A very interesting piece comes to us from Ted Gioia at The Daily Beast about music criticism, or rather its death, or rather its inability or unwillingness to use technical language or display, you know, any kind of actual knowledge. It's especially interesting because it seems to take the viewpoint of mainstream, pop music criticism, referencing outlets like Billboard and even American Idol (I know, that last isn't exactly a bastion of intelligent criticism but apparently Harry Connick, Jr. was sniggered at for using the word "pentatonic"). Sigh.
Classical music, which is actually still reviewed in more technical terms, at least in its specialist journals (I write having been the editor of perhaps the most prominent, Gramophone), also suffers from this somewhat. But to nothing like the same extent as pop. On the other hand, I'd argue that pop music is shorter-form and therefore often much less complex than its classical cousin. However, classical music critics have been lamenting the slow diminution of the critical vocabulary for years. Opera magazine about three or four years ago ran an excellent piece about just that.
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