I know Cardew, Brown and Wolf, but just who is this Bernard person? No idea – and I actually *live* in Holland…

At the same time, Kyle, the web does allow all these publications to make up for the lost word count and freedom to expand an idea: by using their own websites. Column space or even web-space isn’t an issue there, and there’s little reason not to get generous with it. If Bernard Holland is looking silly simply because his stuff is being eviscerated in the print edition, why not give him al the space he needs onine to show his smarts? I know in my old neck of the woods of Seattle, Regina Hackett, the Post-Intelligencer’s long-time art critic — who always seemed competent but a little flat to me — showed her true depth and verve when they gave her her own blog in the Arts section, free to expand on whatever wasn’t making it into the paper.

I have a lot of respect for Bernard as a critic. The problem is institutional. As column inches grow fewer and fewer, and advertising becomes more and more powerful, it becomes more and more difficult to say anything accurately in a newspaper review. Paragraphs get chopped out at the last minute. Fad assignments are given out with no thought to the writers’ expertise (as happened with the recent minimalism fuss). Years ago the Times requested a 700-word piece from me (already way too short for include context), and, a half-hour before deadline, called to say I had to cut it down to 500 (some new ad had undoubtedly come in). The same thing used to happen with some regularity at the Chicago Tribune. Frequently finished articles disappear completely, the critic paid his fee for a piece of writing that got displaced by an ad or some breaking news. Under conditions like this, it becomes very difficult to sustain much pride in the accuracy of one’s expression. Cutting corners becomes almost a matter of self-preservation.

I contrast this to the golden period of the Village Voice, now long since over. My editor and I used to spend 90 minutes a week poring over my column and making sure every sentence, every paragraph, the entire logic of the piece, glittered with color and lucidity. The first time I wrote a column in which he didn’t alter a word (Feb. 16, 1988), I felt like I had scaled a mountain and seen the ocean stretch out on the other side. Once the paper went free in the mid-90s, such intensive editing was considered no longer cost-effective, and discontinued. Fact-checkers were fired. Errors crept in. I could afford to get sloppy, and occasionally succumbed to the temptation. My word count shrank from 900/1700 to 700, then to 550. I started tossing off columns literally before breakfast. None of those short articles are reprinted in my new book, because I’m ashamed of them. They were as big a waste of paper as most of what’s in the Times today.

Daily papers are always worse than weeklies in the editing-and-space department. The Times cut down its feature story lengths from 2500 words to 1200, and I don’t know what they are now. In other words, the problem is institutional. It is nearly impossible for any expert to sound intelligent trying to sum up a topic he knows a lot about in 500 words. The most brilliant critic I ever read (not in music), someone who used to educate and uplift me in the Chicago Reader every week, got “promoted” to a daily paper and became utterly forgettable and pedestrian. We have no idea how smart the Times critics are; we see them only through these little distorting lenses left in the greatly reduced Arts section. Double their word counts, increase their freedom to discuss topics they love, edit them within an inch of their lives, remove their fear that their writing will be torn apart or thrown away – allow them to remember why they became music critics in the first place – and we have no idea what they might flower into.

This article reinforces the irrelevance of the arts coverage of the Times – I rarely read it – they don’t cover what I want to read and I don’t much like what they write. In fact, I usually only read it, as with this case, because they’ve said something God-awful. When you have reporters with agendas, whether it be Holland or Judith Miller, your credibility becomes compromised. Couple that with a reduction of column inches and you start down that slippery slope to irrelevance. It’s become more difficult to feel sorry for their dwindling subscription base. When I realized how skewed the Times had become (and how unresponsive to its readership it had become), I cancelled my subscription and got a broadband connection instead.

Whatever else one might want to say about them, Wolff and Brown were pervasive and widely credited influences on the Downtown improvisation scene around John Zorn in the ’80s, a scene that did not have much use for Cage and Feldman. Cardew, of course, is a towering figure in the field of political music, closer in spirit to Eisler and Brecht than to his immediate contemporaries. To call any of them coattail riders or second-raters is to speak from a blinkered perspective, seemingly that of someone who knows the classical canon and not much else. I can well imagine that Holland might not have enjoyed these particular performances, and he has every right to say so. But to accuse these particular composers of “inside jokes” and contempt for the public reveals cultural illiteracy as to what they were about. Even within the brief confines of a daily-paper review he could easily have made his point without compounding the reader’s ignorance.

There’s some irony in the sight of a critic who is, apparently, responsible to no-one for his opinions, but is given a great big bully platform for proclaiming them, saying that composers should be responsible to audiences. (That’s actually residual from something of Holland’s from earlier in the year–the article about how he didn’t need to prepare for his job, but composers sure had better for there’s). In this case also ironic to have a critic (this one, anyway) excoriating anybody else for his/her arrogrance.

“…made me get down on my knees and give thanks that an era so damaging to music was over…”

What quantifiable ill effects are we currently experiencing as a result of Earle Brown’s interest in open form?

It’s hard to think of three composers who are/were less arrogant or self-absorbed than the three Holland cites. In fact, most of their music brought in all types of crowds, while the music that really seemed to alienate audiences was the more academic type. Is BH just being a Heather, because he wasn’t part of the hipper crowd?

The paragraph by BH was dumb. That’s perhaps the nicest thing I could say about it. Does this guy actually know anything by Wolff or Brown? I could accept, perhaps, if he just didn’t find indeterminate music/graphic music/whatever to his taste. But contempt for an audience? Really? From those two guys?

While I will admit some of their more graphical scores might take a bit of an acquired taste, something like Wolff’s Lines or the Exercises might make him think differently. On the other hand, given that he’s supposed to be an informed “critic,” shouldn’t he have already acquired that sort of taste? And if not, then STFU already.

I’d third it, but my jaw’s too busy dropping.

I second that boo!

Bravo!

Walter Ramsey