"A QUESTION OF MUSIC CRITICISM" a talk by Bryce Morrison at our January meeting

Bryce Morrison is best known as a music critic and broadcaster.  But he is also a pianist, teacher, and adjudicator of piano competitions.  In the course of this multi-faceted career he has met a great many well-known people, a generous selection of whom he mentioned in the autobiographical conclusion of his talk, which focussed finally on his friendship with two pianists, the late Eileen Joyce, whose performance legacy he is intent on preserving, and Alfred Brendel, despite the latter’s acerbic opinion of composers whom Mr Morrison admires such as Mendelssohn, Fauré , Grieg (“music for chambermaids”) and Rachmaninov.

For Mr Morrison, who detests the expression “classical music”, and claims to dislike musical snobbery (a dig perhaps at his friend Brendel?), “music is about everything”, and he began his talk by citing Mendelssohn’s view that “music isn’t too vague for language; it’s too precise”.  Hence there will always be a question about music criticism. Members of an audience may well express their views about a concert they’ve just heard, for or against, but ephemerally.  Critics on the other hand publish their views, and thus expose themselves to criticism of their criticism, with subjectivity difficult to avoid.

Many writers and musicians, including Iris Murdoch, John Fowles, Sibelius and Noel Coward, saw no point in criticism, while others, including D H Lawrence, T S Eliot and Dr Johnson, regarded it as indispensable, if elusive, with music criticism, in Mr Morrison’s view, the most elusive of all.  He suggests that critics should themselves be performers and should avoid criticising works that they themselves have never performed (conditions that could surely rule out much of the critical fraternity, as well as discussion of premieres?).  Music, he believes, is for ever as new as it was when it was composed; thus lofty denigration of “old hat” composers is merely snobbish and consequently worthless.

A good critic is knowledgeable, committed, enthusiastic, able to write well, with talent and understanding, and a desire to point people in the right direction rather than merely to score points.  Many pianists, obsessed with their own genius or technique, find it hard to be objective.  But there have been exceptions, all of them excellent critics, including Schumann, Barenboim, Debussy and even Liszt – and presumably Bryce Morrison, though he was modest enough not to point this out. 

Richard Thomas