The Gesture of Judgement
On the impossibility of the concert review
If you were sitting next to me—as two readers of this publication were—at Woolsey Hall in New Haven on an evening last November at approximately 8:30 or 8:45pm, you would have seen me make an odd motion with my hand while listening to Bruckner’s eighth symphony.
My gesture was in response to a moment (16:55 here) that occurs four times in the second movement—a scherzo and trio. The moment occurs twice in the scherzo the first time around, and twice the second time around, after the da capo at the end of the trio brings us back to the scherzo.1 But I only made the motion the last time, even though I wanted to do it every time and had to restrain my arm from making the motion. This was a truly “compelling” performance; I was physically compelled, commanded, controlled by the music. I was like a puppet.
What happens harmonically in this moment is extraordinary, but only when you hear it. On the page, it doesn’t look like anything special (see below). It’s a modulation. Or, if you want to be strict about it, a tonicization—a momentary modulation—because it doesn’t last very long. It’s a shifting of keys from E-flat major to A-flat minor. Which is surprising. Because A-flat minor isn’t included in the key of E-flat major—only A-flat major is. So Bruckner is mixing modes. He’s taking a chord from a different key—E-flat minor—and surprising us by wedging this moody, dark chord into the otherwise sunny sound that is the key of E-flat major. Coupled with the fact that the horns are emphasizing the top half of the A-flat major chord, which is a C-flat major third, the effect is weird: a shift to a minor key that, nevertheless, through the efforts of the horns, is hell-bent on sounding a little bit major. For God’s sake, the first and second horns are only playing the fifth scale degree—E-flat! Déjà vu!
The sound is grotesque and disorienting. But, to me, it’s warm.
No, it’s hot. It’s rapturous. I want to stretch out my arms and look into the sun. I’m blinded and it feels so good. The sun’s rays swell my chest. My body seems to weigh twice as much, and I’m drawn upward and downward at the same time, my breath deepening. I get the chills. I feel literally bathed in sound. I’m taken: Powerless, impotent. I won’t use the word “orgasmic” because it sounds too clinical for what I’m feeling. (Listening to it on my speaker at home, alone in my room, I moan and groan and smile.) This may not be every listener’s experience, but for me this moment is extremely reassuring. Cozied up in a wool blanket. Grounded. Who knew Bruckner could provide such great aftercare?
And what do I do about it, back on Earth, in Woolsey Hall?
I turn to my friends on either side of me, grinning with ecstatic disbelief, and with my right hand I make a “smoothing over” motion horizontally through the air in front of me, like I’m feeling the hood of a beautiful antique car. Or petting the back of a stallion. But what I’m feeling inside is, like, I’m smoothing over the sea. The air is the ocean and somehow I’m compelled to calm it—but not quite calm it actively; that makes it sound like I want some control. No, I’m trying to express the fact that the music itself is like something that is calming a sea. The orchestra sounds oceanic, powerful, a behemoth. It’s that which can control the sea, not me. I’m trying to show with my arm what I think the music sounds like. And of course I’m doing this because the orchestra is doing it in a way I like. So I’m doing two things with this gesture: I’m approving and I’m describing. In fact, it’s almost like I’m doing music criticism. I’m acting out a concert review in real time. I’m communicating to my two friends, “Look at this! Hear what’s happening right now!” Ecce musicam! The music makes me want to move like this. Music criticism as dance.
And my friends look at me like I’ve got three heads. They have no idea what I’m trying to express. So I pull out the nip of Doc McGillicuddy’s from my coat pocket and take a swig, slipping deeper into satisfaction.
Yesterday, on their Substack, Poison Put to Sound, Max Keller wrote “How Do You Even Write a Concert Review Anyway?” I’m glad they wrote this. I’ve wanted to write something like this for years. I think the concert review is a stagnant form and needs to be spiced up. The only problem is that mainstream publications don’t want to be spicy, and that’s why Max and I, and other experimental critics, write here sometimes. I haven’t been reviewing lately, but Max’s transparency about how hard it is for them to write a concert review—and they’ve been on the beat longer than I have—made it a little easier for me to sit down and return to this piece, which I started months ago. So, thanks, Max.
Max argues that the one thing a review must absolutely do is make the reader feel like they’re there in the hall where it happened. Apart from that, Max writes, it should also feature the critic’s own “observations, impressions, and gut feelings.” By the end of Max’s article, it becomes obvious that this is harder to do than it sounds. They compare the process of turning their scattered handwritten notes, taken during the concert, into sentences as feeling like “trying to reconstruct the kind of deconstructed cheesecake they might serve at The Modern restaurant.” What follows is a visually wonderful, poetic collage of some of these notes. I’ve never been to The Modern, but, after reading Max’s notes, I feel like I have.
Turning musical impressions into grammatical, intelligible sentences is like trying to take a shit after eating Domino’s. Sometimes, the only laxative that works is giving up completely and going to bed.
And I agree that part of the point of a review is to make the reader feel like they’re there. Hell, that’s been on Evenings with the Orchestra’s “About” page, under “Why subscribe?”, since the beginning: “To feel like you’re at a concert you didn’t go to.” But the more I write concert reviews, the harder it gets to find novel phrases to describe similar sounds and techniques, and the more impossible the task becomes.
Not only that, but with concerts that really affect me, I feel in my gut that it’s more important to describe why the concert was so meaningful to me than to describe what it felt like to be in the room. At concerts that really hit me, whatever was happening in the room—silence, coughs, ovations—pales in comparison to the fireworks, head rushes, and quickenings of the heart that happen within me. And that’s what I want to describe to get people to experience the music like I experienced it. To make them feel as much love as I felt. Or, as the case may be, how much hate.
But is this even possible to do?
Think of the some of concerts I’ve been to so far this year that I haven’t written about.
How could I possibly make you understand the dream world of electric spheres I seemed to inhabit when I closed my eyes, opened them only once or twice, and listened to Wendy Eisenberg improvise with Ryan Sawyer and Lester St. Louis at The Stone for a good 45 minutes in February?
How could I possibly relate the soldierly confidence that Wild Up ignited in me when the ensemble played Claude Vivier’s Zipangu at the 92nd Street Y in March?
And don’t even get me started on the understanding and ecstasy I felt last Tuesday after I heard Jan Lisiecki play a wrong note in the final chord of Mozart’s K. 378 violin sonata—the most classic mistake: thinking there are more notes in a Mozart chord than there actually are. We’ve all been there. What a delicious mistake! I’d hear it again if I could.
Maybe you’ll get something out of “dream world of electric spheres,” “soldierly confidence,” and “understanding and ecstasy,” but, at their best, these are charming phrases; at their worst, they’re futile and overwrought efforts to make you feel what I felt. They’re failed attempts at empathy.
The problem with the concert review is it tries to express, with words alone, an experience that is best expressed with no words. Even though I tried above, I can’t really express in words what was contained in my Bruckner gesture.
It’s like teaching children how to express that they like something, to take an example from one of Wittgenstein’s lectures on aesthetics.2 One of the first things a child likes or dislikes is food. And they express it with a grimace or a smile. If the child likes it, the parent smiles back and says, “Is that good?” And because the parent is smiling and saying “good,” the child says, “good,” and maybe adds a little nod if the parent nods. Now the child knows that “good” means good and that he can say “good” whenever he likes something. The caveat, Wittgenstein writes, is that “[t]he word is taught as a substitute for a facial expression or a gesture.” Imagine if a parent asked, “Is that good?”, without smiling? The child’s understanding of social cues would be all messed up, because there is no positive gesture to accompany the words. “One thing that is immensely important in teaching,” Wittgenstein writes, “is exaggerated gestures and facial expressions.”
The same goes for aesthetics, and the activity of judging something to be good or bad, or explaining what we like and dislike. Wittgenstein goes on:
We think we have to talk about aesthetic judgements like “This is beautiful,” but we find that if we have to talk about aesthetic judgements we don’t find these words at all, but a word used something like a gesture, accompanying a complicated activity.
Listening to music and judging it is a complicated activity. That’s why we reviewers get so constipated when we have to put that activity into words:
One of the most interesting points which the question of not being able to describe is connected with, [is that] the impression which a certain verse or bar of music gives you is indescribable. “I don’t know what it is… Look at this transition… What is i?…” I think you would say it gives you experiences which can’t be described…
I said before, with some people, me especially, the expression of an emotion in music, say, is a certain gesture. If I make a certain gesture… “It is quite obvious that you have certain kinesthetic feelings. It means to you certain kinesthetic feelings.” Which ones? How can you describe them? Except, perhaps, just by the gesture?
Suppose you said: “This phrase in music always makes me make one peculiar gesture.”
I feel seen.
If concert reviewers can’t communicate precisely what they saw and felt with words alone, why write a review at all? Should reviewers just make TikToks? Some probably already do, though I don’t know them. Should we take would-be readers out to coffee and gesticulate at them and spit in their faces about how much we hated a performance? Usually this is met with just as much consternation as the Bruckner gesture.
Ultimately, the concert review is an essay, in the strict definition you learn at the beginning of every book about essay writing and every biography of Montaigne, who invented the essay: An essay is an attempt. And most attempts fail.
Even gestures can fail, or else the Bruckner gesture would have given my friends an “Ah-ha, I know what you mean!” moment instead of a “You’re a freak, Ben” moment.
My favorite reviews to write are those during which I know I’m failing. Willingly, joyously failing. I’m writing too much. But I hated it so much, I can’t stop ranting. I loved it so much, I can’t stop proselytizing. Editors be damned. I’m fulfilling an expressive impulse in me. The combination of recording experience and judging that experience at the same time. The act of abstracting the past and trying to make it immediate and present for the reader. Grabbing the reader by the shoulders and shaking them and screaming, “Listen to me: This shit slaps!”
The critic is a personality. Depending on what decade you live in, the tendency will be for critics to either lean into that personality or obscure that personality. There is no such thing as an objective concert review, but mainstream publications seem to cling to the idea. I really don’t know what Zachary Woolfe is like from his writing in the New York Times. He’s hiding himself. But I have a pretty good idea of what George Bernard Shaw was like when he wrote, in 1891, after a performance of an opera by Julian Sturgis and Arthur Sullivan, “I have resolved to suppress my notice of Ivanhoe. I was upon my high horse last week when I wrote it.”
I, too, brother, have regretted writing something. I, too, have failed.
I long for a future when critics don’t hide themselves and pretend to succeed. Make a funny face. Come out, come out, wherever you are.
“Da capo” means “from the top” (literally, “from the head”). Musical scores are roadmaps, so when you see this at the end of the trio, it means you go back to the beginning of the scherzo and play it until you see the double bar, sometimes marked with a “fine” (“end”) to be extra clear.
All quotes are taken from Cyril Barrett, ed., Wittgenstein: Lectures and Conversations on Aesthetics, Psychology and Religious Belief (University of California Press, 1997).