Gilbert Kaplan Welcome to our November show where my guest is the award-winning music critic of The New Yorker magazine, Alex Ross, on today’s edition of “Mad About Music”.
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Kaplan Unlike most kids, he only discovered rock music in college. Until then, it was strictly classical. Since then he has been writing some of the most respected commentary on music – both classical and pop – as an award-winning critic first at The New York Times and now for the past decade at The New Yorker. His much anticipated first book has just been published: a remarkable – and understandably already highly acclaimed – exploration of 20th century music, and, with a fascinating title The Rest is Noise. Alex Ross, welcome to “Mad About Music”.
Alex Ross It’s great to be here. Thank you.
Kaplan Now, as I mentioned in my introduction, if any book can help develop an audience for contemporary music, yours is it. But the question is, can any book? Now Bernard Holland, once a colleague of yours at The New York Times, once wrote an article which basically said that one of the features of 20th century music has been the intimidation of the audience, basically telling them, if you only understood it, you’d like it. And that’s the real question. Can understanding make you like contemporary music, if you’re not liking it?
Ross I think people already like contemporary music, more of it than they know. It’s such an incredibly diverse field of activity, from 1900 to the present – it includes some very difficult sounds that you do have to do quite a bit of work to understand, and may never get there. But there’s also this wealth of very beautiful musical works, some of them in a traditional, familiar language, others in a brand-new 20th century language, and yet touching on some familiar chords and familiar melodies. So, it’s just very hard to generalize about it, and people tend to focus in on the difficult stuff, and so many people have had scarring experiences going into a concert hall and being “mugged,” as it were, by something by Schoenberg or Elliott Carter or another of the difficult composers.
Kaplan All right then, I’m going to put you on the spot right at the beginning of the show and ask you to name – with a money-back guarantee, three late 20th century works that our listeners will love – and please include at least one you’ve selected to play on the show today.
Ross That’s a tough sell, but I’ll give it a try. One name who comes to mind right away is John Adams, who is maybe the most famous American composer of classical music right now, and I think his music is highly approachable, and I would mention his big piece for orchestra, Harmonielehre, from 1985, the title taken from Schoenberg’s harmony textbook, a book in which he said that tonality was dead, and Adams, I think, was saying, “No, it isn’t!” And we can pick up a romantic, tonal language at the end of the century, and make it very contemporary and very American. It’s a very American piece. Another one is Osvaldo Golijov, the Argentinean born composer now resident in America, who has written music that is sort of part classical, part very infused with folk traditions, and his St. Mark Passion is this amazing religious piece by a Jewish composer that brings together all kinds of sounds and all kinds of traditions in a very celebratory, and I think immediately accessible language. It really packs a wallop and brings crowds to their feet every single time I’ve seen it. And finally I would mention, as a personal favorite of mine, Olivier Messiaen, whose music I’ve loved since college, and I’ve had extraordinary experiences listening to his pieces live, and about ten years ago, a little over ten years ago, I heard his piece Des Canyons aux Étoiles, “From the Canyons to the Stars” which is from the 1970s at the Tanglewood Festival, and Reinbert de Leeuw was conducting. It’s a huge, almost two-hour long cycle of pieces depicting the canyons of Utah, which he visited, and the bird song that you hear there, and sort of chords that suggest the geology and the rock layers of the region, and then, the notion of the heavens, and this religious dimension that always enters into his music. And I had the most extraordinary experience at the end of that performance, the back wall of Ozawa Hall was open to the open air, and I went out and laid in the grass for the final movement, which is called “Zion Park,” in honor of the Utah Canyon and looked up at the stars above. It was a beautiful summer night, and it was just one of the greatest listening experiences I’ve ever had, just looking up at the firmament which Messiaen was, I think depicting in this music, along with the canyon itself, and just being completely carried away. And it’s not a completely easy language; there are dense and somewhat dissonant chords here, but mixed in with these pure, shining major triads of the kind that have been used in Western music for hundreds of years. And he’s just pulling it all together. I think this is in some ways the ultimate 20th century piece, or one of the ultimate 20th century pieces.
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Kaplan An excerpt from Messiaen’s “Zion Park and the Celestial City” from The Canyons to the Stars. The Asko and Schönberg Ensembles with the Percussion Group of The Hague. All under the baton of Reinbert de Leeuw – the first selection of my guest on “Mad about Music” today, Alex Ross, music critic of The New Yorker Magazine and author of the just-released book The Rest is Noise – everything you want to know about 20th century music.
Now your book covers an enormous amount of repertoire but you focus quite a bit, don’t you, on the opera? I have found it interesting that you devoted 10 full pages to Benjamin Britten’s opera Peter Grimes which had its premiere in 1945. Now many people feel that that might have been the last great opera composed. I wonder if you agree with that?
Ross No, not at all, actually. And you know, people used to say that opera ended with Puccini and now Britten’s crept into the repertory enough that people are saying, “Oh, no, it ended with Britten.” And, of course, Britten wrote many major operas after Peter Grimes. And his colleague, Michael Tippett, also wrote a couple of very striking pieces, and there’s a whole, very strong English opera tradition that really began with Peter Grimes, I think. But I think there are a number of other examples of really powerful operas after 1945. Messiaen’s Saint Francis, which is a huge, very unwieldy, almost impossible to produce opera; it has yet to be done here in New York, although it’s promised for New York City Opera in a couple of seasons. And that is a piece that is just stunning, even though it can be a little bit of a trial to sit through some of the longer stretches. And then you have the John Adams’ operas, and a large quantity of American operas, starting – going back to the days of Gian Carlo Menotti and Samuel Barber’s Vanessa. Very beautiful pieces, and not all of them great, you know, permanently enduring operas, perhaps, but they’ve become a foundation for an American opera tradition, which is really thriving at the moment.
Kaplan Now your book covers all of the 20th century, and I found it fascinating that you pick Richard Strauss’ Salome as the work that starts modern music. Others have usually focused on Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, or maybe even some early Schoenberg. So, I also understand that Salome is the most collected thing in your collection. I read somewhere you have thirteen records of Salome. So tell us about this opera, and why you feel it kicked off the 20th century.
Ross Well, when I was in college, I fell in love with this piece, you know, that fascinated me and I’ve always felt that it was an underrated piece and people dismiss it as kitsch, as a sort of lurid, decadent thing – which it is – but it’s also a really revolutionary score and so many of the strange chords that float up to the surface of this piece were borrowed by Schoenberg and developed into the language that became atonality. But it’s not an atonal piece at all; there is also these lyrical explosions all the way through it, and it’s just this amazing mix of old and new and romantic and modernistic, and I love these pieces that achieve some kind of synthesis, I mean Porgy and Bess and Peter Grimes and many other 20th century operas that seem to combine it all together somehow. And then there is this historical dimension to why I wanted to start with Salome at the beginning of my book. When I first started reading about the opera, I came across a footnote which amazed me, mentioning the cast of characters who were present at a particular performance that took place in Graz in Austria in 1906. It wasn’t the premiere, it was a later performance, but it attracted Gustav Mahler from Vienna, Gustav and Alma; and Puccini came up from Italy to see what his German rival was doing; Schoenberg was there, together with six of his pupils, which I found out by reading the hotel guest lists in the Graz newspapers. It was sort of a class field trip for Schoenberg and his students. And then there was this footnote that Adolph Hitler may also have been in attendance at this performance, seventeen years old, he just made his first trip to Vienna where he had seen Mahler conduct Tristan und Isolde, and he later told Strauss’s son in the 1930s that he was present at this performance, which is astounding and frightening, the idea of Hitler lurking somewhere in the back of that glittering crowd. So, for me, as a historian writing this book, I mean, the entire cast of characters of the whole first half of the century almost was present on this one evening in Graz. So I just felt that I had to start there, not just because the music is so powerful and interesting, but also there’s this historical dimension. But I think in the music we’re about to hear, you can detect the amazing ambivalence of this music, where it has one foot in the nineteenth century in the romantic world of Wagner and another foot in this world that Strauss was helping to create, the world of modern music. So you start with these glowering strange chords, but melodies start to coalesce from them and float up. Salome is holding this severed head of John the Baptist in her hands and is about to kiss it, which is, of course, a really alarming dramatic situation, but Strauss gets such amazing music out of it.
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Kaplan The closing moments with Richard Strauss’s Salome sung by Hildegard Behrens and Karl-Walter Böhm, the Vienna Philharmonic with Herbert von Karajan on the podium. Music chosen by my guest today on “Mad About Music”, Alex Ross, the music critic of The New Yorker Magazine and author of The Rest is Noise – just released and already acclaimed as a one-way ticket into understanding 20th century music – which for Alex Ross began with Salome. When we return, we’ll discuss whether among all the composers at work today there might be a Mozart in our midst.
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This is Gilbert Kaplan with my guest on “Mad About Music”, Alex Ross, the music critic of The New Yorker Magazine and author of The Rest is Noise, a superb book on 20th century music - just released. Now your book covers all of the 20th century, but let’s focus on today’s composers. Do you think we have someone who is certain to endure and is it possible that we might even have a Mozart in our midst?
Ross That’s very hard to say. I mean, Mozart in his own time, wasn’t particularly appreciated, although he had something of a following. All the great composers experienced struggles, and had much competition; and it’s only with the passage of time that everything sort of sifted down and we now see Mozart and Beethoven and so on, as these absolutely monumental figures. So it will be interesting to see how people look back at this moment and decide which composers are the ones that really matter.
Kaplan But who do you think will really matter?
Ross I’m betting some of my money at least on John Adams, whose music has a kind of comprehensive character to it. I just find it deeply satisfying on all kinds of levels.
Kaplan What about the minimalist composers such as Steve Reich or Philip Glass? Many of your music critic colleagues have described this music as music for people who basically don’t like classical music. Will they endure?
Ross Well, I think they are already part of history. I mean, Steve Reich is one of the great revolutionary composers of the late 20th century, and it’s amazing to see his music live. A whole new audience shows up for it, not the traditional classical music audience at all, but a lot of people who listen to pop music, who follow sort of inventive rock bands and electronic outfits. They swarm into the concert halls to see his music because it says something really vital to them, which is, of course, not true of a lot of other contemporary classical music or repertory classical music. So I think he is already entered into history as a major figure. But he’s still writing really strong pieces. And Philip Glass is, you know, some of his works for me have been successful, and others have been more of a mixed bag. But he’s another one who came along later in the 20th century and really had a liberating effect because he said “Let’s go back to basics, and sort of go back to fundamental old chords of tonality and see what we can do and make them modern”.
Kaplan All right, well, let’s come back to John Adams. As you said before, he is probably the best known, may be the most popular, I think you said, of the contemporary composers, and you have one of his works to play today.
Ross Yeah, well, I mentioned Harmonielehre and I also want to mention Nixon in China. For me personally, again I go back to my college period, when I had so many important experiences encountering music for the first time and sort of mapping out the landscape of my musical taste, in a way. I just pulled this record out of the record library one day and it was from Nixon in China. I thought it was a joke. And then I started realizing - oh, my God, this music is so lyrical and it has a very individual language where he’s taking these churning, repeating patterns from minimalism, but he’s putting things on top of them. He’s making it more romantic, more spacious, and you start hearing things in the orchestration which are like Mahler and Wagner even; and then his own very American voice, where he grew up with big band swing music, and his parents were popular musicians, and so he’s pulling that into the picture, too; and just ends up with this incredible piece, which is a very powerful and haunting piece, not just a comedy, where he’s studying these powerful figures meeting in China, and delivering some really sharp sketches of their different characters, and showing the melancholy, sort of brooding psychology behind these figures of such historical performance. So what I chose to play is an aria by Pat Nixon from the second act of the opera in which she is by herself, musing about America, really; it’s a kind of a rhapsody of a perfect America which exists in her mind and in her husband’s mind – it may not actually exist in reality. A very lyrical piece, but also has a wonderful, mysterious, haunting quality, which is very much the tone of the opera as a whole.
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Kaplan An excerpt from John Adams’ opera Nixon in China with Carolann Page in the role of the President’s wife, Pat Nixon. The Orchestra of St. Luke’s led by Edo de Waart and music chosen by my guest today on “Mad About Music”, the award-winning music critic of The New Yorker Magazine, Alex Ross and author of the just-released book of music in our own time, The Rest is Noise. You know, it seems to me that of all your selections, while they reflect the music you like, you’ve also chosen them because they stand for something; some even have a place in history. Now I’d like to turn to music that has a significance in your personal life, because I was quite taken with an interview you once gave in which you were asked to select music for different activities during the day. I don’t know if you remember this one - it showed up on the Internet. But among the thirteen categories of activities, it included brewing coffee, commuting, waking up. And of the thirteen categories, you picked only five for classical works. The other eight were popular music. So I’d like to ask you about the five classical pieces you picked. To wake up, you said, the jagged, happy first notes of Nielsen’s Third Symphony.
Ross Oh, yeah, I forgot about this. Yeah, Carl Nielsen is just a fantastic composer, he doesn’t get played nearly enough, and actually, every time I move, I have a peculiar little ritual, where, when I set up my stereo system for the first time, I play the beginning of Nielsen’s Third Symphony. It’s just kind of very rapid-fire chords coming at you, one after another. So, that’s a personal favorite of mine. It might be a little much to wake up to, but that’s what leapt to mind, in my case.
Kaplan O.K., well, you skip over coffee, commuting, lunch, commuting back home, working out - none of that gets classical music. And then you come to dinner, and you say “Milton Babbitt, for the guests who won’t leave. He’ll clear them right out.”
Ross That’s a joke, obviously! I myself have never had a dinner party where Milton Babbitt is playing in the background, but you know there’s this idea that classical music is background music, dinner party music for wealthy people at their little houses and so I was sort of rebelling against that image a little bit by sort of turning it on its head and saying well, why not play Milton Babbitt?
Kaplan Now we come to something very personal, lovemaking, where you pick Die Walküre, Act III.
Ross Oh dear. Well, that is very intense and romantic stuff. That actually is music that makes me burst into tears a lot of the time, when I hear it, Wotan’s farewell to Brünnhilde. So maybe it’s not quite the best thing for that situation, but this may be personal associations there that I won’t go into.
Kaplan All right. And then the final item is dealing with sleep, where you really pick an amusing piece by John Cage called “Four Minutes Thirty-Three Seconds,” and you added, “in extended remix.” Now, for the audience who doesn’t know this piece, it is four minutes and thirty-three seconds of total silence. So without asking you why that’s a good piece, I’d like to ask you whether we should take seriously that piece at all, which of course, is not a piece.
Ross Well, it is and it isn’t. It was, I think, an exercise that Cage performed, after so much noisy music, after the first half of the 20th century, with all these explosions of dissonance and so on. He said “Well, let’s go to the other extreme. Let’s see what happens if the performer does absolutely nothing and we listen to the sounds of the room”. It’s not actually a silent piece. It’s about the performers making no sound, and everyone focusing in on whatever else happens to be making noise in any given moment. And it’s, you know, as much a philosophical exercise as a piece of music, but it has a very serious intent to it.
Kaplan You know, much of your book is placing music against the background of history, often against politics. Now, of course it’s true that some composers like Shostakovich certainly wrote their music under the influence of politics. But don’t you think that most composers really reflect just their own creativity and that there really is no world connection or meaning in their music?
Ross That’s a really hard question, something that people always debate in music. Is music just a language, purely of itself and apart from the world? Or does it have real ties with the composer’s biography and with politics and society? And, obviously there are cases in the 20th century where the music really is very obviously stamped by politics, by social concerns, right on the surface. Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man comes straight out of this left wing populism in America in the 1930’s, 1940’s. The title is an allusion to a speech that Henry Wallace gave in the 40’s. And, you know, Shostakovich’s propaganda pieces as well as his symphonies are invested with these political dimensions. And then there are the composers who just wrote, did very deliberately write, straight out political activist music. And you think of Kurt Weill and especially Hanns Eisler in the 1920s in Germany. I mean, people were fighting in the streets at that time for the future of the country, Communists versus the Nazis, and the Social Democrats sort of somewhere in the middle. And so Eisler, who was a committed Communist, gave up writing “modern” music altogether. He studied with Schoenberg and then he said, “Enough of this. I want to write music for the workers,” and he would go into tough neighborhoods in Berlin, in bars, with his favorite singer, Ernst Busch, and put on these performances which, apparently really did have a strong impact on the workers and served as a rallying point for his comrades at that time. I picked a piece that I find just kind of thrilling and frightening at the same time, which is called “Der heimliche Aufmarsch”, “The Secret Deployment”, and it contains lines such as “An attack on the Soviet Union is a stab in the heart of the proletariat,” you know, this kind of thing. And it’s very effective music, it just kind of comes straight at you, and Ernst Busch’s voice – he sings on this recording – just has this really visceral quality to it; but then you sort of step back and think, well what’s this all about? And it’s kind of inciting you to go fight for Stalin, which is not such a pleasant thing. Another one of these very, very ambiguous 20th century phenomena, where it’s hard to know what to make of it.
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Kaplan Hanns Eisler’s “Der heimliche Aufmarsch”, “The Secret Deployment”, sung by Ernst Busch, a work in praise of Stalin and the Soviet Union, a selection highlighting music as a political statement and chosen by my guest on “Mad About Music” today, Alex Ross, music critic and author. When we return I’ll be asking Alex Ross for his assessment of the prospects for Alan Gilbert, the next music director of the New York Philharmonic, and Gerard Mortier, the next head of the New York City Opera.
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This is Gilbert Kaplan with my guest on “Mad About Music”, Alex Ross, the music critic of The New Yorker and author of the just-released and much talked about book about 20th century music, and with the clever title The Rest is Noise. Now as I have been singing your praise as a commentator on music, let’s talk a bit about what’s going on today in New York. You are of course aware of the two major recent announcements of leadership changes at the New York Philharmonic and at the New York City Opera, right? So let’s start with the Philharmonic. How would you assess Alan Gilbert’s prospects as the next music director of the Orchestra?
Ross I’m very excited about the advent of Alan Gilbert. He’s a younger person with a really broad spectrum of interests in music, new and old. Gilbert is, I think, just a new generation and will be a new voice, and I’ve heard some extremely good performances that he has given in the past, and I think he’s still growing as a musician. And I’m really fascinated to see what he accomplishes.
Kaplan And while you are assessing that, you mentioned before that Saint Francis of Assisi by Messiaen will come to New York as part of the new City Opera program, when Gerard Mortier takes over there. Now, he will have as a first season, an entire season of what he calls 20th century masterpieces. How would you assess the likely impact of that on the audience?
Ross For me, it’s just a dream come true, because these are the pieces that I write about in my book, one after another, all being performed in a single season. Saint Francis and Adams’s Nixon in China and Einstein on the Beach and these really monumental late 20th century pieces either being done in New York for the very first time, or for the first time in a while. So, that’s really exciting for me. How the audience responds to it obviously remains to be seen. I have no doubt that Einstein on the Beach is going to sell-out instantly; there will be no seats available within a day or two of those tickets going on sale. When I saw Saint Francis in San Francisco, it had a very powerful impact on the audience, and not everyone lasted through the whole evening. But those who remained were on their feet, and had a really sublime encounter with one of the greatest religious pieces ever written.
Kaplan All right, then, let’s continue with your taste in music but turn away from opera because we now come to that part of the show we call the “wildcard” where you have a chance to play something from outside the classical music or opera genre. So what did you bring us today?
Ross I brought something by the Icelandic singer and composer, Björk, and she grew up very much with classical music. She was a serious music student, played the flute, very well, apparently. And at an early age, she was exposed to all kinds of crazy 20th century music, and got into Messiaen, Cage and Stockhausen, and she remains very interested in that music today. I had the good fortune to profile her for The New Yorker and spent some time with her; and she’s just an extraordinary woman, and very intelligent about every subject under the sun and knows her music history extremely well. So then she went on to start writing pop songs and she was in a band called “The Sugar Cubes”, and a few years ago she put out an album called Vespertine, where she got a little more avant-garde and the song here is called “An Echo, a Stain,” and it’s probably the most far-out music that we’re going to hear on this show in terms of the density of the harmony here, the wordless chorus at the beginning of the song, and then her voice floating in with this shimmering electronic background around it. So if you weren’t told that this was the work of a pop artist, you might think that this is some kind of contemporary classical composition. The language really is quite sophisticated and so this is a sign that boundaries these days between pop and classical music are getting blurred in some interesting ways.
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Kaplan “An Echo, a Stain” composed by and sung by Björk, the “wildcard” selection of Alex Ross, music critic of The New Yorker magazine and author of The Rest is Noise, his new book on 20th century music. Now I’d like to turn away from composers and move to performers – people performing today. Let’s start with conductors – who are your favorites?
Ross Well, Claudio Abbado, who was supposed to come to New York just recently, is an extraordinary conductor for me, who just, almost every time I’ve heard him, just transcendent things happen between him and the orchestra. Valery Gergiev, also, obviously is one who can have a really electrifying effect when he’s at his best. And then there are the conductors, for me, who aren’t so emotionally intense in that way, but just do such interesting things in terms of programming and how they prepare new pieces and give new vantage points on older ones, and can have a very powerful impact in their own ways. Esa-Pekka Salonen in Los Angeles is just doing extraordinary things with that orchestra, and creating this very modern, up-to-date institution; Ken Nagano and Robert Spano are two others who, I just want to see what they are going to do next, and which works they are going to choose to perform. Quite a long list, actually, of really inventive younger conductors at the moment.
Kaplan And what about soloists, either piano or violin, for example?
Ross Among pianists, Uchida comes to mind as one who gives just very, for me, transcendent performances of the classic works of the repertory. And, among violinists, I think Gidon Kraemer is maybe the one who has just been the most transfixing for me, whether playing Bach or Alfred Schnittke – an incredible intensity just every time I’ve heard him play, it’s an event. So he’s very special for me.
Kaplan All right then, let’s turn to your final selection today, which is by Morton Feldman, who, for many people, will always be remembered as the man who wrote a six-hour string quartet. So tell us your view about him, and what we’re going to hear today.
Ross Well, Morton Feldman is just a fascinating figure, and he’s a lesson in how you never know quite what to expect from 20th century composers. They’re a very unpredictable lot. He was a die-hard avant-gardist. He came of age with John Cage and perpetrated all kinds of chance happenings with Cage back in the late 1940s and 1950s. But he was kind of a maverick within the avant-garde world, and – he always loved Sibelius, for example, and praised the symphonies of Sibelius which you know in that crowd was kind of a sin to say anything nice about Sibelius, this late-romantic composer. And he just went off on his own a lot of the time, and just a very appealing character, personally. Was born in Woodside, Queens, and grew up in various parts of New York, worked in his uncle’s dry-cleaner business for a long time before becoming a professor at Buffalo, eventually. And just a wisecracking New Yorker who just was a great sort of stand-up comedian at very serious music conferences. And there are moments in his music that are very surprising, and one of them, I think, comes in this little piece, Madame Press Died Last Week at Ninety, a memorial for his piano teacher, who was this elderly personality in New York, who actually studied with Busoni, originally, and knew Scriabin, I believe. And it’s a very wistful, peaceful piece; nothing much happens, just a few chords, rotating around and around, with little pauses and silences as they go. Very contemplative, meditative, quiet music, and almost all of Feldman’s music is very quiet in this way, and I think just very beautiful in a simple way, and very surprising, coming from this monumental American avant-garde composer.
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Kaplan Morton Feldman’s Madame Press Died Last Week at Ninety, a work dedicated to the memory of Feldman’s piano teacher and performed by the Orchestra of St. Luke’s led by composer/conductor John Adams, earlier identified on the show as perhaps the best chance we have for a Mozart among today’s composers – identified by my guest today on “Mad About Music”, Alex Ross, the music critic of The New Yorker. Now, as we head toward the close of the show we reach one of our most popular sections: fantasyland - where I ask our guests for true confessions - revealing their fantasies about music. With some people I can predict what is to come, but in your case I can’t. So the fantasy question is – in this wide range of interests you have in music, in your fantasies, if you could be a star in one of them – a singer, a composer, a conductor, performer, what would it be?
Ross There’s no question in my head, my fantasy would be to be a composer. This is what I tried to do when I was young, up until age eighteen or so, I kept trying to write music, and I would write sort of ten bars of something, and twelve bars of something else, and come up with a promising start to a string quartet or a piano sonata, and then I could just never really think of what comes next. I could sort of think of a theme, think of an interesting texture, and then you know the creativity of course comes in, not just imagining a single melody, but what happens to the melody. And all the great works of music are basically the adventures of a melody through time. I would just want to be writing huge symphonies of a very eclectic character. But there are already so many composers who are doing that, I don’t think there’s any need for my fantasy to be added to it.
Kaplan Well, fantasies are just that though and you certainly have a right to fantasize. You’ve been a fascinating guest today, taking us through this difficult area, for some people, of contemporary music and pointing out where one can go, where it isn’t quite so lonely to be there. Alex Ross, thank you very much for joining us today. This is Gilbert Kaplan for “Mad About Music.”
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“Mad About Music”
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