Page 17 - Weiss, Jernej, ur./ed. 2024. Glasbena kritika – nekoč in danes ▪︎ Music Criticism – Yesterday and Today. Koper/Ljubljana: Založba Univerze na Primorskem in Festival Ljubljana. Studia musicologica Labacensia, 7
P. 17
music criticism – yesterday and today
ation of a critical contribution. In this regard, the role of the media appears
to be crucial.
Some of the quandaries faced by music criticism today are addressed
by the 15 articles in this, the seventh edition of the collection Studia musico-
logica Labacensia. Among them it is worth mentioning the keynote article
by one of today’s most prominent critics, the music writer Alex Ross, who is
the music critic of The New Yorker and the author of the bestseller The Rest
is Noise, which has been translated into more than 20 languages, including
Slovene. His article draws on his wealth of experience as a music critic in
the USA and sheds light on the problem of the near nonexistence of criti-
cal discourse, a phenomenon that has been affecting the USA for some time
now. The second keynote article is contributed by Professor Susanne Kogler
of the Institute of Musicology at the University of Graz and uses historical
examples to shed light on the socio-political dimensions of art music criti-
cism in the past and present and illustrate the kind of role that music criti-
cism could develop in the future.
Articles by Viennese colleagues Prof. Hartmut Krones and Bianca
Schumann shed light on different aspects of the rich panorama of music
criticism in the former Habsburg capital. The former focuses attention on
composer Hugo Wolf’s activity as a music critic in the “combative” Vien-
nese daily press of the 1880s, where an all-out war between the advocates
of absolute music and those who favoured the newer programmatic orien-
tation was waged in the pages of the capital’s newspapers. Dr Schumann’s
article focuses on the reception afforded to the religiosity of Franz Liszt by
Viennese music critics in the second half of the nineteenth century. Critical
debate at that time did not only revolve around composers and their aesthet-
ic preferences but gave increasing importance to other aspects, above all na-
tional identity and religious belief, which in many ways came to define the
shape of critical discourse. Similar themes are addressed in the articles by
Prof. Helmut Loos and Prof. Stefan Keym, respectively the past and present
heads of the Institute of Musicology at the University of Leipzig. The for-
mer presents in greater detail the already mentioned dispute among music
critics that took place in the pages of newspapers in the second half of the
nineteenth century. As Prof. Loos demonstrates, the fundamentally oppos-
ing views of these critics derived on the one hand from the Judaeo-Chris-
tian tradition and, on the other, from the modern atheist movement. The
dispute had a particularly significant impact in Leipzig, which was then the
capital of German music publishing and of music journalism both in Ger-
17
ation of a critical contribution. In this regard, the role of the media appears
to be crucial.
Some of the quandaries faced by music criticism today are addressed
by the 15 articles in this, the seventh edition of the collection Studia musico-
logica Labacensia. Among them it is worth mentioning the keynote article
by one of today’s most prominent critics, the music writer Alex Ross, who is
the music critic of The New Yorker and the author of the bestseller The Rest
is Noise, which has been translated into more than 20 languages, including
Slovene. His article draws on his wealth of experience as a music critic in
the USA and sheds light on the problem of the near nonexistence of criti-
cal discourse, a phenomenon that has been affecting the USA for some time
now. The second keynote article is contributed by Professor Susanne Kogler
of the Institute of Musicology at the University of Graz and uses historical
examples to shed light on the socio-political dimensions of art music criti-
cism in the past and present and illustrate the kind of role that music criti-
cism could develop in the future.
Articles by Viennese colleagues Prof. Hartmut Krones and Bianca
Schumann shed light on different aspects of the rich panorama of music
criticism in the former Habsburg capital. The former focuses attention on
composer Hugo Wolf’s activity as a music critic in the “combative” Vien-
nese daily press of the 1880s, where an all-out war between the advocates
of absolute music and those who favoured the newer programmatic orien-
tation was waged in the pages of the capital’s newspapers. Dr Schumann’s
article focuses on the reception afforded to the religiosity of Franz Liszt by
Viennese music critics in the second half of the nineteenth century. Critical
debate at that time did not only revolve around composers and their aesthet-
ic preferences but gave increasing importance to other aspects, above all na-
tional identity and religious belief, which in many ways came to define the
shape of critical discourse. Similar themes are addressed in the articles by
Prof. Helmut Loos and Prof. Stefan Keym, respectively the past and present
heads of the Institute of Musicology at the University of Leipzig. The for-
mer presents in greater detail the already mentioned dispute among music
critics that took place in the pages of newspapers in the second half of the
nineteenth century. As Prof. Loos demonstrates, the fundamentally oppos-
ing views of these critics derived on the one hand from the Judaeo-Chris-
tian tradition and, on the other, from the modern atheist movement. The
dispute had a particularly significant impact in Leipzig, which was then the
capital of German music publishing and of music journalism both in Ger-
17
