Who Cares if You Read? Who Cares if We Write? Who Cares if You Listen?

Grant Chu Covell

[January 2025.]

Hearty thanks to the editors of High Fidelity, who craftily renamed Babbitt’s 1958 essay, “The Composer as Specialist,” as “Who Cares if You Listen?”

But who among us has actually read that article, given its title so succinctly captures a contemporary composer’s disdain for his audience? (It’s chewy and not easily digestible. High Fidelity did right.)

Years ago, Walt jokingly characterized La Folia as “Stuff no one reads about music you can’t find.” It troubles me that I cannot recall or find his exact words. Walt and I only corresponded via email, so I should be able to dig this out, but haven’t been able to. (I have reached for it before.) We considered changing the Goya banner atop each page to some version of that statement.

We post few articles here on our quiet Internet corner. Google suggests our readership consists predominantly of bots and indexers rather than real people. Unless it’s during the school year when a few articles (for example) suddenly become interesting, most likely finding their way wholesale into term papers. Or it’s Messiah season. We’ve seen our words pasted into program notes, but less frequently into marketing materials. A close collaborator once declared: “You don’t really write reviews over there.”

And so, we have slipped across the border into a new year, exiting one in which we published very little. I’m not sure if we are ok with our reduced inventory. Of course, we don’t make it easy to get in touch, so if you’re not a bot, think of dropping us a line which we will probably ignore (it’s nothing personal). We’ll do our best to remain here, at the periphery.