Marsh Gets a Message
Marsh told us, “I asked Duke, ‘Do you want me to retire? Is that the point of this? Do you want me to step down?’ He said, ‘Well, that’s your decision.’ It’s not my decision entirely. Taking my job away from me is a message of a kind, isn’t it?”
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
He said, “Steve’s model appears to be [Tribune critic] John von Rhein. It’s a pity John can’t come over and write for the Sun-Times. Steve feels he’s bright, lively, vivid. . . . I don’t try to describe music. I agree with Roger Sessions in his Harvard lectures that you can’t duplicate the musical experience in words. So I write about music in more general terms. John is more descriptive. John uses a lot of colorful adjectives. I don’t. They think I’m old and sober and dull, I guess. I don’t think my readers think I’m old and sober and dull. But the emphasis at the Sun-Times is on, ‘Will this sell papers?’”
Aside from functioning as pundit, Marsh had a beat to cover. It is enormously difficult to cover any beat for 35 years without nodding off, and classical music is no exception. A couple of times lately, Duke complained that Marsh had bollixed stories. And this last one was unacceptable.
“It was felt I should have told Lon Grahnke [the entertainment editor]. Well, perhaps I should,” said Marsh. “I was leaving the office in a hurry, and I thought telling Wynne was enough.”
“The point I’ve made repeatedly,” said Marsh, “is that covering Orchestra Hall and covering City Hall are not as different as you might imagine. Both are intensely political places.”
