Reviews. Music review rules Rock reviews

14.11.2010 21:31

The beauty of the new, “wave” incarnation of Rush was that they began to push the previous boundaries and try different styles and shades in their songs.

It would probably be the stupidest thing to start a review with a story about who Led Zeppelin are and what their background was. This group is so popular among rock fans that it is no longer possible for anyone to keep up with it.

The group has no weak albums. The discography, however, is not very extensive, but each album is good in its own way, with its own personality and mood. But for me personally Badmotorfinger stands alone and is the band's most beloved album. It is in it that there is the spirit of that Seattle, which I tried to describe in a nutshell, it is in it that the spirit of the revival of rock of the 70s is in it - dense, powerful, smart, tearing up the atmosphere with riffs, electrifying it to the limit...

The second album, Reggatta De Blanc, is a completely different matter. The sound has completely changed, which, of course, is the main merit of Summers - his guitar has changed its typical punk coloring to a truly wave one, allowing you to feel either radio waves that orderly touch the strings of our musical perception, or light waves of a calm sea washing distant areas of memory.

This is an album of cover versions of songs by the legendary king of country - Hank Williams(Hank Williams) Of all the albums of this kind (where one artist covers the songs of another), I put this one in first place. Next to me is only Scott Walker, singing the songs of Jacques Brel (but that’s a completely different story).

Springsteen's debut album is rightfully considered one of the best debuts in the history of rock music. Although recognition came to him only when, after the mega-successful Born To Run, “Brucemania” began and his first two albums began to be urgently bought.

Grand Union- the fifth album of the group, a project of the legend of extreme metal Billy Steer. I don't know what happened to music preferences Styra in the late 90s, but Billy turned sharply towards classic rock and, starting in 2000, started playing good old blues-rock with a clearly noticeable influence Cream, Blue Cheer, Hendrix and... In general, the list of influences is probably huge, and it makes no sense to list them.

Do you love music as much as I do? It's clear, NO - it's simply impossible. There is a lot of music and it appears all the time. We listen, re-listen, enjoy, then something gets boring, we rush in search of something new, return to the well-forgotten old - and so on endlessly.

Sometimes a musical hunger hits you, and you start listening to everything, everything new and old, without repeats, for several hours a day (Puh, great!). Sooner or later, the joy of simply listening will want to be reinforced by an educational program on the subject area - what kind of band/performer, what kind of genre, what album is considered the best, what to listen to first, etc. Then you can show off this knowledge in front of candy wrappers like yourself (hey, Pooh!)

So little by little we start reading band histories and album reviews. I don’t know about you, but I read music reviews 20 times more often than books or movies. Most of them, unfortunately, leave much to be desired. Below I offer a series simple recommendations for all would-be reviewers. It will be useful for all of us, simple lovers of good music, to read this.

So, when writing a review it would be good to:

1. Forget all photos and biographies of the artist. And if you don’t know yet, don’t get to know them before you’ve at least written a draft. It’s touching when the album description talks more about the fact that “the vocalist’s appearance is no longer the same as in the 90s” than about the actual album material.

2. Try don't compare the album to previous ones. Yeah, it's very easy to write that “Original Prankster” is a song like “Pretty Fly” from the last album. Stsuko! Write about the music, write about the lyrics. Give new listeners a chance to learn about new song, as something immediate, and not through the prism of your anus brain

I've read a ton of reviews that consist almost entirely of comparisons. The exception to this rule is if the album is a frankly weak knockoff of old hits. Although this is also very subjective, because... many conservative individuals, so to speak, refuse to accept anything new and masturbate to old discs that have been listened to to death. It’s simply incorrect to compare the “quality” of a new album, which you listened to once or twice, with your favorite old one, which you listened to 200 times since you were 14 years old and to which you lost your virginity.

3. Listen to the album carefully, write about it impartially, as if about something new. How do you like reviews like “Good old AC/DC (Motorhead, Offspring, Meteors, Picnic) have released a new album! And that says it all, no one expected any surprises”? Probably, before writing such a “review”, the shitty author did not bother to listen to the middle. It’s good when it’s not added to this that the album is, of course, much weaker than its “classical analogues” (see the previous rule). An example is almost all reviews of Metallica's "Death Magnetic". Write about music. Write about the fact that the guitar song in the interval 1:43 - 2:02 is simply awesome or, on the contrary, complete crap. If you didn’t listen to everything, don’t sit at the keyboard, don’t embarrass yourself.

4. Don't read reviews of the album you're about to review. I laughed for a long time, re-reading in different variations that in the new album, in the song “Witch,” the Melnitsa group “experimented with jazz.” Fortunately, I listened to the album five times before reading the reviews. The jazz in the said song is about as good as gold in my panties. One fool blurted it out, ten repeated it.

Just like that. The rules, of course, overlap and they could have been grouped differently. And in conclusion, the main rule that I want to address first of all to us, the listeners: don't read music reviews, listen to music. Take care of yourself and the environmental purity of your brain :-)

ZY: Anyone who wants to add/correct the list is welcome to leave a comment.

Music journalism and music criticism: training manual Kurysheva Tatyana Aleksandrovna

5.1. Review

5.1. Review

Word review comes from Latin recensio– judgment, consideration, examination. The focus of a music review is on evaluation creative object – piece of music, musical performance, musical production, musical and creative event.

Although reviewing is by no means unique to the artistic sphere (it exists in both science and technology), there is a fundamental difference between scientific and technical reviewing, which seeks to objectively evaluate what has been achieved, from the activities of a reviewer in the field of artistic creativity. This is due to the fact that an art review is directed specifically at a work of art, and the reviewer’s skill lies in subjective perception another art world, in interaction with him. “Review,” as the famous writer wrote literary critic L. Anninsky, - there is a spiritual meeting of two different people. A meeting of two personalities: the one who writes and the one about whom it is written. This is not a slavish dissolution into oneself, this is not him or me, this is something third, something completely new, this is our meeting, our event. What is the difficulty here? In that the “event” simultaneously reveals spiritual world two different people" 2.

Being neither a verdict nor the ultimate truth, a music review is designed to capture a specific moment when a creative artistic object falls into the field of perception of a certain person. On one issue, many reviews may arise, different, even diametrically opposed in conclusions. The range of possible assessments reflects plurality musical perception, which has already been discussed.

The most important thing in review work is the speed of response. A review is all the more valuable the closer it is in time to that specific moment when the meeting between the phenomenon of art and its perception took place. The value attitude towards an artistic event is at its apogee at the moment of presentation. As if spilled in the atmosphere, it immediately begins to melt (how quickly depends on the artistic level of the phenomenon: sometimes the memory of it lasts for years, sometimes it disappears immediately beyond the threshold of a concert or theater hall). That is why a music review is always a quick response. It soon becomes obsolete, its relevance is short-lived.

Of the semantic components of a musical-journalistic performance (see section 3.3), all can be presented in a review. However, both the informational and problematic components are in some way optional, that is, they are not mandatory, although they are desirable - the information helps those who have not directly come into contact with the phenomenon under review to “enter” the phenomenon, and the problematic part brings it to a higher level of generalization, immersing the phenomenon in the context of culture. The main and mandatory are three other components: analysis, interpretation, evaluation. Of these grade– the main purpose of writing a review, analysis And interpretation– mechanisms for its successful implementation.

Analytical part reviews are fueled by musical knowledge. Here, the skills of professional communication with music are especially important: the perception of the intonation structure, language, form, dramaturgy of a new composition, technical perfection (or defects) of performance, that is, all the actual musical aspects of the artistic phenomenon, from which and in the interaction of which the composition is formed. artistic result. No less important is the ability to generalize and systematize these disparate musical data (“verify harmony with algebra”). In the analytical part of the work, both all the formal and technological details are important for the reviewer (however, if they are involved in the final text, they should mainly be “translated” into the language of publicly available figurative and aesthetic equivalents), as well as the entire musical and historical context. The main task of analysis is to understand and comprehend its “spirit” through penetration into the proposed musical “matter”.

Interpretation– the most creative and most subjective part of the review. It is here that the author of the review creates his own world, igniting someone else’s. The nature of associations and comparisons reflects the life and artistic experience of the writer, his worldview, philosophical attitudes, and value orientations. It is in the part of interpretation that contact arises not only between the spiritual structure of the artist and the critic, but also between the critic and the reader. Extracting moments of interpretation from the text, we either rejoice at meeting a like-minded and like-minded person, or we internally protest. The critic’s personality is exposed at the moment of interpretation; the object being reviewed is colored by the subjective attitude of the perceiver.

Grade, although it is the core of the review, it does not necessarily form any special section in the text. All reasoning can be evaluatively colored, and to the greatest extent precisely the moments of interpretation. And, often, it is not so much in the nature of the arguments involved, but rather in the tone of presentation created by literary stylistics - vocabulary, epithets and comparisons, as well as the “tempo rhythm” of syntax - that first of all crystallizes the evaluative image of the review.

To illustrate the work of a reviewer with different directions of evaluative conclusions, let us compare two reviews by V. Karatygin, published at a weekly interval in January 1913 in the newspaper Rech. In terms of form, they are brought together not only by a single authorship, but also by a single object and even a “cap”: “Koussevitzky’s Sixth Concerto” and “Koussevitzky’s Seventh Concerto”. In both concerts, the listener was presented with the premiere of a new composition, and the pen of a venerable critic was directed primarily to evaluate the musical novelty. At the same time, from the standpoint of today’s knowledge, both works – Mahler’s Seventh Symphony and Stravinsky’s “Petrushka” – are imperishable. However, then it was contact with an unknown world, and criticism is clearly reflected in the perception and assessment his the standard of beauty, his value criteria and the nature of evaluation activities.

In the first of the reviews, even before the author approaches the new work, he reveals his attitude towards Mahler’s work, which will largely determine everything that follows: “Considering his symphonies from a purely artistic point of view, it is difficult not to notice that Mahler’s talent as a composer was completely secondary, a million times inferior to his enormous talent as a conductor..." 3. From an evaluative point of view, the key words are undoubtedly a million times(killer hyperbole!) and derogatory definition secondary, reinforced by the word absolutely.

Below is all that has been said, as well as a few more negative characteristics like feeling of boredom, annoyance, gradually leads to the main stage of the review, in which both the analytical elements (characteristics of melodic and intonation details, features of form, style, genre, musical and historical context) and interpretation (primarily epithets and other figurative parallels) are strictly evaluative:

...the music of the Seventh Symphony itself still leaves an extremely vague impression. Mahler's notorious "democratism" mostly boils down to simple melodic vulgarity and banality. The formal outlines of the parts are loose and inconsistent. Lots of lengths. Lots of cheap stuff. Lots of musical roughness. And very little independence. Here is a folk motif, there are echoes of Brahms, Wagner, Bruckner or the Wagnerized “Songs of Dead Children” by Mahler himself. A comparatively more successful and harmonically interesting movement is the middle, scherzo-like “Schattenhaft”. In general, the work is very bleak, individual beautiful pages of which cannot atone for the general awkwardness and pallor of the symphony 4.

In the second review, on the contrary, the author is clearly initially passionate about music. Although at the analytical level he states formal defects, as if insuring himself against the objections of opponents, the entire interpretation bears the stamp of admiration, gradually confirmed by a rich system of evidence. That is why the entire main block given below analysis – interpretation – evaluation The author constructs the essay from the contrary, creating a strong build-up with an evaluative culmination at the end:

From a school point of view, scold this thing last words- the task is so easy that it can hardly seem tempting even to the most ardent enemies of such music. Sharp, shrill lists are here at every turn. All sorts of parallelisms have almost been elevated to a principle. The triads Fis and C sound simultaneously in arpeggiated figuration.

Not music, but some kind of continuous thorny fence of musical audacity and lawlessness, which can discourage many from penetrating the fence, into the interior of the author’s soul. But if you even have the desire to prove that “Petrushka” is a complete “illiteracy”, then, after what has been said above, you simply do not have rights prove that music is bad, because"illiterate." In the same way, I have neither the desire nor the right to convince anyone that this piece is good precisely because it contains such an abundance of violations of all the “laws” and foundations of musical theory. Direct feeling is the only criterion when dealing with works so radical. If your response to Stravinsky is disgust, I won’t argue. It is also impossible logically and theoretically motivate, like that opposite feeling that the same “Petrushka” aroused in me and which I can only talk about - the liveliest artistic joy. This joy comes from the fact that, first of all, in “Petrushka” one senses the presence of a huge and unusually bright talent, so captivating that the most fierce of Stravinsky’s enemies cannot fail to recognize its strength. The music of “Petrushka” constantly boils, sparkles, foams, plays with the most delightful tints of orchestral colors, in the sophisticated flair of which one can easily discern a worthy disciple of the unforgettable Rimsky-Korsakov. You listen scene by scene... and you come to an unexpected conclusion: this music is not anarchic at all. Thousands of threads stretch from it to the work of Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin (in “Petrushka” there is even a figuration just like in the scene of the horns in “Igor”), especially Mussorgsky and the new French. Of course, this is not Korsakov, and not Mussorgsky (perhaps Rimsky-Korsakov, if he were alive now, would not even approve of many of Stravinsky’s “extremes”), and not Debussy. But from these very origins, plus the richest personal talent, arose the charming, so fresh, original and vital art of Stravinsky" 5 (course. author - T.K.)

In his review, V. Karatygin is not just in admiration at the level of immediate feeling. The “radicalism” of music requires similar approaches from the critic, especially since he strongly senses the possible rejection of a conservative listener. On the one hand, the author mobilizes erudition, rightly striving to comprehend the new work in the context of the searches of Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, Mussorgsky, Debussy... On the other hand, he creates a parallel figurative world of the “living artistic joy” he perceived. Here logic is powerless and is not even needed; here we need magic that can infect and captivate the reader ( the music of “Petrushka” constantly boils, sparkles, foams, plays with the most delightful tints of orchestral colors...). And from these two positions, the critic unfolds his review as a battle with an enemy doomed to defeat.

REVIEW BY VARG VIKERNES (The review is not included in the book - note by the author of the fb2 document) A lot of things could and should be said about this book. I had originally intended to expose all the lies in this book in a complete and systematic review, but when I had written twelve pages and