Customer Reviews

Listen to This

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From the first chapter of his second book, LISTEN TO THIS, in which he recounts how Beethoven's "Eroica" symphony inspired a lifelong love of music in him - to the last in which he details the pathos lingering throughout the work of Johannes Brahms - Alex Ross cements his reputation as perhaps the most dynamic writer on music today. His first outing, THE REST IS NOISE, has become an international bestseller and established itself as THE premiere survey on twentieth century classical music - an obtuse subject effortlessly broken down and made accessible by Ross's seamless prose and clear narrative structure.

LISTEN TO THIS proves to be far more episodic than THE REST IS NOISE. In contrast to that book's linear chronology, LISTEN TO THIS is simply a collection of essays on various musical subjects, most of which have already been published in Ross's primary meal ticket, THE NEW YORKER magazine. But LISTEN TO THIS is no less riveting, as Ross's engaging writing is by turns emotional (the sentimental chapter on Lorraine Hunt Lieberson), intelligent (he chronicles the entire musical history of a particular walking bass line in chapter two) and funny (the many on-campus scenes he depicts involving Marlboro College in "The Music Mountain"). Also, since it includes chapters on a wide variety of musicians, from Mozart to Dylan to Bjork to contemporary Chinese classical composers, LISTEN TO THIS truly does have "something for everyone," and reading through all of the essays is a great way to expose yourself to new music in which you may not have had any prior interest. Personally, I was less than enthused about reading the chapters on Schubert and Brahms, for example, but after making my way through them - which I ultimately considered more of a joy than a chore - I found myself researching more historical facts and seeking out samples of their music. It is a testament to Ross's skills as a writer that he has long been inspiring this effect in many of his readers. Don't be surprised if you pick up a Marian Anderson record or develop a sudden peculiar liking for obscure Chinese composer Qigang Chen after reading this book! Ross even makes it easy on us by providing a "suggested listening" section on each chapter, in which he recommends a slew of recordings.

Ross isn't without his flaws, however: he is far more comfortable when covering classical subjects than pop or rock, as evinced by the rather bland chapter on Radiohead (though he fares better with Bjork, weaving comparisons of her music to the Icelandic classical tradition throughout that chapter). Also, the chapter "Edges of Pop" is without any real thesis - only offering brief glimpses at a small smorgasbord of oddball musical artists.

Regardless, anyone with even a remote interest in classical or rock music would be hard pressed not to find inspiration and insight in LISTEN TO THIS. Alex Ross's devout love of music bleeds off of every page, without fail, directly into the heart of the reader.

Fans of his work know that Alex Ross writes mainly about classical music, and Listen To This highlights some of his best writing on the genre in the last decade, including fantastic essays on Mozart, Schubert, and late-period Brahms. But he also has something for contemporary music fans, with almost equally enlightening essays on Bob Dylan, Radiohead and Bjork. His knowledge of music is deep--he grew up listening to classical instead of popular music, and took music lessons as a teenager-- and he applies the same critical musical eye to Kid A and Medulla as he does the Eroica. Indeed, Ross shows us that some of our best pop composers pay just as much attention to textures, rhythm, harmony, and melody as a composer of orchestral music would, and I saw these artists from a new angle.

In fact, this conjunction of music, crossing the border from classical to pop as he calls it, is precisely the book's strength, and possibly its greatest potential benefit. Though these essays are primarily about classical music, he writes with such a contagious zeal, with such an obvious love of music, that he shades the restrictive boundaries we've created to categorize music. He does this well in the above-mentioned pieces. But nowhere is this idea better put than in his essay, "Chacona, Lamento, Walking Blues", where he ties the basso lamento of the middle ages through the centuries all the way to Led Zeppelin's "Dazed and Confused". Ross gets it. He gets that music is music and any genre of it has the ability to touch anyone.

Still, his first love is classical, and nothing seems to concern him as much as the forms lack of popularity, especially the greatly underappreciated works of the twentieth century. This concern informs many of the essays. In "Listen to This", Ross outlines the history of classical music's popular decline. He blames it partially on what he calls the "sacralization" of music, a process over time that turned the proceedings of a classical music concert into an almost religious experience. The most glaring example of this snobbery, the prohibition on applauding mid-piece, even between movements, is explained. But perhaps worse than ridiculous rules of etiquette was what Ross calls the "fetishizing" of the past, the etching of the great classical composers onto a musical equivalent of Mt Rushmore, where there's no room for new faces. He argues that this prompted modern composers to write for one another, pushing the music into territory far removed from the classical repertoire and foreign to the ears of most listeners who were untrained to catch the musical `advancements' these artists were making.

I found the error of the modern composer's way neatly summarized in Ross's essay on Mozart, which is called, "The Storm of Style: Mozart's Golden Mean". Mozart's `Golden Mean' is early advice the composer's father, Leopold, gave him. Leopold told the young Wolfgang that he had to write music that would be appreciated by both connoisseurs of music as well as the general public. As enjoyably and thought-provokingly as Ross writes, I would've liked to have seen him tie the problem of modern music to this simple rule. Because as a fan of classical music who hates just about every modern orchestral piece he's ever heard, I see this as the core problem. I often read rave reviews about contemporary composers, like John Adams, Jennifer Higdon, and Osvaldo Golijov. But they're almost always written by the intelligentsia of classical music: conductors, other composers, or the classical press, people like Ross. Modern composers must make music smart AND entertaining for regular listeners. Otherwise the music will remain as distant from most of us as the lives of the great composers are. Most people can enjoy Beethoven's 5th symphony, even if they don't understand how he spends the entire symphony harmonically taking apart the famous eight-note beginning. But will the average listener appreciate Stravinsky's Rite of Spring if they don't know about or understand the rhythmic intricacies of the piece? I doubt so, in most cases. It's all about the golden mean.

Of course, many people could appreciate classical music more if they gave it the time and attention it deserves. But given the average attention span these days, perhaps the future lies in Ross's essays on pop music. Maybe Radiohead and Bjork are our modern masters. Both are inspired by the composer Olivier Messiaen, but have used his influence in a form more readily accessible in the current world culture. In the essay, "Symphony of Millions", Ross goes to China and finds music conservatories there teaching not just classical theory, but also pop-music arranging. As we may find China driving world culture in the twenty-first century, is this a sign that blended genres and shorter works will render modern orchestral compositions permanently irrelevant? (Indeed, I think some of the more successful contemporary orchestral works already do blend genres. See Golijov, for example.)

Wherever you come down on the issue, Ross's thought-provoking work is a great guide to have in the thinking process. He hits his own golden mean with his engaging and intelligent writing, which will appeal to a broad category of music-lover, not just classical fans. It's for anyone who wants to know how music works its magic, and the artists who create that magic.

The book is very interesting and great to read, but I was very dissapointed to find out that the Kindle version doesn't contain the images/figures that the paper version does! It would have been great if the Kindle version at least had the figures, and maybe even the audio examples built in!

This selection of Essays, most of them already published in the New Yorker, doesn't provide the same thrill as "The Rest Is Noise", which felt like a long and exciting adventure trip, but is nevertheless highly interesting and entertaining.

I liked most the first chapter and the one about Lorraine Hunt, probably also the chapters with the most personal involvement. And, even being a pure classical guy, I especially liked the chapters about the non-classical subjects since they told stories completely new to me. Friends who know more about this music were less impressed though.

Vice versa I was not so impressed by the hardcore classical chapters on Mozart, Schubert and Brahms. They are very interesting and intelligent but seemed to me more a summary of the latest scholary opinions than giving a real personal view.

I, as a German, also sensed much more in this book than in "The Rest Is Noise" that Americans have a different approach to classical music. Not that we don't have similar discussions about the near dead of classical music, the problems with the reception of contemporary classical music and the classification in "high culture" and "pop culture". But what's different is that Europeans consider classical music much more as part of their cultural identity, in a way that probably Americans feel about Hollywood as part of their identity no matter if they are especially interested in movies or not. For Americans classical music, even it also has a own long history by now, stays at the very bottom foreign and exotic, just as something not grown from own roots.

I believe that Alex Ross can enjoy and appreciate the sadness of the late Brahms' music. But I think he lacks the understanding of some deeper layers that are connected with the historic climate of Brahms time. Or the social and communicative implications of feudalism that still define Mozarts music.

However, this is a great book and I'm looking forward to further books by this rarely gifted writer.

This is a collection of really thoughtful essays about music and life. As is the case with most anthologies, some pieces are better than others. However, this is on the whole very good and not as "New Yorkery" as I feared before reading it.

Alex Ross was hired by The New Yawkeh in 1996. He replaced a far more accomplished music critic, the Welsh writer Paul Griffiths, who not only had several books in print, but had written the libretti to operas by Tan Dun and Elliot Carter. I wasn't reading the magazine at the time, because it was being restyled by editrix Tina Brown into another Vanity Fair, but my guess is that she hired young Ross, because he would put a hipster spin on old music, and he could write about pop music as well. I've recently had a look at these old essays of his, none of which --alas-- appear in this book, and they're filled with a youthful enthusiasm. Some are not even about music, but all match the standard of the magazine's other fine writers -- the top of the nation's literary heap.

I first took notice of Alex Ross in the March 24, 2003 issue of the magazine which featured a long rant by him titled "Ghost Sonata." I was so astounded by this piece that I could practically speak of nothing else for weeks. Superficially a discussion of the German philosopher Theodor Adorno (think of Herbert Marcuse writing about music, only worse), "Ghost Sonata" brilliantly explains what went so wrong with German music (once generally agreed to be the world's greatest) after World War II, but it also explains much more. Ross was perceptive and insightful when he pointed out something I had seen many times but had taken no notice of: that on television and in the movies, when a serial killer is depicted stalking his next victim, he without exception listens to classical music. When a Mafia don orders the murder of a rival family, he does so while listening to Verdi. Why is this?

In short, Ross's long review of 2003 is the single greatest thing I have ever read about music. It doesn't explain everything which ails classical music, but it's the best diagnosis yet -- far better than the feeble attempt by Norman Lebrecht. Therefore, I'm not merely disappointed but enraged that Ross didn't include or continue the essay in this book.

After I read that piece I felt that I knew who Alex Ross was. He was the voice I had been waiting for: the Savior, the Redeemer who would start a revolution that would revive classical music. No more overlooking the fact that the concert halls are half-empty and the lingering patrons are geriatric. Vienna, we have a problem.

I expected Ross to go on in successive pieces to explain why this morbid attitude is a perversion and a betrayal. After all, it must be obvious that a symphony concert is dreadfully similar to attending worship. The audience sits in perfect stillness as the maestro, the high priest (or rabbi) raises his hands high and guides his acolytes and deacons to summon the holy spirit of Bach or Mozart, who were not men like us, but divine spirits from another realm. In this grotesque ritual, only the priest, who must be a confirmed genius, can summon these spirits for us mortals, and he does this by making faces at the orchestra.

Elias Canetti (a far greater writer than Ross's Adorno) won a Nobel Prize for his book Crowds and Power, and in it, he observes that at classical music concerts,
"All outward reactions are prohibited. People sit there motionless, as though they managed to hear *nothing.* It is obvious that a long and artificial training in stagnation has been necessary here. People who allow music to affect them in a natural way behave quite differently, and . . . show unbridled excitement."

Of course, as Ross must know, it wasn't always this grim. In his book The Maestro Myth Norman Lebrecht tells of how a London audience became so excited during a performance of Tchaikowsky's Fourth Symphony, under the baton of Arthur Nikisch (who never raised his hands above his head), that they began jumping on the Queen's Hall seats, "stamping and shouting themselves hoarse; many chairs were broken."

This is what classical music once was, and in his position of prestige, Ross could advocate that such "unbridled excitement" and fun return to the concert hall.

But then, instead, a terrible thing happened.

It's quite clear that Ross was practically ridiculing Adorno's belief that "After Auschwitz" there can and must be no music that people can actually enjoy, but instead of continuing to mock such buncombe, Ross seemed oddly influenced by Adorno. The New Yawkeh, under a new, more traditional editor had hired other men to write about pop music, and I suppose that Ross was told to focus on being a traditional classical critic. In doing so, Ross jettisoned what gonzo he had and went backward. Back past Winthrop Sargent, regressing into an unpleasant similarity to Virgil Thomson, and the last thing classical music needs is another Virgil Thomson.

Actually, "Listen to This" has much in common with Thomson's collection of columns, Music, Right and Left. Both books contain discussions which admire contemporary composers, favorite performers, and tell of a visit to a music colony. (Thomson goes to Berkshire, Ross goes to Marlboro.) What is most annoying is that Ross adopts an aspect of Thomson's style that was common among second-rate writers of the past-- explaining a piece of music or a performance through the use of gaudy (and sometimes mixed) metaphors and rancid similes. Such devices have always been the hallmark of cheap writing, and even ol' James Gibbons Huneker would've considered it hackneyed.

How can anyone keep from wincing upon reading such phrases as
"The music in Mozart's mind may have been like a huge map of half-explored territories . . ." [pg.76]
(I'm trying to picture that -- a huge map in Mozart's mind -- and instead, it looks like a Monopoly® board to me.)

"Counterpoint and dissonance are the cables on which Mozart's bridges to paradise hang." [pg. 79]
(Have you ever read anything more cringe inducing? If so, please don't tell me.)

" . . . were read with more plain animal warmth than imaginative penetration."
(Whups! That's not by Ross. That's one of Thomson's.)

"Having shot a ray of darkness into a world of light, Brahms recovers light without struggle." [pg. 295]
(On second thought, Ross resembles Edward Bulwer-Lytton more closely. No one has written anything like that in seriousness since the nineteenth century.)

". . . sinewy recordings . . ." [pg. 251] and "In muscular C minor . . ." [pg.25]
(Does that mean C-minor is a muscular key by nature? Or is this as opposed to a C-minor that has not been going to the gym?)

"The voice is seared around the edges, raised up like a flaming sword." [pg. 291]
(Hey, dude. Yer sword's on fire.)

Schubert's music "often inspires a kind of unsafe love in its listeners." [pg. 126]
(Leave me out of this, will ya?)

Begone, Alex! Out! Out with your flaming swords! Get thee to the Mikado! And take this banality with you!
"[Mozart's] music is astonishingly well made." [pg. 77]

I ask any normal person who, by some remote chance, happens to be reading this to imagine some poor wretch who desperately wants to be respected as an intellectual, and who longs to be admitted to the coterie of those who appreciate fine art -- or "aht"-- reading such junk and applying yellow highlighter to such passages. It boggles my hippocampus that any adult could take this book seriously.

Seriousness, though, is the altar at which Ross worships. (Whups! Now I'm doing it! I hope copying-out the above passages hasn't scarred me for life.) Instead of advocating that unbridled excitement and fun be returned to classical music, Ross has swallowed the entire Theodor Adorno concept of utter solemnity and putrefaction. This is most evident when he performs painful contortions to try and present Schubert and Brahms as chronic depressives who wrote mainly gloomy music. Incredibly, he uses the pastoral Second Symphony of Brahms as an example of this melancholia. Of course this means that he must pretend that the fourth movement -- Allegro con spirito -- does not exist, because it is doubtlessly the most joyous piece of music ever written. It roars out as a young couple in love running naked through a field of wildflowers! (This is not like one of Ross's bad metaphors, because that actually happened.)

But when Ross tries to impale Schubert in the same manner, something is revealed.

Obviously, Ross must ignore Schubert's fun music like the bubbling Impromptu #2 in E-flat, op. 90 (be certain to listen to my switched-on arrangement of it) or the silly Rondo of the Trio in B-flat, D.898 (one of my personal favorites). Instead, he spends three pages (131-133) trying, without evidence, to establish that, in addition to being depressed, Schubert was a homosexual. (And I don't wanna hear no guff about using the H-word. Ross uses it throughout the book, and he uses "gay" only when describing a Bob Dylan song.)

Here, I must stop my japes and banter, because it becomes apparent that . . . the personality being written about is not Schubert at all, and one discovers the reason for the book's oppressive solemnity.

I wouldn't think for a moment that a famous writer would stoop to reading the humble Amazon reviews of his book, and I certainly don't think that it was Alex Ross who churlishly demanded that my review of his previous book be taken down, but Alex, if you should read this, Hey! Lighten up, man! You know what they say -- As long as you got yer health! And look! You have that sinecure, so yer not going hungry, and yer on the TV, and as I said, you have written some great columns. This book is nowhere, but you have years ahead to write more, better books. One day, you'll become something far greater than a music critic, and maybe you will be the savior of classical music, after all. (Jesus didn't wanna be the Savior, either.)

What you gotta keep in mind, though, that the goal of life is to experience the joy of living. Seriousness is a dead end. Forget that Freudian mumbo-jumbo, and take the advice of Dr. Otis: I expect you can get any kind of dope in New Yawk, so drop some ecstasy, then go to where people do the polka, and dance the night away. For six months, listen to nothing but Rossini, Percy Grainger, and the Bonzo Dog Band. Y'got one life to live, and you don't wanna spend it in some dank library trying to prove that everyone great was miserable (or vice versa). You gotta become one of them angelheaded hipsters
burning for the ancient heavenly connection
to the starry dynamo
in the machinery of the night.

This book so far has been a great read. Once again Alex Ross takes the reader beyond the music and words and bring us to a new level of understanding about music, he really opens us to many different generas of music that i have not listen to until reading this book. recommend reading, for music majors and for anyone that loves music

He had me at "national bombast, materialistic excess, and cultural bizarrerie"- with thoughts as well-formulated as that it will be a book I will look forward to reading; his thoughts transcend music- I just saw a 'thought-provoking' section at Barnes and Nobel, and this book should be placed front and center...

He does lament the state of classical music in his preface- which may be a bit dated, or he hasn't been facing East considering what has been uploaded on Youtube recently (quite a direct social barometer)- it is plain to see (literally) that the Classical Baton has been passed from West to East- it has been taken up wholeheartedly and with a youthful, energetic, innocent enthusiasm never realized in the West- it is treated more like pop culture there (sans the gratuitous themes of decadence and death plaguing the West).

I'm sure one of his purposes must be to bring relevance to classical music again, and to do that he had to explore the music that is currently relevant. He has a monumental task, for higher art in the West seems to be mired in glossy photos, receptions, and résumés, losing touch with the basic forces of (and fundamental reasons for) art, being more about the artist turning his back on the audience, and the audience is supposed to like it? Just what is going through the narcissistic minds of Western performers/composers these days? I'd say it verges on artistic cluelessness, and I am saying that angrily. He says today's composers hail from China, Estonia, Argentina, and Queens- as far as artistic relevance is concerned I would take that to a much further extreme...

Like I said, thought-provoking, and I'll add stirring...

This was for my husband's birthday as he loves music in any kinds. I can't really say about the book because of this reason besides he seems to like it.

I really enjoyed Alex Ross' "The Rest is Noise" as a book.
Knowing this, my daughter gave me the audio edition of "Listen to This" for Christmas thinking that it meant just that - you could listen to what Ross was talking about - But let me tell you a secret: You can't.

For those who can read, the audio version has all the disadvantages compared to a book: no index, difficulties finding a particular information, can't read passages to someone else, and so on.
This would have been offset completely if the audio edition had utilized the potential of the medium by giving examples of what the author is talking about. When Ross talks about how a particular sequence of notes sounds, I sit there expecting to hear it - Why else the title?

After the first two chapters I am reluctant to continue listening because I am continually being disappointed.
Why describe the rhythm of the chacona in such great detail when a 5 second clip would have illustrated it much better.
All the description of laments and musical forms and their evolution and polyphony and Hildegard von Bingen or Gesualdo's weird harmonic progressions and such are necessary in a book. But relying only on the description wastes the potential of an audio version.

Ross states in the preface that "Every art form fights the noose of verbal description" yet he hangs his excellent material with this selfsame noose.
So if you are telling me to "Listen to This" and mean music, then give me something to listen to.