Alex Ross: recommendation

Transcript context

…If someone wants to be “the next Alex Ross,” what else do they need to know besides music? If one looks at your writings, you could write about minor works by Heinrich Mann, much less Thomas Mann, without too much effort. Is that important to you, being the music critic that you are? Or is that kind of accident? I think music critics need to have command of neighboring cultural areas because music is just not separate from the rest of culture, from the rest of our world. When you’re writing about opera, you’re writing about literature as well as music. You’re writing about staging, theater ideas as well as music. So every music critic can’t be a pure specialist. Most of my colleagues — I think they all have side interests, and they’ve all had a well-rounded cultural education, so I think it’s essential. I feel very lucky in that I have been able to pursue a lot of writing at the New Yorker which is not strictly musical, and I’ve been allowed to pursue this range of interests, which includes some natural sciences–type travelogue pieces in the last few years on Death Valley and the Bristlecone Pine Forest, as well as pieces on literature and history. I think it makes my musical writing better. I think it also makes a case for classical music. If someone has read what I write about Dylan or Radiohead or the Bristlecone Pines and sees my name at the top of a piece about Mozart or Salieri or whoever, they might give me a chance, having read those other pieces. “Oh, this is the guy who wrote that interesting piece. I don’t care about classical music, but I’ll give this a try anyway.” So I think that helps me in an inevitable aspect of my role as a critic, which is not merely to be this objective, cold, detached commentator, but to some extent be an advocate, a face of the art form itself, and expanding its audience in my own little way. I think that helps with that mission. Last quick question — what music will you listen to today and why?…

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