CMT: Diminishing diversity of news coverage perspective has gone hand-in-hand with reducing the number of newspapers per city, usually to one. With broadcast TV, the variety of channels is superficial and misleading when it comes to news coverage. We're sort of marooned on a sea of mass-media, and there's relatively little fresh-water arts coverage to drink. What kinds of studies, if any, have attempted to look at these trends and their impact on chamber music or on classical music in general?
DSM: This is as good a time as any to wonder at the “rationing” of newspaper coverage of classical and pop music, or broader entertainment and media coverage. Some lucky cities seem to be in good shape, with generous and diverse coverage of all genres. Other cities are not so fortunate. While there is much that I can appreciate in each genre, it seems to me that there is not much in common between Pop and Classical music, nor is it likely that a writer or critic whose affinities and experience are predominantly with one genre will be a good match for covering others. The approach to tonality, to rhythm and meter, to the creation of meaning - is dramatically different in classical music than in pop music. Writing about one of the genres requires a deep understanding of the material, how it is performed, and the lore and history of it. And it's hard for any one writer to adequately grasp all of those features and differences -- for one genre, let alone several of them.
So it might be an advantage for a paper to engage many more freelance writers than they do now (to cover the various genres), rather than hope for any increase in full-time staff assigned to classical music. And it’s a disadvantage that so many dailies assign their local critic(s) to write reviews of mass-market media like movies and CDs. It might be better if they instead bought syndicated reviews of those mass-market products, and conserved their few local resources for reviewing performances or products that are done locally. This would help to insure that the local culture for classical music and chamber music stays vibrant and thriving.
The National Arts Journalism Program at Columbia University has been examining the trends in classical music reporting, including chamber music criticism, for some time. Their recent reports are freely available here:
You might also like to have a look at:
- ArtsJournal symposium on arts criticism in newspapers (2005)
- Music Critics' Assoc of North America 2005 Survey [3 MB pdf]
- Columbia - NEA Institute on Classical Music Journalism
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