“Music teaches me how to talk, how to walk, how to dress, how to love, how to work, how to play.”

Gallatin professor Ben Ratliff spent over two decades as a professional music critic for The New York Times before pivoting to teach at NYU. Ratliff started teaching in 2011 while still at The Times, with one course per year at NYU’s graduate journalism program. After enjoying the experience of communicating directly with students, Ratliff formally made the transition over to Gallatin School of Individualized Study in 2015, following shifts in The Times’ coverage of music, particularly a diminished focus on live performances.

He now primarily works as a freelance writer and spends time working on his own books. Ratliff’s fifth book, “Run the Song,” about his experience with listening to music while running, comes out on March 13. Ratliff will be speaking about the book at Bobst Library on March 18 in the Feldstein Immersion Room.

These interviews have been edited for length and clarity.

WSN: How did your interest in the field of music journalism start? 

Ratliff: I was always interested in music. Growing up, more and more, I became interested in writing. By high school, I really knew that I liked writing. I liked reading, too, and I was reading a lot about music. As a teenager, I was really thankful for music critics. They were my window into what was happening in the world that seemed very far away from me as a student. I also understood back then that if you want to write about music, there are a lot of different ways that you can do it. You can figure out what your own style is and what your own range of interest is and apply that to writing about music. I understood that music criticism could be really flexible and really creative, which is a little different from wanting to be a musician, and I sensed that there was more of a need for someone like me.

WSN: How did your career start and develop?

Ratliff: I admired the writers that I was reading. I wanted to be like them. I wrote for my high school newspaper, I wrote for my college newspaper at Columbia University and, toward the end of my years in college, I took a writing class with one of the critics I really admired. His name was Gary Giddins and he wrote about jazz for The Village Voice, which I read regularly, and I read him in particular really closely. That class was really helpful in allowing me to imagine that I could do music criticism. I decided I really wanted to publish some things out in the world, outside of the college newspaper, and asked him for some guidance on where I can submit my work. He suggested a little jazz magazine based in Canada that might be interested in the work of a really young writer. He was right — they were. 

It’s really just the first time that you publish something somewhere out in the real world, that a switch goes on in your brain and you say, ‘Oh, okay. I guess I’m a writer now.’ Then you can give yourself permission to be a writer, and then you start submitting your work to other places. It kind of builds like a snowball. After six years of writing for various places, I found that The New York Times needed somebody to be a music critic. 

WSN: Have you noticed any shifts in music journalism from when you started working to now?

Ratliff: In many ways, good insightful writing about music hasn’t changed all that much. People knew then, and still know now, that the basic task is to describe the music and try to understand it within its context, and write a little bit about what the music implies beyond how it is sold and how it is marketed. What is its larger meaning? I think that that has stayed constant.

I think that younger writers over the last 10 years have become a little more obsessed with the idea of genre and slicing genres thinner and thinner into micro-genres, and writing about what created these genres and making distinctions between genres. The old way of thinking used to tilt more in the direction of genre doesn’t matter or the best music transcends genre. Now I think younger writers are seeing genre as really interesting, rather than not wanting to think about it, and that’s good.

One big change — there used to be a lot of writing about performances, about concerts. Now there is almost none, and I find that really unfortunate. I actually find it kind of chilling. I don’t blame writers, I blame editors and publications who don’t seem to be very interested in performance as cultural news. They understand that recordings are cultural news. They understand that when a musician does something big through the media, that it could be cultural news. But they don’t really think that they just don’t think about concerts. And I find that really strange because I think there will be performances of music until music no longer exists. I would love to see a little bit more of a return, a resurgence of interest in writing about performance.

WSN: How did this change impact your career?

Ratliff: I write about improvised music a lot — jazz and other things, though most music contains some improvisation. And if you’re in New York and you’re writing about jazz and you’re not writing about what’s happening in the clubs, where scenes of musicians and audiences cohere, and the music is incubated, you’re missing the point. Jazz is a performance-oriented art, and it happens in small rooms. 

The most sweeping of the new editorial decisions at The Times were made via analytics — data gathered about what articles were clicked on the most by readers. I love popular music, but as a critic, I would prefer to be trusted to follow my instincts and write about whatever I thought was worthwhile. On the best days, the culture section of The Times felt like a writer’s paper. On others, it felt like an editor’s paper. But it seemed destined to turn into an editors-and-analytics’ paper, and since I already was getting interested in teaching, it felt like a good time to leave. 

WSN: Journalism as a whole is struggling with the rise of social media and the internet, and music criticism along with it. What would you say the case for music criticism in traditional journalism is?

Ratliff: Journalism, first and foremost, is about the news. It’s kind of like taking the temperature of the world every day and when a piece of music occurs in a moment in time, it becomes cultural news. It creates a moment for critical intelligence to think about it, not necessarily to give it a grade or say simply that it’s good or bad, but to talk about what it implies and what it means at this moment in time. I think that kind of timely function is important for music because music reflects our times and earlier times so strongly. So in that way, I think that writing about music should continue to be linked to the work of journalism. 

But also journalism is a practice, and it has protocols, with house rules and conventions. To some degree, you work within a system of guardrails and suggestions and all of those things can be very helpful to writers. I think it’s important for writers to learn how to write within a set of constrictions, and then once they’ve learned it, to rebel against those constrictions and do unexpected things. I think all of that is really healthy for music, for writing, for criticism. And I also think criticism in general, forget about music per se, is a vital function of life.

WSN: What’s one limitation you see in the music industry today?

Ratliff: One of my issues as a music critic or somebody who writes about music is breadth — the ability to be interested in a lot of different kinds of music and to not have an attitude of, ‘I never listen to that stuff, that’s not that’s not who I am.’ I have always found that there’s something in ‘that stuff’ that will interest me. And the question should be, ‘Can knowing about Bach help you understand hip hop? Can knowing about Cuban music help you understand Japanese music?’ I always find that the answer is yes — the broader your frame of reference, the more you understand musical culture as a whole, and the better off you are.

WSN: Is there one artist that you think everyone should listen to? 

Ratliff: Thelonious Monk. He was a pianist in the jazz tradition. He made his music between the 1940s and the 1970s. Why do I love him? Because he played so distinctly, but he wasn’t a virtuoso in the traditional sense, so his playing could sound abrupt or awkward or unusual. It could make people ask the question, ‘Does he know what he’s doing? Is he actually good?’ If you just listen for 10 minutes, you know the answer is yes, he’s doing exactly what he wants to do in the way that he wants to do it. He was brave enough to play with his own convictions and in his own way. His music is so personal. He wrote maybe less than 100 compositions but almost all of them are so beautifully constructed. I think there’s a very small number of composers in the world whose music sounds good, no matter who’s playing it. It could be the most technically proficient pianist in the world or a beginner, and they’ll all make those songs sound beautiful because they’re so well constructed.

I’ve heard great classical musicians talk about Bach often as a kind of companion through life for them. That’s the way they think about Bach — Bach is always with me; he’s my friend. I’m not a musician, but I feel this way about Monk — he’s one of my companions through life. He’s something I trust and he’s somebody that I can recommend to anybody confidently. I never have to say, ‘You might not like it,’ or ‘It’s not for everybody.’ I could give his music to anybody and be relatively sure they’ll like it. 

WSN: What does music mean to you? What do you think it has the capacity to do?

Ratliff: Music teaches me how to talk, how to walk, how to dress, how to love, how to work, how to play. It teaches me foreign languages. It teaches me patience. It’s just like the way you can take your car to the shop for a tuneup. Music can tune me up, make me feel in balance. Music can suggest that which I do not yet know or understand. In a way, it’s medicine. It’s healing. I also think that music brings communities together, or helps define communities and the ethos of community, because music always contains an ethos of some kind. It’s also a means of getting to know other people. It has always been that for me. I can make friends with people through music.

It also helps me understand history, really and truly. It helps me understand American history and the history of other countries. Because music travels over borders so easily and is shared around the world so easily, if you follow music as your focal point, you can learn a lot about how the world changes and how the world evolves.