Edward Rothstein

American musicologist

Edward Benjamin Rothstein (born October 16, 1952) is an American critic. Rothstein wrote music criticism early in his career, but is best known for his critical analysis of museums and museum exhibitions.

Rothstein holds a B.A. from Yale University (1973), an M.A. in English literature from Columbia University, and a Ph.D. from the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago (1994). In addition, Rothstein did graduate work in mathematics at Brandeis University. He was at The New York Times for a long time, but he took a buyout (a cash payout offered to employees, with compensation based on a sliding scale of the number of years they spent working for the employer^[1]) from the newspaper and joined The Wall Street Journal. He wrote in 2020 that "At The New York Times, freedom of speech gave way to group pressure, and debate turned into intimidation".^[2]

Rothstein was the cultural critic-at-large for The New York Times,^[3] particularly examining the reach and depth of museums, large and small, one by one. He has worked as a music critic for The New Republic and as the chief music critic for the Times. He worked briefly as an editor at MacMillan's The Free Press in the mid-1980s. Rothstein is a two-time winner of the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for music criticism, and was given a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1991.

Writings

Archive of Rothstein's The Wall Street Journal articles
Archive of Rothstein's The New York Times articles
Archive of Rothstein's tech columns in The New York Times
"Mozart: In Search of the Roots of Genius", Smithsonian, February, 2006.
"Contemplating Churchill", Smithsonian, March, 2005.
Visions of Utopia (New York Public Library Lectures in Humanities), with Herbert Muschamp and Martin E. Marty (Oxford University Press, 2004) ISBN 0-19-517161-6.
1998 Diary in Slate
Emblems of Mind: The Inner Life of Music and Mathematics (Times Books, 1995;University of Chicago Press, 2006).
Foreword to Arthur Loesser's Men, Women and Pianos: A Social History (1991).
Archive of Rothstein's essays 1979-90 in The New York Review of Books

References

^ Goldfrey, Brigid (7 August 2017). "Buyouts are Changing The New York Times". MediaFile. Retrieved 10 September 2020.
^ Rothstein, Edward (9 September 2020). "Exorcism in Lieu of Enlightenment". Die Zeit. Retrieved 10 September 2020.
^ Yoe, Mary Ruth, "Everybody's a critic". University of Chicago Magazine, February, 2004 (96:3). Listing for Vision of Utopia at the end of the UCM article appears to be incorrect; the corrected listing in this Wiki article is based on Amazon listing, picture of book cover at Amazon, and internal Wiki links.

External links

Edward Rothstein on Twitter

Chief classical music critics

The Boston Globe

Michael Steinberg (1964–1976)
Richard Dyer (1976–2006)
Jeremy Eichler (since 2006)

The Daily Telegraph

Campbell Clarke (1855?–1870)
Joseph Bennett (1870–1906)
Robin Legge (1906–1931)
Herbert Hughes (1911–1932)
Richard Capell (1933–1954)
Martin Cooper (1954–1976)
Peter Stadlen (1976–1985)
Michael Kennedy (1986–2005)
Geoffrey Norris (1995–2009)
Ivan Hewett (since 2009)

The Guardian

George Fremantle (1867–1895)
Arthur Johnstone (1896–1904)
Ernest Newman (1905–1906)
Samuel Langford (1906–1927)
Neville Cardus (1927–1940)
Edward Greenfield (1977–1993)
Tom Service (1999–2003)
Andrew Clements (since 2003?)

Los Angeles Times

Isabel Morse Jones (1925–1947)
Albert Goldberg (1947–1965)
Martin Bernheimer (1965–1996)
Mark Swed (since 1996)

San Francisco Chronicle

Alfred Frankenstein (1934–1964)
Robert Commanday (1964–1993)
Joshua Kosman (since 1993)

The New Yorker

Robert A. Simon (1925–1948)
Winthrop Sargeant (1949–1972)
Andrew Porter (1972–1992)
Paul Griffiths (1992–1996)
Alex Ross (1996–present)

The New York Times

William James Henderson (1887–1902)
Richard Aldrich (1902–1923)
Olin Downes (1924–1955)
Howard Taubman (1955–1960)
Harold C. Schonberg (1960–1980)
Donal Henahan (1980–1991)
Edward Rothstein (1991–1995)
Bernard Holland (1995–2000)
Anthony Tommasini (2000–2021)
Zachary Woolfe (since 2022)

The Observer

Ernest Newman (1919)
Percy Scholes (1920–1925)
A. H. Fox Strangways (1925–1939)
William Glock (1939–1945)
Eric Blom (1949–1953)
Peter Heyworth (1955–1987)
Nicholas Kenyon (1986–1992)
Andrew Porter (1992–1996)
Anthony Holden (2000–2008)
Fiona Maddocks (since 2008)

The Times

James William Davison (1846–1879)
Francis Hueffer (1879–1889)
J A Fuller Maitland (1889–1911)
H. C. Colles (1911–1943)
A. H. Fox Strangways
Frank Howes (1943–1960)
William Mann (1960–1982)
Paul Griffiths (1982–1992)
Richard Morrison (since 1992)

The Washington Post

Paul Hume (1946–1982.)
Joseph McLellan (mid-1970s–1995)
Tim Page (1995–1999, 2001–2008)
Philip Kennicott (1999–2001)
Anne Midgette (2008–2019)
Michael Andor Brodeur (since 2020)

Others

Chicago Tribune
- George Putnam Upton (1861–1881)
- Frederick Grant Gleason (1884–1889)
Daily News
- George Hogarth (1846–1866)
Evening News
- Mosco Carner (1957–1961)
Evening Standard
- Percy Scholes (1913–1920)
- Barry Millington (2000s)
Financial Times
- Andrew Porter (1953–1972)
- Ronald Crichton (1972–1978)
Frankfurter Zeitung
- Paul Bekker
The Independent
- Bayan Northcott (1986–2009)
- Edward Seckerson (c. 2009–2012)
New York Daily News
- William Zakariasen (1976–1993)
New York Post
- Henry T Finck (1881–1924)
- Olga Samaroff (1926–1928)
San Francisco Examiner
- Michael Walsh (1977–1981)
Saturday Review
- William Barclay Squire (1888–1894)
The Scotsman
- Mary Miller (1992–1998)
Sunday Express
- Ralph Hill (1940s)
The Sunday Telegraph
- John Warrack (1961–1972)
- Michael Kennedy (1989–2005)
The Sydney Morning Herald
- Roger Covell (1960 – late 1990s)

Position abolished

Birmingham Post	Stephen Stratton (1877–1906) Ernest Newman (1906–1919) Eric Blom (1931–1946)

Daily Express	Francis Toye (1922–1925) Arthur Jacobs (1947–1952) Noël Goodwin (1965–1978)

Daily Mail	Richard Capell (1911–1933) Edwin Evans (1933–1945) Ralph Hill (1945–1948)

New Statesman	W. J. Turner (1915–1940) Desmond Shawe-Taylor (1945–1958) David Drew (1959–1967)

The Sunday Times	Joseph Bennett (1865–1870) Hermann Klein (1881–1901) Ernest Newman (1920–1959) Desmond Shawe-Taylor (1958–1983) David Cairns (1983–1992)

Discontinued

The Morning Chronicle	William Ayrton (1816–1826) George Hogarth (1834–1844) Charles Lewis Gruneisen (1845–1853)

The Morning Post	Howard Glover (1849–1865) Henry Sutherland Edwards Arthur Hervey (1892–1908) Francis Toye (1925–1937)

Neue Freie Presse	Eduard Hanslick (1864–1904) Julius Korngold (1904–1934)

New York Herald Tribune	Henry E Krehbiel (c. 1880–1923) Lawrence Gilman (1923-late 1930s) Virgil Thomson (1940–1954) Paul Lang (1954–1963) Alan Rich (1963–1968)