudarstvennoe Muzykal’noe
Izdatel’stvo, 1952).
Klein, Bethany, ‘Dancing about Architecture: Popular Music Criticism and the
Negotiation of Authority’, Popular Communication 3/1 (2005), 1–20.
Klein, Herman, Musicians and Mummers (London: Cassell and Company, 1925).
Klusáček, Karel, Emanuel Kovář, Lubor Niederle, František Schlaffer and František
Adolf Šubert (eds.), Národopisná výstava českoslovanská v Praze 1895 [The
Czechoslovak Ethnographic Exhibition in Prague 1895] (Prague: Nákladem
J. Otty, 1895).
Knapp, J. Merrill, ‘A Forgotten Chapter in English Eighteenth-Century Opera’, Music
& Letters, 42 (1961), 4–16.
Bibliography 747
Knittel, K. M., Seeing Mahler: Music and the Language of Antisemitism in Fin-de-Siècle
Vienna (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2010).
Koechlin, Charles, ‘Les compositeurs et la critique musicale’, La Revue musicale
(1 September 1927), 108–16.
Koehler, Jonathan, ‘“Soul is but Harmony”: David Josef Bach and the Workers’
Symphony Concert Association, 1905–1918’, Austrian History Yearbook, 39 (2008),
66–91.
Kok, Roe-Min and Laura Tunbridge (eds.), Rethinking Schumann (New York: Oxford
Kókay, György, A magyar sajtó története I (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1979).
Kolb Reeve, Katherine, ‘Rhetoric and Reason in French Music Criticism of the 1830s’,
in Bloom (ed.), Music in Paris in the Eighteen-Thirties.
Kolodin, Irving, ‘Huneker’s Hundredth’, Saturday Review (30 January 1960), 53.
Komma, Karl Michael, ‘Ursprünge der modernen Musikanalyse: E. T. A.
Hoffmanns Beethoven-Rezensionen’, in Budday and Deppert (eds.),
Musiktheorie.
Konzett, Matthias (ed.), A Companion to the Works of Thomas Bernhard (Rochester and
Woodbridge: Camden House, 2002).
Körndle, Franz, ‘Die Bulle “Docta sanctorum partum”. Überlieferung, Textgestalt und
Wirkung’, Die Musikforschung, 63 (2010), 147–65.
Kovnatskaia, Liudmila, ‘Introduction to D. D. Shostakovich’, Pis’ma I. I. Sollertinskomu
(St Petersburg: Kompozitor, 2006).
Krassowski, Janusz and Jolanta Woźniak (eds.), Musica Baltica: The Music Culture of Baltic
Cities on Modern Times/Musikkultur der Ostseestädte in der Neuzeit (Gdań sk: Akademia
Muzyczna im. Stanisława Moniuszki, 2010).
Kregor, Jonathan, Program Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2015).
Krehbiel, Henry Edward, Afro-American Folksongs: A Study in Racial and National Music
(New York: G. Schirmer, 1914).
Krehbiel, Henry Edward, Chapters of Opera (New York: H. Holt, 1908).
Krehbiel, Henry Edward, How to Listen to Music (New York: C. Scribner’s, 1896).
Krehbiel, Henry Edward, More Chapters of Opera (New York: H. Holt, 1919).
Kreisig, Martin (ed.), Gesammelte Schriften über Musik und Musiker, vol. I (Leipzig:
Breitkopf und Härtel, 1914).
Křesťan, Jiří, Zdeněk Nejedlý: Politik a vědec v osamění [Zdeněk Nejedlý: Politician and
Scholar in Solitude] (Prague: Paseka, 2012).
Kreuger, Rita, Czech, German, and Noble: Status and National Identity in Habsburg Bohemia
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
Kreuzer, Gundula, ‘Heilige Trias, Stildualismus, Beethoven: On the Limits of
Nineteenth-Century Germanic Music Historiography’, in Mathew and Walton
(eds.), The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini.
Kristal, Efraín (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Latin American Novel (Cambridge:
Krones, Hartmut, ‘Humor als Waffe der Wiener Moderne: Die Musikblätter des
“Abbruch” (1924 und 1925)’, in Musik/Revolution: Festschrift für Georg Knepler zum
90. Geburtstag (Hamburg: Bockel, 1997).
[Krugozor], www.krugozor-kolobok.ru (accessed 2 November 2016).
748 Bibliography
Kühnel, Jürgen, Ulrich Müller and Oswald Panagle (eds.), ‘Regietheater’: Konzeption und
Praxis am Beispiel der Bühnenwerke Mozarts. Mit einem Anhang zu Franz Schrekers ‘Die
Gezeichneten’ (Anif/Salzburg: Mueller-Speiser, 2007).
Kuhnau, Johann, Der musicalische Quack-Salber (Dresden, 1700).
Kuhnau, Johann, Frische Clavier-Früchte (Leipzig, 1696).
Kunzen, Friedrich Ludwig Aemilius and Johann Friedrich Reichardt (eds.), Studien für
Tonkünstler und Musikfreunde (Berlin, 1793).
Kushnir, Aleksandr (ed.), Zolotoe podpol’e: polnaia illiustrirovannaia entsiklopediia rok-
samizdata, 1967–1994 (Nizhnii Novgorod: Dekom, 1994).
Kyprianides, Christine, ‘Musical Crimes and Misdemeanors from the Pages of the
Orchestra (1863–81)’, paper delivered at the Annual Meeting of the American
Musicological Society, Vancouver (2016).
L. N., ‘Weder international noch festlich . . . Schlußbilanz des Wiener Internationalen
Musikfestes’, Österreichische Zeitung (21 April 1951); cited in Joy H. Calico, Arnold
Schoenberg’s ‘A Survivor from Warsaw’ in Postwar Europe (Berkeley, Los Angeles and
London: University of California Press, 2014).
Ladvocat, Lois, Lettres sur l’Opéra à l’abbé Dubos, suivies de Description de la vie et
moeurs, de l’exercice et l’état des filles de l’Opéra, ed. Jérôme de La Gorce (Paris:
Cicero, 1993).
Laeven, Augustinus H., The Acta eruditorum under the Editorship of Otto Mencke
(1644–1707): The History of an International Learned Journal between 1682 and
1707, trans. Lynne Richards (Amsterdam: APA-Holland University Press, 1990).
La Gorce, Jérôme de, Jean-Baptiste Lully (Paris: Fayard, 2002).
La Gorce, Jérôme de, Jean-Philippe Rameau. Colloque international organisé par la Société
Rameau, Dijon, 21–24 septembre 1983 (Paris: Champion, 1987).
La Gorce, Jérôme de, L’Opéra à Paris au temps de Louis XIV (Paris: Desjonquères, 1992).
Laing, Dave, ‘Anglo-American Journalism’, in Bennett, Shank and Toynbee (eds.), The
Popular Music Studies Reader.
Laing, Dave, ‘Taste-Making and Trend-Spotting: The Folk Revival Journalism of
Robert Shelton’, Popular Music History, 1/3 (2004), 307–28.
Laing, Dave, The Sound of Our Time (London: Sheed and Ward, 1969).
Laing, Dave, ‘“The World’s Best Rock Read”: Let It Rock’, Popular Music and Society, 33/
4 (2010), 449–63.
Lam, Joseph S. C., ‘China: I I . History and Theory: 2. Antiquity to the Warring
States Period (to 221 B C E )’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, available at
www.oxfordmusiconline.com (accessed 4 March 2018).
Lambert, Constant, Music Ho! (New York: C. Scribner’s, 1934).
Lami, E.[mílio], ‘Da necessidade e conveniência dum jornal musical em Lisboa’,
O trovador. Jornal musical, literário, e de variedades, 1 (12 May 1855), 1–3.
Land, Norman E., The Viewer as Poet: The Renaissance Response to Art (University Park:
Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994).
Landerer, Christoph, ‘Eduard Hanslicks Ästhetikprogramm und die Österreichische
Philosophie der Jahrhundertmitte’, Österreichische Musikzeitschrift, 54/9 (1999), 6–20.
Landerer, Christoph, ‘Eduard Hanslick und die österreichische Geistesgeschichte’, in
Antonicek, Gruber and Landerer (eds.), Eduard Hanslicks Gedenken.
Langley, Leanne, ‘Agency and Change: Berlioz in Britain, 1870–1920’, Journal of the
Royal Musical Association, 132 (2007), 306–48.
Bibliography 749
Langley, Leanne, ‘Hogarth, George’, in Sadie and Tyrrell (eds.), The New Grove
Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vol. 11.
Langley, Leanne, ‘Italian Opera and the English Press, 1836–1856’, Periodica Musica, 6
(1988), 3–10.
Langley, Leanne, ‘Musical Press’, in McCalman (ed.), An Oxford Companion to the
Romantic Age.
Langley, Leanne, ‘Novello’s “Neue Zeitschrift”: 1883, Francis Hueffer and The Musical
Review’, Brio, 45 (2008), 14–27.
Langley, Leanne, ‘Roots of a Tradition: The First Dictionary of Music and Musicians’, in
Musgrave (ed.), George Grove, Music and Victorian Culture.
Langley, Leanne, ‘The English Musical Journal in the Early Nineteenth Century’,
unpublished PhD dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
(1983).
Langley, Leanne, ‘The Life and Death of The Harmonicon: An Analysis’, RMA Research
Chronicle, 22 (1989), 137–63.
Large, David C. and William Weber (eds.), Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics
Laroche, Herman, ‘A New Opera from the Young Russian School. Snegurochka by
A. Ostrovsky and N. Rimsky-Korsakov, staged by the Private Opera Theatre’, in
Campbell (ed.), Russians on Russian Music, 1880–1917.
Laroche, Herman, ‘P. Tchaikovsky’s Mazeppa’, in Campbell (ed.), Russians on Russian
Music, 1880–1917.
Laroche, Herman, ‘Tchaikovsky’s Eugene Onegin in the Conservatoire’s Production’,
in Campbell (ed.), Russians on Russian Music, 1830–1880.
Larosh, German Avgustovich, Sobranie muzykal’no-kriticheskikh stateĭ, vol. I (Moscow:
Tipo-Litografiia I. N. Kushnerev i Ko., 1913).
Larsen, Håkon, Den nye kultursosiologien: kultur som perspektiv og forskningsobjekt (Oslo:
Universitetsforlag, 2013).
Larsson, Roger B., ‘Charles Avison’s “Stiles in Musical Expression”’, Music & Letters, 63
(1982), 261–75.
Latham, R. E., David R. Howlett and Richard Ashdowne (eds.), Dictionary of Medieval
Latin from British Sources (British Academy, London: Oxford University Press,
1975–2013).
Launay, Denise (ed.), La Querelle des bouffons, 3 vols. (Geneva: Minkoff, 1973).
Lawrence, Vera Brodsky, Strong on Music: The New York Scene in the Days of George
Templeton Strong, 1836–1875, Volume 1: Resonances, 1836–1850 (New York: Oxford
Lawrence, Vera Brodsky, Strong on Music: The New York Scene in the Days of George
Templeton Strong, 1836–1875, Volume 2: Reverberations, 1850–1856 (Chicago:
Leary, Patrick, The Punch Brotherhood: Table Talk and Print Culture in Mid-Victorian London
(London: The British Library Board, 2010).
Le Bail, Karine, La Musique au pas. Être musicien sous l’Occupation (Paris: CNRS Éditions,
2016).
Lebelt, Jochen, ‘Die Wiederspiegelung des Musiklebens der ostsächsischen Stadt
Bautzen in der NZfM: Eine Studie über die Beziehungen Robert Schumanns zu
Karl Eduard Hering (1807–1879)’, in Nauhaus (ed.), Schumann-Studien V .
750 Bibliography
Lebrecht, Norman, ‘Singers in Uproar over Critical Body Insults at Glyndebourne’

(19 May 2014), available at slippedisc.com (accessed 11 March 2018).
Lederman Daniel, Minna, The Life and Death of a Small Magazine (Modern Music,
1924–1946), ISAM Monographs 18 (New York: Institute for Studies in
American Music, 1983).
Leeuwen, Evert van, ‘Method, Discourse, and the Act of Knowing’, in Voss (ed.), Essays
on the Philosophy and Science of René Descartes.
Legány, Dezső, ‘Liszt in Hungary, 1820–1846’, in Saffle (ed.), Liszt and His World.
Lehning, James R., Peasant and French: Cultural Contact in Rural France during the
Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).
Le Huray, Peter, Music and the Reformation in England (London: Jenkins, 1967).
Lemos, Mário Matos e, Jornais diários portugueses do século X X : Um dicionário (Coimbra:
Ariadne, 2006).
Leonard, Marion, Gender in the Music Industry: Rock, Discourse and Girl Power (Aldershot:
Ashgate, 2007).
Lessem, Alan, ‘Imitation and Expression: Opposing French and British Views in the
Eighteenth Century’, Journal of the American Musicological Society, 27 (1974), 325–30.
Lesure, François (ed.), Querelle des Gluckistes et des Piccinnistes: Texte des pamphlets avec
introduction, commentaires et index, 2 vols. (Geneva: Minkoff Reprint, 1984).
Levin, David J., Unsettling Opera: Staging Mozart, Verdi, Wagner, and Zemlinsky (Chicago:
Levy, David B., ‘Thomas Massa Alsager, Esq.: A Beethoven Advocate in London’, 19th–
Century Music, 9/2 (Autumn 1985), 119–27.
Leydi, Roberto, ‘George Gershwin e il Porgy and Bess’, Il diapason, 5 (1955), 15–23.
Liang, Chang Tou, ‘Festive Start to Spring’, The Straits Times Life! (13 January 2014).
Liang, Chang Tou, ‘Liszt Transcendental Studies’, The Straits Times Life! (16 March
2012).
Libera, Luca della and José Maria Dominguez, ‘Nuove fonti per la vita musicale
romana di fine Seicento: il Giornale e il Diario di Roma del Fondo Bolognetti
all’Archivio Segreto Vaticano’, in Giron-Panel and Goulet (eds.), La musique à Rome
au XVIIe siècle.
Liew, Kai Khiun and Shzr Ee Tan, ‘An Unlocalized and Unglobalized Subculture:
English Language Independent Music in Singapore’, in Fung (ed.), Asian Popular
Culture.
Lima, Francisco Bernardo de, Gazeta literária, I I (June 1762), 99.
Lindberg, Ulf, Gestur Guðmundsson, Morten Michelsen and Hans Weisethaunet,
‘Critical Negotiations: Rock Criticism in the Nordic Countries’, Popular Music
History, 1/3 (2006), 241–62.
Lindberg, Ulf, Hans Weisethaunet, Morten Michelsen and Gestur Guðmundsson, Rock
Criticism from the Beginning: Amusers, Bruisers, and Cool-Headed Cruisers (New York:
Peter Lang, 2005).
Lindeman, Ludvig Mathias, Ældre og nyere norske Fjeldmelodier: 1 (Christiania: Malling,
1853).
Lindeman, Ludvig Mathias, Ældre og nyere norske Fjeldmelodier: 2 (Christiania: Malling,
1853).
Lindsay, Jennifer, ‘Intercultural Expectations: I La Galigo in Singapore’, TDR: The
Drama Review, 51/2 (2007), 60–75.
Bibliography 751
Lindsay, Wallace Martin (ed.), Isidori Hispalensis Episcopi Etymologiarum sive Originum, 2
vols., bk V I I (Oxford, 1911).
Ling, John, ‘The Debate in England on the Progress and Regress of Music, 1888–1907’,
unpublished PhD dissertation, Royal Holloway, University of London (2014).
Lipman, Samuel, ‘James William Davison of The (London) Times’, in Music and More:
Essays, 1975–1991 (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1992).
Lippman, Edward A. (ed.), Musical Aesthetics: A Historical Reader, Vol. I : From Antiquity to
the Eighteenth Century. Aesthetics in Music 4 (New York: Pendragon, 1986).
Livanova, Tamara and Vladimir Protopopov, Opernaia kritika v Rossii, vol. I (Moscow:
Izdatel’stvo Muzyka, 1966).
Liszt, Franz, The Gipsy in Music, trans. Edwin Evans (London: William Reeves, 1881).
Livanova, Tamara, Opernaia kritika v Rossii, vol. I I (Moscow: Muzyka, 1969).
Locati, Luigi, ‘La critica musicale nei giornali politici’, Gazzetta musicale di Milano, 49/
52 (30 December 1894), 823–4.
Lochner, Fabian, ‘Un évêque musicien au Xe siècle: Radbod d’Utrecht (+ 917)’,
Tijdschrift van der Vereniging voor Nederlandse Muziekgeschiednis, 38 (1988), 3–35.
Locke, Brian, Opera and Ideology in Prague: Polemics and Practice at the National Theatre,
1900–1938 (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2006).
Locke, Matthew, The English Opera; or the Vocal Musick in Psyche (London, 1675).
Locke, Ralph P., Music, Musicians, and the Saint-Simonians (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1986).
Locke, Ralph P. and Cyrilla Barr (eds.), Cultivating Music in America: Women Patrons and
Activists Since 1860 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997).
Lockman, John, Rosalinda, A Musical Drama. As It Is Performed at Hickford’s Great Room, in
Brewer’s Street (London, 1740).
Lonchampt, Jacques, Le Bon plaisir. Journal de musique contemporaine (Paris: Plume,
1994).
Lonchampt, Jacques, ‘Les Déserts fourmillants de Steve Reich’, Le Monde
(25 November 1986), 16.
Lonchampt, Jacques (ed.), Emile Vuillermoz, critique musicale 1902–1960: au bonheur des
soirs (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2013).
Long, Pat, The History of the NME: High Times and Low Lives at the World’s Most Famous
Music Magazine (London: Portico, 2012).
Lonsdale, Roger, ‘Dr Burney and the Monthly Review’, Review of English Studies, New
Series, 14 (1963), 346–58, 15 (1964), 27–37.
Lonsdale, Roger, Dr Charles Burney: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965).
Loos, Ike de, Charles Downey and Ruth Steiner (eds.), Utrecht Bibliotheek der
Rijksuniversiteit MS 406 (3.J.7), Publications of Musical Manuscripts 21 (Ottawa:
Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1997).
Lora, Francesco, ‘I drammi per musica di Giacomo Antonio Perti per il teatro della Villa
Medicea di Pratolino (1700–01; 1707–10)’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of
Bologna (2012).
Lora, Francesco, ‘Pistocchi, Francesco Antonio Mamiliano’, Dizionario biografico degli
italiani, available at www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/francesco-antonio-mamiliano-
pistocchi (accessed 14 August 2018).
Lorenz, Dagmar, ‘The Established Outsider: Thomas Bernhard’, in Konzett (ed.),
A Companion to the Works of Thomas Bernhard.
752 Bibliography
Lovell, Percy, ‘“Ancient” Music in Eighteenth-Century England’, Music & Letters, 60

(1979), 401–15.
Low, Frances H., Press Work for Women: A Textbook for the Young Woman Journalist
(London: L. Upcott Gill, 1904).
Lowe, David, ‘Vladimir Odoevskii as Opera Critic’, Slavic Review, 41/ 2 (1982), 306–15.
Lubenow, William, Liberal Intellectuals and Public Culture in Modern Britain, 1815–1914:
Making Words Flesh (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2010).
Luko, Alexis, ‘Tinctoris on Varietas’, Early Music History, 27 (2008), 99–136.
Lütteken, Laurenz (ed.), Die Musik in den Zeitschriften des 18. Jahrhunderts: eine
Bibliographie mit Datenbank auf CD-ROM (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 2004).
Lyons, Martyn, Readers and Society in Nineteenth-Century France: Workers, Women,
Peasants (New York: Palgrave, 2001).
Mably, Gabriel Bonnot, Abbé de, Lettres à madame la marquise de P. . . sur l’opéra (Paris:
Didot, 1741; facsimile ed., New York: AMS Press, 1978).
Macauslan, John, Schumann’s Music and Hoffmann’s Fiction (Cambridge: Cambridge
Macchiarella, Ignazio, ‘Tracce di pratiche musicali dell’oralità nelle riviste demologiche
dei primi decenni del Novecento’, in Capra and Nicolodi (eds.), La critica musicale in
Italia nella prima metà del Novecento.
Macdonald, Hugh, ‘Berlioz’, in Sadie and Tyrrell (eds.), The New Grove Dictionary of
Music and Musicians, vol. 3.
Mace, Thomas, Musicks Monument, or, a Remembrancer of the Best Practical Musick
(London, 1676).
Machabey, Armand, Traité de la critique musicale (Paris: Richard-Masse, 1946).
Mackenzie, Compton, ‘Editorial’, The Gramophone (April 1937), 459–62.
Mackenzie, Compton, My Life and Times: Octave Five 1915–1923 (London: Chatto &
Windus, 1966).
Mackenzie, Compton, My Life and Times: Octave Six 1923–1930 (London: Chatto &
Windus, 1967).
Mackenzie, Compton, ‘Prologue’, The Gramophone 1/1 (1923), 1.
Mackerness, E. D., ‘Edward Holmes (1797–1859)’, Music & Letters, 45 (1964), 213–27.
Mackerness, E. D., ‘Thomas Love Peacock’s Musical Criticism’, The Wind and the Rain, 4
(1948), 177–87.
Maddocks, Fiona, ‘Last Night of the Proms – Review’, The Guardian (8 September
2013), available at www.theguardian.com (accessed 7 November 2015).
Mahling, Christoph-Hellmut and Sigrid Wiesmann (eds.), Bericht über den internationa-
len musikwissenschaftlichen Kongress Bayreuth 1981 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1981).
Mainwaring, Madison, ‘As Newspapers Cut Music Critics, a Dark Times for the Arts or
Dawn of a New Age?’, WQXR (11 August 2015), available at www.wqxr.org (accessed
1 August 2018).
Mainwaring, Madison, ‘The Death of the American Dance Critic’, The Atlantic (6 August
2015), available at www.theatlantic.com (accessed 1 August 2018).
Malan, Rian, ‘Where Does the Lion Sleep Tonight?’, Rolling Stone (25 May 2004),
54–66, 84–5.
Malson, Lucien, ‘Dans des centaines de discothèques pop’ [sic] on achève aussi les
jockeys’, Le Monde (8 October 1970), 17.
Manevy, Raymond, La Presse de la Troisième République (Paris: J. Forêt, 1955).
Bibliography 753
Mandel, Howard, Future Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press 1999).
Manini, Juan, ‘Asociación Musical’, La Iberia musical (1 January 1843), 3.
Mann, Thomas, Doctor Faustus, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Vintage, 1999).
Mann, William, ‘Critics’ Choice: Records of the Year’, The Times (28 November
1970), 19.
Mann, William, ‘The Beatles Revive Hopes of Progress in Pop Music’, The Times
(29 May 1967), 9.
Mann, William, ‘The New Beatles Album’, The Times (22 November 1968), 9.
Mann, William [Unsigned – ‘From Our Music Critic’], ‘What Songs the Beatles Sang’,
The Times (27 December 1963), 4.
Mantelli, Alberto, ‘Editoriale’, L’Approdo musicale, 1 (1958), 3–4.
Manul’kina, Ol’ga and Pavel Gershenzon (eds.), Novaia Russkaia muzykal’naia
kritika,1993–2003, 3 vols. (Moscow: Novoe literaturnoe obozrenie, 2015).
Marcello, Benedetto, Il teatro alla moda (Venice: Aldiviva Licante, 1720); English trans.
Reinhard G. Pauly, ‘Il teatro alla moda’, 2 parts, Musical Quarterly, 34 (1948),
371–403; 35 (1949), 85–105.
Marco, Tomás, La música de la España contemporánea (Madrid: Publicaciones Españolas,
1970).
Marco, Tomás, Música española de vanguardia (Madrid: Guadarrama, 1970).
Marco, Tomás, Spanish Music in the Twentieth Century (Cambridge: Harvard University
Press, 1993).
Marlow, Isaac, A Brief Discourse Concerning Singing in the Publick Worship of God in the
Gospel-Church (London, 1690).
Marques, A. H. de Oliveira, Guia de história da 1a República Portuguesa (Lisbon: Estampa,
1981).
Marsh, Christopher, Music and Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge
Marshall, Stuart, ‘A Six-Part Syntax of Sound’, Sound Projector (13 October 2013),
available at www.thesoundprojector.com (accessed 7 November 2015).
Martin, Gerald, Journeys through the Labyrinth: Latin American Fiction in the Twentieth
Century (London: Verso, 1989).
Martin, Nathan, ‘Rameau and Rousseau: Harmony and History in the Age of Reason’,
unpublished PhD dissertation, McGill University (2008).
Martínez del Fresno, Beatriz, Julio Gómez: una época de la música española (Madrid:
Instituto Complutense de Ciencias Musicales, 2003).
Marx, A. B., Musical Form in the Age of Beethoven: Selected Writings on Theory and
Method, ed. and trans. Scott Burnham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2006).
Masson, Paul-Marie, ‘La Musique italienne en France pendant le premier tiers du
XVIIIe siècle’, in Hauvette, Mélanges de philologie d’histoire et de littérature offerts à
Henri Hauvette.
Masson, Paul-Marie, ‘Les Deux versions du “Dardanus” de Rameau’, Acta musicologica,
26 (1954), 36–48.
Masson, Paul-Marie, ‘Musique italienne et musique française, la première querelle’,
Rivista musicale italiana, 19 (1912), 519–45.
Masters, D. C., The Rise of Toronto, 1850–1890 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press,
1947).
754 Bibliography
Masaryk, Tomáš G., Česká otázka: snahy a tužby národního obrození [The Czech Question:
The Endeavors and Yearnings of the National Revival], trans. Peter Kussi, in
Ersoy, Górny and Kechriotis (eds.), Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and
Southeastern Europe.
Matassi, Elio, ‘The Adaemonic/Daemonic Spirit of Music: E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Review
of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony and the Apology of Instrumental Music in W. H.
Wackenroder’, Ad Parnassum: A Journal of Eighteenth and Nineteenth-Century
Instrumental Music, 2/3 (April 2004), 153–62.
Mathew, Nicholas, ‘On Being There in 1824’, in Mathew and Walton (eds.), The
Invention of Beethoven and Rossini.
Mathew, Nicholas, Political Beethoven (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012).
Mathew, Nicholas and Benjamin Walton (eds.), The Invention of Beethoven and Rossini:
Historiography, Analysis, Criticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013).
Mathews, W. S. B., A Hundred Years of Music in America, reprint ed. (New York: AMS
Press, 1970; first published Chicago: G. L. Howe, 1889).
Mathiesen, Thomas J., Dimitri Conomos, George Leotsakos, Sotirios Chianis and
Rudolph M. Brandl, ‘Greece: 1. Introduction’; ‘3. Scope’, Grove Music Online,
Oxford Music Online, available at www.oxfordmusiconline.com (accessed
4 March 2018).
Matoré, Georges, Histoire des dictionnaires français (Paris: Larousse, 1968).
Mátray, Gábor, ‘Bihari János, magyar népzenész életrajza’ [Biography of János Bihari,
Hungarian Folk Musician], in Vahot and Kubinyi (eds.), Magyarország és Erdély
képekben, vol. 2.
Mátray, Gábor, ‘A magyar zene és a magyar cigányok zenéje’, in Vahot and Kubinyi
(eds.), Magyarország és Erdély képekben, vol. 4.
Mattheson, Johann, Das forschende Orchestre (Hamburg, 1721).
Mattheson, Johann, Die neueste Untersuchung der Singspiele, nebst beygefügter musika-
lischen Geschmacksprobe (Hamburg, 1744).
Matthew, H. C. G. and Brian Harrison (eds.), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
Mayes, Catherine, ‘Reconsidering an Early Exoticism: Viennese Adaptations of
Hungarian-Gypsy Music Around 1800’, Eighteenth-Century Music, 6/2 (September
2009), 161–81.
Mauclair, Camille, La Religion de la musique (Paris: Fischbacher, 1928).
Maul, Michael, ‘Johann Adolph Scheibes Bach-Kritik. Hintergründe und Schauplätze
einer musikalischen Kontroverse’, Bach-Jahrbuch, 96 (2010), 153–98; English version
‘Bach versus Scheibe: Hitherto Unknown Battlegrounds in a Famous Conflict’, Bach
Perspectives, 9 (2013), 120–44.
Maurer, Jr, Oscar, ‘Anonymity vs. Signature in Victorian Reviewing’, Studies in English,
27 (1948), 1–28.
Mauro, Letterio, ‘La musica nei commenti ai “Problemi”: Pietro d’Abano e Évrart de
Conty’, in Mauro (ed.), La musica nel pensiero medievale.
Mauro, Letterio (ed.), La musica nel pensiero medievale (Ravenna: Longo Editore, 1999).
Maus, Fred Everett, ‘Criticism, §I : General Issues’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music
Maus, Fred Everett, Glenn Stanley, Katharine Ellis, Leanne Langley, Nigel Scaife,
Marcello Conati, Marco Capra, Stuart Campbell, Mark N. Grant and
Bibliography 755
Edward Rothstein, ‘Criticism’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, available at
www.oxfordmusiconline (accessed 4 September 2018).
MCANA, ‘History of MCANA’, available at www.mcana.org/historyofmcana.html
MCANA, ‘The Classical Music Critic: A Survey of Music Critics at General-Interest and
Specialized New Publications in America’, A Collaboration Project of the Music
Critics Association of North American and the National Arts Journal Program at
Columbia University (2005), available at www.mcana.org (accessed 1 August 2018).
McCalman, Iain (ed.), An Oxford Companion to the Romantic Age: British Culture,
1776–1832 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989).
McCarrey, Scott and Lesley Wright (eds.), Perspectives on the Performance of French Piano
Music (Farnham: Ashgate, 2014).
McClary, Susan, Feminine Endings: Music, Gender and Sexuality (Minnesota and London:
University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
McColl, Sandra, Music Criticism in Vienna 1896–1897: Critically Moving Forms (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1996).
McEntire, Sandra J., The Doctrine of Compunction in Medieval England: Holy Tears
(Lewisham: Edwin Mellen Press, 1990).
McEntire, Sandra J., ‘The Doctrine of Compunction in the West: Theology and
Literary Implications’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Cornell University (1987).
McGeary, Thomas, ‘English Opera Criticism and Aesthetics, 1685–1747’, unpublished
PhD dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champagne (1985).
McGeary, Thomas, ‘Music Literature’, in Johnstone (ed.), The Eighteenth Century.
McGinty, Doris Evans, ‘“As Large as She Can Make It”: The Role of Black Women
Activists in Music, 1880–1945’, in Locke and Barr (eds.), Cultivating Music in America.
McGregor, Smith C., ‘Twelve Foundation Stones for Your Record Collection’, The
Etude (May 1921), 339.
McGuinness, Rosamund, ‘Writings about Music’, in Spink (ed.), The Seventeenth
Century.
McGuire, Philip, ‘Black Music Critics and the Classic Blues Singers’, The Black
Perspective in Music, 14/2 (1986), 103–25.
Mackinlay, Elizabeth, Denis Collins and Samantha Owens (eds.), Aesthetics and
Experience in Musical Performance (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2005).
McKnight, Mark, ‘Music Criticism in the New York Times and the New York Tribune,
1851–1876’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Louisiana State University (1980).
McLeese, Don, ‘Straddling the Cultural Chasm: The Great Divide Between Music
Criticism and Popular Consumption’, Popular Music and Society, 33/4 (2010),
433–47.
McLeod, Kembrew, ‘Between Rock and a Hard Place: Gender and Rock Criticism’, in
Jones (ed.), Pop Music and the Press.
McMichael, Polly, ‘“After All, You’re a Rock and Roll Star (At Least, That’s What They
Say)”: Roksi and the Creation of the Soviet Rock Musician’, Slavic and East European
Review, 83/4 (2005), 664–84.
McMillan, James F. (ed.), Modern France: 1880–2002 (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2003).
McMillan, Priscilla Johnson, Khrushchev and the Arts: The Politics of Soviet Culture,
1962–1964 (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1964).
756 Bibliography
[Media Development Authority], ‘Media 21: Transforming Singapore into a Global

Media City’, Media Development Authority Singapore, available at mn.gov/mnddc/
asd-employment/pdf/03-M21-MDA.pdf (accessed 1 June 2015).
Medvedev, Aleksandr, ‘Shest’ monologov o dzhaze’, Sovetskaia muzyka, 8 (1984), 50–9.
Medvedev, Aleksandr and Ol’ga Medvedeva (eds.), Sovetskii dzhaz. Problemy. Sobytiia.
Mastera. Sbornik statei (Moscow: Sovetskii kompozitor, 1987).
Meinecke, Friedrich, Die deutsche Katastrophe: Betrachtungen und Erinnerungen
(Wiesbaden: Brackhaus, 1946).
Meintjes, Louise, ‘Paul Simon’s Graceland, South Africa, and the Mediation of Musical
Meaning’, Ethnomusicology, 34/1 (Winter 1990), 37–73.
Merwe, Peter van der, Roots of the Classical: The Popular Origins of Western Music (Oxford
and New York: Oxford University Press, 2004).
Metzer, David, ‘The League of Composers: The Initial Years’, American Music, 15/1
(1997), 45–69.
Meyer, Dominique, Szenenwechsel Wiener Staatsoper, ed. Michaela Schlögl (Vienna:
Styria, 2010).
Meyer, Stephen C., Carl Maria von Weber and the Search for a German Opera (Indianapolis:
Migne, Jacques Paul, Patrologiae Cursus Completus, vol. 176 (Paris: 1880).
Migne, Jacques Paul, Patrologiae Cursus Completus Series Latina, 217 vols. (Paris: 1844–5),
with 4 vols. of indices (Paris: 1862–4).
Mikheeva, Liudmila (ed.), Pamiati I. I. Sollertinskogo: Vospominaniia, materialy, issledova-
niia, 2nd expanded ed. (Leningrad and Moscow: Sovetskii kompozitor, 1978).
Mila, Massimo, ‘La linea Nono (a proposito de Il canto sospeso)’, La Rassegna musicale, 4
(1960), 297–311.
Miles, Paul, ‘Beethoven Sketches’, Gramophone (29 October 1929), 12.
Miller, Edward, Thoughts on the Present Performance of Psalmody in the Established Church of
England (London, 1791).
Millington, Barry and Stewart Spencer (eds.), Wagner in Performance (New Haven: Yale
Minor, Ryan, Choral Fantasies: Music, Festivity and Nationhood (Cambridge: Cambridge
Mitchell, Tony, ‘Mixing Pop and Politics: Rock Music in Czechoslovakia Before and
After the Velvet Revolution’, Popular Music, 11/2 (1992), 187–203.
Molnár, Szabolcs, ‘“Mesterszóknak okos formálása”: Zenei terminológia, vita és
karaktergyilkosság, 1831–1832’, Magyar zene, 53/3 (2015), 263–76.
Mongrédien, Jean, La Musique en France, des lumières au romantisme, 1789–1830 (Paris:
Flammarion, 1986); English version, French Music from the Enlightenment to
Romanticism, 1789–1830, trans. Sylvain Frémaux (Portland: Amadeus, 1996).
Mongrédien, Jean, ‘Les Premiers Exercices publics d’élèves (1800–1815) d’après la
presse contemporaine’, in Bongrain, Gerard and Coudroy-Saghai (eds.), Le
Conservatoire de Paris.
Monson, Craig A., ‘The Council of Trent Revisited’, Journal of the American Musicological
Society, 55 (2002), 1–37.
Monson, Karen, ‘Byline Monson: Music Critic’, in Zaimont, Overhauser and Gottlieb
(eds.), The Musical Woman: An International Perspective, vol. I I .
Montale, Eugenio, Prime alla Scala (Milan: Mondadori, 1981).
Bibliography 757
Monteleone, Franco, Storia della radio e della televisione in Italia (Venice: Marsilio, 1992).
Montgomery, D. L., ‘The Myth of Organicism: From Bad Science to Great Art’, Musical
Quarterly, 76/1 (1992), 17–66.
Monti, Mauro Casadei Turroni and Cesarino Ruini (eds.), Aspetti del cecilianesimo nella
cultura musicale italiana dell’Ottocento (Vatican City: Libreria Editrice Vaticana, 2004).
Moran, Dominic P., ‘Carpentier’s Stravinsky: Rites and Wrongs’, Bulletin of Spanish
Studies, 79/1 (2002), 81–104.
Moreau, Mário, O Teatro de S. Carlos: Dois séculos de história, 2 vols. (Lisbon: Hugin,
1999).
Moreda Rodríguez, Eva, ‘A Catholic, a Patriot, a Good Modernist: Manuel de Falla and
the Francoist Musical Press’, Hispanic Research Journal, 14/3 (2013), 212–26.
Moreda Rodríguez, Eva, ‘Federico Sopeña: los años formativos’, in Cascudo and
Moreno, Jairo, Musical Representations, Subjects, and Objects: The Construction of Musical
Thought in Zarlino, Descartes, Rameau, and Weber (Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 2004).
Mordey, Delphine, ‘Auber’s Horses: L’Année terrible and Apocalyptic Narratives’, 19th-
Century Music, 30/3 (Spring 2007), 213–29.
Móricz, Klára, Jewish Identities: Nationalism, Racism, and Utopianism in Twentieth-Century
Music (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008).
Morini, Mario, Nandi Ostali and Piero Ostali (eds.), Casa musicale Sonzogno: cronologie,
saggi, testimonianze, vol. I (Milan: Sonzogno, 1995).
Morley, Paul, ‘Secret Machines’, The Telegraph (29 January 2006), 33.
Morley, Thomas, A Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practical Musicke (London: 1597).
Morrison, Bryce, ‘Messiaen: Vingt regards sur l’enfant-Jésus’ in Gramophone (December
2006), 92–3.
Morrison, Simon, ‘“Surely People Who Go Clubbing Don’t Read”: Dispatches from
the Dancefloor and Clubland in Print’, IASPM@Journal, 4/2 (2014), available at iasp
mjournal.net.
Morrison, Simon, ‘Waist-Deep: In the Mire of Russian and Western Debates about
Tchaikovsky’, Times Literary Supplement (1 May 2015), 14–15.
Morrow, Mary Sue, German Music Criticism in the Late Eighteenth Century: Aesthetic Issues
in Instrumental Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
Morrow, Mary Sue, ‘Late Eighteenth-Century Instrumental Music from the
Perspective of the Italian Press’, in Radicchi and Burden (eds.), Florilegium musicae.
Moskowitz, Marc, ‘Mandopop under Siege: Culturally Bound Criticisms of Taiwan’s
Pop Music’, Popular Music, 28/1 (2009), 69–83.
Motte, Dean de la and Jeannene M. Przyblyski (eds.), Making the News: Modernity and the
Mass Press in Nineteenth-Century France (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press,
1999).
Motteux, Peter, Love’s Triumph. An Opera (London, 1708).
Moya Martínez, María del Valle de, ‘Aproximación a la crítica musical madrileña del
último tercio del siglo X I X ’, Ensayos: Revista de la Facultad de Educación de Albacete, 12
(1997), 163–71.
Muller, Stephanus J. v. Z., ‘Music Criticism and Adorno’, International Review of the
Aesthetics and Sociology of Music (2005), 101–16.
Muradeli, Vano, ‘Za narodnost’ muzyki’, Pravda (17 December 1962), 3.
758 Bibliography
Murialdi, Paolo, Storia del giornalismo in Italia. Dalle gazzette a Internet (Bologna: Il
Mulino, 1996).
Murphy, Kerry, Hector Berlioz and the Development of French Music Criticism (Ann Arbor:
UMI Research Press, 1988).
Murphy, Michael, ‘The Musical Press in Nineteenth-Century Ireland’, in Murphy and
Smaczny (eds.), Music in Nineteenth-Century Ireland.
Murphy, Michael and Jan Smaczny (eds.), Music in Nineteenth-Century Ireland (Dublin:
Four Courts Press, 2007).
Murray, Albert, Stomping the Blues (New York: McGraw–Hill, 1976).
Musgrave, Michael, ‘Years of Transition: Brahms and Vienna 1862–1875’, in Musgrave
(ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Brahms.
Musgrave, Michael (ed.), George Grove, Music and Victorian Culture (Basingstoke:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
Musgrave, Michael (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Brahms (Cambridge: Cambridge
Myers, Robert Manson, Handel’s Messiah: A Touchstone of Taste (New York: Macmillan,
1948).
Nadel, Arno, ‘Jüdische Musik’, Der Jude, 7/4 (April 1923), 223–36.
Nägeli, Hans Georg, ‘Versuch einer Norm für die Recensenten der Musikalischen
Zeitung’, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 5/14 (29 December 1802), 225–37 and 5/
16 (12 January 1803), 265–74.
Nagore, María, Leticia Sánchez de Andrés and Elena Torres (eds.), Música y cultura en la
Edad de Plata 1915–1939 (Madrid: ICCMU, 2009).
Nattiez, Jean-Jacques (ed.), Enciclopedia della Musica, I , Il Novecento (Turin: Einaudi,
2001).
Nauhaus, Gerd (ed.), Schumann-Studien V (Cologne: Studio, 1996).
Nayder, Lillian, The Other Dickens: A Life of Catherine Hogarth (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 2011).
Negus, Keith, Popular Music in Theory: An Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press,
1996).
Negus, Keith, Producing Pop: Culture and Conflict in the Popular Music Industry (London:
Arnold, 1992).
Nelson, Amy, Music for the Revolution: Musicians and Power in Early Soviet Russia
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004).
Nemes, Robert, The Once and Future Budapest (Dekalb: Northern Illinois University
Press, 2005).
Nemes, Robert, ‘The Politics of the Dance Floor: Civil Society and Culture in
Nineteenth-Century Hungary’, Slavic Review, 60/4 (2001), 802–23.
Neri de Caso, Leopoldo, ‘Regino Sainz de la Maza, crítico musical en ABC
(1939–1952)’, in Suárez-Pajares (ed.), Joaquín Rodrigo.
Nery, Rui Vieira and Paulo Ferreira de Castro, História da música (Sínteses da cultura
portuguesa) (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, Casa da Moeda, 1991).
Nest’eva, Marina, Valentin Sil’vestrov: Muzyka – eto penie mira o samom sebe . . . Sokrovenny
razgovory i vzgliady so storony: Besedy, stat’i, pis’ma (Kiev: n.p., 2004).
Nest’eva, Marina and Yurii Fortunatov, ‘Molodezh’ ishchet, somnevaetsia, nakhodit’,
Sovetskaia muzyka, 3 (1966), 20.
Nest’ev, Izrail’, ‘S pozitsii “kholodnoi voiny”’, Sovetskaia muzyka, 10 (1963), 125–30.
Bibliography 759
Neveling, Patrick and Carsten Wergin, ‘Projects of Scale-Making: New Perspectives for
the Anthropology of Tourism’, Etnográfica, 13/2 (2009), 315–42.
Newark, Cormac, Opera in the Novel from Balzac to Proust (Cambridge: Cambridge
Newcombe, Anthony, The Madrigal at Ferrara 1579–1597 (Princeton: Princeton
Newman, Ernest, A Musical Critic’s Holiday (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1925).
Newman, Ernest, ‘A Physiology of Criticism’, Sunday Times (20 January 1929), 7
(10 February 1929), 7 and (17 February 1929), 7.
Newman, Ernest, ‘A Postscript to “A Musical Critic’s Holiday”’, Musical Times, 66/992
(1 October 1925), 881–4, 66/993 (1 November 1925), 977–81 and 66/994
(1 December 1925), 1076–9.
Newman, Ernest, ‘A School for Musical Critics’, Musical Times (1 March 1911), 16–17.
Newman, Ernest, Fifty Songs by Hugo Wolf (Boston: Oliver Ditson, 1909).
Newman, Ernest, Hugo Wolf (London: Methuen, 1907).
Newman, Ernest, Musical Studies (London and New York: Bodley Head/John Lane,
1905).
Newman, Ernest, ‘The Mad World of the Diskers [sic]’, Sunday Times (22 June 1958), 10.
Newman, Ernest, The Piano-Player and Its Music (London: Grant Richards, 1920).
Newman, Ernest, ‘The Ultimate Things’, Sunday Times (6 July 1958), 8.
Newman, Ernest, The Unconscious Beethoven: An Essay in Musical Psychology (New York:
Alfred A. Knopf, 1927).
Newte, John, The Lawfulness and Use of Organs in the Christian Church (London, 1696).
Nicholas, Jeremy, ‘Joyce Hatto: Piano Dreams’, Gramophone (March 2006), 67.
Nicolai, Friedrich, Verlegerbriefe, ed. Bernhard Fabian and Marie-Luise Spieckermann
(Berlin: Nicolai, 1988).
Nicolodi, Fiamma, ‘Opera Production from Italian Unification to the Present’, in
Bianconi and Pestelli (eds.), Opera Production and Its Resources.
Nicolodi, Fiamma, ‘Su alcune querelles dei compositori-critici del Novecento’, in
Capra and Nicolodi (eds.), La critica musicale in Italia nella prima metà del
Novecento.
Nicolodi, Fiamma (ed.), Musica italiana del primo Novecento: La Generazione dell’Ottanta
(Florence: Oslchki, 1981).
Nigito, Alexandra, ‘Le lettere di Filippo Silva al principe Giovanni Andrea III Doria
Landi (1684–1723)’, in Giron-Panel and Goulet (eds.), La musique à Rome au XVIIe
siècle.
Nipperdey, Thomas, Deutsche Geschichte, Vol. 1: 1800–1866: Bürgerwelt und starker Staat,
3 vols. (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1998).
Noiray, Michel, ‘Hippolyte et Castor travestis: Rameau à l’opéra-comique’, in La Gorce,
Jean-Philippe Rameau.
Norman, Larry F., The Shock of the Ancient: Literature and History in Early Modern France
North, John S. (ed.), The Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and Periodicals,
1800–1900 (Waterloo, Ontario: North Waterloo Academic Press), available at www
.victorianperiodicals.com/series3.
North, Michael, ‘Material Delight and the Joy of Living’: Cultural Consumption in the Age of
Enlightenment in Germany, trans. Pamela Selwyn (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).
760 Bibliography
Notley, Margaret, Lateness and Brahms: Music and Culture in the Twilight of Viennese
Liberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
Nováček, Zdenko and Katharína Horváthová (eds.), Hudobná kritika v Bratislave:
1920–1980 [Music Criticism in Bratislava: 1920–1980] (Bratislava: Martin, 1980).
Novak, David, ‘The Sublime Frequencies of New Old Media’, Public Culture, 23/3
(2011), 603–34.
Nunes, Pedro, ‘Good Samaritans and Oblivious Cheerleaders: Ideologies of Portuguese
Music Journalists Towards Portuguese Music’, Popular Music, 29/1 (2010), 41–59.
Odoevskiĭ, Vladimir, Muzykal’no-literaturnoe nasledie (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe muzy-
kal’noe izdatel’stvo, 1956).
Odoevsky, Vladimir, ‘Sebastian Bach’, in Russian Nights, trans. Olga Koshansky-
Olienikov and Ralph E. Matlaw (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1997).
Oja, Carol (ed.), Stravinsky in Modern Music (1924–1946) (New York: Da Capo Press,
1982).
Oliver, Alfred Richard, The Encyclopedists as Critics of Music (New York: Columbia
Olsen, Per Kristian, Asbjørn Bakke and Sigrid Hvidsten, Norsk rocks historie: fra Rocke-
Pelle til Hank von Helvete (Oslo: Cappelen Damm, 2009).
Orlova, Alexandra (ed.), Musorgsky Remembered, trans. Véronique Zaytzeff and
Frederick Morrison (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991).
Ortega y Gasset, José, La deshumanización del arte (Madrid: Revista de Occidente, 1925).
Ortega y Gasset, José, ‘Musicalia’, El sol (8 March 1921), 3.
Ortner, Sherry B., Not Hollywood: Independent Film at the Twilight of the American Dream
(Durham: Duke University Press, 2013).
Ortuno, Daniel, ‘Liszt’s Heirs: The New German School after 1861’, paper given at the
Eighteenth Biennial International Conference on Nineteenth-Century Music, University of
Toronto (18 June 2014).
Orzoff, Andrea, Battle for the Castle: The Myth of Czechoslovakia in Europe, 1914–1948
Osterhammel, Jürgen, The Transformation of the World: A Global History of the Nineteenth
Century, trans. Patrick Camiller (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press,
2014).
Ottosen, Rune, Helge Østbye and Lars Arve Røssland, Norsk pressehistorie (Oslo:
Samlaget, 2012).
Oumano, Elena, ‘Island Targets R&B Market with New Album from Kidjo’, Billboard
(23 May 1998).
[Owen, James], Church-Pageantry Display’d: or, Organ-Worship Arraign’d and Condemn’d
(London, 1700).
Padua, Pat, ‘Pic of the Week: Critical Edition’, In the Music: Performing Arts Blog, Library
of Congress (2 May 2012), available at blogs.loc.gov (accessed 1 August 2018).
Page, Christopher, ‘Reading and Reminiscence: Tinctoris on the Beauty of Music’,
Journal of the American Musicological Society, 49 (1996), 1–31.
Page, Christopher, The Christian West and Its Singers: The First Thousand Years, 2nd
corrected ed. (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2012).
Page, Tim, ‘Critical Condition: Revisiting Composer Virgil Thomson’s Masterful
Prose’, NPR Music (15 September 2016), available at www.npr.org (accessed
1 August 2018).
Bibliography 761
Painter, Karen, ‘Polyphony and Racial Identity: Schoenberg, Heinrich Berl, and
Richard Eichenauer’, Music and Politics, 5/2 (2011), available at http://dx.doi:10
.3998/mp.9460447.0005.203.
Painter, Karen, ‘Symphonic Ambitions, Operatic Redemption: Mathis der Maler and
Palestrina in the Third Reich’, Musical Quarterly, 85/1 (2001), 117–66.
Painter, Karen, Symphonic Aspirations: German Music and Politics, 1900–1945 (Cambridge:
Palacios, María, ‘César M. Arconada, el crítico progresista de una vanguardia musical
inexistente’, in Cascudo and Palacios (eds.), Los señores de la crítica.
Palacios, María, ‘El Grupo de los Ocho bajo el prisma de Adolfo Salazar’, in Nagore,
Sánchez de Andrés and Torres (eds.), Música y cultura en la Edad de Plata.
Palacios, María, La renovación musical en Madrid durante la dictadura de Primo de Rivera: El
Grupo de los Ocho (1923–1931) (Madrid: Sociedad Española de Musicología, 2008).
Palisca, Claude V., Humanism in Italian Renaissance Musical Thought (New Haven: Yale
Palisca, Claude V., Studies in the History of Italian Music and Music Theory (Oxford:
Clarendon, 1994).
Palisca, Claude V., The Florentine Camerata: Documentary Studies and Translations (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1989).
Palisca, Claude V. (ed.), Hucbald, Guido, and John on Music: Three Medieval Treatises, trans.
Warren Babb (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978).
Palkovič, Ján, ‘Hudobná kritika v Slovenských pohľadoch v rokoch 1918–1948’ [Music
Criticism in Slovenské pohľady from the Years 1918–1948], in Nováček and
Horváthová (eds.), Hudobná kritika v Bratislave.
Panassié, Hugues, Le Jazz hot (Paris: Éditions R. A. Corrêa, 1934).
Pándi, Marianne, Száz esztendő magyar zenekritikája [100 Years of Hungarian Music
Criticism] (Budapest: Zeneműkiadó, 1967).
Panteleeva, Olga, ‘Formation of Russian Musicology from Sacchetti to Asafyev,
1885–1931’, unpublished PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley
(2015).
Paperno, Irina, Chernyshevsky and the Age of Realism: A Study in the Semiotics of Behavior
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988).
Parker, Roger, ‘“Classical” Music in Milan during Verdi’s Formative Years’, Studi
musicali, 13/2 (1984), 259–73.
Parker, Roger and Mary Ann Smart (eds.), Reading Critics Reading: Opera and Ballet
Criticism in France from the Revolution to 1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Parkinson Zamora, Lois and Wendy B. Faris (eds.), Magical Realism: Theory, History,
Community (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1995).
[Parmenter, Ross] R. P., ‘Narrative Music of Critic Played’, New York Times (17 January
1954), 82.
Parralejo, Francisco, ‘Jóvenes y selectos: Salazar y Ortega en el entorno europeo de su
generación (1914–1936)’, in Cascudo and Palacios (eds.), Los señores de la crítica.
Parthey, Gustav, Die Mitarbeiter an Friedrich Nicolai’s Allgemeiner Deutscher Bibliothek
nach ihren Namen und Zeichen in zwei Registern geordnet: ein Beitrag zur deutschen
Literaturgeschichte (Berlin, 1842).
Pasler, Jann, ‘Building a Public for Orchestral Music: Les Concerts Colonne’, in
Bödeker, Veit and Werner (eds.), Le Concert et son public.
762 Bibliography
Pasler, Jann, Composing the Citizen: Music as Public Utility in Third Republic France
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2009).
Pasler, Jann, ‘Deconstructing d’Indy, or, The Problem of a Composer’s Reputation’,
19th-Century Music, 30/3 (Spring 2007), 230–56.
Pasler, Jann, ‘Paris: Conflicting Notions of Progress’, in Samson (ed.), The Late
Romantic Era.
Pasler, Jann, ‘Pelléas and Power: Forces behind the Reception of Debussy’s Opera’,
19th-Century Music, 10/3 (Spring 1987), 243–64.
Pečman, Rudolf, Vladimír Helfert (Brno: Universitas Masarykiana, 2003).
Pederson, Sanna, ‘Defining the Term “Absolute Music” Historically’, Music & Letters,
90 (May 2009), 240–62.
Pederson, Sanna, ‘Enlightened and Romantic German Music Criticism, 1800–1850’,
unpublished PhD dissertation, University of Pennsylvania (1995).
Pederson, Sanna, ‘Romantic Music under Siege in 1848’, in Bent (ed.), Music Theory in
the Age of Romanticism.
Pedrell, Felipe, Por nuestra música (Barcelona: Heinrich & Co., 1891).
Pérez Zalduondo, Gemma, ‘Continuidades y rupturas en la música española durante el
primer franquismo’, in Javier Suárez-Pajares (ed.), Joaquín Rodrigo.
Perrey, Beate (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Schumann (Cambridge: Cambridge
Perti, Giuseppe Antonio, Integrale della musica sacra per Ferdinando de’ Medici, principe di
Toscana, ed. Francesco Lora, 2 vols. (Bologna: Ut Orpheus, 2010–11).
Pesce, Dolores (ed. and trans.), Guido d’Arezzo’s Regule Rithmice, Prologus in
Antiphonarium and Epistola ad Michahelem: A Critical Text and Translation,
Musicological Studies 73 (Ottawa: Institute of Mediaeval Music, 1999).
Pestalozza, Luigi (ed.), La Rassegna musicale: Antologia (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1966).
Pestelli, Giorgio, ‘La Generazione dell’Ottanta e la resistibile ascesa della musicologia
italiana’, in Nicolodi (ed.), Musica italiana del primo Novecento.
Peter, Emanuel, Geselligkeiten: Literatur, Gruppenbildung und kultureller Wandel im 18.
Jahrhundert (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1999).
Peterson, Linda H., ‘Writing for Periodicals’, in King, Easley and Morton (eds.), The
Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-Century British Periodicals and Newspapers.
Peterson, Richard A. and Andy Bennett, ‘Introducing Musical Scenes’, in Bennett and
Peterson (eds.), Music Scenes.
Pethő, Csilla, ‘Spieln Zigeuner Lustig Liedl: A magyar szórakoztató zene es
a cigányzenészek külföldi recepciója a 19. században’, Magyar zene, 40/1 (2002),
73–80.
Petrassi, Goffredo, Scritti e interviste, ed. Raffaele Pozzi (Milan: Suvini Zerboni,
2009).
Petridis, Alexis, ‘Their Darling Clementine: Mercury Prize Judges Opt for Obscure
Artist’, Guardian Music Blog, guardian.com (20 November 2015).
Petrov, N., ‘Opera i novyi zritel’ [Opera and Its New Audience], Artist-muzykant, 2
(1918), 5, quoted in Marina Frolova-Walker and Jonathan Walker (eds.), Music and
Soviet Power, 1917–1932 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2012).
Petsch, Barbara, ‘Mortier: “Ich bin Parsifal und Sisyphos!”’, Die Presse (27 April 2013).
Peyser, Joan, ‘A Power Broker Who Helped Shape American Music’, New York Times
(25 December 1983), H17, 20.
Bibliography 763
Phan, Ming Yen, ‘Music in Empire: Western Music in Nineteenth-Century Singapore

through a Study of Selected Texts’, unpublished MA Dissertation, National Institute
of Education (2004).
Piana, Roman, ‘La Diversification du discours critique après le Second Empire: la
rubrique de “soirée”’, in Bury and Laplace-Claverie (eds.), Le Miel et le fiel.
Picard, Jean-François, ‘Tableaux des tirages de la presse nationale de 1803 à 1944’, in
Albert, Feyel and Picard (eds.), Documents pour l‘histoire de la presse nationale.
Piekut, Benjamin, ‘Actor-Networks in Music History: Clarifications and Critiques’,
Twentieth-Century Music, 11/2 (September 2014), 191–215.
Pinzauti, Leonardo (ed.), ‘Ma è proprio vero che è morta la critica musicale sui
giornali?’, Nuova rivista musicale italiana, 29/1 (1995), 49–60.
Piquer Sanclemente, Ruth, ‘El semanario España (1915–1924) y la crítica musical:
Novecentismo y renovación’, in Ramos López (ed.), Discursos y prácticas musicales
nacionalistas.
Pires, Daniel, Dicionário da imprensa periódica literária portuguesa do século X X , 2 vols.
(Lisbon: Grifo, 1996, 1999/2000).
Pires, Matthew, ‘The Popular Music Press’, in Dauncey and Cannon (eds.), Popular
Music in France from Chanson to Techno.
Pisk, Paul Amadeus, ‘Neue Musik dem neuen Menschen’, Kunst und Volk, 4/1
(September 1929), 8.
Pistone, Danièle (ed.), Recherches sur la presse musicale française (Paris: Université Paris-
Sorbonne, 2011).
P. L., ‘Gestern beim Musikfest: Pioniere von gestern – heute Meister: Hermann
Scherchen dirigierte die Wiener Symphoniker’, Wiener Kurier (11 April 1951);
cited in Joy H. Calico, Arnold Schoenberg’s ‘A Survivor from Warsaw’ in Postwar
Europe (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press,
2014).
Plantinga, Leon B., Schumann as Critic (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967).
Playford, John, A Brief Introduction to the Skill of Musick . . . The Fourth Edition (London,
1664).
Pleasants, Henry, Death of a Music? The Decline of the European Tradition and the Rise of Jazz
(London: Victor Gollancz, 1961).
Pleasants, Henry, Serious Music – and All That Jazz! (London: Victor Gollancz, 1969).
Pleasants, Henry, The Agony of Modern Music (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955).
Poole, H. Edmund, Music, Men, and Manners in France and Italy 1770 (London:
Eulenburg, 1974).
Pörnbacher, Mechthild and David Hiley (eds.), Balther von Säckingen, Bischof von Speyer,
Historia sancti Fridolini (ca. 970), Musicological Studies L X V /26 (Lions Bay, Canada:
Institute of Mediaeval Music, 2016).
Porter, Andrew, Music of Three Seasons 1974–1977 (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux,
1978).
Porter, Cecelia Hopkins, The Rhine as Musical Metaphor: Cultural Identity in German
Romantic Music (Cincinnati: Northeastern University Press, 1996).
Porter, James, ‘Bartók and Janáček: Ideological Convergence and Critical Value’,
Portis, Larry, French Frenzies: A Social History of Pop Music in France (College Station:
Virtualbookworm.com, 2004).
764 Bibliography
Portuondo, José Antonio, ‘Prólogo’ to Alejo Carpentier, Crónicas, vol. 1 (Havana:

Editorial Arte y Literatura, 1975).
Pospíšilová, Jana and Jana Nosková (eds.), Od lidové písně k evropské etnologii: 100 let
Etnologického ústavu Akademie věd České republiky [From Folk Song to European
Ethnology: 100 Years of the Ethnological Institute of the Academy of Sciences of
the Czech Republic] (Brno: Etnologický ústav AV ČR, 2006).
Potter, Pamela, Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to
the End of Hitler’s Reich (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998).
Potter, Pamela M., ‘What Is “Nazi Music?”’, Musical Quarterly, 88/3 (2005), 428–55.
Poultney, David, ‘Alessandro Scarlatti and the Transformation of Oratorio’, Musical
Quarterly, 59 (1973), 584–601.
Powers, Devon, Writing the Record: The Village Voice and the Birth of Rock Criticism
(Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013).
Pozzi, Raffaele (chair), Critica musicale e musicologia: quale rapporto? Società e Rivista
italiana di musicologia e Associazione nazionale critici musicali, Latina, Palazzo della
Cultura (27 September 1991).
Pozzi, Raffaele, ‘Il mito dell’antico tra restaurazione e modernità. Su alcune
intonazioni dell’Ave Maria e del Tantum Ergo nel secondo Ottocento’, in
Monti and Ruini (eds.), Aspetti del cecilianesimo nella cultura musicale italiana
dell’Ottocento.
Pozzi, Raffaele, ‘L’ideologia neoclassica’, in Nattiez (ed.), Enciclopedia della Musica, I : Il
Novecento.
Pozzi, Raffaele, ‘L’immagine ottocentesca del Palestrina nel rapporto tra Liszt e il
movimento ceciliano’, in Bianchi and Rostirolla (eds.), Atti del I I Convegno internazio-
nale di studi palestriniani.
Pozzi, Raffaele, ‘Remembering C’è musica e musica di Luciano Berio: considerazioni
attuali su televisione e musica d’oggi’, in La musica negli occhi, International Congress, Il
saggiatore musicale, Bologna (22–24 October 2010).
Pozzi, Raffaele, ‘Jeunesse et indépendance: Alfredo Casella e la Société Musicale
Indépendante’, Musica e Storia, 4 (1996), 325–48.
P. P., ‘A música alemã e a música latina’, A arte musical, 1/33 (21 July 1874), 1–2.
Prados y López, Manuel, Ética y estética del periodismo español (Madrid: Espasa Calpe,
1943).
Praetorius, Michael, Syntagmatis Musici . . . Tomus Secundus De Organographia
(Wolfenbüttel, 1619).
Presussner, Eberhard, Die musikalischen Reisen des Herrn von Uffenbach (Kassel and Basle:
Bärenreiter, 1949).
Price, Simon, ‘Cranes, ICA, London’, Melody Maker (7 July 1990), Liverpool Hope
University Popular Music Resources Centre, Press Clipping.
Prieberg, Fred, Handbuch Deutsche Musiker 1933–45, 2nd ed. (Auprès de Zombry: Fred
K. Prieberg, 2009).
Priest, Deborah (ed.), Louis Laloy (1874–1944) on Debussy, Ravel, and Stravinsky
Pringsheim, Klaus, ‘Der Tonsetzer Adrian Leverkühn: Ein Musiker über Thomas
Manns Roman’, Der Monat, 4 (1949), 84–91.
Printz, Wolfgang Caspar, Phrynis Mitilenaeus (Quedlinburg, 1676–7; revised ed.,
Dresden, 1696).
Bibliography 765
Prinz, Otto, et al. (eds.), Mittellateinisches Wörterbuch, vol. I I , C (Munich: Bayerische

Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1999).
Prior, Nick, ‘Music Consumption as an Assemblage’, Creativity and Technology
Workshop, University of Cambridge (5 April 2015).
Pritchard, Brian W., ‘Caldara, Antonio’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online,
Procházková, Jarmila, ‘Janáčkova koncepce činnosti Pracovního výboru pro českou
národní píseň na Moravě a ve Slezsku’ [Janáček’s Concept for the Activities of the
Organizational Committee for Czech Folk Song’], in Pospíšilová and Nosková (eds.),
Od lidové písně k evropské etnologii.
Proust, Marcel, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 2: Within a Budding Grove, trans. C. K. Scott
Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin (London: Vintage, 1996).
Proust, Marcel, In Search of Lost Time, Vol. 5: The Captive, trans. C. K. Scott Moncrieff
and Terence Kilmartin; revised D. J. Enright (London: Vintage, 1996).
Prynne, William, Histrio-Mastix: The Players Scourge, or, Actors Tragaedie (London, 1633).
Purkis, Charlotte, ‘“A Theme with Many Variations”: Gertrude Hudson, Musical
Criticism, and Turn-of-the-Century Periodical Culture', in Faith Binckes and
Carey Snyder (eds.), Women, Periodical and Print Culture in Britain, 1890s–1920: The
Modernist Period (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019).
Quadrio, Francesco Saverio, Della poesia italiana libri due di Giuseppe Maria Andrucci
(Venice: Cristoforo Zane, 1734).
Quah, Sy Ren, ‘Imagining Malaya, Practising Multiculturalism: The Malayan
Consciousness of Singapore Chinese Intellectuals in the 1950s’, trans. Eng Hao
Teo, Inter-Asia Cultural Studies, 16/1 (2015), 96–112.
Quantz, Johann Joachim, On Playing the Flute, trans. Edward R. Reilly (London: Faber,
1966).
Queirós, José Maria Eça de, As farpas. Crónica mensal da política, das letras e dos costumes
(Cascais: Principia, 2004).
Queirós, José Maria Eça de, ‘Sinfonia de abertura’, ‘O Macbeth’, ‘Mefistófeles’, Textos de
imprensa I (da Gazeta de Portugal) (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional, Casa da Moeda, 2004).
Quenoy, Paul du, Wagner and the French Muse: Music, Society, and Nation in Modern France
(Bethesda: Academia Press, 2011).
Quesney, Cécile, ‘Compositeurs français à l’heure allemande (1940–1944): Le cas de
Marcel Delannoy’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Université Paris-Sorbonne
/Université de Montréal (2014).
Quesney, Cécile, ‘Les Revues d’après-guerre: notes sur Contrepoints et Polyphonie’, in
Feneyrou and Poirier (eds.), De la Libération au Domaine musical.
Quintilianus, Marcus Fabius, Institutio oratoria. Edition by Harold Edgeworth Butler in
the Perseus Digital Library, available at www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/collections
Quirk, Tim and Jason Toynbee, ‘Going through the Motions: Popular Music
Performance in Journalism and in Academic Discourse’, Popular Music, 24/3 (2005),
399–413.
Quitslund, Beth, The Reformation in Rhyme: Sternhold, Hopkins and the English Metrical
Psalter, 1547–1603 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).
Qvamme, Børre, Det musikalske Lyceum og konsertlivet i Christiania 1810–1838 (Oslo:
Solum, 2002).
766 Bibliography
Radano, Ronald and Philip Bohlman (eds.), Music and the Racial Imagination (Chicago:
Rademacher, Jörg W. (ed.), Modernism and the Individual Talent: Re-Canonizing Ford
Madox Ford (Hueffer) (Münster: LIT, 2002).
Radicchi, Patrizia and Michael Burden (eds.), Florilegium musicae: studi in onore di Carolyn
Gianturco, 2 vols. (Pisa: ETS, 2004).
Rae, Caroline, ‘Forging Identities: Latin Americans in Paris and the Musical
Interactions of Miguel Angel Asturias and Alejo Carpentier’, in Huebner and
Lazzaro (eds.), Artistic Migration and Identity.
Rae, Caroline, ‘From a Foreign Correspondent: The Parisian Chronicles of Alejo
Carpentier’, in Kelly and Moore (eds.), Music Criticism in France 1918–1939.
Rae, Caroline, ‘In Havana and Paris: The Musical Activities of Alejo Carpentier’, Music
& Letters, 89 (August, 2008), 373–95.
Rae, Caroline, ‘The Musical Collaborations of Alejo Carpentier: Afro-Cubanism and
the Quest for Spiritual Renewal’, Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 84/7 (November 2007),
905–29.
Rafael, Gina Guedes and Manuela Santos (eds.), Jornais e revistas portugueses do século X I X ,
2 vols. (Lisbon: Biblioteca Nacional, 2002).
Ralph, Barnaby, ‘Comparative Aesthetic Thought in Early Eighteenth-Century
England’, in Mackinlay, Collins and Owens (eds.), Aesthetics and Experience in
Musical Performance.
Ramaut, Alban (ed.), Le Naturalisme sur la scène lyrique (Saint-Étienne: Publications de
l’Université de Saint-Étienne, 2004).
Ramnarine, Tina K. (ed.) Global Perspectives on Orchestras: Collective Creativity and Social
Agency (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018).
Ramos López, Pilar (ed.), Discursos y prácticas musicales nacionalistas (1900–1970)
(Logroño: Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de La Rioja, 2012).
Ramos, Manuel, A música portuguesa (Porto: Imprensa Portuguesa, 1892).
Ramsey, Jr, Frederic and Charles Edward Smith (eds.), Jazzmen: The Story of Hot Jazz Told
in the Lives of the Men Who Created It (London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1957; first
published New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1939).
Ravel, Jeffrey S., The Contested Parterre: Public Theatre and French Political Culture,
1680–1791 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999)
Ray, Robert B., ‘Critical Senility vs Overcomprehension: Rock Criticism and the
Lesson of the Avant-Garde’, in Jones (ed.), Pop Music and the Press.
Reade, A. Arthur, Literary Success: A Guide to Practical Journalism (London: Wyman &
Sons, 1885).
Rebello, Luís Francisco, ‘Jornais e revistas de teatro em Portugal’, Sinais de cena, 1–2
(June–December 2004), 69–71, 56–8.
Reed, Thomas Allen, The Reporter’s Guide (London: Pitman, 1869).
Rehding, Alexander, ‘On the Quest for the Origins of Music in Germany circa 1900’,
Journal of the American Musicological Society, 53 (Summer 2000), 345–85.
Reibel, Emmanuel, L’Écriture de la critique musicale au temps de Berlioz (Paris: Honoré
Champion, 2005).
Reich, Nancy B., Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman, revised ed. (Ithaca and
London: Cornell University Press, 2001).
Bibliography 767
Reichardt, Johann Friedrich, Briefe eines aufmerksamen Reisenden die Musik betreffend . . .
Zweyter Theil (Frankfurt and Breslau, 1776).
Reitan, Lorentz and Inger Bentzon, Harald Sæverud: (1897–1992): mannen, musikken og
mytene (Oslo: Forum/Aschehoug, 1997).
Renan, Ernest, La Réforme intellectuelle et morale (Paris: Michel Lévy, 1871).
Reyes, Francis, ‘A Caffeine Boost’, Bandwagon.asia, available at editorial.bandwagon.sg
/a-caffeine-boost-of-indie-music-jam-88–3-s-fresh-filter-live-at-satchmi (accessed
1 June 2015).
Reynolds, Simon, ‘Fanzines: The Lost Movement’, Monitor, 1 (1984).
Rice, Timothy, May It Fill Your Soul: Experiencing Bulgarian Music (Chicago: University of
Rich, Alan, So I’ve Heard: Notes of a Migratory Music Critic (Pompton Plains: Amadeus
Press, 2006).
Ridenour, Robert C., Nationalism, Modernism, and Personal Rivalry in Nineteenth-Century
Russian Music. Russian Music Studies I (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1981).
Riethmüller, Albrecht, ‘“Is That Not Something for Simplicissimus?!” The Belief in Musical
Superiority’, in Applegate and Potter (eds.), Music and German National Identity.
Riethmüller, Albrecht (ed.), Deutsche Leitkultur Musik: Zur Musikgeschichte nach dem
Holocaust (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, 2006).
Rigolli, Alessandro (ed.), La divulgazione musicale in Italia oggi (Turin: EDT, 2005).
Riley, Matthew, ‘Johann Nikolaus Forkel on the Listening Practices of “Kenner” and
“Liebhaber”’, Music & Letters, 84 (2003), 414–33.
Riley, Matthew, ‘Liberal Critics and Modern Music in the Post–Victorian Age’, in
Matthew Riley (ed.), British Music and Modernism, 1895–1960 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010).
Riley, Matthew, Musical Listening in the German Enlightenment: Attention, Wonder and
Astonishment (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004).
Riley, Matthew (ed.), British Music and Modernism, 1895–1960 (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010).
Riley, William, Parochial Music Corrected. Containing Remarks on the Performance of
Psalmody in Country Churches (London, 1762).
Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolay, My Musical Life, ed. Carl van Vechten, trans. Judah A. Joffe
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1942).
Riskó, Kata, ‘Városi cigányzenekarok hangfelvételei a 20. század elejéről’ [Recordings
of Urban Gypsy Orchestras from the Beginning of the Tentieth Century], Magyar
zene, 52/1 (February 2014), 28–42.
Rivera, Gina, ‘Les filles de l’Opéra in the Early Eighteenth Century’, unpublished PhD
dissertation, Harvard University (2013).
Roberts, John Storm, The Latin Tinge: The Impact of Latin American Music on the United
States, 2nd ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999; first published 1979).
Robertson, John H., ‘Criticism and Science’, North American Review, 209 (1919),
690–6.
Robertson, John H., Essays Toward a Critical Method (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1889).
Robertson, John H., New Essays Towards a Critical Method (London and New York:
Bodley Head/John Lane, 1897).
Robicheau, Paul, ‘Listening to History’, Boston Globe (25 September 1998), §D, 15.
Robinson, Suzanne, ‘“A Ping, Qualified by a Thud”: Music Criticism in Manhattan and the
Case of Cage (1943–58)’, Journal of the Society for American Music, 1/1 (2007), 79–139.
768 Bibliography
Rocha, Clara, Revistas literárias do século X X em Portugal (Lisbon: Imprensa Nacional,

Casa da Moeda, 1985).
Rochlitz, Friedrich, ‘Vorerinnerung’, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 5/14
(29 December 1802), 225–7.
Rockwell, John, All American Music: Composition in the Late Twentieth Century (New York:
Da Capo Press, 1997).
Rockwell, John, Outsider: John Rockwell on the Arts, 1967–2006 (Pompton Plains:
Limelight Editions, 2006).
Rodan, Gary, ‘The Internet and Political Control in Singapore’, Political Science
Quarterly, 113/1 (1998), 63–89.
Rodrigo, Joaquín, ‘Lo que fue para nosotros’, Arriba (7 October 1958), 29.
Rogers, Victoria, The Music of Peggy Glanville-Hicks (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2009).
Rolland, Romain, Jean Christophe à Paris, Vol. 2: La Foire sur la Place (Paris: Ollendorf,
1908).
Romano, Tricia, ‘Last Rites for the Village Voice, a Bohemian Who Stayed on Too
Long’, New York Times (5 September 2018), available at www.nytimes.com (accessed
1 August 2018).
Rosand, David, ‘Ekphrasis and the Generation of Images’, Arion: A Journal of Humanities
and the Classics, 1 (1990), 61–105.
Rose, Michael, Berlioz Remembered (London: Faber and Faber, 2001).
Rose, Stephen, ‘The Contest of Reason versus the Senses: Steffani’s Quanta certezza and
German Musical Thought’, in Kaufold, Strohmann and Timms (eds.), Agostino
Steffani.
Rose, Stephen, ‘The Musical Map of Europe, c. 1700’, in Keefe (ed.), The Cambridge
History of Eighteenth-Century Music.
Rose, Stephen, The Musician in Literature in the Age of Bach (Cambridge: Cambridge
Rosow, Lois, ‘Lully’s Armide at the Paris Opéra: A Performance History, 1686–1766’,
unpublished PhD dissertation, Brandeis University (1981).
Ross, Alex, ‘The Fate of the Critic in the Clickbait Age’, New Yorker (13 March 2017),
available at www.newyorker.com (accessed 1 August 2018).
Rosselli, John, Music and Musicians in Nineteenth-Century Italy (London: Batsford,
1991).
Rosselli, John, The Opera Industry in Italy from Cimarosa to Verdi: The Role of the Impresario
Rostand, Claude, ‘Regard sur la presse musicale’, Carrefour (7 February 1946), 7.
Rothfarb, Lee A., ‘Nineteenth-Century Fortunes of Musical Formalism’, Journal of
Music Theory, 55/2 (2011), 167–220.
Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, ‘Génie’, Dictionnaire de musique (Paris, 1768): English trans.
William Waring, The Complete Dictionary of Music (London, 1779).
Roverud, Lars, Et Blik paa Musikens Tilstand i Norge: med Forslag til dens almindelige
Udbredelse i Landet, ved et Instituts Anlæg i Christiania (Christiania: Self-publishing,
1815).
Roxo, Pedro, ‘Jazz and the Portuguese Dictatorship Before and After the Second
World War: From Moral Panic to Suspicious Acceptance’, in Johnson (ed.), Jazz
and Totalitarianism.
Bibliography 769
Roxo, Pedro and Salwa Castelo-Branco, ‘Jazz, Race, and Politics in Colonial Portugal:
Discourses and Representations’, in Bohlman and Plastino (eds.), Jazz Worlds/World
Jazz.
Rule, Sheila, ‘An African Superstar Sings Out to the World’, New York Times
(5 September 1992), 11.
Rumph, Stephen, Beethoven After Napoleon: Political Romanticism in the Late Works
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004).
Runciman, John F., ‘Musical Criticism and the Critics’, Fortnightly Review, 56 (August
1894), 170–83.
Runciman, John F., ‘The Gentle Art of Musical Criticism’, New Review, 12 (January–
June 1895), 612–24.
Runciman, John F., ‘Women as Musical Critics’, Monthly Musical Record (1 March 1895),
49–50.
Rushton, Julian, ‘The Theory and Practice of Piccinnisme’, Proceedings of the Royal
Musical Association, 98 (1971–2), 31–46.
Rushton, Julian and Manuel Couvreur, ‘La Harpe, Jean François de’, in Sadie and
Tyrrell (eds.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, vol. 10.
Sackville-West, Edward and Desmond Shawe-Taylor, The Record Guide (London:
Collins, 1951).
Sadie, Julie Anne, ‘Parnassus Revisited: The Musical Vantage Point of Titon du Tillet’,
in John Hajdu Heyer (ed.), Jean-Baptiste Lully and the Music of the French Baroque.
Sadie, Stanley, ‘La clemenza di Tito’, The Times (11 February 1975), 7.
Sadie, Stanley, ‘Sound as a Clue to Style’, The Times (17 January 1969), 12.
Sadie, Stanley, ‘The Sound of Authenticity’, The Times (15 June 1974), 11.
Sadie, Stanley and John Tyrrell (eds.), The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians,
2nd ed. (London: Macmillan, 2001).
Saffle, Michael (ed.), Liszt and His World: Proceedings of the International Liszt Conference
Held at Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 20–23 May 1993 (Stuyvesant:
Pendragon Press, 1998).
Safford, Edwin, ‘Critics Must Take on Responsibility to Spur Reform of Music’, Music
Educators Journal, 56/7 (1970), 64–6.
Saint-Mard, Toussaint Rémond de, Réflexions sur l’opéra (The Hague: Jean Neaulme,
1741; facsimile ed., Geneva: Minkoff, 1972).
Saint-Saëns, Camille, Germanophilie (Paris: Dorbon-ainé, 1916).
Sala, Luca (ed.), The Legacy of Richard Wagner: Convergences and Dissonances in Aesthetics
and Reception (Turnhout: Brepols, 2012).
Salaman, Charles Kensington, ‘On Musical Criticism’, Proceedings of the Musical
Association, Second Session (1875–6), 1–15.
Salazar, Adolfo, ‘El estado de la música española al terminar el primer año de la
República’, El sol (1 January 1932), 6.
Salazar, Adolfo, La música contemporánea en España (Madrid: Ediciones La Nave, 1930).
Salazar, Adolfo, ‘Musicología’, El sol (20 February 1934), 5.
Saloman, Ora Frishberg, Listening Well: On Beethoven, Berlioz, and other Music Criticism in
Paris, Boston, and New York, 1764–1890 (New York: Peter Lang, 2009).
Salzman, Eric, ‘Modern Music in Retrospect’, Perspectives on New Music, 2/2 (1964),
14–20.
770 Bibliography
Samaroff Stokowski, Olga, An American Musician’s Story (New York: W. W. Norton,

1939).
Samson, Jim (ed.), The Late Romantic Era: From the Mid-19th Century to World War I . Man
and Music Series (London: Macmillan, 1991).
Samson, Jim, ‘The Great Composer’, in Samson (ed.), The Cambridge History of
Nineteenth-Century Music.
Samson, Jim (ed.), The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music (Cambridge:
Sánchez Cabrera, Maruja, Orquesta Filarmónica de La Habana Memoria 1924–1959
(Havana: Editorial Orbe, 1979).
Sanna, Alberto, ‘Between Composition and Performance: Generic Norms and Poetic
Choices in the Work of Arcangelo Corelli’, in Arcomelo 2013: atti del settimo congresso
internazionale di studi, Fusignano 28–30 novembre 2013 (Lucca: Libreria Musicale
Italiana, 2015).
Sargeant, Winthrop, Jazz: Hot and Hybrid (London: The Jazz Book Club, 1959; first
published New York: E. P. Dutton, 1938).
Sárosi, Bálint, Gypsy Music (Budapest: Corvina, 1978).
Sárosi, Bálint (ed.), A cigányzenekar múltja az egykorú sajtó tükrében, I : 1776–1903 [The past
of the Gypsy orchestra reflected in the press of the time] (Budapest: Nap Kiadó, 2004).
Sárosi, Bálint (ed.), A cigányzenekar múltja az egykorú sajtó tükrében, I I : 1904–1944 [The past
of the Gypsy orchestra reflected in the press of the time] (Budapest: Nap Kiadó, 2012).
Sartori, Claudio, Casa Ricordi: 1808–1958 (Milan: Ricordi, 1988).
Sartori, Claudio, I libretti italiani a stampa dalle origini al 1800, 7 vols. (Cuneo: Bertola
and Locatelli, 1990).
Savenko, Svetlana, ‘Portret khudozhnika v zrelosti’, Sovetskaia muzyka, 9 (1981), 35–46.
Savev, Marc, ‘Deux exemples de presse musicale jeune en France, de 1966 à 1969: Salut
Les Copains et Rock & Folk’, Volume! 3/1 (2004), 5–28.
Savigliano, Marta E., Tango and the Political Economy of Passion (Boulder: Westview Press,
1995).
Savile, Anthony, Kantian Aesthetics Pursued (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press,
1993).
Sayer, Derek, The Coasts of Bohemia: A Czech History (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1998).
Scaife, Nigel, ‘British Music Criticism in a New Era: Studies in Critical Thought,
1894–1945’, DPhil thesis, University of Oxford (1994).
Scales, Rebecca P., Radio and the Politics of Sound in Interwar France, 1921–1939
Scheibe, Johann Adolph, Johann Adolph Scheibens . . . Critischer Musikus. Neue, vermehrte
und verbesserte Auflage (Leipzig, 1745).
Scheibe, Johann Adolph, Über die musikalische Composition. Erster Theil (Leipzig, 1773).
Schenbeck, Lawrence, Racial Uplift and American Music, 1878–1943 (Jackson: University
Press of Mississippi, 2012).
Schick, Robert D., Classical Music Criticism (New York and London: Garland
Publishing, 1996).
Schiller, Nina Glick, Ayşe Çaglar and Thaddeus C. Guldbrandsen, ‘Beyond the Ethnic
Lens: Locality, Globality, and Born-Again Incorporation’, American Ethnologist, 33/4
(2006), 612–33.
Bibliography 771
Schivelbusch, Wolfgang, The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and

Recovery (New York: Picador, 2004).
Schleuning, Peter, Das 18. Jahrhundert: der Bürger erhebt sich (Reinbek bei Hamburg:
Rowohlt, 1984).
Schlögel, Karl, Moscow, 1937, trans. Rodney Livingstone (Malden: Polity, 2012).
Schmelz, Peter J., Such Freedom, If Only Musical: Unofficial Soviet Music during the Thaw
Schmelz, Peter J., ‘Selling Schnittke: Late Soviet Censorship in the Cold War
Marketplace’, in Hall (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Musical Censorship.
Schmid, Marion, ‘À bas Wagner! The French Press Campaign against Wagner during
World War I ’, in Kelly (ed.), French Music, Culture, and National Identity.
Schmidt, Felix and Jürgen Hohmeyer, Interview with Pierre Boulez, ‘Sprengt die
Opernhäuser in die Luft!’, Der Spiegel, 40 (25 September 1967), 166–74.
Schmitt-Thomas, Reinhold, Die Entwicklung der deutschen Konzertkritik im Spiegel der
Leipziger Allgemeinen Musikalischen Zeitung (1798–1848) (Frankfurt am Main:
Kettenhof Verlag, 1969).
Schmutz, Vaughn, Alex van Venrooij, Susanne Janssen and Marc Verboord, ‘Change
and Continuity in Newspaper Coverage of Popular Music Since 1955: Evidence from
the United States, France, Germany, and the Netherlands’, Popular Music and Society,
33/4 (2010), 501–15.
Schneider, Albrecht, ‘Comparative and Systematic Musicology in Relation to
Ethnomusicology: A Historical and Methodological Survey’, Ethnomusicology, 50/2
(2006), 236–58.
Schneider, David E., Bartók, Hungary, and the Renewal of Tradition: Case Studies in the
Intersection of Modernity and Nationality (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 2006).
Schneider, Herbert, Die Rezeption der Opern Lullys im Frankreich des Ancien régime
(Tutzing: Hans Schneider, 1982).
Schnitt, Ulrich, Revolution im Konzertsaal: Zur Beethoven-Rezeption im 19. Jahrhundert
(Mainz: Schott, 1990).
Schnittke, Alfred, A Schnittke Reader, ed. Alexander Ivashkin, trans. John Goodliffe
(Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2002).
Schnoebelen, Anne, ‘Pistocchi, Francesco Antonio’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music
Schober, Franz von, Briefe über F. Liszts Aufenthalt in Ungarn (Berlin: Schlesinger, 1843).
Schoenberg, Arnold, Arnold Schoenberg: The Second String Quartet in F♯ Minor, Op. 10,
Norton Critical Score, ed. Severine Neff (New York: Norton, 2006).
Schoenberg, Arnold, ‘My Evolution’ [1949], in Style and Idea: Selected Writings, ed.
Leonard Stein, trans. Leo Black (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984).
Schoenberg, Arnold, Style and Idea: Selected Writings, ed. Leonard Stein, trans. Leo Black
(Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984).
Schoenberg, Arnold and Thomas Mann, ‘Der “Eingentliche”: Die Dissonanzen
zwischen Arnold Schönberg und Thomas Mann’, Der Monat, 6 (1949), 76–8.
Scholar, Richard, The Je-Ne-Sais-Quoi in Early Modern Europe: Encounters with a Certain
Something (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).
Scholes, Percy A., The First Book of the Gramophone Record (London: Oxford University
Press, 1924).
772 Bibliography
Scholes, Percy A., The Second Book of the Gramophone Record (London: Oxford University
Press, 1925).
Schonberg, Harold C., ‘A Lifetime of Listening’, New York Times (8 February
1981), 40.
Schonberg, Harold C., Facing the Music (New York: Schirmer, 1981).
Schorr, Daniel, Staying Tuned: A Life in Journalism (New York: Pocket Books, 2001).
Schorske, Carl E., Fin-de-Siècle Vienna: Politics and Culture (London: Weidenfeld &
Nicolson, 1980).
Schrade, Leo, Beethoven in France: The Growth of an Idea (New Haven: Yale University
Press, 1942).
Schroeder, Thomas, ‘The Origins of the German Press’, in Dooley and Baron (eds.), The
Politics of Information in Early Modern Europe.
Schueller, Herbert M., ‘“Imitation” and “Expression” in British Music Criticism in the
Eighteenth Century’, Musical Quarterly, 34/4 (1948), 544–66.
Schueller, Herbert M., ‘The Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns’, Music & Letters, 41/4
(1960), 313–30.
Schütz, Gudula, Vor dem Richterstuhl der Kritik: die Musik in Friedrich Nicolais Allgemeiner
deutscher Bibliothek, 1765–1806 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2007).
Schuller, Gunther, Early Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968).
Schuller, Gunther, ‘Sonny Rollins and the Challenge of Thematic Improvisation’, The
Jazz Review (November 1958), 6–9, 21.
Schuller, Gunther, The Swing Era (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
Schulte-Sasse, Jochen, ‘Das Konzept bürgerlich-literarischer Öffentlichkeit und die
historischen Gründe seines Zerfalls’, in Bürger, Bürger and Schulte-Sasse (eds.),
Aufklärung und literarische Öffentlichkeit.
Schumann, Robert, ‘Fragmente aus Leipzig’, Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 7/19
(5 September 1837), 73–5; reprinted in Martin Kreisig (ed.), Gesammelte Schriften
über Musik und Musiker, vol. I (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1914).
Schumann, Robert, Schumann on Music: A Selection from the Writings, ed. and trans. Henry
Pleasants (New York: Dover, 1965).
Schwab, Frederick A., ‘The Baireuth Festival’ [sic], New York Times (14 August 1876), 5,
quoted in Mark McKnight, ‘Music Criticism in the New York Times and the New York
Tribune, 1851–1876’, unpublished PhD dissertation, Louisiana State University
(1980).
Schwarz, Boris, French Instrumental Music between the Revolutions, 1789–1830
(New York: Da Capo Press, 1987).
Schwarz, Boris, Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia, 1917–1981 (Bloomington:
Shapiro, Peter, Turn the Beat Around: The Secret History of Disco (New York: Faber and
Faber, 2005).
Sheehan, James, German History, 1770–1866 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).
Searle, Arthur, ‘The First British Performances of Beethoven’s “Choral” Symphony:
The Philharmonic Society and Sir George Smart’, Electronic British Library Journal
(2010), article 4, 1–30, available at www.bl.uk/eblj/2010articles/article4.html.
Seay, Albert, ‘An Anonymous Treatise from St Martial’, Annales musicologiques, 5 (1957),
13–36.
Bibliography 773
Seidl, Johann Wilhelm, Musik und Austromarxismus: zur Musikrezeption der österreichischen
Arbeiterbewegung im späten Kaiserreich und in der Ersten Republik (Vienna: Böhlau,
1989).
Selfridge-Field, Eleanor, Pallade Veneta: Writings on Music in Venetian Society 1650–1750
(Venice: Fondazione Levi, 1985).
Serov, Aleksandr Nikolaevich, Izbrannye stat’i, vol. I I (Moscow: Muzgiz, 1957).
Serov, Aleksandr Nikolaevich, Kriticheskie stat’i, vol. I I I (St Petersburg: Tipografiia
Departamenta Udelov, 1892).
Serov, Aleksandr Nikolaevich, Stat’i o muzyke, vol. I (Moscow: Muzyka, 1984).
Serov, Aleksandr Nikolaevich, Stat’i o muzyke, vol. I I b (Moscow: Muzyka, 1986).
Serrou, Bruno and Jacques Lonchampt, ‘Chapitre 100, Éthique’, in Musique et Mémoires,
Jacques Lonchampt, filmed interview (Paris: INA-SACEM, n.d.), available at http://e
ntretiens.ina.fr/consulter/Musique (accessed 2 October 2014).
Sessions, Roger, Roger Sessions on Music: Collected Essays, ed. Edward T. Cone
Sgard, Jean, Bibliographie de la presse classique, 1600–1789 (Geneva: Slatkine, 1984).
Shadoian, Jack, ‘Janis Joplin: Pearl’, Rolling Stone (18 February 1971), available at www
Shaverdian, Alexander, ‘Prava i obiazannosti muzykal’nogo kritika’, Sovetskoe iskusstvo
(4 September 1938).
Shaw, George Bernard, How to Become a Musical Critic ed. Dan H. Lawrence (New York:
Da Capo Press, 1978).
Shaw, George Bernard, Shaw’s Music: The Complete Musical Criticism of Bernard Shaw, ed.
Dan H. Laurence, 3 vols. (London: Bodley Head, 1981; 2nd revised ed., 1989).
Shearer, Elisa, ‘Alternative Weeklies: Fact Sheet’, in State of the New Media, Pew
Research Center (June 2016), 95, available at www.pewresearch.org (1 August 2018).
Shehan, Patricia K., ‘Music Critic’, Music Educators Journal, 69/2 (1982), 54–5.
Sherr, Richard, ‘Competence and Incompetence in the Papal Choir in the Age of
Palestrina’, Early Music, 22 (1994), 607–29.
Shirley, Wayne D., Modern Music: An Analytical Index (New York: AMS Press, 1976).
Shneerson, Grigorii, O muzyke, zhivoi i mertvoi (Moscow: Sovetskii kompozitor, 1960,
1964).
Shneerson, Grigorii (ed.), D. Shostakovich: Stat’i i materialy (Moscow: Sovetskii kompo-
zitor, 1976).
Shnitke, Al’fred, Stat’i o muzyke (Moscow: Kompozitor, 2004).
Shnitke, Al’fred, ‘Sub’ektivnye zametki ob ob’ektivnom ispolnenii’, Sovetskaia muzyka,
2 (1974), 63–5; English trans: Alfred Schnittke, ‘Subjective Notes on an Objective
Performance (On Alexei Liubimov)’, in A Schnittke Reader, ed. Alexander Ivashkin,
trans. John Goodliffe (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002).
Shuker, Roy, Understanding Popular Music, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Routledge,
2001).
Siblin, Eric, ‘Ry Cooder Goes to Cuba’, [Montreal] Gazette (20 November 1997), §C, 1.
Sicking, Kerstin, Holocaust-Kompositionen als Medien der Erinnerung: Die Entwicklung eines
musikwissenschaftlichen Gedächtniskonzepts (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2008).
Silva, João, Entertaining Lisbon: Music, Theater, and Modern Life in the Late 19th Century
774 Bibliography
Silva, Manuel Deniz, ‘Rádio’, in Castelo-Branco (ed.), Enciclopédia da música em Portugal

no século X X , vol. I V .
Silverman, Carol, Romani Routes: Cultural Politics and Balkan Music in Diaspora
Simon, Géza Gábor, Fejezetek a magyar jazz történetéből 1961-ig [Chapters from the
History of Hungarian Jazz before 1961] (Budapest: Magyar Jazzkutatási Társaság,
2001).
Simon, Yannick, Composer sous Vichy (Lyon: Symétrie, 2009).
Simon, Yannick, ‘Les périodiques musicaux français pendant la seconde guerre mon-
diale’, Fontes artis musicae, 49/1–2 (2002), 67–78.
Simpson, Christopher, A Compendium of Practical Musick in Five Parts (London, 1667).
Sinkovicz, Wilhelm, ‘Genau so muss ein Tosca sein’, Die Presse (7 September 2013).
Sinkovicz, Wilhelm, ‘Staatsoper: Der schlauen Füchsin später Wien-Besuch’, Die Presse
(19 June 2014).
[Singapore’s National Songs], ‘Singapore’s National Songs’ (2014), available at thatboy
human.com (accessed 1 June 2015).
Skellington, Jennifer, ‘Transforming Music Criticism? An Examination of Changes in
Music Journalism in the English Broadsheet Press from 1981 to 1991’, unpublished
PhD thesis, Oxford Brookes University (2010).
Slim, H. Colin and Stefano La Via, ‘Verdelot, Philippe’, Grove Music Online, Oxford
Music Online, available at www.oxfordmusiconline.com (accessed 15 May 2018).
Slobin, Mark, Subcultural Sounds: Micromusics of the West (Hanover: Wesleyan University
Press, 1993; reissued with new preface, 2000).
Slonimsky, Nicolas, Lexicon of Musical Invective: Critical Assaults on Composer since
Beethoven’s Time (Seattle and London: University of Washington Press, 1953).
Slonimsky, Nicolas, Music of Latin America (London: Harrap, 1946).
Slonimsky, Nicolas, Music since 1900, updated by Laura Diane Kuhn, 6th ed.
(New York: Schirmer Reference, 2001).
Slushatel’ [A listener], ‘Na kontserte M. Iudinoi’, Sovetskaia muzyka, 7 (1961), 89–90.
Smith, Adam, ‘Of the Imitative Arts’, in Essays on Philosophical Subjects (London,
1795).
Smith, Verity, Carpentier: Los pasos perdidos (London: Grant & Cutler/Tamesis, 1983).
Smits van Waesberghe, Joseph (ed.), Johannis Affligemensis De Musica cum Tonario,
Corpus Scriptorum de Musica 1 (Rome: American Institute of Musicology, 1950).
Smits van Waesberghe, Joseph (ed.), Tres Tractatuli Guidonis Aretini, Divitiae Musicae
Artis, A . I I I (Buren: Knuf, 1975).
Snyder, John L. (ed.), Theinred of Dover’s De legitimis ordinibus pentachordorum et tetra-
chordorum: A Critical Text and Translation with an Introduction, Annotations, and Indices
(Ottawa: Institute of Medieval Music, 2006).
[So Happy SG], So Happy Sg, available at www.facebook.com/groups/sohappysg.
Soldani, Simonetta and Gabriele Turi (eds.), Fare gli italiani: scuola e cultura nell’Italia
contemporanea, I , La nascita dello Stato nazionale (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1993).
Solerti, Angelo, Le origini del melodramma (Turin: Fratelli Bocca, 1903).
Solie, Ruth A. (ed.), Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship
(Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1993).
Sollertinskii, Ivan, Kriticheskie stat’i, ed. I. Beletskii (Leningrad: Gosurdarstvennoe
muzykal’noe izdatel’stvo, 1963).
Bibliography 775
Sollertinskii, Ivan, Muzykal’no istorichekie etiudy, ed. M. Druskin (Leningrad:

Gosudarstvennoe muzykal’noe izdatel’stvo, 1956).
Somigli, Luca, ‘Towards a Literary Modernity all’italiana: A Note on F. T.
Marinetti’s Poesia’, in Caesar, Romani and Burns (eds.), The Printed Media in Fin-
de-Siècle Italy.
Sopeña, Federico, Joaquín Rodrigo (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1946).
Sopeña, Federico, La historia de la música española contemporánea (Madrid: Rialp, 1958).
Sopeña, Federico, Escrito de noche (Madrid: Espasa Calpe, 1985).
Sordet, Dominique (ed.), L’Initiation à la musique à l’usage des amateurs de radio (Paris:
Éditions du Tambourinaire, 1935).
Sousa, Jorge Pedro, Helena Lima, Antonio Hohlfeldt and Marialva Barbosa (eds.),
A History of the Press in the Portuguese-Speaking Countries (Porto: Media X X I , 2014).
Sousa, José Manuel Motta de and Lúcia Maria Mariano Veloso, História da imprensa
periódica portuguesa: Subsídios para uma bibliografia (Coimbra: Biblioteca Geral da
Universidade, 1987).
Southey, Roz and Eric Cross (eds.), Charles Avison in Context: National and International
Musical Links in Eighteenth-Century North-East England (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018).
Specht, Richard, ‘Mahlers Feinde’, Musikblätter des Anbruch, 3/13–14 (April 1920), 287.
Spencer, Michael, ‘Théophile Gautier: Music Critic’, Music & Letters, 49 (January
1968), 4–17.
Spencer, Peter, World Beat: A Listener’s Guide to Contemporary World Music on CD
(Pennington: A Cappella Books, 1992).
Spink, Ian (ed.), The Seventeenth Century. The Blackwell History of Music in Britain, vol.
I I I (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992).
Spitzer, Alan, The French Generation of 1820 (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1987).
Sponheuer, Bernd, ‘Beethoven vs Rossini – Anmerkungen zu einer äesthetischen
Kontroverse des 19. Jahrhunderts’, in Christoph-Hellmut Mahling and
Sigrid Wiesmann (eds.), Bericht über den internationalen musikwissenschaftlichen
Kongress Bayreuth 1981 (Kassel: Bärenreiter, 1981).
Sponheuer, Bernd, ‘Reconstructing Ideal Types of the “German” in Music’, in
Applegate and Potter (eds.), Music and German National Identity.
Sprout, Leslie, The Musical Legacy of Wartime France (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 2013).
Staffieri, Gloria, Colligite Fragmentata: la vita musicale romana negli ‘Avvisi Marescotti’
(1683–1707) (Lucca: Libreria Musicale Italiana, 1990).
Stainer, John, ‘The Principles of Musical Criticism’, Proceedings of the Royal Musical
Association, Seventh Session (1880–1), 35–52.
Staley Kline, Donna, An American Virtuoso on the World Stage: Olga Samaroff Stokowski
(Texas: Texas A&M University Press, 1996).
Stanford, Charles Villiers, ‘Some Aspects of Musical Criticism in England’, Fortnightly
Review (June 1894), 826–31.
Stasov, Vladimir, Izbrannye sochineniia, 3 vols. (Moscow: Iskusstvo, 1952).
Stasov, Vladimir, Mikhail Ivanovich Glinka, ed. Vladimir Protopopov (Moscow:
Gosudarstvennoe Muzykal’noe Izdatel’stvo, 1953).
Stasov, Vladimir, Selected Essays on Music, trans. Florence Jonas (London: Barrie &
Rockliff, The Cresset Press, 1968).
776 Bibliography
Stauffer, George B., ‘The Breitkopf Family and Its Role in Eighteenth-Century Music
Publishing’, in Stauffer (ed.), J. S. Bach, the Breitkopfs, and Eighteenth-Century Music
Trade.
Stauffer, George B. (ed.), J. S. Bach, the Breitkopfs, and Eighteenth-Century Music Trade
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1996).
Steele, Richard, The Tender Husband; or, the Accomplish’d Fools. A Comedy (London, 1705).
Steinecke, Wolfgang, ‘Prag als deutsche Musikstadt’, Deutsche Musikkultur, 4 (1941–2),
123–4.
Stendahl, Bjørn and Johs Bergh, Cool, kløver & dixie: jazz i Norge 1950–1960 (Oslo:
Norsk jazzarkiv, 1997).
Stendahl, Bjørn and Johs Bergh, Jazz, hot & swing: jazz i Norge 1920–1940 (Oslo: Norsk
jazzarkiv, 1987).
Stendahl, Bjørn and Johs Bergh, Sigarett stomp: jazz i Norge 1940–1950 (Oslo: Norsk
jazzarkiv, 1991).
Stendahl, Bjørn, Freebag? Jazz i Norge 1960–1970 (Oslo: Norsk jazzarkiv, 2010).
Stephens, Angharad Closs, The Persistence of Nationalism (New York: Routledge, 2013).
Stewart, Graham, The History of The Times: The Murdoch Years (London: HarperCollins,
2005).
Strasser, Michael, ‘The Société Nationale and Its Adversaries: The Musical Politics of
l’invasion germanique in the 1870s’, 19th-Century Music, 24/3 (Spring 2001), 224–51.
Stratton, John, ‘What Is “Popular Music”?’, The Sociological Review, 31/2 (1983),
293–309.
Straubhaar, Joseph, ‘Beyond Media Imperialism: Asymmetrical Interdependence and
Cultural Proximity’, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, 8 (1991), 39–59.
Stöber, Rudolf, Deutsche Pressegeschichte: Von den Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart, 3rd ed.
(Konstanz and Munich: UVK, 2014).
St Pierre, Kelly, Bedřich Smetana: Myth, Music, and Propaganda (New York: University of
Rochester Press, 2017).
Strohm, Reinhard and J. Donald Cullington (eds.), On the Dignity and the Effects of Music.
Egidius Carlerius, Johannes Tinctoris: Two Fifteenth-Century Treatises, trans. J. Donald
Cullington (London: Institute of Advanced Musical Studies, King’s College London,
1996).
Strunk, Oliver, Strunk’s Source Readings in Music History, revised ed. (New York and
London: W. W. Norton, 1998).
Stubbes, Philip, The Anatomie of Abuses (London, 1583).
Suárez-Pajares, Javier, ‘Adolfo Salazar: luz y sombras’, in Nagore, Sánchez de Andrés
and Torres (eds.), Música y cultura en la Edad de Plata 1915–1939.
Suárez-Pajares, Javier, ‘Joaquín Rodrigo en la vida musical y la cultura española de los
años cuarenta. Ficciones, realidades, verdades y mentiras de un tiempo extraño’, in
Suárez-Pajares (ed.), Joaquín Rodrigo.
Suárez-Pajares, Javier (ed.), Joaquín Rodrigo y la música española de los años cuarenta
(Valladolid: Glares, 2005).
Sullivan, Caroline, ‘The Joy of Hacking: Women Rock Critics’, in Cooper (ed.), Girls!
Girls! Girls!
Sullivan, Caroline, ‘Magazine No Longer in Tune with Tastes of Teenagers’, The
Guardian (15 December 2000), 7.
Bibliography 777
Suschitsky, Anya, ‘Debussy’s Rameau: French Music and Its Others’, Musical Quarterly,
86/3 (2002), 398–448.
Sutcliffe, Tom, Believing in Opera (London: Faber and Faber, 1996).
Svatos, Thomas D., ‘Sovietizing Czechoslovak Music: The “Hatchet Man” Miroslav
Barvík and His Speech The Composers Go with the People’, Music & Politics, 4/1 (2010),
available at http://dx.doi.org/10.3998/mp.9460447.0004.101.
Sweeney, Philip, ‘Notes from the Global Village’, The Independent (31 March 1994), 28.
Sydenham, Humphrey, The Wel-tuned Cymball; or, a Vindication of the Modern Harmony
and Ornaments in our Churches (London, 1637).
Symes, Colin, Setting the Record Straight: A Material History of Classical Recording
(Middletown: Wesleyan University Press, 2004)
Szabolcsi, Bence and Aladár Tóth (eds.), Zenei lexicon, vol. 2 (Budapest: Győző Andor,
1931).
Szabolcsi, Bence and Dénes Bartha (eds.), Zenetudományi tanulmányok I I (Budapest:
Akadémiai Kiadó, 1954).
Szabolcsi, Bence and Dénes Bartha (eds.), Zenetudományi tanulmányok I V (Budapest:
Akadémiai Kiadó, 1955).
Szanto, Andras (ed.), Reporting the Arts I I (New York: National Arts Journalism
Program, 2003).
Szerző, Katalin, ‘Introduction’, in János Kárpáti (ed.), Zenészeti lapok (1860–1876)
[Index], Répertoire international de la presse musicale (Baltimore: NISC, 2005).
Szerző, Katalin, ‘The Most Important Hungarian Music Periodical of the 19th Century:
Zenészeti lapok [Musical Papers] (1860–1876)’, Periodica Musica, 4 (Spring 1986), 1–5.
Szíjjártó, Csaba, A cigány útra ment: Cigányzenekaraink, valamint népzenei és
néptánctársaságok külföldjárása a kezdetektől a kiegyezésig (Korabeli sajtódokumentumok
alapján) [The Gypsy went on the road: Foreign tours of our Gypsy orchestras, folk
music and folk dance ensembles from the beginnings to the Compromise (On the
basis of press documents of the time)] (Budapest: Masszi Kiadó, 2002).
Tabet, Georges, ‘L’orchestre de Duke Ellington’, Le Figaro (27 February 1975), 25.
Tabet, Georges, ‘Rock. Chuck Berry l’inventeur’, Le Figaro (26 February 1975), 24.
Tadday, Ulrich, Die Anfänge des Musikfeuilletons: Der kommunikative Gebrauchswert musi-
kalische Bildung in Deutschland um 1800 (Stuttgart: Metzler, 1993).
Tadday, Ulrich, ‘Life and Literature, Poetry and Philosophy: Robert Schumann’s
Aesthetics of Music’, in Perrey (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Schumann.
Tan, Shzr Ee, ‘$1.5m Will Let Her Calm the Ears’, The Straits Times Life! (13 March
1998).
Tan, Shzr Ee, ‘A Myth Sees the Light; Too Flat? Too Beautiful?’, The Straits Times Life!
(15 March 2004).
Tan, Shzr Ee, ‘Experiment Gone Very Wrong’, The Straits Times Life! (17 June 2002).
Tan, Shzr Ee, ‘Perfect Harmony under the Right Circumstances’, The Straits Times Life!
(19 March 1998).
Tan, Shzr Ee, ‘State Orchestras and Multiculturalism in Singapore’, in Ramnarine (ed.)
Global Perspectives on Orchestras.
Tan, Shzr Ee, ‘Tuned for Success?’, The Straits Times Life! (2 August 2003).
Tan, Shzr Ee, ‘When Kitsch Meets Craftmanship’, The Straits Times Life! (28 October
2002).
778 Bibliography
Taruskin, Richard, Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays

Taruskin, Richard, ‘Glinka’s Ambiguous Legacy and the Birth Pangs of Russian Opera’,
19th-Century Music, 1/2 (November 1977), 142–62.
Taruskin, Richard, Opera and Drama in Russia as Preached and Practiced in the 1860s (Ann
Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1981).
Taruskin, Richard, Oxford History of Western Music, vol. 3 (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2005).
Taruskin, Richard, Russian Music at Home and Abroad: New Essays (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 2016).
Taruskin, Richard, ‘Serov, Alexander Nikolayevich’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music
Online, available at www.oxfordmusiconline.com (accessed 24 August 2017).
Taylor, Arthur, Notes and Tones: Musician-to-Musician Interviews, 2nd revised ed.
Taylor, Timothy D., ‘Advertising and the Conquest of Culture’, Social Semiotics, 19/4
(2009), 405–25.
Taylor, Timothy D., Beyond Exoticism: Western Music and the World (Durham: Duke
Taylor, Timothy D., Global Pop: World Music, World Markets (New York: Routledge,
1997).
Taylor, Timothy D., Music and Capitalism: A History of the Present (Chicago: University of
Taylor, Timothy D., Music in the World: Selected Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2017).
Taylor, Timothy D., ‘The Hip, the Cool, and the Edgy, or the Dominant Cultural Logic
of Neoliberal Capitalism’, Rivista di analisi e teoria musicale, 22/1–2 (2016), 105–24.
Taylor, Timothy D., ‘World Music Today’, in White (ed.), Music and Globalization.
Tate, Greg, Flyboy in the Buttermilk (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992).
Teillet, Philippe, ‘Rock and Culture in France: Ways, Processes and Conditions of
Integration’, in Dauncey and Cannon (eds.), Popular Music in France from Chanson to
Techno.
Temperley, Nicholas, ‘John Playford and the Metrical Psalms’, Journal of the American
Musicological Society, 25 (1972), 331–78.
Temperley, Nicholas, The Music of the English Parish Church. Cambridge Studies in
Music, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979).
Temple, William, ‘Upon Ancient and Modern Learning’, in Miscellanea. The Second Part.
In Four Essays . . . The Second Edition (London, 1690).
Tengarrinha, José, Nova história da imprensa portuguesa das origens a 1865 (Lisbon: Temas
e Debates, Círculo de Leitores, 2013).
Tenroc, Charles, ‘Rapport: Ligue nationale pour la défense de la musique française’, La
Musique pendant la guerre, 6 (March 1916).
Ternisien, Xavier, ‘Disparitions. Journaliste. Pierre Drouin’, Le Monde (12–13 September
2010), 25.
Testoni, Gian Carlo and Ezio Levi, Introduzione alla vera musica Jazz (Milan: Magazzino
Musicale, 1938).
Tey, Tsun Hang, ‘Confining the Freedom of the Press in Singapore: A “Pragmatic”
Press for “Nation-Building”?’, Human Rights Quarterly, 3/4 (2008), 876–905.
Bibliography 779
Thayer, Alexander Wheelock, The Life of Ludwig van Beethoven, eds. Hermann Deiters
and Hugo Riemann, trans. Henry Edward Krehbiel (New York: Beethoven
Association, 1921).
Théberge, Paul, Any Sound You Can Imagine: Making Music/Consuming Technology
(Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1997).
Thomson, Aidan, ‘Elgar’s Critical Critics’, in Adams (ed.), Edward Elgar and His World.
Thomson, Virgil, ‘A War’s End’, New York Herald Tribune (12 January 1947); reprinted
in Virgil Thomson: Music Chronicles 1940–1954.
Thomson, Virgil, ‘Covering the Orchestras’, New York Herald Tribune (11 October
1940); reprinted in Music Chronicles.
Thomson, Virgil, Interview with Bruce Duffie (1985), available at www.bruceduffie.com/
vt.html (accessed 1 August 2018).
Thomson, Virgil, ‘Master of Distortion and Exaggeration’, New York Herald Tribune
(26 October 1942); reprinted in Music Chronicles.
Thomson, Virgil, ‘Silk-Underwear Music’, New York Herald Tribune (31 October 1940);
reprinted in Music Chronicles.
Thomson, Virgil, The Art of Judging Music (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948).
Thomson, Virgil, ‘The Music Reviewer and His Assignment’, Proceedings of the American
Academy of Arts and Letters and the National Institute of Arts and Letters 4 (1954);
Thomson, Virgil, ‘The Philharmonic Crisis’, New York Herald Tribune (9 February 1947);
Thomson, Virgil, Virgil Thomson (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1967).
Thomson, Virgil, Virgil Thomson: Music Chronicles 1940–1954, ed. Tim Page (New York:
The Library of America, 2014).
Thomson, Virgil, Virgil Thomson: The State of Music and Other Writings, ed. Tim Page
(New York: The Library of America, 2016).
Thořová, Věra, ‘Vznik Státního ústavu pro lidovou píseň a první léta jeho existence’
[The Genesis of the State Institute for Folk Song and the First Years of Its Existence],
in Pospíšilová and Nosková (eds.), Od lidové písně k evropské etnologii.
Thoumin, Jean-Adrien, Bibliographie rétrospective des périodiques français de littérature
musicale, 1870–1954 (Paris: Union Française des Organismes de Documentation,
1957).
Thrasher, Alan R., ‘China, People’s Republic of: §I . Introduction: Historical, Regional
and Study Perspectives; 3. Sources and Perspectives: i) The Imperial Period’, Grove
Music Online, Oxford Music Online, available at www.oxfordmusiconline.com
(accessed 4 March 2018).
Thurman, Judith, Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette (London: Bloomsbury, 2000).
Tilmouth, Michael, ‘Uffenbach, Johann Friedrich Armand von’, Grove Music Online,
Oxford Music Online, available at www.oxfordmusiconline.com (accessed
15 May 2018).
Timms, Colin, ‘Pini, Maria Domenica’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online,
Tinctoris, Johannes, Liber de arte contrapuncti, in Johannis Tinctoris opera theoretica, ed.
Albert Seay, CSM 22 (American Institute of Musicology, 1975–78), vol. I I .
Tinctoris, Johannes, The Art of Counterpoint, trans. Albert Seay ([n.p.]: American
Institute of Musicology, 1961).
780 Bibliography
Tinctoris, Johannes, The Complete Theoretical Works of Johannes Tinctoris: A New

Digital Edition, ed. Ronald Woodley for the Early Music Theory website, available
at earlymusictheory.org/Tinctoris (accessed 29 May 2017).
Tissot, Victor, Prussiens en Allemagne (Paris: Dentu, 1876).
Titus, Barbara, ‘Conceptualizing Music: Friedrich Theodor Vischer and Hegelian
Currents in German Music Criticism’, unpublished DPhil thesis, University of
Oxford (2005).
Todd, Larry (ed.), Schumann and His World (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1994).
Tombs, Robert, ‘Culture and the Intellectuals’, in McMillan (ed.), Modern France.
Tommasini, Anthony, Virgil Thomson: Composer on the Aisle (New York and London:
Norton, 1997).
Tomoff, Kiril, Creative Union: The Professional Organization of Soviet Composers,
1939–1953 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006).
Torchi, Luigi, ‘Ai lettori’, Rivista musicale italiana, 1 (1894), 1–6.
Torchi, Luigi, Riccardo Wagner: Studio critico (Bologna: Zanichelli, 1890).
Torres Clemente, Elena, ‘El “nacionalismo de las esencias”: ¿una categoría estética
o ética?’, in Ramos López (ed.), Discursos y prácticas musicales nacionalistas.
Tóth, I. G., ‘Hungarian Culture in the Early Modern Age’, in László Kósa (ed.), A Cultural
History of Hungary, vol. I (Budapest: Corvina, 1999).
Toynbee, Jason, ‘Policing Bohemia, Pinning Up the Grunge: The Music Press and
Generic Change in British Pop and Rock’, Popular Music, 12/3 (1993), 289–300.
Treitler, Leo, ‘Gender and Other Dualities in Music History’, in Solie (ed.), Musicology
and Difference.
Treitler, Leo, ‘The Power of Positivist Thinking’, Journal of the American Musicological
Society, 42 (1989), 375–402.
Trezise, Simon (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Debussy (Cambridge: Cambridge
Troitsky, Artemy, Back in the SR: The True Story of Rock in Russia (London and New York:
Omnibus, 1987).
Trouillot, Michel-Rolph, ‘Anthropology and the Savage Slot: The Poetics and Politics
of Otherness’, in Fox (ed.), Recapturing Anthropology.
[Tsai, Jolin], ‘Jolin Tsai’s Same-Sex-Marriage Music Video’, Mothership.sg, available at
mothership.sg (accessed 1 June 2015).
Tschulik, Norbert, ‘Anton Bruckner in der Wiener Zeitung: Ein Beitrag über die
zeitgenössiche Bruckner-Berichterstattung’, Bruckner-Jahrbuch (1991).
Tsing, Anna, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (New Jersey: Princeton
Tsipursky, Gleb, ‘Jazz, Power, and Soviet Youth in the Early Cold War, 1948–1953’,
Journal of Musicology, 33/3 (2016), 332–61.
Tsipursky, Gleb, Socialist Fun: Youth Consumption and State-Sponsored Popular Culture in
the Soviet Union, 1964–1970 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2016).
Tucker, Mark, The Duke Ellington Reader (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
Turbow, Gerald D., ‘Art and Politics: Wagnerism in France’, in Large and Weber (eds.),
Wagnerism in European Culture and Politics.
Turi, Gabriele (ed.), Storia dell’editoria nell’Italia contemporanea (Florence: Giunti, 1997).
Bibliography 781
Turina, Joaquín, Diary (1 January–31 December 1939), unpublished, Fundación Juan

March, Madrid.
Twining, Thomas, ‘On the Different Senses of the Word, Imitative, as Applied to Music
by the Antients, and by the Moderns’, in Aristotle’s Treatise on Poetry, Translated: with
Notes on the Translation, and on the Original (London, 1789).
Unsigned, ‘A Gramophone Concert’, The Times (2 May 1909), 12.
Unsigned, ‘A Gramophone Concert’, The Times (5 October 1909), 11.
Unsigned, Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 50 (5 April 1848), 232–3; cited and translated
in Nancy B. Reich, Clara Schumann: The Artist and the Woman, revised ed. (Ithaca and
London: Cornell University Press, 2001).
Unsigned, ‘Ai lettori’, Rivista musicale italiana, 1 (1894), 1–6.
Unsigned, ‘Angélique Kidjo “Oyaya!”’, Washington Post (18 June 2004), T07.
Unsigned, ‘A New Violinist. Jascha Heifetz at Queen’s Hall’, The Times (6 May
1920), 14.
Unsigned, ‘Campus sur Europe’, Rock & Folk (May 1968), 8.
Unsigned [possibly Jérôme-Joseph de Momigny], Correspondance des amateurs musiciens,
2/2 (13 nivôse an 12/4 January 1804), 12–13.
Unsigned, ‘Covent Garden Opera’, The Times (29 June 1953), 11.
Unsigned, ‘Covent Garden Opera’, The Times (6 July 1955), 6.
Unsigned, Crónica dos teatros, 7/9 (6 September 1867), 1.
Unsigned, ‘Enquête sur la critique dramatique française’, La Revue d’art dramatique, 6
(January-March 1899), 161–97.
Unsigned, ‘Enquête sur l’Alsace-Lorraine et l’état actuel des esprits’, Mercure de
France (December 1897), 641–814.
Unsigned, ‘Filarmónicas’, O espectador (2nd series), 15 (8 December 1850), 118.
Unsigned, ‘Glavnoe prizvanie sovetskogo iskusstva’, Sovetskaia muzyka, 2 (1963), 6–9.
Unsigned, ‘Gramophone Music. Encouragement of Close Listening’, The Times
(23 February 1922), 10.
Unsigned [‘Discus’], ‘Gramophone Notes’, Musical Times (1 January 1921), 40–1 [40–2].
Unsigned, ‘Gramophone Notes. Additions to Chamber Music’, The Times (17 February
1925), 12.
Unsigned, ‘Gramophone Notes. The Aldershot Tattoo’, The Times (29 July 1926), 10.
Unsigned, ‘Gramophone Records by Electricity. Memorial of Unknown Warrior’s
Funeral’, The Times (8 December 1920), 14.
Unsigned, ‘Harriett Johnson, 79, A New York Post Critic’, New York Times (2 July
1987), 9.
Unsigned, ‘Ist es der Hauptzweck der Musik, uns zur Erholung zur dienen?’ Allgemeine
musikalische Zeitung, 4/6 (4 November 1801), 81–7.
Unsigned, ‘Kidjo’s “Oremi” Is Heavenly’, Boston Herald (25 September 1998), S25.
Unsigned, ‘Kogda sobiraetsia sekretariat . . .’, Sovetskaia muzyka, 1 (1966), 29–32.
Unsigned, ‘Lady Journalists’, Speaker (15 March 1890), 283.
Unsigned, ‘“Le Sacre du Printemps” – Russian Ballet at the Princes’, The Times (28 June
1921), 8.
Unsigned, ‘Madrigals on the Gramophone. Records by the English Singers’, The Times
(9 March 1922), 10.
Unsigned, ‘Mechanical Amusement’, The Times (7 September 1910), 9.
782 Bibliography
Unsigned [presumed to be Joaquim de Vasconcelos], ‘Missa do sr. E. Lami’, Crónica dos

teatros, 10/12 (24 December 1870), 1–3.
Unsigned, ‘Mme. Galli-Curci. First Concert at The Albert Hall’, The Times (13 October
1924), 12.
Unsigned, ‘Modern Tendencies in Music. The Composer’s Estimate’, The Times (17 July
1920).
Unsigned, ‘Mr. David Oistrakh: Two Concertos’, The Times (26 November 1954), 5.
Unsigned [attrib. John F. Runciman], ‘Musical Criticism and Musical Critics’, Saturday
Review (15 August 1891), 187–8.
Unsigned, ‘Neuer Versuch einer Darstellung des gesammten Musikwesens in Wien’,
Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, 3/37 (10 June 1801), 622–7 and 3/38 (17 June 1801),
638–43.
Unsigned, ‘New Gramophone Records. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony’, The Times
(28 March 1924), 12.
Unsigned, ‘New Gramophone Records. Mozart’s Fourth Violin Concerto’, The Times
(13 April 1925), 8.
Unsigned [From A Correspondent], ‘New Gramophone Records. Piano
Reproductions’, The Times (1 December 1922), 10.
Unsigned, ‘Nora Holt Dead; Music Critic 89’, New York Times (30 January 1974), 38.
Unsigned, ‘Obsuzhdaem “Poetoriiu” R. Shchedrina’, Sovetskaia muzyka, 11 (1969),
18–32.
Unsigned, ‘Obsuzhdaem Simfoniiu A. Shnitke’, Sovetskaia muzyka, 10 (1974), 12–26.
Unsigned, ‘Opera on the Gramophone’, The Times (21 May 1906), 4.
Unsigned [possibly Edward Holmes], ‘Philharmonic Society’, Musical World, 5
(1837), 93.
Unsigned, ‘Progressos da música italiana’, Revista universal, 6 (4 November
1841), 66–8.
Unsigned, ‘Recent Developments in Acoustical Science’, The Times (19 August 1878), 4.
Unsigned, Schlesische Zeitung (23 December 1877) Clara Schumann: The Artist and the
Woman, revised ed. (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001).
Unsigned, ‘Society of Women Musicians’, The Times (3 April 1950), 2.
Unsigned, ‘Sumbur vmesto muzyki’; English trans., ‘Chaos Instead of Music (1936)’, in
Robert P. Morgan (ed.), Strunk’s Source Readings in Music History, revised ed., vol. 7
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1998).
Unsigned [attrib. Almeida Garrett], ‘Teatro de S. Carlos. (Ópera, Dido
abandonada . . .)’, O Português (28 April 1827), 416–17.
Unsigned, ‘Teatros nacionais’, Revista dos espectáculos, 1/10 (16 November 1850), 1.
Unsigned, ‘The Future of the Gramophone. Converted Musicians’, The Times (23 July
1921), 8.
Unsigned, ‘The Gentle Art of Musical Criticism’, Musical Standard (8 June 1895), 447–9.
Unsigned, ‘The Gramophone’, The Times (25 March 1904), 5.
Unsigned, ‘The Gramophone. A Tallis Fantasia’, The Times (6 August 1940), 6.
Unsigned [From A Correspondent], ‘The Gramophone Habit. “Popular” Records
Now Unpopular’, The Times (22 July 1921), 7.
Unsigned, ‘The Gramophone. Music Round the Map’, The Times (1 June 1940), 4.
Unsigned, ‘The Gramophone. Operatic Fare’, The Times (27 April 1940), 4.
Unsigned, ‘The Gramophone. Verdi’s “Otello”’, The Times (1 July 1941), 6.
Bibliography 783
Unsigned, ‘The Musician’s Gramophone. Bach, Brahms Beethoven’, The Times (2 April
1929), 14.
Unsigned, ‘The Musician’s Gramophone. Beethoven, Schumann, Mendelssohn’, The
Times (12 July 1929), 12.
Unsigned, ‘The Musician’s Gramophone. Stravinsky, Borodin, Ravel, Brahms’, The
Times (21 May 1929), 10.
Unsigned, ‘Ubiquitous Music. Jazz and the Gramophone’, The Times (31 July
1926), 10.
Unsigned, ‘The Viennese Ladies’ Orchestra’, New York Times (27 July 1874), 6; cited in
Julie C. Dunbar, Women, Music, Culture: An Introduction (New York and London:
Routledge, 2011).
Unsigned [‘From Our Music Critic’ (William Mann)], ‘What Songs the Beatles Sang’,
The Times (27 December 1963), 4.
Vaget, Hans R., ‘National and Universal: Thomas Mann and the Paradox of “German”
Music’, in Applegate and Potter (eds.), Music and German National Identity.
Vahot, Imre and Ferenc Kubinyi (eds.), Magyarország és Erdély képekben, 4 vols.
(Budapest, 1853–4).
Vallas, Léon, Claude Debussy: His Life and Works, trans. Marie and Grace O’Brien
(New York: Dover, 1973).
Vanberg, Vidar, Da de første norske grammofonstjernene sang seg inn i evigheten: norsk
grammofonhistorie 100 år (Oslo: Nasjonalbiblioteket, 2005).
Vanhems, Cédric, ‘La Preface de Josse Bade à son édition des œuvres de Paulin de Nole
(Paris, 1516)’, Bibliothèque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, 73 (2011), 607–22.
Vann, J. Don and Rosemary T. VanArsdel (eds.), Victorian Periodicals: A Guide to Research
(New York: Modern Language Association, 1978).
Várdy, Steven Béla and T. Hunt Tooley (eds.), Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth-Century
Europe (New York: Social Science Monographs, 2003).
Várnai, Péter, ‘Egy magyar muzsikus a reformkorban: Mátray Gábor élete és működése
a szabadságharcig’ [A Hungarian Musician in the Reform Era], in Szabolcsi and
Bartha (eds.), Zenetudományi tanulmányok I I .
Várnai, Péter, ‘Mátray Gábor élete és munkássága a szabadságharctól haláláig’
[Gábor Mátray’s Life and Work from the War of Independence to His Death], in
Szabolcsi and Bartha (eds.), Zenetudományi tanulmányok I V .
Várnai, Péter P., ‘Molnár, Antal’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online, available at
Varriale, Simone, ‘Bourdieu and the Sociology of Cultural Evaluation: Lessons
from the Italian Popular Music Press’, Rassegna italiana di sociologia, 1 (2014),
121–48.
Vasconcelos, Ana Isabel Teixeira de, O teatro em Lisboa no tempo de Almeida Garrett
(Lisbon: IPM, Museu Nacional do Teatro, 2003).
Vasconcelos, Joaquim de, Os músicos portugueses: Biografia – Bibliografia, 2 vols. (Porto:
Imprensa Portuguesa, 1870).
Vatielli, Francesco, Lettere di musicisti brevemente illustrate (Pesaro: Federici, 1917).
Vazsonyi, Nicholas (ed.), Wagner’s Meistersinger: Performance, History, Representation
(New York: University of Rochester Press, 2002).
Vecce, Carlo, Gli umanisti e la musica: un’antologia di testi umanistici sulla musica (Milan:
Università Cattolica, 1985).
784 Bibliography
Verlant, Giles (ed.), Le Rock et La Plume. Une histoire du rock par les meilleurs journalistes
français 1960–1975 (Paris: Éditions Hors Collection, 2000).
Viala, Alain, Naissance de l’écrivain. Sociologie de la littérature à l’âge classique (Paris:
Minuit, 1985).
Vian, Boris, Œuvres. Tome huitième, ed. Claude Rameil (Paris: Fayard, 2001).
Vigo, Giovanni, ‘Gli italiani alla conquista dell’alfabeto’, in Soldani and Turi (eds.), Fare
gli italiani.
Vigolo, Giorgio, Mille e una sera all’opera e al concerto (Florence: Sansoni, 1971).
Virgilio, Michele, Della decadenza dell’opera in Italia: a proposito di ‘Tosca’ (Milan:
Gattinoni, 1900).
Visentini, Olga, ‘La critica musicale italiana fra le due guerre: l’impasse idealistica’,
Nuova Antologia, 2143 (1982), 246–76.
Visentini, Olga, ‘La critica musicale italiana fra le due guerre: l’influenza di Croce’,
Nuova Antologia, 2142 (1982), 219–45.
Vollsnes, Arvid O., Finn Benestad, Nils Grinde, Harald Herresthal and
Owain Edwards (eds.), Norges musikkhistorie. Inn i mediealderen: 1914–50, I V
(Oslo: Aschehoug, 2000).
Vollsnes, Arvid O., Finn Benestad, Nils Grinde, Harald Herresthal and Owain Edwards
(eds.), Norges musikkhistorie. 1950–2000: Modernisme og mangfold, V (Oslo: Aschehoug,
2001).
Voss, Stephen (ed.), Essays on the Philosophy and Science of René Descartes (Oxford: Oxford
Vuillermoz, Emile, ‘La peur du silence’, Le Miroir du monde (6 April 1935).
Vuillermoz, Emile, ‘l’Initiation à la musique’, L’Ouest-Éclair (4 October 1935).
Vysloužil, Jiří, ‘Brněnský Pracovní výbor, Ústav a Kabinet pro lidovou píseň’ [‘Brno’s
Organizational Committee, Department and Institute for Folk Song’], in Pospíšilová
and Nosková (eds.), Od lidové písně k evropské etnologii.
Wagner, Richard, ‘La musica in Germania (I )’, Gazzetta musicale di Milano, 5 (30 January
1842), 19–20.
Wagner, Richard, ‘La musica in Germania (I I )’, Gazzetta musicale di Milano, 7 (13
February 1842), 26–8.
Wagner, Richard, ‘La musica in Germania (I I I )’, Gazzetta musicale di Milano, 8 (20
February 1842), 31.
Wagner, Richard, ‘Richard Wagner et les Parisiens: Une capitulation, comédie à la
manière antique’, Supplément au numéro 19 de L’Éclipse (5 November 1876).
Walker-Hill, Helen, From Spirituals to Symphonies: African-American Women Composers and
their Music (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2007).
Wallace, Helen, ‘A Critical Point’, BBC Music Magazine (July 1999), 5.
Wallace, Robin, Beethoven’s Critics: Aesthetic Dilemmas and Resolutions During the
Composer’s Lifetime (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
Walsh, Stephen, ‘Frank Transcribed’, The Times (17 August 1970), 11.
Walsh, Stephen, ‘Portrait of a Guardian Music Critic’, The Spectator (8 February 2014),
available at www.spectator.co.uk.
Walton, Benjamin, ‘The Professional Dilettante: Ludovic Vitet and Le Globe’, in Parker
and Smart (eds.), Reading Critics Reading.
Ward, J. O. (revised), ‘Scholes, Percy Alfred’, in Matthew and Harrison (eds.), Oxford
Bibliography 785
Warner, Simon, ‘In Print and on Screen: The Changing Character of Popular Music
Journalism’, in Bennett and Waksman (eds.), The Sage Handbook of Popular Music.
Warner, Simon, ‘Out of His Pen: The Words of Richard Williams’, rockcritics.com
(22 September 2002).
Warrack, John, German Opera: From the Beginnings to Wagner (Cambridge: Cambridge
Watson, Henry Cood, New World (4 December 1841), quoted in Mark N., Grant,
Maestros of the Pen: A History of Classical Music Criticism in America (Boston:
Northeastern University Press, 1998).
Watt, Paul, ‘“A Nationalist in Art”: Holbrooke’s Contemporary British Composers
(1925)’, in Watt and Forbes (eds.), Joseph Holbrooke.
Watt, Paul, Ernest Newman: A Critical Biography (Martelsham: Boydell Press, 2017).
Watt, Paul, The Regulation and Reform of Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Century England
[Royal Musical Association Monographs 31]. Oxford: Routledge, 2018.
Watt, Paul and Anne-Marie Forbes (eds.), Joseph Holbrooke: Composer, Critic, and Musical
Patriot (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014).
Weaver, Robert Lamar, ‘Melani (3): Alessandro Melani’, Grove Music Online, Oxford
Music Online, available at www.oxfordmusiconline.com.
Webb, Daniel, Observations on the Correspondence between Poetry and Music (London, 1769).
Weber, William, ‘La musique ancienne in the Waning of the Ancien Régime’, Journal of
Modern History, 56/1 (1984), 58–88.
Weber, William, The Great Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Programming from
Haydn to Brahms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
Weber, William, ‘The History of Musical Canon’, in Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist
(eds.), Rethinking Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
Weber, William, The Rise of Musical Classics in Eighteenth-Century England: A Study in
Canon, Ritual and Ideology (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992).
Weber, William (ed.), The Musician as Entrepreneur, 1700–1914: Managers, Charlatans,
and Idealists (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004).
Wegman, Rob C., ‘New Music for a World Grown Old: Martin Le Franc and the
“Contenance Angloise”’, Acta musicologica, 75/2 (2003), 201–41.
Wegman, Rob C., The Crisis of Music in Early Modern Europe, 1470–1530 (New York:
Routledge, 2005).
Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, Das Deutsche Kaiserreich, 1871–1918 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &
Ruprecht, 1973).
Weikl, Bernd, Swastikas on Stage: Trends in the Productions of Richard Wagner’s Operas in
German Theaters Today, trans. Susan Salms-Moss (Berlin: Pro-Business, 2015).
Weintraub, Stanley, ‘Shaw, George Bernard’, in Matthew and Harrison (eds.), Oxford
Weisethaunet, Hans and Ulf Lindberg, ‘Authenticity Revisited: The Rock Critic and
the Changing Real’, Popular Music and Society, 33/4 (2010), 465–85.
Welburn, Ron, ‘Jazz Magazines of the 1930s: An Overview of Their Provocative
Journalism’, American Music, 5/3 (Autumn 1987), 255–70.
Welser-Möst, Franz, Kadenzen: Notizen und Gespräche, ed. Wilhelm Sinkovicz (Vienna:
Styria, 2013).
Weltsch, Felix, ‘Beethovens unsterbliche Geliebte: Ein neuer Beitrag zu ihrer
Enträtselung’, Der Monat, 66 (1954), 635–8.
786 Bibliography
Wentz, Brooke, ‘No Kid Stuff’, Beat (1993), 43.

Werth, Alexander, Musical Uproar in Moscow (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1977; first
published London: Turnstile Press, 1949).
Werckmeister, Andreas, Cribrum musicum (Quedlinburg, 1700).
Werckmeister, Andreas, Musicalische Paradoxal-Discourse (Quedlinburg, 1707).
Wesch, Michael, ‘An Anthropological Introduction to YouTube’, talk delivered at the
Library of Congress (23 June 2008), available on Michael Wesch’s YouTube channel
at www.youtube.com (accessed 1 June 2015).
Wheeler, Alina, Designing Brand Identity: An Essential Guide for the Whole Branding Team,
3rd ed. (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2009).
White, Bob W. (ed.), Music and Globalization: Critical Encounters (Bloomington: Indiana
White, Bryan, ‘Music and Merchants in Restoration London’, in Austern, Bailey and
Eubanks Winkler (eds.), Beyond Boundaries.
White, Charles W., Alejandro García Caturla: A Cuban Composer in the Twentieth Century
(Lanham and Oxford: Scarecrow Press, 2003).
White, Harry and Michael Murphy (eds.), Musical Constructions of Nationalism: Essays on
the History and Ideology of European Musical Culture, 1800–1945 (Cork: Cork University
Press, 2001).
Whiteley, Sheila, Women and Popular Music: Sexuality, Identity and Subjectivity (London
and New York: Routledge, 2000).
Widestedt, Kristina, Ett tongivande förnuft: musikkritik i dagpress under två sekler, vol. X V I I
(Stockholm: Stockholms univeristet, 2001).
[Wikileaks], ‘Journalists Frustrated by Press Controls’, viewing cable
09SINGAPORE61, Wikileaks, available at wikileaks.org/cable/2009/01/09SINGAP
ORE61.html (accessed 1 June 2015).
Williams, Martin, Jazz in Its Time (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
Williams, Martin, The Jazz Tradition, new ed. (New York: Oxford University Press,
1993; 1st ed. 1970).
Williams, Raymond, Marxism and Literature (New York: Oxford University Press,
1977).
Williams, Richard, ‘Critics’ Choice: Records of the Year’, The Times (28 November
1970), 19.
Williamson, Edwin, ‘Coming to Terms with Modernity: Magical Realism and the
Historical Process in the Novels of Alejo Carpentier’, in Modern Latin American
Fiction (Faber: London, 1987).
Williamson, Rosemary, ‘Griffiths, Paul’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online,
available at www.oxfordmusiconline.com (accessed 17 January 2017).
Williamson, Rosemary, ‘Northcott, Bayan’, Grove Music Online, Oxford Music Online,
available at www.oxfordmusiconline.com (accessed 17 January 2017).
Willis, Richard Storrs, ‘Mr. Fry’s Lectures’, Musical World and New York Musical Times
(19 February 1853), 114–16, quoted in Lawrence, Strong on Music, Vol. 2:
Reverberations.
Willis, Richard Storrs, ‘Musical News from Everywhere’, Musical World and New York
Musical Times (7 January 1854), 5–6, quoted in Lawrence, Strong on Music, Vol. 2:
Reverberations.
Bibliography 787
Willis, Richard Storrs, ‘Reply to Mr. Fry, of the Tribune’, Musical World and New York
Musical Times (28 January 1854), 37–9, reprinted in Dwight’s Journal of Music, 4/22
(4 March 1854), 171–3.
Wilson, Alexandra, ‘Defining Italianness: The Opera that made Puccini’, Opera
Quarterly, 24/1–2 (2008), 82–92.
Wilson, Alexandra, ‘Music, Letters and National Identity: Reading the 1890s Italian
Music Press’, Nineteenth-Century Music Review, 7/2 (2010), 99–116.
Wilson, Alexandra, The Puccini Problem: Opera, Nationalism, and Modernity (Cambridge:
Wilson, Blake, Singing Poetry in Renaissance Florence: The Cantasi Come Tradition
(1375–1550) (Florence: Olschki, 2009).
Wilson, Carl, ‘World Music That Scares Starbucks’, [Toronto] Globe and Mail (5 March
2005), §R, 12.
Wilson, John (ed.), Roger North on Music (London: Novello, 1959).
Winklbauer, Andrea and Nick Somers (eds.), Euphorie und Unbehagen: Das jüdische Wien
und Richard Wagner (Vienna: Metroverlag, 2013).
Winters, Stanley B., ‘Josef Hlávka, Zdeněk Nejedlý, and the Czech Academy of
Sciences and Arts, 1891–1952’, Minerva, 32/1 (1994), 53–78.
Wise, Brian, ‘R. P. M.’, [Melbourne] Sunday Age (3 October 1993), §Agenda, 7.
Wistreich, Richard, Warrior, Courtier, Singer: Giulio Cesare Brancaccio and the Performance
of Identity in the Late Renaissance (Farnham: Ashgate, 2007).
Withers, Charles W. J., Placing the Enlightenment: Thinking Geographically about the Age of
Reason (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).
Witte, Robert (ed.), Catalogus Sigeberti Gemblacensis Monachi De Viris Illustribus (Berne:
Lang, 1974).
Wittmann, Michael, ‘Das Bild der italienischen Oper im Spiegel der Kritik der Leipziger
allgemeine musikalische Zeitung’, Le parole della musica I I : Studi sul lessico della letteratura
critica del teatro musicale in onore di Gianfranco Folena, in Maria Teresa Muraro (ed.),
Studi di musica veneta, vol. X X I I (Florence: Leo S. Olschki, 1995).
Wittmann, Reinhard, ‘Was There a Reading Revolution at the End of the Eighteenth
Century?’, in Cavallo and Chartier (eds.), A History of Reading in the West.
Woideck, Carl (ed.), The John Coltrane Companion (New York: Omnibus Press, 1998).
Wood, Gillen D’Arcy, ‘Cockney Mozart: The Hunt Circle, the King’s Theatre, and Don
Giovanni’, Studies in Romanticism, 44 (2005), 367–97.
Wörner, Felix, ‘Otakar Hostinský, the Musically Beautiful, and the Gesamtkunstwerk’, in
Grimes, Donovan and Marx (eds.), Rethinking Hanslick.
Wotton, William, ‘Of Ancient and Modern Musick’, in Reflections upon Ancient and
Modern Learning (London, 1694).
Wright, Lesley, Carmen: Dossier de presse parisienne (1875) (Weinsberg: Lucie Galland,
2001).
Wulf, Joseph, Musik im Dritten Reich: Eine Dokumentation (Frankfurt am Main: Ullstein,
1983).
Wyn Jones, Carys, The Rock Canon: Canonical Values in the Reception of Rock Albums
Wynn, Sarah J., The Emergence of the Music Critic in Late 18th Century London: Composers,
Performers, Reporters (Memphis: Langford & Associates, 2001).
788 Bibliography
Yearsley, David, Bach and the Meanings of Counterpoint (Cambridge: Cambridge

Yearsley, David, ‘The Musical Patriots of the Hamburg Opera: Mattheson, Keiser, and
Masaniello furioso’, in Hohendahl (ed.), Patriotism, Cosmopolitanism, and National
Culture.
Yeo, Irene, ‘Wrong Measure for Chinese Works’, The Straits Times Life! (18 January
2014).
Yoshida, Hiroshi, ‘Eduard Hanslick and the Idea of “Public” in Musical Culture:
Towards a Socio-political Context of Formalistic Aesthetics’, International Review of
the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music, 32/2 (December 2001), 179–99.
Zaimont, Judith Lang, Catherine Overhauser and Jane Gottlieb (eds.), The Musical
Woman: An International Perspective (Westport: Greenwood Press, 1983).
Zaimont, Judith Lang, Catherine Overhauser and Jane Gottlieb (eds.), The Musical
Woman: An International Perspective, Volume I I : 1984–1985 (Westport: Greenwood
Press, 1987).
Zanovello, Giovanni, ‘Les humanistes florentins et la polyphonie liturgique’, in
Galand-Hallyn and Hallyn (eds.), Poétiques de la Renaissance.
Zahra, Tara, ‘Reclaiming Children for the Nation: Germanization, National
Ascription, and Democracy in the Bohemian Lands, 1900–1945’, Central European
History, 37/4 (2004), 501–43.
Zahra, Tara, The Great Departure: Mass Migration from Eastern Europe and the Making of the
Free World (New York: Norton, 2016).
Zhurnalist’ [a journalist], ‘Replika: po povodu odnogo interv’iu’, Sovetskaia muzyka, 10
(1970), 44–6.
Ziino, Agostino, ‘“Contese letterarie” tra Pietro della Valle e Nicolò Farfaro sulla
musica antica e moderna’, Nuova rivista musicale italiana, 3 (1969), 101–20.
Žižek, Slavoj ‘Staging Feminine Hysteria: Schoenberg’s Erwartung’, in Flisfeder and
Willis (eds.), Žižek and Media Studies.
Zöchling, Christa, ‘Ex-“Presse”-Chef im Dienste der CIA: Otto Schulmeister agierte
für den Geheimdienst’, Profil (18 April 2009.)
Zohner, Alfred, Deutsch-österreichische Literaturgeschichte, vol. 4, ed. Johann
Willibald Nagl (Vienna: Fromme, 1937).
Index
À Nous Paris, 669 547, 558, 580, 607, 610, 613, 615,
A zene [Music], 434, 435 616, 656
Abbiati, Franco, 621 affections (as opposed to imitation), 95
ABC, 339 African American critics. See black critics
Abendpost, Die, 598 African American press, 460, 461, 682–4
Abendroth, Walter, 420–1 Afro-American, 682
Ablaze!, 514 Aftenposten, 400, 401
Abrams, Muhal Richard, 478 Against Modern Opera Productions, 607
Ábrányi, Kornél, Sr, 424, 431, agents, 162, 191, 195, 199, 200, 245, 406,
433 543, 548, 552, 650, 673
academia and music criticism, 137, 154, 175, Agobard of Lyons, 10
184, 189, 196, 202, 204, 215, 236, Agostini, Roberto, 627
331, 332, 333, 336, 339, 342, 352–5, Ahle, Johann Georg, 107, 108, 112
369, 374, 379, 403, 404, 428, 431, Ainsworth, William Harrison, 156
433, 435, 436, 443, 446, 459, 502, Aïssé, Charlotte, 79
503, 517, 525, 526, 542, 572, 574, Aksiuk, Sergei, 584
575, 577, 578, 581, 582, 583, 590, Alaleona, Domenico, 614
609, 610, 612, 617, 634–5, 684 Albion (New York), 294, 301
academicism, 155, 162, 223, 374 Album musical, L’, 312
Académie française, 62, 65, 66 Aldrich, Richard, 313
Académie royale de la musique, 62, 64, 65, Alexander II, Tsar, 215
66, 70, 73, 80 All’Opera!, 625
Academy of Ancient Music, 98 Allen, Cleveland, 683
Academy of Music (Hungary), 433 Allen, Henry ‘Red’, 470
Acta eruditorum, 109–10 Allgemeine Deutscher Musikverein, 182
Adams, Sean, 515 Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung, Die (AMZ),
Adderley, Julian ‘Cannonball’, 466 104, 124, 170, 236, 237, 277,
Addicted to Noise, 515 427, 437
Addison, Joseph see also Spectator, The, Allon, Henry Erskine, 156
91–2, 93 Alsager, Thomas Massa, 152, 156, 165
Adé, King Sunny, 531 Alsop, Marin, 281
Adelhard, Saint, 15 alternative press (US), 688–90
Adler, Guido, 443 Álvarez, Marcelo, 606
Adler, Victor, 414, 415 Amadeus, 622
Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund, 591, 594, Ambros, August Wilhelm, 224
599, 621 Amelli, Guerrino, 613
aesthetics, 26, 30, 31, 35, 71, 83, 84, 94, 96, American Music Lover (later American Record
119, 131, 133, 135, 146, 151, 152, Guide), 252, 685
171, 172, 174, 187, 192, 204, 221, American Musicological Society, 684
223, 224, 233, 237, 319, 340, 403, American Transcendentalism, 301–2, 303
408, 410, 411, 433, 435, 444, 445, Amis, John, 631, 632, 633, 634
475, 481, 489, 492, 496, 499, 502, Ammons, Gene, 480
[789]
790 Index
Amore è un dardo, L’, 625 Asafyev, Boris, 574, 575, 579, 583
Amphion, 326 A Book about Stravinsky, 574
Analisi: Rivista di Teoria e Pedagogia Flames of Paris, 575
musicale, 622 Assante, Ernesto, 627
Analytical Review, The, 102 Associated Negro Press, 461
Ancients and Moderns, Quarrel of the, 97–8 Association de la critique dramatique et
André, Yves-Marie, 66, 71 musicale, 348
Andy Kirk, 460 Association of Contemporary Music (ASM),
Anglès, Higinio, 332 573, 575
Année littéraire, L’, 78 Atalaia nacional dos teatros, 322
anonymity. See critics: authorship Atalaya, 488, 492, 493
Anschluss of Austria, 269, 408, 601 Athenaeum, 160, 162, 167
Antheil, George, 596, 673 Atlantic Monthly, 466
anti-modernism, 365, 412, 496, 598, 601 Atlas, 166
anti-Semitism, 187, 189, 411–12, 420, Auber, Daniel, 354
421–2, 595, 601–2, 634 La muette de Portici, 323
Anwar, Rydwan, 550 Aubert, Louis, 659
Apollo (Hungary), 434 Aubin, Tony, 654
Apple Daily, 556 audiences, 29, 45, 48, 55, 59, 63, 65, 68, 69,
Approdo musicale, L’, 623 70, 71, 72, 73, 74, 78, 79, 91, 106,
Aprahamian, Felix, 632, 633, 634 122, 154, 159, 167, 169, 171, 184,
Apthorp, William Foster, 303, 305, 306 186, 190, 194, 195, 200, 214, 267,
Aranovsky, Mark, 583 295, 301, 307, 322, 341, 342, 347,
Arbeiderbladet, 403 356, 359, 367, 368, 369, 444, 459,
Arbeiter-Zeitung, 414, 416, 417, 419, 603 460, 474, 513, 541, 551, 555, 572,
Archer, Thomas, 312 573, 574, 600, 612, 626, 637, 649,
Aria jazz, 342 653, 658, 683, 687, 688, 699, 700,
armonia, L’, 193 702, 703
Armstrong, Louis, 467, 478 Augustine of Hippo, Saint, 25, 27
Arnaud, François, 76 Confessions, 28
Aronowitz, Al, 509 De musica, 25
Arresti, Giulio Cesare, 51 Aurelian, 15
Arriaga, José de, 324 Auric, Georges, 351, 352, 673
Arroio, António, 324 Austrian State Treaty, 601, 602–3
Arruga, Lorenzo, 622 Austro-German tradition, 232, 237, 239–40,
Ars et labor, 195 365, 491, 678
Ars nova (Italian journal), 614 Austro-Prussian war, 183
ars nova (polyphony), 34, 35 authenticity (integrity), 233, 243, 246, 248,
Art Ensemble of Chicago, 473, 477 282, 283, 439, 465, 500, 510, 521–3,
Art et critique, 348 526, 528, 533–6, 537, 538, 539, 572
Art musical, L’, 353 authenticity (performance). See historically
anti-Wagner stance, 359 informed performance
arte melodrammatica, L’, 195 authorship. See critics: authorship
Arte musical, 329 Avanti!, 620
Arte musical, A (J. M. Barreto), 326 Avesgaud, bishop of Le Mans, 14
Arte musical, A (M. A. Lambertini), 326 Avison, Charles, 81, 95–7, 99
Arte musical, A (Montepio Filarmónico), 326 Essay on Musical Expression, 81, 95–7
Arte musical, A (new series), 327 Axle Quarterly, 507
Arte pianistica, L’, 613, 614, 622 Ayler, Albert, 471, 473, 479
Arts Desk, The, 647, 695 Ayrton, William, 151, 156, 159, 164–5, 167
Arts Journal, 691
Arts Spectacles, 659, 660 Babbitt, Milton, 686, 689
Artusi, Giovanni Maria, 38, 49, 51 Baby, Yvonne, 663
As farpas, 324 Bacarisse, Salvador, 334
Index 791
Bach, Carl Philipp Emanuel, 112 Basevi, Abramo, 193, 611

Phillis und Thirsis, 122 Basie, Count, 460, 461, 467, 469
Bach, David Josef, 414, 415, 416, 417, Basner, Veniamin, 584
418, 420 Bastianelli, Giannotto, 204, 206, 614
Bach, Johann Sebastian, 112, 115, 119, 123, Batashev, Alexei, 586
151, 153, 167, 179, 211, 257, 375, Batista, Fulgencio, 488
435, 463 Batteux, Charles, 72
Cello Suites, 269 Battle of the Books, the, 97
Goldberg Variations, 250 Baudelaire, Charles, 500
St Matthew Passion, 374 Baughan, Edward A., 154, 155, 167
Wohltemperierte Clavier, 123 Bayreuth, 308, 350, 422, 591
Bache, Constance, 156 Bayreuther Blätter, 324, 423
Bachtrack, 647 Bayreuther Bund, 422
Bacon, Richard Mackenzie, 151, 156, BBC, 259, 266, 507, 633, 635, 636, 637
157, 160 BBC Proms, 281, 633, 695, 702
Baez, Joan, 282 Desert Island Discs, 631
Bagge, Selmar, 186 Juke Box Jury, 697
Bailey Seymour, Charles C., 299 Radio 3, 265, 266, 270, 531, 633, 636,
Bailey, Mildred, 462 697
Baker, Chet, 403 Record Review, 265, 266, 270, 636, 697
Baker, Janet, 280 BBC Music Magazine, 264, 265, 266, 267,
Baker, Josephine, 366, 491 637, 647, 695, 697, 701
Bakst, Léon, 491 Beard, David, 233, 234, 236
Balilla Pratella, Francesco, 625 Beat, 402
Ballets Russes, 367, 491 Beat Instrumental (formerly Beat
Balliett, Whitney, 466, 470, 472, 473, 477 Monthly), 506
Ballo, Ferdinando, 616 Beatles, The, 242–3, 263, 502, 506, 507, 514,
Ballo, Ivan, 450, 451 644, See also Lennon, John;
Ballola, Giovanni Carli, 621, 627 McCartney, Paul
Balther of Säckingen, 13 ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’, 243
Baltimore Sun, 286 Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,
Balzac, Honoré de, 140 263, 644
Bambini, Eustacchio, 73, 74 The Beatles (The White Album), 263
Banfi, Antonio, 617 Beattie, James, 95
Bangs, Lester, 503, 509, 521 Beaux-Arts, 654
Baraka, Amiri (formerly LeRoi Jones), 461, Beaverbrook, Lord, 638
466, 468, 471–3 Bechet, Sidney, 465
Black Music, 471–2 Bedford, Arthur, 85
Blues People, 471, 472, 473 Beecham, Thomas, 633
Barban, Evgenii, 586 Beer, Johann, 107, 117
Barbieri, Guido, 326, 622 Der simplicianische Welt-Kucker, 107
Bardi, Giovanni, 47, 48, 50 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 129, 142, 144,
Baricco, Alessandro, 625, 627 150, 152, 164–6, 167, 173, 174,
Barilli, Bruno, 617 175, 176, 178, 183, 187, 194, 211,
Barnett, Morris, 160 236–9, 241, 276, 300, 301, 302, 303,
Barreyre, Jean, 659 308, 324, 357, 362, 363, 386, 387,
Barrington-Coupe, William, 268 388, 389, 416, 421, 435, 574,
Barry, Charles Ainslie (‘C. A. B.’), 154, 155 596, 600
Bartók, Béla, 314, 328, 418, 424, 434, 435, Fidelio, 603
436, 438, 439, 448, 449, 500, 574, French appropriation of, 363
632, 633, 673 Piano Concerto No. 5, ‘Emperor’, 252
Bartoli, Cosimo, 44, 45 Piano Sonata No. 32, Op. 111, 387
Bartoš, František, 447–8 Symphony No. 2, 175, 395
Barvík, Miroslav, 452 Symphony No. 3, ‘Eroica’, 300
792 Index
Beethoven (cont.) Besant, Walter, 159

Symphony No. 5, 176–7, 236, 415 Beuve-Méry, Hubert, 661
Symphony No. 6, 164–5 Bevir, Mark, 150
Symphony No. 9, 162, 165, 238, 269, 350, Bewley, William, 101, See also Monthly
363, 416 Review, The
Béhague, Gerard, 484 Beydts, Louis, 659
Bekker, Paul, 388 Beyle, Marie-Henri. See Stendhal
Belafonte, Harry, 529 Bhatt, V. M., 535, 536
Belinsky, Vissarion, 208, 211, 581 Biaggi, Girolamo Alessandro, 611
Bell, Clive, 384 Bianconi, Giuseppina La Face, 627
Bell, H. P., 312 bias, 44, 101, 190, 198–9, 205, 209, 220, 280,
Bella, Ján, 445 290, 306, 356, 374, 383, 385, 388,
Bella, Rudolf, 418 419, 552, 679, 682, 686
Bellaigue, Camille, 362 Bible, the, 13, 86
Bellingardi, Luigi, 621 Bidon, Antonio, 44
Bellini, Vincenzo, 301, 307 Biedermann, Der, 109
Norma, 212 Bifur, 488
Belyayev, Viktor, 573 Billboard, 505, 530, 531, 537, 548
Benda, Georg, 120 Bird, Ronnie, 668
Benjamin, Walter, 594 Birmingham Post, 646
Bennett, James Gordon, 296 Bismarck, Otto von, 182, 593
Bennett, Joseph, 153, 161, 168, 375 Bitti, Martino (‘Martinetto’), 54
Benoît, Francine, 329 Bizet, Georges
Bequadro, 622 Carmen, 344, 356, 360–1
Berg, Alban, 314, 673 black critics, 460–1, 471–3, 474–8, 480–1,
Violin Concerto, 676 681, 682–4
Berio, Luciano, 620, 624, 625 Black Echoes, 513
Berita Harian, 558, 559 Black Music (UK journal), 513
Berkeley Barb, 509 Blackburn, Manuella
Berl, Heinrich, 419 Formes audibles, 280
Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra, 326 Blackburn, Robert D., 380
Berlin Wall, 269 Composition and Style, 379
Berliner allgemeine musikalische Zeitung Blanquie, Louis, 652
(BAM), 178 Blaze, François-Henri Joseph. See Castil-
Berliner Zeitung, 593 Blaze (François-Henri Joseph Blaze)
Berliner, Emile, 254 Blesh, Rudi, 465
Berlinische Musikalische Zeitung, 177 Blessinger, Karl, 410, 412–13
Berlioz, Hector, 127, 129, 134, 136, 143–4, Bligh, Stanley, 312
145–6, 162, 167, 178, 182, 194, 240, Blitz, 329
347, 375, 384, 390, 674, 701 Bloch, Ernest, 672
Benvenuto Cellini, 133 blogs. See Internet
Harold en Italie, 166 Blok, Alexander, 575
Les Troyens, 144 Bloom, Harold
Symphonie fantastique, 179–80 The Western Canon: The Books and School of
Bernard of Clairvaux, Saint, 28, 31–2 the Ages, 235
Bernard Shaw, George. See Shaw, George Blues and Soul (formerly Home of the
Bernard Blues), 506
Bernard, Robert, 652, 653 Blues Unlimited, 506
Bernhard, Thomas, 606 Bluiett, Hamiet, 480
Bernsdorff, Eduard, 186 Blyth, Alan, 264
Bernstein, Leonard, 269, 314, 673, 685–6 Bocca, Giuseppe, 612, See also Rivista
Symphony No. 2, The Age of Anxiety, 676 musicale italiana
Bertocchi, Diego, 621 Boccherini (journal), 193
Bertrand, Gustave, 361 Boen, Johannes, 30–1
Index 793
Boethius, Anicius Manlius Severinus, 26 Brendel, Franz, 181–3, 184, 187

De Institutione Musica, 11 Breton, André, 494, 499
Böhm, Karl, 602, 603 Bréville, Pierre de, 349
Boileau-Despréaux, Nicolas, 63, 67, 69, 96 Bridle, Augustus, 312
Boito, Arrigo, 611 Bridle, Marc, 629
Bokemeyer, Heinrich, 110 British Broadcasting Corporation. See BBC
Bollettino ceciliano, 613 British Society of Women Musicians, 280
Bollettino del Gruppo di Analisi e Teoria della Britten, Benjamin, 257, 632
Musica, 622 Gloriana, 640
Bollioud de Mermet, Louis. See Bollioud- Broadside, 506
Mermet, Louis Brook Farm, 302
Bollioud-Mermet, Louis, 66, 71 Brooklyn Eagle, 675, 686
Bomtempo, João Domingos, 317 Brooks, C. W. Shirley (Charles Brooks), 163
Bonaventura, Arnaldo, 204 Brosses, Charles de, 79
Bonbon, Le, 669 Brown, John
Bonsanti, Alessandro, 618 Letters upon the Poetry and Music of the
Book of the Courtier, The. See Castiglione, Italian Opera, 93
Baldassare: Il cortegiano Brown, Marion, 472
book reviews, 106, 265, 663, 701 Browne, William Denis, 156
Boots and His Buddies, 469 Brubeck, Dave, 466
Borchard, Alain, 652 Bruckner, Anton, 172, 185, 188–9, 411,
Boredphucks, The, 549 422, 575
Borthwick, Stuart, 243, 246 Symphony No. 8, 188
Bortolotto, Mario, 620 Bruneau, Alfred, 351, 352
Boston Evening Transcript, 303, 305 Brunel, Marcel, 652
Boston Herald, 684 Bruno of Toul (later Pope Leo IX), 13
Boston Journal, 305 Brusi, El, 332
Boston Musical Gazette, 297 Bruyr, José, 652, 665
Boston Philharmonic Club, 295 Buena Vista Social Club, 535, 536
Boston Post, 305, 313, 675 Bull, Ole, 297, 393, 394, 398
Boston Symphony Orchestra, 305, 306, 313 Bulletin du Hot Club de France, 666
Boulanger, Nadia, 677, 683 Büning, Eleonore, 590
Boulez, Pierre, 500, 501, 590, 595, 597, 635, Burke, Edmund, 96
639, 656, 658, 659, 662 Burney, Charles, 55–8, 81, 96, 293
Bourdieu, Pierre, 527, 528, 540, 550, 554 General History of Music, 81, 100, 101–2
Bourgeois, Jacques, 660 The Present State of Music in France and
Bowles, Paul, 463, 679, 680 Italy, 55
Bowman, James A., 600 Burnham, Scott, 237, 238
Boy’s Own, 513 Busby, Thomas, 102
Boyfriend, 505, 510 Business Times, 558, 566
Brahms, Johannes, 154, 162, 167, 172, 174, Busnoys, Antoine, 37, 38
185–7, 188, 189, 414, 444 Busoni, Ferruccio, 614
Symphony No. 1, 186, 187, 188 Bussine, Romaine, 311
Symphony No. 2, 186, 187 Butler, Charles, 85, 86
Symphony No. 3, 186 Butt, Clara, 255
Symphony No. 4, 186 Byrne, David, 536
Branco, Camilo Castelo, 323 Byron, Lord, 484
Branco, João de Freitas, 329
Branco, Luís de Freitas, 327–8 C’è musica & musica, 624, 625
Braxton, Anthony, 479 Caccini, Giulio, 43, 47
Brecht, Bertolt, 599 Cäcilia: eine Zeitschrift für die musikalische
Breitkopf und Härtel, 174, 175 Welt, herausgegeben von einem Vereine
Breitkopf, Johann Gottlob Immanuel, 113, von Gelehrten, Kunstverständigen und
115, 116 Künstlern, 178
794 Index
Cadences, 669 música en Cuba, La, 488, 498,

Caesar, Ann Hallamore, 197 499
Cage, John, 314, 476, 635, 659, 673, 678, novels, 486, 499
679, 689, 690 Obras completes, 489
Cahiers du jazz, 664 Tientos y differencias, 489
Cahiers franco-allemands, 652 Carpitella, Diego, 625
Calico, Joy H., 597, 598, 599, 601–2 Carraud, Gaston, 352
Calloway, Cab, 460, 469 Carrefour, 657, 660, 668
Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 329 Carson, Tom, 519–20, 522
Calvino, Italo, 625 Carteles, 488, 489–90,
Calvocoressi, Michel-Dimitri, 352, 356, 496
381–5, 391 Cartellina, La, 622
The Principles and Methods of Musical Carter, Elliott, 314, 476, 673, 674–5,
Criticism, 385 679
calypso, 529 Carter, John, 478
Cambarieu, Jules, 353 Carvalho, Mário Vieira de, 329
Cambro-Briton, 151 Casals, Pablo, 269, 486
Campo, Conrado del, 339 Case, John, 85
Campra, André, 63, 64, 69 Casella, Alfredo, 616
Camus, Albert, 467, 655 Italia, 418
Canada musical, Le, 312 nationalist debates, 614
Canard enchaîné, Le, 660 Cassettes & Cartridges, 266
Candide, 652 Cassidy, Claudia, 287, 311, 682
Candini, Pino, 627 Castaldo, Gino, 627
Candito, Mimmo, 627 Castiglione, Baldassare
Cannon, Geoffrey, 507 Il cortegiano, 43–4
canon formation, 9, 117, 120–1, 138–9, 173, Castil-Blaze (François-Henri Joseph Blaze),
231–48, 269–70, 273, 307, 336, 340, 135–8, 141
452, 466, 467, 469, 518, 576, and Berlioz, 136, 144
579, 610 and instrumental music, 136–7
Cantagrel, Gilles, 664 and opera, 137
Cantastorie, Il, 626 De l’opéra en France, 136
Cantrell, Scott, 691 Dictionnaire de musique moderne, 136
Capell, Richard, 631 Castilho, António Feliciano de, 325
Capital, A, 329 Castro, Fidel, 488, 490
Cappelletto, Sandro, 621 Catholic church, 338, 613
Capra, Marco, 195, 196 Catlett, ‘Big Sid’, 470
Cara, Marchetto, 44 Cavaillé-Coll, Aristide
Cardus, Neville, 251, 257, 371, 378–9, organs, 485
385–8 Cavalieri, Emilio de’, 48
Autobiography, 378, 390 Rappresentatione d’Anima e di Corpo, 48
writing on cricket, 378, 385, 630, Cavallini, Edoardo, 618
631, 698 Cazzati, Maurizio, 51
Carlerius, Egidius, 35 CBS, 267
Carman, Joseph, 691 CD Review (BBC Radio 3). See BBC: Record
Carnegie Hall, 267, 461, 463, 672, 677 Review
Carnerero, José María, 332 CD Review (magazine), 265–6
Carpentier, Alejo, 484–501 Celli, Teodoro, 621
Chroniques, 489 censorship, 34, 38, 78, 85, 172, 208, 338,
Crónicas, 488, 490 339, 365, 409, 420, 425, 426, 430,
Ensayos Americanos, 489 452, 547, 558, 565, 566, 572, 588,
Ese músico que llevo dentro, 489, 499 610, 651
Iman, 488 Centro internazionale di ricerca sui
Letra y solfa, 489 periodici musicali, 206
Index 795
Century, 298 Clark, Andrew, 272

Cesari, Gaetano, 617 Clarke, Campbell, 162
Chabannes, Jacques, 659 Classic CD, 266
Chabanon, Michel-Paul-Guy de, 77 Classic FM, 637
Chambers, Deborah, 285 Classic FM Magazine, 265, 266
Chan, Yoong Han, 566 Classical, 691
Chang, Tou Liang, 552, 563 Classical Source, 695
Chansonnier de Clairambault, 80 Classical Voice America, 692
Chansonnier de Maurepas, 80 Cleave, Maureen, 507
chant. See plainsong Clements, Andrew, 272
Chantavoine, Jean, 368 Cleveland Plain Dealer, 507
Charlesworth, Hector, 312 clichés (in critical writing), 375, 376,
Chávez, Carlos, 492, 494, 500, 672–3 580
Cheetah, 509 Clutsam, George H., 156, 160
Cherednichenko, Tatyana, 587–8 Cobain, Kurt, 520
Chernyshevsky, Nikolai, 214, 218 Cobb, Arnett, 477
Cherry, Don Cochofel, João José, 329
Complete Communion, 473 Cocteau, Jean, 366, 491
Chic, 488 Le Coq et l’arlequin, 366
Chicago Defender, 460, 682–3 Cohn, Nik, 507–8
Chicago New Crusader, 682 Cold War, 593, 600, 648, 650, 655
Chicago Symphony Orchestra, 311, 593 Coleman, Ornette, 467–8, 471, 473,
Chicago Tribune, 287, 310–11 482
childcare, 288–9 Coleman, Rodger
Chilesotti, Oscar, 202, 612–13 Nuvoid Sun Ra Sunday, 482
Chissell, Joan, 264, 265, 287, 634 Coleman, Steve, 479
Choi, Lionel, 561, 563 Colette, 286, 349–51, See also Gautier-
Choir Malay, 555 Villars, Henri (Willy)
Chopin, Frédéric, 142, 162, 178, 183, 241–2, and Debussy, 351–2
257, 310 Claudine, 349–51, 352, 355–6
Piano Sonata in B flat Minor, Op.35, Collé, Charles, 79
241–2 Colles, H. C., 390, 631
Chorley, Henry F., 148, 160, 162, Collet, Henri, 488
165–6, 168 Colonna, Giovanni Paolo, 51
Christensen, Lars Saabye, 403 Colonna, Vittoria, 45
Christgau, Robert, 503, 508–10, 514, Coltrane, John, 466, 468–9, 471–4
521, 525 Ascension, 474
‘Rock-Critic Establishment’, 519 Columbia Artists, 678
Christian, Charlie, 461, 475 Combarieu, Jules, 353
Christiansen, Rupert, 272 Combat, 655, 657–8, 668
Chronique musicale, La, 353 Comédie-italienne, 68, 74, 77
Chulaki, Mikhail, 579 Comércio do Porto, O, 323, 329
Church, Michael, 272 Commentary, 508, 688
CIA (Central Intelligence Agency), 596, 605 Communist Party
Ciampi, Vincenzo, 319 Cuba, 490
Il trascurato (presumed by Ciampi), 319 Czechoslovakia, 450, 451
Ciao 2001, 626 France, 658
Cilea, Francesco, 198 Italy, 620
Cimbro, Attilio, 616 Resolution of the Central Committee of
Cinémonde, 369 the All-Union Communist Party
Citron, Marcia J., 272, 273–5 (Bolsheviks), 571, 578
claques, 198 Resolution of the Central Committee of
Clarendon. See Gavoty, Bernard the Russian Communist Party
(‘Clarendon’) (Bolsheviks), 573
796 Index
Comœdia, 349, 370, 488, 496, 650, 652, Couperin, François, 69

653–4 Les Gout réunis, 66
Composer’s News Record, 675, 680 Courir, Duilio, 621, 627
composer-critics. See critics: Courrier musical, Le, 353, 381
composer-critics ‘L’École des amateurs’, 355
Comte, Gustave, 312 Cousin, Victor, 139, 141
Concave Scream, 549 Couture, Guillaume, 311–12
Concert of Antient Music, 98 Cowell, Henry, 493, 673, 690
Concert spirituel, 77 Cramer, Carl Friedrich, 115
Concerti dell’Unione musicale, I, 627 Cranes, 245
Concerto delle donne, 47–8 Crawdaddy, 508, 509, 514
Concerts Colonne, 351, 354, 369 Cream, 510
Concerts Lamoureux, 351 Creem, 509
Concerts Populaires, 359, 363 cricket. See Cardus, Neville
Conciertos de Música Nueva, 492 Cricket, The, 471
Condé, Gérard, 663 Critica musica, 81, 104, 109–11, 116,
Congdon, Charles T., 297 118
Conrad of Zabern, 33 Critica musicale, La, 614, 615
Conrath, Philippe, 668 Critical Review, The, 102
conservatism, 63, 68, 72, 73, 110, 185, 223, critics. See also bias; canon
283, 293, 305, 312, 360, 361, 363, formation
367, 410, 412, 434, 491, 605, 608, authorship, 107, 109, 111, 112, 114, 115,
616, 617, 647 132, 147, 156–7, 161, 172, 202, 210,
Constantin, Philippe, 667 286, 297, 310, 311, 318, 348, 350,
Constitutionelle, Den, 398 372, 565, 576, 577, 582, 632, 633,
consumers, 106, 113, 115, 117, 148, 164, 662, 663, 697–9, 703
247, 258, 271, 285, 400, 455, 504, bribes, 161, 296, 356
505, 512, 513, 514, 515, 521, 523, composer-critics, 102, 143–6, 151, 156,
530, 538, 555, 643 157, 160, 172, 178–80, 182, 204, 210,
Contrepoints, 656, 658–9 215, 219–22, 227, 240–2, 298–301,
controversies, 266–8 311, 312, 314–15, 317, 327–8, 334,
Joyce Hatto, 267–8 338, 339, 342, 349, 351–2, 356, 369,
Vanessa Mae, 266–7 399, 403, 431, 434, 435, 463, 467,
Cooder, Ry, 535–6 572, 574, 584, 614, 616, 619, 620,
Cooper, Michael, 634 653, 654, 656–7, 659, 661, 662, 675,
Copland, Aaron, 314, 476, 596, 644, 677–80, 681, 683–4, 685, 686, 687,
672–3, 681 688–9
Corder, Frederick, 168 deadlines, 251, 288, 676, 699
Corelli, Arcangelo, 51, 99, 100 education, 39, 60, 68, 130, 136, 154, 155,
Corrente, 617–18, 620 169, 203, 210, 223, 252, 305, 308,
Correspondance des amateurs musiciens, La, 309, 310, 311, 327, 348, 349, 371,
138–9 372, 377–80, 382, 403, 410, 460, 507,
Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et 517, 567, 634, 661
critique, 79 musicology and. See academia and music
Corriere dei teatri, Il, 192 criticism
Corriere del mattino, 618 pay/remuneration, 157, 159–61, 297,
Corriere della sera, 197, 611, 617, 621, 410
627 performer-critics, 333, 616, 619, 681–2,
Cortot, Alfred, 255, 256–7, 653 684, 685
Cosmopolita, Il, 619 professionalism, 145, 158, 170, 201, 205,
Cosmopolitan, 512 208, 252, 298, 318, 322, 348, 351,
cosmopolitanism, 173, 185, 210, 214, 220, 370, 371, 403, 408, 432, 482, 518,
228, 327, 328, 366, 490, 547, 550, 519, 581, 657, 681, 684, 692
552, 554, 563, 564 Critische Musicus, Der, 111–12
Index 797
Croce, Benedetto, 610, 613, 615–17 Dannreuther, Edward, 154, 167, 168
Aesthetica in nuce, 616 Dargomyzhsky, Alexander, 211, 227
Estetica come scienza dell’espressione Rusalka, 216
e linguistica generale, 613 The Stone Guest, Cui on, 222
Cronaca musicale, 204 Darmstadt Summer School, 500, 597–8,
Crónica dos teatros, 322, 326 619, 686
Crónica musical, 326 Dartington Summer Music School, 633
Crosby, Bob, 462 Dauvergne, Antoine
Crouch, Stanley, 468, 474, 476–8, 482 Les Troqueurs, 74
Jazz at Lincoln Centre, 476, 477 Davey, Henry, 156
Putting the White Man in Charge, 476 Davis, Anthony, 479
Crousaz, Jean-Pierre de, 71 Davis, Francis, 479
Crouse, Timothy, 284–5 comparison with Howard Mandel, 479
Cue, 680 Davis, Frank Marshall, 460–1
Cui, César, 219–23, 225, 226–7 ‘No Secret – White Bands Copy
and Dargomyzhsky’s The Stone Guest, Negroes’, 460
221–2 Davis, Miles, 473
Culture musicali, 626 Greg Tate on, 481
Curtis, George W., 303 Davison, James William, 148, 152, 157, 161
Czech National Rebirth (Národni obrození), and Beethoven, 165, 167
441–2 and parody, 163
and Verdi, 166
D’Alembert, Jean Le Rond, 72 and Wagner, 167, 168–9
D’Amico, Fedele, 616, 618, 621, 628 conflicts of interest, 161–2
and Umberto Eco, 620 Runciman on, 373
D’Aragona, Giovanna, 45 Times salary, 160
D’Arcais, Francesco, 611 Dawson, John
D’Argenson, René-Louis de Voyer de Practical Journalism, 380
Paulmy, Marquis, 79 de Angelis, Marcello, 621
D’Arienzo, Nicola, 612 de Martino, Ernesto, 625
D’Ortigue, Joseph, 145 de Rensis, Raffaello, 619
D’Udine, Jean de Santis, Carla, 514
‘L’École des amateurs’, 355 de Sica, Vittorio, 625
Dacier, Anne, 66 Dean, Winton, 634
Des causes de la corruption du goust, 71 Debussy, Claude, 328, 354, 366, 412, 463,
Dagbladet, 401, 404 491, 658
Dahlhaus, Carl, 131 and Carpentier, 491–2, 495, 500–1
Daily Californian, 509 and Fuller Maitland, 167
Daily Express, The, 632 and Philip Hale, 306
Daily Herald, 312 and Rivista musicale italiana, 205
Daily Mail, 643–4 and Vincent d’Indy, 363–5
Daily News, 160, 161 as critic, 352
Daily Telegraph, The, 153, 158, 161, 162, 247, charges of effeminacy, 361–2
249, 272, 631, 632, 634, 638, Debussystes, 363
642, 647 L’Enfant prodigue, 492
Dal Fabbro, Beniamino, 621 La Mer, 306
Dallamano, Piero, 621 Monsieur Croche, 351, 698
Dallapiccola, Luigi, 617, 618, 659 on Willy, 349
Dallas Morning News, 311, 691 Pelléas et Mélisande, 344
Dallas Symphony Orchestra, 311 Petite suite, 492
Dallas, Karl, 263 Prélude à l’après-midi d’un faune, 253, 492
dance music. See popular music Decca, 255, 702
Daniel-Lesur, Jean-Yves, 649 Degrada, Francesco, 627
Danko, Larisa, 583 DeJean, Joan, 65
798 Index
Dekker, David, 600 Diário popular, 329

Del Mar, Norman, 641 Diário, O, 329
Delange, René, 653 Dibango, Manu
Delannoy, Marcel, 652 ‘Soul Makossa’, 530
Delarue-Madrus, Lucie, 286 Dicale, Bertrand, 662
Delaunay, Charles, 666 Dickens, Charles, 160, 387, 391
Deliège, Célestin, 621 Diderot, Denis, 72, 75
della Corte, Andrea, 199, 616, 618, 621 Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des
della Valle, Pietro, 49–51 sciences, des arts et des métiers, 72
Demarquez, Suzanne, 286 Entretien sur le fils naturel, 75
Demény, Dezső, 434 DiDonato, Joyce, 281
Denisov, Edison, 582 Die Zukunft, 410, 411
and ‘Khrennikov Seven’ list, 582–3 Diémer, Louis, 485
Sun of the Incas, 585 Diese Woche, 595
Dennis, John Dieters, Hermann, 186
Essay on the Opera’s after the Italian Digital Audio. See CD Review (magazine)
Manner, 91 Digital criticism. See Internet
Dentice, Luigi dilettantism, 143, 190, 201, 203, 214,
Duo dialoghi della musica, 45 566, 577
Depanis, Giuseppe, 611 Dirks, Walter, 599
Dermota, Anton, 603 Dirty Linen, 531–2
Descartes, René, 65, 71 Disc, 505, 510, 512
Desenjoativo teatral, O, 322 Disco, Il, 626
Desnos, Robert, 494 Discóbolo, 342
Desprez, Josquin, 43 Discoteca, 626
Planxit autem David, 40 Discusión, La, 488, 491
Victimae paschali laude, 41 Dister, Alain, 667, 668
Destouches, André Cardinal, 63, 64, 69 Dobroliubov, Nikolai, 208, 214
Omphale, Grimm’s critique of, 73 Documents, 488, 496
Desyatnikov, Leonid, 582 Döhring, Sieghart, 604
Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung, 597 Dolphy, Eric, 473
Deutsche Musikkultur, 597 Donaueschingen
Deutsche Musikzeitung, 186 Festival of New Music, 590
Deutsche Zeitung, 411, 420 Donizetti, Gaetano, 199, 301, 484
Deutscher Volksverlag, 421 La figlia del reggimento, 307
Dezarnaux, Robert. See Kemp, Robert Dorsey, Tommy, 469
Diabo, O, 328 Doucelin, Jacques, 662
Dial, The, 302, 314, 672 Douglas, Dave, 476
Dialogus de Musica, 10 Stanley Crouch on, 476
Diapason (French periodical), 266 Downbeat, 261, 459, 460, 461, 462, 464, 466,
Diapason. Centro Internazionale della 473, 483, 505, 511, 520, 521
Musica, 619 Downes, Olin, 313–14, 675–7, 679, 681, 684
Il Diapason, 619–20 and emotion in music, 676
diaries, 55–8, 696 and Sibelius, 313–14, 675
Charles Burney, 55–8 on Stravinsky, 313, 675–6
Halfdan Kjerulf, 398 Downtown criticism, 688–90
Johann Friedrich Armand von Dreamwest, 665
Uffenbach, 55 Dreyfus Affair, 344, 357, 367
Samuel Pepys, 82 Dreyfusards and anti-Dreyfusards, 363
Diario de la Marina, 488 Drouin, Pierre (‘Philidor’), 663
Diário de Lisboa, 329 Drowned in Sound, 515, 647
Diário de notícias, 325, 329 The Last Resort, 515
Diário do Governo, 323 Druckman, Jacob, 689
Diário ilustrado, 327 Druskin, Mikhail, 583
Index 799
Dryden, John Elgar, Edward, 155

Albion and Albanius, 89–90 elitism, 267, 335, 401, 402, 490, 518, 628
Du Bos, abbé Jean-Baptiste, 71–2 Ella, John, 165
Réflexions critiques sur la poésie et sur la Ellington, Edward Kennedy ‘Duke’, 460,
peinture, 71, 319 462–4, 467, 478, 480, 662
Dubos, Jean-Baptiste. See Du Bos, abbé Albert Murray on, 476
Jean-Baptiste Black and Tan Fantasy, 463
Dukas, Paul, 351, 488, 657, 658 Black, Brown and Beige, criticism of, 463–4
dulcedo, 22, 26, 28–9, 30, 38 Constant Lambert on, 463
Dumesnil, René, 661, 663, 665 John Hammond on, 463–4
Duport, Lia, 286 Roger Pryor Dodge on, 462–3
duricies vs. mollicies, 30 Ellis, Katherine, 1, 138, 144, 236, 279
Dvořák, Antonín, 239–40, 305, 309, 444, Ellis, William Ashton, 157, 168
445, 586 Ellison, Ralph, 474–7, 480
‘New World’ Symphony, 305 Elschek, Oskár
and Nejedlý, 446, 452 History of Slovak Music, 441
Rusalka, 446 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 301
Dwight, John Sullivan, 302–4, 305, See also EMI, 267, 516
Dwight’s Journal of Music emotion, music and, 23, 25, 40, 72, 77, 97,
Dwight’s Journal of Music, 302–4, 305, 310 98, 105, 118, 120, 153, 179, 247, 301,
Dyke, George J., 312 335, 340, 341, 388, 676, See also
Dylan, Bob, 461, 507, 508 passions, moving of the
Dzerzhinsky, Ivan Encounter, 596
Quiet Flows the Don, 575 Encyclopédists, 63, 66, 72, 77
Engel, Louis, 168
E. A. B. See Baughan, Edward A. English Musical Renaissance, 154
early music, 196, 205, 353, 354, 358, 364, English National Opera, 701
612, 613 Enlightenment, 84, 99, 114, 150–2, 153,
Early, Gerald, 480–1 154, 171, 175, 184, 319, 320, 321,
East Village Other, 511 427, 487
Eberwin of Trier, 13 Scottish Enlightenment, 150
Eccles, Solomon, 85 enquêtes, 355, 367
Echo de Paris, L’, 349, 365 Entartete Musik, 597
Eckart, Dietrich, 412 Entreacto, O, 322
Eco artístico, 326 Eötvös, Peter, 591
Eco musical (J. M. Cordeiro), 326 Erasmus Prize, 603
Eco musical (T. S. Pinto dos Reis), 326 Erben, Karel Jaromír, 442
Eco, Umberto, 620 Erkel, Ferenc, 431–2, 436
École des Hautes Études Sociales, Bátori Mária, reviews of, 431–2
381, 382 Erraught, Tara, 272
Écorcheville, Jules, 353 Erwartungshorizont, 233
Edison, Thomas, 249, 253–4 Escudier brothers, 145
Éducation musicale, L’, 656 Eshpay, Andrey, 583
Edwards, Amelia B., 156 Espectador, O, 322
Edwards, Henry Sutherland, 163 Espelho do palco, O, 322
Edwards, Siân, 281 Esplanade, Singapore, 550, 562
Eger von Kalkar, Heinrich, 22, 35 Espresso, L’, 621
Egge, Klaus, 403 Esprit Nouveau, L’, 488
EIAR (Ente Italiano per le Audizioni Esquire, 466, 480, 508
Radiofoniche), 623 critics’ poll, 462
Eichenauer, Richard, 410 Esterházy, Count Pál, 425, 426
Musik und Rasse, 449 Estrad, 401
ekphrastic criticism, 41 estrada. See popular music
Electrico, 549 ethnonationalism, 447–8, 449
800 Index
Etude, 260, 310 Ferreira, José Mariade Andrade, 325

European Magazine, The, 102 Ferrier, Kathleen, 257, 387
Europeo, L’, 621 Feschotte, Jacques, 666
evangelicalism, 150, 152 Festival internazionale di musica, Venice, 619
Evans, Edwin, 383 Fétis, François-Joseph, 140–4, 180, 194
Evans, Herschel, 469 and Berlioz, 143
Evening Birds, 530 on Chopin, 142
Evening Standard, 507, 630, 646 feuilleton, 131, 175, 347–8, 409, 411, 652, 661
Evensmo, Jan, 482 Debussy’s, 351, 352
Jazz Archeology (sic), 482 Dumesnil’s, 663
Everist, Mark, 231, 233 feuilletonistes, 323, 347, 349
Examiner, 151, 156, 159, 161 in Germany, 590, 594–5, 604–5
Express, L’, 664 in Hungary, 434, 438
Express, The. See Daily Express, The in Portugal, 322–3, 324
Expresso, 329 Kjerulf’s, 398
origins, 697
Fabbri, Franco, 627 Vuillermoz’s, 660
Fabulous, 505 William Haacke history of, 595
Facebook. See Internet: social media Figaro, Il, 192
fado (song genre), 325 Figaro, Le, 347, 648, 655, 657, 660–2
Fairport Convention, 532 Filippi, Filippo, 202–3, 611
Faletta, JoAnn, 281 filles de l’Opéra, 67
Falla, Manuel de, 334, 336, 340–1, 491, Financial Times, 272, 632, 634, 695
492, 493 Finch, Hilary, 643
Fama, A, 322 Finck, Abbie Cushman, 309
Fama, La, 192 Finck, Henry T., 308–9
Fancher, Ed, 688 First World War, 183, 249, 256, 286, 304,
Fanfare, 266 309, 312, 346, 357, 363, 365–7, 399,
Fanfulla, 197 408, 409, 410, 411, 412, 413, 417,
Fanfulla della Domenica, 197 421, 434, 448, 449, 450, 455, 486,
fanzines, 261, 459, 502, 512–13, 514, 613, 653, 665
518, 636 Fisk Jubilee Singers, 303
Fara, Giulio, 625 Flauto dolce, Il, 622
Farren, Mick, 511 Fleckno, Richard, 89, 92
fascism, 338, 421, 451, 610, 615–18, Ariadne, 89
623, 625, 626, See also National Fleischer, Herbert, 620
Socialism Fleming, Carole, 285
Fauré, Gabriel, 351, 352, Fléouter, Claude, 664
365 Floyd, Carlisle, 686
Favara, Alberto, 625 Flying Inkpot, The, 564–5
Fayenz, Franco, 627 Foletto, Angelo, 621
Feather, Leonard, 461–2, 465, 473, 475 folk music, 4, 116, 123, 213, 227, 262, 263,
Inside Bebop/Inside Jazz, 465 327, 328, 333, 393, 394, 395, 396,
The Encyclopedia of Jazz, 462 400, 405, 418, 427, 428, 431, 435,
Fegiz, Mario Luzzatto, 626 439, 442, 443, 444, 447, 448–9, 503,
Feld, Steven, 537 506, 507, 510, 513, 521, 527, 529,
female (critics, composers, performers, etc.). 531–2, 533, 539, 540, 555, 557, 586,
See women 625–6, 644, 650, 667, 697
feminism (also feminist), 235, 276, 279, csárdás, 428, 429
289–90, 508, 514, 548, See also Folk Roots, 513, 531–2
gender; women Fong-Torres, Ben, 519
femme fragile, 284 Fonorama, 342
Ferchault, Guy, 653 Fontenelle, Louis Le Bouyer de, 67
Ferrara, ladies of, 47 Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes, 67
Index 801
Forkel, Johann Nicolaus, 115 Gaceta musical, 488

Musikalisch-kritische Bibliothek, 115, 116 Gall, Saint, 24
Forster, E. M., 681 Gallarati, Paolo, 621, 627
Forstner, August, 417 Galli, Amintore, 202, 611
Fortnightly Review, 167, 372–3 Galliard, John Ernest, 92
Foss, Lukas, 672 Galliard, Marius-François, 494
Frame, Peter, 510 Yamba-O, 494
Framery, Nicolas-Étienne, 77 Galli-Curci, Amelita, 256
France musicale, La, 145 Gallicus, Johannes, 28, 29–30, 35
Franchini, Vittorio, 627 Galli-Marié, Céléstine, 360
Franck, César, 312, 485, 486 Gallop, Rodney, 505
Violin Sonata, 255 Gann, Kyle, 688–90
Violin Sonata (cello transcription), 280 Garanyan, Georgi, 586
Franco regime, 332, 333, 334, 335, 337, García Caturla, Alejandro, 486, 491–3, 496,
338–41, 342 498, 500
Franco, Enrique, 342 García Lorca, Federico, 582
Franco, José María, 339 Garner III, George, 683
Francoism. See Franco regime Garnier, Philippe, 667
Francophone Music Criticism project, 1 Garrett, Almeida, 321–2
Franco-Prussian War, 146, 357, 359, Garrettson Evans, May, 286
362, 365 Garson, Marvin, 509
Frankenstein, Alfred, 311 Gasperini, Guido, 204
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, 590, 594, Gasponi, Alfredo, 621
599, 605 gatekeepers, 164, 165, 168, 169, 231, 233,
Frankfurter Neue Presse, 600 240, 242, 248, 552, 692
Frankfurter Rundschau, 600 Gatti, Guido Maggiorino, 614, 616, 618
Frankfurter Zeitung, 594 Gaulle, General Charles de, 650, 655, 661
Franks, Rebecca, 265 Gauntlett, Henry J., 153, 157, 160, 165
Fraser’s Magazine, 167 Gautier, Théophile, 133–5, 348
Fratelli Bocca, 205 Gautier-Villars, Henri (Willy), 348–50
Fréjaville, Gustave, 654 Colette/Claudine, 349–51
Frendz, 510, 511 Debussy on, 349
Frere-Jones, Sasha, 521 ghostwriters, 349
Fréron, Élie Catherine, 78 Lettres de l’Ouvreuse, 348–9
Frescobaldi, 49 Gavazzeni, Gianandrea, 616, 618
Fresno Bee, The, 514 Gavoty, Bernard (‘Clarendon’), 648–9, 657,
Fricke, David, 514 660, 661–2, 665, 666
Friends. See Frendz Gay, John
Frith, Simon, 242, 243, 246, 247, 261, 265, The Beggar’s Opera, 71, 93
556, 630, 645, 690 Gayle, Charles, 479
Fronimo, Il, 622 Gazeta de Portugal, 324
Frusta teatrale, La, 200 Gazeta literária, 319
Fry, Bridget Gazeta musical, 326, 327
Cinq Chansons du Moyen Age, 280 Gazeta musical de Lisboa (J.G. Pacini,
Fry, William Henry, 298–301, 307 1889–97), 326
and Richard Storrs Willis, 299–300 Gazeta musical de Lisboa (Lence and Viúva
Santa Claus Symphony, 299–300 Canongia, 1872–6), 326
Fuller Maitland, J. A., 154, 167, 206, 373 Gazette (Montréal), 312
Fuller, Margaret, 301 Gazette de littérature, 76
Furtwängler, Wilhelm, 593 Gazette musicale de Paris. See Revue et Gazette
Fusion, 509 musicale de Paris, La
Gazzetta dei teatri, 195
G. B. S. See Shaw, George Bernard Gazzetta di Venezia, 195
Gabriel, Peter, 536 Gazzetta musicale, 192
802 Index
Gazzetta musicale di Firenze, 193 Giorno, Il, 622, 627

Gazzetta musicale di Milano, 192, 193–4, 195, Giribaldi, Tómas
198–9, 202, 204, 205, 612 La Parisina, 484
Gazzetta musicale di Napoli, 192 Gitler, Ira, 466
Gazzetta toscana, 59 Giuffre, Jimmy, 466
Gazzettino, Il, 622 Glanville-Hicks, Peggy, 679–80
Gegen Regietheater in der Oper (Facebook Thomsoniana, 680
group), 607 Glarean, Heinrich, 36–7, 39–41
Geissler, F. A., 412 Dodecachordon, 41
Gelmetti, Gianluigi, 625 Gleason, Ralph J., 509, 521
Geminiani, Francesco, 97, 99, 100 Glebov, Igor. See Asafyev, Boris
Gemütlichkeit, 602, 606 Glinka, Mikhail, 210, 217–20, 221, 226–8
gender, 234, 235, 244, 265, 272–90, See also A Life for the Tsar, 214, 217
feminism (also feminist); women Ruslan and Liudmila, 218–19
gender/genre associations, 361–2 Glinski, Matteo, 619
gendered language, 29–30, 91, 122, 411, Gloag, Kenneth, 233, 234, 236
412, 413 Global Rhythm, 537
Generación del 51, 342 Glock, William, 632–3, 635
genius, notions of, 90, 116, 122, 132, Glover, Howard, 166
139–40, 179, 213, 236, 241, 244, 245, Gluck, Christoph Willibald, 63, 75–7, 143,
248, 275–6, 277, 283, 300, 376, 387, 144, 155, 193, 574
426, 478, 584 Alceste, 76
Gennari, John, 461, 463, 475 Armide, 76, 77
genre hierarchy, 231, 243, 245, 275 Iphigénie en Aulide, 75, 76, 120
genre, world music as, 527–8 Iphigénie en Tauride, 76
Gentile, Giovanni, 615 querelle des gluckistes et piccinnistes, 75, 132
Manifesto degli intellettuali fascisti, 615 Goddard, Arabella, 162
Gentle Bones, 549 Goddard, Scott, 644
Geoffroy, Julien-Louis, 130–3, 134–5, Goebbels, Joseph, 409, 420, 423, 608
137, 696 Goethe Medal, 422
George, Nelson, 514 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 123, 179,
Geração de 70, 325 238, 357, 413
Gerard of Corbie, 13, 15 Goffin, Robert
Gerard of La Sauve-Majeure, 15 Aux Frontières du Jazz, 464
Gervasoni, Pierre, 663 Goldbeck, Fred, 659
Gheorghiu, Angela, 606 Goldberg, Michael, 515
Ghisi, Federico, 618 Goldman, Pierre, 668
Giani, Romualdo, 612 Goldman, Vivien, 514
Giannini, Vittorio, 686 Goldschmidt, Otto, 374
Giddins, Gary, 468, 478–9 Goldstein, Richard, 508–9
Gielen, Michael, 590 Goléa, Antoine, 582, 598, 660, 665, 667
Gil Blas, 349–51 Golos, 220, 223
Gilded Age, the (US), 304, 311 Golson, Benny, 466
Gildon, Charles, 91 Goltz, Christel, 279
Complete Art of Poetry, The, 91 Gombert, Nicolas, 44–5
Gillard, David, 644 Gómez, Julio, 332, 334, 335, 337–8, 340
Gillespie, Dizzy, 478, 480 Gong, 626
Gillett, Charlie, 510, 512, 531 Gonsalves, Paul, 479
Gilman, Lawrence, 313 González Echevarría, Roberto, 484
Gilmore, Mikal, 514 Goodman, Benny, 461, 469
Giornale d’Italia, Il, 619 ‘King Porter Stomp’, 468
Giornale dei musicisti, 614 Gorky, Maxim, 576
Giornale della musica, Il, 622 Gosling, Ray, 507
Giorni cantati, I, 626 Goss, Glenda Dawn, 314
Index 803
Göttig, Willy Werner, 598 Guide du concert, Le, 651, 653, 656
Goujart, Théophile, 355 Guido of Arezzo, 17, 18, 31
Graça, Fernando Lopes, 317, 327, 328 Guitton, Pierre, 660
Graener, Paul Gurney, Edmund, 168
Pan, 418 Gypsy bands, 427, 439
Grammy Awards, 530, 531, 535 Gypsy music (as a brand), 539
gramophone (device). See recording Gypsy music and performers (Hungary),
Gramophone and Typewriter 437–9
Company, 254 Gypsy question, 436–7
Gramophone, (The), 249, 250, 251–3, 256,
258–61, 264, 265–8, 270–1, 504, 516, Haacke, Wilmont, 595, 596
553, 636–7, 647, 697, 701 Habeneck, François-Antoine, 137
Gramsci, Antonio, 625 Habermas, Jürgen, 105, 396–7, 591
Grand Tour, 55 Habsburgs, 425–6
Granma, 497, 499 Haden, Charlie, 472
Grant, Mark N., 306, 315, 673, 676, 686 Hadow, William Henry, 154
Graphic, 161 Hagen, Holger, 598
Graves, C. L., 156 Hahn, Reynaldo, 657, 661–2
Graziosi, Giorgio, 618 Halbreich, Harry, 664
Great Terror, 571 Hale, Philip, 305–7
Grebe, Jakob Halffter, Cristóbal, 342
Gli amori d’Ergasto, 91 Halffter, Ernesto, 336–7, 340–1
Greece, music criticism in ancient, 3–4 Halffter, Rodolfo, 338
Greene, Burton, 472 Hall, Pauline, 400
Greenfield, Edward, 634 Hamerton, Ann
on Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 644 Three Night Songs, 280
Gregorian chant. See plainsong Hammond, John, 461, 475
Gregory I, Pope, 12 on Ellington, 463–4
Grétry, André, 77 Hancock, Herbie, 477
Grieg, Edvard, 393–4, 398 Handel, George Frederick, 99, 100, 101,
Peer Gynt Suite, 393 120, 435, 635
Piano Concerto in A minor, Op. 16, 393 Israel in Egypt, 87
Griffiths, Paul, 264, 635 oratorios, London debate on, 87
Grigor’ev, Apollon, 216 Reichardt on, 123
Grimlaic, 21–2 Hanseatic League, 395
Grimm, Friedrich Melchior, 72–4 Hanslick, Eduard, 172, 181, 183–9, 206,
Correspondance littéraire, philosophique et 238, 399, 444
critique, 79 and Brahms, 185–7
Le Petit prophète de Boehmischbroda, 74 and Bruckner, 188–9
Lettre sur Omphale, 73, 79 and Germanness, 185
Grondahl, Hilmar, 683 and Laroche, 223–4
Gross, Jason, 515 Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, 171, 187
Grove, George, 162, 374 Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, Russian trans.,
Gruneisen, Charles Lewis, 160, 163, 165 224, 225
Grunsky, Karl, 410, 421–3 Harbinger, The, 302
Richard Wagner und die Juden, 421 Harman, Carter, 676
Grupo de los Ocho, 335, 337, 341 Harmonía, 334, 338, 339
Grupo Minorista, 485, 491 Harmonia. Rivista italiana di musica, 614
Guardian, The, 155, 156, 272, 281, 287, Harmonicon, 151, 159, 164
378–9, 385, 507, 524, 630, 634, 638, Harmonie, 664
639–40, 642–3, 644, 647, 695, 698, Harper’s Bazaar, 160, 313
699, 702 Harris, James, 94–5
Gubaidulina, Sofia, 583 ‘Discourse on Music, Painting, and
Gui, Vittorio, 618 Poetry’, 94, 95
804 Index
Harris, Roy, 672, 673 Hindemith, Paul, 500, 574, 681

Harrison, Lou, 673, 679 Symphony
Harrison, Max, 264, 466 Mathis der Maler, 423
Harsdörffer, Georg Philipp Hinkel, Hans, 422
Frauenzimmer Gesprechspiele, 107 Hip Hop Connection, 513
Härtel, Gottfried Christoph, 174 Hirsch, Rudolf, 186
Harvard Symposium (1947), 681 Hirschfeld, Robert, 414
Hassard, John R.G., 307–8 historical method, 383, 384, 628
Hasse, Johann Adolf, 112, 119 historically informed performance, 635
Hastings, Thomas, 293–4 Historisch-kritische Beyträge zur Aufnahme der
A Dissertation on Musical Taste, Mus, 111
293 Hit Parader, 505
Hatto, Joyce, 268–9 Hitler, Adolf, 412, 592, 594, 599
Havel, Václav, 453 Ho, Chris, 549, 565
Haweis, Hugh Reginald, 153 Hodeir, André, 466, 467, 468, 582
Hawkins, Erskine, 469 Jazz. Its Evolution and Essence, 467
Hawkins, John, 96, 98 Hoérée, Arthur, 654
A General History of the Science and Practice Hoffmann, E. T. A., 172, 175–7, 187, 189, 240
of Music, 100, 102 and Beethoven canonization, 236–8
Haydn, Franz Joseph, 155, 174, 176, 324, compared to Schumann, 179
395, 435 on Beethoven Symphony No. 5, 176–7
Symphony No. 45, 691 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 604
Symphony No. 100, 139 Hogarth, George, 153, 160, 162, 166
Hayes, William, 96 and Beethoven string quartets, 165
Haynes, Roy, 471 Holbrooke, Joseph (Josef), 156, 388
Hazlitt, William, 159, 160 Holender, Ioan, 605
health, music and, 88, 276, 283, 361 Holiday, Billie, 461
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 181, Holloway, Amanda, 265
211, 223 Holmes, Edward, 152, 157, 160, 165–7
Heidemann, Hans Olaf, 598 and Verdi, 166
Heifetz, Jascha, 256, 679 on Berlioz, 166–7
Helfert, Vladimír, 451 Holsinger, Bruce, 27
Heller, Stephen, 180 Holt, Nora Douglas, 683–4
Hemphill, Julius, 477, 478, 480 Hölzl, Anton, 415
Henderson, Horace, 469 homosexuality
Henderson, William J., 308, 309–10 dedicated websites, 703
Henry Threadgill Sextet, 477 Lully and decadence, 66–7
Henselt, Adolf von, 194 Tchaikovsky sexuality, 589
Hentoff, Nat, 466, 470 Honegger, Arthur, 500, 656–8
Henze, Hans Werne, 263, 591, and Carpentier, 491, 494, 496–7
620 at Comœdia, 654
Hepworth, David, 513 Jeanne d’Arc au bûcher, 676
Herder, Johann Gottfried, 114, 121, 123, Le Chant de Nigamon, 418
426, 442 Honművész, 429–30, 431, 432
Hersee, Henry, 162 Horowitz, Joseph, 304
Heugel, 145 Horowitz, Vladimir, 267, 679
Jacques-Léopold Heugel, 145 Horsley, William, 162, 164–5
Higgins, John, 264 Hoskyns, Barney, 514
High Fidelity, 686, 691 Hostinský, Otakar, 443–4, 446, 448, 450
high-church sentiments, 85, 103 Česká světská píseň lidová (Czech Secular
Hillburn, Robert, 514 Folksong), 443
Hiller, Johann Adam, 115, 117, 120 Howes, Frank, 631, 632
Wöchentliche Nachrichten, 115, 116, Hueffer, Francis (Franz), 155, 157, 160, 162,
119, 120 167, 168, 373
Index 805
Hughes, John 647, 648, 669, 690, 692, 695–6, 699,

Calypso and Telemachus, 92 702–6, See also individual entries for
Hullabaloo, 509 websites/blogs
Hullah, John, 153 social media, 515, 547, 548, 564, 565, 566,
humanism, 36, 40, 66, 94, 99, 301, 341 607, 608, 692, 695, 699
Humanité, L’, 660 Intransigeant, L’, 488, 496
Humpback Oak, 549 Isidore of Seville, 16
Humperdinck, Engelbert, 327 Iskusstvo i zhizn, 574
Huneker, James Gibbons, 308, 309–10, Isotta, Paolo, 621
313, 314 IT, 509, 511
Hungarian National Choral Society, Italia musicale, L’, 192
433 iTunes, 537
Hungarian National Theatre, 429, 432 Ivanov, Mikhail, 225
Hungarianness, 436 Iverson, Ethan, 476, 482, 483
Hunt, Chris, 513 Do the Math, 481
Hunt, Leigh, 151, 152 Ives, Charles, 500, 673, 690
Izvestia, 580
Iberia Musical, La, 332 Izvestiia, 572, 574
idealism
German, 211 Jackie, 505
Italian, 613, 615 Jacob, Max, 496
Illustrated London News, 158, 161 Jacques de Liège, 34
Illustrazione italiana, L’, 202 Jacques, Edgar F., 157, 168, 373
Images musicales, 656, 662 Jacquet, Jean-Baptiste ‘Illinois’, 477
Impressionism, 327, 335, 400, 495 Jaeger, August J., 156
Incontri musicali. quaderni internazionali di James, Harry, 469
musica contemporanea, 620 Janáček, Leoš, 443, 446, 447–8, 451,
Independent, The, 264, 272, 536, 636, 637, 452, 605
646, 695 Jaubert, Maurice, 500
Indianapolis Freeman, 682 jazz, 259–61, 311, 367, 368, 399, 491, 496,
Indy, Vincent d’, 351, 363–4 497, 499, 503, 555, 573, 671, See also
and Debussy, 363–4 black critics
d’Indystes, 363 antipathy towards, 259, 260–1
on Rameau, 364 authenticity, 465
the Scholistes, 364 criticism, 4, 252, 263, 264, 265,
Information musicale, L’, 650, 652–3, 662 270, 315, 329, 342, 368, 400, 401–2,
Initiation à la musique à l’usage des amateurs de 404, 405, 483, 504–5, 513, 519,
radio, L’, 369 520–1, 555, 561, 585, 587, 626,
Inrockuptibles, Les, 667 636, 638, 644, 645, 646, 649, 660,
instrumental (and orchestral) music, 43, 66, 662, 663, 664, 666–7, 686, 687,
69, 72, 73, 77, 86–7, 94, 97, 102, 107, 697
122, 128, 136–7, 138, 140, 167, 168, free jazz, 474, 666
173, 177, 180, 188, 193, 205, 225, Hot Clubs, 460, 482
237, 300, 319, 325, 349, 362, 555, Italian, 626
612, 613 Jazz français, le, 367–8, 666–7
Integralismo Lusitano, 327 Norwegian, 401–2, 403
International Music Congress (1933), Soviet, 585
Florence, 617 Jazz at Lincoln Center, 476, 477
International Society for Contemporary Jazz Hot, 368, 464, 505, 663, 666, 667
Music Festival (1947), 680 Jazz Journal, 511
International Times, 510, 511 Jazz Magazine, 666
Internet, 231, 270, 330, 406, 462, 481–3, Jazz Review, The, 465–6, 468, 470, 472
515, 531, 551, 558, 564–7, 588, 604, Jazzit, 626
609, 610, 627, 628, 630, 644, 646, Jazzmen, 464
806 Index
Jazznytt, 402 167, 170, 171, 172, 174–5, 177, 181,

Jean Paul, 179 183, 185, 191, 192–6, 198, 199, 204,
Jelinek, Elfriede, 606 206, 236, 270, 320, 322, 326, 329,
Jepson, Barbara, 286, 289 346, 353, 354, 368, 369, 370, 375,
Jerrold, Douglas, 163 379, 401, 402, 410, 419, 430, 433,
Jewell, Derek, 514 434, 452, 459, 461, 481, 572, 573,
Jihad (record label), 471 582, 590, 594, 596, 614, 618, 619,
JL-Jornal de letras, artes e ideias, 329 622, 626, 630, 636, 638, 647, 649,
John of Afflighem, 9, 11, 16, 17 651, 658, 696, 697, 699, 700, 705, See
De musica cum tonario, 11 also magazines, See also entries for
John the Baptist, 24 individual titles
John XXII, Pope Jouvin, Benoît, 363
Bolla Docta sanctorum patrum, 33–4 Judson, Arthur, 678
John, Alan, 561 Juilliard Review, 680
Johnson, Axel B., 259 Jullien, Louis-Antoine, 299
Johnson, Bunk, 465 July, Serge, 668
Johnson, Harriet, 287, 682 Jungmann, Josef, 442
Chuggy and the Blue Caboose, 682 Junta Nacional de Música y Teatros Líricos,
Johnson, James P., 482 333–4
Johnson, Tom, 689–90
Johnson, Victoria, 66 Kabalevsky, Dmitri, 577–8, 580
Johnstone, Arthur, 155 Colas Breugnon, 575
Jolivet, André Kacsóh, Pongrácz, 434
and Carpentier, 486, 494, 497 Kalbeck, Max, 414
Cinq incantations for solo flute, 494 Kalisch, Alfred, 154
Joncières, Victorin, 352 Kallmann, Helmut, 295
Jones, LeRoi. See Baraka, Amiri History of Music in Canada 1534–1914, 295
Jones, William, 95 Kant, Immanuel, 384
Joplin, Janis, 282, 283–4, 664 Karajan, Herbert von, 257, 591, 603, 606
‘Kozmic Blues’, 284 Karpov, Vladimir, 577
Pearl, 283 Kashkin, Nikolai, 226
Jordan, Sheila, 479 Kastner, Macario Santiago, 329
Jornal de letras e artes, 329 Katholikus egyházi zeneközlöny, 434
Jornal de notícias, 329 Keenlyside, Simon, 703
Jornal do comércio, 323 Keepnews, Orrin, 466
Jornal do Conservatório, 323 Keeton, Annie E., 156
Jornal dos teatros, 326 Keil, Alfredo, 325
Joseph II, 426, 442 Keita, Salif, 532, 537
Josquin. See Desprez, Josquin Keldysh, Yuri, 576
Jost, Ekkehard, 473–4 Kemp, Robert, 657
Jouffa, François, 667 Kennedy, Michael, 634
Journal de musique historique, théorique, et Kennedy, Nigel, 266, 267
pratique, 77 Kennedy-Fraser, Margery, 156
Journal de politique et de littérature, 76 Kenney, Charles Lamb, 160
Journal des débats, 131, 143, 347 Kent, Nick, 511
Castil-Blaze at, 135–6, 137 Kenyon, Nicholas, 633
Journal des savants, 78 Kerman, Joseph, 232, 581
Journal musical français, 649 Kerner, Leighton, 689
Journal musical, Le, 353 Kerrang, 513
Journal of the English Folk-Dance Society, 506 Ketoff, Landa, 621
Journal of the Folk-Song Society, 506 Khrennikov, Tikhon, 578, 582
journals, 62, 63, 64, 77, 78–9, 81, 83, 101–2, ‘Khrennikov Seven’, 583
104–6, 108–13, 114, 116, 124, 129, Khrushchev, Nikita, 571, 580
138, 140, 145, 147, 151, 154, 158, Khubov, Georgi, 581
Index 807
Kidjo, Angélique, 528, 533–5, 537 Laloy, Louis, 351, 353

Ayé, 534 Lambert, Constant, 390, 500
Oremi, 534 on Ellington, 463
Oyaya!, 535 Lami, Emílio, 322, 326
Kim, Paul, 268 Lamothe, Ludovic, 485
Kimbell, David, 203 Lancaster, Byard, 473
Kingston Trio, 530 Landau, Jon, 509
Kjerulf, Halfdan, 398 Landowski, Marcel, 659
Klassekampen, 404 Lang, Paul Henry, 680
Klein, Bethany, 522–3, 551 Langford, Samuel, 378–9, 386
Klein, Herman, 155, 168, 377 Lanterna, La, 200
Kodály, Zoltán, 424, 434, 435, 436, 438, 439 Lanza Tomasi, Gioacchino, 621
Koechlin, Charles, 364 Lapierre, Eugène, 312
Koechlin, Philippe, 667 Lares, 626
Kollár, Ján, 443 Laroche, Herman, 219–20, 222–7
Kollmann, A. F. C., 151, 157 and the kuchka, 224
Kolodin, Irving, 310 Lasso, Orlando, 46
Kommersant, 588 Lawrence, Vera Brodsky, 294, 299, 300
Korngold, Julius, 413 Le Cerf de La Viéville, Jean-Laurent, 65, 68,
Krafft, Nathalie, 669 69, 70
Kramer, Barry, 509 Comparaison de la musique italienne et de la
Krasnaia gazeta, 574 musique françoise, 68, 79
Kraus, Karl, 606 Le Flem, Paul, 369, 652
Krehbiel, Henry E., 308–9, 313 Le Franc, Martin
Kreidler, Johannes Le Champion de Dames, 36
Protestaktion, 590 League of Composers, 314, 673
Kreisler, Fritz, 257, 262 League of Composers’ Review. See Modern
Kremlev, Iurii (Yuri), 577 Music
Krenek, Ernst, 673 Lebrecht, Norman, 705
Kronen Zeitung, 606 Lecuona, Ernesto, 500
Krugozor, 572, 586 Lederman (Daniels), Minna, 287, 314–15,
kuchka, 213, 214, 219–21, 223–4, 225–8 673–4, See also Modern Music
Kuhnau, Johann, 108, 109, 112, 121 Lee, Vernon (pseud. of Violet Paget). See
Der musicalische Quack-Salber, 108, 121 Paget, Violet
Kunst und Volk, 409, 417, 419 Legge, Robin H., 154, 249, 258
Leiblang, Alain, 668
LA Free Press, 509 Leibowitz, René, 500, 659
La Grange, Henry-Louis de, 660 Leipzig Gewandhaus, 175
La Harpe, Jean François de, 76, 132 Leipziger Literaturzeitung, 174
La Motte, Antoine Houdar de, 71, 73 Lemaure, Cathérine-Nicole, 69
L’Europe galante, 64 Leningrad Conservatory
LA Times, 514 Department of Musical Criticism, 583
Laboratorio musica, 622 Leningradskaia pravda, 574
Lacépède, Bernard Germain, 77 Lennon, John, 242–3, 264
Armide, 77 ‘John Lennon Wall’, Prague, 454
Poétique de la musique, 77 Leo IX, Pope. See Bruno of Toul
Lacerda, Aarão de, 324 Leonard, Marion, 275
Lachner, Franz, 194 Leonardo, 614
Ladvocat, Louis, 67 Leroi, Pierre, 654
LaFaro, Scott, 472 Let It Rock, 510, 512, 517
Laing, Dave, 510, 645 Letald (monk of St. Mesmin-de-Micy), 14–15
The Sound of Our Time, 525 Létourneau, Omer, 312
Lake, Oliver, 480 letters, 11, 42, 51, 52, 79, 93, 110, 111, 112,
Lalo, Pierre, 364 115, 148, 390, 398, 438, 696
808 Index
Lettres françaises, Les, 658 Lomax, Alan, 625

Levi, Ezio, 626 Lombroso, Cesare, 206
Levi, Primo, 625 Lompech, Alain, 663
Levin, Mike, 464 Lonchampt, Jacques, 649, 663, 664, 665
Lévy, Roland Alexis Manuel. See Roland- London Daily Post, The, 87
Manuel, Alexis London Magazine, 159
Lewis, George, 479 Longo, Alessandro, 613
Leydi, Roberto, 625 Louis XIV (French king), 62, 64, 66, 67
Lianhe Zaobao, 558 Louis, Rudolf, 411–12
liberalism, 133, 150, 154, 317, 408 Low, Frances H.
Libération, 650, 668 Press Work for Women, 381
Liebich, Louise, 156 Lubrano, Antonio, 625
Liebstöckl, Hans, 409 Lučić, Željko, 606
Life, 686 Lully, Jean-Baptiste, 64, 66, 68–70, 71, 72,
Ligeti, György, 635 74–5, 76, 79
Ligue nationale pour la défense de la Académie royale de la musique, 62
musique française, 365 Lunceford, Jimmie, 460
Lima, Francisco Bernardo de, 319 ‘Four or Five Times’, 460
Lima, Manuel de, 329 Lusophony (lusofonia), 329
Lin, Cho-Liang, 566 Luzzaschi, Luzzasco, 50
Lincoln’s Inn Fields Theatre, London, 93 Lyre, La, 312
Linda, Solomon, 530 Lyubimov, Alexei, 583–4
Lindeman, Ludvig Mathias
Norske Fjeldmelodier, 394 Mably, Gabriel Bonnot de, 67, 70
Lion Sleeps Tonight, The, 530 Macdonald, Hugh, 144
Lipman, Samuel, 688 MacDowell, Edward
Lisbon Conservatoire, 317, 321 ‘Indian’ Suite, 305
Listener, The, 507, 637–8 Mace, Thomas, 85
Liszt, Franz, 127, 172, 174, 324, 424, 436, Machabey, Armand
613, 674 Traité de la critique musicale, 657
and Hungary, 429, 432–3, 438–9 Machado, Gerardo, 485, 490, 493
Des bohémiens et de leur musique en Machado, Júlio César, 323
Hongrie, 438 Machart, Renaud, 663
Les Préludes, 445 Machaut, Guillaume de, 500
New German School, 182 MacInnes, Colin, 507
Transcendental Etudes, 553 Mackenzie, Alexander, 162, 374
literary criticism, 26, 29, 63, 95, 104, 113, Mackenzie, Compton, 249, 257–61, See also
114, 115, 121, 129, 159, 167, 171, Gramophone, The
179, 208, 209, 215, 347, 372, 466, Mackenzie, Faith (F♯), 265
488, 666 Mad Scene, The, 564–5
Little Sandy Review, 506 Maddocks, Fiona, 265, 281, 287, 636, 637
Little, Booker madness, 57, 275–6, 283, 284, 307
Up Front, 470 Madonna, 520
Liverpool Mercury, 254 Mae, Vanessa, 267, 281
Lives, 11, 23 magazines, 81, 147, 156, 172, 194, 196, 252,
Locati, Luigi, 612 261, 264, 265, 266, 288, 289, 333,
Locke, John, 118 338, 342, 400, 429, 459, 482, 504,
Locke, Matthew, 90 505, 508, 509, 513, 514, 515, 517,
The English Opera, 90 531, 587, 599, 609, 618, 622, 626,
Locke–Salmon controversy, 82 636, 638, 645, 646, 647, 649, 656,
Lockett, Hedley, 379 664, 669, 680, 682, 691, 700, 701, See
Lockman, John also journals
Rosalinda, 93 Magyar cigányzenészek lapja, 434
Logan, J. D., 312 Magyar dal. See Magyar dal- és zeneközlöny
Index 809
Magyar dal- és zeneközlöny (later Magyar Martí, José, 493

dal), 434 Martinů, Bohuslav, 673, 681
Mahler, Gustav, 189, 410, 411–13, 432, 575, Marty, 505
601, 631, 686 Marx, A. B., 178, 238
and Rudolf Louis, 411–12 Marzocco, Il, 195, 614
anti-Semitism and, 411–12 Masaryk, Tomáš, 445–6, 449, 450
Symphony No. 3, 416 Mascagni, Pietro, 155, 198
Symphony No. 8, 416 Cavalleria rusticana, 194, 198
Symphony No. 9, 269 masculinity. See gender
Mail and Empire, 312 Mason, Colin, 582
Mail, Daily. See Daily Mail Mason, Eric, 643–4
Mailer, Norman, 688 Mason, Lowell, 293
Maitland, J. A. Fuller. See Fuller Maitland, Mason, William, 100
J. A. Massaguer, Conrado Walter, 489
Maîtrise, La, 145 Massarini, Carlo, 625
Makeba, Miriam, 530 Massenet, Jules, 631
male gaze, 274, 278, 290 Massimo, Mila
Maley, S. Roy, 312 ‘La linea Nono’, 620
Malherbe, François de, 63, 65 Masters, D. C., 295
Malipiero, Gian Francesco, 492, Mathews, W. S. B., 294–5, 301, 310–11
616 Matin, Le, 652
Mallarmé, Stéphane, 500 Mátray, Gábor, 428–9, 432, 437–8, See also
Malraux, André, 650, 657 Honművész
Malson, Lucien, 664 on Gypsy and Roma music and musicians,
Manchester Guardian, The. See Guardian, The 437–8
Mancinelli, Luigi, 198 Mattheson, Johann, 81, 104, 108, 109–11,
Mandel, Howard, 479 116, 118–19
Mangiarotti, Marco, 627 Vernünfftler, 109
manifestos, 371, 410, 452, 489, 493, 494, Mauclair, Camille, 363, 364
499, 615, 617, 658 Mauriac, François, 655
Mann, Thomas Maximumrocknroll, 513
Doktor Faustus, 595 Maxwell Davies, Peter, 635
Mann, William, 264, 631–2, 634 Mazel, Lev, 583
1963 review of The Beatles, 242–3, 263, Mazzocchi, Virgilio, 50
502, 644 McCartney, Paul, 263–4, 267, See also
Mantelli, Alberto, 616, 623 Beatles, The
Mantovani, Tancredi, 204 Liverpool Oratorio, 267
Manzoni, Giacomo, 620, 622 McCartney, 263
Marcello, Benedetto, 96 McClary, Susan, 273, 274
Il teatro alla moda, 53 McColl, Sandra, 1, 234, 239–40
Marchesi, Gustavo, 621 McGregor, Smith C., 260
Marconi, Luca, 627 McLean, Jackie, 473
Marcus, Greil, 509, 523, 587 McLennan, Douglas, 691
Margherita, La (Margherita Salicola Suini) McLeod, Kembrew, 282–3, 287
Pistocchi on, 52–3 McMichael, Polly, 587
Marilyn, 505 McPhee, Colin, 673
Marmande, Francis, 664 McPhee, Joe, 473
Marmontel, Jean-François, 76 Medvedev, Alexander, 586
Marpurg, Friedrich Wilhelm, 108, 111, Mégret, Christian, 660
112–13, 117, 120 Meinecke, Friedrich, 593, 595
Marsalis, Wynton, 476, 477–8, 482 Melani, Alessandro, 53
Marsh, Dave, 509 Melly, George, 507
Marshall, Florence, 156 Melody Maker, 245, 261, 263, 402, 406, 505,
Marshall, Stuart, 280 510–15, 517, 518, 520–1, 645–6
810 Index
Melos, 435, 574 Le Boeuf sur le toit, 496

Meltzer, Richard, 509 Maximilien, 496
Mencke, Otto, 109 Miller, Edward, 86
Mendelssohn, Felix, 152, 153, 162, 174, 177, Miller, Glenn, 469
182, 241 Millington, Barry, 634
Fry on, 301 Milloss, Aurel M., 618
Meeresstille und glückliche Fahrt, 301 Mills, Haslam, 156, 379
Mendonça, António Pedro Lopes de, 323 mimesis, 72, 94, 105
Ménestrel, Le, 145, 353, 361, 370, 651 Minerve, La, 311
Menotti, Gian Carlo, 686 Mingus, Charles, 473, 480
Mercadante, Saverio Mingus Presents Mingus, 470
Didone abbandonata, 321 Mitchell, Joni
Mercure de France, 69–70, 73, 75, 77, 78, Blue, 284
79 Crouse on, 284
Mercure galant, 62, 65, 66 Mittag, Der, 597, 598
Mercure musical, Le, 286, 349, See also La Mitterrand, François, 650, 668
Revue musicale S. I. M Mixmag, 513
Mercurio, Il, 619 Mizler, Lorenz Christoph, 110–11, 118
Mercurius Hungaricus, 425 Moda, La, 192
Mercury Music Prize, 524 Modern Music, 287, 314–15, 673, 677–8,
Mereia, Adriano, 327 679, 687
Merlin, Christian, 662 modernism, 312, 314, 328, 329, 335, 341,
Mersey Beat, 506 344, 354, 404, 408, 411, 412, 413,
Messaggero, Il, 619, 621, 627 419, 423, 434, 465, 466, 467, 471,
Messiaen, Olivier, 351, 501, 596, 631, 632, 491, 496, 500, 573, 582, 591, 597,
635, 654, 656, 658, 660 599, 617, 631, 633, 677
Carpentier and, 497, 500 Mödl, Martha, 603
Hatto recordings controversy, 268 Mojo, 514
Le cas Messiaen, 662 Mojo Navigator and Rock’n’Roll News, 509
Quatuor pour la fin du temps, 344 Molendini, Marco, 627
Turangalîla-Symphonie, 631 Molnár, Antal, 434–6, 438–9
Vingt regards sur l’enfant-Jésus, 268 Monaldi, Gino, 611
Messinis, Mario, 622 Monat, Der, 596
Metallian, 665 Monatliche Unterredungen, 109
Métro, 669 Monats-Gespräche, 106
Metronome, 261, 459–60, 462, 465–6, 483 Monde musical, Le, 353
Metropolitan Opera, 313–14, 672, 702 Monde, Le, 649, 655, 657, 660–1, 663–4, 666
Metzger, Heinz-Klaus, 621 Mondo artistico, Il, 195, 200, 202
Meyer, Dominique, 605–6, 608 Mondo musicale, Il, 618
Meyer, Leopold de, 297 Mondo, Il, 618–19, 621
Meyerbeer, Giacomo, 199 Mondonville, Jean-Joseph de
Les Huguenots, 173 Titon et l’Aurore, 74
Robert le diable, 323–4 Monelle, Raymond, 636
Michel, Gérard, 657 Moniteur universel, Le, 133
Michelangeli, Arturo Benedetti, 624 Monitor, 518
Michelet, Jules, 127 Monk, Thelonious, 467, 471, 480
Mila, Massimo, 616, 620–1 Monson, Karen, 288–9
Milan Conservatoire, 202 Montale, Eugenio, 621
Milhaud, Darius, 352, 486, 488, 491, Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat,
494, 501 baron de La Brède et de
Carpentier and, 496, 498, 500 Montesquieu, 72
Christophe Colomb, 496 Monteverdi, Claudio, 38, 49, 51
Incantations, Op.201, 494 Monthly Musical Record, 155, 380
La Création du monde, 496 Monthly Review, The, 102
Index 811
Montréal Star, 311 Music Critics Association of North America

Moore, Carman, 689 (MCANA), 315, 684, 692
moral weeklies, 106, 109–12 Music Critics’ Circle of New York, 315,
Morales, Cristóbal de, 46 683–4, See also Music Critics
morality, music and, 16, 20, 25, 26, 30, 34, Association of North America
35, 63, 64, 66, 67, 74, 83, 84–8, 153, (MCANA)
211, 366, 368, 450, 478, 543 Music Lovers’ Guide, 504
Moreni, Carla, 622 music publishing, 82, 85, 106, 113, 140, 145,
Morgenstern, Dan, 466 148, 174, 193, 194, 195, 198, 303,
Morin, Léo-Pol, 312 326, 338, 427, 431, 592, 633, 701
Morley, Paul, 247, 514 music societies/clubs, 110, 112, 128, 137,
Morley, Thomas 138, 159, 162, 165, 193, 280, 295,
Plaine and Easie Introduction to Practical 298, 300, 301, 302, 322, 402, 419,
Musicke, 94 428, 430, 433, 451, 460, 482, 492,
Morning Chronicle, 159, 160, 161 493, 633, 658, 684
Morning Courier and New-York Enquirer, 298 Music Week. See Record Retailer
Morning Post, 163, 166 Musica, 204, 619, 622
Morrison, Bryce, 268 Música & som, 329
Morrison, Richard, 272, 640 Musica d’oggi, 614, 700
Morse Jones, Isabel, 286 Musica domani, 622
Mortier, Gerard, 605 Musica e dischi, 626
Morton, ‘Jelly Roll’, 465, 480 Musica e Dossier, 622
Mosaic Music Festival, Singapore, 550 Musica e musicisti, 195
Moskovskie vedomosti, 226 Musica Jazz, 626
Mosnes, Terje, 404 musica popolare, La, 194
Mota, José Viana da, 324, 327 Musica sacra, 613
Mothership.sg, 564 Musica viva, 622
Motteux, Peter, 90, 91 Musica/Realtà, 622, 627
Moy, Ron, 243, 246 Musical Advance, 685
Mozart Week, Vienna 1941, 651, 654 Musical America, 286, 683, 686, 691
Mozart, Leopold, 112 Musical and Theatrical Herald (Muzykal’nyi
Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 131, 155, 174, i teatral’nyi vestnik), 215
176, 194, 300, 301, 324, 388, 435, Musical Courier, 306, 435, 680, 685
556, 574, 583–4, 635 Musical Digest, 685
Don Giovanni, 131, 211, 222, 323, Musical Opinion, 386
455 Musical Pointers, 702
La clemenza di Tito, 280 Musical Quarterly, 684
Piano Quartet in G Minor, 295 Musical Record, 306
Münchner Neueste Nachrichten, 411 Musical Review, 157
Mundo da canção, 329 Musical Standard, 375–6
Mundo, El, 495, 499 Musical Times, The, 2, 258, 375, 383, 632,
Muñoz de Quevedo, Antonio, 492 634, 700–1
Muñoz de Quevedo, María, 492 Newman and Calvocoressi in, 381–2
Murphy, Kerry, 201 Musical World, 157, 163, 165, 166, 297, 306
Murray, Albert, 474, 475–7 MusicalCriticism.com, 647
Murray, Charles Shaar, 511, 525 Musicalia, 488, 492–3
Murray, David, 479–80 Musicalíssimo, 329
Murray, Sunny, 471 Musiciens d’aujourd’hui, 652
Murschhauser, Franz Xaver, 110 musicology and criticism. See academia and
Music & Letters, 680 music criticism
Music (Chicago magazine), 310 MusicWeb International, 647
Music and Poetry, 683 Musik, Die, 258, 597, 700
Music Criticism Network, 2 Musikalische Bibliothek, 110–11, 112, 118
music critics. See critics Musikalische Monathschrift, 124
812 Index
Musikblätter des Anbruch, 412, 419 Ne timeas Zacharia, 24

Musikkselskabet Harmoniens Orkester, 395 Nejedlý, Zdeněk, 446–7, 448, 450–2
Musique et Radio, 656 Nelson, Paul, 506
Musique pendant la guerre, La, 346 neoclassicism, 366, 619
Musœus, 297, 698 Branco and, 327
Musorgsky, Modest, 223, 225, 226–7 Carpentier and, 495, 496
Laroche and, 224 Downes and, 675
Mussolini, Benito, 623 Salazar and, 335
Muzak, 626 Nerval, Gérard de, 348
Muzyka i Oktiabr (Music and October), 573 Nesbø, Jon, 403
Muzyka i revoliutsiia (Music and Revolution), Nest’ev, Izrail, 582
573, 574 Nettl, Paul, 451
Muzykal’naia akademiia. See Sovetskaia Neudeutsche Schule, 182
muzyka Neue Freie Presse, 185–6
Muzykal’naia zhizn’, 572, 582, 585 Neue Merkur, 603
Mwandishi, 477 Neue Revue, 410
Mystère des voix bulgares, Le, 530 Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Die (NZM), 178–9,
180–2, 186, 200, 238, 240–1, 592
N’Dour, Youssou, 533–4, 537 Neue Zeitung, Die, 598
Nabokov, Nicolas, 596 Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 591
Nadel, Arno, 419 Neues Leben, 421
Nägeli, Hans Georg, 176 Neueste aus der anmuthigen Gelehrsamkeit,
Nancarrow, Conlon, 690 Das, 116
Napoleon I, 127, 592 Neuparth, Júlio, 327
Nascimento, Milton, 532 New Criterion, 688
Nataletti, Giorgio, 625 New German School. See Neudeutsche Schule
Nation, The, 309, 461, 672 New Masses, 461
National Arts Council, Singapore, 542 New Monthly Magazine, 156
National Gazette and Literary Register, 298 New Musical Express, See NME
National Socialism, 402, 408, 409, 413, 414, New Paper, The, 558
418, 419–23, 449, 451, 454, 592–4, New Republic, 314, 672
596, 599, 601, 602, 603, 651, See also New Review, 373, 375
fascism; occupation: German New Society, 507
occupation of France New Statesman, The, 632, 633, 636
nationalism, 239–40, 327, 328, 336, 441 New Time (Novoe vremia), 225
American, 309 New World, 298
black, 471, 472 New York Age, 682
Czech, 441, 445, 447 New York American, 297, 686, 698
French, 62, 68, 74, 131, 357–8, 359, 361, New York Amsterdam News, 682, 683
362–5, 366 New York Art Quartet, 471
German, 121–3, 170, 172–4, 177, 180, New York Evening Post, 309
182–5, 189, 409, 410, 420–3 New York Herald Tribune, 315, 463, 674–5,
Hungarian, 430, 438 677–80, 684–5, 686
Italian, 190, 194, 612, 613, 614, 625 New York Journal-American, 675
Latin American, 492 New York Morning Herald, 296
Norwegian, 395, 398, 400, New York Philharmonic (Society), 300, 301,
407 312, 313, 314, 554, 672
Portuguese, 325 New York Post, 509, 675, 681
Russian, 213–14, 216, 228 New York Rocker, 513
Slovak, 441, 442, 445 New York Sun, 309, 675, 685
Spanish, 336 New York Times, The, 278, 299, 308, 309, 313,
Nationen, 401 316, 465, 509, 514, 521, 671, 685–7,
Nazi party. See National Socialism 688, 690
Nazione, La, 622 Olin Downes and, 675–7
Index 813
New York Tribune, 298 Nouveau commerce, Le, 488, 495

New York Weekly Review, 303 Nouveaux temps, Les, 652
New York World, 314 Nouvel observateur, Le, 664, 666, 667
New York World-Telegram, 675 Nouvelle presse, La, 349
New Yorker, 466, 470, 473, 508, 511, Nouvelle revue française, La, 652
686, 690 Nouvelles littéraires, Les, 659
Newman, Ernest, 154, 155, 167, 168, Novak, David, 538
251, 371, 377–9, 384, 388–91, Novák, Vítězslav, 446
630–2, 634 Novalis, 179
A Musical Critic’s Holiday, 383 NRK. See radio: Norwegian
and Cardus, 385–6 NS-Kurier, 422
Gluck and the Opera, 383 Nueva música, 338
on training critics, 381–2 Nuova Antologia, 195
The Unconscious Beethoven, 389 Nuova musica, La, 614
Newmarch, Rosa, 155, 156, 215 Nuova Rivista Musicale Italiana, 622, 628
News Chronicle, 644 Nye Takter, 402
newspapers, 2, 58–60, 83, 141, 147, 158,
191, 192, 196–8, 200, 236, 249, 261, O’Brien, Lucy, 514
262, 264, 285, 287, 289, 294, 295, Oakley, Helen, 462
329, 330, 338, 343, 346, 347, 372, Observatory, The, 549
376, 391, 395, 398, 404, 410, 420, Observer, The, 160, 162, 249, 287, 507,
425, 430, 502, 556, 557, 594–6, 609, 632–3
611, 621, 636, 637–42, 644, 646, 648, Obsküre Magazine, 665
650, 651, 669, 672, 675, 676, 682, occupation
688, 695, 696, 698, 699, 704, 705, See Allied occupation of Austria, 601
also entries for individual titles Allied occupation of Germany, 594–6
Newsweek, 691 German occupation of France, 650–3,
Newton, James, 479 654, 656, 658–9, 660, 662
Newton-John, Olivia, 520 German occupation of Norway, 402
New-York Enquirer, 296 Ockeghem, Johannes, 37
Nicholas, Jeremy, 268 Tinctoris on, 38–9
Nichols, Herbie, 473 Odoevsky, Vladimir, 210–15, 217, 226–8
Nicolai, Friedrich, 113–15 Œuvre du X X e siècle, Paris 1952
Nigg, Serge, 658 (festival), 658
Nigog, Le, 312 Œuvre, L’, 652
Niles, Abbe, 505 Offenbach, Jacques, 145, 324, 362
Nineteenth Century (journal), 167 Öffentlichkeit, eine, 397, 405, 406
Nipperdey, Thomas, 592 Ohana, Maurice, 500
NME, 402, 406, 503, 505, 511–12, 513, 514, old-school criticism, 373–7, 391
515, 518, 548, 645–6 Oliver, King, 467
Nonesuch Explorer Series, 535 Oliveros, Pauline, 690
Nordheim, Arne, 403 Ong, Teng Cheong, 543
Norsk Jazz, 402 online. See Internet
Norsk Rikskringkasting. See radio: Online Citizen, The, 564
Norwegian Oon, Clarissa, 561
Norske Intelligentzsedler, 398 opera, 52–3, 56, 111, 266, 295, 307, 319,
North, Roger, 82, 90, 94–5 321, 323, 325, 332, 333, 392, 403,
Northcott, Bayan, 635–6 431, 432, 446, 484, 564, 571, 595,
Northern Bee, The (Severnaia pchela), 210, 222 605, 606, 607, 652, 684, 699,
Norvo, Red, 462 701, 702
Noseda, Aldo, 611 birth of, 48–9
Notes, 701 English, 83, 89–93, 151, 152, 632
Notes from the Fatherland (Otechestvennye French, 63, 67, 68, 69–71, 73–4, 75–6, 80,
zapiski), 210 137, 359–62, 367, 657
814 Index
opera (cont.) Pall Mall Gazette, 161, 374

German, 122–3, 172–4, 177, 187 Palmer, Robert, 514
Italian, 190–1, 194–5, 196–8, 201–2, Palmer, Tony, 507
205–6 Pan-American Association of
debates on, 66, 68, 69, 73–4, 77, 84, Composers, 493
89–93, 100, 101, 103, 122–3, 166, Panassié, Hugues, 368, 666
183, 324, 325, 614 Pannain, Guido, 616, 617, 622
Russian, 211–14, 215, 216–19, 220, Panorama, 622
221–2, 227, 579 Panzacchi, Enrico, 611
text setting, 94, 221 Papuzzi, Alberto, 627–8
Opéra, 656, 659–60, 662 Pareles, Jon, 514
opéra-ballet, 63, 64, 70, 73 Parente, Alfredo, 616
opéra-comique (genre), 74, 75, 354, Parente, Luigi, 617
360–2 Parigi, Luigi, 614, 615
Opéra-comique (theatre), 64, 77, 356, 367 Parin, Aleksei, 588
operetta, 194, 305, 362, 403, 435, 652 Paris Conservatoire, 128, 136, 138, 140, 311,
Option, 513 349, 352, 363, 485, 658, 681, See also
Opus, 691 Société des Concerts du
oratorio, 55, 87, 115 Conservatoire
Ørebladet, 401 Paris Exposition, 1937, 367
Orff, Carl, 423 Paris, Opéra national de, 64, 77, 133, 137,
Carmina burana, 423 485, 605, 661
organ, debate on suitability in church, 87 Paris-Inter, 657
organic criticism, 216, 218 Paris-Soir, 651, 652
organicism, 238, 248 Parker, Charlie, 467, 480
Organissimo, 482–3 Hodeir on, 468
Organization of Revolutionary Composers Parker, Sean, 515
(ORK), 573 Parmenter, Ross, 676
Orkesterjournalen, 401 Parrett, Walter, 374
Orkestra Melayu, 555 Parry, C. Hubert H., 154, 162, 374, 375
Ornstein, Leo, 672 Parry, John, 151
Orphéon, L’, 346 Pärt, Arvo
Orquesta de Conciertos de Caibarién, 493 Perpetuum Mobile, 584
Orquesta Filarmónica, 491, 493, 497 Partch, Harry, 690
Orquesta Sinfónica, 491, 493 Pasdeloup, Jules, 363
Ortega y Gasset, José, 335–6, 341 programming Wagner, 359
Revista de Occidente, 487 Passe-Temps, Le, 312
Ortiz, Fernando, 488 passions, moving of the, 84, 94, 96, See also
Ory, Kid, 465 emotion, music and
Oswald, Henrique, 485 Pater, Walter, 384
Otaño, Nemesio, 339, 340 Patrie, La, 311, 312
Ottawa Free Press, 295 Patriot, Der, 109, 111
Ovation, 691 Paul Simon
Overy, Paul, 507 Graceland, 530–1
Oz, 509, 510, 511 pay. See critics: pay/remuneration
Peacock, Thomas Love, 152
Pacadis, Alain, 668 Peacocke, Emillie, 286
Paget, Violet, 156 Pedrell, Felipe, 332, 336
Paine, John Knowles, 305, 309 Pélissier, Marie, 69
painting, comparisons with music, 71, Penman, Ian, 514
94, 95 penny dailies, 158, 296
Palais Garnier, 485 People’s Song Newsletter. See Sing Out
Palais royal, 64, 65, 79 Pepys, Samuel, 82
Palestrina, Giovanni Pierluigi da, 46, 49, 463 Perfect Sound Forever, 515
Index 815
Perfis artísticos, 326 Pisarev, Dmitri, 208

Pergolesi, Giovanni Battista, 319, 600–1 Pisk, Paul A., 418–19
Il Maestro di Musica, 600 Pistocchi, Francisco Antonio, 51–5
La serva padrona, 73 Pitchfork, 515
Peri, Jacopo Pittsburgh Courier, 682
Euridice, 48 Pius X, Pope
periodicals. See journals Motu proprio, 613
Perrault, Charles, 67 Pivoda, František, 444, 446
Critique de l’Opéra, 67 Pizzetti, Ildebrando, 204, 206, 614
Perrin, Pierre, 66 plainsong, 9–24, 30, 31–3, 34, 424, 613, 696
Perseveranza, La, 202 Plantinga, Leon, 240
Perti, Giacomo Antonio, 51 Playboy, 466, 689
Pesenti, Michele player pianos, 255–6
Tulerunt dominum meum, 40 Playford, John, 85–6
Pestalozza, Luigi, 620 Pleasants, Henry, 687
Pest-Buda Music Society, 428–9, 430 The Agony of Modern Music, 687
Pestbudai Hangászegyesület. See Pest-Buda Plettro, Il, 622
Music Society Plûche, Noël-Antoine, 66
Pestelli, Giorgio, 621, 627–8 Le Spectacle de la nature, 71
and Giorgio Papuzzi, 628 poetry, comparisons with music, 68, 71, 95,
Pétain, Maréchal, 370 97, 237, 620
Petazzi, Paolo, 622 Point of Departure, 481
Petit journal, Le, 346 Point, Le, 664
Petit Parisien, Le, 652 Polignac, Armande de, 286
Petit, Pierre, 657, 662 Polillo, Arrigo, 626
Petrassi, Goffredo, 618–19 Pollard, Cecil, 261
Petridis, Alexis, 524 Polyphonie, 658–9
Petticoat, 512 Pommer, Josef, 443
Peyser, Joan, 314 Pompey, Ángel María, 339
Philadelphia Evening Bulletin, 687 Ponce, Manuel, 488
Philharmonic Society (London), 159, Pont neuf, 79
162, 165 pont neufs, 79
Philidor. See Drouin, Pierre Pop Matters, 515
philo-Semitism, 411, 419 Pop Revyen, 402
philosophes, 72–5, 76, 319 popular music, 259–61, See also jazz
Phonogram Record, 509 antipathy towards, 259, 260–1
phonograph. See recording authenticity, 243, 246, 282, 283, 510,
Phonograph Monthly Review, The, 260, 504 521–3, 526
Phono-Radio-Musique, 369 commercial influences, 243–4, 246–7,
phrasis, 39, 41 504, 507, 510, 512, 513, 514,
Piano Time, 622 519, 525
Pianoforte, Il, 614, 616 criticism, 231, 232, 242–8, 252, 263–4,
Picasso, Pablo, 491 266, 270, 276, 282–5, 287–8, 290,
Piccinni, Niccolò, 76, 132 329, 342, 343, 401, 402–3, 404,
Atys, 76 405–6, 499, 502–26, 531, 548–50,
Roland, 76 554, 556, 571, 585–7, 625, 626,
Pietro d’Abano, 27 629–30, 636, 638, 639–40, 641, 643,
Piferrer, Pau, 333 644–6, 649, 660, 663, 664, 667,
Pinchercle, Marc, 488 688, 697
Pincherle, Marc, 659 Porta, Ercole, 46
Pinzauti, Leonardo, 622, 627 Porter, Andrew, 631–2, 633, 634, 699
Pioch, Georges, 652 Portier, Madeleine, 286
Pirata, Il, 192 Portland Oregonian, 683
Pironti, Alberto, 621 Portland Press Herald, 514
816 Index
Portugal, José Blanc de, 329 Prout, Ebenezer, 154–5

Português, O, 321 Prunières, Henry, 353–4, 488
Portuondo, José Antonio, 490 Prynne, William, 88
positivism, 205, 324, 385, 391, 578, 610, Pryor Dodge, Roger, 462–3
612, 613–15, 616 pseudonyms. See critics: authorship
Pospelov, Pyotr, 588 Público, 329
post-colonialism, 330 Publitsistika, 575, 577
post-feminism, 279 Puccini, Giacomo, 155, 198–9, 205
postmodernism, 405, 478, 483, 620 Tosca, 190, 606
Poulenc, Francis, 352, 491, 492, 495, 500–1 Pueblo, 339
Les Mamelles de Tirésias, 500 Pugachova, Alla, 586
Rapsodie nègre, 492 Pullen, Don, 478
Pour ou contre la musique moderne?, 649 Puls, 402
Powell, Bud, 482 Punk, 247, 248, 402, 481, 512–13, 514, 518,
Powell, Mel, 469 522, 549, 555, 668
Powers, Ann, 514 Punk Planet, 514
Pozzi, Raffaele, 627 Purcell, Henry, 92
Prague Manifesto of 1948, 452, 658 Puritanism, 85, 86, 103
Praise of Musicke, The, 85, 88 Pussy Riot, 589
Prato, Paolo, 627
Pravda, 572, 576, 580 Q, 264, 513, 645
‘Muddle Instead of Music’, 571 quadrivium, 26, 36
Prawy, Marcel, 607 Quarterly Musical Magazine and Review, 151,
Pré, Jacqueline du, 280 157, 165
Premio Nacional de la Crítica Quarterly Musical Register, 151, 157
Discográfica, 342 Queen, 160, 507–8
Presença, 328 Queirós, José Maria de Eça de, 324
Presse, Die, 185, 603, 604–6, 608 querelle des anciens et modernes, 67, 71, 97
Presse, La (France), 133 querelle des bouffons, 64, 73–4, 76, 79, 99,
Presse, La (Montréal), 312 100–1
Prezzolini, Giuseppe, 614 querelle des gluckistes et piccinnistes, 75
Price, Simon, 245 Quick, 594
Prieberg, Fred, 582 Quinault, Philippe, 63, 67–9, 70, 76
Primeiro de Janeiro, O, 329 Quinel, Charles, 652
primitivism, 492, 495 Quintela, Joaquim Pedro (Count of
Principe, Quirino, 622 Farrobo), 318
Printz, Wolfgang Caspar, 107 Quintilian, Marcus Fabius, 26, 29
Phrynis Mitilenaeus, 107
Prix de Rome, 143, 501, 663 R. Peggio. See Baughan, Edward A.
Procházka, Rudolph Von, 194 Ra, Sun. See Sun Ra
programme music Rabochii i teatr, 574
David Josef Bach and, 417–18 racism, 477, 533, See also anti-Semitism;
Edward Holmes and, 166 black music
Hermann Laroche and, 225 Radbod of Utrecht, 20
Progrès, Le, 659 radio, 697, 702
Prokofiev, Sergei, 492, 500, 579, 583, Federal Republic of Germany and Austria,
586 590, 598–9
Symphony No. 5, 676 France, 368–9, 648–9, 651, 657, 660, 662,
propaganda, criticism as, 199, 321, 408, 663, 667
417, 660 Hungary, 439
Protestáns zeneközlöny (Protestant Music Italy, 623–4, See also RAI
Journal), 434 Norway, 399–400, 405–6
Proust, Marcel, 367, 632 Portugal, 328
In Search of Lost Time, 344 Spain, Rodrigo criticism, 340
Index 817
UK, 259, 265–6, 270, 633, 636–7, See Record Retailer, 505
also BBC Record Review. See BBC: Record Review
Newman on Desert Island Discs, 631 recording, 242, 246, 247, 249–71, 315, 316,
US, 671 328, 342, 369, 387, 400–1, 404, 405,
Deems Taylor on, 314 406, 460, 462, 463, 469, 473, 482,
Olin Downes on, 313 500, 504–6, 515, 516, 530, 533, 548,
Radio 3 (RAI). See RAI: Terzo Programma, 572, 609, 626, 636, 637, 638, 646,
later Radio 3 663, 664, 685, 697, 700, 702
Radio 46, 656 canon formation, role in, 231, 250,
Radio Caroline, 508 269–70
Radio-Magazine, 369 comparison of record and concert
Raguenet, François, 68, 110 reviewing, 250–1
RAI, 623–5 educational benefits, 259–60
Mister fantasy, 625 musicality, perceived impact upon, 257
television, 624 Rees, Leonard, 156
Terzo Programma, later Radio 3, 623–4 Reform Era, 428
Raimondi, Ezio, 621 Regélő, 429
Raio teatral, O, 322 Regietheater, 591
Rameau, Jean-Philippe, 63, 64, 69–70, 72–3, Reich, Steve
74–5, 77, 78, 99, 100, 352, 500 The Desert Music, 663
Castor et Pollux, 74 Reichardt, Johann Friedrich, 115, 116, 117,
Debussy and d’Indy on, 364 120–1, 123–4
Erreurs sur la musique dans l’Encyclopédie, 75 Reis, Jaime Batalha, 324, 325
Hippolyte et Aricie, 69 Reiter, Josef, 415
Observations sur notre instinct pour la Reith, John, 259
musique, 74 Rémond de Saint-Mard, Toussaint, 67, 70
Ramsey Jr, Frederick, 464, See also Jazzmen Renaissance musicale, La, 353
Ranelin, Phil, 473 Reporter’s Guide, 379
Rassegna dorica, 625 Repubblica, La, 621, 627
Rassegna musicale, La, 616 Respighi, Ottorino, 614
Croce’s aesthetics, debates on, 616 Resolution on proletarian arts organizations
Ratcliffe, J. V., 379 and creative unions, 1932, 575–6
ratings, 252 Resolution on Music, 1948, 571, 578–81
rationalist approaches, 388 Restoration, 85
Robertson, 377–8, 384–5, 386 Reszke, Jean de, 372
Scheibe, 119 Revista Cubana, 488
Rave, 505 Revista de Avance, 488, 492
Ravel, Maurice, 312, 334, 365, 463, 491, Revista de la Habana, 488
492, 500–1, 658 Revista dos espectáculos, 322
Carpentier on, 497 Revista musical hispano-americana, 334
Daphnis et Chloé, 497 Revista teatral, 322, 326
Pavane pour une infante défunte, 492 Revista universal, 325
Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, 497 Revolução de Setembro, A, 323
Raynal, Guillaume-Thomas-François, 73 revolutions, 1848, 181, 183, 193, 430,
Reade, A. Arthur 604
Literary Success, 380 Revue blanche, La, 351
Real Singapore, The, 564 Revue d’art dramatique, 355
realism Revue de Montréal, 311
Czech, 452 Revue des deux mondes, 346, 362
Russian, 208, 211, 223 Revue des Jeunesses musicales de France, La,
socialist, 452, 576, 578, 580 656
reception study, 149 Revue du Jazz, La, 666
Record Collector, 513 Revue et Gazette musicale de Paris, La, 133,
Record Mirror, 505 141, 142, 143, 145, 194, 200, 353
818 Index
Revue musicale (1827–1835), 129, 140–2, Rock File, 512

143, See also Fétis, François-Joseph Rock Furore, 402
Revue musicale S. I. M., La, 351, 353 Rock Grl, 514
Revue musicale, La (1901–1912), 353 Rockerilla, 626
Revue musicale, La (1920–1940), 353, 651, Rockstro, W. S., 160
653, 700 Rockwell, John, 688
Revue musicale, La (1946–1991), 370, 656 Rodrigo, Joaquín, 339–41, 342, 488, 500
Revue wagnérienne, La, 360 Concierto de Aranjuez, 340–1
Revueltas, Silvestre, 493, 500 Rodrigues, José Júlio, 324
Rey, Anne, 663 Rogal’-Levitskiy, Dmitri, 577
Reyer, Ernest (Louis Étienne Ernest), 351 Rognoni, Luigi, 616, 620
Reynolds, Simon, 514, 517, 518 and Schoenberg, 617–18
Rheinisch-Westfälische Zeitung, 597 Roland-Manuel, Alexis, 312, 488, 657–8
Rhythm, 261 Roldán, Amadeo, 486, 491, 492, 493, 496–7,
Rhythm Music Magazines (later RMM), 531 498, 500
ricerca folklorica, La, 626 Danza negra, 494
Rich, Alan, 684–5 Rolland, Romain, 206, 353, 355
Richard-Wagner-Forschungsstätte, 422 Rolling Stone, 247, 261, 406, 503, 509, 511,
Richter, Hans/János, 155, 168, 424, 432 512, 513–15, 516, 519, 521
Richter, Jean-Paul, 674 review of Janis Joplin Pearl, 283
Ricordi, 199 review of Joni Mitchell Blue, 284
Gazzetta musicale di Milano, 193, 198, 612 Rolling Stones, The, 506
Giovanni, 193 Rollins, Sonny, 466, 471
Giulio, 199 Schuller on ‘Blue 7’, 466, 468
Tito, 193 Romana, Giulio Cesare, 627
Riforma musicale, La, 204, 614 Romani, Gabriella, 197
Rigoleto, O, 322 Romano, Tricia, 690
Riley, William, 86 Romanticism (also Romantic), 133–4, 140,
Rimsky-Korsakov, Nikolai 144, 150, 151, 153, 155, 176, 177,
and Laroche, 224 211, 223, 236–7, 238, 240, 241, 245,
Sadko, 222 276, 321, 323, 324, 327, 336, 341,
Snegurochka, 224 344, 385, 387, 388, 396, 398, 432,
Tchaikovsky and, 228 485, 523, 597, 613, 617, 676
Rinascita, 620 Roncaglia, Gino, 616
Rinascita musicale, La, 204 Ronga, Luigi, 616
Riot Grrrl, 514 RootsWorld, 537
Ritmo, 338, 339, 342 Ropartz, Guy, 355
Ritmo y melodía, 342 Rosenberg, Alfred, 412
Rivera, Lydia de, 494 Rosenfeld, Paul, 314, 672–3
Rivista italiana di musicologia, 622, 627 Rosenfield, John, 311
Rivista musicale di Firenze, 193 Ross, Alex, 690–1
Rivista musicale italiana, 192, 196, 205–7, The Rest Is Noise (blog), 692
612–13, 618, 625 The Rest Is Noise (book), 701
Rivista teatrale melodrammatica, 195 Rosselli, John, 199, 200
Roach, Max, 473 Rossellini, Roberto, 625
We Insist! Freedom Now Suite, 470 Rossi-Doria, Gastone, 616
Robertson, Henry, 151 Rossini, Giacomo, 173, 183, 191, 241,
Robertson, John M., 377–8, 381, 384–6 307
Essays Towards a Critical Method, 384 Guillaume Tell, 177
New Essays Towards a Critical Method, 384 Tancredi, 212, 295
Rochlitz, Friedrich, 170, 174–6, 177–8, 181, Rostand, Claude, 656, 657, 660, 665
See also Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 72, 74–5, 76, 99,
rock. See popular music 101, 139
Rock & Folk, 650, 667 Le Devin du village, 71
Index 819
Lettre à M. Grimm, 73 Salzman, Eric, 686

Lettre sur la musique française, 74, 79 Sam Willows, The, 549
Roux, Marie-Aude, 663 Samaroff (-Stokowski), Olga, 681–2
Rowe, Billy, 461 samizdat, 571, 587
Roxon, Lillian, 507 Samuel, Claude, 664
Roy, Léo, 312 San Francisco Chronicle, 311, 509
Royal Albert Hall, 256, 281 San Francisco Classical Voice, 691
Rubinstein, Anton, 220, 222, 224, 228 San Francisco Express Times, 509
Rudd, Roswell, 472, 479 Sanders, Pharoah, 471, 472, 473, 474
Rue 89, 669 Sandow, Greg, 689
Rufer, Josef, 596 Sangere, Oumou, 537
Rumore, 626 Sanjuán, Pedro, 491
Runciman, John F., 155, 157, 168, 371–7, Sankt-Peterburgskie vedomosti, 220
380–1, 385, 390–1 Sanremo Music Festival, 623
Rushing, Jimmy, 475 Santa Cecilia, 613, 614
Russell, George, 466 Santi, Piero, 620, 625
Russell, Pee Wee, 470 Sapere, 625
Russell, Sylvester, 683 Sargeant, Winthrop, 686, 687
Russian Association of Proletarian Jazz: Hot and Hybrid, 464
Musicians, 573 Sartori, Claudio, 199
Russkie vedomosti, 226 Satie, Erik, 491, 492, 493, 677
Ryan, Desmond, 160, 162 satire, 62, 67, 74, 80, 83, 97, 106, 107, 109,
Ryckel, Denis, 35 111, 112, 163, 409, 419, 547,
564, 660
Sá Noronha, Francisco de, 325 Saturday Night, 312
Sá, Bernardo Moreira de, 324, 327 Saturday Review, 157, 161, 167,
Saar, Ferdinand von, 415 372, 466
Sacchini, Antonio, 77, 132 Saul’ski, Yuri, 586
Œdipe à Colone, 132 Sauter, Eddie, 469
Sadie, Stanley, 264, 280, 634–5 Savage, Jon, 514
Šafárik, Pavol Jozef, 443 Savenko, Svetlana, 583
Saggiatore musicale, Il, 622 Scala, La, 622
Sainte-Beuve, C. A., 384 Scalfari, Eugenio, 621
Saint-Saëns, Camille, 351, 352 scandals. See controversies
‘Germanophilie’, 365 Scarlatti, Domenico, 54
nationalism, 357, 365 Opere complete per clavicembalo, 613
Saintsbury, George, 384 Schaeffer, Bogusław, 582
Saint-Simon, Claude Henri de Rouvroy, Schalk, Josef, 188
comte de, 127 Scheibe, Johann Adolph, 115, 119,
Saint-Simonianism, 127 121–2, 123
Sáinz de la Maza, Regino, 339 Der critische Musicus, 111–12
Salazar, Adolfo, 331, 333–8, 339–40, Schenk, Otto, 605
341–3, 488 Schenker, Heinrich, 239, 410–11, 421
and Halffter, 340 Scherchen, Hermann, 597, 601
and politics, 337 Schiller, Friedrich, 357, 415
and Sopeña, 333–4, 339, 341–2, 343 Schlesinger, Adolph Martin, 178
Grupo de los Ocho, 335 Schlesinger, Maurice, 140, 143, 200
La música contemporánea en España, Schloezer, Boris de, 659
336 Schlögl, Michaela, 606
on Halffter, 336–7 Schmitt, Florent, 351, 657, 661
Salazar, António de Oliveira, 328 Schnabel, Artur, 387–8
Salle Favart, 77 Schnæbelé Affair, 357
Salut les copains, 667 Schnittke, Alfred, 583–5
Salvatori, Dario, 627 Symphony No. 1, 585
820 Index
Schnoor, Hans Scudéry, Madeleine de, 63

and Schoenberg’s A Survivor from Warsaw, Se7e, 329
598–9 Seara nova, 328
Schoenberg, Arnold, 314, 367, 412, 414, Seay anonymous, 19, 20
419, 491, 493, 500, 575, 596, 601, Secolo, Il, 197, 198, 202, 611, 617
603, 617, 618, 620, 673, 681, 689 Second World War, 262–3, 285, 286, 370,
A Survivor from Warsaw, 597–600, 601–2 402, 410, 449, 451, 452, 575, 578,
Five Pieces for Orchestra, 313 591, 595, 597, 610, 613, 618, 619,
Pierrot lunaire, 367, 496 623, 629, 630, 642, 647, 648, 650,
String Quartet No.1, 412 651–6, 657–8, 660, 662
String Quartet No.2, 409 effect on UK newspapers, 637–42
Verklärte Nacht, 418 Secret Machines
Schola Cantorum, 353 Paul Morley on, 247–8
Scholes, Percy A., 160, 249, 258, 259 Século, O, 329
First Book of the Gramophone Record, 269 Seen & Heard International, 647
Schonberg, Harold C., 316, 685 Segodnia, 588
Schott Music, 592 Select, 513
B. Schott’s Söhne, 178 self-help books, 377, 379–80, 384
Schreiber, Ryan, 515 Sentinela do palco, A, 322
Schubert, Franz, 155, 162, 167, 183, 194, sermons, 84, 86
389, 680 Serov, Alexander, 214–19, 220–1, 222–3,
‘Erlking, The’, 306 226–7
Hale on, 306–7 and Stasov, 214–15
piano sonatas, 241 and Wagner, 224
Schumann on, 238–9, 241 debates on Ruslan, 217–19
Symphony in C major, 178 Sessions, Roger, 314, 672, 673, 681
Symphony No. 8 (‘Unfinished’), 306 Seven Arts, 314, 672
Schubring, Adolf, 186 Seventeen, 505
Schuller, Gunther, 463, 468–70, 477, 479 Severnaia pchela. See Northern Bee, The
‘Sonny Rollins and the Challenge of Sguerzi, Angelo, 621
Thematic Improvisation’, 466, 468 Shadoian, Jack, 283
and improvisation, 468 Shakespeare, William, 72, 144, 179, 235,
Early Jazz, 469, 473 238, 380, 387, 391
The Swing Era, 468, 469 Shankar, Anoushka, 540
Schumann, Clara. See Wieck-Schumann, Shankar, Ravi, 540
Clara Shaverdyan, Alexander, 577, 580
Schumann, Robert, 155, 162, 172–3, 174, Shaw, Flora, 285
177, 178–82, 187, 189, 200, 220, Shaw, George Bernard, 148, 155, 162, 163,
240–2, 375, 398, 592, 634, 674, See 167, 168, 373, 374, 376, 377, 386
also Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, Die Corno di Bassetto, 163, 698
Davidsbund, 179, 220, 698 ‘How to Become a Musical Critic’,
Fry on Symphony No. 2, 301 378
on Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, 179–80 Shaw, Greg, 509
on Chopin’s Piano Sonata in B flat Minor, Shawe-Taylor, Desmond, 631–3
Op.35, 241–2 Shchedrin, Rodion, 583, 586
on Schubert, 239, 241 Poetoriya, 585
Schwab, Frederick A., 308, 309 Shedlock, John S., 154, 160
Schwäbischer Merkur, 421 Sheffield, Rob, 514
Schwarz, Boris, 582 Shelton, Robert, 509
Score, The, 633 Shepp, Archie, 471, 473, 474
Scotsman, The, 633 Shneerson, Grigori
Scott, C. P., 378–9 On Music Living and Dead, 582
Scott, Jane, 507 Shoemaker, Bill, 481
Scriabin, Alexander, 492, 500 shorthand, 379
Index 821
Shostakovich, Dmitri, 313, 573, 660, 673 Smith, John Christopher

‘Muddle Instead of Music’, 571, Rosalinda, 93
576–7, 579 Smyth, Ethel, 286
Gorky and, 576 Sniffin’ Glue, 512
Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, 571, Social, 488, 489–90, 496
575, 576 Sociedad Cubana de Música
place in Soviet criticism, 584 Contemporánea, 493
Schnittke on, 584 Sociedad Pro-Arte Musical, 491
Sollertinsky and, 574–5 Sociedade Filarmónica, 317
Symphony No. 5, 579 Società del Quartetto, 193
Symphony No. 7, 575, 579 Société des Concerts du Conservatoire,
Yarustovsky on, 579–80 137, 144
Shuker, Roy, 231, 246 Society for Private Musical
Sibelius, Jean Performances, 419
Downes and, 313–14, 675 Soffredini, Alfredo, 611
Symphony No. 2, 678 Soir, Le, 363
Sigebert of Gembloux, 13 Sokhor, Arnold, 583
Life of St. Malo, 13 Sol, El, 335
Signale für die musikalische Welt, 186, Sole 24 Ore, Il, 622
700 Solerti, Angelo, 204
Silvestrov, Valentin, 585 Sollertinsky, Ivan, 575
Simon, George T., 460 Somigli, Luca, 196
Simon, Paul Somma, Robert, 509
Graceland, 533, 535 Songlines, 531
Simpson, Christopher Sonzogno publishing house, 194, 197, 198
A Compendium of Practical Musick in Five Sopeña, Frederico, 331, 338–43
Parts, 94 and Salazar, 333–4
Sing Out, 506, 510 Sorbonne, 353
Singapore Chinese Orchestra, 555, 563 Sørensen, Dag Winding, 400
Singapore Indian Orchestra, 555, 557 Sounds, 510, 512, 514, 645
Singapore Press Holdings, 557 Source, The, 513
Singapore Symphony Orchestra, 551, Souris, André, 659
552, 566 Southern Rag, 513, 531
Sinkovicz, Wilhelm, 605–6, 608 Souvtchinsky, Pierre, 659
Siohan, Robert, 657 Sovetskaia muzyka, 572, 574, 575–6, 578,
Sitwell family, 390 580–1, 582, 585
Six, Les, 352, 366 Sovetskoe iskusstvo, 574, 577, 578
16 Magazine, 505 Sovetskoye iskusstvo, 580
Slonimsky, Nicolas, 493 Sovremennaia muzyka, 573–4
Chamber Orchestra of Boston, 493 Spanish Second Republic, 333
Lexicon of Musical Invective – Critical Speaker, The
Assaults on Composers since Beethoven’s ‘Lady Journalists’, 380
Time, 686–7 Specchio sonoro, 624
Smash Hits, 513, 645, 646 Specht, Richard
Smetana (journal), 451 and Mahler, 411–12
Smetana, Bedřich, 444, 445, 451 Spectator, The, 91, 109, 153, 156, 507
Dvě vdovy, 446 Speer, Daniel, 107
Nejedlý and, 446, 452 Dacianischer Simplicissimus, 107
Schenker on, 239–40 Speidel, Ludwig, 186
Smith, Adam, 95 Spellman, A. B.
Smith, Bessie, 461 Four Lives in the Bebop Business, 473
Smith, Charles Edward, 465 Spengler, Oswald
Smith, Harriet, 265 The Decline of the West, 487
Smith, Jabbo, 469 Spettatore musical, Lo, 620–1
822 Index
Spiegel, Der, 594, 595 Carpentier and, 487, 491, 492, 495,
Spin, 513 496, 500
spiritualism, 613, 615 Downes on, 313, 675
Spohr, Louis, 153, 177, 301 Druskin and, 583
Spotify. See Internet Le Sacre du printemps, 313, 344, 487, 698
Springsteen, Bruce, 461, 517, 519 Pulcinella Suite, 418
Stadsmusikant, 396, 398 Schnittke on, 584
Stalin, Joseph, 576, 580 Sopeña on, 341
Stalin era, 452, 577 Stravinsky Festival (Paris, 1945), 658
Stampa, La, 621, 627 Three Pieces for String Quartet, 492
Stanford, Charles Villiers, 156, 162, 374, 390 Striggio, Alessandro, 46
‘Some Aspects of Musical Criticism in Stubbes, Philip
England’, 372–3 The Anatomie of Abuses, 87
Star, The, 373 Stuckenschmidt, Hans Heinz, 582, 596
Stasov, Vladimir, 223, 225 Studi musicali, 622
and Serov, 214–15 Stunde Null (Year Zero), 593
Art in the 19th Century, 226–8 Štúr, Ľudovít, 442, 443
debates on Ruslan, 217–19 sublime, 67, 72, 96, 97, 144, 177, 237,
on the purpose of criticism, 209 244
State Academy of the History of the Arts, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 594
Moscow, 573 Südwestfunk, 590
Statham, Henry Heathcote, 156, 162 Suk, Josef, 446–7
Statius Sullivan, Arthur, 167
Thebaid, 15 Sullivan, Caroline, 287–8, 289, 646
Stearns, Marshall, 472 Sun Ra, 471, 473, 482
Steele, John, 91–2 Sunday Telegraph, The, 636, See also Daily
The Tender Husband, 91 Telegraph, The
Steffani, Agostino Sunday Times, The, 156, 161, 385, 388, 514,
Quanta certezza, 117 630, 631–2, 633, 639, 702, See also
Stein, Gertrude, 677 Times, The
Steinecke, Wolfgang, 597–8, 599 Suono stereo hi-fi, 626
Steinway pianos, 565 Sušil, František
Stendhal (Marie-Henri Beyle), 348 Moravské národní písně, 443
Stereo Review, 686 Sutcliffe, Tom, 642–3
Stereoplay, 626 Swift, Jonathan
Stern, 594 A Tale of a Tub, 97
Sternhold, Thomas and John Hopkins, Sydney Morning Herald, 507, 630
86 Syndicat de la Presse Artistique, 348
Stimmen, 596 Syrinx, 622
Stitt, Sonny, 480 Szabolcsi, Bence, 435–6
Stone, Christopher, 259, 637
Stone, Jesse, 469 Tabet, Georges, 662
Straits Times, The, 543, 546, 548–9, 550–2, Tablettes des polymnie, 140
556–9, 560–3, 564, 565 Talking Machine News, 504
Strauss II, Johann, 429 Tang, Ni
Frühlingsstimme (Voices of Spring), 563 The Story of Small Town, 563
Strauss, Richard, 167, 189, 491 Tannenbaum, Mya, 621
Also sprach Zarathustra, 418 Tansman, Alexandre, 500
and Rivista musicale italiana, 205 Tarakanov, Mikhail, 583
Der Rosenkavalier, 272, 604 taste, notions of, 10, 18, 25, 41, 52, 58, 60,
Salome, 279, 412 71, 73, 93, 101, 102, 105, 106, 109,
Stravinsky, Igor, 260, 328, 335, 463, 598, 111, 112, 113, 117, 118–21, 130,
635, 656, 658, 672 131–5, 138, 146, 147, 155, 158, 179,
Asafyev’s A Book about Stravinsky, 574, 583 207, 231, 244, 259, 260, 293, 304,
Index 823
318, 369, 401, 509, 515, 523, 525, Tesoro sacro musical (formerly Tesoro musical
544, 548, 550, 552 de ilustración del Clero), 338
Tate, Buddy, 477 Testoni, Giancarlo, 626
Tate, Greg, 481, 514 Tevere, Il, 617
Tatler, The, 91, 109 Thalberg, Sigismond, 193
Taubman, Howard, 676, 685 Thayer, Alexander Wheelock, 303
taxes on knowledge, 158 Life of Ludwig van Beethoven, 308
Taylor, Arthur Théâtre Feydeau, 77
Notes and Tones Théâtre italienne, 77
Musician-to-Musician Interviews, 480 Theatrical Review, The, 93
Taylor, Cecil, 466, 471, 473 Theinred of Dover, 11
The World of Cecil Taylor, 470 Thietmar, 13
Taylor, Deems, 314 Third Reich. See National Socialism
Taylor, Edward, 153, 165 Thomasius, Christian, 106–7
Tchaikovsky, Boris, 583 Thompson, Oscar, 305
Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Ilich, 216, 219–22, 223, Thomson, Virgil, 314–15, 659, 673–5,
226, 228, 239, 589 677–84, 685, 689
Evgeny Onegin, 220, 222 Four Saints in Three Acts, 315, 677
Mazeppa, 220, 223 The Mother of Us All, 677
Tchicai, John, 474 The Plow that Broke the Plains, 315
TCM Conservatory Bi-Monthly, 312 The River, 315
Teatr, 574 Three Tenors, The, 267
Teatro, 619 Tiger Beat, 505
Teatro Amazonas (Brazil), 485 Time, 686, 691
Teatro Colón (Buenos Aires), 484 Times, The, 2, 156, 158, 242, 252, 253, 256,
teatro illustrato, Il, 194 258, 260–4, 272, 279–80, 285, 287,
Teatro Lirico Fluminese (Rio de 375, 553, 631–2, 634, 635, 638–42,
Janeiro), 484 643–4, 647, 695, 698
Teatro Municipal (Santiago), 485 Tinctoris, Johannes, 36–9, 41
Teatro Municipal (São Paulo), Titon du Tillet, Évrard, 69
485 Tokens, The, 530
Teatro Nacional (Havana), 493 Toldi, Julius
Teatro Solís (Montevideo), 484 Wanderskizzen, 418
Tebaldi, Renata, 606 Tolstoy, Aleksei, 579
Tebaldini, Giovanni, 204, 612 Tolstoy, Feofil (‘Rostislav’), 223
Technikart, 667 Tommasini, Vincenzo, 614
Tedeschi, Rubens, 622 Torchi, Luigi, 196, 204–5, 612–13
Telegraph, The. See Daily Telegraph, The Torno, Armando, 622
Télérama, 664 Torrefranca, Fausto, 204, 206, 613–14
television, 4, 316, 387, 405, 507, 548, 588, Torri, Luigi, 612
609, 624–5, 627, 648, 657, 662, 664, Tóth, Aladár, 435–6
671, 697, 701, 702, 705, See also Touch-Stone, The, 93
RAI; BBC Touré, Ali Farka, 535–6
Témoignage chrétien, 660 Tout et tout, 652
Temple, William Toye, Francis, 390
‘Essay upon Ancient and Modern traditional music. See folk music
Learning’, 97–8 tragédie en musique, 64, 72, 73
Tempo, 701 Traité de la critique musicale, 657
Tempo di Jazz, 626 Treccani, Ernesto, 617
Tempo, Il, 617, 622 Treitler, Leo, 273
Temps, Le, 660–1 Trent, Alphonso, 469
Tenroc, Charles, 365, 367 Tribune de Saint-Gervais, La, 353, 364
Tentzel, Wilhelm Ernst, 109 Tribune des critiques de disques, La, 697
Terrasse, La, 669 Trilling, Lionel, 465
824 Index
Trimble, Lester, 679 Verdi, Giuseppe, 166, 191, 199, 205, 303,
Tristano, Lennie, 465, 482 307, 322, 484, 614
Troitsky, Artemy, 587 Aida, 702
Trouser Press, 513 Ernani, 183, 217
Trovador, O, 322 Holmes on Nabucco, 166
Trovatore, Il (journal), 195 Otello, 262
Troy, Floyd, 469 Serov on Ernani, 217
Tsugi, 665 Watson on, 301
Tsukkerman, Viktor, 579 Verney, Ippolito Franchi. See Valetta,
Turchi, Guido, 623 Ippolito
Turina, Joaquín, 334, 340–1, 488, 492–3 Verseghy, Ferenc, 437
Turntable. See Pitchfork Vian, Boris, 660, 666
Tuttamusica, 626 Videns Jacob, 23
Tutto è musica, 625 Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, 269,
Twining, Thomas, 95 415, 601
Twitter. See Internet: social media Vienna State Opera, 602, 605
20 Minutes, 669 Viennese Workers’ Symphony Orchestra
Tynan, Kenneth, 473, 476 Concerts, 414, 415, 417–18
Vigolo, Giorgio, 621
Uffenbach, Johann Friedrich Armand von Village Voice, 470, 478–9, 508, 511, 514, 516,
diaries of, 55 522, 688–90
Uhelszki, Jaan, 508 Villa-Lobos, Heitor, 486, 496, 500
Ulanov, Barry, 465 Amazonas, 495
Uncut, 264, 645 Bachianas Brasileiras, 495
Union of Composers (USSR), 576, 577, Carpentier and, 494–5
578 Uirapuru, 495
Unità, L’, 620, 622 Villar, Rogelio del, 338
Universal Edition, 448 Villatico, Dino, 621
Upton, George Putnam, 310–11 Vine. See Internet: social media
Uxbridge News, 510 Virgilio, Michele, 190, 206
virtuosity, 60, 69, 179, 240, 319, 429
Valente, Erasmo, 622 Vlad, Roman, 620, 624
Valentine, Penny, 510 Voce, La, 206, 614
Valéry, Paul, 467 Vogue, 646, 680
Valetta, Ippolito, 611 Vold, Jan Erik, 403
Vallas, Léon, 354 Völkischer Beobachter, 422
Vallois, Marcel, 312 Volkonsky, Andrei
Van Vechten, Carl, 314 Musica Stricta, 582
Vancouver World, 312 Suite of Mirrors, 582
Vanity Fair, 314, 672, 677 Voltaire (Arouet, François-Marie de), 63, 70,
Varèse, Edgar, 313, 486, 493, 500 72, 79
Amériques, 495 Vox, 259, 513
Canción de la niña enferma de fiebre, 494 Vuillemin, Louis, 367
Carpentier and, 494–6 Vuillermoz, Emile, 349, 352, 364, 369, 652,
Intégrales, 494 659–60
Ionisation, 493
Octandre, 493 Wachthausen, Jean-Luc, 662
The One All-Alone, 494, 495 Wacquant, Loïc, 529
Vasconcelos, Joaquim de, 326 Wagner, Richard, 146, 147, 150, 172, 174,
Vatielli, Francesco, 615 177, 185, 199, 238, 260, 323, 375,
Vaugelas, Claude Favre de, 65–6 390, 416, 422, 605, 607
Vecherniaia Krasnaia gazeta, 580 Apthorp and, 305
Venegoni, Marinella, 627 Bologna and, 198
Verdelot, Philippe, 44 Brendel and, 182
Index 825
British critics and, 155, 167–9 Weber, Carl Maria von, 177, 241, 674
Carpentier and, 491, 500 Der Freischütz, 300
Czech critics and, 444 Weber, Gottfried, 178
d’Indy and, 364 Weber, William, 98, 233, 234
Debussy and, 352 Webern, Anton, 416, 583, 597
Der Ring des Nibelungen, 271, 308 websites. See Internet
Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, 182, Webster, Ben, 470, 479
187, 415 Wegman, Rob, 35
Dwight and, 303 Wehler, Hans-Ulrich, 592
French debates on, 358–62, 365–7 Weikl, Bernd, 607
Gazzetta musicale di Milano and, 193–4 Weill, Kurt, 620, 673
Gilman and, 313 Weisbard, Eric, 514
Grunsky and, 421, 422 Welser-Möst, Franz, 606
Hale and, 305 Welt, Die, 594
Hanslick and, 187–9 Weltsch, Felix, 596
Hassard and, 308 Wenner, Jan, 509
Hungarian critics and, 433 Werckmeister, Andreas, 110
Judaism in Music, 187 Werktreue (fidelity to the work), 607
Lohengrin, 307, 324, 344 Wesley, Samuel, 156
Millington and, 634 Westdeutscher Beobachter, 422
Music of the Future, 307 Westfalen-Blatt, 598
Newman and, 383, 631, 634 Westminster Magazine, The, 87
Opera and Drama, 216 Whitall, Susan, 509
Portuguese critics and, 324 White, Richard Grant, 298
Rivista musicale italiana and, 205–6 Whiteley, Sheila, 282
Serov and, 216–17, 224 Whiteman, Paul, 469
Tannhäuser, 217 Who Put the Bomp, 509
Tristan und Isolde, 167, 188 Wieck-Schumann, Clara, 162, 181, 277–8
US critics and, 307–9 Piano Trio, Op. 17, 277
Wieland der Schmied, 445 Wiener Damenorchester, 278
Wagnerism (Wagnérisme), 168, 173, 224, Wiener Kurier, 602
344, 359–62, 444, 613 Wiener Zeitung, 186
Waldheim, Kurt, 606 Willaert, Adrian, 46
Walker, Ernest, 156 Williams, Alberto, 485
Wallace, Helen, 265, 695 Williams, Martin, 465–9, 470, 472, 474, 477,
Wallace, Robin, 235, 236 478, 480
Wallace, William, 156 Williams, Paul, 508, 509
Waller, Fats, 461 Williams, Richard, 511, 519, 644
Wallmann, Margarethe, 606 Willis, Ellen, 508, 509
Walsh, Stephen, 280, 634 Willis, Richard Storrs, 299–300
Walter, Bruno, 269 Willy. See Gautier-Villars, Henri (Willy)
Walter, Erhard, 422 Wilmer, Valerie, 474
Ward, Ed, 509 Wilson, John S., 465
Warsaw Autumn Festival, 500 Wilson, Robert
Wartel, Thérèse, 286 Hot Water, 561
Waterloo Directory of English Newspapers and I La Galigo, 562, 563
Periodicals, 1800–1900, 147 Wilson, Teddy, 461
Watson, Alfred E. T., 156 Winnipeg Tribune, The, 312
Watson, Henry Cood, 297–8, 301, 307 Wire, The, 513, 645
Weavers, The, 530 Wittgenstein, Paul, 497
Webb, Chick, 469 Wolf, Dan, 688
Webb, Daniel, 95, 97 Wolf, Hugo, 240, 386
Webb, F. Gilbert (‘Lancelot’), 156 women. See also feminism; gender
Webbe, Egerton, 156–7 criticism of, 67, 88, 272–85, 290, 535
826 Index
women (cont.) Yew, Hongren, 558

critics, 156, 265, 285–90, 314–15, 349–51, Yong Siew Toh Conservatory, 551
371, 381, 462, 474, 634, 679–80, 681, Young, Lester, 469
682, 683–4, See also entries for
individual critics Zaccaro, Gianfranco, 621
Wooden Shoe, 509 Zacconi, Lodovico
world music, 4, 265, 405, 513, 541, 546, Prattica di musica, 46
554–9, 644, 697 Zampa, Fabrizio, 627
as brand, 538–9 Zarlino, Gioseffo, 46
authenticity, 528, 533–6, 537, 538, 539 Zaslavsky, David, 577
World Music Central, 537 Zeit, Die, 594
World Saxophone Quartet, 479 Zemlinsky, Alexander von, 189, 415
World War One. See First World War Zeneirodalmi szemle/Művészeti lapok, 433
World War Two. See Second World War Zeneközlöny, 434–5
World, The, 373 Zenelap, 432–4
Wotton, William, 97–8 Zenélő Magyarország, 434
Wrathall, Claire, 265 Zenészeti közlöny, 433
Württemberg-Hohenzollern Gau, 422 Zenészeti lapok, 431, 432–3
WWI. See First World War Zenevilág, 432–4
WWII. See Second World War Zhdanov, Andrei, 452
Wylde, Henry, 156 Zhizn’ iskusstva, 574, 580
Wyn Jones, Carys, 233–4, 236, 244, ZigZag, 510
245–6 Ziino, Agostino, 627
Zillig, Winfried, 599
Yarustovsky, Boris, 579–80 Zschorlich, Paul, 420
Yawning Bread, 564 Zupko, Sarah, 515
Yeow Kai Chai, 548 Zurletti, Michelangelo, 621, 627

The - Cambridge - History - of - Music Criticism PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

The - Cambridge - History - of - Music Criticism PDF

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

The - Cambridge - History - of - Music Criticism PDF

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF

Music criticism has played a fundamental and inﬂuential role throughout

CHRISTOPHER D I N G L E is Professor of Music at Royal Birmingham

The Cambridge History of Music comprises a group of reference works

The Cambridge History of American Music

The Cambridge History of Music Criticism

The Cambridge History of World Music

The Cambridge History of Medieval Music

The Cambridge History of Sixteenth-Century Music

The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Music

The Cambridge History of Nineteenth-Century Music

The Cambridge History of Twentieth-Century Music

Cambridge University Press is part of the University of Cambridge.

© Cambridge University Press 2019

List of Music Examples, Figures and Tables page ix

PART I THE EARLY HISTORY OF MUSIC CRITICISM 7

1 . Speaking of Plainsong in the Middle Ages 9

2 . Music Criticism in the Late-Medieval and Renaissance Era 25

3 . Musical Discourse in Italy, 1500–1800 42

4 . Music Criticism in France before the Revolution 62

5 . Music Criticism in Britain up to Burney 81

6 . German-Language Music Criticism before 1800 104

PART II THE RISE OF THE PRESS 125

7 . French Music Criticism in the Nineteenth Century, 1789–1870 127

8 . Gatekeeping, Advocacy, Reﬂection: Overlapping Voices in

9 . Constructing a Musical Nation: German-Language Criticism in the

10 . Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Century Italy 190

11 . Music Criticism in Imperial Russia 208

PART III CRITICAL INFLUENCE AND INFLUENCES 229

12 . Critiquing the Canon: The Role of Criticism in

13 . Comparing Notes: Recording and Criticism 249

14 . The Gender Paradox: Criticism of Women and

PART IV ENTERING THE TWENTIETH CENTURY 291

15 . Music Criticism in the United States and Canada up to the Second

16 . Music Criticism in Portugal: Towards an Overview 317

17 . Spanish Music Criticism in the Twentieth Century: Writing Music

18 . Critical Battlegrounds in the French Third Republic 344

19 . British Music Criticism, 1890–1945 371

20 . Music Criticism in Norway 392

21 . Aesthetic Conservatism and Politics in German-Language Music

22 . Music Criticism in Hungary until the Second World War 424

23 . The ‘People’ in Czech and Slovak Music Criticism 440

PART V NEW AREAS 457

24 . Jazz Criticism in America 459

25 . Catalysing Latin American Identities: Alejo Carpentier’s Music

26 . Writing about Popular Music 502

27 . Working in the Cool Capitalism Complex: The Role of Critics in the

28 . Cultural Anxieties, Aspirational Cosmopolitanism and Capacity

PART VI DEVELOPMENTS SINCE THE SECOND WORLD

29 . Music Criticism in the USSR from Asafyev to Cherednichenko 571

30 . The Feuilleton and Beyond: Criticism in the Federal Republic of

31 . Music Criticism in Italy in the Twentieth Century 609

33 . Music Criticism in France since the Second World War 648

34 . Old Divisions and New Debates: Music Criticism in Post-War

35 . Stop the Press? The Changing Media of Music Criticism 695

MARK BERRY is Reader in Music History at Royal Holloway, University of

PAULO F. DE CASTRO (PhD, Royal Holloway, University of London) is Associate

PER DAHL studied musicology, philosophy and psychology at the University of

C H A R L E S D I L L is the author of Monstrous Opera: Rameau and the Tragic Tradition