Interview with Alexandra Ivanoff: Make music journalism great again!

Alexandra Ivanoff is an American living in Budapest with over 15 years of experience in music criticism. She came to Timisoara for the Akordaj – Spotlight on Music conference to train the next generation of classical music journalists. We took the opportunity to discuss the challenges of the profession, but also what you need as a person to pursue a career as a music critic.

A: How did an American get to write for a Hungarian classical music newspaper?

I am an American, and in the past I was an artist and now I am a teacher and journalist. My journalistic career has focused on music criticism as well as news and reviews. I currently write for the online publication Papageno.hu, where I have a column called “Ivana’s Ears in Budapest” and mainly cover Budapest’s musical life and occasionally theater, dance or visual arts performances. In the latter I am not an expert, but artists like it when someone writes about their achievements, so I give them the “ink”.

I have two degrees in music from the New York Conservatory and Yale University. I was, for 20 years, a performer in New York, in all kinds of mediums: classical, opera, operetta, and jazz, but mostly in musical theater on and off Broadway. I was also a voice teacher, so I was teaching classes at the same time I was on stage. That’s my foundation and where I draw from as a journalist, my experience in show business and the music industry. And, I forgot to say, I grew up playing various instruments: piano, violin, viola, viola, French horn and flute and a little bit of timpani. And I also dabbled a bit with soundtracks during my formative years in school and also for off-Broadway shows.

So what I am writing now is based on my whole life as a performer on stage. I started my career in Istanbul. Because when I left the United States I went to Istanbul to live and work, because I got a music professorship there. And I was contacted by an English-language newspaper and they offered me a job as a music critic. And I was shocked to hear this offer. Because at that time, we’re talking about 2009, all the American press was firing not all the critics, but most of them because they didn’t find them useful. Not all of them, but many of them were offered a nice retirement. Particularly at the New York Times, which had many hired critics in my childhood, by that year they were all gone because they were no longer needed. So it was a dying profession in those days, it seemed to me.

When I moved to Istanbul and got this offer I thought “maybe it’s not so dead here”. So I started writing and became very popular in the music world there because I was giving people reviews in English and that’s exactly what they wanted. They didn’t want them in Turkish, they wanted them in English so the audience would be global. And the experience with Papageno is similar. Because before I joined the team, the magazine was only in Hungarian, now it has a global audience. The whole world can read what I write in English. And I’ve been doing that for at least two years now. I must have written around 200 articles, news and reviews.

I’m extremely happy to come to this event where music journalists are trained because it’s a field I’m very attached to, a profession I’ve been practicing since 2009. And I have strong views on how to move forward, how to think about the field of music journalism. There are so many factors that we’re going to discuss: what’s a good review, what’s a bad review, what does it mean for the reader, but what does it mean for the artist? What does it mean for the industry as a whole. Just this topic (of reviews – editor’s note) is very explosive. Another topic is how we write. What is a news story, what is an editorial, if you’re a critic you’re evaluating someone’s interpretation, or a group’s interpretation. And for that you have to have a basis. If it’s a Prokofiev, you have to understand his music before you write about it. Same with Mozart or anything new. With new music I think you get to the most fascinating place as a writer, because there is no precedent for a new score. So everything is new, and how you choose to approach it will have a big influence on the listener. “Maybe this is an interesting concert and I deserve to see it,” or maybe it will convince someone who thinks new music is rubbish, it will convince someone that there’s another side to listening to a new work.

Besides, I have a special place in my heart for geniuses. So when a new genius emerges, whether we’re talking about a soloist or a composer, I get very interested and I look forward to writing about these people who offer a new language to the world and a new spirit, a new understanding of how you can organize sounds. Because you don’t have to limit yourself to piano or violin or flute, you can bring on stage pans or electrics, bells, Tibetan bells, theramine, which was the first electronic musical instrument, invented by Leon Theremin, a Russian. And that was just a box and an antenna, and the sounds were controlled by moving your hand across in front of the antenna. And a composer in Turkey thought, “Why don’t I put this instrument in a composition?”

So this excitement and joy is what I’m going to teach about in my seminar. This must show in the writing. Let’s make music journalism great again. And I can say that as an American. That is my goal.

A: How do you feel when you see a room full of young people wanting to follow in your footsteps?

I can’t tell you how happy I am. I want to know about each one of them, what their passions are, what they pursue, what they need. Today we will have more lectures, but I like the interactions more because I am interested in them and what they will learn. Basically, they’re going to study the ABCs of writing, the differences between different ways of writing, whether it’s news or a gossip column, a review or an interview. There are so many formats that they have to sort through and decide if they fit the topic. So I want to ask them things and I want them to ask me things. The worst thing would be if nobody had any questions. I would tell them “Come on, there are no stupid questions!”. Because that’s the psychology behind thinking “no, I don’t think I can ask that question”.

Yes, you can. Because there’s no such thing as a stupid question. And it opens so many doors because it makes everybody feel safer.

A: I’d like to move the discussion to the audience now. Because you have a unique perspective on it as a journalist in Turkey and Hungary. How different are the readership in the two countries?

I think the audience in Turkey is very receptive, they decide very quickly whether they liked something or not and very quickly move on to discussing the topic. And it’s the same with Americans. Because I have also written in the United States on my blog. I got a lot of feedback from Americans. And also from the Turks. Hungarians don’t give feedback. And that, I think, is my only loss, because I know they have a lot to say and I know they think about a lot of things. Hungarians, in general, are extremely musically educated, at the Moscow Conservatory level, as far as I can see. And they have a lot of very highly trained musical artists. There are 13 professional orchestras there. I wrote an article on “Did you know that this city (Budapest – ed.) has 13 professional orchestras?” And Hungarians said no, I didn’t know that. Here’s a list!

And this happened because after the war, for example, one of the orchestras, which is called the Mav Symphony Orchestra, after the railway line. This orchestra is sponsored by the Hungarian railway company and it was created in 1947 or 1945, right after World War II. And they said then that this orchestra is for our souls. We need music to heal our wounds. What better reason to create an orchestra? For me it is so moving to have such inspiration expressed in this way. It takes a symphony orchestra to heal the wounds of war. And this orchestra still gives concerts.

Yes, I would like more feedback. And here’s another example of why I say that. Because it’s related to what I was talking about, about good and bad reviews. And when I say bad review I don’t mean a poorly written review, but it’s related to criticizing something and explaining why I had those criticisms. I attended a concert in one of the main concert halls there by a famous singer and her ensemble. And she is well known for her vocal qualities, high, low and avant-garde. And I couldn’t wait to see her in person. And, to my disappointment, there were so many problems, both technical and musical, that both myself and the guildmates around me couldn’t believe what we were hearing. What happened? Sounds fake. This part’s too loud, that part’s too slow. Total mess. And they all turned to me when I came out and asked me if I would write about it. And I said, “I don’t know, it’s kind of messed up.” And they said yes, it is. And I said “but are you guys gonna write about it?” “No, we don’t think so.” And I went home thinking if I’m the only voice writing about it, will they believe me? And I wrote about it and nobody wrote back. Online. But in person they came up to me and thanked me for writing about it, because they thought the same thing. This experience is relevant to that society. Where they don’t want to talk negatively about a certain person or experience.

Note: Akordaj – Spotlight on Music is a conference organized by Classical ME, JM Hungary and Scena Muzicală, which brought together classical music journalism professionals from Hungary and Romania in Timisoara with the aim of training the next generation of classical music journalists. The conference was co-financed by the Erasmus+ program.