We’re in yet another iteration of the “What Should a Critic Be?” cycle, precipitated by the reassignment of four arts critics at the New York Times. In line with Richard Brody’s piece for the New Yorker last month is Alex Ross’s piece on criticism in the age of clickbait from 2017 for the same magazine. I always remember Alex’s piece for the idea that a critic is the one who says “Not quite.” For me, this definition is almost right, but not quite. Alex himself re-shared that piece recently, highlighting the Virgil Thomson definition of the genre as “the only antidote we have to paid publicity.”
I mostly agree with this as well. Today, however, I’m here on behalf of a publicist.
I first met Raymond Bisha when he took over as the Director of Public Relations for Naxos of America, back when physical media was still The Thing. At the time I was running the classical pages for Time Out New York — a good fit for a 25-year-old still figuring out what I wanted to be doing with my life. In the meantime, I was happy to fill the black hole of my quarter-life crisis with Naxos’s press freebies, tearing through their catalogue each month like a kid doing the Nickelodeon Super Toy Run while on a speedball of Pixy Stix, Dunkaroos, and Ecto Cooler.
As much as I loved the free CDs, DVDs, and press tickets, I had a debilitating anxiety around publicists. To me, everything felt like it had to be justified; especially since I was in my first “real” job in the industry and almost always the youngest person in the press room. I had a Thomsonian disdain for Publicity (capital P), but I was also pretty sure I was a placebo at best — not the antidote.
Raymond and I connected in earnest about a year later, when I took a double-barrelled job writing about opera for WQXR’s website and hosting a weekly show of new music for its digital station devoted to 20th- and 21st-century music, Q2. Naxos handles the distribution for more labels than pi has digits, and Raymond took both blogging and streaming seriously (which, in 2011, was not a given). He also lived a few subway stops from me in Queens, where he had relocated part-time for Naxos, and I was happy to introduce him to John Brown’s, Salt & Fat, and M. Wells.
What Raymond did, however, wasn’t publicity. At least not in the circle of hell Virgil imagined for publicists. Yes, he met with me to share recordings in hopes that I would cover them. But I think that was just a front in the name of burnt ends. “I can practically smell that smokehouse food from my house,” he wrote me (more than once) to confirm a dinner where I’m sure he was supposed to be focused more on Shostakovich than short ribs. But to Raymond, I wasn’t a transaction. As a result, I wasn’t anxious. Raymond knew that being a publicist wasn’t just about saying “hey, listen to this and then tell other people about it.” It was about a form of curation. It was about showing a critic why you loved something in the hopes that they would find the same (or other) things to love about it.
He had a talent for musical matchmaking. He was the one to introduce me to composer Mohammed Fairouz, who quickly became one of my closest friends as well as an eventual creative partner. (“I’ve created a monster,” Raymond said with ironic resignation one night as Momo and I improvised a full grand opera-bouffe about Muntadhar al-Zaidi.) Knowing I had an interest in East Germany, also he made sure to share with me an Arthaus DVD of the 1961 production of Don Giovanni that reopened the Deutsche Oper Berlin after the war. Yes, it was a West German production. But, he pointed out, they were only a few weeks from opening when, on August 13, the Berlin Wall went up. The piece I wrote about this DVD when it was released was the sort of thing other publicists would have pursed their lips at (I still have some of those emails, too). I barely mentioned the singing — including Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau in the title role. I didn’t notice the “bulky caryatids with sagging breasts that symbolize the sexually-charged atmosphere,” or note that the German translation of the libretto had been commissioned by Goebbels. I was more interested in what was going on outside of the opera house, on both sides of the Wall, while Fischer-Dieskau sang “viva la libertà” — or “Es lebe die Freiheit.”
Raymond, however, saw what I was trying to do before I even did. “This is exactly the kind of writing we need,” he told me. It wasn’t lip service; I don’t think Canadians are able to be that disingenuous. Without realizing it, he steered me into my niche, recommending more and more along the lines of that Berlin Giovanni. I stopped trying to be Alex Ross or Zack Woolfe or James Jorden.
When I girlbossed a little too close to the sun on that front, I got an email from Raymond with the subject line “Ring, ring, wrung.” It reached me at a time when I was wondering whether or not the roof of my four-story apartment building was high enough to actually get the job done or if it would just leave me with insurmountable medical debt, and he signed it off: “Next time we meet, drinks are on me. You’ve earned it.” Whereas some publicists stopped talking to me almost entirely after that fracas,
It was thanks to Momo that I first read The Dyer’s Hand. In it, Auden writes:
What is the function of a critic? So far as I am concerned, he can do me one or more of the following services:
1. Introduce me to authors or works of which I was hitherto unaware.
2. Convince me that I have undervalued an author or a work because I had not read them carefully enough.
3. Show me relations between works of different ages and cultures which I could never have seen for myself because I do not know enough and never shall.
4. Give a “reading” of a work which increases my understanding of it.
5. Throw light upon the process of artistic “Making.”
6. Throw light upon the relation of art to life, to science, economics, ethics, religion, etc.
Raymond worked with an almost superhuman dedication to those introductions, to those reevaluations, and those relations. It was because of this, I think, that he had such an openness to new forms of media. He created one of the first classical music podcasts, long before every asshole with a mic, a closet, and a supplement to sell was making them; “Naxos Classical Spotlight” just celebrated its 20th birthday two weeks ago. In 2015, at a time when Mar-a-Lago Mussolini first started to talk about building a wall between the US and Mexico, he launched Naxos en Español because he recognized the value in meeting people in their own language. He knew that the right reading increased understanding.
I’m not sure if he would take umbrage at my suggestion that he’s a critic rather than a publicist. Most likely he wouldn’t see the need to debate the semantics. He had way too many better things to do; too much light to throw.
Beautifully done.
Lovely.