Musicians of all stripes often lack ethical boundaries. Software publishers know all about that, so music-related software is typically locked down with anti-piracy protections so stringent that should they be applied to standard productivity software you would hear the howling from here to Abu Dhabi. But when you’re dealing with a rapaciously selfish, greedy, and dishonest client base, you have little choice but to protect yourself as best you can. Music software has got to be the last remaining holdout for the dire dongle, a hardware key that you have to plug into your computer for a particular program to run. Such dongles are so necessary that one, the iLok, has become downright ubiquitous as a way of protecting products.
Yes, I know: it’s a tough business and incomes often run from slender to non-existent. But poverty has never been a legal excuse for criminality, nor does it justify the clear ethical violation of taking something that has not been freely offered. Pirating commercial software is a crime, pure and simple. It’s stealing.
But while software piracy is one of the more spectacular manifestations of the gaping hole in the ethical lives of musicians, other and more subtle instances are to my mind no less troubling. None bothers me more than a trend I see happening in the burgeoning business of online concert reviewing.
With metropolitan daily newspapers going belly up and the landscape constantly shifting over a magma of uncertainty, these days the last and best hope for music criticism to survive must reside in blog collectives, those online review magazines that flourish in a number of cities with vibrant music scenes. The advantages are obvious: reviews can appear quickly, distribution is brain-dead simple, and overhead is bound to run a fraction of the cost of maintaining a music column in a major daily paper.
But that also means that those online review magazines can’t afford to pay hefty full-time salaries in the hope of attracting a highly-trained and deeply experienced critic of the Harold Schoenberg stripe. Such writers are either deeply screwed into whatever few publications can still afford to keep them (think Alex Ross at the New Yorker or Anthony Tommasini at the New York Times), or else they have gone into retirement, either gracefully or not as the case may be. Unless an online magazine can harvest the occasional late bouquet from a Grand Old Newspaper Critic, those blog-on-steroids affairs will have to make do with the folks they can get, applying minimal editing (if at all), and gambling that they can generate enough advertising to pay the web-hosting bill and an administrative salary or two.
Which means inexperienced writers. Which means, for the most part, raw young musicians who are just starting out in the field and who are willing to work for peanuts or less.
Which means dire and unreconcilable conflicts of interest. No active musician has any business writing reviews. To do so is to sink headfirst into a deep ethical quagmire, as one’s own colleagues, friends, students, and even teachers become targets of one’s public commentary. In some cases, the offense may be compounded logarithmically if a young tyro comments on the work of a seasoned professional. In fact, seeing precisely such a review set me off on this particular topic; a current student at a music school wrote a review about a performance of one of that school’s faculty members. There is no gray area here, no blurring of ethical boundaries. This is a monstrous wrong, a violation of even the most rudimentary professional ethics.
I look at one popular San Francisco-based review magazine/blog and come across reviews by young folks who are either currently students, or have been students quite recently. But they’re blithely marching into San Francisco Symphony concerts—an orchestra bound to include people who may be their teachers or the teachers of their teachers—and writing reviews.
Of course young musicians are entitled to their opinions and their observations. But not in a published (however we define that) public forum. But not for a quasi-permanent record.
Personally I would rather see a complete end to music criticism in the Bay Area than to see this trend continue. It is more than distressing, more than troubling. It is an utter failure to comprehend even the most basic level of appropriate behavior in a musical community.
I wrote San Francisco Classical Music Examiner for about a year or so. In that time I recognized that concert reviews were absolutely out of the question for me, given that I am a working musician, a teacher, and a friend or colleague of many of the Bay Area’s leading musicians. But I am neither a beginner nor a recent student; I’m on the cusp of Tribal Elder status. And if I shrink at the idea of writing public commentary about my colleagues, how can a kid barely past apprenticeship even contemplate such a thing? Do these kids have any idea of the potential damage they’re doing to their own careers? Those very people they’re writing up may well be their employers in the future. And memories are long in our community. Very long.
But of course they don’t think about any of that. It’s a job, perhaps a few paltry dollars, and they get their name in print. In the ethics-be-damned-this-is-war mindset that characterizes so many of today’s young musicians, that’s all that matters.