A Question of Value Black Concert Music and Criticism

Abstract

Without criticism, black concert music will never be fully understood or appreciated by the general public. Traditional music-historical studies value a composition for its influence on the creation of subsequent works and for its place in a chain of stylistic development. Since black music has been largely ignored by prominent performing organizations, it has had little chance to play an exemplary role in the course of American music history. Also, black composers generally prefer to create within and against a tradition; thus their music rarely anticipates stylistic change. In a word, it is conservative, and conservative music in the twentieth century is not the darling of scholars. Criticism, to most musicians, implies the daily or weekly reporting of concerts. Although such writing may contain perceptive comments on the music, its main focus is the performance. Nor do the constraints of journalism allow the kind of reflection that is necessary to produce criticism in the central sense of the word-a consideration of the meaning and value of a work of art. As we shall see later, criticism also has important correlatives in analysis and interpretive history. Criticism is practically nonexistent in musical scholarship. Positivism still reigns in the form of preparing editions, establishing chronology, rooting out biographical facts, and the like. As Joseph Kerman put it: Musicologists are respected for the facts that they know about music. They are not admired for their insight into music as aesthetic expression (Kerman 1985, 12). Such positivistic studies are necessary and valuableparticularly in black music where the factual groundwork for any basic understanding is still far from complete; but after a while the pile of bricks grows higher, and there is still no building. Criticism seems so subjective, so arbitrary to musicologists. The act of elucidating the meaning of a composition, its worth as art, does not seem as concrete as that of determining whether a note should have a sharp or flat, a composer was born on May 10 or May 11, or a symphony was completed on Wednesday night or Thursday morning. These are simplistic examples, but when we consider how much room for interpretation there is in the establishment of even simple facts, it is apparent that even positivistic studies involve weighing information and making judgments. In the long run, the scholar relies