concertizing again

Sunday evening I went to a concert for review. I had to stuff the writing of the actual review in between some urgent deadlines in my other writing job (more on that when it's published); fortunately, this was a vividly distinct and easily describable concert. I didn't add my best evidence that concerts of the Musicians from Marlboro are worthwhile, the occasion - nearly forty years ago now - that a group of theirs played the Schumann Quintet at Spangenberg (not a great hall, and long since abandoned by classical musicians for newer and better ones), and the pianist really caught our ears. He was young and we'd never heard of him, but we were sure we'd hear of him in the future. And indeed we did, for his name was Murray Perahia.

In this review, I wonder if it's obvious that I know the Mendelssohn well, the Janáček sort of, and that, due to those deadlines, I never made time to get and listen to the Mozart at all. When I write something like "At least in this performance," it means I have no other performances to compare it with. As for the encore by Raff, I hadn't even known he'd written an Octet, but I have heard enough of his other music to feel confident in a generalization like "at his best in scherzos," the more so as that's true of a lot of mediocre composers. (Calling him "a half-forgotten contemporary of Brahms" is intended to be ironic, as at the time there were many who were sure that Raff would be history's giant and that Brahms was the one due for semi-obscurity.)

I also have flickering in my mind these comments from Lisa Irontongue, and others she links to about the professional quality of reviews and the credentials of reviewers. The review they use as a bad example is indeed horrible, being really a fashion note about the performers. There's nothing per se wrong about a fashion view of a concert, regrettable as it is if it substitutes for an actual review, but this one doesn't get off the hook that way, because it's framed as a review. You can't begin with a thesis statement about the music played, and include music-history trivia like Bach not using the term "cantata" (I don't even know if that's true; I'd have to look it up) and pretend your article isn't about the music.

I feel particularly vulnerable here, because although I try my best and I'm well read and have confidence in my ears, I'm no musician. I have in my time done four skilled jobs at a professional level, that is, doing things that people get paid to do because they have credentials in them, and those jobs are:

1. librarian
2. literary scholar and historian
3. concert reviewer
4. convention organizer

Only the first of these do I have professional credentials in. I have a master's degree in library science, which is the standard professional credential. I also trained as a historian, but I have only a bachelor's in that subject, which doesn't count as a professional credential (real historians have PhDs), and none whatever in literary work, in fact I'm proud that I got through college without taking a single course from the English Department, though I have since taught in a college English Department. For music, my credentials are largely forty years of listening, and lots of reading about music; I can read written music slowly and to an extent, usually preferring to follow scores with a recording, and can't do anything more at a piano than pick out tunes or chords; I did study harmony seriously and take non-major courses in college from some distinguished musicologists (including the great Joseph Kerman) and did very well in them, thank you. As for convention organizing, my only qualification for doing that has been doing it. Learn from hard experience, seat of the pants style.

But it did occur to me, even in my early days as a librarian, long before I thought of myself as doing any of those other things, that a credential was just that: an outside certification that the person has the necessary background and skill set to begin in the profession. It does not mean that if you don't have the credential, you therefore lack the skill set. Libraries are full of experienced non-coms who know what they're doing as much as any beginning professional does, and if they lack some background in theory, they've reached the same point via application. I tried never to look down on them just because the lacked the union card; in the field, there really isn't that much difference.

As a scholar and as a reviewer, I'm qualified because my editors - who are formally qualified, and who have the same attitude I do towards qualifications - like my work. And that gives me confidence to continue swimming around in these deep waters.

LJ goes to space

This evening, every time I try visiting LJ using Firefox, my usual browser, I get a woo-woo message reading "502 Bad Gateway". This sounds like something that would foil the Heaven's Gate mass suicide, a street address at a German resort, or perhaps a corrupt version of a Fred Pohl novel.

Works fine on other browsers, though.