The bull-fight on the second day was much better than on the first. Brett sat between Mike and me at the barrera, and Bill and Cohn went up above. Romero was the whole show. I do not think Brett saw any other bull-fighter. No one else did either, except the hard-shelled technicians. It was all Romero. There were two other matadors, but they did not count. I sat beside Brett and explained to Brett what it was all about. I told her about watching the bull, not the horse, when the bulls charged the picadors, and got her to watching the picador place the point of his pic so that she saw what it was all about, so that it became more something that was going on with a definite end, and less of a spectacle with unexplained horrors. I had her watch how Romero took the bull away from a fallen horse with his cape, and how he held him with the cape and turned him, smoothly and suavely, never wasting the bull. She saw how Romero avoided every brusque movement and saved his bulls for the last when he wanted them, not winded and discomposed but smoothly worn down. She saw how close Romero always worked to the bull, and I pointed out to her the tricks the other bull-fighters used to make it look as though they were working closely. She saw why she liked Romeros cape-work and why she did not like the others.
Romero never made any contortions, always it was straight and pure and natural in line. The others twisted themselves like corkscrews, their elbows raised, and leaned against the flanks of the bull after his horns had passed, to give a faked look of danger. Afterward, all that was faked turned bad and gave an unpleasant feeling. Romero’s bull-fighting gave real emotion, because he kept the absolute purity of line in his movements and always quietly and calmly let the horns pass him close each time. He did not have to emphasize their closeness. Brett saw how something that was beautiful done close to the bull was ridiculous if it were done a little way off. I told her how since the death of Joselito all the bull-fighters had been developing a technic that simulated this appearance of danger in order to give a fake emotional feeling, while the bull-fighter was really safe. Romero had the old thing, the holding of his purity of line through the maximum of exposure, while he dominated the bull by making him realize he was unattainable, while he prepared him for the killing. — Ernest Hemingway, The Sun Also Rises
© 1926 Charles Scribner‘s Sons
Jake would have made a hell of a dance critic. Between the lines of Hemingway’s trademark lean prose lies an inherent sensitivity and critical instinct: not only does Jake expertly discern between authenticity and fakery, but his observations to Brett never stoop to pedantry. Instead, he takes her own intuition and affirms it, using it as a foundation on which to deconstruct the bullfighter’s movements, focus Brett’s gaze and reveal the artifice behind the spectacle. Notably, he accomplishes this last point while increasing our understanding and — equally important — appreciation for the art of bullfighting.
Music critics today could use a lesson from the American master. Too often we see verbose reviews — crammed with historical background on the orchestra, a biographical thumbnail of the composer, program-note level description of the performance history of the work in question, observations on the mood of the crowd and a snapshot of the weather conditions outside the hall — crafted by Biographer critics, who say much but refuse to take a critical stand (“Romero was the whole show. I do not think Brett saw any other bull-fighter”). In search of assertion, the reader could cross out background information unrelated to the performance at hand and be left with just a fistful of poor phrases.
Equally anemic as the Biographers are Hemingway’s “hard-shelled technicians,” who feel compelled to tell us when the bassoon is out of tune or take issue with the timpanist’s choice of mallets. The Technicians miss the forest for the trees and provide no insight beyond their own misplaced mastery of minutiae.
Finally, and most egregiously, music criticism can easily devolve into Judgment, wherein the all-seeing Critic has decided to point his infallible thumb to the heavens or to hell, with no evidence or explanation: the Critic has spoken. This, of course, is nonsense.
“The best music critics have never just held forth with judgment as if from on high,” Listen editorial consultant Bradley Bambarger wrote me after I approached him with this article’s thesis. “The critics who add something to the artistic equation tell a true story about a recording or a performance. That story has the ‘how,’ the color and atmosphere and connoisseur’s detail to evoke the music, to prick a reader’s ears through their eyes, in a way. The story also has the ‘why,’ providing the context of trends and history. This is the nuance that can still make criticism enlightening and relevant, that can make it cultural news. If a critic isn’t telling this kind of story, then what he or she is doing isn’t real arts criticism — it’s just slinging opinion.”
