Writing about music

Recently, Mwanji posted a short but provocative piece about so-called music criticism, and in doing so raised a host of issues about music writing in general.

It's an issue I've raised before in regards to my own views about so-called music criticism specifically, and more broadly the issue of writing words about music.

My basic view is this: I do think there are serious barriers to writing about music descriptively, but that those limitations  are best confronted creatively. I confront them through the occasional misuse of vocabulary to convey feeling and connotation rather than meaning and denotation. If I'm writing a review of a concert or recording, I'd rather end up with a piece that described what I heard and how it made me feel than what I heard and what my opinion of that was, or what I thought of it. I'm more interested in writing about what I find value in, instead of attempting to determine if something else actually has value in any objective sense.

With that said, while I believe transparency is a good thing, it can also be crippling.

I find value in the notion of creating a relationship between author and reader where the reader comes to know the taste of the writer enough to develop a sense of their tastes, and as a result engage in something known as trust. This shouldn't be confused for being predictable, and that's where the job of the writer comes in, to have an open mind so that they can surprise their readers by finding value in someplace unexpected, and explaining that value to the reader.

Does a writer also have to pan a few pieces of music to develop that trust? Don't we have to say something is worthless in order to create a sense of worth?

I don't think so.

Then again, I'm not a critic, and nor do I have any interest in becoming one.

A reader of this blog might notice that I don't write about all the music out there. I listen to lots more music than I write about here, that's for sure. I only take the time to write about music that I:

• Enjoy enough to listen to regularly, and believe that I will continue to listen to in the future.
• Believe that readers of the blog, based upon their repeated readership, might enjoy as well.
• Believe that I can write about cogently enough to convey some of its essence to the reader.

I'm also of the opinion that negative reviews of music are of less value than any piece of music ever made. So there. At least a mediocre musician is putting themselves out there to get a crappy review.

It's not that I believe that there's no such thing as bad music. There is. I've heard it, and I don't like it. I just have no interest in devoting any energy into spreading the word about bad music. I'd much rather spend my time and energy talking about music that I think is worthwhile and engaging. Similarly, I'd rather be pointed in the direction of transcendence than be told to stay out of what someone else believes is the musical gutter.

I do believe that there is a fruitful method of writing about music, and for me that involves putting music into some kind of social and cultural context. I find that to be an extraordinarily illuminating practice, and one that simultaneously allows the music to speak for itself while also enriching our experience of it through better understanding of its context. I find more value in this style of music writing than in blow by blow analyses.

What do you think?