Cover of Alex Ross's first book, The Rest is Noise
Black block type, all caps, with details in red-orange
The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century
I woke up early on Monday and found that Alex Ross had posted a note on his blog with the momentous news that after 30 years as the music critic of The New Yorker, he would be stepping down from that position. His note is characteristically modest in tone, but for this longtime reader of his work, it landed like a quiet thunderbolt.
I know that there was a time when I wasn't reading him; I remember his predecessor Andrew Porter's tenure at TNY, and my outrage when the magazine let him go. There were breaks in my subscription over the years and they might have included 1996, the year Ross joined.
Porter was a prolific writer; a look at The New Yorker's archive suggested that he typically wrote two or three columns a month, almost all reviews, though they were not your typical 600 to 800 word newspaper review by any means. They were longer and brought in all manner of detail and history that an overnight review simply cannot accommodate.
Ross's cadence was different; somewhat slower (in his note, he states that wrote nearly 400 Musical Events columns and another 80 longer pieces) and often scholarly without being academic, owing to his lapidary prose. A recent article, "In Northern Scotland, the Neolithic Age Never Ended," was accompanied by a blog post that included his preparatory reading and many photos, for example.
His interests have been catholic in the best possible way, ranging from early music through to the newest of the new, and they weren't limited to musical interests. He's written about – and will continue, as a New Yorker staff writer, to write about –"literature, philosophy, film, émigré stories, California stories, ancient landscapes, and new regions," to use his own words. He's been eloquent about gay life and his own family. He'll occasionally write on musical topics.
In his own memorial to Andrew Porter, Ross said "Porter was the most formidable classical-music critic of the late twentieth century, and, pace George Bernard Shaw and Virgil Thomson, may have been the finest practitioner of this unsystematic art in the history of the English language." I'm not going to disagree with that, but I am more than comfortable asserting that Ross is the finest music critic of his generation and of the entire post-Porter generation. (I see that Joshua Kosman considers Ross to be greater than Porter and makes a case for this opinion. I wouldn't argue with him.)
There is simply no one writing the kind and quality of criticism he's been writing. To some extent, it's because of the freedom and space that The New Yorker has been able to offer; I can't think of anyone else who has had that kind of space and time. There are always more concerts to review, and Ross has been lucky enough to be able step outside the pressures of daily reviewing to have a magisterial, considered perspective on everything he writes about. Would that more of us might have that opportunity, but it will not happen in this time and place.
Newspapers that used to have two or three classical reviewers now have none. Many have only freelancers providing classical reviews. Last year, the NY Times reassigned its chief classical critic to the obits desk, and while they advertised for a new chief critic, they don't appear to have hired anyone for the position.
Ross's news is as momentous as it is not only because of the impact of his own withdrawal from the profession, but because of this general collapse of music criticism. His post at The New Yorker is evidently the last full-time classical music criticism job in the country. I hope, and I am sure that others hope, that TNY will not allow the post to remain vacant.
More personally, I started this blog in October, 2004, not long after I discovered that Alex Ross had a blog, which he'd started in April, 2004. I'd started reviewing for SFCV in February that year, and realized there might be some value to having a blog of my own. That turned out to be the case; I have made many friends and gotten some work through this blog (it's useful to have a large, unedited body of work publicly available). So it's not that he's to blame, but yes, he's sort of to blame, which I mean in the most affectionate way. He is among he friends I've made, and I'm grateful for his friendship and for many kindnesses over the years.
Even in 2004, before he'd published three books, Ross was a lodestar in the critical world, writing brilliantly on so many subjects. It's a gift to know when it's time to close out a chapter of your life. I'll miss reading Ross on music on a regular basis, but I'm looking forward to the pieces he mentions are in process and to the eventual publication of his current book project.
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