by WILLIAM ANDERSON
CRITICAL INFALLIBILITY
MY fundament has for some ten years now been warming the leather of this editor's chair, a period long enough and a vantage point high enough to give me a probably privileged view of some of the goings-on in the arena wherein the worlds of music and hi-fi collide. One of the things I have noticed in that time is a steady decrease in the number of reader letters deploring the "lack of objectivity" in our record reviewers. Though it is certainly possible that this decline means people have either ceased to notice or to care, I prefer to find it, incorrigible optimist that I am, a sign of increased sophistication in this much of the reading public.
A number of years ago the French novelist Gustave Flaubert made an intriguing observation about critics of Shakespeare's Hamlet: whatever their theories about the play (Hamlet was/was not crazy, he was/was not in love with his mother and/or Ophelia), their observations boiled down to just one thing: rank subjectivity. This caused Flaubert to conclude (quite rightly, I think) that we speak of ourselves whenever we lack the courage to re main silent.
Critics, by and large, have no need of such courage, for they are paid to speak up. And most of them know that, when they do, it would be silly even to pretend to objectivity.
Lately, however, I have noticed a budding tendency toward such pretense among record reviewers. It would be bad enough if it developed that they are misguidedly trying to please the least informed (though most vocal) members of their public; it would be absolutely scandalous if it means their ranks have been infiltrated by the Mensurationists, those temerarious technophiles who will not rest until they have the whole gamut of human experience taped, so to speak.
Whatever the reason, I have had the opportunity to be amused by, among others, a critic who delightedly reported discovering a "true pianissimo" (whatever that might be) in a re cent recording (he did not mention a coincidental discovery of his volume-control knob). And I was absolutely startled to find another squandering what might have been useful review space on an "objective" exercise that charted individual performance times (with totals, of course) of all twelve of Liszt's Transcendental Etudes for no fewer than six mostly obscure recorded performances-per haps to lend an illusory credibility to other less focused observations that simply blushed with naked subjectivity (just what is a "fluffy" staccato?).
But learning that the Liszt Etudes have been played in as little as 58' 17" was not with out its uses, for it inspired me to a little conjecture about what a really objective review of, say, a recorded piano recital might contain. The hall or studio first, of course--its dimensions and decor (wood or plaster walls), its reverberation and decay times for the significant frequency range (including harmonics). For the piano we might perhaps dispense with the specific gravity of the wood, the purity of the metal in the frame. But we would need the name of the maker (for type of action), the instrument's age (for both tactile and acoustic reasons), the material used in the keys (plastic is simply not the same as ivory to the touch), heat and humidity figures, and certain facts about the piano tuner (years of experience, results of his latest hearing test, whether he tunes by ear or with electronic aids). For the pianist, we would need some notion of his mood (up, down, or sideways), and perhaps the closest we could come to that objectively (we can't ask him-or his wife, mother, or lover) would be a note from his analyst plus his biorhythm chart for the day.
We would also need some minimum bona fides such as names of teachers, contests won, earnings record for the previous year (we can skip this for debut artists), speed and accuracy in playing Chopin's Minute Waltz, and, finally, a fingernail check (we are looking for hangnails, of course). Next the number, type, and placement of the microphones, response curves on the tape to be used . . . but you see what I mean. All of this information is perfectly objective-and perfectly useless. What we want from our critics is informed, subjective opinion, however fallible. Accept no substitutes.
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