Word: critics
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1940-1949
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...many times have I gone home a defeated man." The speaker was Olin Downes, the occasion was the final discussion session of last week's "Symposium on Music Criticism," and the speech was an extemporaneous one in answer to some statements made earlier in the day by Columbia's Professor Paul H. Lang. The New York Times' music critic sometimes was "defeated," he explained, because he felt he had left something important out of a review, or perhaps and stated an objection too strongly, or failed to emphasize some idea. Put this together with a later statement, in which Downes...
Many different Symposium speeches, starting from widely diverging points, ended at this same central problem: the influence of New York's critics on the nation's music box-offices, and consequently on the lives of musicians. One suggested solution--musicians should be amateurs, and earn their bread by other means. Another--to decentralize American music in various ways, instituting more purely local artists, thereby cutting some tentacles off the New York critic-octopus. There were also countless proposals for improved criticism, for broadened criticism, for more criticism, and for less criticism...
Doubtless, some of these proposals will help. But unless the critic takes a more constructive view than Downes expresses in his you-can't keep-a-good-musician-down theory, neither technical training for him nor decentralization for music will keep him from hurting artists. And unless the public realizes that the critic, for from being a God of Sound, frequently goes home a "defeated man," the true defeat will continue to be rung up on the side of music and the musician...
Completing the roster are literary critic Alfred Kazin, New York Herald Tribune music critic Virgil Thomson '22, J.J. Sweeney, former director of the New York Museum of Modern Art, and public opinion expert Lyman Bryson of Columbia University and the Columbia Broadcasting system...
...second level, purely practical problems of music criticism were discussed. Miss Olga Samaroff, pianist, educator, and former music critic of the New York Post, hit the most basic of these when she pointed out the importance of critics in making or breaking artists...