Private Life: A New York Review Podcast
Jun 10, 2026 · 1 hr 9 min · 12 segments
In this episode of *Private Life*, Matthew Aucoin joins Jarrett Earnest to discuss the state of music criticism, the work of music composition, and the life and writing of Aucoin’s former professor…
Matthew AucoinGuestJarrett EarnestHost[classical music] The way that I wanted to start, which is a little unusual for these conversations, is to spend some time with a piece that you wrote in the November 6, 2025, issue of the Review called Inside the Music, which really lays out the state of certain conversations around music criticism or criticism for new music or c- classical music, or we can actually explain the slipperiness of those terms, and has nested within it a lot of ideas and possibilities for what you think criticism could be, what for you as a composer criticism should be.
And so, like, maybe we could just start with that piece and you can tell me how you came to writing it.
I came to write that piece because there was a very public reshuffling, or maybe something a little more destructive than reshuffling, at The New York Times last summer when four arts critics were reassigned unexpectedly and, and somewhat unexplainedly.
And it's pretty rare, I think, for musicians to respond or certainly to write about the critics who write about us, but this felt like enough of a, a minor earthquake that I wanted to kind of weigh in and say, "Okay, well, this is clearly an unstable moment." There's a lot that's scary about that for, for arts writers.
It's probably even harder to be an arts writer than to be a performing musician.
But if we're a little utopian, can we imagine what a, a really healthy music criticism landscape would look like? And I wanted to kind of both diagnose and imagine that in my piece.
There's a scene in the piece that also comes up in your, your wonderful book about opera, The Impossible Art, where you talk about being in high school or, like, a teenager and going to the library, getting stacks of CDs and scores, which truthfully I didn't even know libraries had those-
... and reading, listening, and looking at them alongside of Alex Ross' The Rest Is Noise-
... as being a kind of a guide into the possibilities not just of the landscape of, of music and c- composing, but also what criticism can be, which feels like an invitation, like bring you into how to love a thing-
And I wanted to know more about that early moment for you because it, when it comes up in this essay, it seems like it kind of captures the best of what you want from writing about music.
Yeah, it was a lucky alignment of stars for me because I was a senior in high school and basically convinced my teachers to, to let me do a senior project, which meant I didn't really go to school for the last quarter or third of the year and just kind of did my own thing.
And that Alex Ross book, The Rest Is Noise, had just come out, had just been published.
And I think it remains an extraordinary book in the way that it weaves together the catastrophes and the rebirths of the 20th century with the music that was being made.
If I remember right, the, the subtitle is Listening to the 20th Century or something along those lines.
And the kind of almost Thomas Mann, like Buddenbrooks-like novelistic sweep of, you know, telling the story of music across generations and across continents felt so exciting, and it felt like this, this beautiful way of embedding or revealing how music is embedded in the rest of life and the rest of history.
So that was a real kind of awakening, um, and I returned to it in this essay in part because I think we're due for more writers with that kind of ambition.
You know, we're gonna be talking in this conversation about the great poetry critic Helen Vendler, too, and I came across something that Vendler said, which was that she sort of thought...Critics should stop writing about brand new poets after they turn 50.
[laughs] Not that they should stop covering living writers, but that they really weren't in touch with the people who are just emerging.
[classical music] The way that I wanted to start, which is a little unusual for these conversations, is to spend some time with a piece that you wrote in the November 6, 2025, issue of the Review called Inside the Music, which really lays out the state of certain conversations around music criticism or criticism for new music or c- classical music, or we can actually explain the slipperiness of those terms, and has nested within it a lot of ideas and possibilities for what you think criticism could be, what for you as a composer criticism should be.
And so, like, maybe we could just start with that piece and you can tell me how you came to writing it.
I came to write that piece because there was a very public reshuffling, or maybe something a little more destructive than reshuffling, at The New York Times last summer when four arts critics were reassigned unexpectedly and, and somewhat unexplainedly.
And it's pretty rare, I think, for musicians to respond or certainly to write about the critics who write about us, but this felt like enough of a, a minor earthquake that I wanted to kind of weigh in and say, "Okay, well, this is clearly an unstable moment." There's a lot that's scary about that for, for arts writers.
It's probably even harder to be an arts writer than to be a performing musician.
But if we're a little utopian, can we imagine what a, a really healthy music criticism landscape would look like? And I wanted to kind of both diagnose and imagine that in my piece.
There's a scene in the piece that also comes up in your, your wonderful book about opera, The Impossible Art, where you talk about being in high school or, like, a teenager and going to the library, getting stacks of CDs and scores, which truthfully I didn't even know libraries had those-
... and reading, listening, and looking at them alongside of Alex Ross' The Rest Is Noise-
... as being a kind of a guide into the possibilities not just of the landscape of, of music and c- composing, but also what criticism can be, which feels like an invitation, like bring you into how to love a thing-
And I wanted to know more about that early moment for you because it, when it comes up in this essay, it seems like it kind of captures the best of what you want from writing about music.
Yeah, it was a lucky alignment of stars for me because I was a senior in high school and basically convinced my teachers to, to let me do a senior project, which meant I didn't really go to school for the last quarter or third of the year and just kind of did my own thing.
And that Alex Ross book, The Rest Is Noise, had just come out, had just been published.
And I think it remains an extraordinary book in the way that it weaves together the catastrophes and the rebirths of the 20th century with the music that was being made.
If I remember right, the, the subtitle is Listening to the 20th Century or something along those lines.
And the kind of almost Thomas Mann, like Buddenbrooks-like novelistic sweep of, you know, telling the story of music across generations and across continents felt so exciting, and it felt like this, this beautiful way of embedding or revealing how music is embedded in the rest of life and the rest of history.
So that was a real kind of awakening, um, and I returned to it in this essay in part because I think we're due for more writers with that kind of ambition.
You know, we're gonna be talking in this conversation about the great poetry critic Helen Vendler, too, and I came across something that Vendler said, which was that she sort of thought...Critics should stop writing about brand new poets after they turn 50.
[laughs] Not that they should stop covering living writers, but that they really weren't in touch with the people who are just emerging.
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3 of 7
Opera's Alternate Planet
Opera's strange laws turn pain into pleasure
Six-Hour Love Inquiry
Composer spends twenties crafting six-hour love odyssey
Orchestra = Collective Unconscious
Orchestra secretly embodies everyone’s collective unconscious onstage
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