Ambit and Ethics
Hello! For those of you that don’t know me, my name is brin solomon, and I am, among other things, a composer, playwright, and freelance music journalist. I’ve written in the past for outlets including Symphony Magazine, Opera Canada, NewMusicBox, VAN, and the National Sawdust Log Journal, and I also earned the runner-up prize at the 2018 Rubin Institute for Music Criticism.
That Supreme Alive-ness is a fortnightly newsletter covering (mostly) contemporary classical music in Western Massachusetts and the surrounding area. Both of those specifications — genre and place — are obviously a little fuzzy around the edges, and I’m not too interested in pinning them down precisely. The ultimate arbiter of what I cover here will always be “stuff I think I have something interesting to say about that’s happening close enough that I can get to it”, but I tend to be drawn most to classical music written in the past hundred years or so, with a special focus on the tail end of that period: the music of today, being written now, by people that are still alive. I may sometimes dip out of that repertoire — I may sometimes cover Bach or Brahms or local Jazz and klezmer offerings or perhaps even plays — but that will be the center around which everything else orbits. (Needless to say: It’s not that other music isn’t well worth covering deeply and extensively, it’s just that this is where my specific expertise lies. One person can only know so much!) Similarly, while I’m based in Northampton, if I do wind up seeing something while I’m on a jaunt away from home, I may cover it as a sort of report back from afar. (But the core audience for this publication in my mind will always be people living in the heart of Hampshire County, so my goal is to cover events that will be pertinent to such people.)
It’s always dangerous to introduce a project that only yet barely exists, but the plan, currently, is to send out a newsletter every other Monday. The heart of each edition will be a ~500-word review of an event from the past two weeks, followed by a roundup of upcoming concerts that I think sound interesting. In particularly heavy periods, there may be more than one full review, or the main review may be accompanied by quick in-a-nutshell summaries of other events that I have less to say about. That seems like a reasonable cadence to begin with, at least.
These newsletters will be always be free, in the sense that anyone can sign up for them and read them. I understand journalism like this to be an act of service to a community, and it doesn’t sit right with me to lock that service behind a paywall, tho I understand well why many publishers do and must. If you choose to sign up as a free reader: thank you! It means a lot, genuinely, to know that you think my words are worth your time. There’s no point to this project if no one reads it.
But in another sense, these newsletters are not free. They take time, labor, and expertise to write, and web hosting and distribution each cost money. If you want to help make these costs sustainable and have the means to do so, please consider chipping in to support this work. You can sign up for as little as $5/month, and by doing so, you’ll be helping to sustain local independent arts journalism. If you give a little more, you’ll get access to periodic longer essays that take a step back and offer more in-depth thoughts about art, writing, and the classical music ecosystem. (The current plan is to do one of these 1,000+ word essays every month, but this, too, is subject to adjustment as the plan makes contact with reality.) And if you really like what I’m doing here, tell a friend! Word of mouth remains the best publicity there is.
The name of this project comes from a delightfully unexpected 1925 essay by EE Cummings celebrating the pleasures of going to the circus, and specifically from this climactic paragraph:
So, ungentle reader, . . . let us never be fooled into taking seriously that perfectly superficial distinction which is vulgarly drawn between the circus-show and “art” or “the arts.” Let us not forget that every authentic “work of art” is in and of itself alive and that, however “the arts” may differ among themselves, their common function is the expression of that supreme alive-ness which is known as “beauty.”
I can think of no better summation of the thru-line that animates my work: I am chasing after that supreme alive-ness and pieces of art that embody it[1].
I am driven to write about that chase because this music matters deeply to me, and I believe it is worth spending the time to think about complexly. It is difficult not to feel that the precipitous decline in arts coverage in the United States of late is of a piece with the ascendant fascism of the present moment — fascism, of course, being fundamentally hostile towards patient thought, nuanced complexity, and reflective engagement (to say nothing of decency, justice, and all human goodness!). I won’t pretend I know how to solve this crisis, but I do know I refuse to cede this ground without a fight. I love this music fiercely, as I love Western Massachusetts fiercely, and I am determined to put that love into action by holding fast to this art and the practice of deep, sustained engagement with it, the practice of thinking, and of delighting in sharing those thoughts with others who think deeply and generously in turn.
I believe in doing this thinking in the form of criticism because — as the adage has it — journalism without criticism is just public relations. I believe it is important that there are people writing publicly about this art who aren’t trying to sell you anything.
But wait, brin, aren’t you trying to sell us something?
At this point, some of you may wonder how my being a classical composer plays into this. Am I not perhaps trying to sell you, in some way or other, on my own works?
It’s true I write about this music as a composer of it. I think this gives me a useful inside view of it: I am always wrestling with it down in the mud, trying to wrench it into shape as it tries to wriggle away. For me, it’s something practical and everyday, a brass-tacks matter, not a mysterious celestial effluence. I think that’s a valuable perspective to have.
It’s also true that this puts me in a somewhat more delicate position than a critic who is not also a practitioner. My extended social and professional networks include large numbers of living composers, and the musicians who perform new music tend to be the sorts of people that, as a composer, I’m excited about working with (and, happily, often have had the chance to work with). All those relationships certainly structure my perspective on this field.
I’m not the only person ever to wind up in this situation. Composers from Robert Schumann to Virgil Thompson have been active music critics, and if you spend any amount of time trawling various contemporary composers’ social media accounts, you will not come up short when it comes to forceful comments on their peers’ works. Still, in line with the exhortation from the Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics to be accountable and transparent, I think it’s worth laying out clearly and publicly how I intend to navigate this space.
For me, this essentially takes the form of a set of promises to you, as readers, and to the performers, composers, and publicists of this milieu.
First and foremost: If I have a relationship with any artist I cover, I will publicly disclose it. This applies to both personal and professional relationships. When it comes to the latter, if I am actively working with a creative project with someone, I will not review their work. (By “actively working”, I mean something more than just saying “gosh, it might be fun to do something together someday”, but if we are in talks about the pragmatics of a collaboration, I will count it even if no final agreement has actually been reached.) Once the collaboration has finished, there will be a cooling off period of a full calendar year before I cover their work again, tho I will still disclose the past relationship indefinitely. To me, this allows reasonable room for my collaborative work to unfold in its own way without being simultaneously tangled up in my critical work.
In the spirit of full disclosure, it is worth noting at this juncture that for my day job, I am employed by the University of Massachusetts. All of the views here are my own and do not represent my employer. Beyond this, while UMass is a major presenter in the area, I am not employed at the Fine Arts Center, in the College of Humanities and Fine Arts, or in any aspect of University Communications. Still, I am going to remind you any time I cover a UMass offering that I work for them.
This may be obvious, but it feels worth stating anyway: I will not review my own music in this space. At most, I may include concerts that include my work in the listings section, tho of course I will disclose that my work is being programmed. If I want to write extended prose thoughts about my own music, I will do that in some other outlet.
Beyond these fundamental considerations, there are a few other matters that it feels worth being very clear about. I will not write reviews of undergraduate performances. The undergraduate music scene here is certainly vibrant, and I’ve been to many an undergrad recital where I had a rollicking good time, but I’ve also seen firsthand just how harmful it can be when an extramural spotlight is shone too harshly on an intramural matter, and I want no part in instigating such a travesty. Feedback is undeniably an important part of undergraduate musical education, but I believe that the proper place for that feedback is the private context of a teacher-student relationship, not the public forum of open journalism.
Graduate performances are an edge case for me: While many of the same thoughts regarding respecting the teacher-student relationship feel pertinent, I have also known many grad students who have been hampered in their efforts to launch professional careers by a complete lack of press coverage. So here is my current compromise: I am open to reviewing graduate performances, but only on invitation by the performers. Due to limits of time and energy, I cannot promise that I will attend and write about every such show I’m invited to, but I can promise that I won’t review any such show I’m not invited to cover. (Of course, I will still shout-out student shows in the listings section, since curation is such a different matter. If we want there to be classical music in the next generation, it’s important to support the next generation of classical musicians! And, again, often these shows are great!)
In all cases, my promise to you, gentle reader, is that you will get my true thoughts, as honestly and clearly as I can render them. If, for whatever reason, I do not feel I can be genuinely truthful about my take on a show, I will not write about it. Joshua Kosman (who I count as both a mentor and a friend) memorably describes music criticism as answering the question that people love to ask each other on the way home from a show: “So, what did you think?” I promise to always give you my level, honest answer to that question. (This is, in its way, also a promise to artists in the field. As a composer and performer, I am often plagued with doubts about the quality of my work, and hunger for honest feedback about it, very much including an assessment of its flaws. That is something you will find here, if it’s something you also seek.)
Ultimately you, as readers, whatever your connection to this music, will each decide for yourselves how well I hit these marks, but these are the standards I am publicly committing to holding myself to. I think there is a lot of space here to do good work.
Finally, a word about comp tickets and copies of albums: It’s my experience that it’s common if not universal for major concert presenters to offer free tickets to music journalists and for publicists to sometimes offer free copies of recordings they’re hoping to garner coverage of. Because this is such a bedrock industry standard (and also, frankly, because so many concerts in the area are already free and open to the public), I don’t feel it’s particularly necessary to disclose exactly which concerts I’ve been comped into. That said, for the publicists in the crowd, I do think it’s worth being clear about my own internal approach to comps. I will not request or accept a comp ticket without fully intending to attend the performance, but in doing so, I make no guarantees of coverage. (The same goes for comped copies of albums, either digital or physical.) Attending shows “on background” is often helpful for writing more richly contextualized reviews down the line, and I am also trying to move away from a cultural pressure for everyone to have a public opinion about everything all the time[2].
The stakes here may be lower than if I were covering political happenings or doing investigative work against billion-dollar industrial giants, but I take these matters seriously even so. I hope that laying these principles out will help this be not only a lively place for classical music coverage, but a thoughtful, ethical, and integrous one as well.
In point of fact, the two anchoring works of visual art for this site are pieces that embody, each in their own way, this alive-ness in a very different medium than my usual bailiwick. The background on the landing page is Wassily Kandinsky’s Auf Weiss II, and my authorial profile pic is an illumination from page 238r of the “Duke of Sussex’s German Pentateuch”, British Library Additional MS 15282. ↩︎
My thanks to Hannah Edgar for helping refine my thinking in this area. ↩︎