"Readable Even by the Deaf"
Toward a literary music criticism for the people
I appreciate the imagination in the following idea from drummer Vinnie Sperrazza’s recent post:
Music critics are as essential as musicians, because musicians are music critics. I watched the great Tony Mason play with pianist Erik Deutsch last night in Williamsburg, and Mr. Mason changed the muffling on the snare drum throughout the set, depending upon the tune. Mason was critiquing his own sound, based on sensitive and nuanced understanding of what was needed for every tune. In a sense, he was doing real-time music criticism.
But I have to call bullshit. If Mason simply doing his job as a musician—listening and adjusting in the moment—counts as music criticism, then every concert reviewer should be hopping the stage to steal the baton away from the maestro and conduct the orchestra himself when he hears a tempo he doesn’t like.
Sperrazza’s idea—that musicians are critics—assumes at least two things. First, it assumes that a major goal of music criticism is to influence the music, that the music should change when criticized. Second, it assumes that the audience (or, more conventionally, the reader) of music criticism is comprised of musicians (Mason’s bandmates probably noticed and liked his changing snare) and the members of the audience who were physically there to hear the performance, when in reality, according to the traditional understanding of criticism (or reviewing), Sperrazza’s very act of pointing out these musical changes is the criticism. Now, I understand that Sperrazza’s “in a sense” means that we shouldn’t take his equivalency literally. But neither should we take the word “criticism” literally; “critiquing” is much too narrow an understanding of what music criticism is and could be.
And so I want to ask, having identified these assumptions: Do we, in fact, assume these two things when we’re doing music criticism? Should we? If not, what should we assume? I’m not trying to take a dig at Sperrazza; he seems to be one of the few commentators who actually used the recent Times reassignments of those four critics as an opportunity to really question what music criticism is and not just to lament the lack of institutional support for arts writing. But there is much more to be said. And it is his generative approach that I want to run with here. Because, ultimately, we don’t just need powerful institutions to care about music writing again; we need an entirely new model of craft, to emulate and to deviate from.
Why do we need to reconsider our craft? Because a lot of music criticism is boring. I will not name names. Probably a lot of the reviews I’ve written are boring or have boring passages. And why is boring bad? Because people don’t like to read boring stuff. And why do we care what people like to read? Because if people don’t like to read us, they won’t. And what does it matter that they won’t read us? I’d like to say, “because then we won’t make any money,” but we hardly make any money anyway. In a deeper sense, then: If people don’t read us, then the writer’s whole project of communication, of reaching out, of (as E. M. Forster said) “just connecting,” of intimacy, will have failed. And why is intimacy important? Because it’s what makes us human. And who cares about being human? For the love of God, if I have to explain it to you.
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), the author of Pygmalion, was a lot of things. One thing he wasn’t was boring. That is especially true of his music criticism. While living in London, he wrote more than 2,500 pages of music reviews and essays, mostly penned in the last couple decades of the nineteenth century for The Hornet, The Star, and The World. The poet W.H. Auden called him “probably the best music critic who ever lived.” Shaw was a leftist whose book, The Perfect Wagnerite, introduced readers to The Ring as an indictment of capitalism. He claimed The Ring for the left years before Hitler would make Wagner the sole province of the right. Shaw’s family was musical, but he taught himself piano and music theory. Because he was self-taught and his writing was so conversational, people thought he knew nothing about music. And that, for Shaw, was the fun of it. “I could make deaf stockbrokers read my two pages on music, the alleged joke being that I knew nothing about it,” he wrote. “The real joke was that I knew all about it.”
And he did know all about it. In an article for the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Public Music Theory, Nicole Biamonte, a music theorist at McGill, analyzes his thoughts on harmony (he was opposed to teaching students to derive harmonic principles from the overtone series), rhythm (he wanted listeners to be better acquainted with asymmetrical meters), form (like a good Wagnerite, he hated how obsessed Brahms’ acolytes were with sonata form), and solfège (he thought it was better to have an ear for relative pitch than to rely on sight-reading). And she concludes that Shaw “was quite well versed in the theory of his time as well as in some historical music theory, if skeptical of its explanatory power, and that he expected his readership to have a grasp of at least some fundamental concepts.” (Expecting the reader to have a grasp of fundamental concepts—we’ll come back to this.)
So Shaw knew his stuff. But when you first read him, the thing that jumps out at you, and the thing that sticks with you, is his personality. He puts himself and his life in his work, without shame, with unapologetic bias. And that’s what sometimes discredited him. Here, for example, is Shaw writing in 1894 on the funeral march from Beethoven’s Eroica symphony:
The fact is, I am not always fortunate enough to arrive at these specially solemn concerts in the frame of mind proper to the occasions. The funeral march in the Eroica symphony, for instance, is extremely impressive to a man susceptible to the funereal emotions. Unluckily, my early training in this respect was not what it should have been. To begin with, I was born with an unreasonably large stock of relations, who have increased and multiplied ever since. My aunts and uncles were legion, and my cousins as the sands of the sea without number. Consequently, even a low death-rate meant, in the court of mere natural decay, a tolerably steady supply of funerals for a by no means affectionate but exceedingly clannish family to go to.
He goes on to give an account of what it was like to process along the winding country roads to the cemetery as a young boy, the sights and sounds making you feel like you’re there. Then he hits you with this:
Such were the scenes which have disqualified me for life from feeling the march in the Eroica symphony as others do. It is that fatal episode where the oboe carries the march into the major key and the whole composition brightens and steps out, so to speak, that ruins me. The moment it begins, I instinctively look beside me for an elbow-strap….
And then a flood of memories overwhelms him. And then:
Finally I wake up completely, and realize that for the last page or two of the score I have not been listening critically to a note of the performance. I do not defend my conduct, present or past: I merely describe it so that my infirmities may be duly taken into account in weighing my critical verdicts.
You don’t even realize he’s writing about a performance until the last few sentences. This whole time, it seemed like he was just musing—the Eroica as madeleine. And there is no critical verdict on the performance. And who cares? Not I.
In reading passages this one, I can’t help but think that the realism of the Norwegian playwright Henrik Ibsen, who so influenced Shaw, did not just permeate Shaw’s plays—as he sought to do to away with the sentimental melodrama of the English theater and replace it with discussions of social issues—but it also seeped into his criticism. Just as Shaw found it necessary to represent how things really are in his plays, he evidently thought the best way to connect with his readers and to show them that music was just as real as life, was to display the convergence of music and memory in his own life. Shaw’s critical practice was an antidote to the idealism of his day, an idealism which manifested in reviews that were written by people who seemed to have no past, no fears, no desires. As he wrote elsewhere, in an essay on Ibsen, idealists cannot stand realists because they are “terrified beyond measure at the proclamation of their hidden thought—at the presence of the traitor among the conspirators of silence.” When we shy away from putting ourselves into our reviews, are we doing it because we’re scared about what those hidden thoughts we have during a performance would reveal about us? Do we dare become traitors?
Shaw reflected on the musical critical practice of his day just as we are now. And he was concerned with many of the same frustrations about how critics pretend to be objective. In the same year as the Eroica review, in a laudatory article on the Anglo-Irish composer Charles Villiers Stanford’s recently published article about music criticism, he wrote:
We cannot get away from the critic’s tempers, his impatiences, his sorenesses, his friendships, his spite, his enthusiasms (amatory and others), nay, his very politics and religion if they are touched by what he criticizes. They are all there hard at work; and it should be his point of honor—as it certainly is his interest if he wishes to avoid being dull—not to attempt to conceal them or to offer their product as the dispassionate dictum of infallible omniscience. If the public were to receive such a self exhibition by coldly saying, “We don’t want to know the sort of person you are: we want to know whether such a work . . . is good or bad,” then the critic could unanswerably retort, “How on earth can you tell how much my opinion on that point is worth unless you know the sort of person I am?”
“Good or bad”? That is the question. That is always the damned question. And the struggle to find an answer to that question every time we sit down to write a review is what makes the process so painful, at least to me. And it’s what makes the bounds of what music criticism could be so limiting. The decision we have to make. To choose between binary options. The feeling that there is one right answer. It’s not even like a multiple choice question, where at least you have the freedom to consider four or five potential answers. No, two choices. And it’s up to you to pick the right one. The pressure. Who the hell wants to write a review of a concert if the reviewer is reduced to operating like a computer, thinking in 0s and 1s? This is the antithesis of creativity.
But music criticism can be creative. And Shaw thought that it could learn something from the literary world.
Shaw was disgusted with two things: the “Mesopotamian” words that music critics use and the reliance on mere description of the music, and calling that a review. The two go hand in hand—you describe the way the music goes by using big words. He tackled the problem with biting satire. In response to a critic who wrote about how the violins and the basses in an orchestra exchanged the principal subject in counterpoint before coming to a close “on the dominant of D minor,” Shaw wrote, in 1893:
How succulent this is; and how full of Mesopotamian words like ‘the dominant of D minor’! I will now, ladies and gentlemen, give you my celebrated ‘analysis’ of Hamlet’s soliloquy on suicide in the same scientific style. ‘Shakespeare, dispensing with the customary exordium, announces his subject at once in the infinitive, in which mood it is presently repeated after a short connecting passage in which, brief as it is, we recognize the alternative and negative forms on which so much of the significance of repetition depends. Here we reach a colon; and a pointed pository phrase, in which the accent falls decisively on the relative pronoun, brings us to the first full stop.’
No literary critic would be caught dead writing like this. “I want to know,” Shaw continued, “whether it is just that a literary critic should be forbidden to make his living in this way on pain of being interviewed by two doctors and a magistrate, and haled off to Bedlam forthwith; whilst the more a musical critic does it, the deeper the veneration he inspires.” He placed the blame on editors. They always fell for it:
[B]y simply writing that the second subject, a graceful and flowing theme contrasting happily with the rugged vigor of its predecessor, appears unexpectedly in the key of the dominant, [I] will reduce that able editor to a condition so abject that he will let me inundate his columns with pompous platitudes, with…every conceivable blunder and misdemeanor that a journalist can commit, provided I do it in the capacity of his musical critic.
Shaw thus believed in writing for readers, not for editors. And he thought editors should believe the same. That’s what he meant when he said he wanted his work to be “readable even by the deaf,” where “deaf” can stand in for “regular people who don’t know that much about music theory.” If only editors weren’t so deaf to the sound of bad prose.
Shaw is railing against mere description. And the Austrian-British music critic Hans Keller was fond of saying, “description is not analysis!” That rule of thumb is all well and good if the music you’re writing about can be easily discussed in terms of sonata form, counterpoint, and key changes. But what about music that can’t be easily written about in that way? What about music whose reportage would actually benefit from description? As I’ve written about elsewhere, so much new music is about space and atmosphere, rather than time. And that’s interesting to me, because I was taught that music, by definition, is “sound organized in time.” I always took for granted that the space music usually occupied was largely consistent: a concert hall. On Friday, listeners (I had planned to go but was too hungover) sat on a floating dock in smelly Gowanus to listen to a sound installation by Christian Quiñones; one of the compositions was Loud Music for Quiet Spaces. Composers and concert curators are also playing around with extra-musical elements. Last year, I went to Columbia’s St. Paul’s Chapel to see an Alkemie concert of Hildegard von Bingen where I was given a throat lozenge and other materials to, in the ensemble’s words, “evoke the five senses.” In this way, music critics should be thankful that Shaw could not see into the future. With the right music, giving a description of a performance can actually be pretty exciting. Plus, many times, reading that description doesn’t require knowing the fundamental musical concepts that Shaw thought necessary.
But who is doing the describing? Is she a transparent eyeball, like Ralph Waldo Emerson in the woods, absorbing the world around him and representing it faithfully, with no identity but that which he shares with the natural world around him? “I am nothing,” he writes, “I see all.” Or is she a person with fears, regrets, loves, losses, and hopes—some of the very things music has dealt with since time immemorial. How can these be acknowledged in the music but ignored in the critic? When I write a review and ignore these in myself, I always feel a sense of guilt, even shame. I feel like I’m lying.
In Shaw’s time as in ours, music criticism, in way of craft, style, and substance, is lagging behind not just literary criticism, but behind all cultural criticism. Take just one example—the opening of novelist Brandon Taylor’s review of Ross Barkan’s recent novel, Glass Century:
For the last month or so, I have been reading Ross Barkan’s Glass Century (2025, Tough Poets Press). When I started the novel, I texted a friend and said, “I am listening to Ross Barkan’s book. Jonathan Franzen must pay for his crimes.” I bought the audiobook (with my own American money, not even an Audible credit) because I am spending the summer in Europe and books are heavy…. I listen to Glass Century as I walk from work. I listen to Glass Century as I walk up that same long stretch of dangerous road going to work. I listen to Glass Century as I shop at Carrefour.
Taylor goes on to recount several more scenes of him listening to Barkan’s book. His initial account of experiencing the text thus doesn’t even involve reading. It’s like if I were to write about, say, reading the score of Brahms’ first symphony while riding on the train. Babies scream, the tracks squeak, the conductor rambles, tourists sit across from—rather than beside—one another and talk loudly. And yet Brahms’ music is so powerful that I can still hear it in my head as I read the score. The text drowns out the din of my surroundings. I don’t even need AirPods. When I get to the concert hall, and I’m listening to the orchestra play Brahms, for some reason it doesn’t sound as sweet as it did when I was hearing it in my head on the noisy train. (This has never happened, but now I’d kind of like it to.) The point is that Taylor is playing with our expectations. We usually engage with books by reading them. Likewise, we expect a book critic to talk about what it’s like to read a book. But rather than reading it, Taylor is listening to it. And that opens up new ways to write about Glass Century, like later in the review, when Taylor talks about his childhood fear of chickens.
As much as he writes about himself and his life using the first-person pronoun, Brandon Taylor’s review is not about Brandon Taylor; it is about Glass Century. In fact, it’s so much about Glass Century that the book catalyzed something within him that made him want to express himself, to reveal the quotidian details of his reading experience, to talk to the reader like she’s in the room with him. And that’s what makes it a great review. I wonder what would happen if we wrote music criticism like this. An expressive criticism, rather than a reflective one. Don’t we have enough reflection? Video replicates everything. We “like” and “share” others’ thoughts on social media rather than come up with our own. In an age like this, isn’t mere description anachronistic? What can’t be replicated, what can’t be captured by any video, is what goes on inside of our bodies, physically and mentally and emotionally, when we listen to music. The stories we tell ourselves—stories both about ourselves and about our surroundings. Those can only be expressed. I guess I’m wondering what would happen if critics wrote less like reporters and more like novelists.
I realize that I am demanding more out of the music critic, perhaps more than is commensurate with his pay grade, if he is paid at all. I realize it could sound like I’m saying that the main culprits of the disaster in arts journalism right now are the critics, not the institutions who have abandoned them. I realize that what I’m calling for is a slippery slope to the-critic-as-influencer. I realize that reforming the craft of music criticism is not guaranteed to bring critics back into the good graces of journalistic institutions. But at the end of the day, all I’m really doing is saying what I personally want to read more of.
I’m calling for music editors to encourage greater creative freedom in their writers. I’m calling for unbridled experimentation in Substack music writing. I want to read irreverent, raunchy, lovely, emotional writing that convinces me that there is a full human behind the words. I want editors to consider the possibility that their publications might be saved if they let their writers talk about how their cat dying last week made them tear up during a Schubert lied, about how they didn’t drink enough water that day and were dehydrated and had a headache that only got worse with every mallet hit in Mahler’s sixth symphony, about how they forgot to pee before the concert so La Mer made them incapable of thinking about anything other than water and they almost pissed their pants.
Music is alive and well. We owe it to the musicians playing it to write like we’re just as alive, even if we aren’t doing that well.
Bibliography:
George S. Barber, “Shaw’s Contribution to Music Criticism,” PMLA 72, no. 5 (1957): 1005-1017, https://doi.org/10.2307/460376.
Eric Bentley, ed., Shaw on Music (Doubleday, 1955).
Nicole Biamonte, “The Public Music Theory of George Bernard Shaw,” in The Oxford Handbook of Public Music Theory (J. Daniel Jenkins, ed.), November 10, 2021, https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780197551554.013.7.
Eugene Gates, “The Music Criticism and Aesthetics of George Bernard Shaw,” Journal of Aesthetic Education 35, no. 3 (2001): 63-71, https://doi.org/10.2307/3333610.
Adam Kirsch, “The Complacent Admiration of Courage, or Ibsen and Us,” Liberties 5, no. 4 (2025): 65-77, https://libertiesjournal.com/articles/the-complacent-admiration-of-courage-or-ibsen-and-us/.