Stop the Press? The Changing Media of Music Criticism

Abstract

Writing in BBC Music Magazine in July 1999, editor Helen Wallace remarked on the rapid decline in space allocated to classical music criticism in British newspapers, notably in The Times, The Independent, The Guardian and Financial Times, all of which had previously provided extensive, important coverage. ‘Concert reports provide the very oxygen needed to keep a flourishing musical scene alive’, she noted, and ‘[if] an event is ignored, it is as if it did not exist.’ However, she perceived a ‘ray of hope’ in the internet, which ‘has no space restriction: maybe the dawn of a new era is nigh...’ Twenty years later, Wallace’s comments seem prescient. Newspapers operate regularly updated websites as a matter of course now, and many of them offer additional content that is not made available in print editions. Online content has helped to sustain the viability of newspapers in the digital age, capitalizing on the tantalising opportunity to report news – and post reviews – instantly. There has also been a proliferation of e-zines devoted to music criticism, starting with titles such as Seen and Heard and Classical Source, allowing amateur enthusiasts to fill the gap left by shrinking column inches by providing reviews of a much wider range of events, such as complete coverage of the BBC Proms by Classical Source; the success of these ventures has led to other sites such as The Arts Desk, whose reviews are written mainly by professional journalists. Yet Wallace’s prediction for the future missed one crucial and unexpected component: the advent of Facebook and, particularly, Twitter has taken criticism out of its privileged domain as a specialist activity and enabled the general public to give individual responses to performances based on personal experience rather than perceived qualification. This chapter examines this shift from the primacy of professional music critics in the twentieth century to the impact of