Best Classical Music Blog?

As regular readers know from my rantings a couple of years back when Spring For Music foolishly held a contest to find out the arts blog in the English-speaking world, I am skeptical of the entire concept of the best of anything. So I am duly skeptical about the news I received today: this blog is among a number that have been nominated by the staff at Forte - which makes a music notation software program - for the title of best classical music web site.

It's just silly. The nominees are all excellent in their own ways and I encourage you to read them all!

There's also the big problem of some of these things are not like the others. The nominated bloggers include critics and general music writers (me, Alex Ross, Jessica Duchen), group reviewing sites (Ionarts, I Care If You Listen), music business writers (Drew McManus, Greg Sandow), composer/critic/academics (Kyle Gann), general culture bloggers (Terry Teachout), opera sites (Parterre Box, Opera Today), and NPR Music.

Really, we are not all comparable, and an awful lot of great writers were omitted: Mark Berry (Boulezian), Jon Silpayamanant (Mae Mai, one of the best business-of-classical-music blogs around), Kenneth Woods, Likely Impossibilities, C.K. Dexter Haven, Dial "M" for Musicology, etc., etc.

So my thought is that you should vote for whomever you like, or not. Apparently the winner will get some software licenses to give out to friends and fans. I know nothing about this software and assume the contest is primarily an attention-getter.

Contest Reactions, Here and There

Time to start tracking the reactions around the blogosphere (watch this posting for updates):

• Anne Midgette throws down a gauntlet that I am looking at squinty-eyed.
• Elaine Fine at Musical Assumptions is "taken aback;" not entering but answering the first question anyway.
• Patrick Vaz at Reverberate Hills is in high dudgeon. In the comments SFMike makes his disdain known. (I like Amanda, Mike!)
• Brian at Out West Arts rightly uses the tag rant for his posting. I need one of those.
• Mr. CKDH at All is Yar was going to ignore the whole thing.
• Zerbinetta, of Likely Impossibilities, rolls her eyes, writes great stuff about how getting to Carnegie Hall didn't help her local orchestra, but may enter! [Update: and she has entered!]
• Douglas McLennan, founder/editor of ArtsJournal and one of the judges of the contest, weighs in, quoting me, Patrick, Brian, and Anne. Are ArtsJournal bloggers allowed to enter? Apparently so, given the loose eligibility rules.
• Seated Ovation is participating.
• Musical Perceptions is participating.
• Opera Tattler entered.
• Omniscient Mussel registered, but seems to have missed the first essay deadline.
• Drew McManus weighs in, skeptically.
• Linda Essig entered, then thought the better of it.
• I'm sputtering. Yes, that was fun to write. Why do you ask? By the way, my answer to the question is "It depends." Alex Ross counted 50 new music groups in NYC a few years back, during the heat of the Death of Classical Music Debate, round 1. I doubt there's another city in the country with that density of new music performance. As for all other aspects of that pointless question, I roll my eyes.
  I also can't shut up:
• Statistics and a Note
• Bloggers, Critics, and Presenters
• The Contest
• The Culture Games

Questions

A couple more points about the Spring for Music contest -

Douglas McLennan's comments really do make it sound as though the authors of the contest threw the idea together in a tearing hurry. I'm wondering now about a few more issues.

• How have they gotten the word out to the thousands of culture bloggers out there? How many people even know this is happening?
• Have they thought through how the judges will cope if they find themselves with, say, 500 entries to read next week?
• How is it going to look if only 20 bloggers enter? :)
• Does the voting mechanism have safeguards against cheating, for example, multiple votes from the same IP address?

Response to Response

Over on ArtsJournal, founder and editor Douglas McLennan has a response to postings by me, Patrick, Brian, and Anne about the Spring for Music best culture blogger contest. I have a response of my own - and also two additional concerns.

The implications of "best English-language culture blogger in North America" took some time to sink in. North America encompasses bilingual Canada, multilingual (but officially English monolingual) United States, and mostly Spanish-speaking Mexico. (Mexico is a multilingual country as well; about 6% of Mexicans speak an indigenous language.) So, about 112 million Mexicans and the 23% of Canadians who are French speakers are effectively excluded - and English-language bloggers elsewhere are also excluded. So much for culture bloggers in the United Kingdom, or those blogging in English but living in Milan or Vienna.

I'm also curious whether there are conflict-of-interest rules for the judges. ArtsJournal blogs are not excluded; one of the judges is the founder and editor of ArtsJournal.

I'm going to bullet-point my objections from the original posting:

• The impossibility of choosing a "best culture blogger" from the thousands of bloggers who are out there.
• Utter lack of eligibility rules and categories, beyond "North American, English-language, culture blogger," meaning everyone from junior high school students to professional culture writers can enter and would be competing with each other. This undermines the credibility of the contest.
• The premise of the first question: zzzzzzz.
• Popularity-contest aspects: encouragement of campaigns, entries not judged anonymously. 
• Concerns about what, exactly, I would get from entering. Would it make me more credible with the arts organizations I write about or review?

I own that I summarized it all as "either you take us seriously or you don't." But the more important point might be the extremely mixed signals sent by the contest.

Now, Mr. McLennan asks how you promote arts blogging and help bloggers find larger readerships. I have a few ideas!

• High-profile sites such as ArtsJournal and individual bloggers such as [boldface name here] can spotlight or link to other culture bloggers both as a regular feature and in the course of normal writing. Does ArtsJournal have a blog dedicated to finding and linking to worthwhile bloggers? This could be the equivalent of Twitter's #ff.
• Individual bloggers can write about how they promote their blogs and what they've done to increase readership.
• Make the various directories and blog lists out there better known. I'm thinking of Colin Eatlock's Big List of Classical Bloggers, for example. There must be similar directories for film, TV, jazz, rock, pop, hip-hop, soul, [music style here ad infinitum], food, art, theater, and dance bloggers.
• If you have to have a competition, consider making it fully adjudicated and a short-list, long-list sort of a competition. I suppose the rounds of 16/8/4 have some of that effect, but the popularity-contest aspects of the S4M contest make me queasy.

The Culture Games

You have to admit, Spring for Music picked the perfect week to announce their contest! Now, where did I leave my bow and arrows?

The Contest

Everything in my last post plays into my reaction earlier today to the Spring for Music contest: evidently that organization is also trying to figure out what to do with us. If you can have a contest to choose the best of something - complete with voting! and campaigns! - you're not treating culture bloggers like professionals or as legitimate members of the media. You're treating us like we're...well, what? Amateurs trying to break into the big time, where only one will be good enough to win? You're treating us like we're contestants, in a contest where the general public's opinion is getting a whole lot of weight.

That's a popularity contest. Yeah, there's a distinguished panel of judges, but so? What's the point of putting us in competition with each other?

What's the point of putting 200 music bloggers, 100 food bloggers, and an unknown number of film bloggers in the same category ("culture bloggers")?

It's just not an effective way to call attention to blogs or the best of the blogosphere. There are thousands of interesting, talented people putting up interested, well-written blog postings every day. Crowning one of them the best English-speaking culture blogger in North American is not doing blogging or the blogsophere any good.

Bloggers, Critics, and Presenters

At the heart of the current discussions of the Spring for Music blogger contest lies the fact that all too many presenters, publicists, and musical organizations are still trying to figure out what the heck to do with bloggers.

The media landscape has shifted enormously in the last ten years. In the US, newspapers no longer have a staff of music critics - except the Times (and any other paper?) - and it seems most papers don't even have one any more. There are two full-time classical music critics left in California, if I'm not mistaken. Bloggers aren't exactly making up the journalism gap, but we're trying.
Many or most bloggers aren't credentialed; that is, many of us are writing about subjects in which we don't have a degree or professional experience or some other imprimatur of respectability. We're not writing for an official organization, whether that's a newspaper or magazine an online journal such as SFCV or NewMusicBox or Salon or the HuffPost.

We're not professionals who are getting paid for what we do, though I was getting paid for reviews by SFCV before I started blogging, and at least one blogger has vaulted into the pages of the NY Post.

Locally, how bloggers get treated by musical organizations varies quite a bit, depending on the attitudes and knowledge of their press departments, paid publicists, and/or the organization members running publicity on a volunteer basis. Here's some of what I know:

• A few medium-sized professional organizations regularly send me ticket offers.
• These organizations are somewhat haphazard about who they do offer tickets to.
• A number of small organizations have me on their press lists, but don't send ticket offers.
• One small organization that I know of has been making ticket offers to bloggers, among other reviewers, since last spring.
• I don't get offers from SFS, though from the number of bloggers I see there, I think they give tickets on request to bloggers.
• SF Opera doesn't make offers to bloggers (or at least not to me). They have been known to refuse to put bloggers on their press-release mailing list, which I simply don't understand. I do get their press releases, presumably because I've reviewed them many times for SFCV.

Here's what I think musical organizations and presenters should do: make up your minds about your policies, let bloggers know what they are, and be consistent. 

This is especially important for small organizations. As a matter of your own survival, I think it behooves you to make comps available to bloggers. We all know that Joshua Kosman can't be in more than one place a night or three or four places each week. Even SFCV can't cover the onslaught of performances; they have limits of their own. 

You want coverage, we're your best source. At the organization size I'm thinking of, wider coverage from bloggers might even make a difference in attendance and in general awareness of your group.

It's not a survival issue for SFS and SFO, or, I imagine, for presenters such as SF Performances and Cal Performances. They've got the big bucks donors, which small choruses, new music groups, and other small organizations simply don't.

Here's hoping that Bay Area music organizations figure out blogging and bloggers.

Statistics and a Note

Colin Eatock has been tracking English-language classical music blogs at weebly. If you don't want to click through, he has so far found 529. Yes, five hundred and twenty-nine. I here note that membership in the Music Critics Association of North American is much, much closer to 100 than to 500.


The press release I received from Amanda Ameer includes "For more information about the contest, or to request press tickets to Spring For Music, please contact," followed by Amanda's contact info and that of another publicist. So perhaps that means I could request press tickets! 


Or maybe not. What if all 529 English-languages bloggers made such a request? Stern Auditorium, the main stage at Carnegie, has a seating capacity of around 2800. I doubt they'd let 1/6 of the tickets go to members of the press. It would make an interesting experiment.

No Contest

Dear Spring for Music:

You are a great organization, and I admire the orchestral programming that has come out of your sponsorship. But....really? Finding the best arts blogger in North America? You have got to be kidding...well, okay, the $2500 prize suggests that you are not.

But you should think about this a little more. Because the more I think about it, the higher my blood pressure gets, for so many reasons.

Let's start with the idea that it is somehow possible to name the best arts blogger in North American, or even in the classical music blogosphere. I currently read or link to a rather large number of music blogs; see link list just to the right of this posting. I know of dozens more that are undoubtedly worth reading; see Alex Ross's ginormous link list. I'm going to guess that there are at least 250 classical music blogs worth reading. Multiply that by the number of good blogs on rock/pop/folk music, jazz, theater, modern dance, ballet, film, sculpture, painting, literature, and we're talking about a minimum of 2500 arts blogs worth reading.

If you think you can name one of those the best with any credibility at all, and based on just four essays written to your specifications, you're wrong. You can't.

Bloggers get credibility by posting intelligently and with some kind of consistency over a period of months or years. I've been at this for seven years; my blog postings have ranged from one sentence to almost-essay-length. I don't write on a schedule, and because I am a full-time professional writer - not in the arts - I value the freedom to write or not write, as time and energy allow. Entering your contest, and even winning it, wouldn't do much for my credibility.

And let's look at who the entrants will be competing against. Why, they could be competing against Alex Ross and Terry Teachout - because your rules do not exclude bloggers who have full-time gigs writing about the arts.

Now, I don't think either Terry or Alex will be entering. They have jobs and book contracts and little to gain by entering. $2500 is a nice chunk of change, but not next to the royalties on books that sell well....or a MacArthur Fellowship. And they're right there in NYC...and if they call you up, you'll give them comps! I mean, you're not going to refuse comps to The New Yorker's classical music writer  or the author of several arts biographies, are you? (If I just showed up in NYC, on my own dime and with no paid review lined up, would you give me comps?)

They're probably not the kinds of entrants you have in mind. You probably also don't have in mind musicologist Jonathan Bellman or John Adams. You probably have in mind people like me: yeah, I have a degree in music, yeah, I get paid for writing a small number of reviews a year for SFCV, but I'm not a full time pro. What you're doing is asking me to compete against my friends, people like Mr. CKDH at All is Yar, or Patrick at The Reverberate Hills, or Zerbinetta at Likely Impossibilities, or Brian at Out West Arts.

Really? I would not hold myself up in any circumstances as a better blogger than those four, and you know, what I really want is for all of us to have bigger readerships.

Also, I see that the essays/blog postings won't be anonymous! Are you telling me that your judges and the voters - the anonymous hordes of the internet - don't already have favorites? That there aren't thousands of opera lovers ready to vote for Parterre Box, if La Cieca chooses to enter?

And you're actually encouraging campaigns on behalf of different bloggers? HONESTLY. That is so junior high! Are you also encouraging campaigns to try to decide the best classical music critic in North America? Maybe not, because, sadly, there are so few paid full-time critic positions left. And anyway - they're pros! They don't need this!

Seriously - either you take bloggers serious as critics and writers, or you don't. Dear Spring for Music, you are sending mighty mixed signals. And I'm not gonna play.

Yours,

Lisa
http://irontongue.blogspot.com/

P. S. That first round question? Seriously, why would I even want to discuss the subject, in the absolute and given the ridiculous way you frame the non-issue?