McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada is home to North America’s first, and still its only, graduate program in the field of Music Criticism.  This worthy but not-so-well-known degree program is well-presented (with the exception of the long-enduring misspelling of the name of the author of its canonical text, Joseph Kernan’s “Contemplating Music”) on this page of the McMaster University web site. 

Just what is “Music Criticism”?  “Criticism” in any field is an engagement (usually in the print medium, but increasingly in others) between its subject, the author’s version of truth, and usually, the author’s agenda to ‘evangelize’ that truth.  Good Music Criticism, while being founded on solid knowledge of history and culture, remains richly (and in my view, appropriately) traced with veins of opinion and agenda. 

What right have critics to impose their version of truth on someone’s music?  One might respond with the related question, “what right have performers to impose their particular ideas on someone else’s music?” - and touch off the same sometimes-heated debate.  Broadly speaking, both represent a subjective portrayal of an abstraction of the music’s origin(s), a term I employ very broadly to draw in all individuals (composers, arrangers, performers, the original performer(s) of a DJs recorded and mixed samples, etc.), societies (be they faith, historically or ethnically conceived) and factors (creative paradigms, ideological movements) that precede and thus affect the either the performance or critique under consideration. 

There is perpetual discernment about the purpose and ethics of criticism, principally among critics themselves.  The degree to which composers and other originators of music want or expect their music to be criticised is debatable: but it seems reasonable to assume that the purpose of all music is to be experienced by others, that criticism encourages broader experience with music, and as we have learned from the pharmaceutical culture it is difficult to put a commodity out in the world and insist it be used in one way and not another.  It is trivial, but perhaps necessary to remind those who disapprove of Music Criticism that music can both flourish and suffer at the hands of both performers and critics.

Opinion and agenda were anathema to conventional Musicology (which, naturally, claimed complete immunity from both), explaining the latter’s traditionally suspicious and even hostile view of Music Criticism.  However, two decades into musicology’s steeply increased interest in culture and context, its characteristically postmodern questioning of structuralist and universalist views of science and history, and its necessary assault on its own multi-biased past, things are changing. Quite beyond reluctantly admitting its own vulnerability to the agency of such mediators as sources, researchers, authors, etc., musicology now seeks to define itself not in terms of the perceived and constructed objectivity of historically-based systems and narratives, but rather within a complex array of intersecting and ultimately subjective factors and approaches: a world that Music Criticism has defined for much of its 200+ year tradition.  In a bizarre twist of fate it could be argued that musicology is fast-becoming a sub-genre of its old a-rigourous and a-scientific enemy.