Facing the Music By Harold Schonberg Summit, 464 pp., $17.95 A Virgil Thomson Reader By Virgil Thomson Houghton Mifflin, 582 pp., $25 Music of Three More Seasons, 1977-1980 By Andrew Porter Knopf, 613 pp., $22.95 Music criticism is a most peculiar business. It can’t be done competently without a great deal of technical knowledge; and so it sometimes attracts failed artists looking for a way to make a living and vent their accumulated spleen at the same time. It shouldn’t be done at all without an insider’s knowledge of the composer’s art and the performer’s craft; but the average music critic, having spent his younger years burrowing through dusty library stacks or writing about burglaries and school-board meetings for the local paper while attending an occasional concert on the side, rarely measures up. Musicians hate it, irate subscribers seem to stay up half the night drafting scatological letters about it—but everybody, or nearly everybody, reads it if they have any interest at all in music. And some people, unlikely as it may seem, even do a good job of writing it.
As it happens, three of America’s best-known and most distinguished music critics have chosen more or less simultaneously to bring out collections of their work. In two cases, the collections are retrospectives: Harold C. Schonberg retired from his post as senior music critic of the New York Times year before last, while Virgil Thomson abandoned the daily grind back in 1954. (Andrew Porter, who came to The New Yorker in 1972, remains active today, although he has been sharing the load of late with Nicholas Kenyon.) Needless to say, comparisons are inevitable; but, in the present case, they also turn out to be quite instructive, since the three writers in question approach their task in the most radically differing ways imaginable.
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