The opening scene of the 1950 backstage movie All About Eve sports one of the most deliciously snide and snooty voice-overs in film history. George Saunders curls his metaphorical lip, raises his metaphorical pinky, and goes at it with supercilious hauteur. I paraphrase: Should it be that you never read newspapers nor attend plays, and thus know nothing of the world in which you live, it might be necessary to introduce myself. My name is Addison DeWitt. In the theater I toil not, neither do I spin. I am a critic and commentator.
Then comes the zinger: I am indispensable to the theater. I’m quoting from faded memory, but I’m certain I got that right. I am indispensable. There is no tone waspish enough to mask that line’s elemental defensiveness. Addison DeWitt is dispensable as all hell and he knows it. But he resists. How he resists. He insinuates himself into theatrical society with all the subtlety of a teen bimbo lusting for membership in her school’s in-crowd. He has half-convinced himself that he is the sun around whom the Broadway planets revolve, although he is actually a dweller of the Oort Cloud, that source of proto-comets out in the deep dark beyond Pluto. At a party in diva Margot Channing’s home, DeWitt perches himself delicately on a stair step and muses eloquently how we are a breed apart, we theater people. The scene bristles with irony, given that DeWitt is surrounded by real, honest-to-Gosh theater people. Each responds with all due gravitas and apparent thoughtfulness, but body language tells a different story: I’m humoring this pompous twit so I don’t wind up eviscerated in tomorrow’s Variety. Addison DeWitt: ever the outsider, ever the reluctantly invited, ever the obstacle to be overcome or avoided. But never one of them. And never indispensable.
Music critics must function as bridesmaids rather than brides. The minute they start doing it themselves, they must cease from reviewing others who have been doing it all along. Certain individuals in the past managed to maintain a footing in the musical profession nonetheless; I’m thinking here primarily of Virgil Thomson, who hoped that his perch at the New York Herald might energize audience interest in his lackluster compositions, or Alfred Frankenstein, who managed to teeter between posts as the lead critic for the San Francisco Chronicle while simultaneously serving as program annotator for the San Francisco Symphony. It might have been Frankenstein’s example that led Harold C. Schoenberg to ban all critics at the New York Times from writing program notes.
Which makes perfect sense. Program annotators are fair game for reviewers. I have received my fair share of notices regarding my program notes, my record liner notes, and my pre-concert lectures. I’m on the other side of the fence from the reviewers, part of the show itself. At least after a fashion. The show will go on just fine without me, so I’m anything but indispensable, but I sit at the musicians’ table and not the audience’s.
Music criticism as a living-wage profession is in terminal decline. I doubt it can survive the twin blows of shrinking audiences and the demise of print news. To be sure there are more reviews available to your average reader right now than ever before in history, thanks to Internet largesse. But quantity isn’t quality, and those legions of quick-shot bloggers that have so crowded the digital spaces are rarely worth reading or considering. Editing would appear to have been banished from all but the most die-hard publications. Meticulously crafted prose has been swept aside in the rush to post quickly and often. Critics have burrowed underground into specialty web sites that are little more than fancy blogging platforms catering to a minuscule readership. Music criticism has become a hobbyist pursuit, the bailiwick of retirees, Sunday enthusiasts, bottom-feeders, and hungry small fry who will snap at any lure.
Thus criticism recedes and vanishes. It will no doubt stagger on in one fashion or another, but the all-powerful, all-seeing critic of the daily paper approaches extinction. Perhaps rightly so. Few of those guys were worth much of anything. Virgil Thomson never let the facts get in the way of his ex cathedra pronouncements, and ground his axes in plain sight before all and sundry. Despite his missionary zeal, his cause—that orchestras promote living American composers over dead Europeans—came to little. Audiences listened politely to those American products (Thomson’s wan scribblings amongst them) and turned back to Beethoven with a sigh of relief. And they kept on digging Sibelius, which must have caused the virulently anti-Sibelian Thomson no end of tummy aches. Like DeWitt, Thomson saw himself as the great king to whom nice customs curtseyed, but in the final analysis he was just a mediocre composer with a flair for bitchy zingers, a fellow denizen of the Oort Cloud.