I came across some inspiring remarks Ross made at a 2004 symposium called "Shifting Ears: A Symposium on the Present State and Future of Classical Music Criticism" (see John Fleming's article in the St. With incisive humor, Ross chronicles various circular debates (historical, personal, nationalistic, musical) concerning whether, at one time or another, a particular work or a composer or a clique was, let's see, too elitist, too commercial, too bourgeois, too fussy, too fascist, too socialist, too florid, too ascetic, too anal, too free, too beholden to state or other interests, too abstruse, too grandiose, too formal, too casual, too programmatic, too old-fashioned, too melodic, too atonal, etc., etc., etc.Īnd this was just over last century, when, say, Stravinsky and Shostakovich were hailed and condemned as all of the above - respectively, sequentially, cyclically, and/or simultaneously. I've just finished reading New Yorker music critic's Alex Ross's mind-bogglingly ambitious critical history of modern "classical" music, " The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century." It's 1) a biting, passionate, ironical survey of political, religious and aesthetic fashions and dogmas (from Richard Strauss to Stalin to Boulez) 2) a serial biography, and 3) an illuminating analysis of individual compositions and musical influences. "I am not interested in writing about music as a horse race with Beethoven or Charlie Parker out in front."
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