Objectivity "Я" Us
An on-line commenter on one of my recent reviews has some sage advice:
Spare us your subjective judgements and report on the concert. How were the performances?
posted by Joshua Kosman @ 6:44 PM
6 comments
On a Pacific Aisle
Notes from the left coast by the classical music critic of the San Francisco Chronicle
6 Comments:
Uh...wtf?
Virgil Thomson supposedly said that a newspaper critic was a reporter first and a dispenser of opinion second. His rule of thumb was: Tell your readers what happened; if you have any column space left after that, tell them what you thought of it. However, when we read Thomson, we discover that he did not always practice what he preached, for the simple reason that there is no such thing as objective perception. One thing experience has taught me is that sometimes it is necessary to spend a few "column inches" on setting context before getting down to what happened. The reader can then appreciate the writer's subjectivity in accounting for what happened and will (hopefully) be better informed.
Well, the performance started at 8:03pm, 3mn behind schedule, and lasted 44mn until the first intermission. There were 84 musicians on stage, whereas the score calls for between 80 and 90. The quorum was still reached at the end of the performance, with the proper ratio of soloists, orchestra members and conductors, which can only means one thing: it was very good.
..and don't forget to mention what the soloist was wearing.
My earlier attempt at commenting on the second comment did not take, so here we go again: Thomson got it backward. I read critics exactly because I want to read strongly held and, I hope, informed opinions. Yeah, if the pianist doesn't show up or the concertmaster falls on his fiddle, I want to know about it, but mostly I want critics to, you know, exercise critical judgment. I'm all WTF over the commenter Joshua quotes because even without knowing which review inspired that comment, I bet he said plenty about how the performances were.
Perhaps a retort would have been, 'spare us your subjective judgements and leave the blogosphere'.
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