ArtsJournal: PostClassic

Kyle Gann on the hazards of being a professional critic:

After all, I live a weird life. My apartment is lined all round with brim-filled, floor-to-ceiling CD cabinets, and for various periods I’m listening to things almost continuously - a little of this, compare it with that, write down the lyrics from this, figure out a chord progression there, play two minutes of this old disc as a reminder, listen to this brand new disc already writing the review in my head as soon as the first sound blares out. It’s not a “normal” relationship to music.

I'm especially happy he mentioned the "instant review" thing.

He goes on:

I hear what happens in a piece, but perhaps I also too much hear every piece IN RELATION to every other piece in roughly the same genre. Music is never an isolated pleasure for me, but exists as a segment in a continuous web in which I spend nearly every waking moment wrapped, and rapt.

I've noticed that when I'm in periods of intense listening, my commenting tends to veer off into the "X sounds like Y with a little bit of Z" mode, Y and Z being whoever I happen to be listening to a lot. Reducing musical input makes me struggle a bit more beyond the easy comparaisons. I'm quite happy that my last few reviews have contained little of that kind of stuff.

And then, the best line of all:
So I’m an expert. Everything I say about music is true, and insightful.

The more I think about it, the more I want to use this as my tagline when I make it to "expert" status.