Alex Ross
Alex Ross, Genius
The New Yorker's classical music critic Alex Ross has been named a 2008 MacArthur Foundation Fellow, otherwise known as the genius grant.
The Observer's Doree Shafrir profiled Mr. Ross in 2007, describing his book, The Rest Is Noise, as follows :
The culmination of 10 years’ worth of work, Noise is a rereading of the conventional wisdom about 20th-century classical music: that avant-garde, atonal music was the important music of the century and that in some ways all modern classical music is derived from it. This argument is near-heretical for many scholars of classical music, but what Mr. Ross is really asking for is a complete reorientation of how classical music is appreciated: as part of culture as a whole, not a hermetically sealed world unto itself. read more »
Classical Music: Awkward, Then Snobbish, Like the Nerd at the Party
The New Yorker's classical music reviewer Alex Ross, (whom the Observer's Doree Shafrir considers the best listener in America) and The New York Times' (mostly) jazz writer Ben Ratcliff have been firing off emails about pop, jazz and classical to each other and posting them on Slate for the past few days. They're attempting to "leave their musical islands." Here's a highlight reel: read more »
Ross: Internet Revives Classical Music
News bulletins were declaring the classical-record business dead, but I noticed strange spasms of life in the online CD and MP3 emporiums. When Apple started its iTunes music store, in 2003, it featured on its front page performers such as Esa-Pekka Salonen and Anna Netrebko; sales of classical fare jumped significantly as a result. Similar upticks were noted at Amazon and the all-classical site ArkivMusic. The anonymity of Internet browsing has made classical music more accessible to non-fanatics; first-time listeners can read reviews, compare audio samples, and decide on, for example, a Beethoven recording by Wilhelm Furtwängler, all without risking the humiliation of mispronouncing the conductor’s name under the sour gaze of a record clerk. Likewise, first-time concertgoers and operagoers can shop for tickets, study synopses of unfamiliar plots, listen to snippets of unfamiliar music, follow performers’ blogs, and otherwise get their bearings on the lunar tundra of the classical experience.
The Best Listener in America
New Yorker music critic Alex Ross has 13 recordings of Richard Strauss’s opera, two cats, a husband and a new book. read more »
The Man Who Sold the Boro; A Broker of 'Good People'
The Man Who Sold the Boro; A Broker of ‘Good People’
Kiki and Herb: The Baddest Act in Town
The Eight-Day Week
