Re: review of Gould's Brahms

[Cristalle Watson <wcristalle@HOTMAIL.COM>]

> > Hey, now you're sounding like John Cage!
>
> Jim
>
> Hey, no need to get insulting!
>
> Musical minimalism is a style choice, and de gustibus non est >disputandum
> (or chacon a san gout, whatever).

To me it's more like a lack of any style choice, a total repudiation of
purpose in music altogether...but that's another story. Don't get me
started.

> But my complaint is a logical thing. Why use words to waste a half->hour
> reading, when you could just plunk the darn thing on the Victrola >and hear
> for yourself what it is ... not a description in some other >medium of what
> someone else thought it was?

For practical reasons. So that you don't have to actually go out and buy a
recording that you later find out you hate. So that, if you're looking for a
recording of a certain piece, you can read many reviews and pick the one
that you think you'll like most. So that instead of just reading, as you
suggested, "Listen to this" or "Don't listen to this," you can actually find
out what the reviewer liked or disliked about the recording, so that even if
the reviewer had different musical tastes than you, you could still get some
useful information from the review.
Using words to describe music puts it into terms that are as objective as
possible. It's very difficult to effectively communicate "This is a good
recording" to another person, without using further description. We all have
our own ideas about what is a "good" and "bad" recording, and this type of
subjective statement probably won't get you very far. But if you say, "I
liked this recording because the artist had very good technique, but on the
other hand the interpretation wasn't very creative..." and so on, you are
describing what you liked about the recording in objective terms that
everyone can understand. So in the above example, I don't consider technique
to be very important but I place a high value on creativity, I would
probably conclude that the recording wasn't very good. I would arrive at a
different final judgement than you would, but I would have gained some
useful information from reading your review. If you had just said, "This is
a good recording, go buy it," I might have been misled into buying a
recording I hate.
To summarize: objective statements are better than subjective statments when
it comes to most things, including musical reviews.

Cristalle


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