HALF A CENTURY AS A MUSIC CRITIC.

WHEN I BEGAN writing music criticism in the daily press in 1963 after doing so in other publications since the late 1940s, critics were identified by their initials at the end of the review. Around mid-1965, their cloak of semianonymity was removed, and their full names appeared under headings which then, as now, were chosen, capriciously, by sub-editors to control page layout. Whether full disclosure of the critical perpetrator has done criticism much good is debatable. Direct, honest, reasonably objective, well-informed music criticism has been sidelined by the emergence of arts coverage containing a dominant proportion of hype, disguised advertising, subjectivity, personal barrow-pushing and tub-thumping.

Straight music criticism, some fifty years after I became entangled in it with all the trepidation of inexperience and a minimum of practical knowledge, is now more than ever relegated to a back seat or, when it insists on a front seat, reserved for the tall poppies of the music performing world. Mind you, the development of libel laws and the orchestrated popularity of political correctness have blunted critical claws. Eduard Hanslick, George Bernard Shaw and a multitude of composers and performers writing about colleagues and predecessors in the nineteenth century, sometimes under a nom de plume, would now be consulting their legal advisers before dipping their pen into hemlock, unfairly and wittily.

A critic is a person with an opinion. End of definition. But the common conception of a music critic includes the expectation that his or her opinion should invite scrutiny in print. From the critic's viewpoint there is also the necessity that the opinion should be paid for by a publisher who considers it sufficiently interesting, controversial or simply commercially useful (perhaps in attracting advertising) to increase circulation. As Samuel Johnson put it: no one but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money.

But music criticism is not a profession; Australia has no full-time critics. Our critics have respectable daytime jobs (under which, reluctantly, I include journalism), which is essential when so many cultural publications suddenly go belly-up, leaving bad debts. In any case the true, committed music critic has compelling non-financial motives, and the main one--unfortunately not shared by all--is the love of music with a proselytising fervour for fanning the flames of a similar love among a potentially flammable population.

But this is a personal, not a philosophical look back at half a century of working outside my normal day job (which was, until retirement, industrial chemistry) as a music critic, a hobby-horse on which I have ridden into related pursuits such as lecturing adult education bodies, usually on the relationship between music and society. How did I get caught up in this activity? As it happens, very willingly.

It began with the monthly Australian music journal Canon (1947-66), long since interred in library vaults. The editor, Franz Holford, had a musical altruism that catalysed Australian music away from its geographical isolation. Following a youthful interest in classical music (my mother sang Schubert lieder) given voice with lecturettes among youth groups, I was invited to review youth concerts in Sydney for Canon, then to submit occasional longer pieces about such dangerously contemporary composers as Darius Milhaud, Aaron Copland and--heaven protect us--Arnold Schoenberg. I shudder when I re-read them.

Then came a lucky break, initiated by me. I was seconded to work in the United Kingdom, mostly near Blackpool and in Welwyn Garden City, by my chemical employer, with the admirable purpose of joining a team which would introduce the manufacture of polyvinyl chloride (PVC) to Australia, and I used weekends and holidays to saturate myself with music, becoming for instance a subscriber to the Halle Orchestra conducted by "glorious John", Sir John Barbirolli, in Manchester, and the Liverpool (later Royal) Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Hugo Rignold and others.