By Collin Ziegler
When I read a review of a performance, I can’t help but skip ahead until I find the key sentence: the one that announces whether it was good or bad.
No matter how sophisticated or intellectual I consider myself, I can’t seem to shake this Pavlovian response to a performance review. When the crucial sentence is missing or buried in an unexpected place, I become frustrated. If the judgment is ambivalent, frustrated again.
I’m not proud of this, especially since the judgment I’m seeking flies in the face of what I know to be true about performance: “good” and “bad” convey nothing about an artistic experience. While the report of a lousy event or a puff piece can be pleasurable, they ultimately fail to describe the music or the experience of hearing it.
But my rush to judgment stems from somewhere else: I want to feel like I’m part of the long-existing community that cares about musical taste.
That sentence I’m always looking for is the shortcut to this. I can agree with the reviewer, I can disagree, I can compromise. The opinion itself doesn’t necessarily matter. It’s the act of engaging with it that means something.
It is good to cultivate ideas and a personal taste, to reach out and join those with similar interests. But there is a risk. When I regard music as something to judge, dispute, collect, I relate to the musical world differently. A performance becomes an event that either fails or succeeds; a musical work becomes a message, either right or wrong; and music serves my taste, not me.
Music is more than social or intellectual capital. So, I need a new perspective on the utility of a music review. No matter how vivid the writing, a review will always fall short of conveying how the performance sounded and felt. What, then, is the true purpose of a review?
An effective review offers what the concert can’t: an extra-human perspective. By “extra-human,” I mean going beyond the experience of any one person, beyond the perspective of the reviewer and beyond the specific concert itself.
In the moment of the performance, we are subject to music’s strange confabulation of time. Music heightens our awareness of the present: our attention is stretched, narrowed, and redirected as every moment passes into the next. The precariousness of that moment is as sweet as it is melancholy; there is no capturing the music, no stopping it to reflect or examine.
This is where the review steps in. Even when the concert ends, we hold onto melodies and feelings and pontificate on their meanings. The review makes space to remember, investigate, and reflect on the music.
A review takes a specific performance — one that can never be reproduced — and sustains it via informing, clarifying, questioning, and interpreting. Free from the laws of space and time that make the performance so thrilling, the review can even reshape the performance, drawing attention to things audiences didn’t identify in the moment.
In investigating my urge to pronounce judgment on music, I’ve realized how I think about music is far from how I hear it. Trying to understand this connection has become my lifelong project.
There was a recent moment when this distance — and its stakes — came into stark relief. I was assigned to review the San Francisco Symphony’s performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony under conductor James Gaffigan. I spent weeks worrying about my impending review, and I even wondered if I should’ve turned it down. Of course I love the symphony, and I’ve never turned down a ticket to Davies Hall. But this was a challenge. How does one review not just a ubiquitous classic, but arguably the classic of all classical music? No one needs me to describe the piece, and I don’t have strict opinions about how it should be performed.
Before the performance, I went back and forth in my head about how I’d dodge the twin dangers of nitpicking and cliche. Ultimately, I came up with nothing. I went to the concert practically dazed by all the recordings I had listened to, praying something would inspire me.
Inspiration, safe to say, did not strike. But I left the concert reassured. I did not need to find something no one has said before, nor did I have to tell the same old story of the composer and his final symphony.
However, one detail stood out to me: how Gaffigan rushed through a few pauses in the third movement. These rests, in between the meaty variations of the Adagio, are not unique to the symphony or to Beethoven, nor are they a microcosm of the whole piece. But Gaffigan’s rigid conducting in those seconds made me think about other recordings, which in turn made me reflect on how I would do it myself.
I wrote this down, plainly. That detail was a feature of Gaffigan’s interpretation, which in itself is neither right nor wrong. I didn’t like it, though, because it rubbed against what I heard as the music’s voice. Suddenly, I had a substantial idea that I could put into a review.
In those weeks of worrying, I had misjudged the point of the Beethoven review. I did not have to stake a claim about the quality of the symphony, nor did I have to provide a scorecard of Gaffigan’s performance. These are part of the review, yes, but they aren’t the point of it. The review was my chance to bring the symphony back to life.
I had allowed the “classic-ness” of the symphony to freeze it in my mind. My longstanding opinion of the symphony (and its annoying ubiquity) had convinced me it always sounded cloying and transparent. I like to think I’m a careful listener and musicologist, but I was no match for the gradual transformation my memory and thoughts had wrought on this music. I had to hear it again, face to face, to realize my mistake.
The strict performance review — the kind that asks whether the orchestra pulled it off — can’t accommodate this transformation, which is as much a part of my relationship to the symphony as the conductor’s choices and the instrumentalists’ playing. I had to go beyond myself, and beyond the performance, to see it.
This is the extra-human perspective I’ve described. The concert had to end, and I had to be given the assignment, in order to discover what actually happened that night at Davies Hall.
My thinking about Beethoven’s Ninth quietly distorted my assumptions about the work; actually hearing it reshaped my thinking; in thinking about the performance, I heard the music anew.
There is no such thing as an ideal performance. Music exists as much in the moment as beyond it. It is better to admit this, and to center the profound reciprocal relationship between music and the review, than to make music into an object to appraise or collect.
