Lilburn Lecture 2024: The music critic - an endangered species in Aotearoa New Zealand? - Elizabeth Kerr

Transcript

Lilburn Lecture 2024: Elizabeth Kerr Transcript

I’ll start tonight with a letter to the editor of The Evening Post from the 1970’s, complaining about an excoriating review of the opening night of a production of Britten’s community opera Noyes Fludde by a cast of children, with some professional musicians.

An outraged Wellingtonian wrote: “Sir, once again your music critic has unleashed an acid flood of comment with barely an olive leaf of commendation, let alone a branch. Certainly the sound system did mar the performance of Noyes Fludde, but this can be adjusted and the acoustics did not drown the tympani, and the children were not "undisciplined" in demeanour. A few more feathers would improve the dove's attire but her dance was certainly not vulgar and the critic overlooked entirely the very delightful dance of the raven. Enjoyable playing by the orchestra - just what is meant by a fifth column of recalcitrants? - was enhanced by some of the finest bugle playing heard in this city for a long time. Again, this was ignored by your critic.”

Slide 3 Owen Jensen

The critic was Owen Jensen, and he replied to the letter, doubling down: “If asking for the best is being acidulous, then pass me the acid drops. This Noyes Fludde was no occasion for olive branches. Having been involved in similar projects from time to time, I have learned to smell undiscipline, laziness and rebelliousness (the fifth column types) a mile off. It was this approach… that made the performance so appalling; and those who did pull their weight were, unfortunately, pulled under by those who didn't. Yes, the raven was charming, the bugling was efficient - and the dove was a problem.”

That was about 50 years ago and since then a lot has changed in Aotearoa, in music and in reviewing styles. The exchange tells us quite a lot about Owen Jensen’s style and intention as a critic. For a start, he considered everything grist to his reviewing mill, including amateur and professional, small ensembles and large orchestras, local schoolchildren and seasoned international stars. And he clearly interpreted the position of critic as ‘one who criticised’, with the intention of upholding high standards, which often occasioned letters to the editor like this one.

When Owen Jensen was my music teacher at secondary school, and a smoker of foul-smelling cigarillos, my fellow students and I didn’t know much about Owen’s ambitions and achievements before that. In 1941 he had founded the lively New Zealand music journal Music, Ho! He named it after a controversial, pessimistic tome predicting a bleak future for 20^th century concert music, written by feisty Englishman Constant Lambert, with the full name Music Ho! A Study of Music in Decline.  Owen’s Music Ho!, much more positive than its namesake, continued for a remarkable seven years, publishing articles on composers, performers, music publishing and criticism. Later in his life his popular and regular radio programme for RNZ was also called Music Ho!.

In 1946, from his position at the Auckland University Adult Education Centre, Owen started the famous Cambridge Summer Music Schools. He invited Lilburn to talk to the students, resulting in the memorable and now often quoted address ‘A search for tradition’.

Jensen began his long association with Wellington’s Evening Post as music critic in 1959.

He based his reviews on a lifetime working with music as practitioner, listener and colleague. He was knowledgeable, opinionated and a lively writer, and he was stimulating discussion about what makes a good programme and a good performance.

Critics, of course, have been reviled by some. Stravinsky was clearly no fan.

“I had another dream the other day about music critics,” he wrote once. “They were small and rodent-like with padlocked ears, as if they had stepped out of a painting by Goya.” 

My topic for this lecture is the place of music criticism and commentary in the musical ecosystem in this country. I've chosen words like "endangered" and "ecosystem" because our musical world is many-faceted, like our environment, with a lot of issues of cause and effect.

A few words about the man himself. Douglas Lilburn, seen here in a painting by Rita Angus,  was my teacher at Victoria University in 1967, my colleague there from 1977 till his retirement in 1980, and my friend till his death in 2001, aged 85.

I hope Douglas might approve of my topic – we know he was very aware that our musicians and composers need a national context, and in his famous and deeply thoughtful Cambridge talk that I’ve already mentioned, and his later lecture A search for a language, he addressed the issues of our culture, tradition and musical language with eloquence and some zeal.

There are many features of a healthy musical ecosystem, and Douglas was well aware of them. His establishment of both Waiteata Music Press and the Lilburn Trust show his commitment beyond composing his own music. Funding is needed to make the work possible, both composition and performance. We need ways to record, publish and broadcast the work of our composers and performers. And we need to keep a record of our past – as we head forward in any endeavour, it’s salutary to know where we’ve come from and what we’ve already explored. I’m aware, for instance, that this year, 2024, is the 50^th anniversary of the establishment of the invaluable Archive of New Zealand Music at the Turnbull Library, set up at the suggestion of Douglas Lilburn. 

Archive of New Zealand Music

There must also be ways to inform people about it all, and to place it in some kind of national and international context. There must be publications and platforms on which to champion it. Above all, there must be ways to make sure the music of our composers and the work of our performing musicians reaches an audience – the triangle of music involves creators, performers and audiences. If music is not heard, does it exist?

Douglas Lilburn and the critics

Douglas’s own first tertiary qualification was in journalism and he himself wrote some reviews of concerts for The Christchurch Press, sharing the role with Freddy Page. Reviews in those days were published anonymously, or at least unsigned. Douglas used language well, as we see from his letters and writings and from his now-famous “searching” talks, and in Christchurch as a young man he had close associations with writers through the so-called Caxton circle as well as with painters and other artists in what was a close-knit community.

That community also included those who reviewed his music - all his premieres received published reviews. Dorothea Turner, who wrote as D.F.T., once expressed a view that there could have been some bias in his favour, since his friends were eager for him to succeed. Partiality, or the perception of it, remains an issue for critics today, particularly in the small community of New Zealand where one is inevitably writing about one’s friends and colleagues.

The model for music criticism in the 20^th century in New Zealand came, like many other aspects of our classical music culture, from Britain. So did some of the critics, who were mostly male. Some were willing to “criticise” in strong language and reveal bias in the opposite direction to that favouritism Dorothea Turner was concerned about.

Some here may remember L.D. Austin. Louis Daly Austin was born in London in 1877, emigrated to New Zealand in adulthood and established what today we’d call a portfolio career, teaching, playing piano for silent films and conducting cinema orchestras. With the advent of the “talkies” he shifted to music journalism and wrote about music for nearly 40 years from 1929. He was also, in the words of music historian John Thomson, “an indefatigable writer of provocative letters to the editor.”

Austin was proudly parochial and Victorian, and his tastes were determinedly stuck in the 19^th century,  For him, Brahms was the last composer to write worthwhile chamber music, Chopin was the greatest composer of all time and contemporary composers were incapable of pleasing. As Thomson wrote, “although regarded by some as a ‘trenchant and provocative’ critic, Austin could more accurately be described as obsessionally retrogressive.”

Douglas Lilburn felt the lash of his pen many times. After attending a performance of Lilburn’s 1943 Sonata in C for violin and piano, Austin wrote vehemently: "Wild horses could never drag me to another example of such decomposition." He was, however, somehow persuaded to drag himself to the radio for the premiere broadcast of Douglas’s 1949  Sonata for piano, of which Austin wrote: "it sounded very much like two cats upon the keyboard, one at each end; and if they both gave birth to kittens during the broadcast, I should not be surprised". He then went on to damn the piece, played by Frederick Page, declaring  "There was not one single bar of genuine musical inspiration or the slightest sign of creative ability in this composition."

I’ll play you a little of the piece in question, played by pianist Jian Liu, a great champion for New Zealand music, who’s here tonight, and you can make up your own minds about Austin’s view.

A negative review from Austin, of course, could well have been seen as a badge of honour. There were, of course, other influential critics who looked much more favourably on Douglas’s music. Owen Jensen was one, and the other I’ll talk about tonight was Frederick Page, the pianist for that premiere scorned by Austin.

Fred Page

This portrait of Fred was painted by his wife, the esteemed painter Evelyn Page. I knew Freddy from 1965 when I became his student at Victoria University, sitting in Music 1 alongside my friend Lyell Cresswell. Freddy was a great character as professor of music, and I have many amusing memories of him  – of his contempt for recordings of music, in those days on vinyl LPs, which he would wipe carelessly with the corner of the chalk-dusty academic gown all lecturers wore, before playing us inevitably scratchy musical examples in class; and of his playing the very challenging four hands version of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring with Jenny McLeod, during which, whenever Fred felt himself getting into trouble, his foot would creep towards the comfort of the sustaining pedal  - at which point Jenny would viciously kick it away!

Freddy’s great strength as teacher and later critic was his advocacy for contemporary music, particularly that of the 20^th century European avant garde. He favoured Schoenberg and the mid-century composers he met and heard when he visited the famous Summer Music School at Darmstadt in Germany, but also – at least sometimes -  the work of New Zealand composers. He had a big influence on Lilburn’s life, having persuaded him to come to Wellington in the 1940’s to work in the brand new university Music Department headed by Freddy.

Freddy became music critic for the NZ Listener in 1975, when he was 69, writing a column on alternate weeks with first Gavin Saunders and then William Dart. He wrote the columns of concert review for eight years, till 1983, when he took what was intended to be a short leave after a health event, and died before his return. John Thomson contributed a chapter to Fred’s memoir, A Musician’s Journal, choosing the title “The Terror of the Listener.”

Caricature image of Fred

This caricature of Fred by Juliet Peter appeared on the cover of the Listener some decades before he became the magazine’s critic, but it captures the style of the man.

Writing about Fred, some people have used words like dilettante and gadfly. In a small society, his forthright expression of negative views made him some enemies, and he was indeed both inconsistent and unpredictable. During his time with the Listener, he became notorious for reviewing an imaginary concert programme that he wished he’d heard instead of the one that was actually played.

It was all part of his determined focus on repertoire, urging our major institutions like the national orchestra and chamber music society to turn away from favoured and conservative mostly English composers and be more adventurous and contemporary. One of his most used phrases in his columns was a slightly querulous “why could we not have had..?” followed by suggestions, almost invariably of 20^th century European works like Berio’s Sinfonia and Stockhausen’s Carré that might have challenged the audience.  New Zealand audiences were perhaps not quite ready for Fred’s tastes.

And when he didn’t enjoy a performance, he pulled no punches – when the famous Kontarsky brothers played a two-piano version of Reger’s Variations for Orchestra on a theme of Mozart, he was deeply disappointed by the composition. Reaching for watery images, like Owen Jensen before him, he described it as “a lumbering sea-elephant of a piece…one was drowned in a sea of notes. My guess is that many of the audience went down for a third time; I struggled and gave up. Hell for me will be the complete works of Max Reger played for ever and ever on FM quadrophonic sound, interspersed with Holst’s The Planets, in a no-exit room.” A Listener subeditor chose to illustrate that review with a picture of Reger and the caption “Hell is his complete works.”

Freddy had some blind spots, including electronic music and what we would call the experimental works of the mid-20^th century and beyond. “Utter bosh” he once said of some of the latter. He offended many, including Douglas at times, but his airy dismissal of music and performances he didn’t enjoy was always accompanied by a liveliness of spirit and a joyous delight in his own naughtiness. His energetic columns were essential reading for many of us.

I’ve used the word context a couple of times, but so far, I’ve been talking about music and criticism in New Zealand in the 20^th century, up to about the 1980’s. Maybe it’s time to speed up the narrative.

Our reviewing past was influenced by the approach to music criticism in Britain and Europe, as were our musical institutions and their programme curation. But Aotearoa New Zealand has undergone a period of rapid change in the past half century or so, as indeed has the whole world – and the impact of those changes on the music being created here and elsewhere is perhaps most notable for the enormously wide range of approach, influence and cultural reach.

Since Gillian Whitehead began collaborating with taonga pūoro musician Richard Nunns, many of our composers and musicians have begun exploring this remarkable new sound world, often in partnerships between tangata whenua and pakeha.

On the screen are Ariana Tikao and Al Fraser. Ariana is a singer and composer from Kai Tahu, and a player of taonga pūoro, and Al is a Pakeha musician and scholar, of Scottish heritage, who has spent many years researching traditional Māori instruments, and is also a skilled player. Their mahi is a current and fruitful example of a creative Māori/Pakeha partnership.

Globally, in many aspects of our lives, the pace of change accelerated in the late 20^th century and the arts, and music within the arts, also changed rapidly, embracing what we can now, with hindsight, understand more broadly as modernism, then post-modernism, alongside experimental practices of all kinds, electronic technology and ethnomusicology.

Now, in the 21^st century, in Aotearoa New Zealand, we’re working in a musical and cultural ecosystem that is, as is music around the world, most notable for its multiplicity.

Multiplicity

Our musical world here increasingly includes, matauranga Māori, Māori knowledge including the renaissance of te reo and taonga pūoro; it’s also operating in a global context where digitisation is front and centre; and music is an art form that, since the mid-20^th century, has valued and practised all kinds of boundary-crossing – cultural boundaries, art form boundaries, stylistic and genre boundaries and more.

And we’re promoting the arts to a multi-generational audience that has embraced the technological changes and made them part of their daily and hourly lives.  As the digital natives of Generation Z reach adulthood, those of us in the boomer generation had better keep up or fall out of society.

The music critic also needs to keep up with contemporary developments. An example is the growing popularity of a concept of “re-imagination”, creative presentation of the works of the past that bring a contemporary relevance to the art and enable us to see and hear it in new ways. It’s much more than just adding illustrative images to an existing work. At its best, this approach involves a complete re-thinking of the original art work, maintaining its artistic integrity while viewing the work through a contemporary lens. We’ve had some great recent examples in Aotearoa.

Slide 14 Voices NZ Mozart Reimagined

Voices New Zealand’s magical concert Mozart Reimagined: A Requiem is one of my recent favourites. 

The slopes of Mt Erebus in the Antarctic in 1979, where 257 people died in a tragic aircraft crash, seem very far from the Vienna of 1791 in which Mozart died, leaving his Requiem unfinished.

Composer Robert Wiremu's reimagined Requiem uses Mozart’s glorious and familiar music throughout, though not always in the order Mozart intended. Wiremu also uses highly imaginative instrumental and vocal timbres, depicting both the Antarctic scenes and the anguished emotions of the story.  

Direct use of Mozart’s music by Wiremu to tell this tragic story is culturally and musically audacious. It would be easy for it to become obvious and literal, or perhaps mawkishly sentimental. Making changes to the composition of a master like Mozart could seem presumptuous. Threading Māori concepts through the whole narrative might risk cultural dissonance.  

These pitfalls are avoided with great subtlety and imagination in this profoundly moving work of art, which held the audience’s hushed attention throughout.

Slide 15 (m)Orpheus

Other examples I’ve written about in recent years include (m)Orpheus, a reorchestrating of Gluck’s Baroque music by composer Gareth Farr combined with Siva Samoa (Samoan dance) and the choreography of Neil Ieremia of Black Grace Dance Company

So what is the role of the music critic in this ever-diversifying musical ecosystem?

As a critic I believe I have four potential and overlapping roles. 

Slide 16 CRITIC – REVIEWER – STORYTELLER – CHAMPION

In the role of critic, I should have opinions, positive and negative, and express these clearly. The critic of old was wont to express the negative opinions in colourful language, never mind the destructive impact. I’m more circumspect – an older critic once said to me “use a light touch for the negatives” - and I do. But I guess there’s an ethical issue too – really, a critic must say what they think - or choose to say nothing at all.

A reviewer is describing what happened, perhaps including some opinions and context but mostly maintaining a fairly neutral position. Sometimes reviewers add some information about the music that has been performed.

A storyteller seems to me a more interesting role – telling the story of the concert or performance, using descriptive and engaging language, perhaps including not only a lively story of the performance or composition but relating the audience reaction, be it hushed silence or standing ovation.

The champion is perhaps the riskiest position on what may be a continuum. As a champion, the music writer is taking the side of the performers or composers, “lifting them up”, encouraging the reader to think well of them, perhaps buy a ticket, or consider listening more willingly to their compositions in future.

Is this role overly partial? I’m well aware of what’s involved in creating, rehearsing, staging a performance, a new festival, a challenging contemporary work. A quick verbal demolition job, however entertaining to read, seems gratuitous and unnecessarily destructive. Conductor Willie Southgate said to me once, “if you prick us, we bleed”.

Without falsely praising where praise is not due, I’m inclined to occupy the right hand side of this continuum, emphasising the positive, using a light touch for the negative, encouraging rather than complaining.

Maybe it’s time for me to widen the lens for a moment and talk about what music criticism can do, and to some extent, what it has always done.

Slide 17 Music commentators and critics can (bullets arrive on click)

· add value to the audience experience by providing context, interpretation, opinion, information, explication and comparison
· we can point out and comment on sector and art form trends
· we can advocate for specific groups eg taonga pūoro musicians, women composers, emerging artists
· we may be able to influence programming choices through advocacy, for example, for NZ composers
· we can encourage audiences to attend events and concerts
· we may open doors to less mainstream areas of music eg contemporary music, new music, sonic arts
· sometimes we might contribute to professional development for performers and composers
· we should initiate or contribute to conversations about music and about sector issues. My most read story this year was called “We need to talk about chamber music” and I believe it did indeed contribute to an important sector conversation.

So, how did I get to a place where I’m talking about music criticism?

Slide 18 Photo of Third Stream

My own journey as a music critic began in the late 1960’s when as a university student I was asked to contribute a few concert reviews to the short-lived but ambitious music magazine Third Stream.

Later, after time away from Aotearoa, I did some casual reviewing for The Dominion newspaper – and have never forgotten the advice of the more experienced critic and composer Dorothy Freed, who also wrote for the Dom. “Remember,” she said, “you’re telling a story for the people who were not there.” I’ve discovered that in fact the people who were there are also very interested in one’s review – to confirm or argue with their reactions and to enable them to relive the concert from someone else’s perspective.

I also wrote quite a few articles over the years for Canzona, the magazine of the Composers’ Association and for William Dart’s splendid Music in New Zealand, founded in 1988, an invaluable source of interesting material that eventually ceased publication in 2002, as almost all music magazines in New Zealand have done. The economic realities of publishing such journals have sadly caught up with most.

Slide 19 NZ Listener

Soon after Freddy Page retired from his Listener column, I took it over, in 1983, and wrote fortnightly, sharing with William Dart week about, for six years. Towards the end of that time Ian Dando joined us for a Christchurch perspective.  Our column was called Concert, was allocated 800 words, and I could choose what to write about – reviewing one concert a column or more if I liked. I could also explore relevant issues around what was happening in the concert halls of the country. Typed copy had to be hand-delivered to the Listener office on Tuesday mornings.

Those years with the Listener in the 1980’s were my first substantial reviewing gig, undertaken while I was lecturing at what is now the New Zealand School of Music, and very enjoyable, even when the word limit eventually shrank from 800 to 600 words per column.  Like Freddy Page before me I often championed the music of our own time, and a letter to the Listener editor during the 80’s, channelling L D Austin perhaps, took exception to my suggesting it would be good for audiences to hear that music, accusing me of “totalitarian intellectual arrogance”. I considered getting the phrase printed on a lapel badge.

Ethical issues for critics include direct conflicts of interest, and it was these that caused me to stop writing for the Listener in 1989, and take more than two decades away from such commentary. I was busy in arts management roles, and also governance, roles meaning I would have had all kinds of conflicts as a critic.

In 2012, having retired from full time arts management, I returned to writing for the Listener and reviewing concerts for RNZ Concert’s now-abandoned Upbeat programme. By then, the Listener no longer published reviews of concerts that had already happened - the focus was, as it remains, on previewing upcoming events with the occasional album review. I wrote a lot of artist profiles, and had some wonderful conversations with some big international names like David Harrington of Kronos Quartet, violinist Hilary Hahn, composer Tan Dun, cellist Colin Carr, Roland Peelman, then of the Australian Song Company and lots and lots of New Zealand composers and musicians.

And then, leaping forward, it was 2020, a watershed year for the world and - for some of the same, and some different, reasons -  for my on-going journey as a music critic.

Slide 20: RNZ Concert

First, in early February 2020, came an existential threat to RNZ Concert which led to the campaign “Save RNZ Concert”. My first move when the RNZ management plan to eviscerate Concert became public was to contact my editor at the Listener and urge them to undertake some investigative journalism about RNZ’s short-sighted and destructive plan. I offered to write it, but we agreed that I was too close to the story as a former manager of Concert, and so The Listener undertook its own investigation, talking to Helen Clark and others as wonderful advocates for the network, and I was contracted to contribute an opinion piece alongside the main story. My subsequent involvement in the almost three-years-long campaign that successfully ensured that Concert is still part of RNZ’s offering is another story – but it demonstrated the efficacy of having a platform through which one could express an opinion.

Then, still in 2020, on 25 March New Zealand locked down to protect the populace against COVID 19. That first lockdown lasted almost 2 months, till 13 May.

On April 2, Bauer Media, an Australian-based company that owned the Listener, as well as Women’s Weekly, Metro, North and South and other magazines, announced it was ceasing publication because the lockdown had rendered these unviable, perhaps in view of their dependence on advertising revenue, but also because the government had ruled that supermarkets could remain open but could not sell magazines.

I believe a healthy art form needs to include critical discourse. So, there I was, locked down, with time to write and no-one and nowhere obvious to publish my work. 2020 was Beethoven’s 250th birthday and I already had an article or two underway for that, plus other pieces in the pipeline. And May was going to be, as usual, NZ Music Month. So, having considered starting a website before, my hand was forced. I enlisted my son Ollie Campbell, a designer and web developer, who lives in Melbourne and was also locked down, and we had several Zoom sessions whereby he provided the expert technical help I needed to set up my website Five Lines.

Slide 21 Five Lines

I started loading content, including a few older articles that were still relevant, and eventually, by May, I was ready to launch. I emailed people I knew who might be interested and invited them to subscribe.

Slide 22 Rolling page of Five Lines stories

Slide 23 Happy birthday, Ludwig!

I had at that stage about 10 stories on the site, and by May 14, I had 89 subscribers. I sent them my first subscriber email with two new stories, a profile of American director Peter Sellars who had visited New Zealand for festival performances that year, and a review of a livestreamed NZSO Shed concert that I experienced at home.

Slide 24: Image of Shed review

Side 25 An Articles page showing several stories 

Now, Five Lines in into its fifth year and there are over 185 illustrated stories on the site, including artist profiles, previews and reviews of concerts, operas and albums, and opinion pieces on issues relevant to the music sector. As well as Save RNZ Concert, I’ve participated, by writing, in the campaign to save the breadth of offering of the NZ School of Music and earlier this year I wrote the opinion piece I mentioned, attempting to save Chamber Music New Zealand from itself.

When I set up the site my son cautioned against having high expectations of visitation. “Most special interest sites like this, Mum, he said “attract just a few readers in the first year, and it will grow after that.” In the remaining 8 months of 2020, 4 ½  thousand unique visitors came to the site, which received 8 thousand page views from 48 countries. People around the world seem to be interested in what’s happening on our stages. My most popular story that year was a profile of NZSO conductor Gemma New, called “On the podium in a pandemic”.

Five Lines now averages over 24,000 page views annually, and over 13,000 unique visitors per year. Traffic to the site is driven by regular emails to subscribers, but also by social media and by artists, organisations and subscribers sharing the stories with their networks.

Slide 26 Visitors to Five Lines by location graph

Visitors to the site are predominantly from Aotearoa New Zealand (almost ¾ of visitors) but there are also thousands of visitors annually from overseas, including Europe, the United States, Australia, the United Kingdom, Asia and elsewhere. The largest number of subscribers and visitors are New Zealanders, unsurprisingly, because of the content, but this year so far there have been visitors from 85 countries.

And it all keeps growing – 2024 page views are currently up 15% on last year and unique visitors 13%.

I’m writing mostly about classical or cross-over music in Aotearoa New Zealand, our performers and composers, about what’s happening here. If I write about artists who live elsewhere like the Brodsky Quartet with William Barton, or English composer Jonathan Dove or the Van Diemen’s Band from Australia, it’s because they’re performing here, or someone here is performing their work. Or they’re Kiwi ex-pats. Or they’re from elsewhere but live here now.

Slide 27: Image of Five Lines logo on screen and the url to subscribe

The content is available free, because I want it to be read. And when people come up to me at concerts and say “I subscribe to Five Lines” or “I enjoy reading your stuff” I’m very chuffed – it’s a vote in support of what I do. And many subscribers now email me or put comments under the stories, so I’m enjoying an on-going conversation.

The Listener returned to publication in September 2020 and invited me to write a weekly column, at first about things people could experience at home, on line or on radio. It was called Classical Home Listening. I wrote that short weekly column as well as Five Lines, and occasionally republished my Listener stories on my site, but after two years of doing both I decided to focus my energies on Five Lines.

Some of my subscribers are here tonight and I thank you for your support. And if you’re not a subscriber, please do join the Five Lines community.

Now, back to that ecosystem in which I do this work. In the last couple of years Creative New Zealand Toi Aotearoa undertook a benchmark research project to explore arts and culture media coverage, reporting and artist portrayal in New Zealand media over the twelve months between July 2021 and June 2022.

Slide 28 Visibility Matters

They did so because they perceived (and I quote) “a deterioration of arts media coverage, with both the media and cultural sectors increasingly under-resourced and under strain. This has not only led to fewer people covering arts and culture stories, but fewer people in our cultural sectors ensuring these stories are visible.”

CNZ’s researchers looked at traditional media content, in print, on line and broadcast. They called the project Visibility Matters, based on their belief that the media is an important bridge between artists and the public.

Slide 25 New Zealand Media coverage Pie chart on screen

In broad terms, they found that 13% of total media coverage over the period was related to arts and culture, (the red and orange slices combined) but that 75% of that was coverage of television, film and pop music, that is, pop culture and entertainment (the red slice).

Beyond that popular culture coverage, just 3.25% (the little orange slice at the top) was related to all the other arts, cultural and heritage activities. So, just 3.25% of all media coverage was about visual arts, performing arts, craft and object, poetry and literature, multimedia, Māori arts and Pacific arts. Classical music was a sliver within that orange 3.25%. For comparison, about one quarter of all media coverage in New Zealand was focused on sport over the same reference period (the green slice).

CNZ’s report is talking about all media coverage, not just critical writing and reviews. Criticism, and music criticism within that, is a vanishingly small percentage of media coverage. RNZ Concert no longer has a reviewing slot, for instance, and The Listener no longer reviews concerts, offering previews written from a journalistic rather than critical perspective. It allocates four to six pages a week to popular music coverage but considerably less that one page to the column now called Classical. Occasionally it publishes a “classical” album review. Books reviews, on the other hand, are still allocated many pages weekly.

Daily newspapers mostly review only events in large venues with large audiences – orchestral concerts, operas, etc. Smaller events, including chamber music, choral concerts, recitals and so on seldom rate a mention in daily newspapers, with some smaller cities like Dunedin the exception. Steve Garden of Rattle Records, an invaluable record label producing albums of classical and crossover music from our performers and composers, tells me I am almost the only writer reviewing albums, and SOUNZ, Centre for NZ Music, confirms that this is also the case with respect to reviews of the recorded work of our composers.

Owen Jensen’s scrapbooks (stored in this library) show that 50 or 60 years ago his reviews of all kinds of Wellington musical performances appeared several times a week and were allocated a decent number of column inches. Further, now some publications no longer pay fees for reviews, assuming “exposure” and free tickets to the concert (provided by presenters) is sufficient recompense. The result is the rise of the hobbyist critic, often someone who would normally be an interested audience member, sadly sometimes without sufficient professional musical background to write about the professionals on stage with credible authority.

The Spinoff, amongst independent media, features in the Creative NZ report as a platform that takes arts and culture seriously. I greatly admire The Spinoff and have been a member for many years, especially enjoying their very comprehensive book coverage, but they have obviously made an editorial decision to mostly avoid classical music and some other artforms as well. Their culture section is called, in bold letters, POP CULTURE. They have published some artist profiles and other arts stories recently, including of composer Victoria Kelly and musician and poet Cadence Chung – these have been commissioned by Creative NZ.

There’s no doubt that music criticism and reviewing of the kind I’ve been talking about is of declining interest to editors. Is it of declining interest to readers? Or just to readers of a certain demographic, maybe those identified as of interest to advertisers? Is this a cultural or commercial decision?

One unfortunate consequence of the declining critical coverage is the absence of platforms on which younger critics can publish their work and develop their craft. When I began writing music reviews many decades ago, I could write, at least occasionally, for a daily newspaper or one of several other print journals. Now, available publications for such work have shrunk almost out of sight.

So, I come back to my initial question: Is the music critic an endangered species in Aotearoa New Zealand? And I’ll add another - if so, what are the solutions?

Slide 30  If the music critic is an endangered species, what are the solutions?

Before we get either too glum or too cynically philosophical about all of this, I have a few suggestions.

• Shining a light on the endangered species!

When rescuing an endangered species, environmentalists first identify the problem and then shine a light on that species. Creative New Zealand has to some extent done both of these things through their recent research and reports. I’m doing it too in a small way tonight.

I believe critics and critical discourse can play a positive role in all artforms. Let’s have the discussion more broadly – and keep it going - and work it out as a sector and its audience.

• Creative New Zealand plans to “strengthen our criticism and reviewing culture”

In its New Mirrors report, a response to the Visibility Matters research, Creative New Zealand itself plans to do something about “strengthening our criticism and reviewing culture”. It is also talking about setting up a dedicated fund for arts and culture media projects, although its own overall funding has not increased and their timeframe is a little unclear.

Creative New Zealand’s reports acknowledge that both the arts and media sectors are under pressure and under-resourced. They recently set up a dedicated cross-agency programme for arts and culture podcasts – the first round, which may be the only round for a few years, closed a couple of months ago and they expect to allocate the $250,000 putea to about 4 of the over 200 applicants. Projects will also get production and development support from the partnership agencies involved, which include RNZ and NZ on Air.

Now, with a benchmark study, CNZ also hopes to repeat the Visibility Matters research over time, budget willing, and will continue to work to raise the profile of the issue with other funders, and encourage media to increase their arts and culture coverage. 

• Media outlets make opportunities for intern reviewers

I’m also, through Five Lines, taking preliminary and independent action by working to employ guest reviewers from a younger generation of musically well-qualified writers. And I’ve applied to Creative New Zealand for some funding support for an “intern” initiative from next year – with my fingers crossed, knowing the pressure their funds are under. 

• Tertiary institutions develop skills in music criticism and communication

We might need some other institutional support to address this issue. Perhaps our universities can acknowledge that their senior music students and recent graduates could usefully add music criticism to their portfolio careers, and find ways within their courses for them to develop their skills. Universities have been teaching “science communication” for some time – perhaps we need a generation skilled in “music communication”?

• Professional development opportunities for would-be reviewers

Perhaps there are musically knowledgeable people with good ears in our concert audiences who would like to write about music as commentator or critic? In the late 1980’s I participated as one of several tutors in a continuing education course at Victoria University called The Attentive Ear, on many aspects of music criticism. I recall Creative New Zealand, when I worked there, organising a seminar for critics a couple of decades ago. Might our larger music organisations collaborate to organise something similar? 
 

• Audience members and organisations lobby media organisations
   

And maybe both audience members and music organisations need to let the editors of newspapers, websites and other online publications and broadcast media know that they’d like to read or listen to more music criticism alongside the other arts stories featured?

My last example tonight is an excerpt from Papatuānuku by Salina Fisher and Jerome Poutama Kavanagh, premiered last year by the Auckland Philharmonia.

Slide 31/2: Papatuānuku by Salina Fisher and Jerome Poutama Kavanagh

Auckland Philharmonia 2023

I’m sorry Douglas Lilburn isn’t here to hear what our composers and performers are creating in Aotearoa New Zealand in the 21st century. I think the man who delivered his “search for a language” lecture would be moved and delighted by the way music in Aotearoa is not just a single “language of our own” but two cultures in marvellous musical conversation, as it is in this work.  Music like this is our unique part of the global zeitgeist, crossing musical boundaries and reimagining both the past and the future.

I see classical music in the 21^st century as a generous and outward-looking art form, with arms wide enough to embrace all kinds of styles and cultures and performance practices and share the results from stages to audiences. It’s not about saying pop music can be called chamber music now. It’s about acknowledging the whole history of classical music and allowing it to be present in all the music we hear – while finding a completely contemporary musical language that communicates who we are now. It’s not easy to pull all the threads together but many of our creative practitioners are doing that successfully. And we the audience and we the critics have to be there to appreciate and champion that mahi, and the results we hear and experience.

I think there’s a very important role today for the music critic in communicating about our contemporary music and performance to audiences and to musicians and to organisations presenting music.

Slide 32: The music critic: a bridge between creative practitioners and audience in 21^st century Aotearoa New Zealand

There’s perhaps an even greater need for the music critic now in our current ecosystem – western art music is changing rapidly and the critic should not be a peripheral, criticising figure but a bridge between the creative artist and the audience, seeking to understand the creators and turning that understanding into words and ideas that enlighten and offer insights to the audience. 

As CNZ says in its recent New Mirrors report: There is a clear relationship between strong arts and culture media coverage and a thriving creative sector. The media acts as a crucial bridge between artists and the public — giving artists a platform to amplify their stories.  - Creative New Zealand’s New Mirrors Report 2023

It’s my hope that the music critic maintains a significant role as part of that bridge.