Meet the Press: Journalists on Music

Tuesday, June 7, 2005

More than sixty people joined PMP at the venerable and well-appointed Curtis Institute of Music to hear what music journalists had to say regarding contemporary music, its criticism and its audiences. The event featured Anne Midgette, Willard Jenkins, Anastasia Tsioulcas, Philadelphia’s own David Patrick Stearns, and Greg Sandow, who acted as moderator.

Sandow has worked extensively as both a classical and pop music critic and now focuses his work almost exclusively on the future of classical music both as an orchestral consultant and Juilliard faculty member. He’s also a composer. He began the morning boldly, dispensing with the “pop” in “pop culture” and declaring the death of classical music as we know it. More compelled by a wider category of art music, including streams of rock and pop, Sandow argued that it was time for classical music to evolve or perish, as some have put it.

The rest of the panel, as they introduced themselves and discussed their approach to classical-and-beyond music journalism, seemed to identify, if not with Sandow’s apocalyptic thesis, at least with his conviction that change is inevitable and adaptation a necessity. Jenkins, who has worked in a panoply of capacities within the world of jazz (arts administrator, producer, presenter, journalist, broadcaster, educator), now mainly operates via his Open Sky consulting platform. He described Wynton Marsalis and Jazz at Lincoln Center as “the 600-pound gorilla,” giving everyone a laugh, and focused his comments on the evolution of jazz away from the clubs and toward festival and concert settings. Jenkins regarded this change within the “aesthetic umbrella” of jazz not unhappily, citing a recent Village Voice article on the same topic and seeming to enjoy the irony of jazz’s departure from the clubs as classical groups clamor to get in.
           
Midgette, the first and only woman to regularly cover classical music for the New York Times, spoke eloquently on the oft-noted issue of classical music’s inaccessibility to young audiences, affirming her intuition that younger generations in fact do have a hunger for art music. She hypothesized that, in part, the perception of classical music as an undifferentiated, “monolithic entity” prevents young people from listening. Similarly, she pointed out that people, especially new listeners, who have idealistic expectations and then experience a barrier in listening to classical or new music are likely to think that the problem is them and give up on such music. New listeners may never suspect that the performance just wasn’t very good.

Tsioulcas was hired to Billboard Magazine as a classical music journalist but described herself as interested in the point “where art musics coincide.” She writes as much about world and jazz music, and especially their intersections, as she does about classical. She was optimistic about young audiences, the growing numbers of listeners with cross-cultural perspectives, and claimed that one of the biggest challenges of her work lies in understanding how best to provide context for an artist or music.

Stearns, the classical music columnist at the Philadelphia Inquirer, was also optimistic about the musical future, asserting simply that, “It’s all going to somehow work out.” He spoke positively regarding the decentralization of music communities, as well as the intriguing friction inherent to the very effort of writing about music. He reflected on the pitfalls of contemporary composition, how people writing new music can take up the wealth of musical vocabularies that have already been developed, and how the very variety of compositional styles and purposes offer challenges to a listener – how, for examples, does a listener differentiate between music meant as an “emotional sounding board” from music based on other, perhaps cerebral or experimental aims?