Sunday afternoon, October 3, 1982: I was twenty-seven years old and felt as though I had arrived. There I was at Carnegie Hall, in my first designated seat as a New York Times music writer, squirming in the then-requisite jacket and tie, trying to look neither too eager nor too self-important, waiting to hear the late Giuseppe Patanè lead the American Symphony Orchestra in works by Prokofiev, Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky.

Those who picked up the Times on Tuesday may have read that I thought the ASO's playing was "still uneven, which might be expected from an ensemble with a somewhat irregular schedule." "But when challenged by a strong conductor like Mr. Patanè," I grudgingly allowed, "it can muster an impressive enthusiasm." The program had closed with Tchaikovsky's Fifth Symphony: "Mr. Patanè's conception was clear-eyed and unsentimental, with a marked avoidance of histrionic excess. This was all to the good, for nothing is more disastrous to the later Tchaikovsky than a tendency to wallow in bathetic crescendos."

Oh dear. Tired truisms from a prissy young man still embarrassed by his own emotions. I wouldn't have admitted it at the time, but I was utterly unprepared for my new position, and few things would make me happier now than the opportunity to delete the majority of my early Times reviews from archives and distant memories. Although I had collected records since I was five or six, knew a good deal about contemporary composition and played the piano acceptably, I had scant knowledge of huge portions of the repertory and no understanding of the day-to-day challenges and intricacies of the music world. Even more to the point, I had not yet begun to develop much human empathy for my fellow mortals. So I approached my new job with the prim, Robespierrean surety and the acerbic would-be cleverness that then seemed to me the most important qualities of a working critic.

The Times was used to steep learning curves — developing a voice with which to speak through New York's most powerful and prestigious newspaper is never an easy adaptation — and my editors were good enough to keep me on. Over the next quarter-century, at the Times, at Newsday and finally at The Washington Post, I learned a great deal, and if I remained capable of producing the occasional dunderheaded howler, at least there were fewer of them.

Strange as it may seem, it had never occurred to my brash younger self that almost everybody pursuing a career in music was there because of a love — a calling, if you will — with aspirations to artistic nobility. Because there is not the same lust for fast money that fuels so many of the other arts, the sort of barbed, slash-and-run criticism found in some movie, book and commercial-music reviews generally has no place in our discipline. It should have been obvious to me that reviewing the latest exploitation film or pulp novel — that is, purely commercial product — was a different case from reviewing an earnest, scared young musician who had worked for years to get to this point. But it took me a while to realize these home truths.

This is not to advocate bland, uncritical criticism. Journalists have a duty to tell the truth, and the exposure of incompetence goes along with the job. And there are times when righteous anger is not only permissible but essential — for if the critic will not take on plummeting standards and grotesque, expensive misfires, who will? During the great David Helfgott hype of a dozen years ago, fueled by an unholy combination of Hollywood and record-company bucks, did not the critic perform a public service by steering well-intentioned listeners away from Helfgott's pallid and disorganized rendition of Rachmaninoff's Third Piano Concerto and toward truer representations of the work by Vladimir Horowitz, Evgeny Kissin and the composer himself?

Yet the reviewer does not work in a vacuum. What is published will have an effect, and words should be chosen with the utmost care. It's all a question of degree — one can say anything one wants, but the tone should be adapted to suit the circumstances. If the concert has been less than satisfactory, there are ways of getting that across without mockery or condescension, without making a liar of oneself, but without being unnecessarily cruel.

Indeed, a budding critic quickly discovers that withering reviews, especially of the glib, dismissive "Joe Jones played Mozart last night; Mozart lost" variety, are by far the easiest to write, but a string of insults scarcely constitutes criticism. It is much more challenging to say something serious about a performance that has been moving and effective. Most challenging of all are reviews of little events such as a Vivaldi chamber program in a church basement. It is a genuinely good thing that these concerts exist: they are unpretentious, they are usually reasonably well played, and they bring pleasure to people in the neighborhood. But it is hard to find much to say about them that will not come across as either damning with faint praise or praising with faint damnation. If I read a review of one of these events that keeps my attention for, say, 500 or 750 words, I am immediately aware that I am in the presence of a remarkable critic.

In 2008, feeling that I'd pretty much said what I wanted to say about musical life in Washington, I left the Post to take a professorship at the University of Southern California, where I have helped establish a master's degree in arts journalism at the Annenberg School for Communications, in conjunction with the Thornton School of Music and several other arts departments on campus. By the end of the program, the student should be able to write critical articles worthy of publication in a variety of periodicals. A longer, research-based yet still distinctly personal article is another requirement of the class, and an ongoing "experiential" diary is suggested.

George Jean Nathan once observed that there were two kinds of criticism — "subjective criticism and bad criticism." Today, thanks first to the alternative press and more recently to the blogosphere, deeply subjective criticism has become so prevalent in our culture that I have proposed to pull back a little and do my best to rehabilitate objective criticism as well.

This does not mean that we quash individual views at USC (quite the reverse — orthodoxy and heresy are both welcome). But it does mean that students must have the facts correctly marshaled when they are making their points. Put it this way: as much as I would disagree with this conclusion, I would not be particularly upset if a student presented me with a cogent, closely argued devastation of Beethoven's Pastoral Symphony. But if he or she referred to a long saxophone solo in the second movement, there would be problems, for the Pastoral, of course, has nothing of the kind. In short, I care about facts, and I insist that my students do, too: we must be reporters first, and nothing undermines the credibility of a critic more quickly and drastically than any misstatement. Still, I am finally less concerned with a student's opinion of a given work than with the representation of that opinion.

It's an anxious time for the media. By the time this article sees print, it is likely that several more newspapers will have cut back on their arts coverage and some will have shuttered altogether. Thirty years ago, when I published my first articles in a weekly called The Soho News, I might have hoped to write for well-remembered music magazines such as High Fidelity, Stereo Review, Ovation and Opus. Back then, The New York Daily News, The New York Post and Newsday all had staff music critics, sometimes more than one of them. At the Times, I wrote up as many as thirteen concerts in a single week — and there were then six or seven classical writers with regular bylines.

That world is gone forever. Why, then, a degree in arts journalism at this particular time? There are several reasons. As long as there are artists, there will be people with a deep and serious interest in explaining, to themselves and to others, the creative manifestations of their time. Indeed, the blogosphere now permits a multiplicity of reactions to any given event, many more than were possible in the fattest years of daily newspapers. In the weeks after the opening of, say, a new production at the Met, there will be dozens, sometimes hundreds, of assessments — good, bad and indifferent, scathing or celebratory, erudite or frothing — available to a curious reader. This vast democratization has its perils, but I think it is by and large a good thing, and the better trained the observer, the better for our culture.

Moreover, I remain optimistic that there will be a working commercial model for journalism again — a way to support reliably the very important duty of independent and unfettered news-gathering. When certain big, bloated record companies lost their way, a host of smart new labels started up. I feel confident that something similar will happen with the media — and who better to lead the charge than a new generation, hungry and unspoiled, with training and tools at its disposal?

Finally, the development of taste and the articulation of that taste can be extraordinarily helpful in any field related to the arts, whether administration, performance, civic planning, education or public relations. Who among us, having lived through the past few years, cannot wish for an across-the-board improvement in critical thinking, and not just in the arts?

TIM PAGE, who won the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 1997, is a professor of journalism and music at both the Thornton School of Music and the Annenberg School of Journalism at the University of Southern California. His memoir, Parallel Play: Life as an Outsider, will be published this fall by Doubleday.

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