Write right?
Last Tuesday, I was delighted to be in attendance at the event Music into Words organised by Cross-Eyed Pianist blogger, Frances Wilson. The event was intended to give participants an opportunity to discuss writing about music in all its forms, and a panel of authors had the opportunity to talk briefly about their own work – blogs, newspaper pieces, novels, and so on – before we began knocking questions and ideas around the room. It was a thought-provoking couple of hours, and I left with a head full of questions, thoughts, ideas… and a little clutch of floating preconceptions and prejudices about writers, readers, and the relationship between the two.
Let’s do a little time-travelling, for a moment. In 1815, if someone went to a concert of what we would now call classical music, they would probably have been rather well-off, possibly nobility, or perhaps a professional musician. They would have heard a miscellaneous programme of musical works in an evening which might well have been part of a subscription series. A few days (or weeks) later, if they were terribly keen, they might have looked up the event in the latest feuilleton or journal, which would probably contain a short article, reporting the details of the event and something about the quality of the compositions performed. The author of this piece might well have been a gentleman – a ‘gentleman scholar’, who had the time and money to be interested in doing such things – or a professional writer, who would have been paid for his contribution. The effort of these writers would have been accorded some authority for having had their work printed in these publications.
By 1915, the concert would have been open to many more people, probably as a one-off event rather than a subscription. The ticket prices would have been more varied to broaden the demographic of attendees (and the venue would almost certainly have been bigger, and perhaps now purpose-built). The concert might once again have consisted of miscellaneous music works to keep interest and entertain the crowd. A few days (or weeks) later, the audience members might find a mention of the event in a newspaper or even a specialist music publication, which would have reported the details of the event and something about the quality of the performance… and perhaps also something about the compositions, depending on how new they were. The author of this piece would almost certainly have been a professional writer and/or specialist music critic/researcher, and their efforts would have been accorded some authority for that reason.
By 2015, the landscape was further radically transformed. Access to events, range of events, programming tactics… all these things have changed too. But if you want to find out about the concert afterwards, you can look to a newspaper, a music magazine, an online newspaper or magazine, a review site such as Bachtrack, or to the blogs of the people who attended (or even performed in it) to get a more personal perspective.
Words into Music featured writers who belong to pretty much all of these categories. Some would not have described themselves as musically trained to a high level – some baulked at the idea of being grouped with ‘academics’ or the kind of (as they perceived it) elitist journalists who have dominated the business for so long. The internet age allows everyone to have a voice, to have a valid opinion, to discuss an event as they wish.
Up to this point in the discussion, I’m doing fine. But here comes the sticky bit.
If you sit at home writing your blog on concerts you have recently attended (and we’ll keep it to this kind of writing for now), you are doing so for no money. You are writing for the love of it. No one is paying you to spend your time writing criticism – not a fee in sight. Furthermore, you are making a hefty expenditure on tickets to attend the various concerts, operas, ballets and so on that you would like to go to. Even if you are sometimes getting press tickets, you’re still investing the time, and time is money. So you have to have the kind of lifestyle, and be in the financial position, where you can afford to give that much of your time and money on a weekly basis to attending concerts and writing about music. I refer you 1815. The model of what we would have called the ‘gentleman scholar’ is not dead, even if it has transformed radically. Could you manage this if you were working every possible hour you could to support yourself, or stay on top of your workload? Or if you didn’t have someone, and/or some cash, to cover childcare? Does this not imply a certain level of privilege, from a group (myself included) which frequently claims to be averse to privilege as a marker and open to diversity and democracy in all artistic pursuits?
Then there are questions of professional parallels. At a newspaper, you have a brief, specific assignments, word limits and an editor. As a blogger you have none of those things. At a newspaper you also had to get hired: someone will have checked your level of knowledge, your ability to spell and punctuate, and so on. To blog, no such hoop-jumping is required. None of this is a problem if you are interested in a non-specialist approach, and aren’t bothered by unbalanced articles or the occasional typo. But as a blogger, you are not automatically a professional (often quite literally not a professional, since no one’s paying you) and you do not hold yourself to the same standards or regulations as a professional writer would, because you don’t have to.
So why are you writing? And who are you writing for? If it’s just for yourself, then go right ahead. If you want other people to read the site, what kind of people are you hoping will find it? Have you checked your facts and dates for them? Have you re-read the thing out loud to make sure it makes sense? If you are claiming to capture the experience of being in the room with the music, is that really what you’ve done, or have you just emptied a bucket of superlatives all over your prose so that, far from making this a more approachable text for a non-specialist, you are constantly telling us how amazing it all was, what a genius the composer was, what a masterpiece the work was…? Can you be self-critical? Can you – and you can see where this is going, and why I firmly acknowledge my own prejudices here – write as if you were a professional, to use every available trick in the writing trade to get your point across?
You don’t have to, of course. Because that’s not what blogging is about – or at least, it doesn’t have to be. Yet we are all still battling, I think, with how the many different kinds of writing outlets now available to us might work together. As soon as you stand up to be counted, whether it’s at a panel discussion or in an online forum, you will be read as an authority and a representative. That’s seldom fair, but we can’t all read everyone’s blogs, so mental shorthand creeps in, and we make assumptions. I guess the point of this piece is, simply, that we should all be aware of this, if we want to write about music, or indeed anything else. Know thyself, and be as curious about your own preconceptions and ideas as you are about all those wonderful performances that you want to hear – at least, that would be my advice. But hey, I’m just a blogger… I speak without authority… and you are well within your rights to ignore everything you have just read.
