Perceiving critics

James writes an interesting summary of how critics are perceived by orchestras and others.  The conversation drifted to the topic of whether or not arts bloggers are legitimate outlets and worth the care and feeding given to other writers.   As James summarizes, if you aren’t Alex Ross or affiliated with a newspaper you lack the requisite skills necessary to legitimately write about and comment on classical performance.

As a blogger, I will confess, there are an abundance of classical music related blogs that do not try and present themselves as places for forums for legitimate classical music coverage.  In fact, I think most classical music blogs fall into this category.  I also admit arts blogs are evolving.  Heck, when I started this site almost a year ago, I never imagined that it would become a second job for me – an unpaid job at that.   However, there are blogs which try to do a little bit more than throw out more than just a few sentences here or there on a subject.  I would like to think that this blog falls into the later category.

I am proud of the team contributing to this blog.  James, Philippa, Ozni, Matt, and myself try hard to present the music we love in ways that are comprehensive and readable.  In general, we provide more coverage and more analysis than most newspapers.  Posts often exceed 1000 words and they cover topics avoided by newspapers.  I am presently working on a post discussing only the hammer blows in Mahler’s Symphony No.6 and the ordering of the inner movements.  Would a newspaper ever devote even a few hundred words to such an esoteric topic?

The narrow view of arts coverage discussed by James effectively disregards any and all outlets that are not in some way connected to an ink and paper publication.  Bernard Jacobsen’s reviews for Music Web International only appear online.  The San Francisco Classical Voice only appears in an online format.  Alan Rich now appears mostly online.  In each case, Bernard’s reviews, Rich’s observations and the San Francisco Classical Voice are superior sites to newspaper arts blogs and even The Rest Is Noise.  Ross’ blog is always entertaining.  Newspaper blogs are too.  But, at the end of the day these blogs are teasers for the print publications they are associated with.

Ross and newspaper bloggers are legitimate because of who they work for, not necessarily because of what is written on the blog.  As the ax continues to fall on classical critics all over the country, their freelance replacements have less knowledge about the subject they are writing about.  With the exception of Ross, fewer and fewer classical music writers in the United States understand the subject the music they are writing about.  Is a rock and roll critic by trade, who covers classical music out of necessity, but is affiliated with a newspaper, better than the writers on this blog?

Ultimately, the readers of this site will be the judge.  So long as the site traffic remains strong I believe we are doing our job.