The front page would like to sing

A PERMANENT problem for music critics: how can you describe music in words? With established pieces from the classical repertoire the problem doesn’t arise so much. You assume the work to be known; you describe the performance and your response to it. But with new work by new composers where do you begin?

Here is Steve Smith grappling with the task in today’s New York Times, writing about three pieces performed at the Mannes Contemporary Music Festival:

—The players meshed in scampering, circling lines and growls, then parted, the piece ending as it had begun.

—Bryan Wagord played stark pulses and zitherlike strums on a prepared piano. The gentle prelude and interlude were haunting processions of twinkles, clangs and thumps.

—Minoru Miki’s “Sohmon III” offered a curious, uneasy combination of lyrical arioso, Noh-inspired inflections and florid marimba writing for which Mr Miki is best known outside of Japan.

It is beautiful writing, but does it get us any closer to the experience of listening? To stretch a point, if you had come across the phrase “lyrical arioso”, or “Noh-inspired inflections”, or even “haunting processions of twinkles, clangs and thumps” in a taster’s notes on an old Burgundy, would you not have accepted them equally well as attempts to decribe a fine wine?

I suddenly hanker for a newspaper which could play fragments of music from its arts pages, like those greetings cards that play “Happy Birthday” using embedded silicon chips. A sort of online journalism in reverse: instead of putting newspapers on to computers we could put computers into newspapers. Given that the world produces more semi-conductors each year than it does grains of ice, this is not such a stupid idea.