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As contemporary European music arrived in the United States and Americans devised their own brands of modernism, a new generation of critics took on a parallel challenge, attempting to interpret these rapid developments for a public that was often bewildered. While their ranks were not large, a few key figures rallied to the cause of the avant-garde. One of them was Carl Van Vechten, who wrote perceptive, even prescient evaluations of new music during the mid-1910s, just as the modernist movement began taking hold in New York City. The other was Paul Rosenfeld, who became an advocate of modernism in all the arts. Like Van Vechten, Rosenfeld's great awakening to modernist music came while traveling abroad: during a visit in 1914 to London, where he first heard the music of Alexander Scriabin. As music critics, both Van Vechten and Rosenfeld agitated for cultural change and grappled with contemporary European figures as well as American popular idioms. However, the two ended up in very different positions. Van Vechten's role in early 20th-century modernism is now largely forgotten, while Rosenfeld is lionized as one of modernism's great interpreters.

This chapter gives an account of two famous music critics Paul Rosenfeld and Bernard Haggin. Composers and critics alike were troubled by the distinct psychological approach and Impressionist orientation of Rosenfeld's criticism. He wrote appreciatively of Schoenberg quite close to the beginning of the composer's career though he became apprehensive as early as about 1916 with regard to the direction his music was taking. The trend away from the intense, febrile, post-Romanticism was something that endowed the music with an air he characterized as “mechanical”. Rosenfeld's most important contribution to music—music being only one of the arts about which he wrote—was his explication, appreciation, and promotion of the twentieth-century serious music of the North and South Americas. Haggin's and his critics were pretty nasty in his treatment of most new music except when it was a matter of any period of Stravinsky, whom he came to admire in his capacity of dance critic because of his passionate devotion to anything that George Balanchine choreographed. A unique accomplishment of Haggin's was his grading of a substantial portion of standard music literature from Bach onwards.

The chapter reviews musical critics who see every innovation in music as a decline. An attitude of this nature on the part of a music critic can very well end up with a determination that it would have been better if no music had been written in the twentieth century rather than the kind that has been. Immediate appeal is a criterion for people who employ the decline theory. Those who reject such a criterion of artistic excellence are usually accused of believing that, good art always goes unrecognized in its time and some people do believe this. What characterizes this tradition are nostalgia for nineteenth-century Romanticism and a consequent rejection of the most significant twentieth-century music in one indiscriminate bolus. But as time advanced so did the composers and their audiences. For a long time in the 1920s and 1930s, and even some of the 1940s, the important American composers were truly underground. Few people were aware that the music of these composers could be heard at the concerts. To assess the desolateness of the early landscape in this particular area it is necessary to bear in mind that in the 1930s there was not the quantity of serious music that could be got on the radio. But today's audience is better informed than the multitude in Mozart's day when serious music was the prerogative of the aristocracy, even though the emerging middle class was making demands to be provided with the opportunity of savoring the fine arts—a development that led to the establishment of public concerts.

This chapter critiques the still influential traditional conception of the music critic (based on the nineteenth-century notion of musical autonomy) by historicizing and politicizing that and related discourses so that children might realize that much of what they assume as natural or true is only historical artifact, myth, or illusion. A more holistic conception of music criticism is offered that seeks to locate music and music education within broader social, cultural, and political webs of knowledge. The remainder of the chapter then critiques recent educational practice and reforms that may frustrate the development of critical consciousness in children by failing to ensure that they are provided with the intellectual conditions that can provoke, foster, and sustain it. The chapter concludes with the recommendation that children should learn to think of political and historical studies as critical tools for challenging conventional accounts and practices.

In this chapter, the author shares his personal experience of being a music critic. He elaborates that the most consuming experience was one that caused him years of inconvenience and exasperation. It was a suit filed against the Tribune in 1952 by the Yaysnoff sisters, a two-piano team entirely new to the local concert stage, who argued that he had libeled them in a review that appeared in the 30 July paper covering their performance the previous evening as soloists with the New York Philharmonic. The proliferation of reviews of pop and dance events in the most recent decades has confronted the longhair music columnist with serious competition that did not exist in his time. In the Times serious music seems to have held its own, though it still tends to be overshadowed by the other arts. The chapter reveals the author's area of work and its ups and downs.

This chapter examines the two most important English-language troupes active during the late 1860s and early 1870s. Caroline Richings, known as a “manageress” or “directress,” performed before, during, and after the Civil War. Her success shows conclusively that Americans of the immediate postwar period were still interested in English-language opera, even though most music critics believed that this style of performance was old-fashioned and passé. Many believed that Richings created the English-language-opera renaissance in America. The Scottish soprano Euphrosyne Parepa arrived in America in 1865 as part of an itinerant concert troupe and subsequently sang in Italian-language opera companies. Richings’s success and popularity inspired her, and she organized her own English-language troupe, which quickly eclipsed that of her competitor. The success of these two prime donne—especially in the face of skepticism about Americans’ interest in vernacular opera—illuminates the operatic tastes of American audiences in the immediate postwar period.

Chapter 19 examines the reception of Prokofiev’s music in the United Kingdom over the course of the last century, providing a case study of the evolving critical reactions in Western Europe to the composer’s works. It illustrates the ways in which Western views of Soviet musical creativity have been influenced by ideological assumptions and stereotypical constructs of Russianness and Soviet-ness. Prokofiev’s early work prompted highly conflicted responses, focusing on commentators’ construction of an exoticized image of a Slavic musical barbarian. Attitudes developed with the composer’s return to the USSR and became increasingly condescending during the Cold War, but these opinions subsequently warmed as more of his operatic and symphonic works became familiar to the general public. Standard scholarly writings, music journals, and newspaper reviews have been extensively consulted, with the focus upon those commentators, such as Ernest Newman, Gerald Abraham, and David Nice, who helped shape Prokofiev’s standing in the United Kingdom.

This chapter presents a translation of Berg's article attacking selected musical journalists. His targets were Julius Korngold (1860–1945), the principal music critic for the Neue fr eie Presse, Vienna's largest paper; and Elsa Bienenfeld, the leading music critic for the Neues Wiener Journal, a respected tabloid founded in Vienna in 1893. In the article, Berg takes up what he sees as the shortcomings and abuses in newspaper criticism of the day, and he pulls no punches in attacking his opponents ad hominem. He quotes extensively from his sources, refuting their every thought from multiple angles, and he uses witty puns available in the German language to satirize his targets. His method in this article is to point out the writers' factual inaccuracies and sloppy grammar: if these writers make repeated gaffes in such basic mechanics, how could their fair-mindedness or judgments about new music be trusted?

This chapter presents a translation of Berg's dialogue which was delivered on Radio Vienna on 23 April 1930. The dialogue took the form of a conversation between Berg and the music critic Julius Bistron. In content it was a prelude to Berg's Wozzeck Lecture, to which he gave the related titled “The Atonal Opera” for its presentation at Vienna's Musikverein some three weeks later. Throughout this period Wozzeck was being performed by the Vienna Opera.

This chapter presents a translation of Berg's article, which he wrote in response to Emil Petschnig's criticism of his opera Wozzeck. Petschnig was a Viennese composer and teacher of music theory. In his article, Berg, for the first time, expressed his thoughts on opera in print and he continued to flesh out the viewpoint which he had at that time and this started to attract attention. The forms within scenes of the opera, Berg wrote, are highly regular and traditional in their construction, they rest on classical norms, and they will be apparent to anyone who has studied the score closely. Using the Krausian polemical method, Berg quotes from several passages by Petschnig and attacks each of them on a factual basis.