Volume 12, Number 12 · June 19, 1969
What Is Quality in Music?
By Virgil Thomson
A professional's judgment of music or painting or poetry is invariably more convincing to me than any amateur's and more than that of any publisher, dealer, or other distributor. Even the learned, though I trust them on facts and on urtext (hoping that their own colleagues will have kept them in line about these things), I do not consider responsible as judges of content. Of iconography perhaps, but not of form or of expression. And as for the caretakers of the fine arts, with their game (rather like Monopoly) of trends and influences and market values, it rarely fits in with the values of form and content as these are thought of by artists. For in all these matters a consensus among workmen is not hard to arrive at. It is only for dealers and distributors and for the historian-verbalizers that the values come out different. And for the amateurs, of course, whose reactions to art, being disengaged from responsibility, are subjective.
Feature, 3262 words
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