Grant, Mark N. 1952-

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GRANT, Mark N. 1952-

PERSONAL: Born July 3, 1952 in New York, New York; son of Bernard Grant and Joyce (maiden name Gordon), both professional actors. Education: University of Rochester, NY, B.A., 1974.

ADDRESSES: Agent—c/o Author Mail, Northeastern University Press, 360 Huntington Ave., 416 CP, Boston, MA 02115.

CAREER: Composer and writer.

WRITINGS:

Maestros of the Pen: A History of Classical MusicCriticism in America, Northeastern University Press (Boston, MA), 1998.

Author of introduction, Remembering Franz Liszt by Arthur Friedheim and Alexander Siloti, 1986.

WORK IN PROGRESS: The Rise and Fall of the Broadway Musical (tentative title), Northeastern University Press (Boston, MA), 2004.

SIDELIGHTS: Mark N. Grant is a composer and the author of Maestros of the Pen: A History of Classical Music Criticism in America. The history of music criticism began in the 1830s. It first took the form of notices of musical events and post-performance acknowledgments of who was in attendance. With the huge influx of European immigrants, music criticism expanded to meet the needs of a larger audience, offering opinions as to what was or was not good music and growing over the next two hundred years to become a lucrative industry.

Grant examines nearly fifty music journalists during what he calls the First and Second Empires. The first, the Gilded Age, lasted from Reconstruction until World War I. It was during this period that reviewers gained the status of professional critics. They were widely read in daily newspapers and rose to the height of their influence, particularly in New York City. The Old Guard included such notables as W. J. Henderson, H. T. Finch, H. E. Krehbiel, Richard Aldrich, and James Gibbons Huneker. These critics wrote from the 1880s until the 1920s. Krehbiel was often mistaken for his friend, President William Howard Taft, and was so popular that his name was placed in lights on Broadway by the New York Tribune. Once the most influential reviewer in the country, Huneker covered music, literature, the visual arts, and theater. He also wrote fiction.

Dana Gioia wrote in the New York Times Book Review that "fueled by a dozen or more daily bottles of Pilsner, Huneker published half a million words per year and still found time to chase divas, hold court at Luchow's, and practice Chopin. Helping move American arts from puritan provincialism to cosmopolitan sophistication, Huneker became the model for later culture czars like H. L. Mencken. For Grant, Huneker serves as a representative figure of a vanished intellectual authority, a magisterial critic and trained instrumentalist who understood music's importance to general culture." Grant's Second Empire began in 1940. Influential critics included B. H. Haggin, Henry Pleasants, Olin Downes, Alfred Frankenstein, and composer Virgil Thomson, whom Grant considers America's foremost music critic.

Grant speculates on the role of critics in music history and their influence on composition and performance. He notes that the Old Guard were Wagnerians and that their attention has ensured that Wagner's operas remain popular. Other composers were not treated as kindly. Krehbiel called Arnold Schoenberg's work "excreta," and upon hearing the first performance of Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire in Berlin in 1912, Huneker called it "the very ecstasy of the hideous." Huneker also thought Berg's Lulu suite to be "squalid and repulsive." Fifty years earlier he trashed Tchaikovsky's "First Piano Concerto," and in 1888 he wrote that Bruckner's Fourth Symphony "is without melodious themes of any kind." Other critics offered their views of Bruckner and his music. Deems Taylor said he "has the talent, but not the mind to control it," while Winthrop Sargeant called Bruckner "vastly superior to Brahms."

Mahler had the support of very few American critics. In writing Mahler's obituary, Krehbiel continued to fault his work, and forty years later Downes was still calling Mahler's Seventh Symphony "detestably bad" and his Fifth Symphony "vulgar music." Gioia pointed out that Mahler eventually developed a huge following, due, for the most part, to the efforts of conductors like Bruno Walter, Otto Klemperer, and Leonard Bernstein. In some cases, critics were key in providing exposure for composers. Olin Downes was an advocate of Sibelius, which brought the Finnish composer into the American limelight, and Paul Rosenfeld promoted the work of Charles Ives and Aaron Copeland. John Rockwell is an example of a critic who reviews rock as well as classical music.

By 2000, critics had become reviewers, and almost none were composers. Reviewing rock became much more lucrative than reviewing classical music, and so the latter was not only not widely reviewed, it was also not promoted. Gioia noted that although there are now fewer classical music critics, there are nonetheless more opera companies, orchestras, and music festivals, and there is an ever-widening range of classical music available through recordings and broadcasts. Gioia said that "perhaps all we need to reinvigorate criticism is a few books as good as this one."

Washington Times reviewer Rufus Hallmark wrote that, in Maestros of the Pen, Grant "declares at the outset that he will not include musicologists in his coverage, but he does make an exception for the late Columbia professor Paul Henry Lang, long a music critic for the New York Herald Tribune (successor to Virgil Thomson). Given this exception, one wonders how on the contemporary scene he could ignore Richard Taruskin of Berkeley, a brilliant, opinionated, and at times vitriolic 'think-piece' writer for the New York Times." Hallmark noted that some of Taruskin's writings fall into the category of concert previews within feature articles. Hallmark noted that Grant makes no mention of Andrew Porter, who wrote regularly about music for the New Yorker in the 1970s and 1980s. Hallmark wrote that "a simultaneous strength and weakness of the book is that while Mr. Grant's characterization of the critics makes one yearn to read the actual reviews and essays they penned, his book provides only tiny snippets, mere tastes that whet our appetites for more."

A Publishers Weekly reviewer called Grant's history "rich with cultural context." Times Literary Supplement reviewer Paul Griffiths wrote that the book "is a gallery of portraits, done in prose of robust American flavour and assembled to make a history that follows one of the great narrative forms. Music criticism in the United States is born, reaches maturity, and dies." Griffiths concluded that "perhaps . . . what changes musical life is not the solitary voice in print but the commercial opportunism of recording companies.... But so long as we believe that a mindless machine can be stayed by one new thought, the dream is worth holding on to."