Kyle Gann writes that music criticism has been reduced to shorthand that renders it toothless. “We critics are told that it’s up to us to defend classical music in the public marketplace – but the newspapers have taken away our tanks, bazookas, and machine guns and left us armed with garbage can lids and pea shooters. The space crunch is everywhere, in every publication. It used to be, when I’d write for the New York Times, they’d ask me one of the sweetest questions a writer can hear: ‘How many words do you need?’ No longer. Articles that would have once garnered 2000 or 2500 words now get half that. And according to what editors tell me, this is true across the board.”