Review Permits Poor Journalism

To the Editors:

What on earth is going on down there? How limited is your writing staff? To qualify as a contemporary music critic for The Oberlin Review, does one have to, you know, know anything about contemporary music or does one just have to be able to spell “New Complexity?”
It is a shame that Andrew Leland was unable to say more about Jim Altieri’s tweeg:phonic than its failure to resemble commercial music and his personal reaction thereto. Especially shocking is the condemnation of a piece of music on the charge that it failed to evoke a mood-state already familiar to the listener. Wow. Is it really news that people approach art to experience novel ways of feeling?
This is not the first music critic printed in the Review to hide his ignorance behind contemporary music jargon (nothing in Altieri’s music even slightly resembles New Complexity, and the “mafia,” or “one composer” to which Leland refers graduated last June), nor is it the first time that a student’s work has beenmisidentified and dismissed without genuine consideration.
Surely, it is clear to the paper’s staff that a critic’s function is first to call the public’s attention to the art in circulation, second to give an informed evaluation of examples of the current art scene, and never to use a column for aesthetic stevedoring. Leland’s review fails at the first two and wallows in the last — why does the Review endorse such poor journalism? Articles that show more bravado than accuracy do the Oberlin community a disservice. At worst, they widen the unnecessary rift between Conservatory and College students for the sake of one reviewer’s folksy posturing. Printing such articles in spite of their inadequacy belies the editorial irresponsibility for which the Review has lately become notorious.

–Leslie Roberts
Conservatory senior