Stop the Press? The Changing Media of Music Criticism

Abstract

Writing in BBC Music Magazine in July 1999, editor Helen Wallace remarked on the rapid decline in space allocated to classical music criticism in British newspapers, notably in The Times, The Independent, The Guardian and Financial Times, all of which had previously provided extensive, important coverage. 'Concert reports provide the very oxygen needed to keep a flourishing musical scene alive', she noted, and '[if] an event is ignored, it is as if it did not exist.' However, she perceived a 'ray of hope' in the internet, which 'has no space restriction: maybe the dawn of a new era is nigh…' 1 Twenty years later, Wallace's comments seem prescient. Newspapers operate regularly updated websites as a matter of course now,

English in Russian musical reviews

“…Musical reviews pertain to music criticism as ‘the intellectual activity of formulating judgments on the value and degree of excellence of individual works of music, or whole groups or genres’ (Bujić, 2011) and involve the evaluation of artistic production (such as music records) in the printed press, on radio and television (Scholes, 1970) as well as on the Internet (Dingle & McHugh, 2019). The primary target of popular music reviews is the reader or the consumer, who is willing to know what musical products enter the market.…”