Farewell to The Seattle Times...and some ramifications

Here’s my farewell column from The Seattle Times, printed in May of 2008, followed by a piece reflecting on the gradual elimination of music-critic jobs here and elsewhere:

By Melinda Bargreen

What a ride it’s been.

For 31 years, I have been The Seattle Times’ classical music critic, a job that ended last week when I accepted a buyout in the wake of some extensive staff reductions. You might think that anyone in the same job for more than three decades has been mired in routine – but instead, it’s been a time of constant and tremendous change.

Back in 1977, quaint 33 1/3 rpm vinyl records arrived for review in big square boxes; more adventurous record labels sent cassette tapes. Only a half-dozen years later, though, we started hearing about those shiny new metal discs that were surely the wave of the future. And now, it’s downloads, transmitted by machines and media that were almost unimaginable to most of us back in the 1970s.

Technology has changed a lot inside the newsroom, too. My first review for The Seattle Times, of the pianist Van Cliburn in March of 1977, was written on an IBM Selectric typewriter and scanned into a mother-ship computer that seemed positively demonic in its capricious disappearing acts: Now you see your story, now you don’t. Frenzied shrieks of dismay arose all over the newsroom when that late-night review on which one had just labored would vanish, requiring the writer to start over.

My last review as Times music critic, of the Moscow Virtuosi with pianist Olga Kern, was typed on a laptop, and sucked into the email ether by a wireless Clearwire modem. The only shrieks of dismay happen when I spill the coffee.

When I arrived in Seattle after two years as a critic for what was then called The Everett Herald, Seattle Opera was already going great guns with its Wagnerian “Ring,” that four-opera epic that first boosted the company to international fame. The Seattle Symphony was moving ahead with its new German-born music director, Rainer Miedel (with regular podium visits from his predecessor, Milton Katims).

Aside from those two organizations, whose performance schedules were already approaching gridlock in the old Opera House, the rest of the classical offerings were modest: among the high points were concerts by the fledgling Northwest Chamber Orchestra, a recital series hosted by the venerable Ladies Musical Club, a Northwest Releasing series in the Opera House presenting a lineup of touring soloists and ensembles, and the Philadelphia String Quartet, in residence at the University of Washington. No chamber music festivals; no Early Music Guild; no professional choruses. Now a look at the weekly listings shows such a lineup of promising events that it would take a whole team of critics to do them justice.

Things got busier – a whole lot busier, because during the past two and a half decades, an unprecedented arts boom hit the Northwest and changed the music scene forever. From Orcas Island to Mount Vernon, Tacoma and points all over the regional map, more than billion was poured into new and rebuilt concert halls, theaters and museums. The opening of Benaroya Hall ten years ago opened a floodgate of expanded presentations by the Seattle Symphony and legions of guest performers.

It hasn’t been dull. Despite being a woman in what has traditionally been (and still is) a male-dominated profession, I can honestly say that I’ve never encountered any form of sexism, but you can’t be a critic without encountering a fair amount of hostility. When you praise an event, you hear from all the people who hated it; when you write an unfavorable review, you hear from the furious fans. Sometimes you hear from them in large numbers: a negative review of star tenor Andrea Bocelli a few years back netted around 125 angry responses, some of them couched in the kind of language we can’t print in our Letters to the Editor section.

Nobody becomes a critic in the hopes of winning a popularity contest, though you can expect a lively correspondence – one of the most interesting aspects of this job. Even more interesting, however, has been a long parade of memorable interviews. Pretty soon, you discover that the really great ones are not the performers with the huge egos; they’re the ones who are down to earth and matter-of-fact about their staggering talents.

Opera stars like Dame Joan Sutherland and Birgit Nilsson joked about their size and stamina, telling funny anecdotes about their earlier years (Sutherland was particularly hilarious on the subject of a youthful stint as a Rhinemaiden in the “Ring”). The extraordinarily gifted Yo-Yo Ma always used terms like “incredibly fortunate” and “blessed to have such wonderful colleagues.” And Murray Perahia always wanted to talk about how great Bach was, never about how fabulously Perahia played the “Goldberg” Variations.

Looking into the future, I have great hopes for the future of classical music, despite the prognostications of several gloom-predictors. Classical music downloads are surprisingly strong; so is concert attendance, and whenever Seattle Opera opens a sales period for its “Ring” (coming up in 2009, by the way), the surges of inquiries always crash the phone system, and all 36,000+ tickets are gone within 24 hours. And whenever anything big happens – tragedy (9/11), triumph (the fall of the Berlin Wall) – we instinctively turn to great music, which conversely is also making its way into clubs, taverns and all sorts of unusual venues.

After all these years, I still can’t believe I’ve been lucky enough to have a job where they pay me to go to concerts. Will the performance be transcendent, or terrible? Which of the infinite paths through Mozart will the players take? What will we hear when this new artist (or composition) debuts? Even on those nights when I’ve grumbled about fighting the traffic, driving downtown, parking and dashing to yet another performance -- when the houselights go down, the magic begins again.

* * * * * * * * * * *

SO WHAT DOES IT ALL MEAN?

By Melinda Bargreen

Can a newspaper of excellence do without a music critic? -- especially in an arts-savvy city?

I had thought the classical music beat was vital to The Seattle Times. During my long tenure there, I had produced as many as 300+ byline pieces per year, some of them featured on the front page, and many of them attracting an increasingly international readership on-line. Seattle itself is no cultural backwater, but a major regional arts center, with widely recognized excellence in its arts institutions – from Seattle Opera and Pacific Northwest Ballet to Tony-winning theater, Grammy-nominated symphony, and much-lauded visual art. And the classical community is strong: ticket sales are up at the Seattle Symphony and Seattle Opera, and chamber music is so popular that the Seattle Chamber Music Society’s summer festivals sold out this year even after expanding into a second venue.

Classical music and the arts in general may be strong, but newspapers aren’t. All around the U.S., newspapers downsizing both their staff and content have made music critics look over their shoulders uneasily, wondering how long the paper’s commitment to this discipline will last. In my own case, The Seattle Times’ decision last April to trim staff led to a list of outright firings and a second list of employees who were eligible for buyouts, because they occupied jobs the newspaper could do without – including the classical music critic position. That kind of “no confidence vote,” after more than three decades in the job, was not hard to interpret.

So what does it mean, when a major newspaper no longer has a classical music critic? Freelancers can act, and are acting, as a sort of stopgap, reviewing a few of the most important concerts and operas, and writing a few previews of events to come, usually for a pittance. What freelancers can’t provide, however, is the vigilance, the history and the depth that a regular staffer can offer – someone who knows where all the hatchets are buried, and whose backs they’re buried in. What’s also missing is constant advocacy for this important discipline, by someone who can argue for coverage of specific issues on this beat even when editors are willing to overlook something significant. (Let it be noted that I had wonderful editors who were genuinely distressed when I left.) Good critics don’t just know and write about the top groups and performers; they also know and can analyze the whole ecosystem of music in the region, right down to the teaching studios, the amateur groups, and the youth orchestras.  A good critic knows who the instrument dealers are, why a choral director was fired, and what kind of “creative accounting” was behind the last symphony-orchestra annual report.

Certainly, the world is full of classical bloggers and websites. At best, these are excellent sources of news and opinion. It’s thrilling to see what can be achieved in “real time,” as I found when I took my laptop to an Elton John concert, logged into the venue’s network, and posted reviews of each song as it occurred. (Don’t try this rather noisy and intrusive process at a classical concert, though.) And it’s great to have the kind of lengthier space that the Internet affords; lack of space is always an issue in print journalism.

There’s also a down side. At their worst, the websites and blogs are the written equivalent of “talk radio”: pooling the collective ignorance, and the unfounded opinions, of people who aren’t held to any particular ethical standard or screened for conflict of interest (jealous composers panning the work of more successful peers, or friends promoting their friends). And even the most highly regarded bloggers usually have “real” jobs elsewhere; it is still not sufficiently clear how blogging activity keeps the writers financially afloat.

To many of us old-fashioned newspaper journalists, Internet writing feels ephemeral: your words are floating out there in the ether, available to everyone for free, even vulnerable to hackers who could change or eliminate what was written. A newspaper is a matter of public record; a web posting can disappear in a flash.

And so can newspaper jobs disappear in a flash, as we are now seeing. What will happen when more newspapers fail, when more critics and print journalists lose their posts? People in the arts community notice, and they mind, if the more than 300 letters from dismayed readers as far afield as France and New Zealand following my departure are any indication. And yes, as print critics disappear there are still plenty of successful arts/news websites – most of which owe their existence to the very print media they’re trying to replace, as they cheerfully loot one paper’s website after another in quest of interesting stories. If those newspapers go under, where will these sites get their news? – Will they muster up large numbers of well-trained, ethical, innovative, paid staffers to do original reporting/criticism on their own?

The performing-arts world won’t stop spinning on its axis if the number of music critics out there continues to decline. Great art will be performed; audiences will show up; brilliant new artists will burst forth on the scene. Increasingly, though, as critics’ jobs vanish, all these things won’t necessarily be heralded and explained and assessed by people who have earned their readers’ trust and their community’s credibility. And that’s a loss.