Listen to This. Alex Ross

      Listen To This

      ALEX ROSS

      FOURTH ESTATE • London

      FOR DANIEL ZALEWSKI

       AND

       DAVID REMNICK

      CONTENTS

       Cover

       Title Page

PREFACE

PART I

1. LISTEN TO THIS: Crossing the Border from Classical to Pop

2. CHACONA, LAMENTO, WALKING BLUES: Bass Lines of Music History

3. INFERNAL MACHINES: How Recordings Changed Music

PART II

4. THE STORM OF STYLE: Mozart’s Golden Mean

5. ORBITING: Radiohead’s Grand Tour

       6. THE ANTI-MAESTRO: Esa-Pekka Salonen at the Los Angeles Philharmonic

       7. GREAT SOUL: Searching for Schubert

       8. EMOTIONAL LANDSCAPES: Björk’s Saga

       9. SYMPHONY OF MILLIONS: Classical Music in China

       10. SONG OF THE EARTH The Arctic Sound of John Luther Adams

       11. VERDI’s GRIP: Opera as Popular Art

       12. ALMOST FAMOUS: On the Road with the St. Lawrence Quartet

       13. EDGES OF POP: Kiki and Herb, Cecil Taylor and Sonic Youth, Sinatra, Kurt Cobain

       14. LEARNING THE SCORE: The Crisis in Music Education

       15. VOICE OF THE CENTURY: Marian Anderson

       16. THE MUSIC MOUNTAIN: Inside the Marlboro Retreat

       PART III

       17. I SAW THE LIGHT: Following Bob Dylan

       18. FERVOR: Remembering Lorraine Hunt Lieberson

       19. BLESSED ARE THE SAD: Late Brahms

       Notes

       Suggested Listening

       Index

       Acknowledgments

       Also by Alex Ross

       Where to Listen

       Copyright

       About the Publisher

       PREFACE

      Writing about music isn’t especially difficult. Whoever coined the epigram “Writing about music is like dancing about architecture”—the statement has been attributed variously to Martin Mull, Steve Martin, and Elvis Costello—was muddying the waters. Certainly, music criticism is a curious and dubious science, its jargon ranging from the wooden (“Beethoven’s Fifth begins with three Gs and an E-flat”) to the purple (“Beethoven’s Fifth begins with fate knocking at the door”). But it is no more dubious than any other kind of criticism. Every art form fights the noose of verbal description. Writing about dance is like singing about architecture; writing about writing is like making buildings about ballet. There is a fog-enshrouded border past which language cannot go. An art critic can say of Mark Rothko’s Orange and Yellow that it consists of an area of yellow paint floating above an area of orange paint, but what good does that do for someone who has never seen a Rothko? The literary critic can copy out a few lines from Wallace Stevens’s “Esthétique du Mal”—

       And out of what sees and hears and out

       Of what one feels, who could have thought to make

       So many selves, so many sensuous worlds …

      —but when you try to spell out the meaning of those lines, when you try to voice their silent music, another hopeless dance begins.

      So why has the idea taken hold that there is something peculiarly inexpressible about music? The explanation may lie not in music but in ourselves. Since the mid-nineteenth century, audiences have routinely adopted music as a sort of secular religion or spiritual politics, investing it with messages as urgent as they are vague. Beethoven’s symphonies promise political and personal freedom; Wagner’s operas inflame the imaginations of poets and demagogues; Stravinsky’s ballets release primal energies; the Beatles incite an uprising against ancient social mores. At any time in history there are a few composers and creative musicians who seem to hold the secrets of the age. Music cannot easily bear such burdens, and when we speak of its ineffability we are perhaps protecting it from our own inordinate demands. For even as we worship our musical idols we also force them to produce particular emotions on cue: a teenager blasts hip-hop to psych himself up; a middle-aged executive puts on a Bach CD to calm her nerves. Musicians find themselves, in a strange way, both enshrined and enslaved. In my writing on music, I try to demystify the art to some extent, dispel the hocus-pocus, while still respecting the boundless human complexity that gives it life.

      Since 1996, I’ve had the huge good fortune to serve as the music critic of The New Yorker. I was twenty-eight when I got the job, too young by any measure, but I strove to make the most of my luck. From the start, my editors encouraged me to take a wide view of the musical world: not