In search of the lost journalism
Alex Ross' collection of New Yorker writing Listen to This, recently published in paperback, is a salutary reminder of the depths to which music journalism has sunk elsewhere in the mainstream media. But where to find an alternative to the standard diet of reheated press releases other than in The New Yorker? Well, Amazon customer reviews may seem an unlikely source, but most professional music journalists could learn a thing or two from this contribution from Paul Magnussen:
This album forms one of a pair on the Nimbus label (the other being Cante Flamenco). Among Nimbus's laudable qualities at this time were first-class recordings, first-class (though not necessarily famous) artists, and careful attention to acoustics.Classical music is desperate to reach new and young audiences, yet the vital role of the music journalist as animateur is completely overlooked. The current generation of "another day another press release" music journalists would do well to reflect on Hesketh Pearson's tribute to a great music writer of the past, George Bernard Shaw.
Especially notable, however, was an almost obsessive preoccupation with performances that were whole and 'live' -- not sewn together, Frankenstein fashion, from the usable parts of corpses. In accordance with this objective, the present album presents Gypsy artists, not in the recording studio, but in a small private club in Morón de la Frontera -- with no chance of retakes! Here Nimbus were really taking to the air without a parachute, because the difficulties of producing a first-class performance to order are legendary. Artists unused to being recorded may get self-conscious and seize up; others may be jealous of each other, or too tired, or too drunk, or not drunk enough...
The qualities in him that specially appealed to youth were his irreverence for tradition and office, his indifference to vested interests and inflated reputations, his contempt for current morality, his championship of unpopular causes and persecuted people, his vitality and humour, and above all his inability to take solemn people seriously.Header montage was created from my own library. Any copyrighted material on these pages is included as "fair use", for the purpose of study, review or critical analysis only, and will be removed at the request of copyright owner(s). Report broken links, missing images and errors to - overgrownpath at hotmail dot co dot uk
Also on Facebook and Twitter.
Comments
I also love some YouTube comments. I love it when someone hears Mahler's adagietto or Mars from The Planets and less obvious things as well, who has obviously never listened to any classical music in his or her life, and is clearly transfixed by this "amazing song".
There is a big dollop of irony in Pearson's reference to Shaw's "...championship of unpopular causes and persecuted people...". He certainly was the first, but the second? His support of Stalin after he met him in the early 1930s was absolute and unbending. In the play On the Rocks, one of his characters speaks of the need for the Cheka and for OGPU, their purpose being to question people about whether they are, to put it simply, pulling their weight in Soviet society. Those who cannot justify their existence, should be liquidated. This is not a satire or such: Shaw was deadly serious. I suspect he thought Stalin to be one of the 'supermen' he had much earlier written would emerge through a natural eugenic process. He did write a condemnation of pogroms on the grounds that they are anarchic: the killing of the undesirable, he said, should be humane.
I think the most appalling correspondence I have read is that between Shaw and Freda Utley. Utley, distinguished academically and a notable journalist (though not always reliable in her later life when, like many other former supporters of the Soviet system in the US, to which she had emigrated, she travelled very far to the Right) who moved to the USSR in 1928 after marrying a Russian functionary, Arcadi Berdichevsky. The turn came when her husband was arrested as a suspected Trotskyist in 1936, and Utley returned to the UK.
Once home, she tried to enlist her friends, and she had many in high places, and others in a campaign to get Berdichevsky released. She wrote to Shaw, and his replies, in their wording, are nigh on psychopathic in their lack of sympathy. He offers none, and says that if her husband has been imprisoned, obviously he must have done something to deserve it. Utley showed the Shaw correspondence to Bertrand and Peter Russell, who had been campaigning for Berdichevsky's release (Russell had turned against Bolshevism as early as 1920), both thought it disgusting, but very tellingly, Russell pronounced it typical Shaw and advised Utley to consider him a lost cause and not bother to write to him further letters.
Russell sometimes wrote rather silly things, especially as his dotage approached, but I have never found cause to doubt his sincerity. After reading those letters, and thinking also of Shaw's notions re eugenics, his support for Eamon de Valera when he wrote a letter of condolence upon the death of Hitler, and rather a lot of other skeletons in Shavian closets, I came to the conclusion that, music apart, in Shaw's writing, especially much of that on politics and society, his inconsistency is so vast that you can hardly trust a word he wrote.