By Maya Trent · Originally reported by Richard Horgan (2010) · Wayback archive →
In late April 2010, Alan Rich — one of the most-bylined American classical-music critics of the post-1960 era — died at 85 of natural causes. His career had taken him across the NY Times, Variety, LA Daily News, California magazine, the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, and Newsweek, before settling into the LA Weekly era of his work.
Then
Rich had been writing music criticism for more than five decades by the time of his death. His 2006 book So I’ve Heard: Notes of a Migratory Music Critic gave the trajectory its name — he had been moving across publications for the entire run of his career.
Now
The LA classical-music criticism category Rich was central to has substantially contracted. The LA Weekly arts coverage that hosted some of his late-career work is no longer in the form it was in 2010. Mark Swed at the LA Times has continued as one of the city’s anchor classical-music voices. The migratory career pattern Rich’s book title described — a critic moving across multiple publications without anchoring permanently at one — has become structurally normal in U.S. criticism as freelance and newsletter work has displaced staff-critic positions across most newspapers.