Today, we are told, is an age of criticism. In painting, both friends and foes of the new tell us that what we see cannot be comprehended without our studying the critic’s notion of the art. In literature, the various flavors of structuralism and deconstruction have managed to replace the text with the exegesis. Across a wide spectrum of the arts, the whole situation curiously resembles the world of what used to be called haute cuisine: for every mouthful of the real thing, one must eat a thousand words.

In music, however, criticism does not quite occupy this exalted position. Here, paralleling the general torpor of a commercially entrenched and artistically routinized establishment, music criticism serves as the handmaiden of a celebrity-oriented audience, at its best applying academic musicology to the rationalizing of box-office success. Where critical writing is able to escape this state of elegant lackeydom, it soon finds itself boosting the new solely for the sake of its newness—even in situations where the critic himself is clearly aware of the ephemeral and trivial nature of that which he feels compelled to praise.

It was not always so. Back in the nineteenth century, when even intellectual journalism could be yellow, music critics saw themselves as passionate advocates of their own tastes, and equally passionate scourges of that which—at least according to their lights—dirtied the holy shrine of art. Of course, there were consequences attendant on this extravagant willingness to praise and damn: for every friend