Just When Did This Critic Become a Thermometer?

On July 20, Mark Swed stated in the Calendar section (“Spectacular Tribute to Olivier Messiaen”), “Messiaen wrote for an orchestra of soloists, and many of New York’s finest chamber players were on the stage (including a few who had been in the work’s premiere). That could have been a mixed blessing, however, because some are also now among the ranks of New York’s burnt-out professional musicians.”

Three days later, he turned down the temperature quite drastically with the observation (“The One and Only J.S. Bach? Not So Fast”) that “While the quantity, majesty and depth of Bach’s output regularly freeze awe-struck professional musicians, the universality and malleability of the music have the opposite effect of drawing in just about everybody else.”

I commend Swed on his tremendous gift for temperature clairvoyance.

I have been a professional musician for almost 40 years, beginning in New York and for 30 years in Los Angeles. In that time I have met aspiring musicians, expiring musicians, enthusiastic musicians, disappointed musicians, ecstatic musicians, disillusioned musicians, wet musicians, dry musicians, overrated musicians, underpaid musicians, tall musicians, short musicians, admired musicians, misunderstood musicians, bald musicians, bewigged musicians, good musicians, bad musicians--but I have never encountered a musician exhibiting either the charring that comes from the application of extreme high heat or the frostbite that results from the absence of all heat.

No doubt, I lack both Swed’s ability to intuit the musician’s temperature and his perspective as a professional music critic--a perspective that sits comfortably and quite safely on the outside looking in, alternately torching and icing the helpless musician as one way of saying something when he has nothing to say.