ARGUMENTS
THE EDITOR 'S RITE
In her book,
Ernest Newman,
Vera Newman reports one
incident in Newman's career that I have personal reasons for finding
especially interesting. Before describing it I should say something about
what it involved. Bernard Shaw, at the time he was writing some of
the finest music criticism ever written, observed that editors, "by some
law of Nature which still baffles science," were always ignorant of
music-a characteristic overstatement of the fact that most editors lack
special competence in this field. And aware of this, they usually engage
a man with the special knowledge of music they lack, and allow him to
operate without interference. What they don't realize is that a man may
have knowledge of the literature of music, its techniques and forms, its
terminology-all that is acquired through specifically musical educa–
tion-but may lack the perception and judgment and taste that make a
musically educated person into a good critic; and since this lack is
something most editors are unable
to
detect, most of the published
criticism of music is worthless. But that isn't all. Shaw went on to say
that all he had
to
do was write that the second subject appeared in the
key of the dominant, and an editor capable of recognizing skill and the
lack of it in writing on any other subject would let Shaw fill his columns
"with pompous platitude, with ... bad grammar, bad logic ... [and]
every conceivable blunder and misdemeanor that a journalist can com–
mit," as long as he did this in his capacity as music critic. In other
words, editors accept from a music critic not only the bad criticism they
are not competent to evaluate, but even the bad thinking and bad
writing they
are
competent to evaluate. It was not surprising that the
editors of the
Times
didn't recognize Harold C. Schonberg's failure as a
critic when he reported the eccentricities and perversities of Glenn
Gould's playing in Brahms's D-minor Concerto without placing them
in their context of the impressive operation of Gould's powers even in
that eccentric and perverse performance. But it was amazing that the
editors of a paper as concerned with propriety and decorum as the
Times
should have tolerated a performance by Schonberg that was
