CLASSICAL MUSIC CRITICISM Serious music criticism did not become part of a cultural discourse in the United States until the middle of the nineteenth century. Until then public concerts were only sporadic. With the exception of such groups as Boston’s Handel and Haydn Society, founded in 1815, and the New York Philharmonic Society, organized in 1842, music that came to be described as “classical” or “art” was performed by amateur musicians in their homes. Edward Downes has identified a review of the ballad opera “Love in a Village” by Thomas Arne dating from 1767 as the earliest printed review. Oscar Sonneck characterized a lengthy concert review appearing in the Philadelphia Packet in May 1786 as “a noteworthy historic document” because of the rarity of such publications. The growth of New York as a commercial center, increased immigration of Europeans—many of whom were skilled musicians—and the beginnings of the newspaper as a medium of mass communication provided a more favorable environment in that city for regular public performances of music and for critical commentary. A season of Italian grand opera began in 1815. Newspapers costing a penny began to appear in the 1830s. James Gordon Bennett, founder of one such newspaper, the New York Herald, began to publish reviews of musical events, for, he argued, newspapers should be “the great organ of social life.” Other papers began to include reviews. A composer of some accomplishment and a champion of Beethoven, William Henry Fry (1813–1864), emerged by mid-century as perhaps the most distinguished author of some of these. His prominence as a composer gave his criticism a technical support and credibility that few others could match. Between 1846 and 1852, Fry was a foreign correspondent for the Philadelphia Public Ledger and New York Tribune, and then from 1852 to 1864, he was arts editor and music critic for the Tribune. British-born Henry C. Watson became the first person who probably made a living from music criticism. Musical historian Mark Grant regards him as “the first modern critic.” Writing for a number of newspapers, Watson joined others in the ardent promotion of music in American culture. By the end of the century, critic Henry Krehbiel concluded that “‘the newspaper now fills the place in the musician’s economy which a century ago was filled in Europe by the courts and nobility.’” Mid-Nineteenth Century to 1920: A Golden Age in the Gilded Age? Some see the middle of the nineteenth century to World War I, as a kind of golden age for classical music and its criticism in the United States. Others have lamented what they regard as a failure during this time to connect this European derived music to native sources to produce distinctively American art music. Great wealth was amassed and spent to establish musical organizations, especially symphony orchestras, and build concert halls and opera houses. The music of the Viennese school (Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven) with the additions of Brahms, Wagner, Mendelssohn, and others came to make up a canon of music that Fry and others argued embodied “immutable laws of beauty and truth.” New England transcendentalists Margaret Fuller and Ralph Waldo Emerson used their own magazines in the 1840s and 1850s—among them the Dial and Harbinger— for essays on music. New cultural magazines that began to appear in the 1850s provided opportunities for expanding discussions of music and made classical music criticism part of a larger discourse on all aspects of culture. Harper’s and the Atlantic Monthly began publishing then, joined by the Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine in 1870 and Scribner’s Magazine in 1887. When William Dean Howells served as the editor of the Atlantic, he appointed in 1872 William Foster Apthorp to be its music editor. Apthorp also wrote for Boston newspapers and in that role became that city’s first major music critic. An especially powerful voice of this period came from Boston. Dubbed “the father of American music criticism” by musical scholar Louis Elson, John Sullivan Dwight wrote very much as a missionary on behalf of European art music and came, according to musical historian Joseph Horowitz, to define what Americans meant by classical music. Beginning in 1852, he began to publish his own magazine, Dwight’s Journal of Music, which employed a number of writers from New York and other parts of the country. It continued until 1881. Through it he and others sustained and amplified Fry’s promotion of Beethoven, and he supported the development of musical organizations throughout the United States. Many critics of distinction succeeded to the earlier group of Apthorp, Dwight, Watson and others. Two might be noted: Henry E. Krehbiel and William J. Henderson. Krehbiel, “the pontiff of musical wisdom” in the words of Grant, worked first as a general-assignment reporter for the Cincinnati Gazette, gradually taught himself music, and eventually defined himself as a music critic. He edited for a time the weekly Musical Review in New York and then moved to the New York Tribune, where he was music critic for more than forty years. Acknowledged by the end of his career as dean of the profession, he did much to aid musicians such as conductor Theodore Thomas and his itinerant orchestra to incorporate Brahms, Wagner, and Dvořák, and perhaps Tchaikovsky into a musical canon. Yet Krehbiel encouraged American composers to use African-American musical material in their music. He thereby found himself at least in partial accord with composer, Arthur Farwell, who in 1905, lamenting “the vise grip which European musical tradition has upon the generation still in power in our musical life,” urged American composers to exploit nativeAmerican music. Member of a theatrical family, Henderson identified himself as a preeminent critic of singers and opera, but as a critic for such newspapers as the New York Times and the New York Sun, he wrote about instrumental music as well. Like Krehbiel, he championed Wagner, and the two thereby became allies of the Wagner protégé and conductor, Anton Seidl, in the promotion of a Wagner cult in New York and elsewhere. Henderson wrote lengthy essays at a time when newspapers provided much more space that they do now for classical music criticism. Horowitz characterizes Henderson’s three-thousand word “highly descriptive and shrewdly evaluative” New York Times essay on the world premiere of Dvořák’s “New World Symphony” in Carnegie Hall in December 1893 as one “of the most astonishing feats of American music journalism.” “The attempt to describe a new musical composition may not be quite so futile as an effort to photograph the perfume of a flower,” the Times review began, “yet it is an experiment of similar nature” (New York Times, Dec. 17, 1893, p. 19). A classical or art music life developed in other cities in the late nineteenth century and the early part of the twentieth. More than in New York, symphony orchestras came to play a larger role in their communities. They developed close relations with local critics. Between 1881 and the end of World War I, Boston, Baltimore, Chicago, Cincinnati, Detroit, Minneapolis, Philadelphia, San Francisco, and St. Louis established resident professional orchestras. Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Los Angeles added such groups just after the war—enough to make the symphony orchestra a significant symbol of quality urban life in the United States. Establishment of an orchestra in Minneapolis led to the appointment of that city’s first newspaper music critic. In Boston the career of critic Philip Hale was closely tied to the early Boston Symphony for which he wrote program notes of prodigious length. A music enthusiast from a very early age and an accomplished pianist, H. L. Mencken in Baltimore wrote lively criticism for the Baltimore Sun and the American Mercury as well as program notes for the Baltimore Symphony. In Chicago a good friendship developed between that city’s first, and, in the opinion of some, greatest music critic, George P. Upton, and Theodore Thomas, whose career Upton helped change by urging city fathers to create the Chicago Symphony and appoint Thomas its first music director. Post 1920: Challenges, Change, and Continuity In the years after World War I, new music required evaluation as did new ways of performing old music. Technology brought radio, television, recordings, the computer, and the iPod—all offering alternative ways to hear music as well as discuss it. What – rightly or wrongly—came to be called popular or pop culture and its music flourished. Discussions of these and other changes expanded and enriched the ongoing conversation about the place of music in the nation’s culture. Radio and television became outlets for musical performances and for commentary and criticism. Both the Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic began weekly radio broadcasts in the 1930s; and late in the decade the National Broadcasting Company offered Arturo Toscanini an orchestra, the NBC Symphony, to perform weekly concerts for both a live and national radio audience. Conductor Walter Damrosch used the medium for a “Music Appreciation Hour” for children. A composer-critic like Fry, Joseph Deems Taylor, who had written for the New York American in the 1920s, built on what Damrosch started and used this new medium to reach a much larger audience and display his very considerable skills as an educator. He provided radio commentary on Metropolitan Opera broadcasts. Conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein used television in much the same way in his Omnibus series in the mid-1950s. A new Viennese school of composition (Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, and Alban Berg) broke with the tonality of the old and thereby posed challenges to performers, audiences, and critics. These men had American counterparts in Charles Ives, John Cage, Harry Partch, Roger Sessions, and many others. Paul Rosenfeld, who began his critical career in the 1920s, found some of Schoenberg’s music difficult to accept, but he wrote with understanding of Ives and other modernist American composers at a time at a time when others either ignored or condemned them. A contemporary of Rosenfeld, Harry Pleasants suggested that the second Viennese school and those who embraced it exemplified a European art tradition whose technical resources had become “exhausted.” Like Krehbiel and Farwell he suggested native sources should be exploited more fully. In this context, Olin Downes, principal music critic of the New York Times from 1924 to 1955, made an effort to give such music a fair hearing but in the end opted to promote that of the more tonal and accessible Jean Sibelius. Composer Virgil Thomson, who served as music critic for the New York Herald Tribune from 1940 to 1954, paid attention to contemporary works, although not always favorably. He applied his very considerable musical talent and verbal skill to analyze all music and its performance in ways that led some to characterize him as a gadfly, “a sacred cow sharpshooter.” Beginning in the 1920s, the popularity of jazz encouraged serious discussion of it and other popular art forms. Gilbert Seldes, who had reviewed classical music for the Philadelphia Evening Ledger, became a champion of the popular arts and published in 1923 The Seven Lively Arts, a book now regarded as a major text of twentieth-century art criticism. Beginning in the 1970s, John Rockwell sustained this eclecticism. He began as a classical music critic for the New York Times in 1972 but almost immediately began writing rock and jazz reviews for that paper as well. He took the position that 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 prejudices….” An accomplished musician and author of critical essays for Commentary, New Criterion, and the Times Literary Supplement, Samuel Lipman dissented from Rockwell’s acceptance of the vitality of popular music. Alex Ross of The New Yorker has echoed the Rockwell view. The 2005 New York concerts of Catalan viol player Jordi Savall afforded him an opportunity to sustain his view that “music is too personal a medium to support an absolute hierarchy of values.” “One musical border after another seemed to melt away,” he wrote of those programs, “borders between past and present, composition and improvisation, ‘popular’ and ‘classical.’” Critics found new ways to discuss these and other matters related to their work. After discussions among critics and conductors during an American Symphony Orchestra League symposium, a North American Music Critics Association was established in 1957. Numbering almost 150 by 2005, it aimed to promote high standards of music criticism in the press and increase general interest in music throughout the Americas. Another opportunity – not limited to just classical music critics but embracing all arts critics – came with the establishment of a National Arts Journalism Program in 1994. Beginning at Northwestern University, it then moved to the Columbia School of Journalism until its demise in 2005. Symphony reported, however, in early 2005 the creation of two new programs for arts journalists, one for graduate students at Syracuse University and the other, a National Endowment for the Arts institute for mid-career classical music and opera writers at Columbia University. Finally, the advent of the Internet has provided a resource for broadening and democratizing discussions about music. Arts Journal.com provides access to some fifteen arts web logs. It also makes available access to newspaper and periodical articles from the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom. Further Reading Chase, Gilbert. America’s Music: From the Pilgrims to the Present, rev. 3rd ed., Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1987. “Criticism.” In, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd ed., edited by Sadie, Stanley, 687–698. New York: Macmillan, 2001. Downes, Edward D., and John Rockwell. “Criticism,” The New Grove Dictionary of American Music, 4 vols., edited by H. Wiley Hitchcock, and Stanley Sadie, 536–546. New York: Macmillan, 1986. Elson, Louis C. The History of American Music, New York: The Macmillan Company, 1925. Farwell, Arthur “Toward an American Music, “Out West: A Magazine of the Old West and the New, 10 (January-June 1904): 454–458. Grant, Mark N. Maestros of the Pen: A History of Classical Music Criticism in America. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998. Hart, Philip. Orpheus in the New World: The Symphony Orchestra as an American Cultural Institution. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1973. Haskell, Henry, ed. The Attentive Listener: Three Centuries of Music Criticism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. Horowitz, Joseph. Classical Music in America: A History of Its Rise and Fall. New York and London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2005. Kammen, Michael. Gilbert Seldes and the Transformation of Cultural Criticism in the United States. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996.