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Metaphors of Mind: An Eighteenth-Century Dictionary by Brad Pasanek This book provides an in-depth look at the myriad ways in which Enlightenment writers used figures of speech to characterize the mind. Learn more | See related books
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Product Details
Hardcover: 384 pages
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux; First Edition edition (September 28, 2010)
Had I not read the author's "The Rest is Noise" before reading "Listen to This", I would probably have enjoyed "Listen" more and might given it four stars. But that's the problem with being the pretty good younger sibling of a dazzling first child: nobody judges you on your own merits. "Noise" is one of the few books that have really taught me a lot: it's also a beautifully written book, pulling the reader along without the effort usually entailed in learning a lot.
"Listen" isn't in the same league as "Noise". Now, before going further, I should say that it clearly was not intended to be. "Listen to This", as Ross says, "combines various New Yorker articles, several of them substantially revised, with one long piece written for the occasion." The articles cover a wide range of musical topics, ranging in time from the Renaissance to yesterday, and in genre from the most popular to the most intellectualized. There is little structural linkage between one article and another, and it probably doesn't matter much if you read them out of order.
The articles are well worth reading, though some (not surprisingly) are on topics of more interest to this reader than others. But that is good feature in this sort of miscellany. Reading something about a musician or composer in whom the reader has absolutely no interest could (and in this case did) spark some interest, leading to a listen to one of the works in question, and to a broadening of horizons. The first essay is of particular interest. It traces a pair of musical figures through the whole history of "western" music. It is also demanding, whereas some of the other essays are the non-fiction equivalent of easy listening.Read more ›
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13 of 13 people found the following review helpful
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.Read more ›
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58 of 89 people found the following review helpful
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.Read more ›
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