If the majority of music critics today fill their columns with superficial talk about conductors and soloists, it means that something that would otherwise absorb their energies has gone dead on them. They are in the familiar nightmare dilemma of being forced to address a huge, hushed audience with nothing whatsoever to say. In other words, the time has passed when the comparative greatness of contemporary composers was a fighting proposition, and critics were looked to for real leadership in the matter of opinion. So much facile and bewilderingly unintelligible music has been turned out in the last decade that critics and public alike are at a loss for any fixed standard.

Ever since Wagner's death, the excitement of hearing and reviewing new music has been dying out, and, with the exception of a politically inspired flare-up in Shostakovitch's case, is almost dead. Gilman of the Herald Tribune, who died a couple of years ago, was the last survivor of the great days of Wagner controversy when a fashionable New York club had to put up signs to the effect that discussions of politics and Wagner were forbidden in the smoking room. As late as the summer of '39 Gilman wrote about a Wagner performance in the Tribune, "One comes from a performance of 'Die Walkuere,' as of any other among Wagner's greater works, with a sense of dazed and shaken incredulity, with a conviction that one has experienced some capturing of essences, some projection of reality that transcends art." The statement went unchallenged. By that time, nobody cared enough about the question either way to take issue with Gilman's exaggerations.

When Brahms was first played by the Boston Symphony, the whole town more or less seethed. It was suggested by one critic that the regular exit signs be replaced by others saying, "This way out in case of Brahms." Now, however, Koussevitsky could play an all-Cole-Porter program and hardly a dowagerly eyebrow would be raised. It is probably no exaggeration to say that unless music recovers its direct person-to-person relationship with audiences, it won't survive as an art in its present form. We are at a turning point now, and it is hard to predict what direction will be taken. More people listen to music, understand it and play it now than ever before, but its grammar has been so muddled by experimentation that it has become a language that everybody understands, but practically nobody can speak. The next few years will tell whether the broken pieces can be put together again or a new tonal language must be created from scratch.