A Letter from the Publisher

An enthusiasm for living out of a suitcase and a tolerance for jet lag are not among the usual qualifications of a music critic. But for Michael Walsh, TIME's music reviewer since last May, these attributes have proved very handy. In seven months he has made 20 trips away from his New York City base, including three to California, for performances of the San Francisco Opera; to Buffalo, for a story on Rock Singer Pat Benatar; and to Lewiston, N.Y., for the American premiere of Philip Glass's controversial new op era, Satyagraha. He has been to Boston, Houston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Pittsburgh, Santa Fe, and the White House twice, once for a memorable concert featuring the American debut of a long-lost Mozart symphony. Last week found Walsh in Paris to review Peter Brook's idiosyncratic new production of Bizet's opera Carmen. "I don't mind the travel at all," says Walsh. "It's part of what makes the job of TIME music critic so rewarding. I can go anywhere in the world where there is a major musical event."

Walsh, 32, came to TIME from the San Francisco Examiner, where he was music critic for 3 1/2 years and won a 1980 ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award for distinguished music criticism. A 1971 graduate of the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, N.Y., where he studied composition and musicology, Walsh has written a piano sonata and a string quartet. Says he: "Only someone who has gone through the agony of putting notes on paper to form a coherent musical structure can know what a tremendous achievement a good piece of music is." He is also an accomplished pianist. In the mid-1970s he gave a series of concerts in upstate New York of 19th and 20th century American popular songs, and he owns an extensive collection of turn-of-the-century sheet music. He relaxes from his musical chores in his Greenwich Village high-rise at his own piano, an 1892 mahogany Steinway, playing the late music of Brahms and Liszt, or Schumann's Kinderszenen.

Walsh thinks it "very important that a critic not be insular about his subject," and to that end, tries to vary his musical diet with as many plays, books and movies as possible. Says he: "The biggest problem in our musical culture today is the nonacceptance by the public of new 'classical' music. Music is too often thought of as the most arcane and forbidding of the arts, when it is, in fact, as exciting and immediate as the latest movie or the newest novel. Because music is a nonverbal, nonvisual art, it has the power to move us more strongly than any other, acting directly on our emotions. The impossible task of the music critic, of course, is to use verbal, visual means to explain it."

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