Q & A with Alex Ross

Alex Ross is the classical music critic of The New Yorker. His first book, “The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the 20th Century,” is more than just one of the major nonfiction books from 2007 and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. It’s an introduction to the vast and challenging world of 20th century classical music, from the atonal to the noisy to the reactionary. Ross will be speaking at the Festival of Books this weekend.

The Daily Bruin’s Alex LaRue talked to him about his book and classical music in the 20th century.

DB: “The Rest Is Noise” has a string of musical biographies that take into account the context the musicians were a part of as much as the music they wrote. Why is that broad perspective important?

AR: There (have) been a bunch of histories written over the years, of 20th century music that focus very much on the technicalities, of different people’s styles ““ you can obviously fill up a big book, or many books, describing all of these extraordinary, revolutionary approaches that composers took in the 20th century, from decade to decade. I think to the uninitiated it can all be rather bewildering and avoids the question of why, deep down, was this musical language evolving so fast? Why, after this relatively steady evolution in the 18th and 19th centuries, do we see classical composers striking out in so many directions?

That is the question that hangs over the whole book, and, of course for a lot of people historically, 20th century music has been mysterious and somewhat alienating.

But of course, people don’t question parallel developments in the visual arts worlds. Picasso, Kandinsky, (Mark) Rothko and Jackson Pollack are very accepted, but their counterparts in music are still seen as difficult, or incomprehensible. Because of this disparity in terms of how people view 20th century classical music compared to how they view 20th century visual art, it was really important for me not just to describe what was going on in technical terms but to show where these people were coming from, what kinds of passions and philosophies and anxieties and deeper social, cultural and historical movements were driving them.

DB: You say 20th century visual art is more accepted, sometimes, than 20th century classical music. Why do you think that might be?

AR: I think it has to do with the differences of how we listen and how we look. When we see a painting that’s unfamiliar, we can look at it once, and if it doesn’t make sense to us we can come back to it later.

Maybe it’ll never make sense, or maybe years later that Rothko will start speaking to us. I guess its harder to do with music, especially if you’re part of an audience, which just gives you one chance to hear a new piece ““ you’re all sitting there together and crowd psychology takes over, and it’s a less intimate experience.

The great thing now, of course, is with recordings and MP3s and samples on the Internet, people can find their way to this music from all different paths and get to know it in all different ways.

For a long time we were stuck in a situation where these works, daring and complicated works, were being presented to audiences who, through no fault of their own, just couldn’t make sense of them on one hearing.

DB: Is anything else helping to make sense of these pieces?

AR: Well, conductors may now talk for a few minutes beforehand about a new piece, or there may be a lecture.

I think institutions are getting smarter about the need to explain the new to audiences in the way that museums have been doing for years and years, with what is the equivalent that we can find in a concert for that very useful little title that hangs beside the painting or through all that supporting material that goes along with visual art.

We need to find a similar thing for music, and I wrote my book with the idea of it becoming one tool with which people could approach this music.

DB: How do you straddle the line between really getting into the theory of these pieces ““ because that’s often what’s really revolutionary about them ““ and also making a book that draws people in who may not have experience with the music?

AR: It’s very tricky ““ as a music critic, I’ve been struggling with this because there’s this huge chasm between what real connoisseurs of this kind of music know and what people on the outside know.

One group wants to be taken inside the piece and shown something they don’t already know. For this other, much larger group, they don’t have a lot of this very basic information about the music. They may not be able to read music, and they don’t know the terminology.

There’s a level of writing for that kind of readership because, just taking the people who read The New Yorker, they’re generally well-educated and cultured, and a lot of them may happen not to know a lot about classical music, and the technicalities of how music works, but they’re curious about it, and they can pick up some basic ideas pretty quickly.

It is very tricky, I mean there’s a little bit of technical language in the book, not a whole lot, some people may be momentarily thrown off by it at first. But it doesn’t last for very long, and when I use a technical term like triad or key area or tritone, in that same sentence I have a metaphor, a figure of speech, that tries to communicate what it feels like or what it sounds like. So even if you don’t know the term itself, you should be able to get a sense of what it does to you as a listener.

I was sort of jockeying back and forth between those two very different audiences, and hopefully I won’t bore the one group of people and confuse the other.

DB: You’re also interested in the mutual influence between classical and folk or pop.

AR: This is one of the major themes all the way through ““ not seeing classical music as this world entirely cut off from the rest of music and the rest of culture, but as something where there’s an exchange of ideals back and forth.

I think for people who are curious to know some of the origins of musical ideas that have cropped up all over pop music, sort of since The Beatles, and The Beatles being influenced by Stockhausen, and Brian Eno being influenced by Steve Reich and Philip Glass, and Björk today listening to Stockhausen and Messiaen, they could approach it from that angle.

DB: I want to go back to what you mentioned about institutions getting smarter and how they need to reach out to audiences. What put the barrier between people and classical music?

AR: I think going back to especially the early and middle 20th century, when classical music was, strictly speaking, a lot more popular and more widely understood, it was more of a part of so many people’s lives.

More people were taking piano lessons and growing up had a music class. At school they’d learn an instrument and learn some music history.

You heard a lot more classical music on the radio and in the early years of television. Time Magazine used to put composers and conductors on its cover all the time, it was just in the mix of mainstream American culture.

Among the classical music organizations, they felt that, well, we’ve got our audience, and we don’t need to work very hard ““ a lot of people out there love classical music and if we put on a concert of Mozart, Beethoven and Brahms, they’re going to show up, and we don’t need to explain what this music is ““ just put it out there, and the concert’s going to sell out.

That formula worked for a long time, even into the 1970s, 1980s. In recent years, people have had this realization that they need to work a little harder, and a great way to do this is to focus on the 20th century and to focus on new music. A lot of young people out there just don’t get excited about a lot of what was going on in Vienna in the 18th century.

We have all of these composers who are just seeing what is going on in people’s lives right now, in up-to-date language, and if you make them the heart of the concert and sort of make them the heroes of the occasion, you might have a better chance of getting younger audiences excited about the concert.