The Music Criticism and Aesthetics of George Bernard Shaw (Revised ed.) (original) (raw)
Robert Shaw and the Brahms Requiem, op.45: a conductor's approach to performing a masterpiece
2014
combination of Christian mysticism, Christian agnosticism, pacifism, Beethoven, Brahms, and Shaw. Shaw doubted that contemporary organized Christianity had been faithful to Jesus; and he doubted that eternity was a place so much as a state of being-best imagined in Bach's music, or Beethoven's, or Mozart's. Shaw well understood that form of profound faith that does not provide immunity to doubt but is intertwined with doubt. ... Shaw saw Jesus as the greatest of all teachers and humanists. He left whatever Jesus was to Bach and other orthodox believers .... Shaw didn't need Jesus to be God. "For me," he [Shaw] said, "it is enough that he was a man." At the memorial "celebration" concert for Shaw, ... Rev. [Allison] Williams gave a meditation that he felt epitomized Shaw and that Sylvia McNair thought summarized Shaw's personal theology.lt is borrowed from Mother Teresa. When ... asked what she said when she prayed to God, she replied, "I do not speak to God; I listen." She was then asked what God said to her. And she replied, "God does not speak; He listens." 9 Burris's summary helps explain Shaw's attraction to the Requiem. The work is a quilt of biblical passages-all surely a familiar part of his youth. 10 Further, Brahms's choice of text defies traditional Christian dogma. Shaw was a lifelong antagonist of organized Christianity. Additionally, its humanistic qualities aligned with his ideology. In 1988, while contemplating the texts of Brahms's Schicksalslied, Gesang der Parzen, Nanie, and Alto Rhapsody, Shaw wrote, "The four texts together offer an almost overwhelming and despairing assessment of the 'human condition.' ... They offer none of the occasional hope-inspiring assurances of his German Requiem. (Even in the Requiem, however, these assurances do not occupy a dominant amount of the total time, and the pervading atmosphere is that of attempting to comfort and console in the abiding presence of grief.) Lest anyone give up and take to a monastery, let me propose that the mulch of tragedy, impermanence, frailty-possibly-even decay are the only ground upon which heroism can grow. (As others have noted, even a Christian God had to prove
SHAW SHADOWS: REREADING THE TEXTS OF BERNARD SHAW
SHAW SHADOWS: REREADING THE TEXTS OF BERNARD SHAW (University Press of Florida), 2004
Gahan's path-breaking book rereads Shaw's writing, dramatic and non-dramatic, against the background of critical theory in order to reassess its radical influence in both its own time and ours. Though sometimes dismissed as merely witty, Shaw should be considered one of the progenitors of contemporary literary studies, Gahan says, in that his work actually allows for ideas of theorists such as Derrida and Lacan. Gahan first considers Shaw's poststructuralist pioneering thinking in a general, philosophical way. Taking a fresh and thoughtful look at a wealth of readings, he examines Shaw's criticism and autobiographical writing, in which questions of authorship and subjectivity were crucial. Gahan looks at essays on music, science, and politics and at Shaw's critique of Darwinian theory, in which he calls for a new metaphysics within the discourse of science. In concentrating on his less familiar plays, Gahan shows how Shaw incorporated themes like writing, language, meaning, and authorship into his playwriting, while acknowledging an awareness of the subjectivity of human experience in general and of the writer's experience in particular. For the first time, the play cycle Back to Methuselah--the work Shaw considered his magnum opus--is examined as central to the oeuvre. This book heralds a major shift in the future of Shaw studies, restoring Shaw to his rightful place as a major intellectual figure and writer, as one of the most important authors and dramatists of the early 20th century. And it positions the Shaw text as pivotal in the historical break in Western culture between Victorian and modern worlds.
Journal of the Royal Musical Association 138.1 (May 2013)
The spectre of music as a transcendent artistic ideal figures prominently in the literary criticism of Victorian aestheticism, though the extent to which aestheticism of the movement actually influenced the thinking of British composers has received only marginal scholarly attention. By the first decades of the twentieth century, aestheticism had become decidedly unfashionable even in literary circles, so it is unsurprising that composers of the time would choose to distance themselves from its rhetoric. The prevalence of a certain type of metaphysical conception of the creative act of the artist and intuitive act of the critic, however, may suggest an important remnant of aesthetic influence. Drawing from new critical trends which themselves mirror those of aestheticism, this article posits a revised conception of aesthetic discourse as an activity of self-cultivation, and examines its role in shaping the lives of selected British composer-critics from the early part of the twentieth century. By casting the aesthetic ethos not as a doctrine but as a set of internal practices that inform the creation and subversion of doctrine, the article demonstrates how a ‘relational musicology’ can act as a tool for historical inquiry.
Musicae Scientiae, 2014
The study offers an overview of a large sample of music performance criticism in the British classical music market through the analysis of reviews of Beethoven's piano sonata recordings (n=845) published in the magazine Gramophone between 1923 and 2010. Reviews were collected from the Gramophone archive, and descriptive and inferential statistics were used to explore the reviews' metadata: issue, text length, repertoire, release status, pianists reviewed and critics. There were a large number of recordings (n=641) and pianists (n=216) considered during this period, with reviews provided by 52 critics. However, reviews were concentrated around only a small number of authors and performers. The most frequently published critics had long careers and a high level of familiarity with the repertoire and its interpretations. Comparisons between performances were found to be a characterizing trait of critical practice, and the most often reviewed pianists corresponded to those most frequently used for comparisons. Besides new recordings, there were many reviews of reissues (n=2045), although this pattern decreased in later decades. The findings emphasize the importance of the comparative element for the evaluation of performances and the necessity to account for the peculiar nature of recorded versus live performance to understand the processes behind critical practice. Furthermore, taken together the results suggest that critics may have an important role as filters of choice in the musical market.
The critic's voice: On the role and function of criticism of classical music recordings
Frontiers in Psychology, 2022
In the Western classical tradition music criticism represents one of the most complex and influential forms of performance assessment and evaluation. However, in the age of peer opinion sharing and quick communication channels it is not clear what place music critics' judgments still hold in the classical music market. This article presents expert music critics' view on their role, function, and influence. It is based on semi-structured interviews with 14 native English-and German-speaking critics who had an average of 32 years professional activity in classical music review. We present the first visual model to summarize music critics' descriptions of their role and responsibilities, writing processes, and their influences (on the market and on artists). The model distinguishes six roles (hats): consumer adviser, teacher, judge, writer, stakeholder, and artist advocate. It identifies core principles governing critical writing for music as well as challenges that arise from balancing the above six responsibilities whilst remaining true to an implicit code of conduct. Finally, it highlights the factors that inform critics' writing in terms of the topics they discuss and the discursive tools they employ. We show that music critics selfidentify as highly skilled mediators between artists, producers and consumers, and justify their roles as judge and teacher based on a wealth of experience as against the influx of pervasive amateur reviews. Our research approach also offers occupation-based insights into professional music review standards, including the challenges of maintaining objectivity and resisting commercial pressures. This article offers a new viewpoint on music critics' judgments and recommendations that helps to explain their expectations and reflections.
2019
musical criticism, and turn-of-the-century periodical culture Charlotte Purkis Gertrude Hudson was a female writer and editor active from the mid 1890s to the late 1900s. Her colourful writings for multidisciplinary arts and general interest magazines as well as for specialist music journals deployed intensely subjective, dialogic, even confrontational modes of writing to challenge established modes of music criticism. Hudson's writing explicitly connected music and the other arts exploring ways to enable readers to fine tune connections between musical experiences, poetry, visual arts and architecture, merging Walter Pater and Oscar Wilde's notions of aesthetic criticism with her own distinctive voice. Hudson's work is preoccupied with the nature of musical response by contemporary audiences and music's presence in global culture. Her essays range from portraits of performers, composers and performances of musical works, location pieces about audiences and music-making from London venues, and her travels and unusual commentaries on animals. All these topics show an enthusiasm for combining observations of her world with musical evocations in a range of sites and contexts. Hudson's writing offers unique subjective manifestations of topical debates, from the apparently passive position of a spectator and travelling consumer. Her reflections both witness the development of musical criticism as outsider and show us its reshaping as insider. As an observer specialising in celebrity culture in the 'classical' music world, she is both gossip and autoethnographer. This chapter seeks to re-situate Hudson within literary and musical networks. In so doing, it continues the investigation from my earlier exploration of Hudson in The Idea of Music in Victorian Fiction (2004) looking now at her prose writing as critical theorisation and critical act. Examples of Hudson's well-informed witty rhetoric around musical