Stop the Press? The Changing Media of Music Criticism

Writing in BBC Music Magazine in July 1999, editor Helen Wallace remarked on the rapid decline in space allocated to classical music criticism in British newspapers, notably in The Times , The Independent , The Guardian and Financial Times , all of which had previously provided extensive, important coverage. ‘Concert reports provide the very oxygen needed to keep a flourishing musical scene alive’, she noted, and ‘[if] an event is ignored, it is as if it did not exist.’ However, she perceived a ‘ray of hope’ in the Internet, which ‘has no space restriction: maybe the dawn of a new era is nigh …’.