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Music criticism

The Oxford Companion to Music defines music criticism as "the intellectual activity of formulating judgments on the value and degree of excellence of individual works of music, or whole groups or genres".[1] In this sense, it is a branch of musical aesthetics.

This article is about classical music criticism. For the contemporary usage of the term, see music journalism.

With the concurrent expansion of interest in music and information media since the turn of the 20th century, the term has come to acquire the conventional meaning of journalistic reporting on musical performances.[1]

History[edit]

To end of 18th century[edit]

Critical references to music (often deprecating performers or styles) can be found in early literature, including, for example, in Plato's Laws and in the writings of medieval music theorists.


According to Richard Taruskin, the active concert life of late 18th-century London meant that "the role and the function of arts criticism as we know it today were the creations of the English public."[5] However, the first magazines specifically devoted to music criticism seem to have developed in Germany, for example, Georg Philipp Telemann's Der getreue Music-Meister (1728), which included publications of new compositions, and Der kritische Musikus which appeared in Hamburg between 1737 and 1740.[6] In France in the 1750s, the Querelle des Bouffons (the dispute between supporters of French and Italian opera styles as represented by Jean-Philippe Rameau and Jean-Baptiste Lully respectively) generated essays from Jean-Jacques Rousseau and others, including Denis Diderot's Rameau's Nephew (1761).[7]


The English composer Charles Avison (1709–1770) published the first work on musical criticism in the English language – an Essay on Musical Expression published in 1752.[1] In it, Avison claims that since the time of Palestrina and Raphael, music had improved in status whilst pictorial art had declined.[8] However, he believes that George Frideric Handel is too much concerned with naturalistic imitation than with expression,[9] and criticises the habit, in Italian operas, of

List of chief music critics

for reporting on classical and popular music in the media

Music journalism

Category: Music critics

Avison, Charles (1752). Essay on Musical Expression. London. from IMSLP.

Downloadable

Bujic, Bojan (n.d.) "Criticism of Music" in The Oxford Companion to Music, , accessed 1 January 2013.

Oxford Music Online

Charlton, David (2003). "Hoffmann as a Writer on Music", in , 1–22).

Hoffmann (2003

Conway, David (2012). Jewry in Music: Entry to the Profession from the Enlightenment to Richard Wagner. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  978-1-107-01538-8.

ISBN

Davison, J.W., ed. Henry Davison (1912). From Mendelssohn to Wagner: Memoirs of J. W. Davison. London: William Reeves.

Dean, Winton (1980). "Criticism", in (ed. Stanley Sadie) vol. 5, 36–50. London: Macmillan ISBN 0-333-23111-2.

New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians

Graf, Max (1948). Composer and Critic: 200 Years of Musical Criticism. London: Chapman & Hall.

Hoffmann, E. T. A., ed. David Charlton (2003).E. T. A. Hoffmann's Musical Writings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.  0 521 23520 0.

ISBN

Taruskin, Richard (2010). Music in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, Oxford: Oxford University Press  978-0-19-538482-6.

ISBN

Urban, Sylvanus, ed. (1843). "Deaths", in The Gentleman's Magazine. London: William Pickering; John Bowyer Nichols and Son.

Weber, William (2001). "From Miscellany to Homogeneity in Concert Programming", in Poetics 29, 127–34.

Weber, William (2003). "Consequences of Canon: The Institutionalization of Enmity between Contemporary and Classical Music", Common Knowledge 9/2, 78–99.

(September 2019). "In Memory of the Critic's Trade". DePauw University. Archived from the original on 23 September 2020.

Page, Tim

(20 May 1979). "The Shop Talk of Critics". The New York Times.

Schonberg, Harold C.