The Future of Music Reviews

I just wanted to add my voice to Norman Lebrecht's recent post about music reviews. YouTube really changes everything. If you are talking about a particular piece of music, you can just put up a clip of it. If you want to compare different performances, as I did in this post, then you can insert them into your text. Here is the review that Norman links to, a superb example of how to review using examples from YouTube.

A friend of mine keeps asking when I am I going to write that book on music criticism. I guess my answer is, as soon as I figure out a way to duplicate how I work on this blog in a book.

For example, wouldn't it be great to be able to do in some kind of book format a section like this post on the Bach family that includes music by Bach pere and his three famous composer sons?

But let's not kid ourselves, even with YouTube for illustrative examples, if you really want to get down to brass tacks and talk about the musical details, you are going to have to use musical notation. We didn't spend a thousand years developing it for nothing! Have a look at this post to see what I mean.

Appropriately, let's end with a clip: