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Review
‘Chacona, Lamento, Walking Blues..This essay is Alex Ross’s own chaconne, one that only he could have written – a display of lateral thinking as virtuosic, in its own way..It alone is worth the price of the book, which I strongly encourage you to buy’ Damian Thompson, Sunday Telegraph
‘These hugely enjoyable and serendipitous essays were written over more than a decade, resulting in a rewarding historical perspective. Ross's rapid-fire discourses on music from very different parts of the musical spectrum create fascinating perspectives. One minute, you're immersed in Mozart, and then suddenly you're on tour with Radiohead and contemplating what it must have felt like for an unworldly Finnish conductor, Esa-Pekka Salonen, to take the reins of the LA Philharmonic. Reading the book is the literary equivalent of an iPod on shuffle; it offers fresh and unexpected stimulation at every turn.’ Charles Hazlewood, Guardian
‘The qualities that make him a top-notch critic become clearer in concentrated reading…Ross is an avowed buff. He loves music with a nerdish obsession and he wants you to love it as much as he does’ New Statesman, Norman Lebrecht
Praise for ‘The Rest is Noise’:
‘It’s a history of 20th-century music so vivid and original in approach that it made me listen again to many pieces I thought I knew well.’ Philip Pullman, Guardian (Books of the Year)
‘Ranks as my non-fiction book of the year. Erudite and engaging, written with flair and passion.’ Boyd Tonkin Independent (Books of the Year)
Product Description
In Listen to This, Alex Ross, the music critic for The New Yorker, looks both backward and forward in time, capturing essential figures and ideas in classical-music history as well as giving an alternative view of recent pop music that emphasizes the power of the individual musical voice in whatever genre.
Alex Ross’s award-winning international bestseller, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, has become a contemporary classic, establishing him as one of our most popular and acclaimed cultural historians.
In Listen To This Ross, the music critic for the New Yorker, looks both backwards and forwards in time, capturing essential figures and ideas in classical music history, as well as giving an alternative view of recent pop music that emphasizes the power of the individual musical voice.
After relating his first encounter with classical music, Ross vibrantly sketches canonical composers such as Schubert, Verdi and Brahms; gives us in-depth interviews wth modern pop masters such as Bjork and Radiohead; and introduces us to music students at a Newark high school and to indie-rock hipsters in Beijing. In his essay ‘Chacona, Lamento, Walking Blues’, Ross brilliantly retells hundreds of years of music history - from Renaissance dance to Led Zeppelin - through a few iconic bass lines of celebration and lament.
Whether his subject is Mozart or Bob Dylan, Ross writes in a style at once erudite and lively, showing how music expresses the full complexity of the human condition. He explains how pop music can achieve the status of high art and how classical music can become a vital part of the wider contemporary culture. Witty, passionate and brimming with insight, Listen to This teaches us to listen more closely.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Alex Ross has one of those great jobs that seem to only exist in movies and/or in New York: he writes about music for the New Yorker. Then he goes all over the place talking about and reading what he's written. If he didn't write so well, so passionately and so engagingly it would be easy to hate him. And, by all accounts, he's a nice man too. Feck sake.
After the deserved success of "The Rest Is Noise" Ross has followed up with "Listen To This", which is essentially a collection of essays and pieces that he's written (mostly from the New Yorker). It's a really well collated collection and it displays his catholic tastes, from Bjork and Dylan to Brahms and John Luther Adams, and it also allows him to rove and range with an idea across the musical landscape: his long and engrossing piece on bass lines makes the book worth purchasing alone. But don't think this is a fusty exercise in musical elitism; Ross is extremely knowledgeable about music and he writes beautifully about structure, melody and composition, but his real gift is how he draws readers in and takes them on his journey too. His enthusiasm for his subjects is open and unguarded (but not uncritical) and he sweeps you along.
I'd been reading his pieces only every so often when I first read his great tale of his road trip with Dylan back in 1998. I was taken aback with how well he wrote about Dylan's music and his performances; I've been a Ross fan since then. Writing about music and musicians is fraught, at best. When it goes wrong, or more commonly when it goes flat and stale, it can be dreadful; when it works it really works. Good writing about music is unusual and the best of writers soar with the songs and melodies. And, most importantly, they send you back to the music. Ross is one of the good ones and you'll find yourself putting the book down to root through your records or cds or ipod to listen to something. And you'll find new stuff too: Ross' gorgeous description of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's singing of Bach Cantatas had me off to Amazon. And I wasn't disappointed.
Have a look at Ross' website where he has appended musical tags and tips for each chapter of the book.
And, in the meantime: read this.
After the deserved success of "The Rest Is Noise" Ross has followed up with "Listen To This", which is essentially a collection of essays and pieces that he's written (mostly from the New Yorker). It's a really well collated collection and it displays his catholic tastes, from Bjork and Dylan to Brahms and John Luther Adams, and it also allows him to rove and range with an idea across the musical landscape: his long and engrossing piece on bass lines makes the book worth purchasing alone. But don't think this is a fusty exercise in musical elitism; Ross is extremely knowledgeable about music and he writes beautifully about structure, melody and composition, but his real gift is how he draws readers in and takes them on his journey too. His enthusiasm for his subjects is open and unguarded (but not uncritical) and he sweeps you along.
I'd been reading his pieces only every so often when I first read his great tale of his road trip with Dylan back in 1998. I was taken aback with how well he wrote about Dylan's music and his performances; I've been a Ross fan since then. Writing about music and musicians is fraught, at best. When it goes wrong, or more commonly when it goes flat and stale, it can be dreadful; when it works it really works. Good writing about music is unusual and the best of writers soar with the songs and melodies. And, most importantly, they send you back to the music. Ross is one of the good ones and you'll find yourself putting the book down to root through your records or cds or ipod to listen to something. And you'll find new stuff too: Ross' gorgeous description of Lorraine Hunt Lieberson's singing of Bach Cantatas had me off to Amazon. And I wasn't disappointed.
Have a look at Ross' website where he has appended musical tags and tips for each chapter of the book.
And, in the meantime: read this.
6 of 8 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
Brilliant. I want to know more about music and this book was refreshing and informative....it links to a web site as well so the reader can listen to music referred to...it can't get better than that.
13 of 20 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
If there is an underlying theme in this beautiful book this is the unity of music, classical and popular. The distinction between classical music as 'high art' and popular music as 'low art' is false. As Berg once aptly remarked to Gershwin, music is music. The author in providing an insight into the music of the Finn song-writer and singer Bjiork is simultaneously expressing criticism to both classical and popular musicians but also possibly expressing an ideal:'music is restored to its original bliss, free both of the fear of pretension that limits popular music and of the fear of vulgarity that limits classical music. The creative artist once more moves along an unbroken continuum, from folk to art and back again.'
The elements that comprise the book's fascination are the erudition of the author -music critic for the New Yorker - his unbound love for the subject, his charisma in writing exemplified in the compelling narrative and the unimpeded flow of the prose, his personal interaction with the living musicians presented in the text and his uncanny ability to sketch the personalities of musicians - live and dead - appearing in the book and to provide a profound insight into the character and characteristics of their music.
The book organized in three parts combines revised New Yorker articles, with one long piece written for the occasion. The first part comprise three aerial surveys of the musical landscape, encompassing both classical and pop terrain. The first chapter is a kind of memoir turned manifesto. The chapter 'Chacona, Lamento, Walking Blues' is the new thing - a whirlwind history of music told through two or three bass lines. 'Infernal Machines' brings together thoughts on the intersection of music and technology. The verdict is positive on Technology in that it democratizes music.
The second part traces a dozen or so musicians living and dead:composers, conductors, pianists, string quartets, rock bands, singer-song writers, high-school band teachers. These essays generally excellent, some masterly are self-sufficient and consequently they can be read in any sequence and not necessarily in the order they appear in the book.
The final part describes three radically different figures - Bob Dylan, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, and Johannes Brahms who touch on things almost too deep for words. I found the essay on Dylan particularly fascinating and intriguing and possessing an elusive personality. Dylan is seldom talked in musical terms:his work is nalysed instead as poetry, wisdom or causing bafflement.
Somehow I feel the urge to conclude the review with three Dylan songs of the several that appear in the text:
William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll
With a cane that he twirled round his diamond finger
At a Baltimore society gathering.
Me, I'm still on the road, heading for another joint
We always did feel the same, we just saw from a different point
Of view
Tangled up in blue.
A saxophone someplace far off played
As she was walking on by the arcade
As the light burst through a beat-up shade
Where he was waking up
She dropped a coin into the cup
Of a blind man at the gate
And forgot about a simple twist of fate.
The elements that comprise the book's fascination are the erudition of the author -music critic for the New Yorker - his unbound love for the subject, his charisma in writing exemplified in the compelling narrative and the unimpeded flow of the prose, his personal interaction with the living musicians presented in the text and his uncanny ability to sketch the personalities of musicians - live and dead - appearing in the book and to provide a profound insight into the character and characteristics of their music.
The book organized in three parts combines revised New Yorker articles, with one long piece written for the occasion. The first part comprise three aerial surveys of the musical landscape, encompassing both classical and pop terrain. The first chapter is a kind of memoir turned manifesto. The chapter 'Chacona, Lamento, Walking Blues' is the new thing - a whirlwind history of music told through two or three bass lines. 'Infernal Machines' brings together thoughts on the intersection of music and technology. The verdict is positive on Technology in that it democratizes music.
The second part traces a dozen or so musicians living and dead:composers, conductors, pianists, string quartets, rock bands, singer-song writers, high-school band teachers. These essays generally excellent, some masterly are self-sufficient and consequently they can be read in any sequence and not necessarily in the order they appear in the book.
The final part describes three radically different figures - Bob Dylan, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, and Johannes Brahms who touch on things almost too deep for words. I found the essay on Dylan particularly fascinating and intriguing and possessing an elusive personality. Dylan is seldom talked in musical terms:his work is nalysed instead as poetry, wisdom or causing bafflement.
Somehow I feel the urge to conclude the review with three Dylan songs of the several that appear in the text:
William Zanzinger killed poor Hattie Carroll
With a cane that he twirled round his diamond finger
At a Baltimore society gathering.
Me, I'm still on the road, heading for another joint
We always did feel the same, we just saw from a different point
Of view
Tangled up in blue.
A saxophone someplace far off played
As she was walking on by the arcade
As the light burst through a beat-up shade
Where he was waking up
She dropped a coin into the cup
Of a blind man at the gate
And forgot about a simple twist of fate.
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