The Art of Judging Music

by VIRGIL THOMSON

1

THE layman is under no obligation to exercise judgment with regard to musical works, to describe to himself their characteristics or to estimate their value for history. He can take them to his heart or let them alone. He does not have to be just or fair or to reflect about them in any way. He can accept, reject, or tolerate, using only caprice as his guide. The professional has no such liberty. Neither has any music patron or amateur who has chosen to follow as a music consumer the standards that govern the music producer.

These standards are not immutable, but they do exist. They exist because being a professional involves, by definition, the assumption of a responsible attitude both toward the material with which the profession deals and toward society in general, which the profession unquestionably serves. That service, indeed, is the price of any profession’s toleration by society. And the acceptance of money for professional services rendered is the criterion by which professionalism is determined in our society. This transaction is no guarantee of quality delivered, but it is a symbol of responsibility accepted. And once that responsibility is accepted, the workman must be at least morally worthy of his hire, however limited his skill or mental powers may be.

Every mature musician, therefore, is a music critic. He is obliged to make musical judgments and to act upon them. This necessity obtains primarily, of course, with regard to the work of other musicians, living and dead, in so far as his work is at all a comment on this or an interpretation of it, which nine tenths, at least, of anybody’s musical work is. And so even the composer, no less than the scholar, the pedagogue, the executant, and the reviewer, is constantly under the necessity of making a fair estimate, and a decently responsible one, of other people’s musical work.

This first stage of this operation does not involve fairness at all. It consists of listening to a piece, or of reading it, rather in the way that a cook tastes food. This act of cognition, this beginning of acquaintance, is probably a more powerful determinant in our final judgments, the ones on which we act, than the subsequent cerebrations by which we endeavor to correct them are. And we cannot prepare for it by purifying the spirit. We do not need to, as a matter of fact, because curiosity is stronger than prejudice. Any musician, faced with a new piece, will listen. He will listen as long as he can, as long as it holds his attention.

The second stage of the first operation, after the initial tasting, is going on listening, the experience of having one’s attention held. Not all pieces hold one’s attention. One is sad when they don’t, but one must never undervalue the fact of their doing or not doing so. Fatigue here is of no more importance than prejudice. In reasonable health, and awake, any musician will listen to music, to sound of any kind, rather than merely ruminate, just as a painter will observe or an athlete move around. If a musician can’t keep his mind on a piece of music, that fact must be considered when he comes to formulating judgment.

The final stage of the first operation is the aftertaste, the image that the whole piece leaves in the mind for the first few moments after it ceases to be heard (I say heard because reading a piece is hearing it in the mind, in however attenuated a fashion). This is as significant a part of its gustation as the first taste of it and the following of it through. It is a recalling of the whole while memory is fresh and before the operations of correction and reflection have been undertaken. Never must one forget, never does one forget hearing for the first time a work that has absorbed one from beginning to end and from which one has returned to ordinary life, as it were, shaken or beatified, as from a trip to the moon or to the Grecian Isles.

All new music does not produce this effect. But the degree to which it does is as valuable a datum for judgment as any that can be found in subsequent analyses. A great deal of subsequent analysis, as a matter of fact, is a search for the reasons why the piece did or did not hold one’s attention on first hearing. And the initial taste or distaste for its qualities will constantly return to plague one’s researches or to illumine them, to discourage or to inspire one in the process of making fuller acquaintance.

2

MAKING fuller acquaintance is the second operation of judgment. If first acquaintance has proved agreeable or interesting, one undertakes the second. The undertaking is a result of first judgment, though not necessarily of reflection. The whole first operation, let me insist, is spontaneous; and so is the initiation of the second. At this point, however, spontaneity ceases to be the main highway to experience, or guide to knowledge.

We must now amplify and correct our first impression. If the first Impression was gained from auditory means, from hearing only, we must now see the score. If it was gained from a score, we must now hear the work in execution. Many pieces look better than they sound, and even more of them sound better on first hearing than their design justifies — because sound is usually pleasant whether or not high intrinsic interest of an expressive or textural nature is present. In the case of executant musicians there is a constant shifting, during the study of a work, between score and execution, each stimulating and correcting the other till the artist’s interpretation is fully formed as a concept and completely clothed in sound.

At this point there is material for a reflected judgment, and one formulates that judgment if there is a necessity for doing so. Otherwise one continues to study and to correct until interest flags. The third operation of judgment can be undertaken only after a period of rest, or vacation from the subject. Here the acquisition of experience and those shifts in the center of emotional experience that come from growing older are capable of lighting up the work in a new way. Sometimes they make it appear nobler and more interesting; sometimes they show up shoddy material or poor workmanship; sometimes one can’t see why one ever bothered with the piece at all. As in reading old love letters or reviving an old quarrel, one’s former association is now an element to be dealt with. It involves one in loyalty or ruthlessness, in any case in lots of remembering. The music is no longer new and shining; nor has it been kept bright by continual use. It has acquired a patina that must be rubbed away before one can see the object as anything like its old self. Restudy and rehearing are necessary if a new judgment has to be made.

No judgment, of course, is ever final or permanent. At any stage of musical acquaintance action may become necessary; one may have undertaken to perform the work or to explain it to students or to describe it in public. For any of these purposes one must formulate some kind of judgment — if not about its value, at least about its nature.

This formulation can take place at any point. Reviewers describe new music from one hearing, as pedagogues criticize student compositions or performances from one reading. In nine cases out of ten this is sufficient for the purpose, and no injustice is done. Works of standard repertory are more often described after both hearing and study — that is to say, after the second phase of acquaintance, such acquaintance being easily available nowadays to all, though the press is not invariably so well prepared in standard repertory by score study as it might be, and many members of the teaching profession have not so broad a prepared repertory as might be desired for the answering of student questions and for exposing to the young all the kinds of music that there are. The press in general tends to express judgments of new work from hearing only, just as historians, especially those dealing with remote periods, are obliged to describe from score a great deal of music that they have never heard at all.

In order to make a fair judgment from only the first stage of acquaintance, either from hearing or from reading, everybody is obliged to have recourse to the aid of clues and clinical signs. The clinical signs of quality are (1) a certain strangeness in the musical texture, (2) the ability of a work to hold one’s attention, (3) one’s ability to remember it vividly, and (4) the presence of technical invention, such as novelty of rhythm, of contrapuntal, harmonic, melodic, or instrumental device. The pattern that a score makes on a page can be enticing, too, even before one starts to read it. In the matter of attention, it is not germane that one should be either delighted or annoyed. What counts is whether one is impelled to go on listening.

It is necessary to keep wary, too, and to examine one’s mind for possible failure to make the cardinal distinctions. These are: (1) design versus execution, or the piece itself as distinct from its presentation; (2) the expressive power of the work as distinguished from its formal musical interest; and (3) a convincing emotional effect versus a meretricious one. One must ask oneself always, “Have I heard a pretty piece or just some pretty playing?” “Have I been listening to sentiment or brilliance, counterpoint or profundity?” “Have I been moved or merely impressed?”

Study will provide answers to all these questions; but when one has to act quickly, one must assume that one’s first impression, so far as it goes, is a true view. In the case of successive contradictory impressions, the first, I think, tends to survive.

First one votes about a piece, spontaneously, sincerely, and more often than not, permanently. One adopts it or rejects it. Liking is not necessary for adoption, but one must be interested. In that case one can study the work further with profit. In the other case one forgets it. After study, one can forget it too, but not completely. In this case one can revisit it after a time. But at any time when the formulation of a judgment or opinion is found to be desirable, that formulation must be based on a description of the work. The techniques of musical description are: —

1. Stylistic identification, its period or school, as recognizable from internal evidence, from the technical procedures employed. These answer the question “What is it like?”

2. Expressive identification, its depiction of the cadences of speech, of bodily movements, or of feelings (that whole series of anxiety-and-relief patterns that constitutes emotional life). This decodifying is a more difficult operation but also a more important one, since one can, if necessary, neglect stylistic differences or even abstract them from the problem, whereas one cannot perform, communicate, or in any other way use a piece of music until one has found an answer, correct or incorrect, to the question “What is it about?”

3. The classical aids to memory. These are the known methods of melodic, harmonic, orchestral, and formal analysis. They are of little value without stylistic and expressive identification, but they help one to remember detail, provided one has first understood the whole. Analysis is an indispensable procedure, but the analysis of a given piece is valueless to anyone who does not have some previous knowledge of the work. That is why one must first, in describing a work, answer the questions “What is it like?” and “What is it about?” before attempting to answer “How does it go?”

4. The fourth procedure of musical description is verbal formulation. This is, of course, a literary rather than a musical problem; but no one escapes it, not the teachers, the conductors, or the stringquartet players any more than the historians or the journalists. In some of the musical branches it is easier than others. Vocalism is particularly hard to teach otherwise than by example, or to describe in any circumstance, because there is no standard vocabulary for the purpose. Instrumental terminology is richer, though most of this is borrowed from the language of painting. Composition is chiefly described in metaphor, though the stylistic and expressive identifications do have a scholastic terminology. That for styles follows the history of the visual arts except for the years between 1775, say, and 1810, where the visual artists discern a neo-classic period and the musicians a Classical one (with a capital C). The classification of subject matter as strophic, choric, or spastic is elementary; but the spastic division, which includes so much of our grander repertory, is incapable of further precision save through poetic allusion. The same is true of musical landscape painting. Here one must use similes; there is no other way.

You will note that I have said nothing about communicating one’s passion about a work. I have not mentioned it because it presents no problem; it takes place automatically and inevitably. What is most interesting about any musical judgment is the description and analysis on which it is based — or, if you like, since the judgment is likely to precede the analysis, by which it is defended. This is revelatory and stimulating. The fact that one man likes or does not like a given piece will influence nobody. The fact, that he considers that piece to be, shall we say, more like a newspaper editorial than a direct transcript of personal sentiments is, however, right, or wrong, convincing or foolish, worth following up, if only for refutation.

Nobody has to be right. Any opinion is legitimate to act on, provided one accepts in advance the responsibilities of that action. Any opinion is legitimate to express that can be stated in clear language. And any opinion at all is legitimate to hold. As I said before, it is not the yes or no of a judgment that is valuable to other people, though one’s original yes or no may have been itself the determinant of a whole lifetime’s activity. What other people get profit from following is that activity. That is why, just as an emotional reaction is more significant for its force than for its direction, a musical judgment is of value to others less for the conclusions reached than for the methods by which these have been, not even arrived at, but elaborated, defended, and expressed.

Here is the terrain where a man’s professional qualifications show up. The instinct for judging music is universal; acting on musical judgments is a privilege of the profession. The art of formulating musical judgments is chiefly the art of describing music. At this exercise it is desirable to be skillful and, as often as possible, convincing. But it is the skill that counts — the skill or gift, if you will, of understanding and explaining; at least of explaining that such and such is, for the present, one’s understanding of the matter.

The foregoing is, for the present, my understanding of the chief procedures involved in the formation of musical judgments. The formulation of these in clear language is another subject. That belongs to the English department. It cannot, however, with impunity be neglected by musicians, since poor verbal expression can become as expensive a habit as poor judgment. When young people ask one how to prepare themselves for musical criticism as a profession, the double reply is obligatory: “Study music and learn to write.”