Writing matters

All my adult life I have wondered how people write about music, and how their efforts are received by the public. It has always struck me as being an uncertain business, more miss than hit, and more miss than writing about other artistic endeavours. It seems to be more difficult for a writer to find an individual voice, a convincing prose style, when talking about music than when discussing painting or architecture, or even when writing across the arts. By and large the public have responded to this sense of uncertainty by putting music on one side: not by giving up on the concerts themselves, but by not elevating music books to the status of compulsory reading of the standing of, say, Gombrich’s The Story of Art or Clark’s Civilisation.

Mention of these two general histories of the arts reminds me of something else: music hardly appears in them. Clark did his best with the Viennese classics, but at one point in the television series he referred to William Purcell when he meant Henry, and no one thought it necessary to correct him.