RESPONDING TO CRITICS

posted by James Reel

    I’m a bit slow catching up on this, but last week oboist-blogger Patricia Mitchell pondered, as she does from time to time, what she should do when a music critic doesn’t get it—particularly when a critic makes a factual error, like crediting her for an orchestral solo she didn’t perform. Says Patty, “I never correct reviewers when they make these mistakes. Having this blog is, I suspect, enough to alienate some who write reviews, and I realize that I may never get a mention because this site here might be off-putting to some people. Correcting a reviewer is just not something I'll ever do ... would a reviewer only comment on me unfavorably if I did that?”
    Well, there are maladjusted, vindictive jerks in every profession, and I’m sure a few music critics answer to that description, but not many. I’m not familiar with the personalities of the critics in Patty’s vicinity, but I think she should try “talking back” to them.
    In the first place, over the years she’s made a point of not badmouthing people or seeming like a general malcontent. (The only person she openly criticizes is herself.) So no reasonable person is going to think she’s on the attack if she offers a reasonable response to something she’s read.
    As a critic myself, I encourage artists to respond to what I write. First, critics who make factual mistakes, no matter whose fault they may be, need to be politely corrected. Any responsible critic wants the record to be set straight. In Patty’s case, she might send a letter to the newspaper’s editor saying, “I appreciate Virgil Thomson Jr.’s positive review of our orchestra’s performance last week, but he shouldn’t have praised me for the oboe solos. Those were actually played by my substitute, Arundo Reed, who was not credited in the program.” Simple, polite, correcting an error without pointing fingers (except maybe at whoever left the sub’s name out of the program, which may have been printed before the substitute was called in).
    Now, arguing with a critic about subjective matters is something else, and probably a futile pursuit. Judging a performance involves one’s personal taste and experience, and putting that judgment into words that accurately convey the critic’s impression. Lots of variables there, and nobody’s going to win an argument about aesthetics. It might be interesting, though, to blog about why a performance turned out the way it did—not to make excuses, just to let people in on elements that affected the concert. Was the conductor especially inspring, or hard to follow? Were there problems with the parts that complicated things? Was the music unusually hard, or so easy and overfamiliar that one was tempted to play on autopilot? Most importantly, if the critic complained about, for instance, shrillness in the Rossini overture or wrong notes in the Beethoven symphony, was that because the performance followed a new edition with prominent piccolos in the Rossini or odd variants in the Beethoven? All these things are worth blogging about, and no reasonable critic should think such musings constitute a personal attack … assuming the critic ever reads the blog.