Alex Ross - "Listen To This"
When the question of classical music’s demise comes up these days, which it seems to do more and more often, I find it concerning, but not all that hard to understand: classical music has to be one of the hardest art forms to appreciate.
Virtually anyone can pick up a book written in their language and make some judgment about the work, no matter how simple that judgment may be: a reader doesn’t have to know the secrets of good storytelling to know whether or not a good story has been told. Most people can stand in front of a painting and understand what they’re looking at. And even in the case of abstract art, your average viewer can understand the intent of the artist once it’s explained to them.
But to fully appreciate a classical piece musically requires learning an entirely new language, or, at the very least, taking some form of music appreciation course that teaches one how to listen to the music and instructs them on what to pay attention to. Certainly even the simplest pop song employs musical “tricks” to grab listeners. But these songs are usually three to four minutes long and quickly grab its prey. Classical works can be thirty, forty-five minutes, and sometimes an hour long. They often work their magic slowly, almost imperceptibly. In a world of increasingly short attention spans, how can the form possibly compete?
This is where Alex Ross and his new collection of essays called Listen To This come in.
Fans of his work know Ross writes mainly about classical music, and this collection highlights some of his best writing on the genre in the last decade, including fantastic essays on Mozart, Schubert, and late-period Brahms. But he also has something for contemporary music fans with almost equally enlightening essays on Bob Dylan, Radiohead, and Bjork. His knowledge of music is deep - he grew up listening to classical instead of popular music, and took music lessons as a teenager - and he applies the same critical musical eye to Kid A and Medulla as he does the Eroica. Indeed, Ross shows us that some of our best pop composers pay just as much attention to textures, rhythm, harmony, and melody as a composer of orchestral music would.
In fact, this conjunction of music, crossing the border from classical to pop as he calls it, is precisely the book’s strength, and possibly its greatest potential benefit. Though these essays are primarily about classical music, he writes with such a contagious zeal, with such an obvious love of music, that he shades the restrictive boundaries we’ve created to categorize music. He does this well in the above-mentioned pieces, but nowhere is this idea better put than in his essay, “Chacona, Lamento, Walking Blues” where he ties the basso lamento of the middle ages through the centuries all the way to Led Zeppelin’s ‘Dazed and Confused’. Ross gets it. He gets that music is music and any genre has the ability to touch anyone.
Still, his first love is classical and nothing seems to concern him as much as the form’s lack of popularity, especially the greatly underappreciated works of the twentieth century. This concern informs many of his essays. In “Listen to This”, Ross outlines the history of classical music’s popular decline. He blames it partially on what he calls the “sacralization” of music, a process over time that turned the proceedings of a classical music concert into an almost religious experience. The most glaring example of this snobbery, the prohibition on applauding mid-piece, even between movements, is explained. (Ross also points out that when the great composers were alive, concert halls were bustling with noise, even during the middle of a piece. And many pieces were written as if begging for applause throughout. The modern listener of the first movement of, say, Beethoven’s or Dvorak’s 9th, or Mozart’s 40th will often find themselves having to sit on their hands at the end to avoid spontaneous shouts of joy. That’s because we weren’t meant to sit on our hands.) But perhaps worse than ridiculous rules of etiquette was what Ross calls the “fetishizing” of the past, the etching of the great classical composers onto a musical equivalent of Mount Rushmore, where there’s no room for new faces. He argues that this prompted modern composers to write for one another, pushing the music into territory far removed from the classical repertoire and foreign to the ears of most listeners who were untrained to catch the musical advancements these artists were making. Orchestral music became unlistenable to most, and, for the most part, this is where we stand to this day.
I found the error of the modern composer’s way neatly summarized in Ross’s essay on Mozart, which is called “The Storm of Style: Mozart’s Golden Mean”. Mozart’s ‘Golden Mean’ is early advice the composer’s father, Leopold, gave him. Leopold told the young Wolfgang that he had to write music that would be appreciated by both connoisseurs of music as well as the general public. (And by all accounts Mozart did a pretty good job at that.) As enjoyably and thought-provokingly as Ross writes, I would’ve liked to have seen him tie the problem of modern music to this simple rule. Because as a fan of classical music who hates just about every modern orchestral piece he’s ever heard, I see this as the core problem. I often read rave reviews about contemporary composers like John Adams, Jennifer Higdon, and Osvaldo Golijov, but they’re almost always written for the intelligentsia of classical music: conductors, other composers, or the classical press, people like Ross. Modern composers must make music smart AND entertaining for regular listeners. Otherwise the music will remain as distant from most of us as the lives of the great composers are. Most people can enjoy Beethoven’s 5th even if they don’t understand how he spends the entire symphony harmonically taking apart the famous eight-note beginning. But will the average listener appreciate Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring if they don’t know about or understand the rhythmic intricacies of the piece? I doubt so in most cases. It’s all about the golden mean.
Of course, anyone willing to put in the time can learn to appreciate even the most challenging works of any art form. Ross was inundated with classical music at a young age; while the majority of us were losing our virginity to our favorite rock bands, he was listening to classical works over and over again, learning them and divining all their secrets. But again, with children having the attention spans of gnats these days, and adults with the time to maybe play music as background noise while loading the dishes in the dish washer, what chance does even Beethoven or Mozart have with the modern crowd?
Perhaps the answer lies in Ross’s essays on pop music. Maybe Radiohead and Bjork are our modern masters. Both are inspired by the composer Olivier Messiaen, but have used his influence in a form more readily accessible in the current world culture. In the essay, “Symphony of Millions”, Ross goes to China and finds music conservatories there teaching not just classical theory, but also pop music arranging. As we may find China driving world culture in the twenty-first century, is this a sign that blended genres and shorter works will render modern orchestral compositions permanently irrelevant? Imagine a hundred years from now a list of the twenty-first century’s greatest composers with the names Bjork and Jonny Greenwood on it. (Of course, I already believe a list of the greatest composers of the twentieth century is incomplete without the names Lennon and McCartney.)
Wherever you come down on the issue, Ross’s thought-provoking work is a great guide to have in the research. He hits his own golden mean with his engaging and intelligent writing, which will appeal to a broad category of music lovers, not just classical fans. It’s for anyone who wants to know how music works its magic, and about the artists who create that magic.
Ross even convinced me to give some modern works a try: I bought a few John Luther Adams and Golijiov pieces. I won’t say I prefer these to Beethoven’s or Bach, but I’ll open my mind and heart just a little more thanks to this excellent collection.
