[ applause ] Tim Page: Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you all so much for coming tonight. It feels very strange to be on this side of the stage. I have so many memories of the Coolidge Auditorium. I think I came here first in 1987 when they found those Gershwin scores out of the blue that had been locked in a warehouse in Secaucus, New Jersey for all these years. And I can still remember that evening, and still probably hum a couple of the tunes. So it's great to be here on a stage where so much musical history has been made, and I'm humbled and I'm honored. I'm talking tonight about writing about music in a time of change. We have a nice, small crowd here tonight, so we'll be able to open up the floor whenever you would like, after I get a few things out of the way, and we can talk about anything that might be on your mind. But it's a very interesting time. I was thinking a little bit about how much things have changed in Washington, even in the 11 years I have been writing here. But one thing is for certain, the Library of Congress has always been a place to hear wonderful chamber music, Bela Bartok has been on the stage, the Juilliard String Quartet, Nathan Milstein and too many musicians to recount right now. Richard Wagner decreed that his final opera, "Parsifal," should be staged only at the Bayreuth Festival that he had founded in 1876 for the presentation of his music theatre works. It was only one of the most grandiose examples from a lifetime consecrated to egomania, and it meant that for a full two decades after the composer's death, until New York's Metropolitan Opera broke copyright in 1903, if you wanted to hear and see "Parsifal," it was necessary for you to travel to a small Bavarian village; no overnight plane trips then. And then once you got to the village, with luck you might be able to obtain admission to the legendary and legendarily cramped Festspielhaus for what would almost certainly prove a once-in-a-lifetime performance. And yet they came, mile after mile, year after year, the hungry, the curious, the faithful. Can we still imagine what it must have been like to be among those first audiences finally arrived at Bayreuth, only to set off on another kind of journey as the wandering and prayerful opening passages, the "Parsifal" overture, shimmered from the strings, drawing listeners inexorably into the music drama; form from nothingness, sound from silence, as singers, orchestra and audience united into a group of pilgrims on a mutual quest for Parsifal. Everything has changed. Today it's possible to make a toll-free call, or to sign onto the computer and have a dozen recordings of "Parsifal" delivered to your door within 24 hours to listen to again and again; all to the good. But are we listening? More to the point, is this suffusion of information affecting our very ability to follow? We live in a time of such overstimulation; a time when distraction has become so rampant, in which we are exposed to so many extraneous interruptions, that we are forced to muster a conscious fight to follow a sustained thought, let alone a long and demanding work of art. This became increasingly clear to me within the last dozen years, as Amtrak was lost to the cell phone. What had long been one of the last places in the world where you could be alone with your thoughts, where you could actually settle down with a book and watch the cities go by was suddenly just another place for bartering and selling, as the mosquito-like buzz of the phone began to interrupt every few moments, after which a loud and one-sided conversation would begin. Now, cell phone manners have improved enormously since the 1990s, and I confess that I now have one of those dreaded contraptions myself. But when you add in the other aspects of early 21st century communication -- the ubiquitous e-mail from strangers, corporations and every now and then an actual friend, the call waiting feature on our telephones, the radio that follows us on the street and in taxicabs, the television, the Internet, digital videos and the sheer overstimulation of living in a large city -- is it any wonder that we sometimes wander about as dazed and confused as if flashbulbs were going off perpetually before our eyes? It's said that the average American now watches seven hours of television every day. That's not quite correct. People aren't really watching most of the time, not even much of the time; the TV is simply on. Indeed, I have friends who are now incapable of following even a half hour program through from start to finish. Instead they must ride the remote control -- a little of this, a little of that -- anything to fill up the time, anything, it seems, to keep from concentrated thought. Which makes one wonder what it is exactly that we're afraid of thinking about, and why are we so uncomfortable with our own company? We all know what it's like to call a large company, and then be immediately put on hold with the assurance that our call is very important to them. Lately, however, this charade has gotten more sinister. Now the custom is to intersperse speech with music so that we might hear a snatch of the "Pachelbel Canon," followed by another taped assurance of our incredible value to the company, followed again, immediately and grotesquely by a snippet from the Mozart "40th Symphony," or Miles Davis' rendition of "Porgy and Bess." We tune in. We tune out. We tune in and out again, and our senses are slowly deadened as we bounce back and forth between stimuli. In the last few decades, the sort of concentration that audiences used to bring to any concert, let alone a never to be repeated experience with "Parsifal," Richard Wagner's last opera, has all but evaporated. It is a remarkably challenging time to write about the arts. How do we hold our readers, our listeners, our Internet audience's attention? Do we start to speak in aphorisms? Are we merely service organizations? Sometimes I pick up a newspaper and look at the movie ads, and all that I see on three or four pages in a row is three words with an exclamation point, "two thumbs up!" with perhaps a few additional comments from other papers down below. Imagine that; an Asian domestic drama, a modern screwball comedy, a setting of a legendary play or novel, a documentary, and all the readers seem to want to know is whether the thumbs are up or are they down. It's probably a dying field, writing about music these days. There are probably only about 25 of us in the whole United States who make a full living working as music critics. In a lot of cities they hire somebody from the university, or they have what they call a culture critic; somebody who will go to the ballet and go to the occasional classical event that they think that readers want to know about. Twenty years ago the Washington Post had two classical music critics on staff full time; we're down to one. When I was at the New York Times in the early '80s, we had something like seven or eight classical writers; they're down to three. The Boston Globe has one writer. The LA Times has one writer. The Chicago Tribune has one writer. It's changed considerably, and I don't know what I would say to somebody who was asking me about what to do in a career writing about the arts. And yet, I maintain there has never been such an exciting time to be in arts journalism. To begin with, everything has opened up enormously. As James Joyce put it in Finnegan's Wake, three-quarters of a century ago, "Here comes everybody." Look back 25 years at the stratification that we found in our media and what we heard in the arts. There were three or four major television networks, the hit records all came out of the same corporate organizations. If you wanted to publish your book, you had to go through a few big houses that increasingly cared very little for anything that wasn't going to be a big, mega best-seller. The number of magazines and newspapers were shrinking, and there was almost no place to break into the business. Now, I'm not Pollyannaish enough to suggest that everything is perfect today; far from it. But we now have any number of television networks, with more of them added every month. We have seen the rise of the small, selective boutique label in classical music. We can publish our own books. We can bring out our own CDs. The Metropolitan Opera, very soon, is going to be able to sell you a CD performance of what you've just heard in the auditorium. It's also coming to movie theatres; you're going to be able to actually buy a ticket and go and watch the Met in Arlington and in Alexandria. And I think that's really quite thrilling. Anybody can start a blog and say to the world whatever it seems necessary to say, without just writing for one's diary anymore. We're now able to type in a Web address and get any kind of radio recording, news program or political opinion that we want in the office, at home and before long, in the car as well. With this information, of course, comes a vast explosion of stimuli. Some of you here will remember setting your alarm clocks in the '70s or early '80s in order to wake up at 2:30 a.m. to see a film that you had always wanted to see, and was never shown. Since the advent, first of videotape and then DVD, it's now possible to own most of those films. We no longer need rummage through every secondhand bookstore in every town we visit in order to find the rare volumes we have wanted to read; they are available to us online. These days you can sometimes just download them. We know infinitely more about Bach than Beethoven did, and more about Beethoven than Muller did. We can teach ourselves all about the silent film or Hong Kong cinema through Netflix. We can call up superbly detailed images of paintings and drawings throughout the world. We can listen to aguinaldos and folk music from Venezuela; the marvelous and eerily beautiful music of the Mbuti pygmy tribes from Africa, the great early jazz of Fats Waller and Bix Beiderbecke. In a gigantic Metropolitan area such as the Washington, Baltimore area, with some 18 million people, multiculturalism is not so much a theory as an established fact. What remains for us is to take in and begin to explain and explore the richness that surrounds us. I don't think it's so much that tradition is being lost, but rather that many different traditions are now vying for our attention, and so I do believe in critical pluralism and heterodoxy. It was said long ago by the critic George G. Nathan that there were only two kinds of criticism; subjective criticism and bad criticism. I am not so interested in whether a young critic tells me something is good or bad, as I am in the way that he or she came to that conclusion. Description is the key; the personal, passionate and magical evocation of a work of art that helps explain it, contextualize it or otherwise bring it to life. I have been teaching music criticism at a number of schools -- at the Manhattan School, at Juilliard, and most recently at Peabody Conservatory -- and I use the opening day exercise to, metaphorically speaking, throw my students into the pool and make them swim as critics immediately. I play a recording of a piece that's likely to be somewhat unfamiliar and difficult to place -- maybe something like the second movement of Jean Sibelius's "4th Symphony," or the interlude from Vaughan Williams' "Sinfonia Antarctica," and then I ask the class to write a brief essay about what they have just heard. I hear some groaning about what an impossible thing this is, and how can I be so unfair, and how can I ask them to write in 10 minutes about what they have heard, but they sit down and they eventually give me something; you know, maybe 400 or 500 words. I collect the paper. After that, I play the music again. This time I name the piece that the class is listening to, and I mention the name of the composer. I then play the piece, the class has another 10 minutes to write an exercise, and then I collect the papers again. Finally, I go out there before the piece is played, I tell them everything that they want to know about the piece, I tell them all about the piece and the composer's life and what part of his career it came from, and what the critics thought at the same time. I play the piece one more time and I ask them to write me one more essay, and then I collect them. Does anyone want to guess which essay is almost always the best? The first. Almost always. There's that initial untutored and brave and honest response to the music which is original and perceptive. The moment I tell the class that it has been listening to Sibelius, I start getting phrases such as "The austere Finnish master shakes his fist at the sky," and then the third time they basically recite whatever program notes I have given them before. They seem to be much more secure parroting what they think it is that I want than they are with venturing any opinions of their own. Now, don't misunderstand me. I'm not at all suggesting that a critic should be some kind of know-nothing savant; somebody who is protected from research and information. The ideal is to balance an intimate and profound knowledge of the score with an eternal capacity to be surprised. A good critic can listen to, say, the Sibelius "4th Symphony," know it by heart, know all about its history, all about the opinions it has provoked, and still reflect anew and come up with some fresh conclusions. But first we have to learn to trust our ears. An exercise of this sort can be adapted to many different disciplines; a scene from a film, an unknown painting, a chapter from a novel. What I like to hope that my students take away from my classes is an independence of thought, a willingness to commit occasional heresies, an openness to a world that is much less fixed and static than it has ever been, and a keen interest in telling us all about it. In many ways, if the term has not been too debased, I would call myself profoundly conservative, and I venerate the classical canon. But in no way do I believe that the final word is in yet. Once a work, heralded as a masterpiece, ceases to be interesting, it seems to me that it may no longer be a masterpiece at all, but something stuffed and mounted rather than alive and blooming. And if we are ranking classics, I'll trade you any number of pompous and overblown 19th century symphonies I can think of for a few of these simple, three-minute and utterly perfect rock singles from the '60s. It's hard to say what really makes a music critic, and one of the things that I think is very important about it is that any critic quickly learns that the blithe and dismissive "Joe Jones played Mozart last night, and Mozart lost" type of reviews are really not very interesting. They're basically just saying something negative; coming up with some kind of glib, cheap shot. It's much more difficult to write about something that is beautiful and profound and has touched you to your soul. But even harder than that are the concerts which are neither necessarily spectacular, nor something to be sneered at. I'm thinking now of, say, a Vivaldi or a Telemann chamber concert in the basement of a church. Now, it's likely that the people who are playing there are playing there because they really want to play there; they're certainly not going to be making a lot of money. It will be attracting a lot of people from the neighborhood; it will be something that adds to the culture of that neighborhood. And so there's no reason to get very upset about it, or to bring down the gigantic boot stomp of a major newspaper on it. On the other hand, you don't want to make it sound as though it's the most extraordinary thing you have ever heard, because it probably won't be. So the way I can tell when somebody is a really first-class critic is when they can give me something in a middle voice; somebody who can write a mixed review, a positive but not profoundly ecstatic review of something that deserves to exist, something that is quite important, but there's no faking with the audience, there's no pretending that it's been something which absolutely changed the world. If you can write me 800 words about a Telemann concert in the basement of a church, I know that you are a real critic if you keep my interest, because those are the hardest to write. What really makes a music critic? It sometimes seems that there are many rules, and at the same time no rules whatsoever. I think the first two duties are so obvious they barely need to be mentioned; a critic should know something about music, and a critic should know how to write. You cannot have one without the other, although it sometimes seems to me that critics try to prove otherwise. Beyond this beginning the rules are less clear. I do believe that the critic owes a performer a certain respect, because almost everybody, particularly in this business, is here because of a love; a calling, if you like. There's not the same possibility of a quick, fast buck that we find in so many of the other arts. That's one reason why I believe that in general the sort of barbed slash and run criticism that we find in some movie, theatre, television and commercial music reviews doesn't necessarily have the same place in what we do. It seems to me that if you're covering something that's purely commercial, something that was just done to bring people in and to make a lot of money, that it's very different from reviewing some poor, scared young debutante on stage at the Levine School. It's all a question of degree. You can say anything you want, but it should be said differently for different situations. There's no reason to break the spirit of a young artist in print. If something has been terrible, there are ways of getting that across without mockery or condescension; without making a liar of yourself, but also without being unnecessarily cruel. Reading criticisms of the past also teaches us there's no need to champion one single cause or esthetic. The attempts to prove Wagner or Brahms the more important composer, or Toscanini or Furtwangler the better conductor now seem trivial in retrospect. The four of them, all of them great musicians, approached their craft in different ways. Likewise, I do not believe that Elliott Carter and Steve Reich and Stephen Sondheim and Meredith Monk, radically dissimilar creators, need do esthetic battle with each other. They have chosen divergent paths, each of which may have merit. It is a 19th century conceit to envision the history of art as one irrevocable vortex behind one inevitable vanguard; I believe we should welcome the variety of musics available to us. At the very least, we should be able to attempt to understand before rushing to judgment. One thing I decided from the very start when I was writing about music criticism -- and I've now been at this since 1978, so it's a little while -- was that I wanted to bring some of the energy and the excitement that I found in a great deal of pop music criticism to the classical world. And I felt that it was very important to try to make it lively, make it interesting, to have something both for the professional musician, and also something for somebody who is reading me on the Metro, or over a quick coffee or something along those lines. I also early on decided that it was important to write in the first person. A lot of older journalists were not happy with this, especially at the New York Times, which in those days was an extremely straightened and very tense place. They said that using the first person was egotistic. My own attitude was that it was the exact opposite. In other words, I wanted to actually come to a concert and not be the voice of the New York Times, but be somebody who writes for the New York Times who happened to attend the concert and felt this way. Rather than some institutional stamp of approval or stamp of disapproval, it seemed much more honest, much more important to me to just go there and actually write from a first person perspective about what it was that I heard, or thought I heard. And yes, sometimes I do change my mind; I can think of pieces that years back I absolutely loved that now seem a little shopworn to me, and vice versa; pieces which just seem more and more extraordinary year after year. I have to think that criticism is an adventure for the critic as well as for the people who read that critic and the people who are being criticized. When it goes from being an adventure, it's really not something where the heart is in it as much anymore. I have always also felt -- on the one hand, trying to add the personal quality, I have also tried to remain slightly distant from what actually is going on in the classical music world. I know a lot of people, but I don't have a tremendous amount of friends who are in classical music because it becomes very hard. It's very hard to review the work of somebody that you know very well. I have had to do it a couple of times, and I have often been shocked by how surprised people are. Reviews which I thought were semi raves were suddenly some kind of deep personal attacks, or things which I thought were very negative would get a response which was, "Thank you, you should have been harder on me." So it became very hard to write about this. Virgil Thomson used to say that he could review his grandmother. And maybe Virgil could, but I don't really want to review my grandmother or my friends. And if you're good friends with somebody and you go to a concert and it's not very good, what are you supposed to do? It's a sham and a lie to write a glowing review, as much as you may love the person you are reviewing. But what is more important, honesty or longtime friendship? And that becomes a very tough question to answer. I also noticed that I tended to be harder when I wrote about people that I knew; that I was harder on them than I was on people I didn't know. For example, Philip Glass is an old friend of mine; I have known him since I was a sophomore in college. I helped edit his opera "Satyagraha," and I love some of his music, mostly the early music, very much indeed. When one of his records came out, I was talked into reviewing it for High Fidelity magazine, and I panned it. I just thought it was a terrible record, and I felt, well, I have got to be honest, I have got to just go ahead with this and write about it. And Glass wasn't particularly happy about my review. He was actually very funny about it, because I ran into him after that and I said, "Oh, you know, I'm sorry I didn't like that record very much." He says, "Oh, that's all right, I don't like everything you write either." But it felt strange. And what I now think is that I was tougher on the record than it deserved; it's actually a rather nice record. No masterpiece, but a perfectly pleasant record which I have returned to with pleasure several times in the 22, 23 years since it came out. And it convinced me, more or less, that I was better off not really reviewing anybody I knew outside of a formal sit down interview situation, and I have avoided it since. It sometimes amazes me the impressions that the public has of the nuts and bolts of the critical profession. I have had readers come up to me and think that we spend the first minutes of the concert, then run off for an evening of drinking and lecturing, chatting with glamorous divas and then retire to the privacy of a cork-lined tower to ponder and meditate, and then finally the words start to flow and the review is written in one flash of inspiration and delivered to the paper in tablet form. The reality could not be more different. Those reviews that you write -- most of which I hate -- of the National Symphony Orchestra; the concert will end at 9:00, I have to have my review finished by about 10:15; that includes traveling from the Kennedy Center. I wake up in the morning and I agonize sometimes over those, because the problem with writing on deadline is that it doesn't leave you any freedom to go down rabbit holes. By which I mean, if you have 45 minutes, 50 minutes, an hour to write 600 words, you don't have the luxury of saying, well, this is an interesting idea, I'm going to see where that goes. Because if it goes nowhere, as often happens, as any of you who have written for publication know, you're stuck with losing 10 minutes or 15 minutes, or however many minutes that you spent chasing down that rabbit hole. So you have to stay with very, very simple, very straightforward thoughts, and often you fall into cliche. And so when I did a collection of my criticism rather recently, about four years ago, I found that -- I think I had a grand total of two reviews that I wrote on deadline, because it just doesn't work. I remember one time I was on such a deadline; I was flying to South Carolina, and I suddenly realized that I had not written a review that I had promised to write that morning before I left. And I started to think, oh my gosh, the moment I arrive in Charleston I have to call in and deliver my thoughts over the phone. And so I got very anxious, and I got a pen and a piece of paper -- and I looked around for something to write on, and actually there was no piece of paper, so I actually ended up writing my review of this revival at the Metropolitan Opera for the New York Times on the back of an airline sickness bag, which I still have to this day. And it was one of these things which had to be written very, very quickly, and if there was some way of going back and scraping it out of every single Internet or micro text, I would do it. Believe it or not, critics do not go to concerts waiting for wrong notes, sharpening their fangs to destroy the career of a promising new artist. Nothing brings us more joy than the discovery of a new talent; somebody who makes us hear music from a fresh perspective. When we must write a bad review, we do it with regret and as much gentility as we can muster. Obviously we'll be harsher on organizations that charge, say, $300 for a ticket than we will be about something where it's small and it's something where people are going because they want to attend, and they're just putting on a show really out of the goodness of their heart. We won't make it sound as though it's a spectacularly good event, but when I look back on the really, really negative reviews I have done, they have all been at places or at events which mean a lot to me; the Washington National Opera's terrible Trovetory [ spelled phonetically ] about three or four years ago, or a -- there's a wonderful piano concert series at the Terrace Theatre, and they had somebody who I swear would not get into any conservatory there. And there, I think, when you are really upholding a tradition, that's when I think the critic needs to say something. When people ask what possible good music criticism serves, I spend a little time thinking about it, because it's something which naturally goes through all of our minds. But I finally come up with the idea that we are an antidote to paid publicity; nobody can buy a good review in the Washington Post or the New York Times. The critic will give you an honest opinion, and the critic is not being paid by the performer, by the presenter, by anybody; they are being paid by a completely separate organization, namely the publication that they are privileged to work for. And so a little honesty, a disinterested -- by which I certainly don't mean uninterested -- review is important in those situations. I think one of the critics' finest hours in the last decade was the whole David Helfgott mess, which probably some of you remember. There was a rather good film -- I actually liked the film "Shine" a lot, but it was not biography. How many of you saw the film, or are aware -- I figured. Wonderful Washington audiences, everybody knows everything. But it was a film about this disturbed pianist, and the idea behind the film was that he had been just brutalized by his father. He was this great genius of a pianist, and eventually there was a happy ending when he went and he played and things went very well. Hollywood has taken over our mindset so much that instead of just giving the Hollywood film a happy ending, they decided to give the life a happy ending. So what they did was they brought poor David Helfgott out on a concert tour, and they brought out this man who -- you know, and bless him. I have no animus towards him at all, but he couldn't play the piano. And it was obvious he couldn't play the piano; he didn't have technique, he couldn't carry a musical thought, he would stop in the middle and get up and bow and walk off the stage. It was a really, really scary and saddening affair, and I guess the question became, do you walk away from this? Do you not write about it at all? Do you treat it as an embarrassment, and just act as if it hadn't happened? And, you know, we all thought about this, because nobody wants to be too harsh on a handicapped man who has gone through a tremendous amount of agony in his life. But then I thought of the concerts, and I thought of people holding up their children to him for him to touch the children on the head, and all these people going out and buying Rachmaninoff third recordings which are completely incoherent, when there are great recordings by Rachmaninoff and Horowitz and by Van Cliburn and many others, not to mention all the superb pianists who spent years and years and years practicing and learning their trade, to all of a sudden have this all taken away because a Hollywood company has a lot of money, and they want to make a lot of money and promote their film. So we got a lot of letters telling us we were monsters; we got a lot of letters, you know, attacking us in many different ways. And I don't feel badly about it, because I have to say, I think the Times and the Boston Globe and the Post and all of us did as good and as gentle a job of separating the story from the reality. So in the long run I felt pretty good about that. I was thinking about memorable moments in the concert hall, and of course there are many that are memorable for reasons that they're just superbly beautiful musically, but there are also ones which are just so terrifically funny that you just remember them because they are such odd situations. And one of the very few times I can think of that a story was just too good to be true actually turned out to be true, and it happened right here in Washington. And maybe some of you were at this event. I wasn't there, but I did get to write about it because I heard from everybody in town who found my number at the Post and called me about this. You probably know the concept of an urban legend. And there are many urban legends, and many of them involve opera. The most famous urban legend in opera is about the "Tosca," who at the end of the opera goes to the barricades and says, "Oh, Scarpia, we will meet before God," and jumps off, and at least in the urban legend hits a trampoline and bounces back up again. I have investigated this story, and it does not seem to be true. I have been told it about Brigitte Nielsen, I have been told it about Leontine Price. I have been told it about Montseratt Caballe, who in fact actually refused to even ever jump off; she would walk off into the stage after she committed suicide. Don Henahan, who was the chief music critic at the Times, said that she looked like Queen Victoria out for a stroll, which was a pretty funny line. But there is a true story that happened right here in Washington with "La Boheme," about 10 years ago. Many of you will remember the days when your portable computer would only go for exactly two hours and not one minute more, and many of you will also probably remember times where you did not have it plugged in quite as well as you might. Well, they do the super titles for the Washington Opera from a portable computer backstage. And I'm sure nothing like this has happened in the last 10 years, but back in those days, Frank Rizzo and his wonderful titles that he does for the opera, and they were -- it was the last scene of "La Boheme," which many of you will remember -- Mimi is dying of consumption, and she's coughing and crying. It's very, very touching. And she says something like, "Oh, don't leave me, Rodolfo." And Rodolfo looks at her and, you know, sings something with all the love in his heart, which at this performance, because the computer was having trouble -- the super title suddenly went from regular white on black to red on black, and it said, "Your batteries are low and your lights are dimming." [ laughter ] True story, and it happened right here in Washington. So it's been an incredible pleasure being here for the last 11 years as your music critic in the Post. We have had a lot of wonderful writers for us here at the Post; we had my great predecessor, Joe McLellan, who I still miss each and every day, who could not have been kinder to me when I came here. We have good criticism in the Washington Times, and in the city paper. It's still a very lively, very interesting city in which to live and to care about music. [ end of transcript ]