...or further thoughts about the Lebrecht programme, though now ancient history. But I still want to give my reactions to parts of the programme.
Lebrecht and others falsely set the professional and the amateur critic in opposition to one another. The former, they implied, free from prejudice, professional and knowledgeable enough to set a piece in context for the ignorant reader, was contrasted with the intemperate blogger, who tosses insults across the networks without thought or discipline.
When I was a boy the first music criticism I read, apart from Neville Cardus's pieces in the Guardian, were the collected music reviews of George Bernard Shaw, writing as Corno di Bassetto. I borrowed the three volumes of the Bodley Head edition time and time again from Cambridge Central library, in its former home at the back of the Guildhall. These writings, along with certain writers I read later on in the great days of the New Musical Express in the seventies and early eighties, are for me the pinnacle of musical criticism. I found GBS humorous, sharp and hugely convincing, but by no means free from prejudice: look no further than his writings on oratorio. I also remember being astonished that he could produce such brilliant writing to order and against fierce deadlines: an evening concert might end at 10 o'clock and, to appear in the following morning's paper, his copy must have been written, subbed and typeset in a couple of hours. As for the NME writers were interesting and enjoyable precisely because they eschewed objectivity and the ‘on the one hand,....on the other hand’ approach. It seems therefore incorrect to describe the professional critic as free from prejudice.
The advantage of the blog, as demonstrated by those journalists who also blog, is freedom from censorship and more subtle restrictions such as word counts and the fear of what the advertisers or proprietor might think.
Some other brief points:
- The programme was not about blogs as an art form though, if Norman Lebrecht and the panel had taken up the points made by e-mail contributors, it could have gone in that direction
- A programme about blogs as blogs is as nonsensical as a programme about pencils and pens, and I could not help thinking for much of the time that the poorly-briefed Lebrecht was still trying to understand how blogs work.
- Quality and accuracy; yes, of course we should be concerned about this, but in every medium. My time as a librarian has taught me to read everything critically, whether it comes on a clay tablet, an HTML page, or any thing between the two.
- John Sutherland made a perceptive point about the literary blog, noting their development came at the same time as the boom in literary festivals, book clubs and fan fiction
- Dorian Lynsky became very excited about the lack of courtesy among bloggers. But he was talking less about blogs and more about the corralled quasi-bulletin board format that the Guardian uses. Mena Trott, as might be expected, also held forth on this subject.
- Norman Lebrecht asked contributors more than once for better ranking and navigation (did he mean finding or discovery) tools for blogs. No one mentioned that such tools already exist; every major search engine now has a specialist blog search feature, and Technorati rankings work as well as anything. What troubles me more is why they would want to rank blogs. That n million people buy Jeffrey Archer’s books or the Sun newspaper tells us nothing about the merit of those publications.
- Opera Chic was probably ill-advised to admit to uploading illegally-obtained video shot inside opera houses on her site. Most bloggers respect copyright and intellectual property, and the widespread use of Creative Commons licences among us suggests some of us are better aware of copyright and intellectual property issues than most.
- Funniest remark of the programme: John Sutherland’s description of himself and Rachel Cooke as the Savonarola and Cruella de Ville of blogs.
Some of the participants not on the panel:
Matt Brown: http://blog.mattbrownart.com/
Parterre http://parterre.com/2007/01/lebrecht-cest-echt.html I wonder why Lebrecht chose Opera Chic rather than Parterre as a panelist?
André Durand: http://durandgallery.blogspot.com/index.html
Someone who is an accompanist for Joshua Bell and also blogs; I think this must be Jeremy Denk: http://jeremydenk.blogspot.com/
Ensemble 360: http://ensemble360.livejournal.com/
