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Music Lane It's all about the music, dude! Sit down, relax and listen to some tunes. |
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Music Lane It's all about the music, dude! Sit down, relax and listen to some tunes. |
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In Reply to: Are music critics to be ignored? posted by tinear on November 16, 2014 at 07:43:50:
Hi Tinear - pretty much everything Chris and rbolaw and amphissa have said in this thread is right on. There is a VERY big difference between critics and the judges of a competition or an orchestra audition. In fact, there is almost no similarity beyond the superficial one. An audition committee is always composed of the conductor and some musicians in the orchestra - everyone on the committee is a working, professional musician, looking to hire someone that they may very well be spending the rest of their careers working very closely with. In a competition, there is sometimes (but not always!) more distance between the judges and the competitors, however the judges will also always be either performers themselves, conductors, or in some cases top notch teachers.
Very often, critics have absolutely no professional experience performing, and much more often than you would think, have almost no experience playing an instrument at all. Especially nowadays, when so many newspapers do not even carry a music critic anymore. Even if they do, they often merely write puff pieces, saying everything is wonderful - in such cases, they are very little more than free marketing for the local orchestra. Very rarely do you find a critic anywhere who actually writes objectively, based on what he/she heard that night. In my orchestra's media market, there is only one who does out of several - the others are hardly worth reading at all, as far as judges of the performance. I certainly hope you can understand that there is simply no way that even the very best critics can possibly be as good a "judge" of the actual performance as a professional musician could be. It should be equally obvious, on the other hand, that they are much better writers than the musicians are. Rbolaw's posts are an excellent summary of what sort of knowledge the critic is expected to provide - their main function is not necessarily to actually judge the performers, even though they often do (and often quite ignorantly!), but to educate the readers/audience, so that they can become more knowledgeable about the music they heard, which will help them judge the performance for themselves.
In closing, think about this - almost never do the critics writing about say a major piano competition agree with the judges thereof.
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Follow Ups
- RE: Are music critics to be ignored? - learsfool 21:54:07 11/17/14 (0)
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