Henry Pleasants (music critic)
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Henry Pleasants (1910-2000) was an English music critic.
Pleasants was a longtime London music critic for the International Herald Tribune and an expert on the human voice. He studied voice, piano and composition at the Curtis Institute of Music and received an honorary doctorate from Curtis in 1977. For 29 years, Pleasants lectured and conducted seminars on singing at the American Institute of Musical Studies in Graz, Austria.
He is best known for his 1955 book The Agony of Modern Music, a polemical attack on the direction taken by much of 20th-century serious music, and an argument in favor of jazz and other vernacular styles as the true music of the time, both as entertainment and as art. He developed this theme in other books, for instance, Death of a Music?: The Decline of the European Tradition and the Rise of Jazz (1961) and Serious Music — and All That Jazz! (1969).
However, Pleasants's first and major enthusiasm was the human voice. His book The Great Singers (1966) became a standard reference work. Other books on singers and singing were The Great American Popular Singers, Opera in Crisis, and The Great Tenor Tragedy: The Last Days of Adolphe Nourrit. His article, "Elvis Presley," reprinted in Simon Frith, ed., Popular Music: Critical Concepts in Media and Cultural Studies. Volume 3: Popular Music Analysis (Routledge, 2004), describes in detail Elvis Presley's "extraordinary compass and very wide range of vocal color."
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