Music journalism

Music journalism, often known as music criticism, is the practise of providing commentary and news coverage on many aspects of music, such as popular music, classical music, and traditional music. In the seventeenth century, journalists first started writing about music and offering opinion on what is today considered to be classical music for the first time. After The Beatles achieved mainstream success in the 1960s, the music press started devoting a greater amount of attention to covering popular music genres such as rock and pop. Print media have been supplemented online by music bloggers, aspiring music critics, and veteran critics since the emergence of the internet in the 2000s. This has led to an increasingly big online presence for music criticism. Reviews of songs, albums, and live performances are all a part of today's music journalism, as are artist profiles, the reporting of news about recording artists, and the coverage of live music events.

The study, discussion, evaluation, and interpretation of music that has been composed and notated in a score as well as the evaluation of the performance of classical songs and pieces such as symphonies and concertos are the traditional components of classical music criticism. The roots of music journalism can be traced back to classical music criticism.

Before the 1840s, reporting on music was either done by musical journals, such as the Allgemeine musikalische Zeitung (founded by Johann Friedrich Rochlitz in 1798) and the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik (founded by Robert Schumann in 1834), and in London journals such as The Musical Times (founded in 1844 as The Musical Times and Singing-class Circular); or else it was done by reporters at general newspapers where music did not form part of the central objectives of the publication. The Allgemeine musikalische One important English music critic from the 19th century was James William Davison of The Times. He wrote about music in England. In the 1830s and 1840s, the French composer Hector Berlioz also contributed articles, reviews, and comments to the newspaper in Paris.

The field of modern art music journalism is frequently influenced by music theory, which examines the myriad of different aspects that make up a musical composition or performance. These aspects include (in the case of a musical composition) its form and style, as well as standards of technique and expression for live performances. These criteria were articulated, for instance, in periodicals like the Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, which was established by Robert Schumann. These standards are still being articulated today in the columns of respectable newspapers and periodicals like The Musical Times.

The growth of education, the influence of the Romantic movement both in general and in music, popularisation (including the "star-status" of many performers like Liszt and Paganini), and other factors, among others, led to an increase in the interest in music among non-specialist journals, as well as an increase in the number of critics by profession, with varying degrees of competence and integrity in each case. The 1840s might be regarded a turning moment in the history of music criticism since, following that decade, music writers were often not also working musicians. On the other hand, counterexamples include people like Alfred Brendel, Charles Rosen, Paul Hindemith, and Ernst Krenek. All of these people were contemporary practitioners of the classical music tradition, and in addition to writing about music, they did such themselves.