Terry Teachout
Terry Teachout
Terry Teachoutis an American critic, biographer, librettist, author, playwright, and blogger. He is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal, the critic-at-large of Commentary, and the author of "Sightings," a column about the arts in America that appears biweekly in the Friday Wall Street Journal. He blogs at About Last Night and has written about the arts for many other magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times and National Review...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionCritic
Date of Birth6 February 1956
CountryUnited States of America
Useful though they are, the vast majority of dictionaries and encyclopedias are poker-faced pieces of work that stick to the facts and present them as soberly - and unstylishly - as possible.
Only the tone-deaf doubt the power of music, though some feel it more strongly than others.
Few of us boggle - though we should - at the fact that Louis Armstrong sang and played trumpet with similar panache, or that Leonard Bernstein and Benjamin Britten were equally adept as composers, conductors and pianists.
Everybody in America was talking about TV early in 1949, though comparatively few Americans owned a set of their own.
Instrumental music is nonverbal and thus radically ambiguous. It doesn't lend itself to what might be called content-oriented analysis, though plenty of intellectuals have tried to analyze it in precisely that way.
What's the funniest play ever written? I used to think it was 'Noises Off,' but now that I've seen 'The Liar,' I'm not so sure.
What is true of ballet is no less true of the other lively arts. Change is built into their natures. You watch a performance, and then... it's gone.
The smaller newspapers probably won't have any critics at all. Maybe that's not such a bad thing because there's a certain level of seriousness that you can't get with a small newspaper for critics.
The script of a play is not a finished product: It's a set of instructions.
Critics at their best are independent voices; people take seriously their responsibility to see as many things as they can see, put them in the widest possible perspective, educate their readers. I really do think of myself as a teacher.
Anna Deavere Smith's new one-woman show bills itself as being about health care, but the truth is that 'Let Me Down Easy' is mostly about the grimmer subject of death and dying.
Samuel Beckett's estate will not license productions of his plays that are not performed as written.
Even the Impressionists, the most innovative artists of their time, sought to paint realistically. They believed that their freer way of portraying the visible world was truer to life than the literal realism of the 'salon painters' who dominated French art throughout the 19th century.
Copland was one of the first American composers to forge a truly modern style of American classical music while also making use of American popular music - including jazz.