Page 263 - 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
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what is happening to music criticism?
The reasons for such a development are complex and rooted in pro-
found social changes, the appearance of new media and, not least, the ex-
cessive adaptability of critics. The prevailing opinion is that it is the result of
an interaction of various social phenomena. The start of this development
can be placed in the 1960s, at the time of the pop culture revolution and the
gradual affirmation of pop culture as the social and cultural mainstream.
This revolution began to blur the boundaries between “high” and “low”,
not only in the arts but also, gradually, in every other segment and level of
the life of society. At one time this was a very usual classification of artis-
tic genres. The French music critic Armand Machabey, for example, divid-
ed music into two major families: higher genres, consisting of instrumental
and vocal works, opera and ballet; and secondary genres, consisting of mu-
sic hall and cabaret shows, together with their substitutes: film, radio, etc. 10
Today the boundaries have disappeared completely, while the arts continue
to diminish in importance as part of mainstream culture and are becom-
ing increasingly marginal. The situation is vividly described by the German
music critic Ulrich Schreiber:
The European musical tradition and, with it, music criticism has ‘gone
to the dogs’ and is on a sinking ship. And the iceberg that sank this
ship was the pop culture revolution of 1968, reinforced by the events of
1989, by the turning point, by the great capitalisation, in other words the
global victory of capitalism.11
Arts criticism may be said to have had its heyday in the print media
era. With the advent of television and, later and more significantly, the in-
ternet, print media began to lose importance. Western civilisation is al-
ready predominantly visually oriented, something that even in the golden
age of print media began to be exploited by tabloids with short sensational-
ist articles and an abundance of visual material. In the digital age, this ap-
proach has gained further momentum. The cultural pages of many news-
papers, where they have survived at all, are becoming increasingly similar
to picture books, to which the articles are then adapted. A general increase
in “resistance to reading,” in particular resistance to reading in-depth con-
tent, may be observed, with the result that, as Alex Ross puts it, “[c]riticism
10 Cristina Şuteu, “Is there a theory of musical criticism?” ResearchGate, January 2014,
113, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/348175583_IS_THERE_A_THEO-
RY_OF_MUSICAL_CRITICISM.
11 Katja Lückert, “Wozu noch Musikkritik?” Deutschlandfunk, Februar 11, 2006,
https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/wozu-noch-musikkritik-100.html.
263
The reasons for such a development are complex and rooted in pro-
found social changes, the appearance of new media and, not least, the ex-
cessive adaptability of critics. The prevailing opinion is that it is the result of
an interaction of various social phenomena. The start of this development
can be placed in the 1960s, at the time of the pop culture revolution and the
gradual affirmation of pop culture as the social and cultural mainstream.
This revolution began to blur the boundaries between “high” and “low”,
not only in the arts but also, gradually, in every other segment and level of
the life of society. At one time this was a very usual classification of artis-
tic genres. The French music critic Armand Machabey, for example, divid-
ed music into two major families: higher genres, consisting of instrumental
and vocal works, opera and ballet; and secondary genres, consisting of mu-
sic hall and cabaret shows, together with their substitutes: film, radio, etc. 10
Today the boundaries have disappeared completely, while the arts continue
to diminish in importance as part of mainstream culture and are becom-
ing increasingly marginal. The situation is vividly described by the German
music critic Ulrich Schreiber:
The European musical tradition and, with it, music criticism has ‘gone
to the dogs’ and is on a sinking ship. And the iceberg that sank this
ship was the pop culture revolution of 1968, reinforced by the events of
1989, by the turning point, by the great capitalisation, in other words the
global victory of capitalism.11
Arts criticism may be said to have had its heyday in the print media
era. With the advent of television and, later and more significantly, the in-
ternet, print media began to lose importance. Western civilisation is al-
ready predominantly visually oriented, something that even in the golden
age of print media began to be exploited by tabloids with short sensational-
ist articles and an abundance of visual material. In the digital age, this ap-
proach has gained further momentum. The cultural pages of many news-
papers, where they have survived at all, are becoming increasingly similar
to picture books, to which the articles are then adapted. A general increase
in “resistance to reading,” in particular resistance to reading in-depth con-
tent, may be observed, with the result that, as Alex Ross puts it, “[c]riticism
10 Cristina Şuteu, “Is there a theory of musical criticism?” ResearchGate, January 2014,
113, https://www.researchgate.net/publication/348175583_IS_THERE_A_THEO-
RY_OF_MUSICAL_CRITICISM.
11 Katja Lückert, “Wozu noch Musikkritik?” Deutschlandfunk, Februar 11, 2006,
https://www.deutschlandfunk.de/wozu-noch-musikkritik-100.html.
263
