Posts tagged alex ross
“”Most notably, Philip Glass’s “Satyagraha,” a monumental minimalist opera evoking Gandhi’s campaign of civil disobedience in South Africa, had a transfixing revival at the Met, even as Occupy Wall Street unfolded downtown. The contradictions seemingly inherent in the presentation of a Gandhi opera at Lincoln Center led activists to stage a protest after the final performance, with Glass in attendance; the theatrical force of the action only added to the uncanny aura of the work. I was elated by this constructive confluence of music and politics, and yet I wondered whether the demonstrators had selected too predictable—and too small—a target. Pop stars and their parent corporations are the true élites of the cultural sphere, reaping vast rewards from a winner-takes-all system. I’m with Seth Colter Walls, who, in a generally positive commentary on the “Satyagraha” action, wrote, “This persistent fiction of ‘elitism,’ and contemporary classical music’s supposed inaccessibility, is one of the strongest propagandistic tools ever devised by the titans of corporate pop culture. They would prefer that you not cost-compare a Family Circle seat to ‘Satyagraha’ alongside a 3D screening of ‘Transformers 3.’”
I was haunted all year by a sentence that I read in Virginia Woolf’s “The Waves”: “One cannot live outside the machine for more perhaps than half an hour.” These days you can’t live outside the machine for more than a minute. Contradictions invade every square inch of our physical and mental space; even the purest-seeming creations are in some way tainted by the radical inequalities of early twenty-first-century society. The most potent artistic work, though, doesn’t conceal such contradictions; instead, it makes us agonizingly aware of them. Over the centuries, classical music has been allied with wealth and power, and it has also caused trouble for wealth and power. Its present marginal position gives it, at least in theory, critical distance from the materialist excess of pop culture—the ruthless equation of monetary and aesthetic value. Tellingly, classical music in America reached its maximum popularity in the nineteen-thirties and forties, when the country came closer to disavowing the capitalist faith than at any time in its history. One measure of the levelling spirit of the age was that millions across the land could tune in to NBC radio and listen to Beethoven symphonies. Are d.j.s blasting Beethoven in the V.I.P. lounges of the Second Gilded Age? Not that I’ve heard.
Culture Desk: Outside the Machine: The Best Classical Performances of 2011
Alex Ross demonstrating, yet again, why he is the best at what he does. I’ve often wondered about the key absurdity relayed here: that classical music is the domain of the elite. It’s chief flaw, in the eyes of its credulous critics, it seems to me, is that, like most truly meaningful artform, its very nature precludes it from partaking in the creative destruction of capitalist market economy. A saving grace, as far as I’m concerned!
Julia Lezhneva in Ottone, featured on Alex Ross’s blog.
‘Listen to This’ by Alex Ross
By Geeta Dayal “I hate ‘classical music’: not the thing but the name,” writes Alex Ross in the opening chapter of his new book, Listen to This. “It traps a tenaciously living art in a theme park of the past. It cancels out the possibility that music in the spirit of Beethoven could still be created today … [the] phrase is a masterpiece of negative publicity, a tour de force of anti-hype.” This collection of Ross’s essays from the New Yorker, where he has been a staff critic since 1996, is a forceful argument for this music’s continued relevance. Though Ross is best known for his writing on classical music, a sizeable portion of the book covers popular music, including extended essays on Björk, Radiohead, and Bob Dylan. All the pieces are smart and thoughtful, but the chapters on classical music and opera are where Ross truly shines; even the most steadfast hater of these genres could be stirred by his obvious passion. He contends with complex musical concepts without descending into hazy academic jargon; his writing is meticulous but fluid, thorough without being dense. […]
As a longtime staff critic at one of the nation’s most celebrated publications, Ross enjoys a privilege of access, and a budget, not available to most journalists today. For the Radiohead piece, Ross tagged along with the band for several dates on their European tour, allowing him to record observations from an intimate dinner with the group in the hills above Bilbao. In Ross’s research for his article on Dylan, he attended ten Dylan concerts, “including a six-day, six-show stretch that took three thousand miles off the life of a rental car.” In a chapter on Björk, in which he spent several days with the artist on her Icelandic home turf, he tosses off enviable lines such as “On the day I was to leave Iceland, Björk decided that I should see something of Reykjavik’s art scene.” Many other chapters in Listen to This are memorable, especially one on the history of the chacona, a playful dance that surfaced at the end of the 16th century, and a poignant piece on the mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, who died in 2006. The substantive, passionate writing contained in this book is a strong argument against the ossification of “classical music.” It is also an argument for the continued relevance of the critic—someone who shows why we should listen to this, and why we should care.
