Music Criticism

Histories of classical music of whatever epoch – medieval, baroque, twentieth-century – tend to be written by university professors writing for a university readership. That being the case, they are issued by academic textbook publishers and are unlikely to pop up in your local bookstore. Chances are they won’t appear on best-seller and ‘pick of the critics’ lists.

Following years of debates with people who denied that Bob Dylan was worthy of serious literary study, I eventually conceded, albeit in a somewhat roundabout fashion. Having brought enjoyment and illumination to millions of people, what on earth had Dylan done to deserve being beaten about the head by literary criticism? But after a hiatus, The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan has brought me up to date with the field of Dylan studies, and I can confidently declare that there is hope. This collection consists of nine ‘big picture’ essays on subjects such as Dylan as songwriter, Dylan and collaboration, Dylan and gender, and so on, followed by shorter pieces on eight of Dylan’s most influential albums (how they chose from the fifty-odd on offer is anyone’s guess).

On paper, jazz critic John Shand’s Jazz: The Australian Accent is a welcome intervention, one of the first books to take Australian jazz seriously. Shand’s prose is well paced and easy to read, if slightly glib. There is little obfuscation in his method, which is infinitely preferable to the pretensions of many jazz critics who fail to translate jazz into prose. Shand’s descriptions of music are engaging enough to make you want to listen to the musicians whose work he is describing, if only to confirm or deny the mutedly rhapsodic element of Shand’s descriptors. Unfortunately, they generally don’t live up to his prose, which you’ll discover when listening to the compilation CD that accompanies this book.

In the myths that inspired Wagner to write Der Ring des Nibelungen, the World Ash-Tree (Die WeltEsche) is the symbol of Wotan’s power and enlightenment and eventual downfall. As a young god, he cut a branch off the tree to fashion into his spear. In The Ring, it is not until the Prologue to Götterdämmerung, as the three Norns are weaving their rope of fate, that we are told the World Ash-Tree is withering and dying, as the gods themselves will do by the end of this long evening. As with most of the objects in The Ring, symbolism is never too far away. The tree: the spear: the twilight of the gods. On Wotan’s orders, the branches of the tree (as the Norns tell us, and as Waltraute is soon to tell her sister Brünnhilde) are split and piled around Valhalla, where the gods sit, waiting for their fiery end.