{"id":33082,"date":"2024-04-20T13:39:05","date_gmt":"2024-04-20T20:39:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=33082"},"modified":"2024-04-20T13:39:06","modified_gmt":"2024-04-20T20:39:06","slug":"a-cultural-mission-bids-adieu-to-the-chronicles-classical-cat","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2024\/04\/20\/a-cultural-mission-bids-adieu-to-the-chronicles-classical-cat\/","title":{"rendered":"A Cultural Mission bids adieu to the Chronicle\u2019s classical cat"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

\"\" by\u00a0ANDREW GILBERT<\/a><\/strong> APRIL 19, 2024, 5:06 AM (MissionLocal.org)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"A
Joshua Kosman. Photo by Nan Wiener<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Joshua Kosman\u2019s announcement last week that he\u2019s retiring from the San Francisco Chronicle at the end of the month, giving up the classical music critic\u2019s chair he\u2019s so ably occupied since 1988, is more than the end of an era.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As one of only a half-dozen or so staff music critics focusing on classical music at an American newspaper, Kosman departs at a moment when serious cultural coverage is more diffuse and less influential than ever. In a media environment largely given over to the pursuit of clicks, Kosman continued to serve as an essential component of the Bay Area\u2019s arts ecosystem, providing pithy and cogent criticism and a form of institutional memory that can\u2019t be replaced. And, in fact, it seems that he won\u2019t be. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hired by the Chronicle in 1988, he was famously tapped for the chief music critic position by esteemed writer Robert Commanday (who\u2019d held the chief critic spot since 1964). The baton, it seems, won\u2019t be passed again. \u201cIt\u2019s been made pretty clear that there won\u2019t be somebody hired who will be the classical music critic,\u201d Kosman said on a recent phone call, while ticking off several papers that still employ a full-time music writer. \u201cWe\u2019re approaching zero or one. The New York Times<\/em> will hold out. It\u2019s a very discouraging development, but an understandable one.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On Tuesday, April 30, Kosman will be at Manny\u2019s<\/a> for a celebratory send-off and conversation about criticism, the arts and memorable concerts with Chronicle<\/em> theater critic Lily Janiak, whose indefatigable coverage exemplifies the way arts journalism can play an indispensable role in fortifying a scene. Kosman\u2019s exit takes place at a fraught moment that he\u2019s covered closely. Last month, conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen announced he wouldn\u2019t renew his contract with the San Francisco Symphony, an \u201cupheaval I did not see coming,\u201d Kosman said. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cI\u2019d already decided when this all came out, and it\u2019s just lamentable that I\u2019m leaving when things are getting interesting. Just bad luck, bad timing. It may turn out this is a sequence that doesn\u2019t need constant bird-dogging for the next three years. Maybe the symphony will turn a corner, reorganize, and we report on that.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Does he have any concrete plans for his post-Chronicle<\/em> life? Kosman is looking to launch a Substack-like blog \u201cdoing the best parts of my job, going to concerts and writing about them in a weekly column, a genre of criticism very important to me that I\u2019ve never have done.\u201d He hasn\u2019t made any decisions yet about when he\u2019ll launch it or what he\u2019ll call it. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our paths have crossed occasionally over the years and, as a freelance contributor to the Chronicle<\/em>, I\u2019ve always been grateful for his willingness to respond to questions about what he was (or wasn\u2019t) going to write about. A side of Kosman that doesn\u2019t show up in print is that he\u2019s a dogged champion of young writers. Hannah Edgar<\/a>, a regular contributor to the Chicago Tribune<\/em> covering jazz, classical and new music (who uses they\/them pronouns), grew up in Walnut Creek reading the classical coverage of Rich Scheinin in the Contra Costa Times.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cBut as I was getting interested in classical music around 14 or 15 I started reading Joshua online,\u201d Edgar said. \u201cI admired how pithy and to the point he was. I\u2019m guilty of filing reviews with twice the word count, trying and failing to use his writing as a model.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Edgar considers Kosman a key mentor who opened some crucial doors. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

As an undergrad at the University of Chicago with a growing interest in music criticism, Edgar looked to apply to the Rubin Institute of Music Criticism<\/a>, which is now situated in the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. But they were locked out, because the program only accepted applicants from a few schools, including Oberlin, Yale, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and Stanford. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the University of Chicago, Edgar emailed Kosman \u201cand he was like, \u2018You are so right,\u2019 and went to bat for that concept,\u201d Edgar said. \u201cThe following year, 2018, I was able to participate.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Kosman took Edgar under his wing, reading copy and offering advice. When the position with the Tribune<\/em> came through \u2014 a part-time position created in partnership with the Rubin Institute \u2014 Kosman was one of the first Edgar contacted to thank.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Maybe Kosman, who also found his calling as a music critic in college, saw something of himself in Edgar. He realized he wanted to write about music as an 18-year-old undergrad at Yale. After graduating he moved to the Bay Area in 1983 to study music at the University of Caifornia, Berkeley. \u201cI didn\u2019t finish a degree,\u201d he said. \u201cI wanted to be a more educated music critic.\u201d During his five years at Cal, he started writing for San Francisco Bay Guardian and Berkeley Monthly. He was about to embark on a dissertation when he landed the job at the Chronicle. His first piece was a review of Chanticleer.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He has written about his regrets<\/a> over his early years as a critic, when he used what he thought of as honesty \u201cas way to escape responsibility for the words I wrote. I evolved the tools to be honest and humane, and I like to think I\u2019ve given up cruelty and bluntness,\u201d he said, quoting the concluding lines from Philip Larkin\u2019s poem \u201cTalking In Bed<\/a>,\u201d about \u201cWords at once true and kind\/Or not untrue and not unkind.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

What\u2019s brutally true is that the career path walked by Kosman has been washed away by the digital world. He sees a much wider problem, \u201cnot so much a crisis of classical music coverage, but a crisis of journalism,\u201d he said. \u201cAs the pressure grows to write things that people will click on and read, we lose things. We no longer do reviews of single-night shows. It\u2019s hard to know what this means.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cFor years, you used to have editors say, \u2018Why are we writing about this concert, when it\u2019s too late for anyone to hear it?\u2019 My response was, \u2018Why are we writing about the Giants, when everyone knows who won the game?\u2019 But there\u2019s some truth to that question. I clung to the notion that there was a big body of people who wanted to read reviews, but it used to be an unfalsifiable proposition. Now we have insanely detailed metrics, and the market for a classical music review was more niche than we thought.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s a niche that Kosman made brilliantly his own, and the Chronicle<\/em> will not be the same without his byline. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by\u00a0ANDREW GILBERT APRIL 19, 2024, 5:06 AM (MissionLocal.org) Joshua Kosman\u2019s announcement last week that he\u2019s retiring from the San Francisco Chronicle at the end of the month, giving up the classical music critic\u2019s chair he\u2019s so ably occupied since 1988, is more than the end of an era. As one… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33082"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33082"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33082\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33083,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33082\/revisions\/33083"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33082"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33082"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33082"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}