Katy Hamilton

This week, I did some more terrifying than… hang on, thinking of terrifying things I’ve done before… My worst job interview? Yup. Running off a mountain attached to a parachute? Yup, definitely more terrifying than that. A PhD viva? Yes. More terrifying than that too. What was this thing, then, that had me tied in knots with anxiety? It was the sending of an email. And attached to the email was a short word document outlining my thoughts on 5 new CDs I’d been asked to review for Radio 3.

What is it about the thought of writing a review that had me so worked up? In light of my having turned into a near emotional wreck by the time I pressed ‘Send’, I thought it worth some investigation.

Music critics have had a pretty awful year, all things considered. Those of you who have been visiting these pages for a while will remember that the Post That Began It All was written as a response to the heinous treatment of Tara Erraught by four major newspaper critics, following her first night in Der Rosenkavalier at Glyndebourne last June. This and several subsequent reviews prompted a major outcry from performers, writers and commentators, which carried on reverberating for several months. There was even a “Battle of Ideas” debate about what critics are actually for. And we’re all familiar with the usual put-downs aimed at badly-judged reviews: “Never pay any attention to what critics say. Remember, a statue has never been set up in honor of a critic!” (sorry, Sibelius, but actually it has); they’re just jealous; it’s not like they could do it… and so on.

Yes, reviewers are not looked upon too kindly. But that wasn’t quite it. Book reviewing makes me not at all nervous. Perhaps this is because authors of academic books are used to having to fight their corner and engage in regular debate and justifications of their work?

No, it turns out it’s much more fundamental a thing than that. The book authors are writing: the reviewer is writing. Pen and ink on both sides. That is an even discussion, and often there is room for subsequent back-and-forth if required.

‘492. Hand. Writing. 2012’ © Pablo Luis González-Rueda

But this is not the case with musical performance. As Martin Mull famously said, “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.” And this is nowhere more apparent than in written reviews. If you are preparing a critique of a concert, working on the assumption that your readers weren’t there, you not only have to recreate the sense of the hall, the logic of the programme, the context of the pieces, the response of the audience… you then have to try to get across what it sounded like in words. The two media are fundamentally incompatible, and unless you are a top-notch poet, you are most likely going to fall back on certain vocabulary – plangent, full-blooded, floating, ethereal, coruscating, and so on – to try to conjure music that your readers cannot hear. That’s basically impossible. It relies upon linguistic analogues that are clumsy or overused at worst, blurry in their meaning at best.

If that isn’t insurmountable enough, there are a raft of other complications too. What do you do if you know the artist(s)? As an examiner of university recitals, I would be able to declare an interest and avoid assessing a friend. Do reviewers get to do this? I don’t know the answer, but I rather suspect that they have little choice in the matter (spouses, partners and family members aside), since they are likely to meet a great many performers in other related journalistic tasks. How do you know when you ‘know’ enough to review something? If you are not yourself a baroque oboist, how do you decide when you think you can sensibly talk about that one player, in that one piece, in that one concert of perhaps three concerts you have to review in the next week? Should you too, in fact be taking baroque oboe lessons before you dare put pen to paper?

And there are problems, too, which the critics foist upon themselves. Like being unnecessarily aggressive, or using witty bon mots to destroy someone’s performance, reputation, or career. Critics are like conductors. They make no sound at all, no actual music, yet their voices can be among the loudest. And that is often not terribly helpful.

And that, I think, is where my fear comes from. How to express in words something which can only be hinted at; to know enough to feel qualified to offer an opinion (of course, we all critique the things and people around us all the time, but seldom label ourselves ‘critics’ as a result); to find a way of couching my remarks in a way that is fair, thoughtful, kind and humble. I am not the one who laboured for hours to create 72 minutes of recorded music. To forget that is to fail, instantly. And I’m not sure I’d want to attempt to review something my audience couldn’t hear – at least in a broadcast, excerpts can give listeners a hint, allow them to judge for themselves. Like every good conversation, a review should offer room for equal interaction and debate. I don’t expect everyone to agree with me, and I’d be rather disappointed if they did. What is important to me is to give them the sense, as far as possible, that for all the time I have put into listening, researching, note-making, re-listening, and so on, I am just a person with a particular set of experiences, and a particular body of knowledge, and I would like to share what I think about the performances in front of me. If you wish to disagree, with me or the performance, that is your right as a free-thinking individual, and your prerogative as an interested listener. Everyone’s a critic.