A major music critic is taken off his post

late morning thoughts on Zachary Woolfe, the Times, and the role of the critic

Hello again - it’s been a while. No, this is not a revival of Industry-the-newsletter. But back in the days when I had a blogspot — no, I’m not going to link to it, but it’s not hard to find — I would write about the world of music criticism, and penned two tributes to departed mentors: one for Jim Oestreich, my first editor at the Times, when he retired in 2013, and another following the tragic and sudden death of the great critic and friend Andrew Patner in 2015.

I’m very upset to feel it necessary to write another one of these tributes — thankfully not to someone who died, but to someone who has clearly been done wrong by the paper of record. Variety reported yesterday that the Times is taking major critics off their roles: Jon Pareles in pop music, Margaret Lyons in TV, Jesse Green in theatre, and Zachary Woolfe in classical music. Moving Pareles off the beat he has maintained for 40+ years is deeply disrespectful to one of the greatest music critics of all time: I hope and expect this will be covered by others (Nate Chinen’s got a good take). But I am also disturbed by the relocation of Woolfe; I have no inside baseball about what went on at the Times or where he is headed next at the paper, but I am confident that this is a grave mistake.

Woolfe and I came up together (I’ll call him Woolfe here but I could say Zack; whatever). We both began freelancing for the Times in 2011, albeit in very different circumstances: whereas I had done some blogging and began writing occasional feature contributions around when I started grad school, he had earned a place at the newspaper following an extraordinarily run of columns at the Observer, where he brought a trenchant and irreverent voice that is too often missing from classical music coverage. Woolfe is a product of the 2000s classical music blogosphere, brought up on the queer zaniness of Parterre Box, and took that energy to the Observer and then, thankfully, managed to continue to cultivate it at the Times. No one really wants to start writing for a major publication at almost the same time as a contemporary — going through old emails, I just found one where I called him “my new nemesis” (we both reviewed the premiere of Nico Muhly’s Two Boys) — but I was very impressed by Woolfe’s criticism from the get-go.

Woolfe wrote a number of fantastic articles in that initial run as a stringer: my favorites include a deep, well-researched examination of the puzzle of Rossini’s retirement; a pointed call for the New York Philharmonic to play more contemporary music; an essay on seeing Bellini’s Norma from *nine different vantage points* at the Met, which doubles as an autobiography of his love of opera; and a two-part reflection on how the Met’s Live in HD series was fundamentally transforming the opera industry. I remember being impressed, and jealous; there is a clear, authoritative voice in his early work that still endures, which is quite difficult to pull off in the editorial context of the Times. Well-reported, personal, educational, penetrating: what you want out of a great music critic. From the end of the Norma piece:

His confidence seemed to return when Ms. Meade and Ms. Barton entered the production for the seventh and eighth performances. Viewed from a prime orchestra seat on the aisle ($310), the opera felt rebalanced with its new stars. While her ivory voice is less distinctive than Ms. Radvanovsky’s, Ms. Meade handled Bellini’s long lines more elegantly and invested her duets with more urgency. Her voice rich and focused, Ms. Barton added a luminous presence, serious but joyful, that suffused her singing even when I was in a Score Desk seat ($12) and unable to see her.

That performance, my eighth “Norma,” may have been the most pleasant one of all. The Score Desk spots are at the very top and sides of the theater. From there, you don’t have a view of the stage, but you get a desk and a lamp and incredible music. The sound gains energy and focus as it rises, and the blend of instruments and voices grows smoother even as individual elements stand out more clearly. Listening to the performance while following along in the score made clear how brilliant a work of art “Norma” is, from the telling combination of sensual colors and martial rhythms in the orchestral introduction to the opening scene: love and war juxtaposed from the start.

I had never before been at a Score Desk, but the experience was exactly as I’d imagined, complete with an older woman with wild hair next to me ferociously haggling about the relative worth of the singers. While it wasn’t quite where I’d spent so much time growing up, it still felt like home. After the bows, I descended the staircase more slowly than I did when I was a child. But I ran my hand against the velvet wall and felt young again before the cold night hit me.

During this period, we struck up an email correspondence and met for a couple concerts in New York, and he generously advocated for my freelance writing to Times editors. From 2015 to 2022, Woolfe served as classical music editor at the Times, and he then took on the position of classical music critic. Hiring Woolfe as editor, and then as chief critic after Tony Tommasini’s retirement—where Woolfe became the only staff classical critic left—were among the best things to happen to classical music coverage at the Times since they brought on Alex Ross as a freelancer in the 1990s.

Woolfe served as editor for many of my Times articles, and helped me get a gig writing obits and listings. He eagerly accepted my pitches for some ideas that I know other editors would balk at — including one of the best things I’ve had the privilege to write, about minimalism and turtles, which ran on election day in 2016 — and provided insightful and generous edits.

As an editor (which he did while continuing to write a ton of criticism!) he also, importantly, understood where the world of journalism was heading in the era of digital subscriptions, clickbait, and the “unbundling” of the newspaper, and how classical music coverage could try to stay a part of it.

In this period, he was essentially the *only* forward-thinking editor creating new modes of classical music discourse online; it is incredibly rare, and really, nonexistent, to have an editor at a major newspaper finding new ways to engage online audiences about classical music. That included a number of new, digital-forward roundup features such as "The Week’s Best Classical Music Moments,” and, most famously, “5 Minutes that Will Make You Love.” I would occasionally poke fun at this kind of material on Twitter, but the work largely holds up, as a much-better version of the kind of bite-sized, multimedia content that the internet economy demands. The “5 Minutes” features were educational and at times touching, bringing the voices of musicians and scholars into the fold and often helped me hear music differently (which is, I think, a paragon of great arts writing).

Woolfe was deeply and personally invested in trying to figure out the role of classical music criticism in a marketplace that was clearly disincentivizing it, and understood the privilege and responsibility of his position. Like the best arts critics, he felt an ethical mandate to do right by the music, and the musicians who make it. As he wrote in an essay for the 2021 book Classical Music: Contemporary Perspectives and Challenges,

Obviously, I worry about our responsibility to the music field. The sense I get from many conversations with artists, managers, impresarios, and presenters is that The New York Times coverage is meaningful less in terms of attracting audiences than in attracting (and keeping) donors. Particularly for smaller groups, the Internet has provided many ways to stimulate ticket-buying and keep a sizable amount of interested people aware of activities and events. But donors, by and large, are of the age and class for whom mention of an artist or company in The New York Times has been for decades a seal—even the seal—of approval. Some people still think that if it wasn’t mentioned in The New York Times, it didn’t happen. When the Cincinnati Symphony, say, comes to Carnegie Hall, it’s the result of intensive fundraising work, and many givers expect a The New York Times review as part of the package.

I don’t have an easy answer regarding how organizations should handle this period of transition as those expectations change, other than to clearly elucidate an artistic vision to donors and to have frank discussions about how the media environment has shifted.

I miss having Zack as an editor, but I was also very happy that he took over the position of chief critic in 2022: his authoritative, grounded, and impassioned writing deserves the top spot at the newspaper of record. Go and read some of his recent coverage, which include, yes, the obligatory highlights of the Met season (though with incisive critique and insightful descriptions of the voices heard), but also a fascinating profile of Peter Sellars and a great feature on opera in Des Moines. I loved his recent, brief listening guide to Brahms’s Romance in F, which concludes: “There is a lot of music that cries. I associate Brahms’s music, though, with holding back tears, with not confessing to your ex that you’re still in love, with gazing back without lingering, with a stiff upper lip that — like that trill — is ever so slightly quivering.”

I will admit that I basically despise that the mandate of what-remains-of-arts-coverage seems to be “HEY TAKE 5 MINUTES TO STOP THINKING ABOUT TRUMP AND LOOK AT THIS PAINTING AND MAYBE YOU’LL FEEL BETTER” but if that is what the world is asking for, right now, then there’s no one better than Woolfe to deliver it.

So, it feels incredibly facile to be writing an essay about one specific person’s job, especially one that would likely not be characterized as an “essential worker,” as the world actively falls apart. (Or, to be more specific: as evil people destroy the world.) Yes, arts criticism is necessary, but I’m not going to pretend it’s necessary like USAID is necessary, or vaccines are necessary. But it is something useful and personal and illuminating in a time that seems increasingly concerned with incentivizing the useless and impersonal and deadening. And criticism, like journalism more broadly, is a form of accountability: to audiences, to artists, and to the art itself. It educates the public on what great art can aspire to, and how they can listen for it and to it.

There is a lot of continued talk these days about gatekeeping and gatekeepers and the harm they can cause, but I believe in real gatekeeping, by real people, with authority and expertise and wisdom and generosity. As classical music critic for the New York Times, Woolfe is a gatekeeper; as a professor and writer, I am a gatekeeper. That comes with privilege and responsibility, and there are not enough gatekeepers in positions of power who look and think differently from Woolfe or from me. But the arts critic is one of the rare roles in the arts ecosystem who has actual independence, and no financial stakes in the game; remove them and you still have plenty more gatekeepers (managers, publicists, bookers, etc) who may be more concerned with great profit than great art. The art suffers, and the audience does not know what they are missing out on.

The alternative to gatekeepers isn’t an egalitarian world of beautiful art for and from everyone; it’s the algorithmic, profit-driven world of conspiracies and AI slop that we are becoming. I prefer a world with Zachary Woolfe as classical music critic of the New York Times.