New Yorker critic Alex Ross rewrites the classical canon

Admittedly "lacking in talent and genius" with regard to his own formative classical music composing aspirations, Alex Ross became a music critic for the New York Times before he was 25 and the New Yorker before he was 30. His decade-in-the-making antidote to classical music malaise, The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, was published in October, and he blogs at therestisnoise.com. Ross recently took a break from his book tour frenzy to talk to Radar about "awesome music," and the missing link in classical music characters.

RADAR: We asked one of your colleagues whether you had any quirks we could exploit, and he said you work a lot and go to concerts. Was he missing something?
ALEX ROSS: I don't think I have a whole lot of quirks. I'm a standard, slightly neurotic writer, I suppose. But I try to relax. I go running and I play with my kitties. We watch TV, like Heroes, and we love Desperate Housewives.

I'm very eclectic. Just because I write about classical music all the time doesn't mean I have this need to be serious about stuff

Do you have any guilty entertainment pleasures that offend your sensibility as a critic?
I don't think so. Of course, there's this trap for a classical music person where if you start talking about something else as a guilty pleasure or trash that you enjoy then you sound like a snobby classical music person looking down on popular culture, so I try to avoid putting it that way.

But that's your job, right?

I think in every medium, whether it's classical music, popular music, or television, there's kind of the serious, ambitious stuff and then there's the silly entertainment aspect and the kind of underground alternative scene. Every genre has those divisions. I'm very eclectic. Just because I write about classical music all the time doesn't mean I have this need to be serious about stuff. If there's something that I am enjoying on some simpler level, I don't see that as a big contrast to what I usually pay attention to, because everything is so mixed up. Any important artwork is going to have some serious side and a lighter sensibility that balances that. I try not to put things in separate categories. When I go running I like to listen to the Oasis record (What's the Story) Morning Glory, or even the next record, Be Here Now, which is really kind of a mess. I can see it as offending your critical sensibilities and yet I enjoy it. It's horribly overproduced and bombastic and yet doesn't have anything to say, but it's still enjoyable.

What did you think of Richard Taruskin's recent dressing down of classical music critics in the New Republic?
I've been saying for a while that classical music people have a tendency to wring their hands, bemoan some kind of decline in wider culture, and complain about how people aren't paying attention to classical music anymore, and Richard Taruskin definitely has a point. Some of what he had to say about the individual writers was a touch harsh, but he's making a point that we need a sharper, more committed discourse around classical music instead of this polite, cautious back-and-forth. I don't agree with him on every point, but the destination I agree with 100 percent. People should, in their writing, show their emotional engagement in the music as well as their intellectual engagement. That's kind of what's been missing from a lot of classical music writing in recent years and recent decades. Just contrast it with pop music writing, where people put their personalities at the forefront and dramatize their own experiences listening to a certain band or their history. That kind of writing is very rare in classical music.

Do you think pop music writing is inherently more welcoming of that emotion than classical music writing?
You could say rock is more overtly emotional, whereas classical music is much more abstract, so it's hard to bring your own emotional world into the picture. But I'm not so sure about that. I have very visceral reactions to classical music—whether it's Mozart or Mahler or Stravinsky or contemporary works, my initial reaction is always a visceral, emotional one, and then the whole critical process and writing process is about making sense of that reaction and analyzing it, or just taking that and adding my more intellectual appreciation of what's going on in the piece. There is all this stuff in writing about classical music. You need to describe the form, you need to describe the different styles the composer may be drawing upon, his place in history, and necessarily the writing will be a little more dry, but I think you can have both: emotional on one hand and analytical on the other.

Shouldn't good pop writing do that, too?
Yeah, the great pop writers do that. Everyone could move toward a middle ground where the classical music writers can be a bit less intellectual and the pop writers can be a little less about attitude and first-person-based. I think there is an attitude that's attached to the music that may not have a lot to do with music itself, but a sort of lifestyle surrounding it. The music itself may not be so far apart.