Critics Robert Christgau and Gary Giddins conversed last week as part of the “Writing About Music” series sponsored by the Graduate Writing Program at the New School. “I first met Gary Giddins in 1974, when I became music editor of the Village Voice,” said Mr. Christgau, opening the program. “There were four regular music writers at the Voice when I arrived, and within three months, three of them were gone. But within three days, Gary had a column.”

Mr. Christgau said Giddins’s prose – unedited – exhibited intellectual acuity, literary reach, and a sense of humor. “Edited,” he said, “I like to think he got even better.”

Mr. Christgau described Mr. Giddins’s feat of publishing four essay collections as “a major achievement for any critic this side of Pauline Kael,” adding, to audience laughter, “Let’s just say when you get to publish your essays in the order you wrote them, you have really made it.” Mr. Giddins’s most recent collection, “Weather Bird: Jazz at the Dawn of Its Second Century” (Oxford) collects essays he has written on jazz since 1990, mostly from his Weather Bird column in the Village Voice.

Mr. Christgau read from Mr. Giddins’s essay on jazz drummer Billy Higgins. Praising it, he said, “There is nothing so difficult to describe as drumming.” Mr. Giddins, in turn, said the essay form allowed a writer to invite the reader in and explore a subject – not “the meat-and-potatoes review” of a daily newspaper.

Focusing on Mr. Giddins’s prose, Mr. Christgau said that unlike many jazz critics, Mr. Giddins knew “lots of other kinds of criticism” such as the literary, movie, and cultural varieties. Mr. Giddins later cited author Albert Murray, who became a kind of mentor to him and once said, “You can tell how good someone wants to be by what they read.”

The discussion touched upon literary skills. In teaching courses at Columbia University, Mr. Giddins said he has stressed that music criticism is a species of literature and not a species of music. Criticism is a writer’s art, said Mr. Giddins, but “some critics think that they’re part of the music; it’s a conceit that can destroy a critic.”

Mr. Giddins told of his formative years. “I grew up wanting to be a novelist.” He yearned to be Nathaniel Hawthorne after reading “The House of Seven Gables.” Mr. Giddins’s father subscribed to Esquire (and hid the magazines behind the hatboxes in the closet). There the budding youngster discovered the first critic who made an impact on him: Dwight Macdonald, “a rich Trotskyite who could really write.”

Moreover, Mr. Giddins said, “He was funny.” He cited a book in which Macdonald included the semi-comatose, deathbed babbling of gangster Arthur “Dutch Schultz” Flegenheimer as a parody of Gertrude Stein’s prose.

Mr. Giddins singled out two other critics who had a formative influence on him. Martin Williams, an “almost puritanical kind of prose writer,” showed how to write an essay on masterpieces. Dan Morgenstern exuded a passion for the whole spectrum of jazz. “I would buy records as a kid just for his liner notes. He would say, “‘Those eight bars are the best solo on the record’; he was always right.”

“I assume that no musician is going to read anything I ever write,” Mr. Giddins said, but told a humorous story about one musician who did. A young saxophonist at a club once told Mr. Giddins, “I’d rather have a bad review from you than a good review from anybody else.” Mr. Giddins paused, adding in deadpan, “So I obliged.” The musician did not talk to him for about 20 years.

Mr. Giddins was asked how he works. He told of writing his columns in five or six hours – “off good notes,” Mr. Christgau interjected. “One of the reasons I had trouble with longer books is I couldn’t write 600 pages in one sitting.”

Mr. Giddins said he wrote his book on Louis Armstrong in three and a half weeks after a full year of nonstop research, including 50 or 60 interviews. He often typed at night until sunrise, putting on an Armstrong recording when he didn’t know where to turn next.

Before writing “Visions of Jazz: The First Century” (Oxford University Press), he had dinner with his editor, Sheldon Meyer. Mr. Giddins told him of his idea for an unconventional, nondefinitive history of jazz that would reject the standard chapter periodization by decade and major figures, and added, “but I’m not going to have a chapter on Louis Armstrong.” The editor ate his lunch, and at the end, said, “That’s fine, but of course, you have to have a chapter on Louis Armstrong.”

Messrs. Christgau and Giddins discussed if good critics needed to know how to read music. Martin Williams thought that a critic ought “to go another step and become a musicologist,” but the consensus here was that it was not necessary.

Mr. Giddins was asked about how a critic can continually hear work with a fresh ear. He preferred hearing each new CD recording “blind” in his CD changer, which holds five disks in rotation. It “gets rid of your prejudices.”

Messrs. Christgau and Giddins talked about jazz journalism. Mr. Giddins said there was generally less jazz coverage in major New York dailies. In mainstream magazines, he said the story is usually “‘jazz is dead’ or ‘jazz is back,’ both of which are equally untrue. You can only write that kind of article once or twice a year.”

What about letters he receives from readers? he was asked. He recalled a line from a former Village Voice columnist, Arthur Bell: “If people hate your stuff, they write to the editor. If they love you, they write you.” Mr. Giddins said he learns from his readers, since he’s a generalist, and on almost any subject he writes on there are those who know more.

He told of the time a person complained: “It’s only your opinion. Why don’t you just say that?” Mr. Giddins replied that, yes, of course, he is only expressing his opinions, but, well, for one thing, “it’s illiterate to start off every sentence with ‘in my opinion.'”