The Regulation and Reform of Music Criticism in Nineteenth-Ce... - 9781138288669

Taylor & Francis

Music criticism in England underwent profound change from the 1880s to the 1920s. It gave rise to \u2018New criticism\u2019 that aimed to be rational, impartial and intellectually authoritative. It was a break from the criticism of old: the work of the opinionated journalist who wrote descriptive concert reviews with invective, clich\u00E9, bias and bombast. Critics such as Ernest Newman (1868\u20131959), John F. Runciman (1866\u20131916) and Michel D. Calvocoressi (1877\u20131944) fostered this new school and wrote extensively of their aspirations for musical criticism in their own times and for the future. This book charts the genesis of this new wave of musical criticism that sought to regulate and reform the profession of music critic. Alongside the establishment of principles, training manuals and schools for critics, hundreds of journal articles and dozens of books were written that encouraged new criticism, which also had a bearing on scholarly writing in biography, aesthetics.