Critical Juncture

The end of Beginner's Ear and a new beginning

Critical Juncture

Stop me if you know this one:

A man goes to the doctor. He works at the circus. For decades he has been the guy who follows the elephant around the rink with a little brush and dustpan, sweeping up elephant poop. Now his back is killing him from all the stooping.

The doctor examines the man, then looks at him with a serious expression. “I’m afraid your body is just not up to it anymore. You’re going to have to find another profession.”

“What!?” the man exclaims indignantly. “And give up show business?”

This newsletter marks an end and a return for me. After five years of developing live music meditations, I am closing my Beginner’s Ear series and turning my focus back on journalism, joining the team of New York Times critics once more as a freelancer. I’m also moving my newsletter to Substack in the hope of expanding its readership. (It might look a little different, but if you’re on my mailing list, it will continue to float into your inbox for free.)

I guess in much of the popular imagination, the critic’s place in the arts is as tangential as that of our circus poop sweeper, and maybe as crooked. Popular culture is full of caricatures of parasitic critics churning out grubby prose twisted with envy. That’s if they’re not playing God with the careers of cowering artists.

At the same time, newspaper criticism is shrinking, most sharply in classical music. Much of that has to do with the expectation by masthead editors that reviews should be useful to the reader in the same way a consumer column is useful for sifting through competing brands of sheets or blenders. This works for movies and Broadway shows – “I have a date this weekend, what should I see?” – but not for classical concerts, which are typically one-off events. By the time the review appears, the show is over.

But criticism understands that culture is not just for consumption. It’s a conversation. Art is itself is in constant (non-verbal) dialogue with the past, with the works, styles and ideas that came before. The critic gets to speak up on behalf of the present, weaving the conversational thread back into the realm of words.

And criticism brings a listener’s perspective into the mix. That’s not as obvious as it sounds. A lot of artists now generate reams of commentary on their own work. Press releases and program notes are increasingly essays in interpretation that don’t just describe the genesis of a new work but tell you which artistic tradition or social construct is being subverted, complicated or tested and on which intersection of two abstract nouns this is all situated.

I realize that if American public funding wasn’t so miserly, artists wouldn’t be quite so beholden to university residencies and grant foundations and the academic jargon they favor. As it is, the best way to prevent the cultural conversation from booming around an echo chamber is to bring in voices that are disinterested, discerning but also loving - toward the art form, if not always toward each individual artist.

“Loving demystification” is how the film critic A.O. Scott defines criticism — a process he, um, situates at “the hinge that conjoins the twin activities of creation and analysis.” If you were at one of my Beginner’s Ear events in the past, you may have experienced my brand of “loving demystification” in the live sphere. It’s a principle I’ll try to continue to follow as I take up position, dustpan in one hand and pen in the other, on the intersection of the right aisle and Row T.

Corinna

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