January 2026
Every professional musician has a story or two of a laughably stupid review. Chalk it up to professional mutual mistrust.
I recently decided to do something radical, at least from a professional musician’s perspective, by calling a reviewer on inaccuracy in the written review. Doing something like this is basically unheard of in the profession, a type of professional suicide, if you will. The possibility of retaliation is too real. The musical critic’s world is a one-way street. Critics can criticize musicians; but musicians cannot criticize critics.
Never one to stand on convention, and believing that some principals need to be challenged, I took a recent bogus review, which happened to feature me, and wrote a letter to the editors of the San Francisco Classical Voice (SFCV) where the review had first appeared. The review had been picked up, in addition to the online format of SFCV, by the San Francisco Chronicle; so it was read by many thousands (likely far more than the 7500 or so who attended the three performances). I was not surprised that SFCV didn’t respond to my letter, nor offer to correct the mistakes of the reviewer, so I upped the ante by publishing my letter on social media. I wanted the public’s view of music critics and their comments.
Within days of this, I had some 250 enthusiastic comments and shares, and well over a thousand likes. Only two people, both music critics themselves, took umbrage to my letter. Because the review was not complementary of me, those two saw it as sour grapes; but no one else saw it that way. In the review in question, the music critic had focused on the main soloist’s clothes and muscles! He (the reviewer) faulted the flutist for playing a metal flute when, in fact, he was playing a wooden flute. Was this guy really at the concert?
Rather than delineate the ways that the reviewer simply didn’t “get it,” I found I was more annoyed with the fact that reviewers have the last word when it comes to musical performance. Not the audience. Not the musicians. Not the composer. Also the reviewer is not accountable to anyone. If he/she says something totally demeaning, or out to lunch, no one can challenge him/her.
This all clicked in place, in my mind, when one of the two music critics commenting on my social media post admitted that the purpose of reviews is entertainment. In other words, the reviewer is wanting to amuse, presumably through an erudite analysis of a musical performance, for the sake of gaining an audience and selling a publication.
This is why music reviews need to end.
Music is not quantifiable, reducible to a series of likes and thumbs up emojis. Music is about soul, about profundity, about spirit. To objectify it, reduce it to the likes and dislikes of a music critic, is to entirely miss the point. The purpose of music, like the purpose of all art, is to manifest the Divine. Amusing reviews do a great disservice to the art. Think about it. The whole concept of reviewing music only began in the 19th century as music started to become a commodity (with the birth of the middle class) and therefore susceptible to quantitative analysis. Such was never the aim of why music graces the globe.
We don’t review sports games. Instead we interview the players, getting their take on what the experience was like for them. If we adopted a similar approach with music, interviewing the experience of music making (from the players) and the experience of music listening (from the audience), we would likely massively grow an interest in art music.
Instead, we pick things apart, critiquing interpretations, technique, clothing, anything that seems edgy. In so doing we underscore the society’s disdain of transformative experiences.
©2026, Jonathan Dimmock, all rights reserved