How Do You Even Write a Concert Review Anyway?

A couple weeks ago, I gave a guest lecture on concert reviews for a “Writing About Music” course at Queens College. The students, exceedingly bright and engaged — but many of whom admitted to having never before read a concert review — taught me more in that hour than I have learned in years of writing.

The basis of the lecture was the simple-sounding question: “When was the first concert review?” Finding the answer turned out to be something of a wild goose chase, depending heavily on how you define concert and how you define review.

There’s an early concert review-of-sorts in a 1552 treatise titled Duo Dialoghi della Musica, but it might just be literary invention. We also have musical accounts in diaries, such as Samuel Pepys’s, but these weren’t always intended to be read. And of course, there’s historian Charles Burney’s account of his Grand Tour, including concerts he heard.

But it’s only in the late 18^th century that reviews of public concerts appear in newspapers. The Cambridge History of Music Criticism includes a 1789 review in the Gazetta Toscana of a performance by the accademici armonici in Florence. I couldn’t, however, find out when the very first was.

When, in desperation, I asked ChatGPT, probably killing a small forest thereby, it gave me suspiciously specific yet plausible-sounding answer: A January 8, 1740 review in the London Daily Post of a Hickford’s Room concert of Francesco Geminiani. This was quickly disproven by looking at an online historical newspapers archive. No such review, or concert for that matter, ever happened.

Days before the Queens lecture, I’d suffered a small crisis of confidence after writing a review of which I was not particularly proud that was swiftly bashed in the comments section for its excessive snark. (I won’t be linking it.)

I can’t remember if it was Alex Ross or Tim Page who said that for a young critic, writing reviews is learning in public. This can be illuminating, humbling, even embarrassing. I’m thankful for my forgiving readers here. Poison Put to Sound started, mainly, as a place for me to write reviews, which are notoriously difficult to publish, yet require practice to hone.

The concert review might be my favorite form, though it can hardly be called that. It is a sort of formless form, hovering perhaps somewhere in the realm of prose poetry. You can write a review that doubles as a list, as a haiku, as a time-stamped play-by-play.

While there are certain readerly expectations — such as the who, what, when, where, why of it all — even these can be subverted. This, perhaps, makes the review difficult to teach, let alone do well yourself.

Returning to ChatGPT for a moment, I take some comfort in the fact that, no matter how improved AI gets at research, it will never be able to write an inspired review. That’s because doing so requires sensibility, opinion, intellect. In short, it requires soul.

For my Queens lecture, I got inspiration from Edwin Denby’s “Dancers, Buildings, and People in the Streets,” which started as a lecture for Juilliard dance majors. “One part of dance criticism is seeing what is happening onstage,” Denby writes. “The other is describing clearly what you saw.”

In this regard, I agree with Denby that the one thing a review must do is create a sense of being there, what scholars call “musical ekphrasis.” I believe that if a writer really describes what happened —attending to their own observations, impressions, and gut-feelings — the proper balance of praise and critique should come naturally.

Of course, this doesn’t always happen. One Parterre comment, the repetition of which has become a household joke, still haunts me: “But did you like it?” No, @OperaFan69, I didn’t like it.

As you may have noticed, I’ve taken a break from Poison these last months, partly to recover from top surgery, and partly to focus on my schoolwork. Returning for a musicology PhD has had me reflecting on the somewhat puzzling divide between academia and journalism. This divide, which has a long history, more than merits its own post.

But what, today, unifies musicology and music journalism (thanks to Joseph Kerman’s interventions) is this word “criticism.” Every so often, in reading articles by musicologists like Carolyn Abbate or Marion Guck, I come across passages, mixing ekphrasis and analysis, that resemble concert reviews. These passages wouldn’t be out of place somewhere like the New Yorker.

Essentially, good writing is good writing. Yet, I’ve struggled to find an academic voice that feels as authentic as my journalistic one. I’m searching for a happy medium. But, as I’ve learned writing reviews, it’s often impossible to please everyone.

And it turns out that thinking too much about concert reviews might make you worse at writing them. For whatever reason, I’ve struggled to exorcise a review of “Solo Operas” which I saw last month at The Tank.

It might start something like: “How many people does an opera make? According to Experiments in Opera, at least two. One to write it, and one to perform it.”

Next comes the part I most dread: Trying to turn my disjointed notes into sentences. It feels like trying to reconstruct the kind of deconstructed cheesecake they might serve at The Modern restaurant. A streak of strawberry sauce. A graham cracker crumb. Flipping through my Moleskine, this is what I see:

                                 This Is Not About Natalie
                                            by composer Jason Cady with soprano Sarah Daniels
                   Literal ventriloquism (there’s a puppet)
                                Character study 
                                                showing plight of the musician-influencer
                           Synth track with electric guitar and 
                                                                         incisive voice

                                INcomplete Cosmicomics 
                                                   based on Italo Calvino
                                          by composer Anna Heflin with cellist Aaron Wolff
                                    (a disclosure: Wolff is in class with me at CUNY Grad Center)
                         roguish,     arrogant,       androgynous,     maddening
             mostly spoken, 
                                  heavy fingers tapping on fingerboard
           reminds me of: 
                 Luciano Berio’s Sequenza XIV
                 Morton Feldman’s Projection 1
                                       looper symbolizes simultaneous realities
                          running bow up and down fingerboard 
                                                                         while touching hand to heart
             wave machine,        wind chimes,           snoring,             whispers
              it feels like being alone in the house at night during a rainstorm

I want to add something about how serendipitous it is that Heflin includes Ursula K. Le Guin’s feminist critique of Calvino, considering that her daughter Elisabeth Le Guin wrote Boccherini’s Body, a work of “carnal musicology” about the cello. Then, I decide that’s too niche. I’m not sure how to end it, until I remember that question: “But did you like it?” Yes. Yes, I did.

Photo by Reuben Radding