Jeremy entering the Komponierhäuschen in Attersee, 2005.
My friend and colleague Jeremy Eichler, who has been the Boston Globe's chief classical critic since 2006, has left his position in order to take up a post at Tufts University, as a professor in music history and public humanities. He promises to continue writing in a music-critical vein and also to pursue new book projects, in the wake of the international success of Time's Echo. He has written a characteristically eloquent, thoughtful, and searching farewell essay for the Globe, which gives a sense of all he has accomplished during his tenure. Jeremy also makes a potent argument for the value of journalistic criticism, even as he steps back from it. He writes: "Robust cultural coverage is essential for any city’s arts ecosystem — which also, of course, plays a key part in the local economy. (As the Globe’s art critic Murray Whyte has pointed out, '21 million people go to the theater, visit a museum, or buy a ticket for a concert in the Greater Boston area over the typical year — four times as many as those attending every single home game of Boston’s four major sports teams.') Yet beyond these larger civic benefits, for individual readers, I have always believed good criticism can offer still more ... I have always considered it my responsibility as a critic first and foremost to enact, with some sense of invitation, a way of thinking about, responding to, or, most simply, living with the presence of art." This resonates very much with my own thinking about a steadily dwindling, seemingly doomed, but not yet fully extinct profession. The good news is that the Globe seems inclined to maintain a full-time classical-critic post — something that appears not to have happened with the recent retirement of Joshua Kosman at the San Francisco Chronicle. So perhaps we can — to apply once again a favorite phrase of Morton Feldman's — keep it going for a little while more.