The Music Box

"Too many times have I gone home a defeated man." The speaker was Olin Downes, the occasion was the final discussion session of last week's "Symposium on Music Criticism," and the speech was an extemporaneous one in answer to some statements made earlier in the day by Columbia's Professor Paul H. Lang. The New York Times' music critic sometimes was "defeated," he explained, because he felt he had left something important out of a review, or perhaps and stated an objection too strongly, or failed to emphasize some idea. Put this together with a later statement, in which Downes assured the audience that a music critic could not kill any truly good piece of music, claiming that a composition with vitality would bounce back sooner or later. The combination of these statements forms a wedge into what struck this observer as being the core problem at the Symposium.

Downes goes home, having met his midnight deadline, and suspects that his review is not strictly on the beam throughout, but when the occasion demands, he becomes comforted by the supposition that a vital piece of music (and by implication a vital artist) is bound to register favorably some day, no matter what the critics say. It is no easy task to balance this theory with some stark and fully documented facts presented by Miss Olga Samaroff. To get booking with a decent manager these days, in a country full of budding Rubinsteins and Heifetzes, a young artist must have the good word from New York's critics. Likewise, the composer, for instance, of a new opera. No rave notices equals no more performances of the opera and little chance for production of future operas.

Many different Symposium speeches, starting from widely diverging points, ended at this same central problem: the influence of New York's critics on the nation's music box-offices, and consequently on the lives of musicians. One suggested solution--musicians should be amateurs, and earn their bread by other means. Another--to decentralize American music in various ways, instituting more purely local artists, thereby cutting some tentacles off the New York critic-octopus. There were also countless proposals for improved criticism, for broadened criticism, for more criticism, and for less criticism.

Doubtless, some of these proposals will help. But unless the critic takes a more constructive view than Downes expresses in his you-can't keep-a-good-musician-down theory, neither technical training for him nor decentralization for music will keep him from hurting artists. And unless the public realizes that the critic, for from being a God of Sound, frequently goes home a "defeated man," the true defeat will continue to be rung up on the side of music and the musician.