Joshua Kosman’s announcement last week that he’s retiring from the San Francisco Chronicle at the end of the month, giving up the classical music critic’s chair he’s so ably occupied since 1988, is more than the end of an era.
As one of only a half-dozen or so staff music critics focusing on classical music at an American newspaper, Kosman departs at a moment when serious cultural coverage is more diffuse and less influential than ever. In a media environment largely given over to the pursuit of clicks, Kosman continued to serve as an essential component of the Bay Area’s arts ecosystem, providing pithy and cogent criticism and a form of institutional memory that can’t be replaced. And, in fact, it seems that he won’t be.
Hired by the Chronicle in 1988, he was famously tapped for the chief music critic position by esteemed writer Robert Commanday (who’d held the chief critic spot since 1964). The baton, it seems, won’t be passed again. “It’s been made pretty clear that there won’t be somebody hired who will be the classical music critic,” Kosman said on a recent phone call, while ticking off several papers that still employ a full-time music writer. “We’re approaching zero or one. The New York Times will hold out. It’s a very discouraging development, but an understandable one.”
On Tuesday, April 30, Kosman will be at Manny’s for a celebratory send-off and conversation about criticism, the arts and memorable concerts with Chronicle theater critic Lily Janiak, whose indefatigable coverage exemplifies the way arts journalism can play an indispensable role in fortifying a scene. Kosman’s exit takes place at a fraught moment that he’s covered closely. Last month, conductor Esa-Pekka Salonen announced he wouldn’t renew his contract with the San Francisco Symphony, an “upheaval I did not see coming,” Kosman said.
“I’d already decided when this all came out, and it’s just lamentable that I’m leaving when things are getting interesting. Just bad luck, bad timing. It may turn out this is a sequence that doesn’t need constant bird-dogging for the next three years. Maybe the symphony will turn a corner, reorganize, and we report on that.”
Does he have any concrete plans for his post-Chronicle life? Kosman is looking to launch a Substack-like blog “doing the best parts of my job, going to concerts and writing about them in a weekly column, a genre of criticism very important to me that I’ve never have done.” He hasn’t made any decisions yet about when he’ll launch it or what he’ll call it.
Our paths have crossed occasionally over the years and, as a freelance contributor to the Chronicle, I’ve always been grateful for his willingness to respond to questions about what he was (or wasn’t) going to write about. A side of Kosman that doesn’t show up in print is that he’s a dogged champion of young writers. Hannah Edgar, a regular contributor to the Chicago Tribune covering jazz, classical and new music (who uses they/them pronouns), grew up in Walnut Creek reading the classical coverage of Rich Scheinin in the Contra Costa Times.
“But as I was getting interested in classical music around 14 or 15 I started reading Joshua online,” Edgar said. “I admired how pithy and to the point he was. I’m guilty of filing reviews with twice the word count, trying and failing to use his writing as a model.”
Edgar considers Kosman a key mentor who opened some crucial doors.
As an undergrad at the University of Chicago with a growing interest in music criticism, Edgar looked to apply to the Rubin Institute of Music Criticism, which is now situated in the San Francisco Conservatory of Music. But they were locked out, because the program only accepted applicants from a few schools, including Oberlin, Yale, the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and Stanford.
At the University of Chicago, Edgar emailed Kosman “and he was like, ‘You are so right,’ and went to bat for that concept,” Edgar said. “The following year, 2018, I was able to participate.”
Kosman took Edgar under his wing, reading copy and offering advice. When the position with the Tribune came through — a part-time position created in partnership with the Rubin Institute — Kosman was one of the first Edgar contacted to thank.
Maybe Kosman, who also found his calling as a music critic in college, saw something of himself in Edgar. He realized he wanted to write about music as an 18-year-old undergrad at Yale. After graduating he moved to the Bay Area in 1983 to study music at the University of Caifornia, Berkeley. “I didn’t finish a degree,” he said. “I wanted to be a more educated music critic.” During his five years at Cal, he started writing for San Francisco Bay Guardian and Berkeley Monthly. He was about to embark on a dissertation when he landed the job at the Chronicle. His first piece was a review of Chanticleer.
He has written about his regrets over his early years as a critic, when he used what he thought of as honesty “as way to escape responsibility for the words I wrote. I evolved the tools to be honest and humane, and I like to think I’ve given up cruelty and bluntness,” he said, quoting the concluding lines from Philip Larkin’s poem “Talking In Bed,” about “Words at once true and kind/Or not untrue and not unkind.”
What’s brutally true is that the career path walked by Kosman has been washed away by the digital world. He sees a much wider problem, “not so much a crisis of classical music coverage, but a crisis of journalism,” he said. “As the pressure grows to write things that people will click on and read, we lose things. We no longer do reviews of single-night shows. It’s hard to know what this means.”
“For years, you used to have editors say, ‘Why are we writing about this concert, when it’s too late for anyone to hear it?’ My response was, ‘Why are we writing about the Giants, when everyone knows who won the game?’ But there’s some truth to that question. I clung to the notion that there was a big body of people who wanted to read reviews, but it used to be an unfalsifiable proposition. Now we have insanely detailed metrics, and the market for a classical music review was more niche than we thought.”
It’s a niche that Kosman made brilliantly his own, and the Chronicle will not be the same without his byline.
