A former colleague who no longer reviews music once approached me before a concert and said, with disarming candor, “I wish I understood music at a deeper level.”
Alas, the poor fellow couldn’t tell the difference between a “flatted seventh” and a “diminished eleventh,” which got him into trouble whenever he tried to analyze — in print — the music he was reviewing. Musicians chuckled at his bloopers, which used musical terminology the way comedian Norm Crosby uses the English language.
Unfortunately, reviewers who lack musical training are not exactly in short supply at American newspapers. For the most part, arts critics tend to come out of journalism or liberal arts programs, not music schools, so they rarely get a chance to study the technical elements of the art form in depth.
And that’s why a new and still untested degree program at Northwestern University comes not a moment too soon, for it just might raise the level of music criticism in America. Or at least try to.
Jointly designed by the School of Music and the Medill School of Journalism, the new course of studies will offer budding critics an opportunity that has been sorely missing from academia: rigorous training in both music and journalism.
Though many universities offer elective (or optional) courses in each, one is hard-pressed to think of another major school that requires degree candidates to attain both the mastery of a musician and the proficiency of a journalist. The folks at NU don’t know of another comparable program in the U.S.
Specifically, anyone who completes NU’s forthcoming Bachelor in Music/Master of Science in Journalism, which will be accepting candidates in the fall, will study not only news writing, editing and reporting but also music history, theory and, most important, aural skills.
Listening skills
As any music major knows, you cannot get a degree in music at most universities without completing two years of “ear training,” as students call it, which teaches students to discern the sounds they’re hearing. When I majored in music at Northwestern, in the 1970s, during the first week of aural skills we had to learn to identify a pitch instantly upon hearing it. By the end of the second year, we were transcribing music of Stravinsky from recordings.
It wasn’t easy, even for the most accomplished students, but it profoundly changed the way we heard music. No longer were we swept away by the mere volume, speed or drama of a performance. Instead, we learned to identify chord progressions, listen for voicings, analyze intonation and otherwise understand the way a piece of music — and a performance — was put together. Anyone who enters the new NU program will have to master these skills to complete the degree.
So why did NU come up with such an unusual hybrid?
“Because we need a new paradigm for what a good journalist does,” says Loren Ghiglione, newly appointed dean of Medill. “The old paradigm was that any good reporter can do a good job of covering any subject, regardless of how complicated it is.
“The new paradigm says: `Wouldn’t it be good if people really knew what they were writing about?’ In other words, reporters should try to know as much about a subject as the people he or she is writing about.”
“I have been trying to push through something like this for a long time,” says Bernard Dobroski, outgoing dean of Northwestern’s School of Music. “In a way, the idea started as far back as the 1970s, when one of our faculty members was teaching music students about newspaper reviewing.”
That educator was Thomas Willis, former classical music critic of the Tribune and, later, a teacher and administrator at NU’s School of Music. Were it not for Willis, who retired a couple of years ago, scores of music majors he trained (including me) might not have had the opportunity to learn the fundamentals of criticism while studying the art of music in depth.
A complete course
But the new NU program expands dramatically on Willis’ efforts, offering both music and journalism students a complete course of study in each discipline.
Skeptics might argue that music training isn’t really necessary, that anyone writing for the general readership of a newspaper should stay away from specialized language and esoteric discussions. Yet if the writer doesn’t understand the tools of the musician he’s reviewing — from chord structure to details of instrumentation — how can he possibly hope to explain the music to anyone else?
And though it’s true that a detailed understanding of music may not be necessary in some pop genres, there’s no question that jazz, classical, Afro-Cuban and many other folkloric idioms are enormously sophisticated and require critics who can decode these sounds.
“We need critics who can write about our music as well as we play it,” jazz trumpeter Red Rodney once told me, “but we don’t get much of that.”
Come this fall, that may start to change.
