The house of music: art in an era of institutions

National Review, Sept 21, 1984 by Terry Teachout

"MUSIC IN detail," Samuel Lipman writes in his new book, The House of Music, "was hardly Shaw's real strength. He was not, on the most tolerant of assessments, a trained musician. It hardly mattered; there were, after all, established music critics entrenched in English concert life who knew all about music.

Shaw knew something much more valuable: He knew what he liked." Much the same can be said in praise of the outstanding music criticism Mr. Lipman has been publishing in Commentary and The New Criterion for the last few years. Knowing what he likes, Mr. Lipman is unafraid to describe the long-defunct Hollywood Quartet as "perhaps the best string quartet ever to have been assembled in America"; to eulogize Glenn Gould as "the one pianist . . . who seemed to have the ability to say something new and interesting about familiar--and overfamiliar--music"; to dismiss Leonard Bernstein's string-orchestra recording of Beethoven's Opus 131 as "the nightmare of musical alchemy . . . Beethoven at his greatest has been transformed into bad Mahler"; to observe that the music critic B. H. Haggin "brings to the discussion of music and musicians something of the seriousness associated in literature with F. R. Leavis." It isn't necessary to agree with Mr. Lipman (sometimes it isn't even possible) in order to appreciate his plain, direct prose style and his wonderfully forthright opinionizing. The House of Music bears the Thomsonian subtitle "Art in an Era of Institutions," suggesting a unity of concept that sometimes seems imposed on the author's material; Mr. Lipman might have done better to emulate the young Norman Podhoretz and boldly declare that his book is really a collection of unrelated magazine essays whose only unity is the subliminal one produced by the impress of a particular mind. No matter. Samuel Lipman is quite possibly the best home-grown American music critic in business today; his first collection, the 1979 Music after Modernism, was superbly promising; in The House of Music, the promise is realized.