Daniel Morriss
Philip Ratliff
Writing About Music
5th of March 2013
Musical Criticism
Musical criticism
plays many critical roles in today’s society, not only providing artists with
constructive criticism for their works, but also delivering proper reviews and
promotions of said artists to the general public who then listen to or avoids his/her
music. In his novel, Music Criticism, Carl
Aschenbrenner talks of the complex dilemma of music critics, who have to lie in
the gray area between letting artists critique their own works with their own
individual artistic standards, as well as the other extreme of letting
historians and nitpickers infinitely compare the work with previous works of
similar natures and time periods, destroying and bastardizing any view of the
work as novel or innovative.
Aschenbrenner asks
“why [the musician’s] works must be seen or heard only through the filter of
concepts whose provenance may lie far afield from them,” meaning that an
individual’s work, if it be truly original, holds its own standards and means
of judgment, and that it is unfair to judge one man’s original creation by the
standards of another. For, if so judged, the piece’s “individuality is
compromised or at least not respected.” The author also states that, while one
must be respectful of the originality of a work, a critic cannot allow an
artist to establish his own criteria upon which the piece must be judged, for
then all art would be good art, as it would be judged by its creator.
There must instead
be objective, unbiased standards by which critics must judge all pieces;
however, would that truly be fair to the artists, who are themselves
individuals with their own original tastes and feelings? Musical criticism is
inherently a largely subjective task which depends upon the critic.
No comments:
Post a Comment