Music Critic in Residence

By way of Lisa Hirsch's blog Iron Tongue of Midnight I ran across this clip of music critic Joshua Kosman talking about his job of teaching music criticism in a new program at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music:

It's a nice clip and he seems not only a nice fellow, but a knowledgeable one. Plus, he has bookshelves groaning with all the right reference books. I noticed in particular the New Grove (which I secretly covet) and Shostakovich: A Life, by Laurel Fay. I'll bet he gives a darn good course on how to be a music critic.

I just have two problems: first, the old mass media outlets like newspapers and magazines are getting rid of music critics as fast as they can, plus, the newer media outlets like television and radio never really had formal music critics, the kind of people who had to have a set of the New Grove handy, and the newest media outlets like the internet don't seem to have any paying positions for music critics. And by music critics, I mean people like Joshua Kosman who talk and write about concerts of classical music, not do reviews of hip hop albums. So I honestly don't see who is going to employ graduates of the program.

The second thing that I noticed was that he didn't engage any of the issues or problems of music criticism and in a four minute clip you wouldn't expect him to. He says that music criticism has three parts: first, report on the event (where the concert was, who played, what was the music), third, render your critical judgement and second, explain why this was your critical judgement. Yes, that was his order. But then he throws in a little bit of advice that assumes the conclusion of a whole argument and I thought it was interesting how he put it (my transcript):

So my advice to someone trying this for the first time is trust your reaction. Trust your reaction to what you've heard and what you've witnessed and be assured that you are right in thinking what you think.

Hmm, well, the corollary to this is that therefore critics are always right, but of course criticism can be a lot of different things (good, bad, well-founded, barking at the moon mad) and surely the way to become a better critic is by recognizing when you have fallen short? Isn't criticism a bit similar to being a performer? Performers spend much of their time analyzing critically what they do. If we could record the inner soundtrack of a performer's morning practice routine it might go like this: strings sound a bit dead, need to change them ... that's a funny sound ... whoa, better do that again! ... damned uneven scale ... the bass is sounding hollow again ... how the hell is that supposed to be phrased? ... should the development really be that forte? and so on, much of it very tedious because maintaining one's technique, for example, involves solving a lot of the same problems over and over again.

I think I would want to modify his advice to a young music critic. But, yes, I would say something just that encouraging to get them started. But instead of saying "you are right in thinking what you think" I would say, in order to check on the validity of your reaction, examine your reasons. Did you hate/love the concert because of the dress the soprano was wearing or her tone color? What principles do you follow in your criticism? What specifics can you point to in the concert to support your opinion? Do you know the repertoire well enough?

And one other thing, perhaps he is right, based on his long experience, but is it really harder to write a good review than a bad review? Surely if you are a well-educated music critic you can explain what was so great in the concert? He mentions a singer as an example. I could mention Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, whom I have heard in concert. He was a great singer, but there are a thousand things you could mention that went into why. For example, his diction was unparalleled. Listening to him sing, you could write down every single letter of every word, even if he is singing in German. Maybe the reason Joshua finds it hard to write about good concerts is the likely restriction on technical vocabulary, though that didn't hold me back from mentioning something about Fischer-Dieskau.

If you tell people too often that everything they think is right, then don't you encourage half-baked narcissistic opinions?

But this train of thought would lead us into a philosophical problem and this post is long enough already.

For my musical envoi I won't pick something by Fischer-Dieskau as I have done that so often. Another singer that I heard give an incredible concert about which much could be said was Nigel Rogers. His particular achievement was to revive the art of vocal ornamentation in music of the early 17th century. I heard him sing a whole concert of this music by people like Caccini and Purcell. Remarkable agility and clarity of execution. Here he is with the big aria from Monteverdi's Orfeo of 1607:

Friday Miscellanea

I'm almost sure that this is one of the signs of the imminent Apocalypse: "Chanel Unveils $5000 Quilted Headphones."

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And in complete contrast, Norman Lebrecht digs up a great tidbit from music history to counter all that nonsense about Bach's wife writing the cello suites.

Johann Sebastian Bach’s second wife, Anna Magdalena, a gifted singer who shared his work and who bore him 13 children, died in great poverty 10 years after Bach’s passing.

Her last child (JSB’s 20th), Regina Susanne, died in 1809, the year of Felix Mendelssohn’s birth.

A decade before her death, Regina Susanne was also living in poverty. Friedrich Rochlitz, the editor of the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, put out an appeal on her behalf, saying that she was starving, but that she “cannot, no, she should not, no she shall not beg.”

Among those who answered the appeal was Ludwig van Beethoven, who sent her 307 Gulden — a large sum. At the same time, he wrote to his publisher, Breitkopf & Härtel, to give her the royalties from one of his forthcoming compositions. Regina Susanne wrote to him: “With tears of joy, I received this sum, which surpasses all my expectations. Not a day that Providence grants me will go by that I will not remember you with heartfelt thanks, my benefactor.”

We usually don't think of Beethoven as being a great benefactor like Haydn (who did lots of benefits for the bereaved families of musicians) but Bach's children were a special case.

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Listening to sad music makes you happy? Well, sure.

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Be warned, music reviewers and critics: if the subject of your review doesn't like it, there might be consequences. Here is the story in the Washington Post. Here is the review in question. Here is the kernel of the argument:

Every nuance of the music was underlined visibly with a host of concert-pianist playacting gestures: head flung back at the end of a phrase; left hand conducting the right hand; or a whole ballet of fingers hovering over keys and picking out their targets before an opening note was even struck at the start of Chopin's Ballade No. 3. There were fine moments, but they stubbornly refused to add up to anything more than a self-conscious display of Fine Moments. The final movement of Chopin's Second Piano Sonata was in a way the most successful part of the program: sheer virtuosity, and perfectly unhinged.

Without having attended the concert, one cannot judge the fairness of this, but it is exactly the kind of thing a music reviewer ought to be doing and I have seen exactly this kind of exaggerated sensibility ruin quite a number of piano recitals. It is an epistemological problem, really: what is reality? Is it what the performer claims it is? Is it what the reviewer heard? If both performers and reviewers are not allowed to express themselves freely, then we have little hope of discerning the truth of the matter...

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Regarding the claim that Anna Magdalena, Bach's second wife, was the true composer of the cello suites, Alex Ross does a masterful job of skewering that argument here. A lot of the claim is based on the title page of one manuscript of the solo music for violin and cello. Alex points out:

In all, Jarvis’s reading of this title page is irrational in the extreme. Looked at upside down or sideways, it still says the same thing: the Sonatas and Partitas and the suites were composed by Bach and copied by his wife.

Well, yeah, that's what we thought all along.

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McGill University, my alma mater, is dominating the major music scholarly conference of the year, being held in Milwaukee this week. The Schulich School of Music is sending quite a number of professors and graduate students to give papers and hold discussions on matters musicological and theoretical. Sample title: “Beneventan Notated Fragments in Abruzzo: Exchange and the Domestication of Plainchant in Southern Italy”. Arthur Kaptainis, the music critic of the Montreal Gazette has an excellent article on it. What puzzles him is how very, very little attention the people we consider great composers are given in conferences like these. He notes:

To leaf through the Milwaukee program is to be left with the impression that musicology and music theory (remember, different things) no longer concern themselves much with great music. Not that “great music” has any viability as a concept in out postmodern age. Indeed, the notion of music as self-sufficient entity is much shakier than you might suppose. To believe in it is to put yourself in a difficult position.

And about that McGill contingent:

Montrealers can note with pride that the Schulich School of Music is sending 20 professors and graduate students to Milwaukee, either as presenters or session chairs. This total places McGill well in advance of any other university. The University of Chicago is in second place, with 16. Yale, with 15, is third. Bundled in fourth place with 14 are Harvard, Princeton, Florida State and the University of Michigan.

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Terry Teachout is an excellent writer, often about music, and I direct your attention to this brief essay about youth and experience--mainly because of the mention of Joseph Haydn. In it he also mentions a larger essay he wrote about Haydn for Commentary. This larger essay is so brilliant a picture of Haydn that you should read the whole thing. Here is an excerpt:

...the musical style that evolved over the course of Haydn's employment by the Esterházy family is noteworthy above all for its combination of unpredictability and equipoise: it is balanced without ever being dull. While one can hear this in everything he wrote, I find his last symphony, No. 104 in D Major (popularly known as the “London” Symphony), to be a veritable locus classicus of what makes Haydn Haydn. It begins unexpectedly with a broad, spacious introduction in D minor, at once grand and pensive, that leads no less unexpectedly to a first movement full of the vigor and bustle one might almost expect to hear in the overture to a comic opera. This public utterance leads to a tenderly poised major-key slow movement, followed in turn by one of the droll, heavy-footed minuets in which Haydn specialized; a high-spirited finale wraps the proceedings up with the kind of life-enhancing brilliance that no other classical composer has ever quite managed to equal.

For all the summary excellence of the “London” Symphony, it is important—essential, really—to keep in mind that one might just as well have chosen any of 30 or 40 other compositions to stand for the whole of Haydn's work. Other pieces emphasize other facets of his richly varied style. Some are wittier, some more emotionally penetrating, some more obviously “serious” in tone. Yet none could be mistaken for the work of anyone else. Has there ever been an artist, regardless of genre, who was at the same time so prolific and so unfailingly excellent, so varied and so immediately recognizable?

No, I really don't think so. Every professional classical musician I know loves Haydn.

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Remember that list the New York Times music critic came up with of the ten greatest composers in Western music? I've had fun disagreeing with it a couple of times. One of the issues I had with it is that it does not include Joseph Haydn. Well, I just ran across a similar list in the Independent of fourteen composers they offer ebook biographies of and, thankfully, it does include Haydn. Here's the link.

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And that gives us our musical envoi for the day. Here is Haydn's last symphony, No. 104, the "London" performed by those seasoned masters, Bernard Haitink and the Vienna Philharmonic at the Proms in 2012:

It's just magnificent, the whole thing, isn't it?

24 X 2

I did an interesting listening project the other day: I listened to the 24 preludes and fugues from Book 1 of the Well-Tempered Clavier by Bach and then I listened to the 24 preludes and fugues--no, not from Book 2, but the ones by Shostakovich. Actually I mixed them up. Each recording is on two CDs so I listened to the first CD of Bach and then the first CD of Shostakovich and then the second of each. Interesting. Both the differences and the similarities. Let's look at a couple of pieces. Here is the G major prelude from Bach:

And here is a performance (it is of both prelude and fugue):

A typical Bach prelude: brilliant, tightly-written (meaning it is based on one motif) and harmonically delightful. One thing about this prelude in particular is that it is in the time signature of 24/16 (on top and "common" time on the bottom). Sure, that is just 4/4 with sextuplets. But I cannot think of a single other example of a composer who just had to use the 24/16 time signature! Now let's look at an example from Shostakovich that is vaguely similar. Here is the A major prelude:

And a performance, again, with the fugue as well:

Very charming prelude, also tightly-written and with delightful harmony. Shostakovich also has a compound time signature, but the much simpler one of 12/8.

Let's look at the last fugues in each opus. Bach organizes his pieces by simply moving up the chromatic scale: beginning with C major and minor he progresses to C# major and minor and so on until the final prelude and fugue are in B minor. Here is the beginning of the fugue in B minor:

One thing to notice about that really snakey subject is that it is dodecaphonic! Yes, it includes all twelve tones of the chromatic scale (mind you, some are repeated).

Here is a performance of the prelude and fugue. The fugue begins around the 7:48 mark:

I picked the Richter performance because I like this one slow. I have Friedrich Gulda and he takes sixteen minutes!

Shostakovich organizes his pieces through the circle of fifths. C major is followed by A minor and then by G major and E minor. This means that his last prelude and fugue are in D minor. Here is the beginning of the fugue:

Far simpler theme, almost bare with all those fourths. Here is a performance, by Shostakovich himself, of both prelude and fugue. The fugue starts around the 4:16 mark:

After a long section just using that simple subject, there is an accelerando into a Più mosso with a new subject in running eight-notes. Then the two subjects are combined, making this a double fugue. On the last page there is a stretto using the first subject, accompanied by the second subject.

Some things to notice: the pieces by Bach are actually more complex in some ways than those by Shostakovich. There is a wistful, archaic quality to the Shostakovich. In the D minor fugue he resorts to some rather dramatic devices. Bach, on the other hand, just works out an incredible variety of contrapuntal possibilities with that tricky subject--it is really a tour de force.

If Shostakovich does not quite manage to out-do Bach at preludes and fugues in all the keys, he certainly writes some wonderful music. Beethoven answered Bach's Goldberg Variations with his Diabelli Variations to great success, but bear in mind that Shostakovich is the only one, in three hundred years, to fully take up the challenge of the Well-Tempered Clavier!

Why We Do What We Do

I was talking to a friend the other day, just ordinary everyday conversation. I mentioned the diet I just started--I really need to lose about twenty pounds--and she mentioned that she works out about an hour a day. These sorts of things plus our jobs, our budgets and a host of other details are what occupy our minds.

But I am also a musician and composer and thus, for me, life also has another dimension. I certainly don't think of myself as a romantic, but, as one writer described it

In the old, Romantic dispensation, art was understood to be salvific. “The priest departs,” said Whitman, “the divine literatus comes.” Art took you from the dark and brought you into the light. Its purpose was transcendental; its effect, transfigurational. But who believes that anymore? First high culture was dethroned by a popular art that asserted equally exalted claims—think Dylan or the Beatles—then that itself became so commercialized, so commodified, that it lost its position, as well.

Now we’re on to something new. Art has become a kind of DIY affair that’s felt to be in anybody’s reach. Think of the number of people who fancy themselves to be writers or visual artists in these days of technologically assisted narcissism—all those would-be novelists and memoirists, those photographers and videographers. How easy it is to reach an audience now, or to think you’re reaching one.

I don't think that the transcendence of art was merely an artifact of the Romantic Era. Think of the ancient Greeks listening to Homer recount the story of Troy at 800 years before Christ. Or the sublime delight of a mass by Josquin in the 15th century. Imagine Prince Nikolaus listening to a new Haydn symphony in his concert hall at Esterházy. The writer, William Deresiewicz, has written elsewhere about how central food has become to our culture, tending to displace art:

I wrote a piece not long ago about foodism as the new culture. Food, I argued, has replaced art as the object, among the educated class, of aspiration, competition, conversation, veneration. But food, I concluded, is not art, is not narrative or representational, does not express ideas or organize emotions, cannot do what art does and must not be confused with it.

Yes, absolutely. Classical music a hundred and more years ago, was a huge element in our culture, but it has diminished in recent decades. If we glance at the Wall Street Journal we see the occasional (very occasional) article on classical music, while every edition has dozens of articles on food.

So back to my conversation with my friend. She sets aside a significant part of her energy every day to working out. This is probably the largest discretionary expenditure of time and energy in her day--not counting work, study, sleep, eating and so on. It is, as the saying goes, "something I do for me". She is not a narcissist, but this is a kind of narcissistic endeavor. Our culture cultivates narcissism: this we do for us.

But anyone who devotes a significant amount of time and energy to the arts must not be doing it for narcissistic reasons, not if they are doing it properly.

The part of my time and energy that I could spend working out I devote instead to composition. But I have the feeling that most people don't really understand why. It is not for fame--that, at this juncture, is unlikely. It is not out of economic need--I am a non-commercial musician if there ever was one! It is not out of an obsessive compulsion--though I'm sure some people think so.

No, the reason I do it is because I can. Composition interests me. It is the most challenging thing I can think of doing. I have a predilection towards it. It is fulfilling. But most of all, it is something that I hope will give pleasure to others. I do not do it principally for myself. There is some kind of Aristotelian impetus that says to me, if you can do something of lasting worth in your life, then you simply must do it.

So that is why I compose music. I hope that some of you, at least, will enjoy it. Here are three pieces I have written. The first one is from my avant-garde phase, written around 1980 for guitar orchestra. This performance is from 1990:

The next piece is a song setting a poem by Li Po written around 2009. The unusual sound that begins and ends the piece is produced by attaching a paper clip to the sixth string of the guitar.

Finally, a piece for violin and guitar written in 2013. Coincidentally, this piece was inspired by the friend I mentioned having the conversation with.

Concerto Guide: J. S. Bach

As we saw last week, Bach took his inspiration for the concerto form from Vivaldi. There is even a story of him sneaking out at night when he was young so he could copy out a Vivaldi score by hand. Bach was a master synthesist, taking dance movements and ornamental style from the French, but for the concerto, he turned to the Italians because they had invented the whole idea of a concerto. One masterful recreation of Italian concerto style is found in Bach's Italian Concerto for solo keyboard. The necessary contrast between solo and tutti (the whole orchestra) was achieved by a mechanical device that coupled the two keyboards of the harpsichord together. Let's let Elaine explain how this works:

As she mentions, Bach was the first composer of what we might call a keyboard concerto and he did it by first transcribing a number of violin concertos by Vivaldi for one or more keyboards and orchestra. In 1721 he gathered together six of his original concertos, including one for keyboard soloist (though joined by solo violin and flute) and sent them to the Margrave of Brandenburg in hopes of winning a court appointment. Alas, the Margrave did not even send an acknowledgement and they were likely never performed. The six together, each for a unique group of soloists, are now known as the Brandenburg Concertos, after the Vivaldi Four Seasons, probably the most famous concertos from the Baroque era. Richard Taruskin in the Oxford History of Western Music makes a special point of how very eccentric these concertos are. Each group of soloists is an oddity in itself. The first concerto, for example, has the bizarre combination of two natural horns, three oboes, bassoon and violino piccolo, a small violin, now obsolete. These are the solo instruments! Let's have a listen. Here is the Freiburg Baroque Orchestra with that first concerto, in F major. The piece begins at the 40 second mark:

That's quite a sound! One wonders what Vivaldi would have thought. Equally unprecedented is the role of the harpsichord in the Brandenburg No. 5, where, halfway through the first movement, about where an Italian concerto would have been coming to an end, the harpsichordist takes over and launches into a lengthy solo that is unique in the Baroque era. Akin to what later on became the soloist's cadenza in the Classical era, at the time this was unprecedented. The harpsichord solo starts just after the 6:30 mark in this recording by the Cleveland Baroque Orchestra.

Bear in mind that a whole concerto, in three movements, by Vivaldi only runs around ten minutes in length. The Brandenburg No. 5 first movement alone is over ten minutes.

Bach also transcribed his own original violin concertos. One of the most famous of his concertos is the one for two violins in D minor, that he later transcribed for two harpsichords in C minor. Here is the original for two violins:

The new Philistines are just like the old Philistines

I don't agree with all the thoughts expressed in this essay, but it gives a colorful introduction to the music criticism of Robert Schumann that was largely directed against

the banal and empty theatrical and virtuoso-compositions which were then popular. It chafed him no end that so soon after the deaths of Beethoven and Schubert, the public taste had been won by the likes of Rossini.

It is a lamentable fact that a lot of the so-called supporters of classical music actually do more harm than good. Some typical examples are the music educator who relentlessly teaches only the superficial qualities of music with no hints of its depths, the music critic who writes only to flatter his readers and is always in tune with the political correctness of the day, the composer who sticks to gimmicks and tricks, the performer who acts out the theater of the music with hair tossing and distracting clothing but doesn't put across the music very well and, a curious example, the fellow-next-door, regular-bloke type who explains to you that classical music is all stuck up and stuff.

This latter fellow is the topic of this post and we find him lurking in the pages of The Telegraph: Alan Titchmarsh tell us to "Stop being so snobbish about classical music"! The subhead tritely informs us that

While I’ve always preferred the likes of Beethoven and Mozart to more popular forms of music, I believe that music is something to be shared and enjoyed by all

Well sure, Alan, but what's your point? As this is an entirely false opposition, signaled by the "while", I'm sure you are trying to pull the wool over our eyes in some way. He begins:

What is it about classical music that encourages snobbery? In most walks of life such behaviour is frowned upon, and yet, in the world of “serious” music, it is alive and kicking. Since my teenage years, classical music has been my preferred genre. Oh, I bought She Loves You by The Beatles, but it was simply for street cred, though the term itself had yet to be invented.

Nice scare quotes around "serious". How dare a mere musical genre think itself serious? Well into the article we find out that the writer is actually a professional radio host:

for the past two years or so I have presented its Saturday morning show – a mix of exactly the kind of music that I would listen to at that time of day and at that time of the week. It is an eclectic confection, majoring on the giants – Beethoven and Mozart, Wagner and Chopin, Schubert and Handel – but it also has room for Lehar, along with good film scores and light music composers such as Robert Farnon and Eric Coates.

He finally gets to his complaint:

But for some “serious” music lovers the net is cast a little too wide, and the fact that the presenters appear to be real human beings who admit to being au fait with other forms of musical life is just too much to bear. To them the world of classical music is an exclusive one, to be preserved for the enjoyment of the select few who are possessed of a superior intellect.

There are those scare quotes again. It seems that, while he loves music, the lighter forms at least, what he hates is the idea that there are levels of aesthetic quality. The idea that some music is more challenging, more dense and requires more patience and understanding, he just won't accept.

Well, they are entitled to their opinion, but I would rather its appeal was broadened and that the sheer joy that can be derived from music was shared by as wide a range of folk as possible. Alas, musical snobs will all too often confuse accessibility with “dumbing down”. There is, I maintain, a world of difference. It is possible to popularise a subject without losing its integrity; something I have tried to achieve, over many years, in the world of gardening. 

I would like for the whole world to appreciate and experience the sheer joy of Beethoven's late quartets, but I think it is unlikely. Most people are going to prefer Beyoncé and I accept that. But if you want to convince me that Beethoven and Beyoncé are on the same level of aesthetic worth, then I think you will have a tough job doing so.

Alan, it's like beer: there is Schlitz Lite and then there is Belgian Morte Subite. The latter, brewed with "wild" yeasts and at 9% alcohol is going to be just a tad more challenging. There is fizzy Lambrusco and then there is aged Barolo. Don't mix them up!

Also, don't make the entirely different aesthetic mistake of confusing difficulty with quality. There is also extremely complex and dense music that is of little aesthetic worth. But Alan is not likely to fall into that error.

Back to that first quote, the one that trashes Rossini. The truth of the matter is that Beethoven and Schubert both envied Rossini a bit for his effortless command of opera. Despite the fact that Rossini is immediately enjoyable, it is also very good music. So let's end with some. Here is the overture to La gazza ladra:

And just for the record, I'm an elitist, not a snob.

Music writing then and now

Music writing now is pretty much like it has been for a hundred years or more. Possibly the most well-known music critic in the English-speaking world today is Alex Ross. A hundred years ago it was probably George Bernard Shaw. They do have a few things in common. Both being prominent in their professions, they are given the benefit of lots of space. Alex Ross' latest essay in The New Yorker on recent books on Beethoven runs close to five thousand words! In 1893, in The World, George Bernard Shaw published a similarly lengthy essay on several recent concerts, including one of Brahms' chamber music. What similarities do we see? As they are both writing journalism, there is a great deal of blather and a minimum of technical detail.

Ross begins with a number of gestures in the direction of what are the currently fashionable ways to look at music:

After Beethoven, the concert hall came to be seen not as a venue for diverse, meandering entertainments but as an austere memorial to artistic majesty. Listening underwent a fundamental change. To follow Beethoven’s dense, driving narratives, one had to lean forward and pay close attention. The musicians’ platform became the stage of an invisible drama, the temple of a sonic revelation.

Above all, Beethoven shaped the identity of what came to be known as classical music. In the course of the nineteenth century, dead composers began to crowd out the living on concert programs, and a canon of masterpieces materialized, with Beethoven front and center. As the scholar William Weber has established, this fetishizing of the past can be tracked with mathematical precision, as a rising line on a graph: in Leipzig, the percentage of works by deceased composers went from eleven per cent in 1782 to seventy-six per cent in 1870. Weber sees an 1807 Leipzig performance of Beethoven’s Third Symphony, the titanic, turbulent “Eroica,” as a turning point: the work was brought back a week later, “by demand,” taking a place of honor at the end of the program. 

This little history of Beethoven reception underlines the current shibboleths: classical music is austere, unforgiving, ivory tower music, the realm of dead white males.

George Bernard Shaw begins with a statement of offhand elitism that would fit quite well with the way that his audience, upper-class Englishmen, viewed the world:

I think in the case of both writers, one of the crucial elements, coming far before engaging with the music in any detail, is flattery of the reader. Both are writing for people of high cultural station. The easiest way to flatter the reader, when talking about someone of the stature of a great composer like Beethoven or Brahms, is to relate their foibles, their ordinary humanness to bring them down, not to the reader's level, but just slightly below! Ross does it through health and psychology, themes our time is obsessed with:

Throughout the book, we register, in our mind’s ear, Beethoven ranting, grumbling, pestering, pontificating, leering, sneering, and, above all, complaining. Especially in his final years, Beethoven was in constant misery, some of it ordained by fate and some of it self-imposed. Heavy drinking compounded other health problems and, Swafford argues, proved fatal. (The theory that the composer died of lead poisoning, publicized in the 2001 book “Beethoven’s Hair,” has been undermined by further testing of his remains.) In Friedman’s novel, doctors ask about blood in the stool and the quality of his urine. There is squabbling over money, and an almost total lack of serenity.

Shaw goes about it in a different way. As it would have been unseemly to a late Victorian to talk about Brahms' drinking problem, he does it by way of taking a superior attitude to the music itself:

My point here is not the truth or falsity of these characterizations--they certainly carry more weight if they are true--but rather the function of them, what the writer uses them for. In both cases, I think it is to flatter his readers. This is, of course, what distinguishes musical journalism from musical criticism.

Now there was, of course, real music criticism a hundred years ago, just as there is now. It is not likely to be found in high-profile magazines catering to the carriage trade, however. A hundred years ago it was found in the program notes and Encyclopedia Brittanica articles of Donald Francis Tovey a musicologist, conductor and composer. Here are a couple of samples of his writing:

What both these excerpts reveal is a kind of profound respect for the art and those who create it. There is no hint of a need to flatter the reader by reductionist tactics. There are writers on music today that share this attitude and I'm sure I have mentioned them before. One is Charles Rosen who writes about how a young Mozart invented the structure of the Classical era concerto in this excerpt:

Yes, Mozart at age fifteen had the kind of command of musical structure to do this. Let's listen to those very early Mozart piano concertos, based on solo piano sonatas of J. C. Bach. Here are all three concertos, K. 107: