Mu­sic cri­tique is the criti­cal strife for the knowl­edge hid­den in mu­sic.

The pur­pose of mu­sic cri­tique is to awaken, or to deepen, the in­ter­est of the reader for a par­ticu­lar piece of mu­sic, or to keep the gen­eral in­ter­est for mu­sic alive in the popu­la­tion.

As a means of its criti­cal in­ves­ti­ga­tion mu­sic cri­tique em­ploys the word in its spo­ken or writ­ten form. The ob­sta­cle, which mu­sic cri­tique there­fore imposes upon it­self, is the fact that the sound­ing mu­si­cal event, or even the mu­sic it­self, can only vaguely be de­scribed by the words of our col­lo­quial lan­guage, but can­not pos­si­bly be rep­re­sented sat­is­fac­to­rily.

Through the mean­ing of words, the com­pe­tent mu­sic critic can at least draw the mu­sic lis­tener’s at­ten­tion to cer­tain ele­ments of a mu­si­cal work and, thereby, to some ex­tent stimu­late the lis­tener’s mu­si­cal-ana­lyti­cal think­ing, thus facilitating his ac­cess to the mu­si­cal truth.

Good mu­sic cri­tique de­scribes the in­ner world of the mu­si­cal sound-space with words in a clear and very sen­si­tive man­ner – be it re­gard­ing a piece of mu­sic in gen­eral, or the suc­cess of a spe­cific mu­si­cal per­form­ance.

Mu­sic cri­tique, there­fore, de­mands a high de­gree of self-dis­ci­pline from the critic him­self; be­cause a mu­sic critic not only must have an out­stand­ing mu­sic-pro­fes­sional quali­fi­ca­tion, but also a com­pletely neu­tral hu­man at­ti­tude to­wards what he de­scribes – be­cause any sort of emo­tional out­burst, be it posi­tive or nega­tive, is far from the true un­der­stand­ing of mu­sic.

In the genu­ine com­pre­hen­sion and dis­cus­sion of mu­sic, feel­ing and un­der­stand­ing are so highly co­or­di­nated and har­moni­cally in­ter­woven that any as­sess­ment which is ex­clu­sively domi­nated by the un­der­stand­ing, but also any state­ment overchar­ged with emo­tions, can­not but lead the reader away from the es­sence of mu­sic.

Suc­cess­ful mu­sic cri­tique al­ways has its basis in the deep love of mu­sic on the part of the mu­sic critic him­self – in his pro­found un­der­stand­ing of mu­sic, in his clear knowl­edge about the proc­ess of cre­at­ing mu­sic, and fur­ther­more in his prac­tice-re­lated ex­per­tise on the pos­si­bili­ties of how to real­ize mu­si­cal ideas.