09 Top Ten Top Ten

December 2009 The end of every year is conspicuous by the presence of exaggerated media enthusiasm for 'Top Tens' (or 20s, 50s, 100s etc): the season when broadcasters and journalists, anxious to attract profligate punters, fill schedules and columns with the favourite pop songs/albums and films of various critics, 'celebrities' and, supposedly, the public. Readers, listeners and viewers are, clearly, meant to find these vacuous collections somehow exciting or interesting, and not notice - perhaps because they're tanked up to the eyeballs on turkey and sherry - that they are in fact nothing more than space-filling, bone-idle journalism.

Naturally, the music industry's cheerleaders ('Classical' Division) are delighted to join in. Every critic worth his or her weight in tinsel rushes to tell the waiting world in list form what their favourite musical experiences of the departing year were, whether Top Ten New Releases, Best Concerts, Best CDs For Those On A Budget, Big-Label Boxsets For Those Obviously Not On A Budget, or Hottest MP3 Downloads. The sheer banality of it all is neatly encapsulated by two typical 'seasonal' examples: Classic FM magazine's brainless 'Top 10 Downloads for New Year's Day' (January 2010 issue); or Jeremy Nicholas, in December's Gramophone, who gives the breath-bated public his "Top Ten Non-Vocal Christmas Works" - garnered, by the looks of it, from Ten Minutes on Google.

Newspaper and magazine critics, internet outlets, radio and TV broadcasters - all are brimming with similar end-of-year trivia lists; if some kind of Christmas theme can be worked into it, even (or especially) if it's tinsel or turkey, so much the better (or worse).

It's no coincidence, of course, that these Top Tens are highly redolent of the ubiquitous music award galas, where overhyped performers (very rarely composers) are heaped with prizes and plaudits they may (but quite often don't) deserve. Narcissism aside, media-sponsored lists are, like music industry awards, contrivances that above all stimulate sales - at a time of year when consumption is at its most obnoxiously rampant.

With typical end-of-year spirit, musoc.org's experts have given generously of their time to produce their own 2009 Top Ten (questions). In no particular order:

  1. Why are end-of-year Top Tens so boring?
  2. Does anyone take any notice of them?
  3. How come there are always exactly ten items (or some other precise rounded number)?
  4. Why do the advertising media never take even a day off?
  5. Why are critics presumptuous or pompous?
  6. Why are art music critics and their publishers no better than the rest?
  7. Why do so many art music critics inevitably use such lists to flaunt 'liberal' credentials (with the inclusion of items drawn from pop culture)?
  8. Do critics and their publishers genuinely believe such lists have any validity?
  9. Or are they 100% cynical?
  10. Is there anything critics won't endorse for money?

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